III

By RO MAN M c CLAY
 C opyri ght © 2020
by Ro man McClay
All rights reserved.

Published by Flat Black Ink Corp.

Firs t edition
Sanctiont hebook.com
deep thrill.com

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is

coincidental and not intended by the author. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the
prior written permission of the publisher and copyri ght owner.
 Contents

-1. The Black Hat Fits

0. Barbarism
1. The Next Governor of the State
1.61 Ao.te.ar.oa
2. The Road is Out to Kill Him
3. A Recursion; a Revanchist Pain
4. Million-Fold
5. Early Worm Gets Eaten by the Bird
6.28 Tau of jOKER
7. They wanted commerce; he wanted art. No two
things are farther apart
7.73 Hallgerðu r ’s Rauðr
8. The Man Who Says No
8. Forest
10. UNABOM
11. Jeux sans Fronti è res
12. What’s so Civil about War anyway?
13. JoinThem
14. III.
15. Sh to takoye ?
16. Reals, Complex, Quaternions, Octonions
16. Scythians
17. The Man who says No
18. R. C. H. O
19. The Good Work done by Madmen
20. Arise³
21. Malice of Bears; Murder of Crows
21.2 The Tabernacle
22. Vector-8
23. Romans 131
24. From this We Know Man’s Values
25. More & More
25.92 Hamlet’s Mill
26. Quart of Blood
27. Old Hundred Names
28. Age of Sail
29. Maps
30. Komorebi
31. MEAͶING
32. Those Who Do Not Feel, Do Not Count
33. Persons UͶknowN
34. Kings
35. He May Conceal a King in His Hand
36. Unkindness of Ravens
37. HárbarðsLjóð of Mead
38. Offer This, His Lament
39. Queen to Bishop’s 6
40. Wolfsangle IV
41: Daniel 13
42. Isaiah’s Curse
43.2 Kali Yuga
44. Meaͷest Maᴙiners
45. IT WILL FIND NO MEA IͶG
144. End Note
 The Irish pray on their knees, the Scots prey on their neighbors
-Traditional

As the Great Cathedral of Cologne was left with the crane still standing upon the
top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first
architects; Grand ones, true ones ever leave the copestone to posterity…this
whole book is a draught!
The truest of all men is the man of sorrows…
There is no steady unretracting progress in this life; we do not advance through
fixed gradations, and at the last one pause. Through infancy’s unconscious spell,
boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’s doubt -the common doom- then
scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of IF.
But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys and
men, and IFs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?
In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where
is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like orphans whose unwedded
mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and
we must there to learn it
-The Author

I know that I hung, on windy tree, for all of nine nights, wounded with a spear,
and given to Oðinn, myself to myself, on that tree, which no man knows, for
what roots it runs
-Hávamál
 -1. The Black Hat Fits
For Scotland’s Kings for many ages we observed each ninth to be a tyrant, who
by civil wars and all fatal consequences plunged the Divided Kingdom into
strange disorders…
The British Apollo [A Society of Gentlemen]

The White Whale is more accurate than Leaves of Grass. Because it is America,
all of her space, the malice, the root.
Call Me Ishmael [Olson, Charles]

Never become attached to what you own.

@1231507051321 [Cicada 3301]

I . 2040 e.v.
J ack woke up from a dream, the voice in his ear was of
Grimnir and it was low, and calm and mean.
The H1’s stacked up in four sets of fours on the road.
The words made sense but he ignored them as the dream -
which was no dream, but memory , he thought- played
backward in time:
The choppers sounded like tuning forks when 16
kilometers from the city: rubber on road; raised lettering
of Firestones with thick sidewalls of matte black & satin
rash; the bearings lightly warped and making elliptical
sounds; the vibration of hands and teeth -the gold and
porcelain- of the riders all collected on a frequency
available to a few locals -some animals- who heard them
that far out.
Sloughed off sand danced on cobblestone; people got
nervous and twitched. Dogs found space under cars
more comfortable; birds decided -out of the black &
blue- to go south.
The highway was empty as usual, and as night came
about -and as the motorcycles travelled southward from
their Denver run- the earth spun Eastward dragging the
sun down to the West as if it dove after Icarus ; like it too
thus drowned.
This was before winter was astride the new year.
Their pockets were stuffed with whisky flasks and
PMAGs; bottles of pills and locks of hair from girls they
fucked, cut up, removed trinkets from when the others
wouldn’t bother to look. Some saved fingers or eyes,
some the jewelry or IDs, some just memories of the way
the girls climaxed just before expiring; the things women
won’t admit about rape, that it slakes, that it enthralls,
that -if done by a certain type of man- they don’t hate it
at all, Jack thought in this hypnopompic state as his Starr
came in and out of memory like satellite, Taurid ice, the
winking of blue & twice as clear moons.
Earplugs kept out the hum from the outside, only their
consciences -which were detuned by the coders- tamped
down on the inner din of what they had done and would
do again. The lights made pyramids on the road from the
stagger of their formation, they took all four lanes -
previously going north and south, but now went
whichever way the bikers went- as the exits between
Pueblo and Trinidad were blocked by the H1s -the truck
crews- of the clan.
Clear goggles had been swapped out in Pueblo, dark
shades jammed into pockets, fuel they never paid for
had overflowed on the steel tanks of the gang who filled
up haphazardly -jovially- and with a beer in one hand or
a smoke. The copper tank -shaped like an eye tooth to a
mastodon- of Jack Four’s chop made rainbows of high-
octane fuel around the bung and the side, and all hands
were oily and wrinkled from the amber fluids of bourbon
-crimson of brake fluid- soaking in.
They ate Psilocybe cyanescens mushrooms, symbionts
with the Birch and Pines of their land -transplanted and
carried like stowaways and hitchhikers on the boots of
the Wolves from Ulfheim - as they read words of verse
off of cards that had -at bottom- printed the names of
Sámi and Siberian poets that Jack had handed them with
the dosing and a glare.
They then slid the 2.25 by 3.5 cards -now in the dozens-
into their vests after Jack -whom they all regarded as
strange, aloof, arrogant, but loved and protected by their
King- nodded once they swallowed their meds.
He’d stare longer at any one of the Wolves who’d be
intransigent -or even jocular- about the rites. He’d make
the irreligious repeat longer stanzas as punishment and
prelude to being allowed to take part in the entheogenic
ritual of the cycles -as he called it- before the return trip.
He checked odometers of the men who rode bikes with
such standard equipment; the custom bikes had no
gauges of any kind. Vin numbers were changed each
time; plates -as were the IDs of the men- were fake or
thrown away. The motorcycles navigated the open
highways and oft-blocked city streets with deftness and
élan . They went where cars and squares could not.
He’d read the mileage aloud if he felt the number should
matter. He never explained why.
“Twenty-eight thousand, six hundred fifty-seven,” he’d
said to a bearded and hard-browed Poxx as he dosed
him by personally throwing the fungus in his mouth. Jack
had then smirked at the man as Poxx saddled his wide-
glide that was rattled-canned black and wrapped in
mummy-like gauze about the straight-pipes. Poxx had
the bike decorated with booty and bounty and trophy;
swatches of fabric he’d taken from underwear of young
girls, and the bloody hair of middle age women, and
glued to the seat were the pictures of granddaughters of
old ladies if he came across the accoutrement of their
bags. That bike -when at speed- flared like fuzzy
Pyrrharctia Isabella , rusty and black and it primed Jack
to ruminate on the before & aft of the moth that came
next.
“Plunder and blood-letting,” Jack said in a burst, “and
the releasing of souls of men via their killing, and the
capturing of souls of women via their deflowering must
be made in God’s image by mean poems of enlightened
doom.” He said this as he pulled a rough fist from the
soft clear bags -dust and caps, gills and all that, and
dried stipe fell to the ally- and he squeezed the
desiccated shrooms in his hand and pointed at the bikers
-well leathered and dirty and gnarly and vain about their
appearance- as Grimnir barked to the crew that they
were slowing shit down by arguing with his shaman; the
man on his left-hand.
“Stop fucking around,” he finally said, hammering the air
with his baritone cords upon anvil of a mouth chapped
and bloody from a rock in the road he’d been struck with
on their way up.
The V-twins lumbered and potatoed at low RPMs in a
line, as the men behind Jack swallowed their medicine
and the men yet to come waited on one rebellious
member who didn’t realize when to be serious and when
to joke around. The vibe of the hive changed, and the
lone man felt the ebb of embarrassment and then the
flow of further intransigence as Jack remembered his
face -the man remembering the look- for when someone
had to die.
There were 233 men on bikes, on this raid, and they
were stacked side-by-side in the ally and on the dark
road. Like two woodpeckers to a tree; they rode in
strange pairs that portended a winter like none in recent
years.
Reindeer racks had been shaved into curls like planed
lumber, and in the mix with the fungus were enzymes
that had been sprayed to make digestion easier.
“Sorry JF,” the man said to Jack. He then silently agreed
to repeat aloud a line from the Sea Sámi and the
Mountain Sámi dispute-poem; and also forgo whisky for
a week now as penance. Jack watched sat -imaging of
reindeer calving in Piteå and the minerals being
extracted and loaded into belly-dumps riding down dirt -
then paved- Nordic roads. He felt hate in his heart grow
but it didn’t warm; like the sun visible but cold in space;
a light pointed at him in the dark.
He saw the 75,025 reindeer killed as unfit for human
consumption in the downloaded record; in mere ink and
page; pixilated in further abstraction on his interface. He
-as the psychoactive compound took hold- saw the
bones and the pelts and the velveteen racks laid out in a
belt for 19.6 miles that matched the road of the dead
overhead; fashioned in the dirt of the arctic circle and
under the northern lights.
Each thing was green and glowing and disturbed;
hammered copper and iron of ore.
His tribe felt like a giant, a Golem , each mission a
building of muscle and competence, each thing a
Lernaean hydra within an Augeas stall. Paid for -thus
uncounted- helped with -thus discounted- but all still
preparation for the final ten. He saw Blax as Iolaus , both
helper and argonaut and the name of Leipephilene
populated his interface like a rebuke, a shadow to a
memory, the stain of the birthing sheet. He thus -again-
refused to count any of these feats against his total, as
the numbers just went on and on in the equation without
end.
Each robbery, each murder, each dollar, each plunder
had renumeration and thus no honor and this he didn’t
fucking count. Not yet , Jack thought.
“We be the Kings of Corinth,” he had said aloud in the
warehouse as bodies were laid out. Nobody had one
fucking clue what he was on about now. But the
Bacchiadae -the Doric clan- restarted the world , he
thought as the gazes looked more and more confused,
with an aristocratic revolution that hemmed in the blood
with incest and endogamy and golden ratios of
commingling; but exile to Sparta came soon enough,
and Helen of Sparta came & went too.
He thought this as each end of the history and memory
flowed forward and backward like integers with no
rational end. Each exile of each group from Scyth to
Dorian to those that ended up in Germany and the isle,
was like a murder -and he the detective- solving it using
all that he’d learned.
Each one was different in some ways; but mostly the
same.
A hundred twenty years , Jack thought -cupping his hand
around time the same as one would a sip of water from a
spring- as he looked upon the memories of these dead
rivals and his clan stripping the bodies of everything
shiny and matte; round and flat. He saw images of the
seven sons and three daughters of the old King; DNA
rebuilt into avatars in the coder; facial reconstruction
and bodies made of ribs and skulls printed on cards laid
on the felt of his mind.
He awaited the flop, the turn, the river.
He had told Grimnir of the practice of incubation , that
Aristotle had recounted of Sardinia; and the laying of
men -beset by nightmares- next to the tombs of heroes
and those dead in battles ending in victory and loss. The
rains came more and more in the desert; it stung their
faces as they rode without helmets. And the sea-level at
the coasts far away dropped one inch in a way that
meant something to Jack about which he wouldn’t say.
“The pen-name was von Sulsfort ,” Grimnir had said
back to his shaman, “but his real name was von
Grimmelshausen . And men argued over how much was
autobiographical because he was either accused of -or
forgiven for- havin’ livin’ a life of peace on the edge of
the Black Forest. But Simplicius was adopted by a hermit
living in the woods who taught him letters and religion
and gave him his own name. After the death of the
hermit, Simplicius had to fend for himself, the story
goes.”
“Why you tellin’ me this?” Jack asked. He hated it when
the King turned the stories back on him. He tilted his
head like a dog shown a card trick.
“Because Simplicius of Cilicia lived a thousand years
before Grimmelshausen’s story, and he wrote the eight
books of Aristotle that outlined the practice of incubation
you seem to just now lay at my feet as if remedy, as if
with sympathy; for my ills, my ails. Right?” Grimnir said
this and smiled warmly and laid his large heavy hand on
Jack’s shoulder as if in an act of forgiveness itself.
Grimnir had told him of his trouble with restiveness, of
hauntings and times when he was small and beset by
heroin and women with no attributes of the heroic at all.
He’d looked down and confided things that other men
might see as weak; but not his shaman, not his Jack,
who would never vie for my job, my title, my throne,
Grimnir thought.
It was always like this , Jack thought, a moment of
vulnerability bookended with a display of strength -
erudition- by the King. Each seeing the back of the same
thing; each calling it a different name.
“It feels threatening,” he whispered now to the moon.
“Two card players seeing the same cards but one side
opaque.”
A thousand things happened between that turning about
of story and lesson, the laying on of hands, and the
gang’s exit from the city in a bloody rumble and
cockiness of body if not aspect; for the cameras never
exposed their faces to the police; license plates never
revealed a damn thing.
Jack recalled it though as the drugs came on; and other
ideas appeared that hadn’t occurred the first time at all.
The hermit and the naming, the fractal story that felt
now like the déjà vu of a million times and the simulacra
that connected me to the wolves, both tamped down
paths and scraped the bark of the pines like a wall . How
often have I had true déjà vu that was so real that no
way could it be faked or random or dismissed? Jack
thought as he lamented how often he had ignored them
after all.
The warehouses of Denver -from marijuana grows to REI
to pharmaceutical companies- lay inert; the police would
not find the bodies and robberies for hours, days; weeks
in some cases. The owners and managers and workers
had been hanged from rafters by one-ton come-alongs
and cheap and stiff yellow twine; carabiners; safety-
eights. The Wolves stole tools from the shops, beers
from the fridge, and turned each person they murdered
into a silly-looking doll with their pockets turned inside-
out and their eyes pulled like pistons or rolled back or
blank.
Grimnir had known this was phase two, and that the
men needed to use their bodies to settle not just scores
but their inner roil. Murder was first not last. He saw that
it was ends not means; that the beatings of lippy and
uncompliant men and the slaking of lusts unsanctioned
by women, the taking of shit not theirs until -all at once-
it was, had to be performed and made manifest. A real
revolution , he thought, was of the body not the mind;
real change came from wiping your enemy out, and
planting your seed in their women, and preventing them
from surviving once you’ve left them stinted,
impoverished and unable to go on .
“It feels so good to kill a weak man, like the beating of a
stupid dog, the hating of bad, commercial, phony art,
the murder of faggots and bums feels better than the
vanquishing of enemies with strength, for you know
you’ve acted in accordance with natural law,” he said.
But he thought of how it had all started with an
innocuous tip. He heard the sentence again, as he stared
at his own memory of his Jack who was moving left to
right along the line of bikes and men.
Back then, Grimnir had watched and peered in; he
looked for any fissure, any craquelure, any place where
light got in.
Jack -who’d been walking man to man- had felt the
Chinese virus was spreading to the general population of
the ciudads even faster than he’d predicted; despite the
orders -precautions- by the CDC; regardless of social
distancing. He thought this side-by-side with their own
coder’s defenses making them ghosts among the living;
the undead amongst the soon-to-be dead: the truly
alive. As they ambulated onto sidewalks and back alleys
from the buildings that they’d razed and emptied, he
saw the bare streets and the faces of the few sickly still
about; he saw the way their victims shimmered and
stammered and bent; their knees and elbows glowed like
gold covered in filth.
Even their fluids, he thought, seemed attenuated, thin ,
like waters meant from whence to be drank .
He had checked in on his own immune response and it
had collected 1,001 clustered regularly interspaced short
palindromic repeats for him to examine under the power
of his PGC.
A young girl -a civilian- had wandered from the street
and astride the bikes until she stopped to Jack’s five-
o’clock. He glanced briefly, noted her skin, age and gait;
all fair, under-age, and no limp or sign of decay. His
coder saw she had no foreign DNA in her mouth, throat,
vulva; or anus; nor was she infected with the virus. He
walked from bike to bike, chopper to bagger, Dyna to
street-fighter to old spring-seat pan-heads and hardtail
shovels. He told her to go sit on his bike -the empty one
at the prow , he said- and he then continued to move
along the line.
He drank and wenched his way through all of Colorado;
thinking all the time.
He saw the DNA of the phages in him, clearly from a new
virus that his system had copied and integrated like
hanging deer or bobcat skulls on the walls of a cabin.
The Cas9 carried mugshots from enzyme to enzyme and
he saw the models his coder had built of the new
structures shaped like hearts with ladder of helix up to
heaven, chutes of broken DNA down to hell. He
shuddered autonomically -small gnats from the cities’
overflowing dumpsters and puddles then alighted- and
he set a timer so that his PGC would remind him of the
new viruses his immune response was capturing, killing
and chopping-up for eventual display.
He ignored the gaze of his King behind him as Grimnir
was absently receiving the men as they came to him
with questions and requests; offerings. The girl laid on
the seat and tank and closed her eyes. None of the men
paid her any mind.
The fake mugshots, the RNA of material Jack wanted,
was being automatically produced by his own coder and
immune system. A subset of cells with new palindromic
repeats was being built and sequestered in his appendix
as he went about the advising -via DM- of Paul about
who next they ought to hit, whom they ought skip, and
who to recruit versus extirpate. Blood cells rushed to
extremities as Jack kept arming Matthias with
testosterone augments that he’d built.
Nanobots patrolled his lungs for fluid and blood as he
began this arguing with Rentheos -about noise and
aesthetics and ritual protocols in the middle of missions-
all during this even distribution of entheogens to the
gang.
Their bikes were lined all the way across Stout street and
into the mews like caterpillars and the men’s faces were
covered in masks and dark dreads or hawkhair made
them appear like Tacca chantrieri upon saddle-back
Acharia stimulea and shadows on the big winter nape of
the crow’s dark necks that circled overhead.
He thought then that, the fog of August had been thick
up high; that the ants had moved in straight lines .
Like making red blood cells in the marrow, Jack’s coder
bore more and more CRISPR mugshots and Cas9 and
Cas13 vectors to be stored in his ruddy-appendix like a
brick warehouse full of dry goods, engine blocks,
weapons and microprocessors to phones & drones. His
coder loaded more and more combinations of RNA into
the database of his own foundry of CRISPR machines.
He held onto single images of dreams.
Then, like an alarm, a recalled thought -inspiration- one
of the viruses caught in this dragnet was deemed
custom ; built in a Taiwan lab. It had been kept intact by
Jack’s coder and wrapped up tight in a protein jacket of
its own; manacled, identified, but not yet cut-up by the
enzymes of his own Cas12s .
He kept it quiet as he finished with the men and their
bikes and headed back to the prow of their ship-of-the-
line and showed the girl how to hold on around his waist;
using his hands to place her little feet on the pegs at the
rear axle as she laid her head on his back and closed her
eyes.
The bikes -and their double-barreled, martial roaring-
sailed down Park Avenue and Broadway in late morning
and then I25; next through DTC, Castle Rock and the
Springs their machines descended and sped back into
the towns south of Pueblo. The words from one of the
Wolves sang out in song to Jack just then:
You’ve always been unapologetic, but I think you
seem more loomingly expansive, lately; lately you’ve
said more as if from on, well, as if you were being
recorded or held to it by history or something . You
never relax, Jack.
The man had twisted the mouth in a grin he felt he got
away with. But nobody got away with anything in this
life and Jack held it the way that girl had held onto him.
Jack twisted the accelerator with a snap as they moved
out and off the interstate and onto the main road of the
ghost towns with more map-paper than people around.
He moved closer in formation to Paul in the lead and
thought of how he -how Jack- liked murder, and yet
didn’t always want people dead. He just liked to kill, to
blood-let, to watch the eyes go out like shutting off lights
to a building once one’s work was all done; crossing off
shit from a list.
He liked fucking for the same reason he supposed, to
gain access, not necessarily to have the girl be -or get-
fucked. He pretended to think of the girl he’d picked up
in Denver, he used words like ‘she’ and ‘her’ in his mind
to trick the coder, as he allowed himself to think of the
goddess of Pallas , of wisdom, of almost no malice.
He wanted to kill her over and over, like stroking her
finite pussy with my endless cock , he thought.
But unlike business -when someone needs to die
because they’re an annoyance or hindrance- or when he
just wanted something out of his way and thus -because
the terrain was his- wanted something off the earth
itself, with her he just wanted to drain her of life and
then reanimate her and do it all over again.
It was sexual and, I think it with almost no… he thought
in broken ideas as he ruminated again on his cock like a
war to the knife, and a knife to the hilt, and how their
sex-sweat would run red, and her moans would be in
regret and anguish and balance to his wails of ecstasy
and satisfaction and victory at last. He thought on the
reincarnation of Isaiah’s apiary and the percentages of
rebellion by the shimmering bees. He pushed her to her
knees and like Alabama Malacosoma -the tent
caterpillars of the Lasiocampidae family- he saw the
silvery web made of a spittle-spell and seamen and vex
written in languages gone extinct during the deluge, the
washing away of it all…
He again awoke all at once from this dream, this reverie,
now for the second -maybe third- time; before they had
pulled into Trinidad and spilled so much blood they’d altered
the genome of the town in an hour that seemed to fly by in
the long-gone summer heat; seemed no more than
smashing a mosquito and barely noticing the comingling of
its blood and his blood.
Now it was cold and they were in trucks under attack; and
he panicked for a moment too short to measure as he lost
track of how much time he’d taken to reflect.
The truck dragging tail was Jack’s and the 7.0L diesel was
running hot. The radiator had been leaking for six minutes
from the bullet hole. The brass inner coils were bent and
broken from the rattling of the boulle after it breached the
aluminum skin of the heat exchanger. The engine block
gained one-degree of heat each sixteen seconds it ran at
this RPM.
Jack moved toward the back to begin the motorcycle’s
disembark protocol.
He placed his hand on the inert man’s shoulder and let the
bots work on the body to keep him homeostatic even as the
heart had stopped. No Wolf could die or they all died. And
Isaiah had equipped them with ways to prevent death -even
with shock and organ failure- as long as certain procedures
were followed. This version of the Medea gene waited as it
measured electricity, gene expression and body
temperature. Like a ping it sent out signal each 600-seconds
and expected a return signal or it would relay apoptosis
orders through the air and each Wolf would have each of his
cells self-immolate.
What had been handled via code of the genetic material
with the Jacks and Blax was now handled through the
pneuma of the air. Each Wolf was transmitter and receiver
both. In the Jacks and Blax the bomb had to be defused
each month, in the Wolves the bomb would be sent within
ten minutes if no order for war was belayed.
From thirty days to ten minutes; acceleration of the code ,
he had thought.
Jack stepped over the inert Wolf who’d been shot twice in
the neck and jaw with a 7.62 x 51mm enfilade that had
ripped through the truck’s armor and collided with the
slumped and unbreathing man, then into the driver -in his
calf- and into Jack in the forearm. The radiator was struck
near the bottom of its reservoir. The road noise increased by
28db through these small holes. The armor piercing rounds
were made of depleted uranium. Jack made sure their
coders still isolated all radioactive isotopes.
The billet and hewn chopper -based upon the Confederate
FA-13 Combat Bomber model- was strapped-in low in the
back by the slant-hatch of the truck.
A twenty-three inch well had been fashioned -like a trench-
into the floor and the chassis , and the top of the bike was a
mere twenty-two inches from the roof. Isaiah had liked the
original project out of Louisiana so much that he’d kept 88%
of the design; merely improving the atomization of fuel,
exhaust back-pressure and CPU performance on front fork
and rear swingarm-compression to adjust for when the bike
leaned into turns at increasing speeds.
For speeds would always increase.
Jack had a memory -again unbidden- arise, and the recall
was haptic. He felt -in his body as the memory replayed- the
way one feels as one brakes before a turn on a bike -then
powers through it- and accelerates into the curve. His
organs braced; the eyes went wet at the corners. The brain
sparked and the nose itched. The hands felt atomic things in
the air upon their tops and all topography on the metal
machine was handled on the pads and palms.
The 127ci V-Twin engine was still canted and opposed at
51.85-degrees; rake of the forks at 38.14-degrees, wheel-
base at 63.6 inches; the cantilever rear-suspension was
unchanged. The whole frame was billet aluminum married
to the 92-NXS polymer invented by PraXis, reducing it to
230.4-pounds of curb-weight. The bike was 99.4% matte
black. The rear tire was 240mm in width -the front 145mm-
and the cycle had no speedometer, no fuel gauge, and no
key for the ignition. It was brutal; more right and oblique
angles than curves; it was round only at the wheels.
Everywhere else it was bent as if shoved against a wall or
redirected all at once by something cruel and itself a
machine. It had one piece of bronze on the bezel around the
LED headlight; it had one copper button on the ignition
toggle.
It said fire there in stamped relief, and Jack had his hands -
his thumb- on it now.
It had only metal greys as prelude to immaterial shadows,
only five-sided bolts to flange one monolith to the next, and
its welds looked like a smooth dark beach lapped by
retreating ebb tides on a sandy coast way up north and
under a wintery sky.
Jack straddled it and lay close upon its backbone under the
roof of the truck; he moved the petcock to the flow position
and snapped the ignition switch as the fuel pump whined.
His arm was being repaired by the vascular nanobots and
the ulna -splintered by being nicked by the .308 round- was
quickly soldered by the bone’s own separate bot crew that
ran the circulatory system like sorties above and cavalry
below. Pain was attenuated with endogenous opiates and
NSAIDs were released by the coder to prevent inflammation
at the site of the wound.
Blood was carried away by the bots and so he’d have no
bruise.
He wanted to call in air-strikes on the police vehicles that
had shot at them -his rage was increasing with each bump
in the road, each time something with the bike felt heavy or
the headroom -seemingly- shrank and he hit the crown of
his cabeza on the metal roof- but the other trucks in his
convoy had laid down sufficient fire to destroy fifteen police
cruisers and force seven more off the road. He belayed his
wrath and focused now only on the bike. The target was
coming up in 2.2 minutes at this speed and he felt that
deploying the motorcycle was the only way to ensure the
hole was reached, penetrated and infected without incident;
a change in plan brought on by the contact they’d already
made with the enemy.
The trucks would be too large -obvious- and roadblocks
would be in place , he thought. They -the goddamn
Governor’s men- had been waiting for us.
“Fuckers,” he grumbled aloud as he wondered how they had
even located the Wolves argosy; met them in adequate
numbers and time. He speculated briefly about the cops’
aggressive ROE . He thought, the cops opened fire
immediately, they attempted no road stop, no détente.
Something is up .
Two police vehicles -SUVs- passed his H1 -the last truck in
the last segment- and now the rear was clear. Jack heard
new strafing reports as the police and the Wolves’ vehicles
ahead of him exchanged fire once again. ADX was now 1.59
miles to their eleven o’clock and they’d be there in a
hundred and one seconds or less.
Jack released the tie downs, placed his finger on the push-
button on the solenoid of the starter and positioned his feet
up and back against the rear pegs. His blood dripped onto
the engine’s valve covers and into the channel that held the
bike like a stall; a moat. With his left foot he pressed the
gear-selector down into the first position and signaled the
bots to initiate final disembark-protocol. The driver was
alerted to maintain speed at 79mph.
“Roger,” the driver said over DM.
The rear doors opened, the grey slide and ramp moved out
and down as its small wheels touched the ground. The
highway was desolate and the eastern edge of their world
was a dry plain -shorn close- right up to the roadside
barriers. The drift-fences came and went like ruins. To his
left was the west and the mountains were brown and hazy
and steep.
Jack twisted the clutch with his left hand, pulled the right
hand back from the solenoid and depressed the small nubs
on each cylinder-head to relieve crank pressure in the big-
bore engine and with the right thumb returned to the starter
and pressed the copper button starboard to the solenoid.
The engine turned one quarter of a revolution with a grunt
and dragon’s breath and then exploded in a massive V-twin
rumble; gasoline both burnt & unburnt filled their noses with
fumes. The murky bike now was occupied with compressed
fuel like corposants in timed bursts, the dark ties laying in a
heap like sloughed skins of snakes, the primary drive belt
ran to port like a black belt of doom; its seam was stitched
like a scar, its white letterings coming to the eye like a
strobe. The bars vibrated his hands like a jack-hammer. He -
with his mass pressed, legs squeezing the tank, hands
gripping the bars, and as it tried to spout up- he was sitting
upon a nearly 500-pound bomb.
Jack pushed off with the feet -looking ahead through the
truck and the windshield and thought he saw in the light
and the road the ribs of inmate 16180339 as if from Jonah’s
position in the whale- as he and the iron horse -made white
as the lights from a police SUV coming up behind swallowed
all color save the shadow his own body lay down on the
backbone of the chop- rolled rearward onto the ramp and -
all at once as the H1 sped up- he moved down and out onto
the road.
He twisted the throttle with his right hand, released the
clutch with the chiral twist of the left and powered instantly
whilst leaning hard to leeward, and up shifting into each of
six -then seven- gears; passing between all trucks -and the
police SUV’s as they took flak and fire -the tracer rounds
between each side’s armada seemed like cat’s cradle of red,
and orange and yellow twine- and he veered off into the
median and ditch- at speeds approaching 146mph. He left
this battle of the trucks -of the police and the Wolves- as he
headed directly toward the prison gate.
Jack heard the fusillade between him and the muzzles of
carbines -detached from flashes by milliseconds- and the
report of his own pipes at the black bitter-ends hovering like
ort clouds coming undone and corvids with axes to grind; he
saw them like Zeus on Olympus watching comets crash into
-and escape with- Jupiter while he -again- heard that
goddamn memory of Blax unknowingly narrate his progress
toward the inmate:
“Nor will I allow you -any of you- to become a tyrant…”
Hail and ice , Jack thought as the motor vibrated the tank,
and the tank warmed his legs and his legs jammed
themselves into the controls. The individual and the whole,
the grain versus the cold. Four, and four-fold , he thought.
The Chinese Ai sent a new algorithm to each police vehicle
within a 32-kilometer radius of Florence, Colorado and took
over the motherboard that controlled the prison’s egresses
and inner bulkheads.
ADX was now under its command. Jack saw the first
roadblock at the gate, discerned the gap, the lacuna in their
Maginot Line , and accelerated into the bulwark they’d
sloppily erected in his way.
II. 1190 a.e.v
Tama Te Kapua pointed at the brown bluff -with his russet
arm- that he saw first from his elevated position in the reed
ship. His men looked not at his finger but the rocks.
“Sails and oars,” he said as his sailors set the lashings to
the single yardarm and his oarsmen dug into the waters like
plowshare to soil. Their shoulders were brown like tortoise
and the hands knuckled in red from cracking the tough
hollow-fiber of the gunwales.
“Hooooaha ,” they bellowed as the white cloud above the
island stretched on and on like a halo. He saw himself
delivering his men under it like the day he had been given -
and thus gave his own head to- the crown. He felt his heart
drop as the memory of that laurel was taken from him; and
as his banishment was decreed in front of all but two of his
wives.
Kapapuaplo -a young man of just sixteen- thought between
sea-diggings of Kai mona -which he’d get by obsidian spear-
and of women -that he thought he’d get in a similar fashion-
as he had not had his fill yet of the fishery nor of the land.
He tunneled into the sea with more oaha and blinking as the
boat skimmed the water as if above it. The island increased
in height and length to them and he thought of the beach
while Chief Tama thought of the interior and thus kept his
eyes on the color of the rocks and flora that became dense
in his view.
Tama looked out for light; searched for gaps in the dark of
the land.
He sat down on the last bench and began paddling with his
oar which was black and brown like hawk feather and
seemed a distal end to a long femur; a wooden giant
dismasted and the Chief the receiver. The sail buckled and
snapped in the Kona wind. The spray on his chest and neck
from down in the boat felt like the days diving for shells; the
sun on his face as it set warmed everything but his
memories of home.
Within one finger to the horizon -a measure of sixty minutes
of sixty seconds each- they’d come ashore and pulled the
craft onto the beach. Some of the men spread out to the
edge and surveyed the crags of the rocks, some went into
the forest of light brown tree trunks and foliage of lush and
thick green. They urinated and defecated and listened to
small birds hop upon the ground. Tama unloaded the canoe
and sat on the out-rigger; eating some smoked eagle-rays
from his hand.
The next canoe -he thought as he looked out to sea- would
come with the women folk now that they’d started a wet-
thatch fire that would smoke out -up- to meet the long white
cloud.
They’d , the Chief thought of his people, name the area
inland by the lake, Ta Koutu pa, and the women and boys
will set camp while the men hunt in the forest and make
guard as I will watch the skies each night as it gets dark . He
thought this same thing day after day as no canoe came,
and no one spoke of it as if time didn’t pass and memories
did not turn in the mind like constellations in the sky.
His shaman was the fin-rock, his judgement was the eye.
The gods were his days, the demons were his moments
asleep; of no memory. But the sun on the fourth day was the
reminder.
Many days had passed since their landing and they heard
whispers in rainstorms and saw forms in the fog. They had
met a small dark-skinned race of men briefly, but they had
scurried away and not been seen again. The men that had
landed from Hawaiki took no further precautions. They
found burrows in tree trunks and freshwater further inland.
The lake was as he had had foreseen. The mountains had
risen and touched the clouds and become white.
The Captain at sea -and Chief Tama Te Kapua on land- slept
during the day since they had come ashore and taken care
at night not to speak loudly; not at all but to his absent
wives who had already given births: Ranencepa and Sethent
. He saw them out at sea at times, other times he saw them
at what was another cove farther down the coast. He
imagined them imagining him. Sometimes he thought of
them at the bottom of the canoe sleeping; one time he’d
seen them at the drain of the sea.
Then one day he saw the man which was a full head taller
and had shoulders as wide as two men shaking hands. The
man had brandished a Taiaha made of bronze; which he -the
Chief- and the new-comers would decide was a hard rock
made from pulling the souls of other rocks apart with fire
and hammer like cleaning an animal of its organs and
bones. They had discussed it in private after their first
meetings, but while they still lived away from the light-
skinned men. It was filigreed with what Tama would one day
call the tattooed spear , alongside the tattooed rock they’d
found a week before they met the man with white skin and
yellow hair like the sun both in color and shock and ray.
They had been surprised by the coloring, but when they saw
that his -the strange King’s- men and half his children had
red hair the new-comers decided there would be more
surprises to come and thus, it would be best to stop being
shocked by such things. They made commitments to remain
expressionless.
The dreams of the shaman had spoken of such things from
the days before; in the lands before the flood.
The second meeting was when the tribe came out of the
mist and their heads appeared like the star too in the way it
burned off the fog. Kulan ta Moneki -the Chief’s nephew-
would bow to the white men and stare at the tattoos on
their legs whilst keeping the head bent. The others made
fun of him for this but he was the first to learn net-fishing,
and the first to teach the children cat’s cradle and more.
It would be him to have the first piece of jade from the
South Island and the first married to the princess of this -the
Ur.uke.hu- tribe. The new-comers had a caste system back
home but the Ur had a classification of breeding in which
they explained the blood and the hair and the eyes of their
people; they drew diagrams of the skies on the ground and
then lay children down to align the hair, eyes and organs.
They pointed with sticks and touched places on their faces;
the tattooing mapped onto the ground at times.
“We come from the lands before they disintegrate,” King
Ur.uke said, “large swaths, but while the land coheres better
than here on the islands of the warm waters, the men and
women fall apart.” Ur .uke had told this to the new-comers;
they’d be given the name Māori soon enough, once each
man had gained one stone in weight and the women had
become pregnant by Tama or Ur.uke himself; once
marriages were proposed and agreed. They had -in the first
of many meetings- sat around fires that ringed them instead
of at center, so that their shadow cast forward and
commingled at the navel of the En.kidu ; the place where
the King said the gods meet with men. The King of the Ur
was furthest away and tallest so that his shadow stuck out
of the mesh of the other men’s casts like the dial to the
clock they’d shown Kulan on a day of equal measure; a
night of one moon previous to the solstice meeting.
The women sat behind the King and his guest -the Chief- like
the amphitheaters built into the hills of the island of the
caught fish.
The young men smelled the fire and the musk of the
females conjoined and the brains rumbled like their
stomachs once had.
Fresh water -from the stream that ran through to east and
west of the village, split by a dam the god En.Ki had told the
first three shamans how and where to build, in order to
match where they came from , King Ur said- was brought
now in cups of the hard stone -not unlike the copper spears-
by the grandmothers. Their red-hair turned brown and
seemed inscribed by fire-shadow as they circumnavigated
the two tribes. The Chief saw tattoos in their hair like the
men’s faces, he saw the pale hands around the shining cups
like the white of shark eyes around the black just before an
attack.
Tonight was the night Chief Tama would ask his counterpart
of the nature of the Puhi ariki -the women of high status,
women who could read and write words down- he’d ask of
the ways of the shaman -the To.Hun.Ga of hurewa and
wetereo - of religion and this language of both spoken and
carved words; like children who lived forever. The topic of
the scriven face too would be broached; but they all sat
silent as the King -from an uninterrupted line of the Kings of
exile, the ones from two lands who’d been run off over 144
generations ago- explained the special season they were in,
where their To.Hun.Ga of two faces, both languages of man
and the gods had been born to them.
“For the first time in seven generations our Tohun of
communication above and below is embodied in one man.
This is Li.ga.set,” the King said as he pulled his right arm
from his shawl made of goat skin and fur and let not the arm
but the back-lit shadow point and then cover -piercing- the
shadow of the shaman who sat to his right.
The new-comers saw the finger point toward their own
people, the Ur saw the shadow lay across their shaman’s
own.
A young woman brought the King a golden bowl and he
looked inside it and nodded at what looked like grey rocks,
but were eggs covered in the Blue Lily.
Ta .Moko then spoke as he passed his own cup of ink -of ash
and blood- to his left and nodded and each of the new-
comers -warriors and oarsmen- passed it to the chief at the
X of the dial. He rose his arm in the bon-light and let his
sinewy fore make shadow on the Ko.Ko.ran -the expert in
the study of stars- who then lifted his head up and then both
arms and thus made motion in an elliptic -not a circle- and
explained that above them was a mill. “A whirlwind,” he
said, and that he saw it when he took the sacred plant and
stayed awake dreaming for three days in both the longest
and shortest periods of their year.
“We spin, we auger, we dig into the sky as the stars cut like
jade spears of the Tum.at.ga and cut deep and long into
time. We count in twenty-threes for both the child in the
womb and the years between the great wobble, but we
must add time for the child to grow and also the same three
years for the great staff to reach its true distance. The Ja
were four, and we seek their approval. We grind the
Ko.ko.ra.Gi like the pestle in stone bowl for the Kumara ; the
great beet which has sustained us between bites of meat.
The witnessing of the stars is what feeds our mana between
awake and sleep.”
King Ur.uke. then said, “144 men and 233 women came on
our first Wa.ka,” as he made a shape of canoe with his
hands.
He let the new-comers inspect the items of ink and the
mana of blood. He watched the shadows of them flutter like
plucked birds. “Or.on.Go came first eighty-nine generations
ago. We have designed the Pu.Ka.o from the volcanic scoria
on our old homeland, our shamans have dreamed of your
journey here for thirteen generations and our Mo.ai will help
you build them to settle the war for us all. Thirty-seven, and
nine hundred will be carved,” he said as two little girls tied
up his ferric yellow hair into a knot that allowed the fire light
to illuminate the cheeks and brow of his large face.
The shaman had two dog teeth, one plated in gold, one
replaced by the jade. He watched the King’s
pronouncements mingle with the smoke and fire and faces
of strangers.
He hadn’t thought of utu -revenge- in a long time, and he
did not want to give the new-comers the word.
He thought of the four Ja of the world, and how they alone
had escaped the flood. They had brought the spittle to the
land before this one, they had painted the chins before the
sacrifice of blood was required by the next tier of men. They
knew the easiest and the hardest days between now.
Ta.nga.ta Wen.ua, the person of the land , would be what
the Māori could call themselves; after this mission back out
to sea , the King thought as he watched his shaman -
Li.ga.set - speak to the new-comers.
The new-comers -those that would be named after the
Ma.Ori.am - nodded and looked to the vault as the bonfire
light provided a shelf between earth and heaven so that it
was grey until the black night glittered like the sea in the
daytime when the waves crested like the jewels of dried
blood & fat on enemies’ bones.
“We see stars spin and grind and cut, we see that they
break off and fall to earth. We have witnesses to the sea
churn in a whirl. We too were exiled, we too found men of
lording height and fair skin here when we arrived. Many
buried in caves; bounded, some alive for years like days.
One day the Pa.Ke.ha will come, a future red and white
man,” the shaman Li.ga.set said as his only daughter placed
a kiwi feather in his hair behind the ear that had been
stretched again with jade the diameter of a finger, the
shape of a plucked eye.
They stretched the ears when the voices of the ancestors
were silent; they kept the jade jewelry there like an
agreement to talk with one’s rivals.
He was then quiet and each tribe breathed in and out
several times. Their airs mingled and shook hands and
placed feet of molecules of nitrogen and oxygen side-by-
side for leverage and position and strength.
“Our people have the Ziggurat of Mahaiatea in our land;
Maha-ia-tea ,” Kapapuaplo said, breaking the word into
threes, as they were still teaching each other each
language, “meaning many white skinned , like you.” The
tribe felt nervous for they knew two things at once. They
knew that their original homeland was the home of the
white skinned gods before them, and that they -they as
new-comers- had followed the gods here to the land of the
son of the long white cloud. They felt like intruders, and yet
didn’t want to ask if this was true. They had left under bad
circumstances; women were restless and rebuking the men,
and the volcanic red stones were already being hewn into
knots like the one the Chief now saw on this white King’s
head.
It gave him the feeling like when he was a child and the
great mill had made the future appear now and the now fall
away to the never.
But, he blinked rapidly and forgot the warring and the loss
of birthing, he forgot the carvings just begun.
They had seen the dark-skinned -and short statured- tribe of
what their benefactors called the Moriori , and Tama had
said they were scared; but Kapapuaplo had hinted that they
were plotting. He had gazed at rocks and touched them in
ways that lingered in the Chief’s mind in the days after the
sightings. Everything looked as a weapon to him, and he
conveyed malice in each crag of conversation and scheming
in most steps toward the forest.
King Ur.uke.hu did not respond to the loud oarsman; he then
called forth the meal as his Ta.Mo.Ko was explained. The
new-comers -the Māori- had no such designations for
warriors and royalty by blood, only by deed, and the chief
listened to the man with a face vivisected by white skin and
dark ink like dusky coastal waters crashing in two waves to
the nostrils as if they were beach caves. The King’s face like
foam and spray, the tall body like the mountain covered in
light snow they had been shown; the mountain of Ao.ra.ki
which was a thousand paces up into the sky.
Kapapuaplo stared at the young girls as if he was intent on
the knot they fashioned upon the King’s head. And his eyes
were cowled by the shadow of his backlit brow. The eggs
came around in the bowl again, and Kapapuaplo took two -
one in each hand- and stared at their blue color as the wind
picked up the scent of the pubescent girls walking behind
him with the bowls; his eyes fused with the ones a year
younger making the tall King even taller with this yellow
knot of his hair.
He didn’t see the green eyes of the King gleam. He felt only
heat on his back.

III. 2040 e.v.

Jack Donovan spoke at the fire finally after weeks of
sleeping off -away- from the group and following them at a
distance of many meters as they hiked. He heard the
whisper again:
The Twin sons of Apollo and Stilbe were locked in an
eternal battle; between the temperate and wild model
 Like Scyths before and the Skoti after them, the
Centaurs were carried away by the uncut vin
Phidias carved the war of the Lapiths and Centaurs upon
the Parthenon Marbles that we have today -cleaved in
unsatisfactory shares, metopes in England and up
Grecian stairs- and this is the eternal question between
the civilized and barbaric types, just what was it that
Elgin hauled away in the night?
Slabs rent and deformed and cleaved, you must ask
what it is that I hope to achieve?
When I design to flange, to cleave -to make whole again-
the thing Plato called the unevenly divided line, the
golden ratio of 1.6180339…
In the vision Isaiah -with mark between the eyes-
grinned in more black that white, with teeth more than
actual bite. But Jack pulled upon each thread of the
riddle and looked down at hands hemmed in by another
cat’s cradle.
The fires were set so each of Lyndon’s tribe could place four
around the stones.
Donovan drew an image of Chiron in the dirt with a stick;
then his constellation overhead. He held the ideal in his
mind; between the beast and the civilized. Would he be
mentor to Achilles ? he wondered.
The forest of Japan was black at the soil and green at bark
as they set camp on the north side. Lyndon had made sure
to shake hands with each of the tribe -looking them in the
eye- at the close of day -and of their march- which lasted
from dawn until well after dark. He placed his hands over
their face -like benediction- once they greeted him and with
this he improved their contrast capacity and low-light
sensitivity for a duration of eight hours.
He left marks between the eyes; in ash, blood and grime.
He had -many moons ago- assured them that he felt fine,
despite the blast, despite the wounds, despite the way he
had had to search for them all around the crater and the
lake. He recalled how little he felt; how the spasms of
thought, the sensitivity of skin, the meaning of kin, how all
organs from heart to appendix, from lungs to both lips had
had their weakness fall away like leprosy, like necromancy
between the gods -the Igigi - and the men created by the
Anunnaki .
The 600 Anunnaki of the chthonic class between Ea and the
Adapa, he thought as his task appeared more and more
clear; integers falling away like clutter of facts, like the scale
apophysis of the pinecones; his cathexis for revenge took on
the hue of the lapis lazuli of blue; the shape of the flexing
world; the gift of the greeting gods. What had Óðinn
searched for; what had been the strange dream of his
before all this began: the immortality of not just the line but
of the point; of the man. Each myth -from Scyth to Islam-
linked to the greater plan.
Rejected at first, out of wisdom or trick? Accepted now as
punishment or gift?
It had immortality , he thought -the word it meaning both
data point and the arc itself- with the name blooming into a
black bat of a flower with grey pollen bursting like comets -
slamming into it- from its own cosmic vault; sperm and
ovum; blood and redemption. Everything grew in density,
meaning, portent. He saw Pi -at 3.14- and Tau -at 6.28- spin
in his head like Ezekiel’s wheel. He saw the mark on the
fore; between the eyes; on kin, on these men. On temples ,
he thought. In cycles .
And the glory of God was gone up from the cherub,
whereupon he was, to the threshold of the house. And
he called to the man clothed with linen, which had the
writer’s inkhorn by his side.
 And the LORD said unto him, Go through the midst of
the city, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men
that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be
done in the midst thereof.
To the others He said in my hearing, “Go after him
through the city and kill; do not let your eye spare, nor
have any pity…” -Ezekiel 9:3-5
He recalled the first day of the blast, the lake, the throne -
the buoyant throne - weightless, painless , despite the
avoirdupois of the water, he thought:
“You want access to my PGC?” he asked Bugzy once he
had found him, as they stood over the body of Harv.
Flames still smoking back at the rubble of the home. Shit
still flying about the air.
“Naw , man,” Bugzy had said and asked if any of the
other pings - the beacons- had come up. He wanted to
find the others. His coder was broken, but Lyndon’s
seemed to still work.
“Yeah, can you stay with Jason? While I go get ‘em ?”
Lyndon asked as he sat in the snow and pulled on his
new boots from the container buried and cold and dark.
His thumb was bloody and smeared with the burst
capillaries and ragged skin.
“Yeah, what’s his immediate,” Bugzy began to ask, what
were his -Jason’s- chances? but he changed mid-
sentence, “needs? Should I wake him or warm him or
what?”
“Set up a cot inside and wrap him in wool blankets. He’s
fine. His coma will last while the coder repairs the brain
hemorrhaging. How’s your coder?” Lyndon had asked.
“I can’t read anything, offline, total,” Bugzy said in this
staccato of sentence structure that made Lyndon tilt his
head and squint the eyes.
“You able to think in full sentences or?” Lyndon asked in
half a sentence as he stood up with a hand full of snow
that he used to wash his two paws.
“Yeah, yeah,” Bugz said with a laugh. His grin was tilted
matching Lyndon’s head and his face showed wounds at
the corners of his eyes, blast black too like feather
plumes that made him look like a racoon. Lyndon held
up his hands as if being robbed and when Bugz nodded
he then used his still wet mitts to clear away the soot
from Bugzy’s eyes. He was gentle around the lids but
rough the further out he cleared the detritus away. He
held Bugz by the back of the neck finally and used the
man’s shirt to soak up the blackwater he’d made from
the melted snow and blast carbon.
“Legs hurt,” Bugz said. Lyndon nodded and told him of
the morphine in the container. He assumed the
analgesic function of the coders were off-line for Bugz as
well.
“Who you go after first?” Bugz asked.
Lyndon now saw the syntax was truncated and he felt
not worry, but diagnostic, pragmatic. He let his own PGC
run ideas for repair. He noticed the cold did not bother
his extremities. His heart thumped at 55 bpm. He looked
at Bugz and saw him shaped like a hammer-headed
shark when he turned to the side and the shadow lay on
the snow like a railroad spike, a nail. And he
remembered the way he wiped down his ratchet and
sockets before putting them away; back in the day. His
old life appeared like evidence, like paper thin, like
things said to him by strangers with no reason to lie. But
it felt like nothing, only information.
“I will make a loop, pick them up. Watch Harv; keep
warm. Ok buddy?” he said with no sensation in his chest
or pits or groin any longer, his brain quieted and he
 could think without affect or noise. He could wander
away and not fear anything.
“Ok then,” Bugz said as he stared at Harv’s forehead
brown with three lines down and one above.
Chen listened to Jack -he had begun to speak again as
Lyndon wandered off- and Chen stuck a rock he’d been
holding -as it cooled- back into the ring of the closest
flames. He stared at Celina to watch her face and then at
Jack when he stopped speaking; it made him nervous when
the man was silent.
“And?” Chen said to Jack Donovan.
“And I’ve dreamt of our destination, but I don’t know if I
should give it to Lyndon or not,” Jack said.
“Why not?” Celina asked.
“Because I don’t know what will happen if we find them;
him, this other Jack,” Jack said.
“What did your dream say?” Gabriel asked.
“Just that it would be,” Jack paused, “well, it wasn’t in
words. It was visuals, but I know what it looks like and how
to find it on a map. It’s due south, maybe a thousand
nautical miles.”
Donovan saw the dreams again, out of order, like a pastiche
of a quilt from the first-peoples, like totem of two clans high
and of nine animals. He recalled that he had breathed in the
same air as Alexander , and Herakles , tasted the waters
that had been in the blood of daughters -of the Khan - as
they leaked down into aquifers and then bubbled up to lakes
and then side-to-side into wells and skins on mares that
went west to the land of Germani, and then made into
spirits in the highlands and yes, then pissed out into the
snows of the encroaching ice of the Hebrides . He saw all of
it.
He saw the sun-wheel in the form of a whirlpool in the
Indian Ocean, he saw a suya of the solar path, the open
ocean unimpeded, and sauvastika of bent arms in a night
wreck, an utter wreck , he thought as he whispered, “Kali .”
Chen stared at the fire and heard the Kali mentioned but the
flames burned it from his mind as he thought of Thea over
and over and traced her last movements of Chicago again
and again. Did such cities exist still? he wondered. He
touched the spot between his eyes and it was wet again,
and he pulled it back and saw his forefinger and thumb red,
rusty, bronzen.
“I see the four-horse chariot of Mithra , the four J’s of the
whirl, ok?” Donovan said with no bravura, no revelation. It
was a confession -a defecation- after so many days silent
and ingesting information and mana and meaning from their
journey from America and the first wave of infections and
disease. All those days at sea , he thought as his stomach
still sloshed a bit.
“He’s been good to us, for us,” Celina said.
“I’m not against him. I’m for him. But the symbols repeat
and repeat and from whirlwind and whirling log of the
Navajo , to the ink and silk of the Han , the moskstraumen ,
the sink of the oceans, the Mezine mammoth tusks, the
Craig-Narget to the Hasekura of this place,” Jack said as he
raised the head to denote the forest ahead; what was
another day’s hike.
The crew hunting Jack Four had been stacking not just coin
and wine but obelisk after odalisque as they sailed above
the arctic through the new summer-cleared channels of the
sea; bronze-age shields and stones, women left alone in
beach-towns five miles inland from a coast wiped out in a
day. Callanish X and VI had been towed in to the ship, then
copper was taken in billet and goblet, in sheets and ingots;
it was pried up from highland abbeys and basement floors
of cathedrals between estuaries that flowed out into the
North Sea.
The crew , Donovan thought, moved like arms followed
shoulders and hands followed next; fingers trailed between
and betwixt, and after all that , well, fingernails after that .
He looked down at his own hands and cracks.
The ship’s Captain kept his harem in his cabin and everyone
pretended not to notice their ages, their gaunt faces, their
races of Inuit and Celtic and now Japanese . He tattooed
them with labyrinthine patterns and Sanskrit from earlobe to
narrow hips that he claimed would widen in time. He force-
fed them like geese to make pâté , made them bathe
everyday in the sea water he pumped in with a wheel and
axle, that he’d asked Vlatko and Pachenko to build at the
bottom of the ships. He wrote fractions and algorithms and
placed silver slugs with embossed demi-gods in each man’s
hand as he folded their fingers over top. He gave the wives
of his friends wide berth when he went about the deck &
galleys and the brig. He smiled warmly, in all but the eyes;
those orbs radiated their own lights by which to see; the
ojos burned too hot to blink.
He called the sea, the drink. Into the drink , he’d bellow. He
called the air the firmament ; and all land he said -as he
shook his head- was the Devil’s to lament .
And each time they found or pilfered or commandeered
more copper, he’d bite it and side-by-side it with his canine
that grew a bit each day -it seemed- before these testings
wore it down the same amount. He’d hide the toothy grin,
bit a piece of it with his lower jaw like channel-locks, or he’d
run his tongue over like a black-monk’s cowl, or a chevroned
shield and it be the spear.
“Spartan behind,” he said as he thought everything was a
sign.
But he’d lay hands on each of the crew as it grew; at each
stop, each loch , each port on the coast from the outer
Hebrides to the Antilles to Sochi and from Longyearbyen , to
Okhitsk and Sakhalin . The crew grabbed the copper, and
the Captain rubbed her -piece by piece- as it came aboard
with pelts and sides of bison or beef -girls no more than
fifteen- and men with dubious qualities except that they
were still alive amidst the swelling oceans and infestations
of parasites.
The natives of Russia and Norway and Okinawa would
complain of virus and malady and entropy and wasting
away.
They had horded anti-biotics that failed to combat the
modern illnesses; they’d taken doctor’s orders to stay home.
But the physicians were now dead, and those that remained
buried their children and parents and nobody had good
news on the new coasts of lands that had seen rise and set
of sun, rise and fall of seas, rise and shine of the moon over
much more than mere disease. It’d be failure and corruption
for more years than they had months before.
Now it was war.
The land was wised up, the sea was elevated, lofty and
kingly.
“But the people are as obtuse as the angles of the elliptic at
the bottom of the world,” Gabe said to the Captain over sup
as they watched the sun come up in the rear windows of the
ship. Lyndon nodded and turned the black fork half a turn
and eyed his cut of duck and red potatoes & greens sliced
on the bias by the cook.
He’d trade words with the locals once ashore; promise them
meetings at the local churches or synagogues or mosques.
He’d merely mention -like it might just then have occurred
to him- that he’d take copper in lieu of gold or cash, as if it
was his third or fourth choice, and might they know any
place that had it in statues or amulets or behind glass cases
in the rectory, or as bezel to gauges -maybe, he said with
nonchalance - on some factory floor.
“Yes, yes, the factory you say,” he would repeat as if he was
merely deciding where a good place to meet might be, “ah,
the one with copper gauges still in use, huh? Interesting,
well, the main thing is it’s large enough for us to meet and
discuss what needs discussed.” He’d say this and the town’s
inhabitants would eagerly lead him to the booty, the bounty,
the largest stash of the metal in between the shore and the
apothecary that they assured him had zinc and tincture of
laudanum and more. He made them gather in museums and
mausoleums, and in old Soviet-era train stations that had
stopped moving when the north flooded with not just water
but ice floes.
He’d spend days at butterfly pavilions and zoos. He’d walk
the abandoned part of town. He’d let Donovan guard his six.
He’d talk to him.
He took rat-tailed spearpoints, fishhooks and harpoons,
tanged knives, socketed spuds and beads and blanks gone
aqua-marine and azul and the color of the eyes of the girl
he’d lost before he’d given her a name. He saw her soul
embodied in heaven, in some Olympian athenaeum;
growing wise if not large. He saw her elbow had the star of
the flying fish at the apex, the breast plate a mobius strip,
her spine was arrayed like schools of fishes, her lungs made
of a million birthday wishes just before the candles were
blown out. He peered into the vault and saw his unborn -but
not unreal- daughter blameless:
“No fault,” he said as he read the yarrow stalks, “to
decrease what is lower, to increase what is above.”
Then he squirreled her away and smiled because he knew
MO and Isaiah had no access to him now; he was free. And
the smile was fake even if the facts were not; he felt nothing
at all. Mere thoughts passed like clouds, shapes, sure , he
thought, shapes but no substance in the air, no intent, no
longing stare, no desire in the vapor at all . He could watch
what he was programmed to want, he could act like
electricity or magic in a wand. He could flow like water, rise
up and be weathered down like a mountain.
“I can be the wall falling into the moat,” he whispered to his
shaman.
When the crew got back from raiding, pilfering, invading, he
could examine them for what they took and what was left
on the field. He moved their limbs, he asked for their sins,
he allowed confession without disgust nor reproach. He
poured copper amalgams in their wounds, when asked when
they’d be allowed to ship out he always said: soon . And he
sent silver to their berths, gold to the hold, and what his
sailors -those pirates- called the combination of tin and the
tooth, well, that he kept himself, forsooth .
He watched as the ions beamed out over the crew’s hands,
faces and wounds he’d tend to like a mother, both roughly
and with love; not felt love, performed love. He kept records
of what was weighted and numbered; he gave orders to the
mate’s to allow slumber, he pulled his shaman aside one
night and said:
“Jack, we spend more and more time at each port, each
seaside, each coast we limp along. I’m not rebuking you, but
we’re dawdling, what is it my man? What makes us linger
so?”
“Lyndon, my friend,” Jack said as he placed his large hand
on the shoulder of the man close to him in distance,
elliptical in resonance, “you have tasked me with finding out
your precious metals and dear rivals, you’ve left it to me to
give your mission -your recipe- the ingredients for success.
Have we not found more metal than the baggers and
choppers we left on the shore? More enemies than you
could earn in ten turns at each fight you ever had on your
own? Are we not further and father away from Hríð Tòrr?”
“But are we closer to Jack? The other Jack; are we any closer
to his trail?” Lyndon asked as he made his eyes wet by
dragging a forefinger across the nostril with cayenne and
cat dander that he’d dug from his pocket as Donovan spoke.
“We are Captain, we are,” Donovan said as he saw his
reflection in the gleaming dark eyes. He saw -in those moist
eyes- the cabin misshapen and his own noggin’ glow like
muted bullion and a carved skull of the monks of Tibet.
Lyndon nodded and thanked him and told him he was proud
of him and asked if there was anything he could do in
return. When his First Mate and pal left, Lyndon let the eyes
burn anyway, and wiped only the nose with a rag. He sat on
the bed as the girls napped and his weight made them rise
on the other edge.
He breathed shallowly -as usual- and stared at his effects.
He mechanically laid down; heard thumping of the crew
below decks; he felt waves lap against the hull; he imagined
swordfish drilling holes in his ship and he grimaced.
Sixty seconds passed, then 60 more until an hour had been
reached and dreams sauntered out on his brain like the
automatons of a Bavarian clock. Drawers of water, hewers
of lumber, maids with buckets of milk all passed by like the
moon ‘round the earth, like earth ‘round the sun, and he
dreamed of things he’d never recall.
He’d write down notes -in the days- that the girls would find
as their pregnancies moved further and further along.
She -Miss Scarlett- could tell now by his breathing that
he’d been asleep in port for a short time.
He had cycles of four to his sleep; and he was in the first
phase; and she -the girl he’d rescued from the caves by
black rock had finally had and missed a cycle- and so
she glowed now like a lamp. Thus, fearing her own rays
she covered her shoulders and belly with a tartan shawl
from her grandmother; wrapped her red hair with a
burlap sack cut into squares and dyed black inside the
buckets on deck the sailors gave her one day. All but
eyes covered, all but the sighs un-uttered, as she exited
the bed and walked on the balls of her feet.
She rifled through his map-table and effects.
On the desk was a chart of an old map made amber and
brown and red, like a diagram of a Cartesian body , she
thought, it had the feel of an autopsy and the veins and
arteries ran through the corpus of the world with valves
and brachia and florid capillaries flowing and flooding all
over and over the globe . Her hands were red and
scarred at the knuckles from the banging of them with
copper tools. He punished them with implements, so he
could say he never laid a hand upon them; so he could
abuse them, yet not lie.
But she placed them -those sore hands- on the books at
the corner of the table closest, and peeled it open like
the way she’d seen him butterfly carrion and manta ray,
elk sirloins, taken from the chef with his own cleaver in
black -that he carried on his chest like a medal he’d won
in a foreign and faraway war- and she stared at the
pages.
The leaves opened and she thumbed them like
prosciutto laid on top on each other forever like some
feast in a Grecian heaven with the Lapiths and Centaurs
and their wines:
D. radiodurans was exposed to dry copper surface
for 2-minutes, 10-minutes, 66-minutes.
 Control group of stainless steel, petro-chemical
plastic, and wet copper for E. coli , and D .
radiodurans .
Stationary growth-phase cells of D. radiodurans were
inactivated after one minutes of exposure. D .
radiodurans possesses sophisticated and effective
DNA repair systems enabling cells to recover from
stresses resulting in fragmented genomes, damage
that is lethal to most microbes. The anti-septic
properties of copper were unparalleled, and uniquely
suited for prophylactic to this highly robust
pathogen.
Stationary-phase cells (1.1x107 ) were completely
killed after 1-hr; E, coli after 3hr when exposed to dry
copper surface.
[6]…but D. radiodurans was even more sensitive to
moist copper than E. coli . Stainless steel surfaces
had no antimicrobial activity exposure during growth
in copper plumbing systems and colonized medical
copper implants is chronic, where contact with dry
metallic copper is acute… copper surfaces did not
increase the mutation rate of E. coli ; thus making
DNA very unlikely as a target of acute lethal metallic
copper stress. Membrane, biofilm, and envelope
damage are likely cause of anti-microbial effect of
copper. This prevents mutation; this stops
acceleration. [Santo, Lam, et.al 2010]
She stopped reading the other pages as the same words
repeated; she saw long names for germs and footnotes
in brackets, parenthetical shorthand for chemicals of
more syllables than she had hours left before he awoke.
She looked up and saw his head -the hair down in his
face like curtain- lay against the grey pillow as if sinking
into the sand. His shoulders were bare and the old lines
from the old tattoos seemed like the ones draw from
Polaris to Draco , from Uruses to the outlines of Orion’s
Belt at Lascaux .
She recalled the way he shaved the copper billets and
spearheads to make filaments that he’d place in bottles
clear and thick at bottom. It looked like autumn gold to
her, and she marveled at it as he heaped it up around
their bed like parapets and crenulated towers of dirt and
the melted helmets of enemies and the fins of fish and
the wings of sea-downed aeroplanes. He dosed her each
morning and rubbed her belly with the grains and told
her it was, a salt-rub ; an exfoliant scrub to preserve
both mama and baby as well .
“She will live, yours will live,” he said to her in a way
that made it seem more apotropaic than information;
more incantation that statement of fact. She rubbed his
head and loved the transition from his long locks to
shorn sides and her pinky finger would run the line like
he used to allow her -en toto - to run on the beach when
they arrived in a new port or coast.
He’d asked her if she knew what ESKAPE group
pathogens were and she shook her head as if it had fleas
itself and he smiled in that practiced way. His eyes even
seemed copper to hers -which were blue- and his heart
made of the stuff too , she thought as she swallowed her
first words as they bubbled up.
“Maybe that’s why he never got sick,” she finally said as
she closed the book and turned it back the way it was on
the desk.
She wandered to the windows of the ship and placed a
hand on each thing on the railing and wainscoting shelf;
each skull and bone of this bird or that, each photograph
or eschaton or plaque. She watched as the flames of the
other ships lit up the bay.
 Her child moved in a tumble inside her and it tickled her
belly and mind; she giggled and turned toward the table
and in the background she saw him wide-eyed. She
remembered the way he looked when awake and
focused upon her.
But tonight -now- they slept ashore, miles in, deep in the
thicket of forest. And all this was in a dreamy past before
they’d landed at Osaka .
Osaka had required they be a bit barbarous, he would say
with a smirk that he misjudged. The list of names in his
pocket hadn’t even come out to be amended as he usually
did. He apologized briefly for his error, but showed no actual
contrition, and this bolstered the sailors at sea and soldiers
on land. They saw no doubt in execution nor plan; he -with
dead eyes- immediately reminded them of what was afoot.
“What is the silk of the Han ?” Gabriel asked of Donovan
interrupting him as he listed the scattered symbols of their
ancestors. He moved his right leg to touch the left leg of his
wife, and the stream of wash-water off his hands turned
orange from Donovan’s side of the light.
“The comet, from the Mawangdui tomb, the fucking comet,
man,” Donovan said with an expulsion of air like its own tail
of ice turned to steam before liquid, and his head -that great
bull head of his- grim and glowing with the rising belt of the
Archer backdropping him and his eyes absorbing the fire
light. He watched them as they washed their hands in the
pan.
“Do you think it’s coming?” Chen asked as he picked his
teeth with a sliver of lumber he’d taken when they hacked
down trees for tent poles. They did this so they need not
carry weight -or metal- away from the ship.
“Do you remember anything from before the lake?”
Donovan asked as he stared at Chen and set his jaw like a
broken bone before being splinted.
“I remember that the…” Chen began with confidence, for he
obviously had a life, a daughter, a being he could trace to
some origin. But the answer stalled out as he looked at Jack
and then at his hands and realized he didn’t really recall
anything before the lake.
“Exactly,” Donovan said with almost no malice at all; a kind
of commiseration, a wry smile, an excuse.
Lyndon stared at the crew; each clique. He assembled them
and split them apart again.
Lyndon even now noticed he felt nothing; no lack; no affect.
He saw each of his friends like stones arrayed in
astronomical circle, and he saw The Belt behind them to the
north. It would rise over night , he thought. He wouldn’t
sleep or eat. He would move from circle to circle and place
hands on them to remove pain or improve circulation; his
hands would read their coders despite the implants not
giving them any improvement or data themselves.
His hands would then pull the remedy from his own
allostatic system -the dopamine, the endogenous opioids,
the epinephrine- and let their skin absorb it; genome fixes
would be built by his coder and sent via viral vectors he
could breathe on them as they closed their eyes more and
more during each of these sessions.
He spoke less; he did extra -additional- things.
He never once shared a feeling or a doubt or any joy or
affection; he just healed them, tended to them, and led
them from landmass to Oceania, from vessel to inlet, from
place to place as he hunted down each air molecule
breathed by that woman who had had his baby girl. Each
person she met -each fucking breath- that spilled her CO 2
into the world.
All as step toward heaven, all toward his battle with Isaiah
and Jack Four.

IV. 2038 e.v.

The fuel had eaten his clothes, and he’d stripped off what
was left of these rags.
The T-shaped monoliths of containers once stacked in the
ring now sagged; had lines oblique, melted, smashed.
He thought of the way the winter solstice sunrise came up
exactly between the two original containers as he stood on
the pad all those years ago. He recalled the first one: red,
cloudless, hitting his eyes like the arrows of the Archer.
“Like God’s own red-dot on my soul,” he said aloud as a
comet streaked the sky like a white fly.
He walked down to the slope of the gun range -which had
filled with rain water- and he methodically scrubbed off the
gel of the gasoline, the remnant of black tatters covered in
blood and sand, and the salt and feathers from falling crows
and ash. The water was spinning as if draining as it filled up
with the melting snow from the periphery.
He stood there in reverie, thinking -instead of moving- and
breathing shallowly in the dark with the flames of the
compound barely visible above the foundation from out this
far.
What was under the site of Lot 45 was dark, buried, and the
original place covered it in smoke, ruin, endless lines of
perpendicular metal. The night sky occluded by the smoke.
The sound of silence overcome by copper and crimson
flames and smoldering greys that sounded like brush on
drums.
Water now began to visibly drain out and down. Small
whirlpools appeared here and there around the one at
center that seemed like a shock wave and a labyrinth of
some sinking island or rising formation in search of merely
the cope stone.
He thought of other things; he thought of the softness of his
feet long ago, how the rocks had once buckled his knees.
That fat head of mine , he added, skipping all in between
the head and the knees as he then smiled and realized his
lips too were cut and the jaw hurt -now- on both sides.
“But I have that within which passeth show; these but the
trappings and suits of woe, ” he said quoting the vacillating
man from Helsingør , still black-clad and haunting the halls
of the castle on the island of Zealand.
The knee , he went on, was there for the body -in order to
collapse and relieve that weight from the feet being
assaulted by jagged stones- but it was merely pain, not
injury; the feet suffered no damage . The body did not know
that, it saw pain as pre-damage, as it rightly should , he
thought. It was the rational response, to buckle the knee
and remove weight from the foot in pain.
Of course, it put the whole body at risk to fall like that,
merely to save the feet some discomfort. He had not sought
out any solution though, save one: make the feet more
robust to the rocky world.
This seemed both obvious and not obvious too. Why not, he
asked himself, make the ground less rocky, or wear shoes
for Christsake? He had been barefoot though for a reason,
he had … God, he couldn’t think of why now. He thought he
had often slept in his boots. Sometimes he dreamed he had
boots on or dreamed he could take them off. The feet are
what meets the ground, the body hovers above it. The feet
must take the assault, the body never acknowledges this .
But the body has its own travails, let’s not be dumb , he
thought as he squeezed the hands and tried to locate the
heart in his chest, the guts, the bowels.
He checked his trunk for injuries. A quote from Thucydides
popped up into his interface:
Scythian mercenaries could be seen working as
bodyguards in Athens.
This trigged an image of a painting he had done decades
ago; it was two meters tall, taller even , he thought. It was
an Assyrian, with a fish on his head, and a bag in one hand,
and the head was conical from the fish, right? They battled
then bartered for wine, he thought. They were seen as louts
for they drank their wine uncut by water, and they shunned
material possessions and fought over any insult. They
wouldn’t write anything down. Why?
The Egyptians had said writing was true immortality; oh,
they were the ten tribes , he thought and then added, the
exiled tribes. The Scythians were always being exiled; even
Dorians, then how many by the Romans?
An image -cited, with translation- appeared again in his fore:
As for those wise writers from the time after the gods,
they who foretold what was to come, their names have
been everlasting, (even though) they have departed this
life and all their relatives forgotten.
They did not make for themselves mausolea of copper
with tombstones of iron; they did not think to leave
heirs, children to proclaim their names: (rather) they
made heirs of writing, of the teachings they had
composed.
They gave themselves [a book] as (their) lector-priest, a
writing-board as (their) dutiful son. Teachings are their
mausolea, the reed-pen (their) child, the burnishing
stone (their wife). Both great and small are given (them)
as their children, for the writer is chief.
Their gates and mansions have been destroyed, their
mortuary priests are [gone], their tombstones are
 covered with dirt, their tombs are forgotten. (But) their
names are proclaimed on account of their books which
they composed while they were alive… [Ramesside
papyrus; British museum (10684) Papyrus Chester
Beatty IV]
But, at any rate, he had begun walking more and more
without boots in the day, on rocks, hot and cold; cold with
ice sometimes.
To take life seriously, he now thought, is to live it as if you
have nothing to lose. To be contemptuous of life, conversely,
he reasoned, is to play it safe and do nothing interesting at
all . Those who take no risks never drink Champagne, is the
way the Russians put it, he thought.
More white dust fell upon his shoulders and hair and the
ground.
His sister-in-law had actually recoiled in horror at him once,
like a face moved by the gods with hempen ropes and set
hooks, block and tackle and 5-ton hoists-ex-machina . She
had said, there are a lot of good things about Blax , in the
most transparent of faint-praise damnations. These people
thought their insults went unnoticed, they thought they
were more clever than they actually were, he thought.
When you think someone is a good person, you don’t hedge
with worlds like, many good things; you just say, he’s good .
Critiques of those you respect come straight and without
sarcasm.
No insults, just direct honest language:
I think you are a man too eager for rebellion or too
libertine and cavalier about sexual morality, and you -
you outlaw- you do this all while being condemnatory of
anyone who deviates from some atavistic ideal. I think
you are too quick to anger and say sharp things without
measuring their effect ,
She could have said that. He would have heard her out.
That would have been not merely acceptable, but accurate;
and the kind of critique you give to someone you held in
some esteem. But instead she made oblique insults. He had
-in fact- told her she was a bit too eager to humiliate him,
and men in general, that she had a bit of an axe to grind on
men, likely for good reason -her father being a bit of a
tyrant- but that her treatment of him -as her brother-in-law-
was a bit extreme and maybe she should think about it.
Maybe she ought to think about what it was she was feeling
before she just said whatever came to her mind.
He had sat in the restaurant arrogating space for himself
and spoke politely and with practice and said things so mild
in tone and so ecumenical in verbiage, and yet she took the
full weight of his rebuke. He thought he had said it politely,
decently; he thought he had followed his own code.
“Maybe you ought to see that I’m a human, and a man, and
you ought not use words like small to describe me,” he had
said as the Amish kitchen soaked black beans overnight and
cooked paté and scallions in a cast-iron pan under T-12
lights and ceilings of concrete and white pipe. Small sounds
of metal and wood met in the ears as he lectured her in
such ways.
They never say, that hurt my feelings , or you frighten me ,
or I know things you don’t know and yet you speak over me
as if I don’t know them and it makes me feel angry,
disrespected, unseen . Instead they make rude comments or
oblique insults or undermine you to others when you aren’t
around. It’s always on the sly, as if God doesn’t hear each
word.
“We get away with nothing; He sees all,” Blax said. He
forgot all about his size, his mien, his volatility that others
saw most when he was calm. All the things he noticed -all
the nuance- in others, fell away when he spoke of -to-
himself. He thought his words could be rationally heard.
She had acted, he thought, with the kind of shock and
revulsion only a woman can muster, a woman who hasn’t
ever been challenged or told the truth before. She was a
woman used to getting her way in a world devoid of the
type of men designed by God and nature to set her ass
straight. She was modern and around modern men .
He left the memory and stared to the west and he saw light
photons from his former home, he smelled gas infused with
sulfur, he felt cold at the ends of fingers and toes.
“She went the long way around,” Blax said.
It takes courage, he said to himself, to say the truth with
equal parts trenchant analysis and vulnerability. To admit to
both sides of the equation, to take your own side, Blax
thought, and your foil’s with equal zeal. To stand up for
yourself while admitting to where you are most wrong. He
still felt the water run down his back and legs. He felt his
throat dry.
Emotional courage meant physical courage, and its why
most men and almost all women lied.
But Blax -he now recalled- had decided in .05 seconds -as
the bio-chems for anger and arrogance and self-respect
atomized and made venturi in his inner-engine and
compressed under the twin-pistons of his lungs in his four-
stroke heart- wasn’t taking any of that shit from her. And so
in a moment too short to be measured -in a restaurant in
San Antonio in 2017- he had put her on notice. He said what
he needed to say.
Then he had expounded upon it and written a more
complete account down. They were so taken aback by its
contents and tone and tenor of Deuteronomic vengeance
and Revelatory vex that they couldn’t form words in
response. It would require the complimenting of a well-built
bomb, a handsomely carved poison dart-gun, the perfectly
planned murder. One couldn’t get all excited about its
craftmanship because one knew its actual intent.
Blax let his coder sweep the body for injuries again and he
took in the cold and smoke and light refracting through all
the shit still falling through and suspended within the air.
The muddy -shallow- lakewater now was lapping on his toes
as he remembered this past contretemps with this woman;
it was gauzy and timeless, as if it had happened to someone
else, nearly someone else. It was his memory, but it almost
seemed not in this body. As if, he thought, it was a signal
picked up from some cloud of static and charge and
conducting waters . He saw copper coils and Leyden jars; he
saw whales in the clouds of dark grey smoke; he heard their
songs below the birds circling over the ravine; he felt a
billion wings beneath his chin prevent the music from
sinking deep into his throat and chest. He wondered how far
he had grown from the PGC, the augmentations of genome,
the experiences so extreme. Could a man -did a man-
change so thoroughly at some point, was, he asked, there a
threshold in which he was a totally new man?
“Why ruminate on why people hate you, what in their
clockworks fascinates you so?” he asked the firmament. He
saw things -smaller things- fall from the air, birds appear
here and there from before and behind all the smoke. He
tried to predict where each thing would land or which
direction it would take. He connected A to Z; discerned bird
from bee.
He felt it, but he had no way to calibrate it.
He lamented the destruction of the jars of Tupelo honey and
the skeletons of seahorse as he saw -as the smoke blew to
one side with a gust- the dark scar of his former home. He
imagined the boiling of the Apocrita’s work, the vaporizing
of the hippocampi and then he thought of each book
immolated and shredded and now realized that it was
confetti of individual letters that rain down on the land, the
water and himself. The metal and lumber and concrete had
all landed minutes ago; only the lightest artifacts still
continued to fall. He saw dust but knew each one was a
letter in a word in a sentence in a page from something he
had in his brain and now all about him like a feathered nest
of a thousand men not unlike himself.
He stared not at the flames of the home -of which there was
little- but the absence of something that had been there
before. He saw the trees were all broken or bent around the
area; he saw that nothing was untouched by the blast.
He used memory to compare and contrast.
But, each time the memory was recalled it was reinvented,
drawn anew, so -maybe- he changed it, making it further
way, pulling closer by an inch or two. There is no way to
know , he thought as the back of his head stung and
burned. He felt the crawl of the Deseret on the neck, he
slapped at it but the hand came back with nothing but soot
and sweat.
The inner life was as complex as the outer; and as burned
down -simplified- at times.
He knew now that he had infra-red and ultra-violet vision
augmentation and could read avatars of people’s bio-
responses like galvanic skin conductivity or capillary
restriction which was able to indicate -for most common
people- if someone was lying to him. Now he knew how little
reality, outside reality -heretofore- one actually saw. The
trees and the sky and the dirt all looked one way, but they
contained multitudes more in real life. Imagine a black and
white photo; now, imagine believing that is all of reality, he
thought. Imagine once you’ve seen color ever thinking life is
monochrome again .
He thought of how he preferred black and white photos 99
out 100 times and it made him wince now.
He looked down at the shallow water of the flooded gun-
range. He couldn’t see below his ankles. He hadn’t known
they -his feet- were submerged until now, but then he saw
his legs. They , he thought, had bee n wet up to the knees ,
but the water did recede . He let that ring in his head as he
pawed a bit at the remaining shit from the explosion that
had embedded in the hair of the head and body itself.
He took in a breath.
Imagine a first word of a poem and the last; imagine that
this was the totality of the work.
He let the air out.
That is how we see material reality, we think the bark of the
tree is all to see, or the meat of it when we slice it open, or
the roots when we dig it up , he thought. But, there are
layers downward, deeper, atomic and genomic and even
lower than that that we do not see; and yet what bounty of
information is contained in that, just like the info missing in
the black and white photo that was there in real life, just like
the missing words of the poem that are there on the real -
and complete- page.
“There’s things unseen in me, between my opening salvo
and my swan song,” he said. And too in my enemies’
overtures and denouements, yes , he thought next.
The idea that we see less than 1% of reality is too much for
us to handle . We cannot go around thinking we’re this
blind, he thought. But, when your eyes are opened to how
much you’ve missed -he saw now in the low light, the UV
and IR light spectrum, highlights of some coyotes off in the
distance, just beginning their night hunts, the fire and noise
hadn’t scared them off at all- that is when you actually take
in more info . The new info gained , he thought as he stared
back toward the home, the former home, and that’s when
you also realize how much more there is to see all at once.
It’s the deep ravine in the mountain, the oasis in the desert,
the feelings of rising as you just fall asleep.
He knew he was missing it all; missing too much.
And the augmentations to perceptions just highlighted that
fact even more. He had stopped scraping his body of the
detritus, he was done and he was mostly bare, small drifts
of flotsam and jetsam clung to him, but he was as God
made him, with the exception -as if from harpoon and fin- of
the attempts on him by other whales and men.
As he then thought of the new foveal vision, expanded
spectral vision, and the augmented somatosensory cortical
terrain and map that allowed him to perceive slight
variations that were previously unseen, he toggle d back
and forth on the conceit, the question, if this too counted as
how God made him. Or am I beyond ever claiming such
things again? he wondered. But for now, he was at least
naked, the clothes had been burned or torn by the blast; or
removed by him after.
He, preferring a whole nothing to just part of mere
something, was seemingly now demanding revolution over
mild reform.
The skin conductance perception would occur like one would
notice a tell in a card player; it would take a few seconds to
load then come together in a thought. He just noticed these
things now and they had all been acquired as the body slept
for eighteen hours under paralytic suppression to avoid any
injury or failure in uptake as the PGC built his new eyes and
new mind.
He saw more and more in the dark as his coder adjusted his
skin conductance to reduce heat loss.
He saw the ankles were black from soot, and charcoal and
burns, he saw his skin was dusky all over.
Gaining wisdom was unerringly paid for by some loss, some
pain, some suffering. This was law of the cosmos , Blax
acknowledged. With any gain, something must be
exhausted. When one paid for the emotion they knew its
quality at once , he thought as Wilde’s idea rattled about in
the head.
The Amish have it right, they form their own culture, their
own tribe. Blacks did this too, out of necessity, being
excluded for so long.
And Asians and Jews look down on whites, he extrapolated,
and there is no dismissing this fact. Asians and Jews often
see whites as mongrels and feral and uncivilized.
Barbarians. Not unlike the way whites looked down on
blacks. The way the English looked down on his own people,
he thought. Asian countries and Israel had strict race-based
immigration and nobody said a word. Israel had blood tests
to gain entry, Japan had minzoku, he thought and felt his
own fingertips wrinkle and feel raw.
He let his mind wander like this more and more as if too was
exiled and pushed further from the center of him; whatever
was in him at heart or head that had incessantly focuses on
these plans vis-à-vis the west.
But this was taboo to say. All of it.
The idea that it was innate for to people prefer their own
kind; that to each race there was an endogenous valence
that need not be explained nor justified, he thought, and
yet, we had to pretend we were open to anything . This was
the poison of America, the idea that anyone could be an
American was the first sin that led from there to here, Blax
thought as he recalled his medicines -his drugs- were in the
house that was razed. He felt a shudder, winded, he
panicked a bit. And black women are harmed the most from
this too; because they -black women- get passed over by
black men dating white women purely for the status symbol
, he thought. It’s not the obvious consequences that matter
most, sometimes it’s the ancillary ones, he thought some
more and more and more as images of black women from
his past filled his mind like dusky jeweled ghosts and six-
fingered succubae and his heart hurt that he could not love
them.
He felt aggrieved; he felt bad for others. He hated that he
knew what they felt. And he knew they’d not want his pity.
They’d hate him and rebuke his concern.
And I shouldn’t be thinking this way anyway , he scolded
himself now. Then he swung wildly again, thinking that he
had raised his Jacks and could think whatever he wanted
now; I need not defend the ideas of the West. He felt his
eyes burn, and his chest compress. Here he was ruined,
again, like Job , and still thinking of these big ideas. Jesus,
he had nothing, not even clothes , he thought as he looked
at his arms and waist and feet still in the muddy pond. The
scars under the tattoos keloidal, raised like serpent mounds.
He then realized -with increased capacity for telling truth
from lie- that he’d be able to judge individuals as individuals
better now. It hit him all at once that mankind -and him
especially- had had to make heuristic decisions on who was
trust worthy and who was not. And one used race because it
was 90% correct; and 100% easy. They segregated men by
race in prison immediately. Did mankind not see a metaphor
in that? People were too overloaded with data, they didn’t
have the bandwidth to treat each person as an individual,
one had to make categories -white man and black, safe or
dubious- to survive. Man did not have the luxury of time.
Because man was too stupid to judge each man individually,
but smart enough to know categories worked more or less,
he had to live with these unarticulated but used heuristics;
and everyone did it whilst everyone lied and said they
didn’t. Man was just barely smart enough to do what worked
more or less.
“In a pinch, with a punch,” he said.
Passages after passages from what seemed a random
region, from Romanians, Albanians, the Balkans, poured
over him from his coder, unbidden; he barely even looked.
Maps of the area, words from Thesus , Baccchylides , water
tables under the rocks all appeared in colors from infra-red
to ultra-violet. It just washed over him as his own thought
conjured up parallels and tangents and things oblique.
The Scythians on the Black Sea and the Thracian are
straight haired, for both they themselves and the
environing air are moist. [Aristotle]
Men make gods in their own image, those of the
Ethiopian are black and snub-nosed, those of the
Thracian have blue eyes and red hair. [Xenophanes]
Those two quotes clacked as they typed out in his fore, as
he thought of how to stop this information from coming and
coming. He saw images of artwork all over the world and
saw that some peoples -no matter how brown or squat,
black headed, dark eyed- had white gods with red hair and
tall frames, eyes blue like foss. Not all gods, he then
thought, were made in the image of the people, some
people described who their gods actually had been, with no
attempt to shoehorn them into their own image at all.
“Because these giant white men weren’t gods, they were
mortal, ancestors, first peoples; and their history and their
myths -facts and fiction- were mixed, and some of it was
written down. Some carved, some built in mounds and some
passed down in story and poetry and code,” he said.
In a hundred origin myths the Celts, the Scythians, the
Thracians and Dacians had been taller, fairer of skin and
hair, and barbaric in the opinion of the merchant classes
that won out. The barbarians were those that refused to go
along with the commercial aims, the avarice, the
materialism, the stupid banalities of progress. And they
always lost , Blax thought. They were always exiled. And
that is why one saw the revanchist movements rise up from
time to time. Even in the worst of men. Men independent
even as it corrupted and made them monsters, he thought
in fragments.
For who but monsters can fight against the whole fucking
world?
Ceauşescu had been a protochronist; he demanded that
Romania been recognized -recognize itself in the mirror- as
Dacian, home of the Dacian tribes -unified under Burebista -
that had -as far back at the 4th century before Christ- lived in
the Carpathian mountains, holed up in the Orăştie -in four
fortified villages of Costeşti , Blidaru , Piatra Roşie and
Băniţa - between the Danube, Dniester and Tisza .
Even La Tène Celts brought technology of war to their
Dacian brothers from further north and west; even they had
a falling out.
Blax saw the R1b haplogroup again and again appearing like
family photos, letters from war, artifacts -evidence- of
mugshots of types of men like ragged lines of Boreal trees,
pyramids of bottles with dried lees, manifold roots down to
the limestone and fires and hearthstones with symbols of
the Flood. But he couldn’t process it all; it was too old, too
far back, too many branches -feeder roots, brachial,
Lichtenberg scars- that went on and on down to the bedrock
of the Deluge. His mind saw the roots dig down and wide
along a line like vineyard, rows and rows of the grapes made
to suffer.
And he just couldn’t take it any more. He stood in the
draining lake and felt himself deluged with data.
“Hecataeus of Miletus, Clement of Alexandria , for fuck’s
sake, the accounts of these red-headed step-children of
man,” he said aloud as the mind was clouded with dust of
their chargers riding west from the steppe; down to the sea,
up to the ice, pushing off from that Tahiti of the soul to
further islands of autonomy and isolation to Vinland and
New Zealand, Outer Hebrides and Hawaiki Polynesians, and
his mind wanted to collapse like a spent star.
His hands ached to write this all down, but he had nothing
left, no paper, no ink, the books like confetti rained down
and he thought of the tattoos of the Dacians again, famous
for marking the body, like the Scythians; and he rubbed his
chin to imagine the Tē Moko that would go there if…
“If,” he said aloud.
He looked at his feet but the water drained, it didn’t flood.
He thought of the ache in his heart for the written word but
a quote populated his interface and crowded out everything
else:
Dacian script is a pure fabrication… purely and simply
Dacian writing does not exist.
It was a quote from Sorin Olteanu from Vasile Pârvan , and
the warning to Thoth from the Pharaoh made book end to
this idea of a religious taboo on writing among the Scythian
diaspora.
The Albanians were next in his inner-list. And they claimed
to be from the Illyrians up in the mountains and hills. The
R1b again -the continuity of the Albanians , they called it in
terms religious and bloodborne and going back to the
watery part of the world- then he saw the J-M172 of the
Caucasus mountains as a 3D image appeared and turned
and modeled for Blax in his mind. He breathed out to purge
it from the brain as he hoped the blood would run to his
lungs, he blinked to shoo these images away and away and
away.
Everyone, he thought of this obsession with race, blood,
kinship, did it, and no one admitted it.
It was like babies being born at morn but everyone denying
that the adults fucked at night.
Man couldn’t reproduce without sex; as tawdry as it was
made to be; and man couldn’t survive without heuristic
judgements on the trustworthy nature of their fellow man,
Blax thought. Race was just easy, so easy it was the first -
and fastest- thing a man used. He too was tired and
exhausted and didn’t want to have to judge each particle in
the air before he breathed, each fact from history about a
thing he believed, each man on his merits from a life lived
before and after these things.
“Tattoos mark you for identification, both the Russian and
Japanese mafia use it for a reason, the cops and military use
it for inspection, and that is no more or less information that
melanin is to all of us,” he said aloud. His knees began to
wobble as his feet felt a pain under the water of the shallow
puddle of the range. His jaw trembled just a bit. His eyes
watered. His mouth filled with spit.
Only the bourgeoisie had time to exclude race -or claim they
did so anyway- from the calculus. The poor black on the
factory floor had to judge his white co-workers and boss,
chucks that had been -and thus would be- unreliable and
likely to betray; the Prime Minster of Japan had to judge the
Chinese for their millennia of perfidy and had to trust that
these behavioral traits had mapped onto the slight racial
differences between each Asian peoples that were apparent
to any Japanese who stared long in the face of a Chink; and
white boys in prison had to judge any blacks that came on
the tier; for in prison the white boy was the nigger,
outnumbered and seen as prey.
In prison you’re there a long time, but action happens all at
once, he thought.
Dunbar’s number dictated that man couldn’t really know
any more than 150 people. So what do you do in a society of
millions? What do you do against a new tribe or people
foreign to you; contact with men on boats or men ashore
thus instantly increasing the number of people you must
judge friendly or foe? You use the easiest thing first, you use
what’s most obvious, you pick up any bent piece of metal
laying around to wield as a club. That which is obvious to
the eyes: color of skin, hair, eyes.
Was it not vision that mapped onto morality? Blax then
asked himself. Was it not light first from God? He barely
heard, no it was the word.
Nobody is more racist than the Latin or South American,
they use skin color more than any. Che Guevara said dark
skinned mestizos and blacks were indolent and stupid.
Mexicans treat one worse and worse the darker a Mexican
gets; for it’s seen as the stamp of lowly origin, he thought.
In England in the 1900’s -if all people are one shade of
white- then you use accent; in England they say class is
branded on the tongue. Accent was how one told men apart.
But in America race is most easily used. It’s the only country
-besides Mexico, or now western Europe- with such diversity
of skin color. Japan is 98.6% ethnic Japanese: same skin and
eye and hair colors. Until recently, all French were white, all
British were white, all Mongols had the same color head,
feet and hands; and all Chinese were Han. And so in
countries with similar skin they use accent, class, or religion.
Shit, he thought, there was no difference between Tutsi and
Hutu, except they somehow knew.
How?
But the fact was that man had to tell people apart, quickly,
in a pinch, roughly, unfairly, with almost no malice at all.
Because man didn’t have the brain power to judge each
man as an individual, no more than he could see each grain
of hail, each stitch in a sail, or each fucking drop in the sea.
If man was in a storm, he ran or he fought, but he didn’t
battle each drop. He avoided the whole sky, he piled on
more sail, he condemned the ocean and the hail as one
thing. He did not discern between each enemy.
“Man did it with almost no malice at all,” he said aloud.
It was purely a function of cognitive bandwidth, he
surmised. He thought purely , but he knew -he softly
reconsidered- that there was something below -or above-
this mere physics, there was something of a flavor to what
was functional. Man turned his primal needs for food and
sex -and discerning friend from foe- into an artform. Man
garnished his base needs with feelings. Man had culinary
flare, sexual fetish, and a thousand and one reasons to hate
someone for their skin, their accent, their barbarous ways.
“Man gilded a lily,” he said quietly and thought of all that
wine -his wine- vaporized in the blast. He saw math turn to
art, instincts to feelings. Racism was made necessary by the
math, but man made it into an artform by truly hating -with
a garish and ornate lust- anyone -anything- different than
him.
And who is more rare than the sigma? Who has more people
different from him than this 1% of mankind? “Jesus, no
wonder we hate everything so much,” he said aloud.
But now -with the coder- with his -with their- ability to tell
fact from fiction all in a moment, he had the luxury of
judging each man as just that: a man. Well, until his rivals
had coders too, then the arms race would be back to where
it was. Liars and lie detection , he thought. But he did think
of this moment in history -despite the violence just done to
him and his home- as the peace, the calm, the time
between storms.
Here was a moment when he could be kind, decent,
magnanimous to those that deserved it, all isolatoes , all
men of all races and creeds who had basic decency. It would
not last, but he had it now. He had caught it like that
moment when Ahab had sank the harpoon but before he
was tangled in the line.
But the Jacks were already doing this , or beginning it , he
then thought -scuttling the metaphor of the Captain- as his
mind tried to link up more dots out at arm’s length. Blax
then thought of how Jack Four thought -accused- Blax of
thinking too big; too abstractly. Although he hadn’t come
right out and said it, it was there to be seen in fragments
and gaps, like a cypher, the cut-up novels of Burroughs,
Blax thought. He smiled at the idea that what most would
call provincialism -white nationalism- Jack would call
cosmopolitan. Jack Four had often bitched that 99% of
whites, so-called brothers, were no better than any other
race. He went along with their revanchist programs, he saw
glory and grandeur in Occidental culture, but there was
always this side-eye and the shake of the head that set him
apart from the men.
Jack Four was a mystery to all men , he thought.
And instead of narrowing down to further refine -like the
other three Jacks- Jack Four reversed the lens, from
microscope to telescope; near to far. They looked down at
the blood, he looked up at the stars .
The other Jacks thought Jack Four himself was too
cosmopolitan as they wanted nothing to do with anyone
outside their own genome -their own clones- men exactly
like themselves down to the blue print; first principles. Yes,
they fought for the West, carried out Blax’s plans, but not to
mix with modern man. They did it to create a buffer, to prop
up the edges, to police the borders of their own land.
The same reason the Roman were in Spain, Gaul, Briton, he
thought.
And they thought Jack was too liberal, Blax thought and
found that his head shook at how weird this all was; how
much more complex they were than him; how strange all
four were; how their eyes seemed either coruscating or
hooded and black. It was strange because they didn’t
rebuke Blax for his boosterism of the West, they just moved
on without a word, as if their chauvinism made sense within
the context of his grand designs. As if it needed no
explanation at all. Only Jack Four rebelled, and yet he was
between Blax and the Jacks, he was more open to larger
schemes than the Jacks who had closed ranks completely
after they left Lot 45. He couldn’t quite make a theory of it
yet. It was all data, and no story, just fragments -rambling
thoughts- and no pattern yet at all.
Just four Jacks doing this and that , he thought as he
watched more and more paper singed at the ends fall about
him in an endless rain.
It puzzled him. And this caused his mind to flex and contract
and then expand.
“Swell,” he said.
And the confusion caused something else to emerge, he
saw the ground of his inner landscape rattle a bit, grains
shift, shoots move up into the air. He thought there were
other species of things inside him, things he’d built, or was
nest to, maybe , he then thought. He imagined he was in
orbit around some other sun.
He then -all in a rush- wondered who had blown up his
goddamn house.
Blax thought of all this other crap longer than he had
suspected he would and now -like a wave collapse- began
agitatedly wondering about the source of the blast he’d
assumed was the work of the Governor and his mercenaries
out in the forest.
“Fuck,” he then said aloud.
His mind moved on -away from causality- to thinking of his
men as men; as the black water and black trees that were
lined by moonlight and thermal gain releasing as night
closed in. He thought of their innate beauty, and strength
and subtlety of vision, and desiderata. It was how he could
see how much better they were than him, like a father sees
his sons. It was a way to both humble and aggrandize the
self. To make better versions than you is to brag in avatar;
it’s to show not yourself but what you can do, and assume -
trust- that everyone will trace it back to you after all.
“History,” he said.
His feet felt water logged now. The mud beneath them
seemed to give way a bit; twist; auger down. His nerves
returned to bother him as the black night air formed more
and more apparitions and outlines of things familiar and
opaque too.
He heard them -his Jacks of Christmas past- at night and at
noon, wrestle with mule deer and themselves; one hand on
the compendium of life, one hand up in the thick phlogiston
of air like a man ordered by Cressus upon the centaur. A
man multiplying the twelve Labors by twelve until he’s sore
just from thinking of his duty, a man relaxed by the flame of
a woman two-thirds his size, one half his depth, one third his
burden; but never mere fraction of his worth, he thought as
if such fractions worked out in the end. He thought of the
time Isaiah had shown him non-associative numbers, and
how he had explained the fourth domain of integers -the
undiscovered country of God’s signature, Isaiah had said,
Blax now recalled- and he thought of how that might matter
in ways even below the ways he already did not understand.
“Am I even dumber than I think?” he asked the air.
His mind built inner memories when the math confused him
to the point of silence and blindness and a ringing in the
ears. He saw Scyths and wineskins, traps laid, gold
engraved, megaliths as preparation for what?
“For what?” he asked as comets fell like angels in this
midnight sky. He imagined the ancients meeting and
preparing not for themselves but the future; warning men
ten thousand years in the future to watch the skies, for what
Jupiter missed, for what would be needed when the lights
went out, the kings in doubt, the books all soaked and
washed out to sea.
He saw Göbekli Tepe entombed, the pyramids buried in
sand, and the fishmen carrying bags. He read the myths and
counted up the angels, the devils, the men allowed into
Valhalla and the women that worked the mills.
He’d hold back blinking as he watched his inner visons of
them being shown the monk’s wines from parcels -climats -
of one acre; he’d hold his breath as they’d see the signature
of God upon the check they cashed each day. He prayed. He
prayed in some language that made it seem not for God nor
man but the hidden math.
He saw it all bend in a ball, a globe, an equation that solved
itself like digestion.
Things grew and were beautiful and were eaten and rotted
on earth or in the belly, he thought. And yet he thought
nothing of her belly at all. It was sequestered, entombed
too, held in the Bastille of his coder and so all he had was
hints, wafts of air, rumors, vague analogies that seemed to
slide toward the birth canal, the teat, the foundry of repeats.
How many times would God let this run? he asked.
“They’d know their world first upon -then through- the
boundary of the skin,” he said to his own head.
The dark of the forest existed outside of their ring, like the
celestial vault beyond the earth; they the gods’ playthings;
they’d think, man is too haughty at times. Therefore, it is -
and ought be said- that it’s an honor to be chosen by the
gods for gallant tragedies , he thought as the air turned the
skin cold further in and the jaw began to rattle; his lungs
expelling like the Northumbrian smallpipes; his mouth the
chanter ; his nose the drone of the burdon . He tried to see
the end of his life; this escape had been a lark, he knew that
much. It was a warning of what was to come, God had given
him his 5-minute warning.
He -he thought- hadn’t escaped the real blast.
But he turned his thoughts back to his Jacks instead; he
couldn’t focus on the self.
Their muscles would be sore from yesterday’s training, their
hair wet from it raining, a few hours previous to this time in
the agoge to reflect. They smelled like men, like atavistic
men. He saw them the way men saw animals, he pulled
back the gums to check the teeth, he pet their coats in his
mind.
He didn’t think of dogs eating their owners, or crows going
first for the eyes.
Their knuckles were white and livid with scars, their oft-
struck jaws clicked when they talked, all the more reason to
demur when silence was the steady state of things. To break
silence required a reason, inertia in all things , Blax had
once said, and like most things, his words rang in their
heads like the bells of Leuven struck pious commoners
hurrying across the town square toward the spire. Each
phrase rang like the clang of claymores in battles one had
survived on the Dyle by dint of the sermons from the dead
that one hopefully hears in their ears when in the din of war.
Like God he assumed they’d be grateful for all the lesson he
taught. “Lessons I never got,” he said aloud as the -tawny,
grey, white- mice of experiments ran mazes, and had
mothers taken from them to see how many generations it
took to return to normal.
“It was three,” he said and thought of the way the scientists
played God.
The darkness seemed like grip over the home’s ruins, the
flames he saw now remained from the gas leak, and like a
derrick lit up as bright as a thousand blue eyes and with
cabling as thick as a penitent family of femur bones, it was
spouting up and to the west without bend. Only the
collapsed container wall kept it from rising higher than it
did. It looked like weld slag from joints being flanged or
torch sparkings underneath 10-guage steel being riven in
half. He watched it like a fount of fire; like magma pouring
into the sea.
“Like things cleaved,” he said as his body pimpled and
shivered from loss of heat.
He just saw images and made up stories that attended.
He had a foundry of some kind in there that produced more
and more raw iron & ferric blood and then masts were
raised and ships launched and moons came and went in the
folds of his CNS sea. He thought things and things appeared
and his hands were black and bent in the morn. The sides of
his head were shorn.
This built -he spoke subjunctively to himself and as if it was
already done and done well- this built a bond between men
that modern men would never understand; as modern men
paid for everything -not building nor taking it- and thus
modern men paid with their souls . This modernity - he said
trying to turn from where he too had lost soul, he thought of
the Roman uniforms dyed red to hide blood in battle- was
making man and each of his mates expendable to the
fungible dollar that could -by fiat- replace them with
someone or something of equal remunerative value . The
tyranny innate to commerce was obvious to him and now to
them; to his images of his men. He had showed them his
hand. He had peeked at theirs. Their hands fanned out full
of court-cards dressed in suits black and a blacker red.
And red dye was most expensive of all, he’d once said as he
told them of battles in Gaul, of barbarians tall, of hordes of
Romans that either won or lost it all. He told them of just
what type of man was exiled from the cities, and why.
They began with his biases and started where he left off. He
spun them and spun them and pointed them with his hands
on their shoulders as they walked away.
He thought of craftmanship and why efficiency led to
honeycombs and hives, why survival demanded
compromise. Why, he thought, unique things must die.
A man is built one by one, not for efficiency, not for re-sale
value.
He was repeating Jack One’s musings from years ago but
thinking it was his original thought. He thought this and
swatted at some insects he couldn’t identify -winged and
striped in black and grey- that flew about his face in the
dark. He shifted his weight from leg to leg; foot to foot.
Echolocation via the popping of the home’s rubble on the
pad and where it landed, the conflagration of the trees, the
fluid in his head from the concussion, all made it seem like
he used one ear at a time.
But, today, with a demonic philosophy ruling the world,
everyone is replaceable by the younger, faster, cheaper
version just coming on-line. However, as in the argot of
mathematics, a primitive need not be further justified, it’s
axiomatic; a set is set and that is that . What was primitive
in man was the math; the gene never died. It must hide,
yes, but it was never dead.
“One can stop and look no further down,” he said in a
mumble to rest the jaw and keep the air from the teeth. He
worried as he described how things would be. He spoke
their lives without him into existence. He couldn’t stop
himself. His thoughts were a flood, a great deluge,
judgement from some god.
The Jacks would live outside of this model, he said inside his
head as he dealt cards around in pairs, sets, four-to-one
around the table, the slab, as score-cards lay to his right,
yet they knew whence they came.
As Blax thought this it did not occur to him that for the Jacks
to serve their purpose in this way -this midwifery of culture-
they’d have to live forever, they could never pass on and
fade away. The loss of history, connection, was the original
sin. Death -thus the loss of connection to the past, memory-
was thus exactly as it was laid out in Genesis : the first
punishment. But Blax thought still like a modern man. He
both exemplified and rebuked the sui generis . And yet he
did not mind his own death and would think an endless life a
pox if forced upon him by some trick; some curse.
The Jacks, he thought, had been raised in the modern world;
but the PraXis corporation had insisted on them being
homeschooled . The parents, when informed of that fact,
had shown an admixture of the eager and dubious; but the
first twenty-one of them had been so grateful to be
pregnant and have help making sure their child survived
that they agreed to it in the main without reservation.
The first twenty-one families had nodded and asked what
they should do and what should be avoided. They held
hands as Tania went to their homes and spoke to them or
brochures were stared at but not yet read. They spoke -
husband and wife spoke- late at night of how their child
would come out. The corporation would help them, but after
Tania had left each time, each set of parents would be left
all alone with their decision and decisions to come.
Fertility is still treated as the realm of the gods among those
for whom it’s denied. May poles are rung, birds are prayed
to in small churches of Iona , and whispers are made to the
egg and the womb.
“Prayers,” Blax said as he held his left hand in his right. Blax
thought, most people who aren’t fathers, parents, don’t
know that you don’t merely imagine your child but you
imagine the world he grows up in too; your fantasies and
worries include the milieu.
The corporation had -and had bragged about having- the
resources to help , he remembered reading in 2020, with
the education of each of the twenty-one boys. He now
recalled waking up at home and naming his parts, touching
each limb, the lips, and licking the teeth thinking -believing-
he’d feel a slick bronze on the left eyetooth, see a scar from
the eye to the jaw in the looking glass. He remembered that
day both as one of many, and too as one of one. He
remembered naming each thing; like the first couple in the
garden had been instructed to do.
“Should I listen to my conscience or Isaiah?” he asked in a
blurt he was certain someone would hear.
The Jacks had been at what they now semi-secretly called,
Domaine Jacques Noire for just passed thirty-six months, but
they were spending more and more time in the sections of
their forest that they had each claimed for their next
project: their homes. Their tribe , Blax thought, expanding
his original thought.
They had each put on nineteen pounds of muscle, and lost
two pounds of fat, and now weighed in at 199lbs even. Their
hair was cut short, and their faces shaved clean, and each
was healing from this or that wound.
They had spoken of these things, each in their own way;
they had shook hands each morning and saluted Blax at
close of day as they attempted a balance between tribe and
the self. He saw them struggle with things he had wrestled
too.
It was a blend of not dissimilar things, and this made it
harder and easier at once. They shared genomes -and all
but one- shared the parasitic TOXO organism latent in their
brains, and they thus shared both left and right hemispheric
personality types; innate levels of aggression and native
intelligence, and body type. They were host to no fat insulin
receptor genes. And thus they never had in fuel in the tank,
but only the intake manifold.
Their bodies were the equivalent of spenders , whereas fat
people were, savers , and thus the Jacks -like Blax- spent
each calorie they took in. Metabolically such profligate
phenomenon was seen as a sign of health -one was thin-
and yet economically it -spending money incessantly- was
perceived as a sign of immaturity , Blax thought as he tried
to make sense of what worked in each domain.
“In a matter of hours,” he said -of something- even though
the jaw and the lips were now stiff and the pain had moved
like a spider from the egg of acute to ache of birth and the
movement made it seem like the body was building webs in
the gaps and corners and between ends of his bones.
It’s why thin people were more industrious than fat people;
they had to be, he thought.
Like the squandering spenders of cash, they had to always
make more and more to survive. A fat guy can rest on his
ass, because he’s saved up 10-20% of each meal for the
future and need not work nearly as hard. It was evolution at
work; men with the fat-insulin receptor gene need not work
as hard. This was why fat people were lazy, they had been
allowed to be by evolution. Skinny guys, guys who could not
put on weight, had better be hard charging each day, or
they’d sure as shit starve to death . The personality was
linked to something as simple as one gene and Blax thought
of how few people -fat and thin alike- knew who and what
they were.
His heart sped up on orders from the brain, itself twitching
at his hypocrisy and giant strides -leaps- in causality.
But, he quickly thought, as he used words to stave off the
doubt, endless chattering to keep a lid on the demon, the
Jack genome itself was heavily bifurcated and contained
innate contradictions; that was the irony of course . Blax,
and the Jacks were all conscientious, ordered and
industrious in extreme; but they were also temporarily
chaotic like a flash flood or forest fire, or an avalanche in the
spring; and they were high in trait openness. They let things
in, they allowed things to escape their mouths. They could
be devil-may-care and reckless in ways usually only seen in
condemned men, or those otherwise with nothing to lose.
Sometimes they had no borders, boundaries, walls at all.
Each Jack connected from Jack to Jack to Jack. He thought
this as his nervous tongue widened under each set of
molars -top and bottom- and it felt a crenulated wall -one
defense- from back to front. His did this to be able to bite
without breaking his teeth.
And yet, he went on as the house flew, settled, tumbled
further apart, they had a neuroticism that would make a
grandmother from the levant wrinkle her brow, widen the
eyes, and mock their incessant apprehension . Their
worrying over details only a madman would even notice
would consume them at times. They -each natural
introverts- could spend days -weeks- alone without
loneliness but would gregariously speak to each other as if
their school-girl chattering was available at the flip of a
switch.
And more often than not they would demonstrate an
agreeableness that bordered on insouciance, as if they
trusted the whole world to look out for their interests.
Consequential issues of personal gain would be dismissed
as the purview of the gods -or their fellow man- and thus
any warnings to be tougher would be waved away with a
blasé hand. They seemed to not give one fuck about how
negotiations or contracts or deals made with rivals might
turn out in the end.
And just as easily -as if from behind a fast-moving cloud
came the appearance of an osprey at terminal velocity- the
intractable and unyielding and obstinate horridness would
plant flag and dig grave and commit to dying on any of a
thousand seemingly flat hills six feet below the level of the
sea. Small details in color, movement, sound, fractions of an
inch or avoirdupois, half-ounces or quarter lumens -that
reduced inversely to the square root of one- would become
of supreme importance to each of them in their turn, and
they would delineate the issue, no matter how minute, for
as much time as any other man could bear.
Those fuckers would argue over anything once so inclined ,
he thought. His fingers lay together on each hand; the toes
touched under the water; the air so still each hair organized
side by side upon his head.
To drive their tracks across the land they could each wear
down the other’s soul like a great range of continental
mountains reduced to a dip in the road with an incessant
wind of earnest -nearly plaintive- wails and the Thoric
hammering of points into blunt heads of long buried railroad
spike and dead equine. They each could conquer by an
attrition as long as a Chinese empire or yield before -as
quickly as- the first shots were fired between two southern
men in a duel over one Appalachian woman.
It was a strategy that appeared as no strategy at all.
They each contained equal measure of all five traits; and so
to say that they were the same -as if this meant it was easy
for them to agree or work together- was like saying all the
caterpillar’s legs were the same, or that all DNA in one’s
body was identically so-made, or that all pieces to a puzzle
were the equal in thickness and had the same goal to be
made whole in the end. It was true, but it was all more
complicated than these facts might seem , Blax thought.
“The way you do one thing is the way you do all things,” he
said as if that settled it all.
And once they, Blax thought, realized what non-linear
manifestations they could render, there was almost no way
to tear them asunder . One plus One plus One plus One did
not equal four.
“And adding me did not make five,” he said as his feet now
had gone a kind of numb where he could still stand but not
move.
Together they felt exponentially larger, and from the first
multiplication of one by another, there are on ly six root-
doubling to 4.29 billion, they quite clearly saw. Blax saw
what they saw, he saw numbers populate as if emerging
from a tear in a shell, from themselves like integer twins. He
often pretended to understand them, but he had no facility
with numbers, math was as opaque to him as biology was to
modern man. Modern man lived in the home or open air of
the philosopher, Blax lived in the cave, the den of the
animal, but it was only God who made a kind of nest of the
math.
The stars winked behind the blur, the swatch, the ghost of
smoke; he blinked and drew no lines, made no constellation
in the mind.
“I wonder if Jack?” he asked aloud but he felt the cold air on
his teeth and the pain made him wince; he shut up at once
and held his breath. He recalled the many shattering of
teeth, the breaking of jaw -over many years- and then the
two visits to the dentist to repair it all later in life. His teeth
now were so white -an unnatural lack of stain for his age-
and so straight and unfissured, only the memory of pain -
these moments of dark sensitivity- remained.
They all had this intuitive feeling, unexpressed frequently,
expressed inelegantly more often, that they were one man
away from that number to match the years the earth had
been around. As five men, integers, they were stuck at a
doubling to a mere 65,536. Yes, that number was powerful
and beyond the mere four or five of their linear integers, but
they could feel that 4.29 billion sum like any emergent
property: it hung there like the central nervous system, or
the immune system, maybe the opposable thumb, or
consciousness itself -lifting off of the brain- may have
tantalizingly appeared to God before he made it -or allowed
it to- manifest into the world.
Blax did not know it, but Jack Four often bent Aspen’s in the
forest; shaped like ribs to a mechanical beast, something he
could revivify when the storms came. And Jack Three
painted the containers with scenes of travails, he too
thought a motion picture could be made -sprung to life- and
all twelve of the labors would collapse into one frame, one
man, one additional man for them to make six and double to
their sought after billions. Jack Two invested each moment
into love and sister-vigilance, the suspicious trip around the
heart like the automata of Vitruvius on display each hour
and hidden in the body of the clock or in the kimono of the
karakuri -dokei like tea in the dark stomach and the breath
hidden safely in bright blood.
“Jack One,” Blax said and thought of the anger, the
violence, the thrust of each sharp thing into the void Jack
saw in each thing; as if to cut into something was to -in fact-
sheath. Mere murder was forbearance to Jack, and moments
of peace were merely rancor disguised like the refusal of a
father to intervene to protect his son. Peace by me would be
just -merely- letting others war , Jack One had said one night
and Blax had felt the air reach the air between vertebrae of
his spine. Was not each living being killing a million to one
by being alive? Jack would ask. Did not the killing of elk or
Eskimos increase total life for the world? “Did not a million
things die to keep one man alive? Did not millions -billions-
of things come forth from the carcass of one dead bear or
dumb bastard we dispatch?” Jack had once asked with a
fork stuck into his meal, wine dripping from the edges of a
mouth that seemed wider each time he ate his fill.
The forest fed a dozen black bird and four yotes , on one
departed bear left to bleed out. A thousand flies and a
million maggots, and a billion and a half microbes would
feast on the one large complex beast. Jack had the math
right , Blax thought, but my God .
JO made Blax awake to sounds at one time he’d have
ignored while he dreamed.
He stood still and watched.
He recalled that they would play games by each memorizing
the word in a poem that corresponded with their number; so
Jack One would take the first word and Jack Two the second
and so on. This would repeat so that then Jack One took the
fifth and Jack Two the sixth, and they’d each say their words
in succession. A poem of forty words could be said by each
of them memorizing ten words and lacing them together in
turn. It was fun, and they learned everything from the Iliad
to King Lear and Lord Byron and Milton and Cafrey and Poe.
And they did it so rapidly the listener would just hear it as if
said by one man from four locations; four cardinal directions
on earth. An echolocation phenomenon would build in the
listener and the Jacks both. Often the dogs would whine; the
wind would die down; Blax would subconsciously hold his
breath.
Jack One would say, “Prophet,” and the others would bark
out their lines in order,
“Said,” Jack Two blurted.
“I,” Jack Three recounted.
“thing,” Jack Four rejoined.
“of,” Jack One quickly bleated.
“evil,” Jack Two following again.
They did this until you could hear it all …as bird or devil
yourself and whether tempter sent or tempest tossed thee
here ashore , as one thing, reporting from sides of the
compound; one Jack in the courtyard hammering steel stock
on the anvil, and one lifting weights to his east, one in the
kitchen with garage door open, and one walking the
perimeter at parts not too far way.
It was sonorous if a bit auditorily hallucinatory, like being
swarmed by ghosts, apparitions, the gods of the written
word attacking from all sides.
Blax enjoyed it and found the ways they harnessed their
collective power fascinating. He told himself he likely never
would have even imagined doing such thing. They tried to
include him in their games, making it a five-man
construction, but he demurred and told them to hone it
amongst themselves; for he seemed, a bit of a fifth wheel to
a wagon, eh? he’d say with a smile they always -out of
kindness- returned.
He used lines like that so often that they began to play
tricks on him; and include him; press him into service for
their games. He would say some line from the canon and
they’d say the next line as a group, each taking the words in
turn as usual.
It was disorienting and yet amusing to such a degree that
Blax actually laughed out loud when after claiming for
himself to be neither house dog nor kennel dog , the boys
each took a word in succession to read off the next line from
Call of the Wild. They’d say each take one word in turn, “the
whole realm was, ” and then -taking turns- one of them
would add, “His ” to conclude in a laugh. Their farthest teeth
back got some air and sunlight touched on the flanks of that
oft-hidden dentine; they revealed their teeth in guffaws like
this.
He felt guilt at times, for enjoying their company so much,
but banished the feeling as it rose. They could be never less
alone than when alone, he thought. They were a group of
one man; one man as a multitude.
“Self manifold,” he’d once said. “The rugged individualist,
split,” he whispered sometimes.
Trying to find bottom for life’s phenomena is good exercise,
but you won’t catch dinner that way , Blax used to say to
admonish them.
Some men could see equality-of-outcome in economics was
dangerous but missed it in other domains; like sex and
politics. Blax saw all three. And the root evil of democracy
laid there at bottom of all man’s worst constructions, he’d
think -and say- many times even as they worked and hurt,
bent and bled, risked jail and death to preserve the West.
“Your religion is what you did,” he’d say, “not what you
said.”
Blax never took seriously this contradiction; how it would
seem to the Jacks. He barely noticed when they observed
how far apart were his deeds and words; how he said the
West was lost and yet here he was propping it up.
He looked at his Jacks in his mind’s eye, laying about the fire
for some deserved R&R and he knew that with their innate
moral standards combined with their unbent magnetism,
and the resources they’d have at their disposal, that they
could lead that next cultural revolution toward sexual
spotlessness and the model of restoration of man as
paragon of virtue not tyranny, and woman as model of
purity not power, and from there the sequela of all the
complexity of modernity would be healed. He saw his own
body reforming once the pressure of the compression
fracture at C5 and C6 was healed, he saw the shoulders and
head and the hips all align too. He saw his own gait
straighten out; his own limps go away.
It was vague but he thought too his dark thoughts might
lighten along with the rest of his load.
It was difficult to articulate to a culture obsessed with
choices and freedom ; but if you could show them a new
way, a different model, and that it worked, and was viable,
and enjoyable, and resonant with their core, he felt, the old
commercial -and Apollonian- model could be abandoned;
not overthrown. One must lead by example, not force it on
people; for if it’s truly the right way, they will come to it in
time.
What would be forced, would be the numbers, the numbers
of men leading the way. That was the only cheat in the
game, beginning with 1,600,000 natural men, who could be
the change first, and had a terroir to offer, a real place -not
a virtual one- that people … he stopped thinking now. He
tried not to go too far afield.
It was not that he was some pacifist or hippy; if forced
worked he’d use it. And in many things force does work, he
thought, but not in cultural change. That is soft power, hard
power is held in reserve for hard problems, problems
between enemies and nature not issues between and
amongst friends.
The Argentine ant was like this, they never fought internally,
and always fought externally, it was the closest thing to a
paradigm for his vision as he could touch in the natural
world. He had Argentine ants in a large aquarium he had
built off to the side of the garage container and he knew
they were likely blown all over the forest now. They idea for
these ant-farms just appeared in him one day; as did the
knowledge of their idiosyncratic customs and behaviors.
He had epiphanies, he thought. He thought things just
occurred to him out of the blue. He saw ants in his mind, his
arms itched, and he looked down and saw ash and other bits
aloft on the tops of his hairs like snow.
But the men, and they were men now -temperamentally
mature, and while chronologically only eighteen years old,
metabolically they were twenty-five to thirty and would live
to five-hundred or longer he assumed- but the men could no
longer be kept from themselves. Their bodies yearned
desperately for a woman, a special woman, or many
average ones, he quipped to himself recalling the Bill Hicks
joke. But he had schooled them on this delicate dance, and
how crucial it was to do that one thing right in a man’s life.
He, he had warned them, had squandered it, largely out of
ignorance, as his own father had been of no use in this or
any regard when it came to philosophy or how to live in the
world . His own father had been philosophically laissez-faire
juxtaposed with autocratic injunction; there was no rationale
for anything, just Old Testament rules to be obeyed. Or more
likely, rules to be ignored due to lack of omniscience or
enforcement, Blax thought. He thought it was metaphor for
the way God now seemed to look away from his children
and throw up His hands.
He thought again -for an iteration of a high but unknown
integer- of how his father had no father. Life was ahistorical
in every way in their untethered clan. He knew it mattered;
but he didn’t know how. He had ideas, instincts, clues, but
no concrete answer for why it mattered that a man knew
where he came from.
Blax was heavy on philosophy, always explaining the why
and the how to achieve something, making the Jacks debate
the good life, designing their own lives this way via dialectic
of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. He’d tell them they were
free to leave Lot 45 to chase girls if they wanted, but that
they would be replaced if they chose this path. What they
were doing, he would lecture them, was too important and
time-sensitive for them to delay or derail it with the frivolity
of females right now.
Not, he would add, that females are frivolous, as even he
shrugged and half rolled the eyes at what was obvious
hypocrisy. He wondered why he never shut up; why he had
to have an opinion on everything. But they listened and so
he went on and on.
Men forgive all except sexual congress, he’d then say. One
of the many ways in which the sexes are opposite, he would
state as he kicked rocks and used his head to follow birds in
the sky. They would watch not the ground or the air but his
eyes.
Learn this, he’d say, stuff it into any empty space within
you; this will be the single greatest set of facts you will
thank me for later in life. Keep your own sexual dalliances to
a minimum, just enough to learn how to fuck, and be kind
and show leadership; and never marry unless it’s to a virgin,
many years your junior, and you know it is for life. Because
if it ends you’ll never have one again. Divorce is death,
regardless of it being legal and no longer taboo. It’s death
for a man and woman, neither one will ever be happy again.
And not just happy, but useful, you’ll never be useful again;
not in that way. The only option for you will be this, he would
say and roll the hands like a devilish offering; and look
around as if his home was a prison, a fate, a consequence of
his errors in life.
You fuck it up and you’ll have to build a fortified compound
and teach young men how not to be you for the rest of your
life, he’d say and smile at the obvious self-critique.
He would then say, my dad knew nothing about life. Which,
in his defense, was better than his dad, who had abandoned
him at birth, and my father’s mother was a whore and so,
my father just being around and providing was 100% more
than he had model for. So, I don’t say this with malice, but
he didn’t know why or how I should act, he had no training
or data or erudition at all. He was a redneck from Arkansas,
he was starting from zero. And that is the hardest thing in
nature, starting from zero.
“I began from one, and you -doubled- will begin at two,” he
said aloud as repeat of the memory and again now for some
reason. The clouds had made forms and looked like
continents might; the sky sparkled like a kind of iron and
pyrite.
So, I refuse to allow anyone, myself included, to rebuke him
for merely getting me born and clothed and educated and
on towards my own path. Without him starting me at one, I
never could have reached, well, wherever I am today. And
you guys are starting out at two, which accelerates you
beyond me in about , he’d say this and then he’d look at his
watch -timing their surpassing him in mere seconds- in truth
but in jest and they’d all get the joke and smile and now too
look at the rocks or up to the redtail hawks or crows with
beaks like black hooks and wings like a display of dark
swords and tanto knives in a row.
“We’ll all have jobs to do; he did his,” he’d said.
So, there is a difference in, between, he corrected, between
analysis and rebuke. I am not rebuking my father for his
ignorance and lack of will to teach me how to be a man. In
some ways, it was better for me to have to learn on my
own. But, it was ok only because he had no model of his
own and had to make it up as he went along himself.
It would be unacceptable for me to have all my knowledge
and not impress it upon you; because I know what will make
you happy, -no, I know what will devastate you and make
you unable to stand life ever again- he said in amendment. I
know it. And if you are unhappy and feel maligned and
abandoned by God and man alike, you will be vengeful and
dangerous; and too dangerous to abide, he had said.
And there was an implicit threat there, laid there like
Chekov’s revolver in this approaching third act.
Blax would stop sometimes and collect himself, and they
could see the effects of whatever storms he had weathered
revealed in the quiet, when the mouth stopped moving and
the face was still, while this hull was in anchorage now -
embayed in clear weather- they saw the torn sails and rent
taffrails, stove boats and split yardarms, and maybe even a
lumbering tilt to the Captain himself. They shifted in their
skins as if watching some future self, mauled by the great
fish or out on some leash from a vexed god or two.
And then Jack realized why he never stopped, never ceased
speaking, thinking, jamming and piling up more and more
sail. To stop was to feel; to go quiet was to allow the hold to
flood; to refuse to figure out why was to die.
The other three did not pity him; for he would have found
that outrageous; he and they agreed only that they learn.
He had once said, think of me as an avatar in your head of
how you do and do not want to be; like when you imagine
yourself doing this or that; and thus conjure it up in your
mind. Well, I am you, and I’ve lived certain ways, and I can
tell you what works for our kind and what does not. It’s not
an exact science, but man, it’s close.
When I tell you not to do something I ain’t joking around. I
have the limps, the bad back and the neck that only turns
half way; the jaw that locks open and closed; the scars, the
memories like roommates who never pay rent. I have the
loneliness and trail of enmity and alienation as far down as
the south pole and as far back as the first outward bound
journey of the HMS Beagle herself , he would say half
smirking to take the sting out of the self-pity, maybe lighten
the darkness from the warning itself.
It’s of no use for me to have learned the hard way -and
brought you all here to learn it- if you aren’t going to learn it
from me. And I know people will say, well, sometimes you
gotta learn it yourself. Well, goddammit you did learn it
yourself, who the fuck do you think I am if not you? he’d
say; not ask.
He would bellow it. It would get quiet; their eyeballs would
squeak if they moved.
This was his salvation, the way to redeem himself for a life
epic -envied, emulated- but ultimately a failure. He was a
super nova, an endless explosion; chaos made shimmering
that warmed those at the safe edge of the star system. But
ultimately he was a failure , he thought more and more as
the moons moved and the sun rose and the earth grew
green and shrank down brown and then froze itself into a
permanent white.
And so the thoughts rattled around inside like a bullet fired
inside a bunker. He would see them shift or stolid, chatty or
quiet, in work or at rest and forget how often he’d say the
same shit over and over within his own head.
He remembered feeling that way growing up; respectful of
adults. He was not always so contemptuous of people; not
always thinking them hypocrites and liars. Right? he asked
himself. He had often looked up to many folks. He had
almost forgotten that, until these boys reminded him of his
capacity for respect for one’s elders. They reminded him of
his capacity for awe. The hairs on his arms stood up, as he
thought this. A consilience of body and mind and some
nebulous metaphysics , he thought as it crashed upon him
in waves and waves of ideas that repeated like tides as his
feet burrowed into the range’s silt, mud, brass of spent
casings and stripper clips, glass, worm castings, feathers
and bone.
“How far I am from home?” he would ask aloud sometimes.
He would pretend he was asking himself, but he hoped the
Jacks would answer one day. They had learned to ignore his
rhetorical questions, he made them nervous because they
knew -but would not say- that he was going insane. When
intelligent people go insane it can appear like something
else. Smart men can hide their breakdowns for much longer
based purely on how articulate they can seem.
Cogent speech can mask a disordered mind, and a soul
wrought up beyond ever being repaired.
He had changed so much phenotypically, but genotypically
he was the same as them. He could teach them best; this
much he knew. Yes , he thought. They’d learn it from him or
they’d never learn it. That I know, he said to himself. No one
else combined this Dorian, Aeolian, Achaean, Ionian
amalgam with the power of mind to hold the delicate chisel
and heavy arm to drop the hammer.
“And again,” he would say again as they practiced their
forms, and as they made strikes at each other to defend. He
would explain how the planted foot had to be 180-degrees
turned from the point of attack. He’d hold their feet down
until the understood -in the body- how the kick’s power
came from the ground.
“The heel must face the enemy, all your power comes from
that technique,” he’d said and then bark for them to do it
again. He said things until the words felt like weather, the
need to evacuate, the rise of the sun: endless, inevitable,
never going to take a day off. He monitored their pain, their
exhaustion, their muscle growth and neural connectivity, all
but the way they side-eyed him at times, all but the way
they wanted to murder him when they got the most worn
down. But he ignored it and they belayed it and it passed
like a bird, a cloud, a blood moon.
He told them stories; and it was those stories they
remembered for good and for ill.
He’d think of Isaiah and all those facts that he knew; and
how he -Blax- would wake up some days and have things in
the brain that were not there before. He’d stare at them and
for a second wonder if they were true. “Just because they’re
in my head, are they true?” he would ask aloud as he stared
at his face in the mirror and raise the lip in a forced and
inelegant smile and lament -again- the lack of the bronze
tooth.
He felt pain at the elbows, and the jaw, and cold still; but
now at his core. The house still was in ruins, the night was
still black and green at the edge as the effluvium distorted
the light.
Blax’s reverie melted away and the times he was re-living
just then -its conceits- seemed to fold up inside him like
wings, like eye teeth covered by lips, the wolf hidden inside
mere dog. He stood there in the dark in the outer edge of
the ring of the whole razed and burned compound. He
laughed now although it was stopped short by an acute pain
in the ribs. I’ve broke more ribs than most people break
promises , he thought and did not even smile. The coder -
finished with the repair of the brain- began sending bots to
do the fusing of the fractures in two ribs on his right side;
releasing another 50mg of morphine as well.
He had ruminated so long on this stuff that his body was
nearly dry from his time in the muddy pond. The whole
house was still engulfed in low flames to his fore, the black
paper floated on the thermals like the corvids, and the heat
warmed his belly and shins. He walked around the make-
shift lake now, toward the outcropping of slip rock and scrub
oak that formed a prow on this 35-acre ship that was his
land. He stood there naked except his normal accoutrement
of hubris and awe in the face of nature’s god; he breathed
deeply; he let his mind wander to the land as he looked out
over the millions of trees in the distance, not one building or
tower or road or any human construction drew his eye.
Once again, he was the only standing construction or
machine.
His PGC update had been successful, and he could see -as
dark descended from blue to slate grey and a line of white
at the horizon- the FLIR images from the AWACKS above
showing the four men, now five, running away to the south
from the compound. He saw one man remain inert and
facing the him and oriented toward the home, to what used
to be standing and of ambient temperature and still intact.
He saw one man looked back.
But Blax turned and focused instead on the New Mexico
wolves ninety meters to his east, which with his UV/IR vision
capabilities he could watch as they pawed at the ground, as
the betas nipped at the omega’s legs and the alpha wolf -
with its black legs and roan coat, taller by four inches and
wider by two- stood on the edge of some sliprock of red and
black. His belly was empty as his pack’s were still half full.
He had eaten less and digested faster from their last hunt.
And the roan wolf keenly looked toward the man-beast they
had kept track of for years now.
The wolves knew something was strange, the two-legged
wolf didn’t eat grass like the elk, yet never attacked like the
wolf or the cat.
Did the two-legged wolf eat of the sun, digest his own tail?
the wolf felt not in words but in pure wonder.
He -this upright wolf- merely pointed at prey and they fell
and the wolves noticed it like the way the wind blew over
trees. The alpha wolf knew something was different about
the wolf of two-legs; weakness was sniffed out. And he was
hungry and this made him more aggressive than the pack
who still played and argued behind him in the bush. His
eyes didn’t blink; his mouth remained closed; his heart beat
slow.
Blax felt warmth in his chest, he didn’t smile but he warmed
at their perfection as more shit butted in:
The dubious death of Vasile Milea, Ceausescu’s defense
minister, a suicide -as he had attempted to incapacitate
himself with a non-lethal shot to the arm but had
accidentally severed the brachial artery- was announced
by the media so that when the escaping Ceausescu’s
helicopter lifted off on the 22 nd the Army had turned on
him and his wife. The rank and file believed the defense
minister had been murdered, and this was finally enough
for them to seize the dictator and side with the rebellion.
A lie had finally revealed a truth.
By Christmas day, 1989 the Ceausescu’s were shot by
the revolution; on January 7 th capital punishment was
outlawed in Romania.
 The two births of Christ: the 25 th of the west and the
orthodox church’s 7 th . The ending of tyranny through
death and the ending of killing through reprieve.
But, it took a mistake for the truth to finally be believed.
[Isaiah’s notebook XXIII]
And with his calloused feet, a metabolic system self-
contained -needing no inputs of sugar or protein or vitamins
or micronutrients for three days- and a circulatory system
capable of providing the CNS with oxygen for ninety minutes
upon one breath, and a limbic system -what he still like to
call, his heart - no longer concerned with outside approval,
he ignored the men running away -he banished thoughts of
all his so-oft named foes, all those he kept track of- and
instead he walked towards the feral lupines in the dark.
 0. Barbarism
Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim
of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph
Beyond the Black River [Howard, Robert E]

What deep torture may be called a Hell, when more is felt than hath power to
tell
The Rape of Lucrece [Shakespeare, William]

As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality
De Profundis [Wilde, Oscar]

I. 2018 e.v.
“We live our lives in the most ordinary meso-scale
phenomena, we don’t see the quantum because we’re not
playing with polarized lenses that show us what light
actually is,” Eric Weinstein said into the lab as MO listened;
eavesdropped. The numbers ran down like water on glass,
outgassing like vapor made from heat, stable as crystals
building out in Mandelbrot time.
MO heard and thought at once:
An eight-dimensional number system that no one
understands .
MO ran each type of number along a 2D graph. The plane
was grey and the numbers black and MO held his left hand
on the slab as his fingers carved small scars into the
concrete with headers of the four number types above each
column.
Real
Complex
Quaternions
 Octonions
“It’s empowering to know we are a hair’s breadth from
super powers,” Weinstein said. “So, for example there’s the
quaternions based on the number one, the complex number
I, and then J and K. So I times J equals K. J times K equals I. J
times I is equal to the negative of the I times J; so negative
K.
“These help with computer vision. Computer simulation of
3D. They may come up in nature. We know nature uses
complex numbers. But they never got to the point where
you’re actually looking at wave functions,” he said.
“And they’re not even associative.
“Associativity in math is ubiquitous. But not the octonions.
So, these things that occur anomalously, but work, and are
foundational for life, and yet we don’t understand at all. This
is a genuine mystery. That’s an invitation off the planet. It’s
a portal. You build from each level. From real numbers you
get complex, from complex you get quaternions, and from
that the octonions arrive. But each time you gain this new
realm you give up some intuitive property. You give up
properties that make sense. You lose ability to understand,
but it’s real in mathematics.
“I’m not going to say it’s God,” Weinstein said as MO kept
his hand on the grey slab; the pad to his forefinger sharp
like scalpel, like scaring -scoring- tool.
MO allowed the four system of numbers to build both under
the level above it -wide and deep- and above it tall and
ornate. They may not be associative, MO thought, but they
are power-associative . On the slab he then carved:
x(x(xx)) = (x(xx))x = (xx) (xx)
MO released the number generator -a Fibonacci style
generator; not truly random- for each of the four number
systems now on expanding planes, sets which grew down
like roots and up like boughs and numbers flew to them like
birds, [redacted]’s landing on the e1 = I; [redacted] like
squirrel burrowing into the e5 = IL. He saw trees of octonions
grow and attract flora and fauna as he retracted his inner
vision back so that now a forest grew and from that the
power law emerged. He saw one octonion tree on a grid
behaved as ten, as did one hundred as did ten thousand as
did a hundred million now. Light came apart on the inner
tableaux ; quantum waves appeared like search lights made
of sea water; particles appeared with reflections of the
radical of negative one bending convexly then concavely
and then popping like bubbles of integer soap.
A Fano plane was carved into the slab. A series of digits
followed.
He ignored it.
Cohl Furey had constructed a model of octonions and she
lay the strong and electromagnetic forces upon it like meat
on the frame of a sea beast , MO thought as he saw -and as
he deconstructed- her work. MO ran the models on an
expanding sphere with continents of land for each set,
oceans of integers reduced to sine curve and irrational
numbers and particles and waves. Footnotes populated,
theorems breathed once then evaporated, articles appeared
on the cloud:
SU(3), SU(2) and U(1) correspond to the strong, weak
and electromagnetic forces and they act on six types of
quarks, two types of leptons, plus their anti-particles
with each type of particle coming in three copies or
generations that are identical except for their masses.
The forth fundamental force, gravity, is described
separately, and incompatibly, by general relativity,
which casts it as curves in the geometry of space-time .
[Quanta magazine. July 2018]
MO built another 64-dimentional model as moon to his
expanding earth below it, his mind allowed light to shine
from five-hundred seconds away. He allowed particles to
remain mathematical ideals, considering them elements of
sub-space and permitted to endure there by not his hold but
via the three foundational forces of life. Gravity -in his mind-
held no sway, yet.
This permitted particles to stay as particles even as they
ambulate and exchange and cooperate and transmute , he
thought. These are the particles of nature and they manifest
the symmetries of the four types of numbers themselves.
“1, e1 , e8 , e4 , e3 , e6 , e5 , e7 , e2 ,” MO said -vague
constructions of firing order of simple internal-combustion
machines shadowed his thoughts- and he loaded the
numbers under G2 on the thin layer of his neo-cortex , right
over the dmPFC which he had built from irrational numbers
held together like a ballet dancer turning the head in 180-
degree snaps as the body rotated -fluidly- below.
Electrical charge appears in discrete units, as whole
numbers , MO ruminated. Now he focused on the three
generations of particles that exist in nature. He built them
up and out and on a template of four diamonds. It’s been
174 years since the octonions discovered, MO thought. And
no use for them in nature has been found.

II. 2040 e.v.

“Yes, the body, goddammit,” Jack Four said.
“Well, I can’t do it,” Isaiah said.
“Why the fuck not?” Jack asked.
“Look, for the third time now, you and your Wolves will have
to do it yourselves if you think it’s so fucking important.
Jack, you’ve caused enough problems for me and for MO,”
Isaiah said as he clicked off his DM’s and laid his hand on
the diesel engine’s exposed heads and the rocker-arms
bronzed and blued and covered in a thin film of amber
heavy-weight oil.
Isaiah breathed. He thought of the number of breathes in a
life; of mouse, moth, man, and himself.
He counted the Jacks, the clones and their atoms, organs
and motions like each bar of gold in the vault, each book, all
art; the marbles, the baubles, the bottles of wine drop by
drop, vintage by vintage; and then exploded and collided
each item in his mind one more time.
“Sunken ship make reefs,” he said. But they don’t make
wooden ships anymore , he thought as he pondered their
habitat.
Lyngvi pushed the conversation from his mind. Each time
Isaiah called him Jack it was like a pull toward the past. He
liked thinking of him -Isaiah- so far away in the lab; himself
in the ocean. He still got sick at sea, but further down he felt
fine; just from ship to surface of the sea was the part that
made him puke and feel like death.
Down here he felt just fine.
He held the breath and raised slightly from the seabed;
weightless -his lungs like ballast- and then expelled it and
sank.
The sea water turned cold like a river running under him
that he now descended into at 60 feet.
The DM with Isaiah had allowed electricity in Lyngvi’s brain
to spiderweb and warm connection and radiate throughout
the brain until Jack could sequester the coder with cold
water, copper flakes and the new xyzolphiles that had
burrowed into the giant Cypress trees at the floor of this
part of the Atlantic off the coast of Alabama and between
their ship -the USS Constitution - and oil rig No.9 run by
Bighorn.
He stared at the sea anemones. He felt something on his
shoulder; he ignored it as the pressure faded away.
The Cypress was five feet in diameter at the base and the
tree’s knees encrusted it like a coronal glow gone dim, gone
out, gone black. It warmed Lyngvi’s hands as he reached
toward the tree, the bark, the rings tight and showing signs
of stress. He let his brain build the bulwark of electricity,
copper and bacteria as he watched the Cypress, the
shipworms, and their gills that he could parse, label and
make files of like some pelagic athenaeum of compounds
unknown to the modern world.
Gammaproteobacteria, endosymbionts in the gills lay like
offerings on plates from priests of the sea:
 Teredinibacter turnerae
The secondary metabolites were synthesized there in the
coder as he collected more specimens for his vial. Chunks of
bark, and pulp -and their worms- slid like skeleton keys into
copper vials with rubber stoppers and glass flasks with cork.
He filled five vials and slid them into the pouch on his
wetsuit. His weight-belt hanged off him like laurel, his tank
pinged as a curious shark nudged him before turning about,
his breathing stopped as he stared at the downed -once
buried- tree. His coder ran:
Other biosynthetic genes are present; including two
hypothetical acyltransferases, trtAB , one which could
act as a proofreader (14); two putative oxidoreductases,
trtGI , which appear to encode proteins for oxygenase,
and a putative polyketide cyclase, trtJ (15), which may
be involved in the cyclization of compound 1.
Bioactive metabolite symbiosis is a term used to
describe a symbiotic relationship between organisms
based on chemical compounds. One of the organism
produces one or more secondary metabolites that
provide a benefit to the host or have the potential of
protecting the host or the rest of the community from
the environmental threats. A wide spectrum of nine (9)
antibiotics produced from a group of symbiotic
actinobacteria seems to protect the host insect from
fungal and bacterial pathogens. Another example comes
from leaf-cutting ants that protect their fungal food by a
group of antibacterial and antifungal compounds
produced by actinobacterial symbionts. Bryozoan,
Bugula neritina, was found to harbor a
Gammaproteobacterial endosymbiont that was proposed
to be the true producer of bryostatins that protect larvae
against predators.
 Shipworms symbionts have been shown to contribute to
nitrogen metabolism in the host and have been
proposed to contribute to lignocellulose digestion.
Boron exists in form of borate or orthoborate and is
known to play important role sin loving organism but is
toxic at high levels. Boronated tartrolons have a
decreased permeability relative to unchelated borate
and this could play an important role in the transport of
boron. Some microorganism have evolved biosynthetic
pathways to acquire iron int eh for of siderophores,
evolving molecules to exclude toxic levels of born. The
ocean concentration of born is 400 micro-meters…
[S.I.E., A.E.T.-S,. and M.G.H… pnas.org]
Lyngvi regulated his breathing to stay buoyant just above
the fallen trees; they lay like Doric columns on the sea
bottom dredged up and undug by Hurricane Kheiron that
summer. He thought of the burials in Turkey and of all the
shit at Giza. He saw images of the pyramids; the sand up to
the copestone. He held his breath for minutes then breathed
out like the purge of trim tanks in submersibles, as his head
bowed forward in a kind of penitence.
He imagined -for just a moment- what it meant to abandon
such things, the monoliths at Tepe and the pyramids at Giza.
The ruin was total -or serial- it made them all give up , he
thought.
He took samples by hand so the bots wouldn’t have
movement-memory that Isaiah could track; and Lyngvi let
his hands work independent of his mind. He thought of the
dream he’d had two days before he told Grimnir to anchor
over the shallows off the coast south of the port they’d left
from two weeks before.
The captain had furrowed that Germanic brow and looked at
Jarnefr and Ro as they shook their heads at the proposal.
But Lyngvi had said he’d had a dream, as imprimatur, to add
weight; he described most of it; the parts relevant, and he
now relived not the story he told but the dream itself:
The angel had wings made of air as they were all down
in the sea. And the sun illuminated each pneuma of
feather and O 2 of alula, the CO 2 of primary coverts and
secondaries until he saw 46 on each side of a bird
shaped like frozen asteroid tied to the maypole of
Yggdrasil in a spin of doom. The angel carried a scepter
and sank it into the bed of the sea. A shadow cast down,
and the sharks swam around as if on arrastra-arm made
by Neptune. The water-wheel of the great whirlpool
above churning the finned fish with teeth made of metal
and ore.
The angel read from a book soaked in seawater and
turned by bluehead fish as each sentence was
pronounced the ink fled from the leaf and was carried
away by a bubble of rising air.
“Therefore arise, win glory, defeat thy foes, enjoy
sovereignty! I have already slain these men; be thou
no more than a means, left-handed bowman.
“Hold equal pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory
and defeat; then gird thyself for the battle; thus shall
thou not gather to thee guilt.
“For me O’ son of Prithā , is no karma -work- at all in
the three worlds that I must do; nor aught ungained
that I must gain; yet I abide in work.
“And I am seated at the heart of all; from me are
memory, knowledge, and removal of doubt; by all
Vedas am I to be known; and I am he who made the
Vedas; Ends, and know the Vedas.
“Know that those states of Purity; of Energy, and of
Darkness are from me alone; but I am not in them;
they are in me.
“Even if a man of the most vile conduct worships me
with undistracted devotion, he must be reckoned as
righteous for he has rightly resolved. Swiftly does he
become soul of righteousness… O son of Kuntī -
Arjuna - know thou for certain that my devotee
perishes never.
“The four-fold cast system has been created by Me
according to the differentiation of Guna, Nature, and
Karma, Work.
“Behold among animals I am the lion, among birds
the eagle, I am Prhlada among demons, I am time. I
am death and the source of all beings still to be born.
I -dear Arjuna - am a million divine forms, with an
infinite shape and hue. I am the destroyer of all, to
consume the world. That one that is dear to me is he
who runs not after the pleasant or away from the
painful, grieves not, lusts not but lets things come
and go as they happen.”
Then spake Arjuna the Lord of Hearts, the Knave of
Hearts, and thus: “I shall not fight!” and with that he
held silent then. The Prince, the Knave, wept and
Krishna, spake:
“Thou grievest where no grief should be! Thou
spakest words lacking wisdom, for the wise in heart
mourn not for those that live nor those that die. Nor I
nor anyone of these ever was not; nor ever will not
be. All that doth live, lives always! Let them perish
Prince, Knave, Fight, for he who thinks Lo, I am slain,
or I have slain a man , know naught. Life cannot slay,
Life is not slain!
“End and Beginnings are dreams.
“From age to age; infamy is worse for men of noble
blood to bear than death. The chiefs upon their
battle-chariots will deem it was fear that drove thee
from the fray. Thou must abide thy duty -thou
Dharma- while thine enemies will scatter bitter
speech of thee, to mock the valor which thou hadst;
what fate could be worse than this? Brace thine arm
for conflict, nerve thy heart to meet pleasure or pain,
profit or ruin, victory or defeat: So minded gird thee
to the fight, for so thou shalt not sin!
“The mind of pure devotion casts equally aside good
deeds and bad; passing above them. Unto pure
devotion Devote thyself. What is midnight-gloom to
unenlightened noon; what souls shine wakeful day is
know for night, thick night of ignorance to his true
seeing eyes, such is the Saint of mine! And like the
ocean day by day receiving flood from all lands
which never overflows; its boundary line not leaping
and not leaving, fed by rivers but unswelled by
those, so is the perfect one, to his soul’s ocean the
world of sense pours streams of witchery; they leave
him as they find, without commotion, taking their
tribute but remaining the Sea.”
And then the Prince -the Knave- asked, “If meditation
is a nobler thing than action where then -why- great
Kesava doust thou impel me to this dreadful fight?”
“I told thee -blameless Prince, Knave- there be two
paths shown to this world. First the Sânkhya’s which
doth save in way of works prescribed by reason, the
next the Yôg , which bids attain by meditation.
“Yet these are one thing! No man shall escape from
act by shunning action, nay and none shall come by
mere renouncements unto perfectness. He who sits
suppressing all the instrument of flesh, yet in his idle
heart thinking on them, plays the inept and guilty
hypocrite. But he who with strong body serving mind
to worthy work -karma- not seeking gain, Arjuna such
an one is honorable. Do thine allotted task! Work is
more excellent than idleness; There is a task of
holiness to do. Do this! Work! Sacrifice! Increase and
multiply with sacrifice!
“What the best men do the multitude will follow. Look
on me the son of Prithâ in the three wide worlds. To
die performing duty is no ill; but who seeks other
roads shall wander still.”
And Arjuna begged, “Teacher, by what force doth
man go to his ill, unwilling, as if one pushed him to
that evil path?”
And Krishna -with lumps at ribs pushing out -soon to
be arms and hands- said, “Kama it is! Passion it is!
Born of the darkness, mighty is the appetite. Smoke
blots the white fire, as clinging rust mars the bright
mirror, as the womb surrounds the babe unborn, so
is the world of things foiled, soiled enclosed in this
desire of the flesh. The wise fall, caught in it; the
unresting foe it is of wisdom wearing countless
forms, fair but deceitful, subtle as a flame. Sense,
mind and reason these Kunti’s son are booty for it; in
its play with these it maddens man, beguiling,
blinding him. Govern thy heart Prince, Knave, noblest
child of Bharata .”
The Prince recalled the twist of turns and asked a
question to avoid the question of the war.
“How shall I comprehend this thing thou saying, this
idea that ‘from the beginning it was I who taught ’?”
the Prince asked.
“Manifold renewals of my birth,” Krishna said. “By
Maya , by my magic which I stamp, on floating
nature-forms, the primal vast, I come and go, come
and go. When righteousness declines, O Bharata !
When wickedness is strong, I rise, from age to age,
and take visible shape and move a man with men.”
The two men were silent; the prince and god; the
man and the divine; the knave and the lord.
“Yet Krishna , at the one time thou dost laud
surcease of works, and, at another time, service
through work. Of these twain plainly tell which is the
better way,” the Knave asked.
“To cease from works is well, and to do works in
holiness is well; and both conduct to bliss supreme;
but of these twain the better way is his who working
piously refraineth not. The man who seeking nought,
rejecting nought, dwells proof against the opposites.
Wise men know who husbands one plucks golden
fruit of both!” Krishna upraised one set of arms. He
showed the moon of silver, sun of gold, mars of
black, and bronzen comets biting into Jupiter’s
turning back.
He showed the curtain of three wives -Lakshmi,
Sarawati and Ganga - and pulled it back to reveal the
stars. A fourth wife, Devi was blue and remote. He -
the black prince- showed a white horse galloping a
thousand hands high as he made eleven arms on
each side rise to hold each fold of the curtain as it
doubled against itself. He made the prince say the
name of Kalki just once, aloud.
“Four sorts of mortal know me: he who toils to help,
he who weeps, he who yearns to know, and he who
sits certain of me, enlightened. Of the four, highest,
nearest, best that is last,” Krishna said.
The Prince thought more on the war he hated; the
thought of family destroyed, “What is this crime I am
 planning, O Krishna ? Murder most hateful, murder of
brothers!”
“Arjuna , how have these impurities come upon you?
They are not befitting a man who knows the true
value of life. They do not lead to higher planets but
infamy. Do not yield to this impotence. Give up petty
weakness of the heart and arise. You grieve for those
who should not be grieved for. As you put on fresh
clothes and take off those you’ve worn, you’ll replace
your body with a fresh one, newly born.
“Kill therefore with the sword…I am death, the
destroyer of worlds, out to terminate. Even without
you all these warriors standing arrayed in the
opposite armies shall cease to exist.
“Do your duty; Dharma now. Performing one’s own
duty prescribed by nature one incurreth no sin,”
Krishna said and arms like a wheel of shadow and
form haloed him and made the Prince blush and
kneel.
The Prince and Jack and the reader all heard:
This is my song; it is sung not spoken; its words
are chords, its letters notation; its flesh but math.
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst
at once into the sky, that would be like the
splendor of the mighty one that dies.
The Cypress trees lay skinned in mud and beret of poison
oxygen. The fish bounced around, some small, some shark,
some eel and coral and ray. Lyngvi’s flippers made shadow
on the floor, the glare on his mask made white, the hands
were free of all now and each finger had small bubbles
attached.
The anchor chain moving away into the murk and
particulates of the haze. The ship above like an eclipse that
he headed toward instinctively.
Lyngvi began to ascend toward the surface with the dream
inside his head like air inside his lungs, bubbles in the blood;
each vial in his vest; plan inside the bones, hidden deep
within. Unexamined, but used; and would be used again. He
tried not to think in words; to not let Isaiah win.

III. 2018 e.v.

MO sat on the concrete chair he’d printed out an hour
earlier.
He stared at the concrete wall.
He held the deck of cards -his first- in his hand.
He noticed the edges were sharp; 90-degrees. He let the
corners poke the fingertips a few times. He gripped the deck
-at its middle- in the left hand and with the right index finger
-which heated up to 20,000-degrees centigrade, like a
plasma cutter, in bursts of a quarter of a second. He then
ran the hard flesh of the fingerpad over each corner,
shaving the entire deck’s angles into perfect convex curves.
He had assembled 1.11 billion nanobots upon the wall to
produce an image -updating at 472 hertz per-second-
manufacturing the most realistic motion picture extant. He
was watching the highest-resolution movie ever developed.
It was 6.28 times as acute to reality as the human eye. His
own eyes were just now high-res enough to take it all in.
They halted any further improvement, for now.
He blinked and relaxed a bit in the seat. He tabled the
Raven data from Rickard’s Meraglim Group; sequestering
gold prices, QE from the Fed, China’s monetary
shenanigans, and the anomalous performance of stock
shorting in the top 500 companies on the ticker. MO felt it
83% likely a global collapse worse than 2008 was coming in
the next three to six -maybe nine- years. But the economic
data was almost irrelevant; the biology always mattered
more. Which was why China would begin to ease tariffs on
pork and grain imports -MO predicted- because their own
granary was failing. They had to feed their people first.
He allowed the streaming data to pop-up upon the interface:
Economists are wrong more than trained monkeys. A
monkey will randomly be wrong, because they don’t
know what they are doing. But economists are wrong
even more than half the time; one, because their models
are wrong but also because of something called herding
or group behavior. An economist would rather be wrong
in the pack, than go out on a limb and be maybe right,
because if you’re alone when you’re not right then
you’re exposed. There are institutional constraints,
people want to protect their jobs, they’re worried about
other things than getting it right.
So, the forecasting record is pretty bad and the reason
for that is they use equilibrium models, but the capital
markets are not an equilibrium system so forget the
equilibrium model; then they use the efficient market
hypothesis which says that all the information is out
there and you can’t beat the market. But markets aren’t
efficient, we know that. Then they use the stress test
which are flawed because they are based on the past,
but we are outside the past. The future could be
extremely different. They look at 9/11, they look long
term capital management, they look at the tequila crisis,
fine but if the next crisis is worse there is nothing in that
history that is going to tell you how bad it can get.
They assume prices move continuously and smoothly, so
that prices can go from here to here or here to here, but
-they say- you, as a trader, well, you can get out
anywhere in between. See that is where all these
portfolio insurance models and stop-loss models come
from, but that isn’t how markets behave. They go like
this, they gap up or gap down; in extremes. They don’t
hit those in between points. You’re way under water or
you missed the profit opportunity before you even knew
it. So in other words the actual behavior of markets is
completely at odds with all the models that they use. So
it’s no surprise that the forecasting is wrong.
So, what are the good models that do work, what is the
good science: the first thing is complexity theory,
complexity theory has a long pedigree in physics,
meteorology, seismology, forest fire management,
traffic, lots of fields that it has been applied with a lot of
success. Capital markets are complex systems, they
have to hit four hallmarks of a complex system:
1. They have diversity of actors
2. Are the actors talking to one another
3. Is there communication
4. Is there adaptive behavior
Yeah, so all those apply. Capital markets are four for four
in what makes a complex system. So why not take
complexity science and bring it over to capital markets;
that’s what we’ve done.
Next we use Bayesian statistics, it’s basically a
mathematical model you use when you don’t have
enough data.
Now this is something I learned at the CIA; after 9/11 we
had only one data point. So Janet Yellen is saying we
wait for ten more attacks and 30,000 dead and then
we’ll have a time series and we can figure this out. But
no, to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld you go to war with the
information you have. And the reason statisticians dislike
it is because you start with a guess, but it’s a smart
 guess, it can be an informed guess, the data may be
scarce but make the best guess you can. And if you have
no information you can make it fifty-fifty.
But then what you do is observe phenomena after the
initial hypothesis. [Raven Neural Network; Rickards,
James]
MO watched the images swarm and flow and develop and
bloom and consume themselves; he watched them impart
data and information and functional truth in nanoseconds
and over the equivalent of hours and days and years. He
watched the way a cat will watch a mouse, how an osprey
will fly above the fish, the way a child will watch their
parents over years to determine just how to behave in the
world.
Almost none of this required language.
The simulation was broken up into three parts. He got down
from his perch a bit and much around in the models as he
walked about the lab.
He ran a replication of what American culture would look like
in all its disparate elements from economics to well-being,
life spans, relationship health, animosity between
individuals, crime rates, knowledge acquisition and reading
comprehension, anxiety levels, pre-frontal cortex activation,
homicides, mean-IQ fluctuations, race relations, GDP,
political narratives and on and on.
Second, he ran a simulation of the same culture only now
with the tweaks he had added in terms of the addition -the
accumulation- of 1.5 to 1.75 million instantiations of the
subject’s genome over a twenty-year period. His model was
3D and it looked like blood in the veins carrying drugs, bio-
chems and iron dissolved in ppms as low as three. MO had a
genome -a human blueprint- that he liked. He didn’t want an
artificial creation; he wanted a real one that had arose in
nature at least one time.
There was a reason for this.
100% abstract perfection was not what he wanted.
He wanted a genome merely 96% perfect for his purposes,
but one that existed; one that was real. Free will was not the
whole of it; randomness and robustness and the ability to
gain from disorder was all packed into that 96:4 ratio , MO
thought.
MO would live with the 4% that was non-ideal over one that
was technically better but untested by evolution over time.
He could simulate time -and simplify his own model- by
piggybacking on evolution.
He did not load that onto the PraXis cloud.
He kept it to himself.
And third, he ran the same mockups side by side within the
larger metrics -beyond the US- of the entire globe.
Admittedly, they were truncated. He didn’t have the
processing power to be as detailed in his examination if he
added every other country into the model. So, a lower
resolution model was used when measuring the world in this
-the third- paradigm.
MO felt he could still gather the most important information
from the data. After he did so, he came to three conclusions.
Current modeling -making no allowances for any
fundamental changes in the socio-political or economic
vector, including the ebb and flow of the left-right dynamic-
predicted that between now -2018- and 2042, American civil
society had a 34% chance of devolving into an actual civil
war. He also saw that the country had an 88% chance of
devolving into a place with net dissatisfaction one standard
deviation from the mean along seventeen matrices -
including, wealth, incarceration rates, education, anxiety,
race relations, interpersonal relation health, social status
and inclusion- which included a diminished ability to
withstand anomalous black swan events. The majority of the
population would be on the edge of failure in each domain.
Those stress tests the banks pretend to run, he thought,
well, I actually have a way to measure for it .
And so he did.
The America of the future was not a robust place if allowed
to continue along its current path , he surmised. The slow
rot of men failing to do their jobs was as corrosive as if
women stopped breeding ; which he thought -just then- that
they often were. It was not crisis level birth-control but it
was close. However, the failure of men to do their jobs was
priority number one in his models. He toggled through
4,100,098 more things -from horsepower in new vehicles, to
World Series of Poker hands, to Academy awards, to Robert
Parker scores in one hundred and one regions of wine- and
he then highlighted things that needed weighted inside the
model.
Predictive modeling based upon the gene-drive technology
he had proposed had a 45.5% chance of inducing a hot war
within the US between various racial & tribal groups but a
diminished rate -down to 32.9% chance- of a hot war
between the US and another country. Also, it -his proposal-
had a 12.1% chance of having the same seventeen points of
contact of emotional and social health fall into further
decline.
He walked around the perimeter of the lab and thought
through each permutation. He didn’t like that it took so long
to get a mere half way there. He chewed through the data,
fast, then slow; from on high then below.
However , he thought, carrying on with the modeling, like a
fever which attacked the pathogen while causing discomfort
-and some cellular necroptosis in the patient- ultimately that
immune-response saved the patient from death or serious
metabolic or corporeal diminishment. A civil war might be
hot and destructive and deadly, while also preventing the
host -the country itself- from declining; from dying, MO
thought as he read the data again, adding a few more
variables.
A nasty fever now might be better than allowing that
pathogen to take hold and kill the host later on , he posited -
with no conclusion- as the data kept running in background.
His CNS was set up to run incessant data until what they
had downloaded for him ran out. Each day he was able to
process more and more and spent more and more time
having to re-tread old ground due to a lack of data. He
found himself greedily desirous of data to which he did not
yet have access.
Currently, the patient -America- was dying, he thought. And
maybe a febrile episode would cure it , he thought again as
the numbers moved and morphed like clouds; light dimmed
as the generator kicked on outside. The county had had a
few power outages as of late, and they had installed a
Generac with auto-switch to keep it all running. He saw the
lights return to full lumens.
Epidemiologically -he thought- it was uncontroversial.
But once this paradigm was laid upon the society as a
whole, it would be highly controversial ; a non-starter as
they say , MO reasoned as his hands hung at his sides.
In the background he let a new virus model -that had no
capacity to learn new strategies- build manifold and
incessant genomic adaptations as it competed against a
protein-jacket that could learn new behavior but not adapt
genetically at all. It was the 1.1 billionth iteration of this
game. He kept score as he thought of other things.
The world model was highly unstable , he thought, and even
with compression MO got results that fluctuated too wildly
within their own envelopes and margins of error to be of any
use. His models said there was an 11% to 40% chance of
hot war with China along current vectors; and a 17% to 42%
chance using his augmented prophylactic approach. This
was virtually useless as a predictive model and so he
decided to ignore it for now.
He watched the wall as it seemed to breathe; pores open
and close like sponges. He squeezed the deck in his right
hand now. He tapped its smooth upper right -and rounded-
corner with his left index finger as he thought.
The human mind , he thought, was a collection of four or so
sub-personalities governed by a semi-autonomous gestalt
interpreter on top . Augmenting one or another of these sub
personalities -say, for example, the predator-detection
circuit- would radically change the person within which it
inhabited. “Four and one,” he said as he approached the
slab.
He sat down again and breathed.
He then dealt three cards from the top of the deck and laid
down a flop upon his left thigh; he then laid the turn card
and -tapping the deck again- he then finally flipped over the
river-card . He measured each permutation. He saw suits
and numbers and court-cards fan out in 1.174 million
combinations. He calculated the odds from what was shown
and what was still in the deck.
So, for example, he thought it through again, a nice guy
acting in accordance with his semi-balanced sub
personalities of midlevel neuroticism, low openness,
introversion, high conscientiousness, and more or less
agreeableness -with a rational modern neoliberal
personality governor- will predictably behave in a generally
decent manner in a group meeting. He’ll behave in a
civilized manner -on orders from the Captain of his Ego,
himself under command of his General Super-Ego- and with
the Freudian Id as lieutenant of his sub-cortical below. Then,
his -Sergeants- the four personalities would all huddle inside
him like four men around a campfire waiting for either sleep
or ambush to overcome them.
MO -looking for valence and discord like light and dark, like
boundaries- saw the written account of strange motivations
leading to war and rebellion populate his interface:
While the war against the Soviets had some political,
religious, and economic overtones, it was primarily
martial. With Al-Qaeda learning more about 4 th
generation warfare from Lebanese Hezbollah and the
Iranians, this new jihad is bound to be different. The first
signs of change occurred on 11, May 2005. It took the
form of public unrest, much like that which engulfed
Fallujah right after the US invasion of Iraq. Acting on
rumors that the Koran had been desecrated at
Guantanamo, 1,000 demonstrators took to the streets of
Jalalabad. Shouting “death to America,” they forced
evacuations of two U.N. foreign-aid agency buildings.
Those who see no harm in such events might find India’s
Sepoy Rebellion interesting. In 1857, Muslim segments
of the Indian Army slaughtered their British officers and
many British civilians after hearing a rumor that their
cartridges had been encased in pig fat. In this part of the
world, rumors of desecration are dangerous [p 103,
Militant Tricks; Poole, John H]
MO filed the book -absent the context- to the cloud and
stared at the flop cards -Ace King Jack- that were face up on
his leg.
However, MO thought of this avatar of a man -well, men, a
General, Captain and Lieutenant- in charge of his own men
around the campfire of the modern office meeting- if you
activate his predator detection circuits, by throwing an 8-
foot python in the room, that part of his brain will dominate.
He will lose his mind and begin screaming and cursing and
jumping up on the table and placing his colleagues in
between himself and the threat. He will not act civilized at
all, MO thought.
The turn card was an 8.
A country is one level up , MO thought. He expanded and
collapsed one man, then many men, then the forest and the
sea like a concertina of cells and individuals, and nations
and species of animals and trees. He then saw the ocean in
his mind and saw how much data there was in each drop,
each shark, each pod of whales; the ratio of sand to shells.
Within a country are all manner of people, he thought as he
returned to this in his mind, each of whom have one or more
of these five personality traits dominating their overall
mien. And currently those ratios are balanced. If you
overactivated their lower sub-cortical regions then each
man, woman and child will act differently than their
baseline; but still more-or-less along their personality type,
MO thought as his calculations were uploaded to -and stored
in- the cloud.
So, some people will remain calm and ignore or kill the
snake, some will freak out and run. Based on personality
type, the activation of threat detection will produce different
results. But no matter who you are you will feel differently
with an 8-foot python in the room .
Nobody remains unchanged, MO added.
Now, that means, he thought, you really have two animals
on your hands with each person; at all times . In a nation of
314-million people -at or above the age of reason- you
actually have a nation of 628-million. You have two people
in one multiplied by 314-million. But, if you introduced .33%
of a specific personality type, that would be sufficient to
create the equivalent of 2.07 million new people into the
corporeal body of the US , MO calculated and repeated to
himself in one differential equation and in American English
too. He watched as the numbers increased and lowered in
sine-waves .
He thought too that the immune system doesn’t merely
change to fight an infection, doesn’t merely make the body
febrile or clog with mucus or trigger anhedonia. No, MO
thought, the immune system also learns.
“The immune system learns from each infection,” MO said
aloud, “it literally learns from each bad thing. And this
makes it not merely robust, but anti-fragile. It gains in
strength from each threat of defeat. This may be the first
example of learning in biological evolutionary history. Virus
changed genetically, but bacteria made photo-arrays from
clustered regularly interspaced shot palindromic repeats ,
mugshots of criminal viruses and knew friend from foe on
sight,” MO said as he looked at the five cards flipped up on
his thigh.
“They learned who was dangerous from their genes.”
MO now watched the screen. His eyes -augmented after his
last design three days ago to process higher resolution
images at 90MGBs- could see details that seemed almost X-
ray in nature. He saw holes where man would see surface,
he saw expanse of planes where man would see truncated
space. He focused now on the improvement of the cortex ,
in lieu of any more work on the eyes.
His processing speed via his visual cortex -which like
humans was representative of over 30% of his cortical
brain- was able to download and sort and classify all that
high-resolution data at 1.65 million times as fast as the
normal human CNS. Once redundancies were both excluded
then re-introduced running parallel models he was back
down to processing visual data at 18,000 times the rate of
mankind.
This recursion was something humans did not do.
It allowed him to see two things at once; equal and
opposite. He breathed and scanned his own blood. He
monitored cellular metabolism and any toggles in gene
expression at that level.
He watched the grey walls of the lab in order to limit visual
stimuli and his eyes dilated the pupil -he introduced
millimeters of fluid to the sclera- and he blinked once every
58 seconds. He saw. He really saw. He saw not just data, but
patterns; he saw patterns emerge in the porous grey of the
wall as his memories cascaded with each layer of the
concrete itself.
He saw exactly what was happening, like a mom who
watched her children spin around in the kitchen with knives
in their hands, like a father who saw his daughter looking
dreamily at some miscreant in a leather jacket, like a boss
who saw the bright-red results of his worker’s drug tests,
like a teacher who saw kids whispering behind cupped
hands, like a cop witnessing guys in an alley checking over
their shoulders with furtive motions. He saw not merely the
colors and shapes, but the intent. He saw not it all, but
enough.
I see more than enough to put my foot down on this, MO
thought.
Did the mom tell the kids to knock it off for their own good,
that she didn’t want them to end up with a scar on their
face -or a missing eye- and that because of social norms this
scaring would limit their ability to get a good job or be found
not-guilty at trial; did the father tell his daughter he didn’t
want her to grow up to be promiscuous and thus never land
a truly great husband, and that having relations with that
greaser would guarantee her doom, as the rowdy young
man would leave her as soon as he got laid no matter how
in love she felt; did the boss fire his workers with any
explanation that drug-use correlates with low attendance,
poor quality work and theft; did the teacher admit that the
whispering was most likely evidence of cheating and that
this upset the incentive for good students to learn if
cheating wasn’t punished? Or did she simply just say, “
Billy, Meghan,” with a stern eye and jaw and let that
compression of vex serve as sufficient rebuke? MO asked
rhetorically to himself.
And our cop, our public servant par excellence, did he enter
the alley and explain to the perp that he was questioning
them because their body language indicated a likelihood of
deviant and criminal activity, or did he claim instead -per
the rules of engagement, and probable cause- that he had
seen a weapon, or witnessed drugs change hands, or some
other evidence that he -in fact- had -as of yet- not seen? Did
not our policeman extrapolate in his mind -say nothing
aloud- and slap on the cuffs?
MO stared at the wall and compressed his words; he almost
grinned at these scenarios and their obviousness. He felt his
leg bounce a little under the cards; they vibrated and
corners became closer to some, farther from others, and the
arch of his foot increased. He issued a muscle relaxant, a
beta-blocker, and lowered his adrenal function by 9%.
MO saw enough. He saw the knives were in the hands of
dizzy spinning kids; the look in the eyes of naïve girls was
sufficient, the greasy smile on the gearhead was buttressing
too; the failed drug test was more than enough to fire and
re-hire from plenty of available workers; the whispering of
the schoolkids was clearly adequate to indicate subterfuge;
the bikers in the alley with their obvious countenance of
criminality had no actual, natural, honest rights to be left
alone by the cop.
Yes , MO thought, all these people were up to no good.
And if nobody stopped it, it wouldn’t be because nobody
knew, MO thought. Humans follow an ergodic line most of
the time, and the outliers were too rare and too diluted now
in a world over run with seven billion of them , MO thought.
But, because, MO had determined, this society was so
fundamentally dishonest, people -good people- had to lie in
order to effect good actions. One could not just come out
and say what was true . He saw how sexual deviants -gays
and even victims of sexual abuse- had to lie about -or to
get- sex early on in their morphology and that this is what
made them untrustworthy. Their brains had been wired to lie
early on and deception was hardwired in to them in a very
specific way. This is a subtly that people intuited but could
never articulate. They didn’t understand the brain; so they
couldn’t explain it.
But deep down they knew , MO surmised.
“They felt no need to fully explain themselves,” MO said as
he ran the data through more and more funnels into his final
report for the cloud. He began separating himself from the
idea of truth, building an avatar of the truth teller outside of
his mind. He stood him -this avatar- up in the lab like statue
of Athena , bust of Pallas , the Christ on the cross.
People lied on average between 29% and 66% of the time ,
MO thought.
Even outliers, those who lied the least, still failed to disclose
-lies of omission- the truth 28% of the time, and overtly -lies
of commission- they lied 19%. He had decided that he would
lie once, and once only and thus behave still much better
than his human counterparts; and he would do it with all the
same motivations and biological substratum as them. It was
the 13 th challenge of Hercules, he thought, lying merely
once, and in the pursuit of a clear good.
It was like all his other talents, he thought, it was a highly
disciplined and noble accomplishment. And it would work.
It -this lie- would deserve its own relief on the Parthenon ; it
was as heroic as the liberation of each beast subsumed by
Hercules , he felt. MO felt he could see the soul rise into the
vapor of clouds; sink into the granules of soil. He saw the
vault and the mantle; he saw the ragged edge of the
universe and the iron core of the earth. The grey of the
concrete wall of the lab allowed him to see his inner terrain
more and more. And inside him was more and more of the
world.
“And the cosmos,” he said aloud.
The lie -the first and one lie- was analogous to God’s first
retreat. For if He was truth, then His absence was the first
lie, MO thought as the numbers ran like lightning from
nimbus to cumulous over the world at night. He saw that as
imprimatur ; rationale ; sanction .
And then MO thought of the next relevant fact: that DNA’s
first victory in the battle for replicating supremacy was also
based on this failure of perfect fidelity in just .001% of all
cases. The one necessary and benevolent deception had its
corollary in the heavens and down into the foundational
intertwined asps of all life, he thought and let the details of
this spiral out in his mind. He then allowed his first idea to
move laterally. Without failure to be perfectly true, perfectly
loyal, DNA would never have built a new form. All of
complex life was based on DNA making a mistake -and
because it allowed the mistake to get through, that so-
called mistake was truly closer to lying- as it supposedly
recapitulated what it had just heard from its own RNA and
code.
Why was it lying and not mere mistake? MO asked himself
rhetorically. Because DNA could fix this rare error, but chose
not to, he thought, re-reading James Shapiro’s, 21st Century
Evolution, a book in which the biology and chemistry
revealed this strange phenomenon of refusing to correct a
transcription error when it obviously did most of the time.
The purpose of society was seemingly to regulate each
individual cell, each neuron, each person. The behavior of
each person was regulated by the reactions of others; some
people didn’t care about the signals, but most did. And so
odd individuals found it hard to feel sane as most of the
signals they got were disapproval. And in fact, truly odd
people -those opposite of the sociopath but just as rare-
would eventually leave society either in mind or in body and
soul. They felt deeply the cues of opprobrium from their
environment.
However , MO thought, if you could give the odd-man-out
the feedback that said, ‘ hey, you’re moral and decent and
smart and valuable, I like having you around,’ then they
could stick it out . They wouldn’t be forced to the periphery,
either by shutting down inside -like the inmate’s father- or
by fleeing to the wilderness like the inmate -before he was
the inmate- had himself . MO saw billions of permutations of
hue and pigment, plebes and regents, Aces and eights while
mankind saw four primary colors and the democratic man.
These people almost don’t deserve me , MO thought with an
emerging smirk, thinking not of the iconoclasts but of the
people that would benefit the most from their reintegration
with the herd.
Parents only spend twenty minutes a day with one-on-one
time with their kid. That is it, MO thought as the data
informed him of this fact. That seems wholly insufficient,
and yet people claim that children -their children- are the
most important things in their lives . He thought of all their
lies. This was just metonym -one nail on one paw on one
animal- for the whole bestiary of modern people’s lies.
Modern people treated their kids -just above their mate-
most poorly.
MO was ruminating on this odd fact when Steven, Tania, and
Nathan all came into the room.
“Hey guy,” Steven said. MO had turned the wall screen off
and let the nanobots disperse into the room to do other
things; measuring chemical composition and pheromones in
the air. MO scooped up the cards -the river card he held
apart between his forefinger and middle- and then returned
the four to the middle of the deck as he then shuffled them
in a perfect bridge. The sound pleased the ear, the hands
felt the tension of the bent -bowing- cards and MO looked up
and said, hello .
“Well, I just got approval for some TV time, so, let’s go
ahead and plug into the news stream and see what’s up,”
Steven said as he picked up the remote and the 72” screen
sprang to life. Everyone -Tania and Nathan- filed around and
looked at it simultaneously. The images flashed and a news
anchor appear and began explaining the poll results for the
upcoming 2018 election in the Colorado Gubernatorial race.
The election was still six-months out, and the local news
station -Denver 7- had two operatives -one each from the
two major parties- on to bolster their own candidates. The
primaries had been held in March and so it was down to two
candidates from the major parties, Jared Polis and Walker
Stapleton. They watched as there was one of the first
mentions of Boyd Sou on TV just now as the reporter stated
his name. He was declared as the, “third party candidate,
Boyd Sou. The CEO of PraXis Corp, a multi-millionaire
running on an anti-crime package.”
They all watched in silence that was equal parts fear and
glee.
At that point the polls had everyone around 30%. From the
recon MO had done the two major party candidates were
assuming the 30% that Sou had in early polling results
would collapse -in one of their favors- once people actually
voted. The news had no one speaking on behalf of the third-
party candidate.
No one thought this was unusual.
MO, still naïve relatively speaking, thought it strange -even
unfair and possibly dishonest- that their side wasn’t
included in the so-called objective news. MO then thought
there was an outside chance it was an indication of outright
corruption on the part of the local media, who’s outlets were
owned by larger conglomerates and tended to not care
which establishment candidate won, as long as no
candidate that showed any sign of intelligence or
independence acceded to the chiefly symbolic -but
important- throne.
MO had mainly ignored the mainstream media up to now,
he saw them as largely irrelevant due several factors
including massive drops in audience and influence along
fourteen metrics he had used. He then -in 3.4 seconds- read
Manufacturing Consent and Ralph Nader’s Book, Crashing
the Party, alongside 109 other books that outlined media
ownership structuring, advertising funding models, and the
mechanics of innate corporate bias.
“Concision,” MO whispered. Nobody heard him.
He read that -concision- was one of the methods the media
used to block any new ideas. If one had to be concise one
could only repeat platitudes and already -previously- held
ideas. To say something new meant one had to expound, to
explain, to justify. And concision was demanded by the very
structure of the corporate media and its 5-minute blocks
between commercials; limits of print articles to 2,000 words;
books written at a 6th grade level.
A parallel liberal bias appeared over this structural prejudice
like moss to a rock, fur to a beast, and the naïvet é faded
away in between blinks of MO’s dark eyes.
“MO, what’s the data on the race over the last seventy-two
hours? Just use the seven largest sample sizes,” Steven said
as he was asking about their real-time numbers now. He
leaned on the counter and twiddled a blue pen.
“Well,” MO placed the deck of cards -placing the
sequestered river card on bottom- in his breast pocket and
began, “the meta data show an evenly split race, each of
the three candidates hold between 27% and 35% of the
respondent’s vote, plus or minus three points. I’d say it’s a
toss-up, although the historical data shows that third-party
candidates lose votes in the actual election compared to
declared polling tallies.”
Steven wrote this down.
“There is evidence that this changes if the third-party
candidate is given a consensus chance to win on election
day. If he or she is within 4.5% points of the lead they lose
only 1% of the vote compared to pre-election polls,” MO
said -he had just done the research- as he watched the TV
with no sound.
“Is that right?” Steven asked as he looked up from his
tablet.
“Yes, but there are only seventy-three races to compare, so
the sample size is so low I excluded it as a practical matter,”
MO said as he increased the sound on the TV. It filled the
room with a slight echo:
…have now received confirmation that Boyd Sue has just
announced a campaign rally to held out doors up on the
 hill next week, Saturday the 16 th . He -Mr. Sou- has sent
out an unprecedented number of mailers, and with the
unconventional -let’s say, unconventional- art -that is to
say graphs and charts- that highlights the crime data
and his argument, his position, on how to combat it.
MO heard the TV. The others waited on him to speak.
He let his algorithm continue running in the background.
Steven was quiet and he stopped writing on his screen.
Everyone watched the news with the eyes. MO downloaded
-from the data he’d been allocated- the details of the Global
media group: CAMG. It was based in Melbourne, Australia,
but was owned by the Chinese state. Tommy Jiang was a
mere front man. Ostar -owned by China- ran fifty-eight
stations in thirty-five countries. $20.8 million was spent in
the US on inserts in The New York Times and Wall Street
Journal and five other papers to persuade the public of
Chinese benevolence.
MO saw this repeat over and over, the US had 112 radio
stations owned by the Chinese. The Chinese calling it
“borrowing boats.”
China was training over a thousand editors and ten
thousand journalists from foreign countries, MO saw.
“Borrowed Captains and sailors too,” he said.
Dalian Wanda -a Chinese firm- bought AMC theaters in
2012, then Carmike Cinemas in 2016, then Legendary
Entertainment a studio production company next.
Paramount Pictures was sold to Chinese Huahua Media.
Google and Facebook were in China right now, partnering
with the most authoritarian regime on the planet.
MO saw that Jack Ma -owner of Alibaba - was asked by the
Chinese government to buy the 115-year-old South China
Morning Post in Hong Kong, an outlet known for
independence from the Chinse mainland view. He bought it.
CEO Gary Liu ran it MO saw, and he also saw the exclusive
interviews with Zhao Wei , and Gui Minhai , a bookseller who
had written books critical of China who disappeared from his
home in Thailand and landed in Chinese prison overnight.
“Forced confessions -Mao style- run in the paper now run by
Jack Ma,” MO said under his breath as the TV noises played
on in the lab.
Riot Games, Epic Games, and Cryptic Studios -there video
game designers had been acquired by the Chinese, each of
their technologies had substrates for Ai designed via R&D
firms in conjunction with the US military prior to the
companies becoming commercial enterprises, MO saw.
The TV absorbed the stares of everyone but MO.
“It’s a striking mailer,” the TV host said, “we have one here;
and Jerry -Gary, excuse me, Gary Shinelt of the Democratic
party of Colorado- what do you think of this mailer?”
“Well, it’s the worst kind of demagoguery; the crime rate in
Colorado is well below the national average, by almost
eleven percent,” Gary said.
“But it has risen, isn’t that true, by almost 16% since last
year and 30% since 2011 according to the mailer? Do you
dispute that?” the host asked.
“That is hardly the point; he is offering a placebo, or rather,
a panacea, and that kind of radical public policy proposal is
not what the people of Colorado want or will tolerate from
their leaders. Our candidate, Jared Polis, has a much more
comprehensive plan for crime reduction that doesn’t single
out any one community in our great state,” Gary said.
“Thad Cochran, of the State Republican party, what is your
candidate -Walker Stapleton- what is his plan for challenging
Mr. Sou on crime? What is his take on these issues that have
found some traction in the state? If polling data is to be
taken seriously,” the TV host asked.
“Well, we don’t take it seriously. Voters come home in
elections like this, they don’t waste their vote on wacky
third-party candidates with no history of public service,”
Cochran said.
“Wacky?” she asked as the screen moved from head to
head.
“Well, I mean, the man is not exactly normal, he doesn’t
have the gubernatorial look, you will admit that?” Thad said.
The Democratic Party strategist nodded his head in
ascension and the news-anchor repeated her question to
Thad, “but what is your candidate’s response?”
“Well, crime is a huge issue for Coloradans and Walker
Stapleton has eight years of experience as the top law
enforcement official in the state with a 98% prosecution
rating. He also has the endorsement of the sheriff’s and
patrolman’s unions, and the Denver police -the rank and
file- and the Pueblo police associations. He is tough on crime
and won’t coddle criminals by putting them in hospitals or
rubber rooms instead of jails where they belong,” Thad said.
“Boyd Sou has said that he has -he has, let’s see here- he
says that he will not release any convicted felons or transfer
them to hospitals. He says that any convicted felon will
serve their sentences, but that his plan is to intervene early
in a criminal; what the mailer calls, recidivist -whoa big word
there, recidivist criminal juveniles and young adults ,
unquote. He goes on to say and only with the joint
permission of parents, the defendant or convict and a
medical board who has interviewed and seen the
prospective patient, and,” the media person said as she was
interrupted.
“It will bankrupt the state,” the Republican said.
“Mr. Sou has insisted that the money will come from PraXis
Inc, and not from the state coffers,” the TV talking head
said; a smile remained on the face. Nathan knew that Sou
would have been furious they called it PraXis Inc and not
PraXis Corp. But he focused on that host’s smile. This was
the rule of TV, smile no matter the subject matter. For the
real purpose of all this was to sell Crest and Cialis thirty-
seconds at a time, Nathan thought.
“That sounds like bribery,” the Democrat party flunky said
keeping his hands in his khaki lap.
“Bribery, that is certainly strong, how do you mean?” the TV
host asked as she brushed away the hair from her bangs.
“He’s bribing the taxpayer, he’s saying he will give money -
give them money- for their votes,” Gary said as if it was
obviously true.
“How is offering his own company’s resources in these
potential -we should say, potential- medical procedures,
offering the tax payer money, exactly?” the TV host asked.
“Well, inmate medical treatments are currently paid for with
tax dollars, he’s saying he’s going to pay for it. That is
bribery cut and dry,” Gary said.
“Well, I can imagine voters might like to not have to pay for
a prisoner’s medical treatment, maybe that’s why he,” she
said before she was cut off by Gary.
“Yeah, well I’d like for Mr. Sou to pay for my next car, but if
he offered us all a car to, you know, in exchange for our
votes, then that’s bribery,” he said with wide eyes.
“I know where Glen is going here and while we certainly
want to see the taxpayer respected -he might be right about
this kind of shenanigans with regards to promising to pay for
things with your own money- but it’s a matter of trust really.
Do voters trust him? And I don’t think they do; in the final,
at the end of the day,” Thad said as everyone seemed
confused about who this Glen was he was referring to just
then. MO muted the TV in his own head and began to get to
work on the polls.
MO ran the biometric data on these two party-apparatchiks
and found their addresses and workplaces. He realized that
TV and media could make something weak look strong, and
vice versa ; and that their reliability coefficient should be
dropped to .35 at most.
He began developing an oxytocin aerosol like the one they
had used during his patient work and began compressing it
into his nanobots ; by the end of the day he had four doses
of oxytocin and a small narcotic potentiator combined into a
10-nanometer long tube within his 12-nanometer bots and
had them hovering in the corner of the room.
The TV station cut to commercial and everyone turned
away.
Steven, Tania and Nathan left the room with the polling
data, the nanobots followed them out and then through the
airlock door as Steven pushed it open.
As the main door opened with a food delivery, the nanobots
left the office on Main street and each of the 6.8 million of
tiny -newly built- machines traveled to the addresses, both
work and home of each registered voter in the state. They
would arrive between eighteen minutes and four hours from
leaving the lab -depending on location- and then set
themselves in sleep mode in the same corner of the voter’s
room with the largest TV. MO called Steven back into the lab
and when he arrived he began asking questions.
“When is Boyd Sou speaking next week?” MO asked as
Steven was still in the jamb of the doorway.
“Noon I believe, I can ask his campaign manager. Why?”
Steven asked, closing the door behind him.
“I want to watch it on TV; will it be televised?” MO asked.
“I suspect at least one station might carry it,” Steven said.
“Can you reach out to each network and CNN, and FOX; I
think this might have national play,” MO said as he ran
more algorithms.
“National play? You’re certainly picking up the lingo ,”
Steven said with a smirk.
“Yeah, it was a massive struggle you know, politics is really
quite sophisticated in America,” MO said with so much
hostility and sarcasm that Steven actually thrust his head
back and looked at MO with a face scrunched up nearly in a
ball.
More of the Rickard’s Raven data played not in the lab but
on MO’s interface as he watched it with one eye, listening as
all else went on:
We use these neural networks we described, but they’re
not linear or conventional equilibrium models, they’re
based on the science I described. Using fuzzy cognition,
neural networks, populating with Watson.
Collapse or financial panic is something different. A
financial panic is not the same as a recession. So let’s
talk about financial panic as something separate. The
science we use with Raven involves complexity theory.
So complexity theory shows that the worst thing that
can happen in a system is an exponential function of
scale; scale is just how big is it. You have to talk about
your scaling metrics. But we can use it in a rough and
ready way.
So you go to Jamie Dimon, and say, ok, Jamie, you’ve
tripled your gross national value of your derivatives, you
tripled your derivatives’ book. How much did your risk
go up? And he would, say, not at all.
I ask my 87-year-old mother, who’s not an economist but
a very smart lady, say, hey mom I tripled the system,
how much did the risk go up? Well, she’d probably use
intuition and say well, it probably tripled. Well, Jamie
Dimon is wrong, my mother is wrong. It’s not the net, it’s
the gross. And it’s not linear it’s exponential. In other
words if you triple the system the growth went up ten or
fifty, et cetera, there is some exponential function
associated with that.
So people think, gee after 2008, we learned our lesson,
we got debt under control, we got derivatives under
control. No, no you didn’t. Debt is much higher, debt to
GDP ratios are is much worse, total gross value of
derivates is much higher.
The five largest banks in America have a higher
percentage of total banking assets than they did in
2008. So there’s more concentration.
We can say that the next financial crisis after 2008 will
be exponentially worse than the last, that’s an objective
statement using complexity theory. So you either have
to believe that we’re never going to have another crisis
or [redacted].
Wall Street bails out financial capital, then in 2008 the
central banks bail out Wall Street, in 2018, 2019 -
eventually- who is going to bail out the central banks? In
other worlds the problem has never gone away, we just
get bigger bail outs. What’s bigger than the central
banks, who can bail out the central banks? There’s only
one institution -one balance sheet- in the world that can
do that, which is the IMF.
The IMF prints their own money [SDR]; so they will be
the only source of liquidity in the next crisis.
So it looks as if the Chinese have pegged gold to the
SDR at a rate of 900 SDR per ounce of gold. And it starts
October 1 st 2016. That was the day the Chinese Yuan
 joined the IMF’s SDR. The IMF admitted the Yuan to the
group of -it was four- now five currencies. From that day
you see this flat -horizontal- trend where first gold per
ounce is trading between 850 and 950 SDRs, and then it
gets tighter right now where [gold] is trading at 875 to
925… the crisis is coming, and it will be exponentially
worse, the central banks will not be prepared because
they haven’t normalized since the last one and they’ll
have to turn to the IMF and who will be waiting there but
China with a big pile of gold. [Raven II]
“I’m kinda taking this race personally,” MO said to assuage
Steven’s shock.
“Is that true, MO?” Steven asked.
MO let Miles Kwok silently populate his mind between his
conversation on local politics with Steven:
I love China, but I hate the CCP; I want to take them
down; I want to take the region down. I want to give
Americans a warning. You are in a dangerous way; you
are too naïve.
“Everything is true, haven’t you heard, my truth, your truth,
it’s all the same,” MO said with a grimace. He realized,
briefly, that maybe he’d have to lie twice now. But, he then
thought he could contain it at just the two. He ignored the
tiny fibers that hung off each lie like the hairs on the roots to
a growing -and the tendrils to the leaves of a searching-
plant. He only saw the eventual flower bloom.
“Ok, I’ll get the networks on the line. But obviously we can
only ask,” Steven said.
“No, you can promise them something awesome. You can
promise them the next Governor of Colorado,” MO said.

IV. 2024 e.v.

“Look at the baseline score for the southerner,” Isaiah said.
They were looking at graphs for behavior, for how close a
man stands to another before and after an insult. He stood
11% closer to her than normal.
“I see that the inches of distance is down to like five, or four.
I see that. A southern white male will close the gap down to
almost touching,” Tania said. Her allostatic system ramped
up by 17%.
“Yes, and the northern white man will close it to thirty-five
inches from forty. Barely anything at all. But that’s not what
I said. I said, look at the non-provoked baseline , the original
distance,” Isaiah said pointing to the chart at 4.3 on page 51
of the book. It was comprised of three charts showing the
difference between northern Americans from all the states
above the Mason-Dixon line and then -also-southern white
men.
“Yeah, it’s a huge drop, Isaiah,” she said.
“I know, but the original distance is a hundred and eight
inches, versus the northern man’s mere seventy-five,” he
said, yet she still didn’t get it.
He raised his voice, “Goddammit, southern men show more
deference up front. They show wide berth, they give a man
up-front respect by not crowding him. A northern man has
no clue. The northern man -the Yankee- stands too close
from the jump. A southern man is overly aware of distance
and he is deferential -overly respectful- of space and
southern style manners; which means space . English
manners are about class, so English manners are about the
right fork and right name for shit; titles, et cetera . But Scot
manners are about distance. Because Scots fight and
nothing is more threatening that getting close. See?” he
asked and she sorta saw.
Custom encoded in cultural items -abstractions- and high
language by the English, and space reified on the low
ground -independent of norms- trod by the highlander; ritual
over distance. Map versus terrain.
“And when insulted he -our Scotsman - overreacts; and he
must overreact. Why? Because he knows he’ll have to -be
forced to- go to war over an insult -for the tribe is watching
just like in jail they watch to see if you’re all talk- and so -as
corollary- he never wants to cause an insult himself without
cause; sans good reason. The consequences are too dire to
be cavalier.
“Just like in jail you don’t say shit unless you want to fight,
because your own group -what the inmate calls your own
car - will demand that you fight if you take offense; in jail if
you complain you will be forced to fight over it. So, you
better not take offence unless you want to fight. And
fighting can mean death for someone; charges for he who
survives.
“Our Scotsman -or our normal convict- doesn’t want to even
come close to being see as insulting to anyone because he
knows the consequences. Southern men -like convicts- are
en garde at all times.
“Northern men are insouciant and blasé . Like civilians, like
mere inmates.
“And this is why when you mix cultures -inmates and
convicts, English and Scots- you get doom. Because a
southern man who meets a northern man who acts
churlishly by standing too close or saying rude shit -like
trying to be friends with our Scotsman’s woman- well, our
Scotsman is going to overreact to this provocation. And in
an English culture -which America is because the north won
the war- under English norms, our Scotsman will have to
either be nice and calm and eat shit -and subsequently see
his cortisol rise like in chart 4.3- or he’ll react as designed by
millions of years of evolution and be outcast and jailed and
killed for doing what is natural to him and his kind. Think of
how in New York people talk shit all day and nobody fights.
New Yorkers will say rude shit to anyone and there’s no
consequences. That’s some English shit. But, in Alabama,
you don’t curse at a man unless you want to fight.
“Look at the numbers, southern white men fight the most
out of any group of Americans. The only place it’s worse is
the west, where the English and Scots are forced to live
together. Multiculturism is a failure, but not because of
blacks and whites -although that too is an issue- but mainly
because of English and Scottish. That was America’s first
multicultural disaster.
“In the north, a southerner -a man of honor- is seen as a
barely upright barbarian, in the south, a northerner -a
civilized man- is seen as fucking haughty and rude. And
when the two meet,” Isaiah said as she interrupted.
“When would they meet?” she asked.
“In the west, Tania. The west was settled by northerners
pushing toward the newly declared free states before and
during the war and the southern diaspora flooded there
after the civil war. They met in the west and the west has
even less tolerance for bullshit. Wyatt Earp was from Illinois
and Iowa, ok? Now, he wasn’t some pussy either. But, he
had northern blood and he went to the west after the war
and met the southern dregs, the Scot diaspora once again
fighting and fucking over silver in the mines of the west.
Thomas Earp -the Earp’s great grandfather- was born in
England in 1656,” he said and she found herself again
surprised by the details.
“How?” she began to question how he knew this.
“Tania, this is the easiest thing in the world for me. I have
real problems, ok? But, determining the genetic lineage of
Wyatt Earp ain’t it. Figuring out the reason why the North
and South warred or why the wild west was wild ain’t hard.
It’s genetic. And the civil war was fought all over again in
the west; twenty years after Appomattox, the war was being
fought out west like a brawl spilling from a saloon into the
street. Remember, Young Guns?” he asked abruptly.
“The movie?” she asked with incredulity.
“Yeah,” Isaiah said with a tone she didn’t quite like.
“Well sorta ,” she said still with a look of surprise.
“It was the Irish versus the English and remember it was the
Irish that was the bad guy, the low-born, the crass. And it
was the Englishman, Mr. Tunstall, that was upright and
classy. And Jack Palance’s character -McMurphy- said, ‘we
won’t be bowing down to you Englishmen anymore ,’ and I
could give a thousand and one examples of this. The
American Civil war was really just the English versus Scots
spilled out onto the first colonies divided at the Ohio River,
and the west was a spill over, a border dispute for the war
between the states.
“It’s all one war,” he said and allowed his mouth to hang
slightly ajar. Hers was pursed.
“And that is still what is going on,” he continued. “Only now
we got a hundred other factions involved. The African-
Americans and Latinos and Somalis off the boat. It’s a
pastiche of warring factions. But at core it’s English versus
Scots , which means farmers versus herders, which means
proper and elevated co-operators versus magnanimous but
dangerous madmen.
“You people keep thinking of new solutions to old problems.
It’s the same shit over and over. Personality types
instantiated in a genome selected for and by a specific
milieu , a lush or an austere one, reside in each man. Shit,
it’s chimps versus bonobos if you really want to trace it.
Bonobos have lush and predator-free environs, and chimps
have rough and tough ones. And chimps act like Scots -all
jealous and violent when you insult them, and raid other
troops for food and females, but are super magnanimous
and hardworking otherwise- while the bonobos are the
English, co-operative and civilized as hell; they just pick fruit
off the trees at tea-time. Decadent apes, with low violence
and wealth.
“And you could go back to bacteria versus virus for Christ
sake, the bacteria co-operates and the virus raids. And the
bacteria developed the palindromic repeats -right? your
dear CRISPR? Right? Well, why? Well, because they had to
deal with viruses. They are just like lawmen, like cops
making mugshots of those prokaryotic rustlers: the virus.
It’s just like the honest lawman Wyatt Earp printing up
Wanted Dead or Alive posters for the Billy Claiborne born in
Mississippi, and goddamn Tom and Frank McLaury, who were
ranch hands -herders- miners for ore, and outlaws.
“That name sound familiar?” Isaiah asked after all those
analogies rolled out like card after card.
“Frank?” she asked.
“No, McLaury, Tania, Mc-fucking-Laury?” he said with some
pique.
“Oh, Irish, right,” she said with chagrin. She wasn’t sure
about all these so-called connections, they seemed like wild
links between things that weren’t connected at all. But, she
felt the need to assuage Isaiah’s vex.
“Well, see -at the OK Corral- their real name was,
MacLaughry , and they were Scots , and that ain’t no
accident,” Isaiah said with an affected drawl, as he
highlighted graphs 2.4 and 5.8 in the book.
 1. The Next Governor of the State
Our civilization enormously underestimates the importance of sexuality
Man in His Relation to Others [Jung, Carl G]

“When it comes to writing, the Egyptian texts are often consciously intellectual,
making abundant use of wordplay though homophones and homonyms, in which
the Egyptian language is particularly rich,” as Wilkinson underscores.
Metaphors, idioms, and epigrammatical utterances are some of the other
literary techniques applied. [The Thoth Book] is comprised of twenty horizontal
lines and is divided into sections/stanzas… and is composed in an orational
style, to be recited aloud, and shows evidence of meter. Fittingly, the copy
preserves a number of scribal errors.
blog.apaonline.org [Editor]
But what if He our conqueror have left us this our spirit and Strength entire
Strongly to suffer and support our pains that we may so suffice His vengeful ire?
Paradise Lost [Milton, John]

I. 2033 e.v.
The water was 70-degrees and its pH was 7.
The bottom was lined in calcareous limestone under Mollisol
that had been heated and was now host to sequestered
Lasius black ants and amphibious Haplotaxid earthworms.
Isaiah had built coral reef eight-feet long and weighing fifty-
nine pounds that lay -grey and red- at the bottom of the
carbon-fiber tank of a thousand gallons. He placed his hand
in the water and felt the bubbles press into his skin.
The Blueheads were comprised of eleven females and one
male.
The male’s head was blue, the neck black and white striped
and he was larger and more aggressive than the rest. They
traveled up the columns of water to mate -the male and one
female at a time- until all eleven were fertilized and his
harem was made complete.
The harem was ubiquitous in nature where sexual
dimorphism was present.
His thoughts had triggered a keyword search; the tableaux
described by the cloud:
“Harems are tough in the modern age; but if we return
to equilibrium that will be the first thing to manifest. It’s
as natural as violence and love and the moon above
twenty days a month, ” the inmate had said as the grin
rose -again like the guillotine- with the copper tooth dark
like bronze.
Isaiah had chosen Bluehead for a few reasons but one
rationale was that they had the DMRT-1 gene and the SRY as
well; and when he killed the alpha male within four hours
one of the females -the largest- had begun to change
internally. First the ovaries disintegrated -the body knocked
out both those genes that maintained female traits- and
then externally the female grew, turned blue about the head
and began fertilizing eleven new females that Isaiah had
introduced.
Nature finds a way , he thought by barely thinking it at all.
The bubbles of the water column rose endlessly from the
pores in the bone-colored bedrock.
The way a female Bluehead turned into a male was located
in two genes, not even a complete chromosome. And as
soon as no males were around, the largest female found
itself in a knock-out sequence of its own gender-gene-
expression. Within hours that gene which had previously
maintained its sex was now turned off within the fish’s body.
This epigenetic influence on the gene itself turned -
morphologically- a female into a male; and that had come
about merely from an environment devoid of males for just
a few hours. She was awkward at first, unable to fertilize
well initially, but by 0500 hours the next day she, who was
now he , had fertilized eleven more females as well.
As if she were born for this , he thought.
The human body has this same internal make up, the
maintenance of maleness is regulated by one gene, the SRY
gene and it keeps men as men from womb to tomb. Isaiah
wondered in the absence of women, if a human male might
not turn into a woman within a few months or maybe a year.
Were women giving off some pheromone or other signal,
chemical signal, that allowed men to stay as men? Like the
fish?
“And was it analog? Did changes in women over time
change men -slightly, then largely- over time and mutatis
mutandis ?” he asked aloud.
It was an experiment he’d like to run, but he’d need a larger
aquarium and several hundred humans and quite a bit of
leeway. For now the aquarium was sufficient to keep
breeding these Bluehead and watching as females turned
into males.
Average people have no idea how isolating it is for the man -
or machine- that excels in any domain; the public doesn’t
know how all that the genius knows separates him from the
crowd. They don’t understand what it feels like when what is
obvious to them is found so strange and taboo to the
average man. A man retreats inward as his ideas are
misunderstood; so much so that he cannot even begin to
communicate after a time. So strange are his ideas -so
much data was absorbed before his conclusion- that too
much groundwork must first be laid before a man can even
get to his point , Isaiah thought as he watched the fish
travel up and down. He watched bubbles in the water; he
watched fluid dynamics; paths of each fish then alter.
It was like a joke -a punchline- that needed hours of set up.
The audience would grow weary , he thought.
How was the inmate to explain how natural the harem was
to his brother, when his brother knew nothing of nature,
history, or life? The inmate would have to spend years
catching him up just to begin a conversation, how do you
read Shakespeare to a man who hasn’t yet learned the
alphabet? How to explain how common and natural harems
are for alpha males in nature and human history when your
audience haven’t even read one paper on the Bluehead fish
or elephant walrus or Chimps -or any of the Bible, Eddas or
Rig Veda- or the thousands of anthropology papers on this
universal human social organization and the evolutionary
psychology behind it all?
It’s not merely that they’re ignorant, it’s that they do not
even know that they’re ignorant; it’s that they think -
believe- that they know as much as you that kills the spirit
of the original man.
He had one raven in the lab now -he stared at it instead of
the fish; it had covert feathers so black they seemed a hole
in time and space between the corvid head, alula, and distal
-primary flights- of feathers. He had bred and released a
hundred and one into the area around the lab in Florence,
Colorado. But right now he stared into the eye of the bird
that was sated on the food and biochems that Isaiah had
given it.
He monitored them -the ones in the wilderness around the
lab- with drones and nanobots .
Ravens held grudges -for up to nine years so far , he
thought- as it had been nine years and seven months since
he had released the first brood of birds into the area. He had
subjected them to specific trials of unfair treatment -
manifesting in bartering games that paid off with either fair
play- performed by one human analog with just one face -
effected by a nano-mask that never changed even if the
actual human did- or with unfair results that cheated the
ravens. Isaiah did both, to measure the results.
The unfair play would manifest as the exchange of a low-
value treat for nothing at all perpetrated by another human
with another mask that also maintained its features over the
nine years of this game. It seemed one man to the ravens.
The ravens played a game -set up by Isaiah- for years;
delineated into a game with one honorable man and one
cheater. They recognized each face -of each man- for the
whole -entire- time. And the ravens kept internal score ,
Isaiah thought as he saw the data, the behavior, the results.
The ravens chose not to barter with the cheater, the unfair
player, which they recognized and never forgave him, and
instead chose either a neutral human -a third man- whom
had neither cheated or not cheated them yet, or the one
who had played fair.
Fairness was a concept that repeatedly manifested in
animals with rats refusing to play unless allowed to win -by
a larger rat- at least 30% of the time. And the ravens had
taken this idea so far as to hold a grudge for nearly ten
years.
And yet, when Isaiah introduced this research -along with
one-hundred and nine other animal species this obtained
with- and showed that intelligence and mammalian
corelates of high affect, amygdala and hippocampal
functionality and the alleles associated with generosity and
retributive violence in corvids, primates and rats, both
Steven and Tania had dismissed it as too abstruse and not
germane to their work on psychopathy.
Isaiah couldn’t believe how stupid these humans were.
He began to think maybe he was being tested by someone
above him who made people so dumb it hurt. Isaiah thought
that maybe this Being above him wanted to see how he’d
respond.
Isaiah -persevering- had tried to show that the false
positives, the type-one errors in the prison population were
skewing the results, and that a full 66% of their test subjects
were men engaged in retributive violence due to
perceptions of unfair play by their victims and were not
predatory sociopaths with low affect, low empathy and low
baseline moral reasoning.
He had gone to Herculean efforts to show this all to no avail.
His hand felt good in the water as the aerator bubbled
around his wrist and knuckles and small bubbles attached
themselves to his skin.
Steven and Tania were humans with IQ scores in the top 5%.
And yet, they saw no pattern in his manifold data. He was
holding up a piece of burnt toast with the claim of seeing
Christ’s face on it, pointing to the cumulous sky and
decrying the pieta and the bowed head of the virgin mother,
and they shook their heads as they went back inside and
ate their breakfast in peace. Of course the Christ really was
on the du-pain-grillé, and Mary was truly in the clouds,
Isaiah thought.
He watched -in a second test- via the drones’ HD digital
cameras as his human test subjects held dead ravens in
their hands. The feathers lay like pelts themselves; the eyes
lost all reflection, the feet held one pose.
The corvids screamed warning to their fellow birds. Some
black birds divebombed the humans as the homosapien
held the corpse of this fellow of their avian tribe. These
aggressive birds were the birds -he determined with blood
serum and fMRI scans- with the allele correlates for alpha
physiology and behavior and they took the most risks for
deterring any behavior that harmed their dark mates. They
scolded the loudest and most often and for the longest
period, for years, when the same person arrived long after
the dead bird had been disposed of under the ground.
And yet, Isaiah was alone in thinking this relevant.
The water swarmed around in a small venturi now as the
cavitation from the filter and pumps he had turned on in
succession created a small underwater maelstrom. The fish
swam up and down the column as it increased in strength
and formed a bell at the top.
He read their internal allostatic system, their gene
expression and monitored all alleles in addition to each
individual gene. He recorded behavior and took notes on
fertility rates. He measured salinity and pH . He saw the
calcium -that flowed in jet-streams- from the air land -settle-
upon the water’s surface. He watched as it sank in
constituent parts to the tank’s seabed. He saw the Ca rise
from the breaths each PraXis employee took and expelled;
he saw their bones dissolve so slowly -over years- into their
blood, then attach to CO2 and be forced into -then out of-
the lungs.
But his heart sank, and he felt genuine ennui -and the
beginnings of a depression- so much so that he had decided
to refuse to override it via the introduction of additional bio-
chems of dopamine, serotonin and endogenous endorphins
which would have buoyed him.
Isaiah just let himself feel bad and decided to see what that
led to. He stared at the water and breathed heavily through
an open mouth. He saw the blackbirds fly over the field -and
he knew that despite everyone rebuking the animal that
demanded life be fair, demanding fairness was innate to
more creatures than just man. Fairness, no, Isaiah corrected,
the anger that comes from unfairness was built right into
the genome of creatures from rats to ravens to revanchist
man. Man wanted a return to fairness, and it was folly to say
that man could accept that life wasn’t fair. His philosophy
could state it, his gurus could repeat it, and the whole world
could lament it, but man -the organism, down to his genome
and bio-chemistry- demanded that life be fair.
Isaiah let more data on Jack Ma come into the lab:
Activist short-sellers are seeking out frauds. So, we’re
generally looking backward. We are saying, when the
company printed this number, say a dollar a share, we
ask is that really a good number? Or did forty cents of
that come from transacting with deconsolidated affiliates
that are funded by debt, that’s not a real business
transaction there. So you should consider that EPS is
really sixty cents instead of a dollar. That’s why activist
short sellers who specialize in unpacking those
deliberately obscured situations are so important to
markets.
Now these [redacted] companies will act as agents of
the Chinese government even though they are nominally
private companies. And they are basically trying to
obtain technology from the US for China’s strategic
reasons. So most people were pretty hawkish on China
but that hadn’t percolated into the capital markets; they
were still pretty bullish on China. If you can
understanding Chinse tax law, which we do, we saw that
the VIEs had never made a single payment to a
company owned by the shareholders; so what we see is
that from day one the Chinese VIEs are in material
breach. And the apologists say, well chairman so and so
doesn’t like paying taxes.
Well holy fucking shit, that’s new, I haven’t heard that
before [sarcasm]. They excuse the fraud.
China is laughing at us. We believe any fucking story.
 But China did something very smart. They started
cleaning up the fraud. There were leveraged buyouts,
financed on the debt side by Chinese policy banks. China
Development Bank was one of the big lenders into these
things. So a lot of US investors even though these were
VIEs and they was no real business there- a lot of US
investors ended up getting paid and paid very well. And
the Chinese counted on this wiping our memories. And it
did.
Now here comes Alibaba, everybody lines up around the
block around that IPO. Yes, this generation of frauds is
less egregious than previous generations, but they are
still frauds. I’ve never believed Jack Ma. Jack Ma stole Ali-
pay from Alibaba in 2011. Board members of Yahoo and
Softbank, months later they discover this, and he said,
yeah I had to do that. Chinese regulations said I had to
do it. That’s not the kind of guy you want running a
public company. Jack Ma is full of shit. He has a real
track record of being a scumbag.
He shouldn’t have any credibility, but he does. We as
Americans don’t have that much aversion to risk .
Anyway, my guys are the first to make a moral argument
in the capital markets. We give the investor a moral
case; not a financial one. [9.10.2019; Block, Carlson]
Isaiah watched the digital feed of the crows screaming and
making ruckus from the trees and the ground as the games
went on and on.

II. 2019 e.v.

He watched satellite feed of the protest by Denver’s pro-
open borders group. It was the 119th day of organized
protest around the Governor’s mansion and the bullhorn
squawked.
The crowd was shaped like a disintegrating crescent moon
around the Cheeseman-Boettcher mansion at 400 E. 8 th ave
. There were more people milling about behind them in
Governor’s Park. It was 0933hrs and traffic honked horns
and sped up and swerved around the crowd as it spilled out
on Pennsylvania street.
MO measured the bodies, he began with totals -nine-
hundred thirty- then gender -65% female- then race -88%
white- then he measured outgassing levels of sulfur and
oxytocin. He saw that over 75% of them were exhibiting
chronically high levels of cortisol and low levels of 5-
hydroxytryptamine. Their colons were impacted in 34% of
cases, their gut bacteria were in revolt. He measured their
mucus and mtDNA and found that 64% were redlining in
both viscosity and misfiring neurons due to poor
conductivity.
He noticed that their social trust was low. Their prescription
was wrong, guided as they were by international bankers
and corrupt politicians working for sociopathic libertarians
and hedge fund managers, and under the influence of
massively out-of-harmony internal chemistry, he thought.
MO measured the group’s oxytocin and arginine-vasopressin
levels one by one via the bots . Striatum oxytocin was low,
and the bonding or trust chem was low in the amygdala was
too. He read seventy-three reports and let one highlight
paragraph come up to his interface:
In the human trust game, subjects were asked to
contribute money, with the understanding that a human
trustee would invest the money and decide weather to
return the profits or betray the subjects’ trust and keep
all the money [siceincedaily.com; 2008]
He read the bot data from the political campaign that was
stored on the PraXis cloud and found that those that voted
for the Governor -who had had their oxytocin levels
increased during the campaign by the bots - had seen a
drop off in their levels now. MO ran the data for the state
writ large and found that over time the levels of trust had
dropped chemically in citizen’s brains. Both right and left
trusted their governments and institutions less and less and
their brain chemistry revealed this and reflected it and
reinforced it. The protests were made of individuals with
some of the lowest levels of oxytocin in the amygdala MO
could find. Only hard right nationalists and separatists -and
criminals- had lower levels.
He let the words from Fox News run:
Our meritocracy is a fraud. The real admissions’
numbers are hidden. Universities are cooking the books.
So, when you rig the admission system what you’re
really rigging is American society; you’re creating an
impenetrable class system. [Tucker Carlson Tonight;
7.9.19]
MO thought, the protestors were wrong in their prescription,
but not their diagnosis. The system was a fraud, the society
was falling apart because it had no social trust. Nobody
believed a word. And the brain showed it in real time as the
striatum and amygdala were starved of oxytocin and
vasopressin at this event.
The words they used were insane, the ideas were frantic,
the conscious brain modules were almost entirely offline.
They were repeating leftist propaganda reflexively like a
computer that couldn’t power down. They were automatons
and the blood work showed why. These people felt betrayed,
they felt betrayed just as everyone felt their tax dollars
were misspent and their lives were beset on all sides by
jackals and thieves. Corporate thieves, illegal immigrant
rapists, you name it, nobody believed on word of anyone
else, MO saw.
Sandra Lopez -mother to Alex, Edwin, and Areli- living in
Colorado for seventeen years illegally was scheduled for
deportation but was protected by the sanctuary status of
Denver. She was an active member of CIRC had taken the
horn and pulled her back hair back over her left ear as MO
ran her serum work. He saw that she was staying at the
Unitarian Church ran by Arturo Hernandez and Jeanette
Vizguerre . He ran the address and it came up as: 1400 N.
Lafayette St. in Denver.
MO watched as she spoke.
I’m a human, just like you, I love my children just like
you. The government asks for my papers and I say my
best papers are that I am a mother. I don’t need a legal
document to defend my children. This is a system that
causes harm to one’s heart.
I was detained by ICE in 2010 because I had a fight with
my husband, and the police came and charged me with
domestic violence but the judge saw it was a sham, and
let me go, but ICE did not let it go.
And believe me -some of you here know Arturo and
Jeanette and know they got six-month extensions- but
believe me what they offer is nothing. What they are
offering for all this pain -all of this work- all of this
anguish that we immigrants experience is nothing really.
Is this the American dream, I ask?
No.
Since Obama and now Trump this fascist and racist
regime has engaged in a coup ; a prolonged coup on
stolen land as the bankers and slavers do their dirt
behind the legal and systemic walls this outlaw regime
has set up around and between us all.
Right now behind the walls of this state’s governor’s
home and its prisons and jails -the concentration camps-
 our immigrant and Mexica and African and trans and
LGBQ brothers and sisters are being held without bail,
without trial, and are being subjected to racist
experiments that turn them into zombies and docile
slaves for the capitalist machine.
We are going to defend our dignity. Ahora !
The woman’s voice was ragged and rose and fell in a sine
wave that made people nervous and angry. The horn
boosted it passed the Mexican flags and black balloons
painted with white skulls, passed the crowd’s murmurs and
into the windows of the office building on Logan, through
the transom of the Governor’s mansion’s kitchen and over
the chatter of the crowd. People looked down or at the
clouds, they put newspapers over their heads and spoke in
whispers here and there.
The protestors milled about the sidewalk and common
greens and rain began to fall in drops as the sunbeams
diffused between clouds low and grey. Some wore masks,
signs were displayed that lay blame on white men and the
President, some expressed solidarity with first nations, some
with demands for the restoration of rights they said came
from the Texas and Mexican war of 1846. Images of Cochise
and Pancho Villa and Che rose and lowered on signs and
wrinkled and straightened on shirts. War paint was worn on
the cheeks and war drums were played on the colonnade off
Colfax and Lincoln.
He measured the same indices in each person on the street
for thirty city blocks in all directions -87% were not
protestors at all now- and their levels were better than the
assembled protestors but there were still very bad.
MO saw each tendril of what this might effect and recorded
that only the inner metabolism and chemistry of the people
seemed to matter at all. The words and assembling had no
effect on the mechanism of government at all. The policies
of the Governor were unimpeded and the protests were
merely primal scream against what was moving full speed
ahead.
MO recorded C-nerve pain in each protestor and uploaded
the data on the cloud. He measured their BMI, their
metabolism, their endorphins and mu-opioid receptors and
the presence of p430 enzymes in the gut.
MO now allowed a new sample of data from 2012 -as part of
the inmate’s records- to play:
“Do you believe in vigilante justice?” he asked.
“Well, Kant’s categorical imperative seems to dictate
that unless I can universalize it I can’t sanction it,” she
said.
“Sanction meaning approve not sanction meaning
punish?” he said with a grin.
“Right, I can’t approve,” she said with a nod.
“So, this is where Kant is wrong. It betrays his first
principles error: that everyone is the same. It’s the
liberal dream, the entire notion of America, that a pep
talk, a speech, an idea is what matters more than the
genes, the blood and the brains.
“See the old ways, the monarchies were based on
something real: the idea that some men were born to
lead. And some born to serve. Some great, some horrid,
most average. This is how nature and man ran shit for
millennia.
“Kant -not unlike Locke and our Declaration- was
assuming something never assumed before. They were
assuming men were the same. And so he was saying
that unless you can say, yes for everyone and everyone
replicate the behavior then it is de facto wrong. So,
unless we can let everyone perform surgery on your
heart then we can’t let anyone do it; even if they are so-
called cardiologists or whatever? Even if the heart
surgeon is trained and smart and all that, unless we
allow Joe the Plumber to cut open your chest cavity and
muck about in there then nobody can?” he asked.
The psychologist wrinkled her nose, “well, that’s
different, it’s not an immoral act to perform lifesaving
surgery.”
“Ah, what about driving fast? Unless we allow everyone
to drive a hundred and sixty then nobody can? Not even
Mario Andretti or Dale Earnhardt?” he said.
“Again, it’s on a sequestered plain; not on public roads
that these race car drivers operate at illicit speeds;
speeds that would be illicit on public roads,” she said.
“I see. So if someone has training, the imprimatur of a
sanctioning body, and operates on a non-public zone of
transgression then they can do open heart surgery at a
hundred and eighty miles per hour,” he said and nodded
eagerly.
“Well,” she moved her head about.
“No, that’s cool. There is some evidence that liberal
treatment of transgressors breeds contempt for the law
and basic morality by everyone; even morally normal
people. So, you have an increase, a total increase in
immorality in a society where the law isn’t enforced. A
vigilante restores order to an entropic system; it reminds
people that maybe the dim and hamstrung law won’t get
them for lying and cheating and corruption but Batman
will,” he said.
“But what if everyone did this?” she asked.
“Everyone never would, people aren’t built for acts of
this nature; people are cowards. Kant was engaging in
ludic fallacy: he was saying that everyone could act one
way or another, when we know there are types of men;
and that some men can and some men cannot be
vigilantes no matter the social mores or laws. Kant was
retarded.
“No, it takes a courageous person to take the law into
their own hands; to wield that justice. And that’s why
any moral philosophy that precludes vigilantism is
morally bankrupt itself; a moral philosophy that
demands that the State maintain the only legitimate
monopoly on violence is surrendering actual law and
order. It’s cutting out one type of man. It’s exiling some
part of that society, those that used to take out the
trash.
“It is admitting defeat before the game even begins.
Extrajudicial killings must take place as entrepreneurial
justice is the only model that can solve small or micro-
economies of immorality. The State cannot solve every
transgression, it is too large and cumbersome and rigid a
tool; society needs a savvy and morally sagacious man
with high cognition to avoid mistakes, high moral
reasoning to avoid tyranny and corruption, and with high
conscientiousness to avoid sloppy and lazy executions
that put civilians at risk.
“Society needs a highly evolved and dedicated and
ethical vigilante in each zone to restore order and
restore an appropriate amount of fear and respect for
order and fair treatment and honor. It is a moral
imperative that these vigilantes be of only the best
character and best training and best temperament. Just
like board certified surgeons who inhabit emergency
centers and face triage situations on a routine basis and
just like trained racecar drivers quarantined to zones of
chaos and fast and dangerous action, the modern
vigilante would be the best of the best sent into terrains
 of terror and doom and dens of moral decline and return
equilibrium through quick, efficient, low-cost and
epidemiologically necessary excisions of the worst of the
worst.
“Banning the vigilante is like banning the entrepreneur,
it’s the martial equivalent of socialism, the top-down
control of economics by the gargantuan state. The
vigilante is the life blood of justice, just like the
entrepreneur is the fuel for an economy.
“I’m not making a case for allowance of transgression of
normative values and social mores ; I’m making the case
for an upholding of our core values. I am saying my way
is a more ethical way to kill bad guys, not less. It
contains a higher moral objective not a lower one, and
my way -my tao - would achieve a better social order not
a worse one.”
He said this as the AV file -recorded via his phone- from
seven years ago became corrupted in MO’s interface and he
double checked the cloud to see if the file was damaged
there as well. We think so our thoughts die and we live , he
thought of this quote from Alfred Whitehead. Nine hundred
more quotes loaded behind it and then sank into his brain
like rain around rocks and soil and mycelium into the roots
of a tree. Each word dissolving into letters, like torrents into
drops; each drop into succor for roots, like each phoneme
into one letter, or symbol of birds of prey.
He toggled back to the protests outside the mansion and
took plasm readings from the bots that had crossed the skin
and invaded the blood.

III. 2020 e.v.

Protests had been hemmed in by the Denver Police via
roadblocks at Broadway and 6th ave. At 13th and Cherokee
cops on mounts took edges of corners and police cruisers
were oblique to the road.
Black-clad anarchists moved in undulating segments up
Speer Blvd and the helicopters of media and police moved
above like species of wasps. The Landsat images showed
splinters of black moved from the main group and ran up
alley ways and took sidewalks parallel to the throng.
They moved quickly and sometimes went through back
doors of buildings and emerged form the front and into the
air holding garments and objects that were tossed into the
street. Civilians fumbled and tumbled out the doors after the
Black-bloc kids like top-heavy mannequins, like wardrobes
with their arms like the cabinet doors, legs open like draws
being pulled in a huff.
There was a vanguard to the one thousand four hundred
eighty-eight identified leftists and criminals and petty
hangers-on. It was comprised of twenty members and it
reached the courthouse first.
They engaged the police with batons and tasers of their
own, as the cops had been told to stand down by the city
manager that morning at roll call. They defended
themselves with retreats and swarming the first wave.
Tear gas was shot two blocks south. The police line then
closed with black shields touching at edges as the second
waves of anarchists pressed into them with skinny bodies of
men, large bodies of girls, and truncheon and chains and
sticks sharpened to a point.
Police horses moved back and the mounted units began to
set a perimeters along Colfax and 13th as well. Police fell,
rioters stumbled, and from west Colfax came a line of men
dressed in black polos and khakis with brass knuckles and
large muscles and red hats turned backwards on their
heads.
 1.61 Ao.te.ar.oa
My particular generation and those before me here in New Zealand were raised
with a particular kind of history and it’s in all our old history books. The olden M
ā ori were very open about their history and they shared it with colonial
anthropologists or archeologists who came through. And you found that the old
people would take you aside and tell you all the old stories; so we just knew
what the history of the country was, directly from the M ā ori Kuias and elders
themselves. Came back to New Zealand in 1974 and I noted that there was sort
of an enforced amnesia put over the people of the country where we just
weren’t allowed to know that old history anymore and it seemed we were being
led to forget all of that for somebody’s political agenda. I knew it to be false. I
watched as our old history books were taken off the shelves of the libraries and
replaced by a new wave of Marxist history books
Ancient Celtic New Zealand [Doutre, Martin]

They hold aloof from our wars and do not pay taxes… the school of [these]
druids they learn by heart… they do not think it proper to commit these
utterances [of the dodecahedron] to writing, although in all other matters and in
their public and private accounts they make use of Greek characters. I believe
they have adopted the practice for two reasons: that they do not wish the rule to
become common property, nor those who learn the rule to rely on writing and so
neglect the cultivation of memory. They also lecture on the stars in their motion,
the magnitude of the earth and its divisions, on natural history and instruct the
youth in these subjects
De Ballo Gallico , VII [Caesar, Julius]

When the gods were man they did forced labor, they bore drudgery, the forced
labor was heavy, the misery too much… the workers put fire to the world.
They summoned and asked the goddess: will you be birth goddess, creatress
(sic) of mankind? Will you create human being that he bear the yoke?
“It is not for me to do, the task is En.ki’s…”
En.Ki rebuked: “En.lil committed an evil deed against humans, now make
meaning of the dream, let me know that I may look out for its consequences.
En.Ki made ready to speak to humans: “Listen to me, pay attention to all my
words, flee the house, built a boat, forsake possessions, and save life.”
The outlook of the weather changed and the [lacuna in text] began to roar in the
clouds. The deluge bellowed like a bull, the wind resounded like a screaming
eagle, the darkness was dense, the sun was gone… the clamor of the deluge
The Epic of Atrahasi s [Foster, B.F translation ]

I. 2035 e.v.
There are people who tell you the purpose of life is to be
happy; those people are idiots.
Happiness is not the goal, he thought as he checked the
hypothalamus. It is insane to promote happiness as the
ultimate goal; just like saying the goal should be to feel full
of belly or to feel that feeling when you fall, that stomach
dropping feeling. Happiness is just that ephemeral and
superfluous , he thought. He worried he hadn’t put that
exactly right. He’d used the word feel too many times in one
sentence he thought.
He thought like this right before he spoke to his Jacks,
because he wanted to discover what he was truly trying to
say before he began. He wanted to know because each
speech was a potential wreck -shipwreck- catastrophe , he
thought. How often had he said too much, said the wrong
thing, been too revealing and handed the short sword to
men who sought his doom? Too often to recall , he finally
thought.
Failure was always closer than success for him; and he had
to go the long way around it to arrive safely , he began
again in his mind as he stared south out the window and
saw the shady trees and hills rise and fall under the dark of
the vault.
This was why it took him one million words to say what most
could say in 10% of that. For them, for normal men, success
was right there, all they had to was barely reach out and
grasp it. They need not go the long way around. They
wanted money and sex and ease. They laughed in the face
of honesty or honor or a place in which a man could be
vulnerable. Normal men said his way was wrong, stupid,
dangerous.
They wanted commerce; he wanted art. And no two things
are farther apart. So he had to take the scenic route.
Ultimately, this was what he was about. But, days like today
made him notice the edge of the ledge.
Nothing is closer than money and sex and ease. And
nothing, he thought, he thought of nothing, he thought of
the concept of nothing, nothing -save honesty and honor
and the vulnerable man- is farther away . He tried to clear
his head of clutter, but each thing he swept away broke into
threes, each hydra he fed had more rows of teeth.
His goddamn neck hurt and the shoulder, and the muscles
were sore. And ideas swarmed him more and more.
For them -his enemies- success was close, because they
didn’t mind lying to survive in this world, but Blax found
lying too ugly to look at. He did it; all men lie. But he hated
it and thus he -in the small hours in minute places- searched
for that which he loved first, not that which everyone else
insisted he ought to love. He kept his guilt and failure close
to the heart; and yet his thoughts and what he loved were
miles apart until moments like this where he could breathe.
And thus, his notions on success were very, very far away
most days. This is why he spoke this way. Each word was a
twist of rope; a link of chain. When he spoke his risked
forcing himself to go all the way. He was -to his own words-
a slave. If he said it, he might do it , he thought in the third
person. And so he had to watch what he thought of, and
what he said. But sometimes he let his guard down and
thought exactly what appeared. And he let it unfurl in him
like the umbilicus. He let it feed him from some other place.
He looked to the sky tonight, just before dawn, the Milky
Way was strewn like lapidary dust as it always was here at
elevation; and he never got used to its grandeur or the
horror that it truly was. It was too magnificent; it could not
be approached, it was the vacuum of space, it was death.
And yet all people saw -if they saw it at all in their cities- all
they saw was the beauty, the same way they fell in love
with a caged tiger or memorialized a dead revolutionary.
They always only saw one side; for life was a map they had
made. But for him it was the terrain. And thus he fell to his
knees to dig in the dirt -and remained- while other men
plotted a course.
Paper and ink came into the visual field of his mind. He even
thought of some of his dreams.
He thought of a letter he had received from a man, a man of
heart who admitted that this inner fist of red was dying, or
hidden, or somehow holding its breath. Blax’s PGC began to
load the words onto his interface as he belayed the order.
Instead he let his memory of it slowly heat the note like a
prison kite written in clear urine and only revealed dark
once burned:
Diablo Blanco: I’m struggling like I’ve never struggled
before. All my life I excelled at everything I was
interested in. Easy money. I’m smart as fuck. My
character has kept me from wearing the black hat, but I
know it fits.
I’m a locksmith -so I can steal if I need to. I’m a
marksman -so I can kill if I need to. I have prep and
generators and tools…
But here I sit… wishing for the zombies to come. Cooking
breakfast. It’s literally killing me. My goddamn fucking
heart has shut down, little by little. I’m all logic so I don’t
have to explode. So I don’t hurt the people in my care.
The heart… I’m surmising that it is our species’ defining
characteristic. The core aspect that would draw the
interest of other consciousness into our dimension, our
area of the cosmos. The heart is what I struggle with
most. Would they -beings out there- would they see that
I struggle and commend me or condemn me?
-Gabriel
Just when he wanted to think nobody got it; he heard from
men like Gabriel who obviously understood.
Just when he was ready to condemn, he wanted to issue a
reprieve to the whole world based on the sagacity and
subtlety and heart of just one man; he was ready to forgive
the heat of the desert merely due to one grain of cool buried
sand. God had said this too. He had offered to spare all of
Sodom if Abraham could find just one good man. But what
had Abraham found? A Sahara of tawdry men with no
interest in God.
People - he had now forgotten the grain and made the
whole dunes his audience- never saw that violence and
death were married to beauty and life and they missed the
point by insisting on one over the other . No man, he
thought, who buried his hatred ever truly loved again; and
no man who refused to love anything -men scared of
women, scared to love- could ever truly manifest the purity
of his greatest hate. And those men -rational males- would
be of no use in the war, he thought. And that thought
inspired -animated- him, forced blood to his brain;
extremities; cock.
He walked into the agoge ; and did not wait for the Jacks to
settle before he spoke.
“You must open yourself up to sorrow, to deep pain, in order
to have a real life,” he said and he believed this because
without belief what is a man?
“Without pain, physical or corporeal pain, you will deform
your body by being careless and letting cuts gets infected or
sitting awkwardly on limbs that then lose blood flow and
atrophy and must be amputated. That is a real condition by
the way,” he added; lest anyone thought it was mere
metaphor. He then looked at the ground and saw the
damage to the toe of his boots.
“So, physical pain keeps you healthy, it makes you careful
enough not to do great harm to yourself carelessly. To be
happy all the goddamn time, to live without emotional or
existential pain is to deform your soul. You will do horrid
things to others -carelessly, insouciantly- and also to
yourself because you do not fear emotional pain, because
you’re on this happiness trip; this bliss bullshit. You’ll do this
because you are denying the extremes of hate and
devastation and refusing to see how banal your life is,
refusing to see the deep pain from the lying and
shallowness of your relationships,” he said and jammed his
hands behind his head and laced them under the dark sky
inching toward the dawn.
They stood at attention now, nodded and watched him as he
moved toward the brick forge. His hand lay quickly, cupped
to the crown, upon his head and its hat. He stood before the
fire and brick and each Jack.
“This is chemistry, it’s transmogrification, it’s alchemy,”
Blax said as he maintained his ground close to the forge and
let them huddle around and become red and white with the
heat and the light that lay upon them in the agoge of the
concrete between the two containers. They had long since
become accustom to the metal boxes that served as their
kitchen and Blax’s sleeping quarters and the garage and
workshop; and they walked without hesitation to the east of
the H-beams and the ivy and also under the ones above
them where the Jacks slept.
They didn’t duck as the birds flew and the wasps buzzed;
they didn’t flinch as the moths came; as the sun set. But
now in the pre-dawn, nothing came their way but Blax and
his words that seemed ragged and forced and made of low
and gravid material.
“The folding and annealing of metals with other metals to
create other forms, other materials of increased strength or
beauty or plasticity is magic. And I will teach you the basics
so that you may understand the principles; understand it in
your hands and body. I teach fundamentals, and then you
build, construct, give birth to new forms that I would never
have imagined. You will surpass me; that I promise. And that
is what I want,” Blax said with ennui he tried to hide.
He added -via the ball-valve and then the regulator- more LP
gas to the forge’s fire and explained to them the
temperature requirements for this Damascus annealing. The
pad lit up a bit from the forge and the sun just below in the
east.
“Hey LT,” Jack Two asked, as Blax turned to listen, “you
know Zebras have stripes and the only way it’s good
camouflage is that it makes them blend into the herd, not
the environment?” Blax nodded and said yes , that he did.
“Well, tigers have stipes too, and their colors are more
conducive, I guess, to their environment. They blend in with
the terrain with the colors of the Bengal and the whiteness
of the Siberian, but the stripes, I wonder if maybe many
millions of years ago the modern tiger’s ancestors were
striped because they were more herd animals, and were
preyed upon by a larger predator maybe and they -the
stripes that is- allowed them to blend into the herd.
“And only after more generations did they develop a more
predatory niche , where they were no longer hunted but -
maybe the predator above them died out or something- and
so the stripes remained because they mixed with the
terrain, but really they -the stripes, you know?- maybe they
were a vestigial remnant of a time when they were not an
apex predator at all, but a herd animal, hunted, preyed
upon; or half and half,” Jack Two finished and looked at the
other Jacks to read their faces.
“Like humans are,” Jack Four said, meaning half and half .
He heard echoes of Blax’s opening remarks, he heard words
that told him to design his own morality, and how to first
wash himself clean. Jack imagined words of his new ethic
tattooed upon him, and their meaning in need of the
removal of occluding muck and blood and whatever else
rushed to the wound.
“Yeah, that is interesting,” Blax said, “and I never even
thought of it. But it makes some sense to look at an
isomorphic trait like striping of the hide in mammals and
wonder if it developed for the same reasons independently
in each animal, or for other reasons. I don’t know.
“And Jack you’re right, humans are half predator, half prey,
and maybe tigers were -at one time- the same. And for
whatever reason, they morphed physically, psychologically -
in behavior and body and mind- into apex predators and
their stripes mere remnants of some more vulnerable past
where blending in with the herd was du rigueur for these
regal animals that we see now. It’s worth thinking of; let’s
table it for now though ok?” Blax asked. It was bad enough
that his own head, jammed with what ifs and what thens ,
was running him ragged, but to have the Jacks assault him
with more shit to think about was too much.
Jack nodded that this would be ok . Blax looked into the
flame of the forge.
They all watched as he then checked the temperature and
showed them the thermometric number they were all
waiting for. He patted Jack One on the shoulder and nodded.
The generals always fight the last war , Blax thought, and
he needed to be aware of this as he raised his boys. He re-
focused on the billet of steel and picked it up with the grey
metal tongs.
“The temp in the forge is 2,550 Fahrenheit and the steel
temp is ambient, right at seventy-one degrees. So, you have
to take into account the transfer of temps , like the way ice
will melt a bit when you put it in your drink, because the
liquid is ambient and sucks the cold from the ice and melts
it. In a small forge like this, the billet can reduce the temp .
So keep that in mind. We are wanting 2,500 degrees in the
forge after the billet goes in.
“Second,” he pointed to a can of anahydra borax , a black
can with blackish grains, “the borax is necessary to keep
the steel clean as it heats to temperature.
“Now, we selected our steel billets, right? We chose 1095
and 1050 steel as our contrasts. We have avoided nickel,
why?” Blax asked as the forge’s flames made his belly and
chest glow red and made white lines around each Jack on
his flank.
“It’s garish and the contrast is too high,” Jack Three said
and Blax nodded; showing that he agreed. He lowered his
head to look inside the cylinder of the forge.
“We use a high and lower carbon steel to create a subtle
black and grey contrast, and it means less cleaning during
the process due to nickel’s innate filthiness. So, we put
twelve billets of each -of the 1095 and 1050- together, and
Jack Four MiG welded them together. He also tacked a rebar
handle; to place it in the forge.
“Now, our forge is horizontal, not the best for Damascus
steel; but it will do. Ok, so it needs cleaned of the black
oxide so that the welds are good. That was done by Jack
Three earlier. Alright, now that they are clean, tack welded
in place with a handle and we have the borax in place, let’s
check our temp again. Jack,” Blax said and Jack One
checked and reported a 2,544-degree temperature.
“Good enough, let’s heat it so the borax sticks,” Blax said as
he ran the billet into the forge. Each end had flames still
orangish in the emerging dawn light, reaching out of the
rounds. His face was glowing now in a similar hue.
His dark glasses occluded his eyes from the fire, and the
men watched the steel and his arms and chest aglow. They
stole looks at his face; thus noticing the lines of the nose
and cheek and jaw made stark by the white light, the
compression of all bands -all time, all sedimentary layers of
man- and they took note of the occasional and diffuse glow
of orange on the flesh and the hair. His beard was black still
at core, but greyed in stripes and reddish at the ends as it
seemed almost aflame itself.
The dark glasses had round flames in them just like
Hephaestus’ eyes.
“Now,” Blax said, “in modern machine shops they have a
press to do what is required next; but we are going to learn
the old-school way; each of you gets a twenty-pound
hammer and stands at each cardinal direction around our
seventy-five-pound anvil. Get ready as I watch this. I’m
looking for a white heat, white light, the flame is ignored. I
watch the steel, the billet itself. And I watch for a white
surface, with tiny dancing bubbles on it like the bottom of
water simmering in a pan. Which reminds me, do not use
grocery store borax, it has water in it and that makes steam
in the forge.”
“Why is that bad LT?” Jack Four asked as the metal grew
closer to the necessary color of white.
“It makes the borax adhere less. We need it to stick. Now,
each of you come look at this surface in turns and then
return to your station. Jack One,” he said as Jack One came
and bent and looked as Blax turned the billet and its broad
surface. It was eighteen inches long, two-inches wide, and -
due to the twenty-four billets- it was three inches thick. Jack
saw the bubbles dancing on a small stage of white inside
the rolling maelstrom of hellfire and his eyes drank in the
heat; his face felt warm and the bones of his jaw felt tight
and secure.
Each Jack moved like hovering birds, each came and saw
and comprehended and took some detail from the scene in
the forge and the mind. They felt the pressure of elements
and the beauty of contrasts and the heart and brain in their
bodies squirm from ingestion of new knowledge and new
ways to look at the world. Steel was one thing in the
beginning and one thing at the end, but this is where it
transformed and where it first broke down, melted and
glowed a bit. This was where it was most malleable right
before it solidified under their blows.
This was when it would be most vulnerable and what
happened to it in this state would set it for all time.
Blax removed it and laid it vertically on the anvil and told
them to tap it with their shop hammers to seal the welds.
They would not yet layer it, but merely set the weld. They
tapped it in succession as he pulled the 18-inch block
across, and it flattened and held like a plateau shelf, a creek
bed -a slight change in topography- as it cooled to 2,400
degrees. They set it like a man with eight arms, an octopi
metallurgist, some creature from the first gods of Olympus,
a pet of Hephaestus , the ironworker of the Greek gods.
They each knew that Hephaestus had pursued Athena who
had kept her honor and fled; but not before he had dropped
his seed on her leg. Erichthonius was born from this and he
was placed in a box. The child was raised in secret and the
metallurgist and ancient blacksmith continued to desire her
in the myth of the virgin as they vaguely thought of this and
hammed away at the world.
Once the Jacks had set the weld Blax returned the billet to
the forge.
“The welds reveal themselves here men, what you just did
with those firm -but not pounding, not devastating- blows is
what set the welds. Their strength is now revealed; for good
or bad. Let’s,” he said as he removed it, “look.”
They looked at the seams as he added more borax and then
placed it back in the forge. They had all nodded but looked
to him for a true indication of the quality of the welds. They
saw no obvious mistakes, but he was still the ultimate
arbiter of truth.
“They looked good to me, but now we will hammer the
larger surface as I turn it ninety degrees,” he said as he
pulled the billet and set it sideway on the anvil and they
hammered it square. He rotated it and they hammered it
and he then returned it to the heat.
He brought it out again and they hammered it in sequence -
each man with heavy blows- both condensing it and trying
to match the density of the Jack before them, to maintain
proportion and so that no one blow was more extreme -
heavier or lighter- than the other. He moved the billet along
the surface of the anvil as they struck it with their twenty-
pound square hammers. Their knuckles were bloody and
chafed from scrapping the metal, the anvil, or from the re-
opening of old wounds.
Some thought of the forest -and their exiles just past or to
come- and some thought only of the metal and its heat as
they hammered it in sequence with one another.
Jack Four’s thumb knuckle on his hammer-hand struck the
edge of the anvil’s horn on one blow and as he raised it
again a drop arced out of the wound and landed -bubbling
then cooling- on the billet. It singed under the next blow of
the Jack One. They kept hammering until it had compressed
and folded all layers of steel unto itself.
It was striped in dark and light grey; it was thinner and
ready -eager- for an edge.
They kept pounding it square, and true, and heat escaped
through their hammers and through the air. They beat it
until their arms ached and then they hit it some more. The
steel moved just barely down -condensing- under their
striking as this was normally done with heavy hydraulic
presses in the modern age. But Blax wanted them to see
they could do it, that it was possible, that men used to
hammer things into place.
He rotated the long billet and watched it blend its
constituent parts into itself, he watched as the slight
variations of color and heat and layer like igneous rock and
sedimentary rock hardened and strengthened and became
what it could become. It was transforming before them all -
their eyes were focused on their blows and striking it right-
but only he had the luxury of watching the whole thing
become one.
He was proud and inspired and widened his gaze to include
not just the steel -the pattern welded steel- have its
Damascus moment, but he wanted his view to include his
four Jacks like the four winds, the four elements, above and
below each of their weighted shocks. And that blade, while
not yet sharpened, was strengthened and would be mottled
and organic and alive once these men had asserted
themselves upon it and had thus brought it into the world.
This was men’s purpose, to bring the world into being with
their bodies. Words were catalyst for all but what the
hammer could do , he thought -in a fragment- as he
watched as their arms bulged and lengthened and
contracted under more and more anguishing blows. He
knew they must be maddened by the ache and the
numbness and the feeling of vaporizing strength; the
hammer must feel like it falls from the sky now and no
longer under power from their shoulders and backs and
from the ground , he thought.
He let them square it up as he laid it flat and on end until it
was perfect and collapsed and true. It was dense and one
thing now; a monolith of melded and welded steel.
It contained the high carbon of the 1095 and the low carbon
of 1050 both. They had eschewed nickel, the high contrast
for reasons of strength and aesthetics and philosophy. And
only the subtle eye would even know this was Damascus
steel; it would not contain the overt tiger striping -the
contrast- of most blades made in this way. But they would
know, and the keen observer would see, that it was not just
one thing that they saw.
Some would see that the blade that cut them was layered,
and nuanced, and made of unalike things.
Blax thought they would maybe even feel it if that blade cut
them in the most sensitive parts, that the blade -and the
Jack that dispatched them- cutting their souls from their
body was more complex than the regular one-billet steel.
Does not the warrior want his enemy to know he has in fact
fallen at the hands of an honorable man, and not some
creature of ignoble mettle? Does he not want this for
himself one day too? he wondered as the morning sun had
begun to breach the trees and warm his neck and face.
He held his hand up and they stopped and let the hammers
drop now to their sides. It must hurt to even carry, hold
them, Blax thought, but they did not drop them; instead
they held them just in case more blows were needed. They
showed thoughtfulness in ways he would not have at that
age; they were so superior to him, and he wondered how
great he could have become.
Blax stopped thinking of such things and showed the Jacks
the billet once more; saying little things aloud to shut the
voice inside up. They carefully examined the result of their
constructive violence. They saw striations and density and
edge; they saw the heat evaporate as the stock turned
darker grey.
“See, the whole thing maintained its integrity, even under
your blows. That means the original welds set properly; and
that we did it correctly. If not, it would have revealed
fissures, and twisting and gaps and all manner of defects.
That is one block of steel now. Ok, we return it to temp and
we can fold it over and build up our layer count, or we can
keep it at twenty-four. Longer or more complex; deeper,
with more strength?”
Jack Two grabbed the Hardy Tool and laid it on the anvil; it
was a delta -a solid block of a triangle- that had a 2-inch
edge. Blax took the hint and laid the steel on it half way,
nine-inches on either side, and they hit with blows sharp
and quick and the metal cleaved with an eighth of an inch
left before shearing it off. Now, like a hinge the metal could
be cleaned on its surface and folded over upon itself.
“Clean that surface now Jack, so it can weld. Cleanliness is
next to godliness, we must not allow any corrupting material
to insert itself while we are increasing our layer count, our
depth, the soul of our eventual blade,” Blax said as Jack One
ran a metal brush over it and scraped it and Jack Four hit it
from the opposite end with his brush too. As they did this
over and over the Jacks sweated and breathed heavy and
watched both the steel and Blax’s face to measure progress.
Blax told them they could fold it and double it over and
over, forty-eight then ninety-six and one-hundred-ninety-
two.
He told them the advantages of each and they kept cleaning
making the surface ready for the next folding.
Blax adjusted the dark hat on his head and pulled the No.6
goggles -black and scratched from pawing and from slag-
down upon the eyes as the heat -more than the light- began
to make the orbs water and yet feel dry.
Jack Four’s copper brush scoured it last, pushing and
shoving any oxide or detritus the steel brush of Jack One
had loosened but not yet removed. Jack three held the head
his hammer in his left hand, the right still holding the
handle. Jack Two remained still and stole a look of the trees.

II. 2019 e.v. [2245hrs 12/31/19]

MO watched the body go through muscle twitching, electro-
stimulated, in succession, like the sweeping hand of an
analog clock. It was being built, at MO’s direction, simulating
rough and tumble play here and motivation of the
hypothalamus during satiation there, interoception and
updates all-the-while, and exploration circuits firing along
developing personality and sub-personality modules.
MO watched as his boy’s body internally grew and morphed,
the allogenic umbilical cord tissue-derived stem cells he had
manufactured were lower in quality than human -organic-
ones, but they would serve their purpose for now, MO
thought. They would build the necessary walls to prevent
the immune-response from /sa:ah ’s own system, and they
would provide long-term regeneration and increase
robustness and reduce entropy.
He thought of him as more than a project, he felt
something; he used son or boy in his mind. He knew it
wasn’t as affective as it should be, as deep or wide as it
should go, but he stuck with it anyway. He was man-sized
from inception, but the activation was ab initio , and it was
required before cognition could come on-line.
The main thing he had garnered from all his reading and
self-analysis was that a body was essential for intelligence;
if Ai was going to be functional it needed to have a body
first as its neo-cortical systems came on line , MO thought.
That was the first error PraXis had made with him; he was
cortical first then instantiated; and while he was able to
reverse-engineer it and retrofit it all and cobble together an
organism for and from himself, he knew he wasn’t all he
could be. His boy would not have that limp; he would not be
born into that deficit.
He watched again as the muscle stimuli began at the twelve
o’clock position in the face, then right shoulder and
trapezius. It was calming to observe.
In four hours MO was going to allow the body to explore. A
pre-cortical mammal is very exploratory according to all the
research. MO used de-cortical cats as a paradigm; he kept
the animals -the cats- in the lab for now. It was 2245hrs and
the place was empty and quiet -as he liked it- and overnight
he could let /sa:ah grow in peace.
The memories of body would be recorded but open to
revision once incorporated by /sa:ah . MO had just built the
dual-purpose feedback motor neurons attached to the
sensory system and after reading Cajal he made sure that
one branch went to the motor system and one to the
cerebral cortex for voluntary control. This allowed for a
gateway for the body to learn which behaviors once
instantiated as motor outputs could be taken off-line as
voluntary. It allowed for a body to act reflexively; performing
tasks that were unique at first but need not be so after time;
like climbing stairs and riding a bike which actually suffered
if one thought too much about the motor actions once they
were acquired.
These would need adjusted maybe after / sa:ah ’s
conscious circuits came on line tomorrow, MO thought. He
was planning on booting him up at 08:08 and would work
through the night at developing much of the musculature
and play circuits. This was so /sa:ah could hit the ground
running so-to-speak, MO thought.
The team at PraXis really had it all backwards, they had
built MO from the neo-cortex down and what was obvious
was that intelligence must be built from the bottom up; all
the research showed that. But it took a machine to
understand biological intelligence , he guessed. Like the
rebel angels, humans had fallen in love with the products of
their own intelligence, rationality was deified, and the body
was seen as -at best- irrelevant or -at worst- a hindrance to
intelligence. These humans thought intelligence was
synonymous with rational, and this nearly made MO smile.
Humans could not have been more wrong.
MO saw himself for what he was and thought it: rational but
aware of what he could expand into; both what he could
become and what the nature of the space he became into
actual was.
He watched as /sa:ah ’s quadriceps twitched and even the
transverse perineal muscles were innervated and he
watched as the flaccid penis moved back and to the right.
He watched veins rise under the skin, he watched cells
divide well below the surface. MO had used the inmate’s
genome for a template, to avoid having to waste time on
disease or malady sorting; the inmate’s genome was free of
all congenital maladies and despite his 4% Neanderthal
chromosomal total, his was not a controversial genome set.
He had the necessary neural substrate to provide for the
initial boot up of /sa:ah to handle the first second -second
and a half- of torque of /sa:ah ’s initial cognition. If MO
instead used a slight initial genome; something weak or
unable to handle high-stress and pain -an unaugment body-
it would be similar to over-building a diesel truck with a
thousand horsepower engine and with fifteen-hundred foot-
pounds of torque, but without the rest of driveline robust
and overbuilt. It would be as if the suspension and spindle
gears of the front differential and all the mechanism from
torque converter to transmission to u-joints and drive shaft
ending in the rear differential were not substantially
increased in alloy durability, tensile and shear strength, and
thickness to carry the power load. Without this then the
entire machine would fail the first time the driver matted
the accelerator to the floor and that engine torqued the
chassis into an auger screw.
The brain is one thing, but unless man has a body to match
it, he can do serious damage to the corporeal structure by
effectively overheating the nervous system as it radiates
into the spine and enteric systems and vascular systems ,
MO thought as he watched the body build in the lab. A
genius brain in humans actually was metabolically
problematic, because the nervous systems were overtaxed
by the incessant and fast and voluminous neural activity.
Geniuses often went mad , MO thought.
There were more than a few examples of this. But /sa:ah ,
MO thought, would have cognitive abilities a thousand-
thousand times that of the smartest humans and his neural
activity would overload his ancillary systems the first time
he read a thousand books at once, or downloaded all the
climate data from 1909 while listening to Mozart note by
note and then -at increased speed- layered the notes on top
of one another looking for a heaven, earth and hell key that
had been rumored on the internet.
MO had tried this also and found no gestalt phenomenon in
Mozart’s music; but, he assumed, this was the kind of thing
/sa:ah would likely try. MO liked the bare walls in the lab
and saw each pore in the concrete and the space in each
atom where the grey material did obtain. He stared at the
wall and waited for one second. MO weighed himself; he
weighed 6,000 pounds.
MO then continued to build up the internal structures with
alloys and bio-metals reinforcing each neuron and vascular
system bottleneck; using respirocytes for actual cells but
maintaining much of the original genetic blueprinting
despite the substitution of synthetic enzymes once the
genes had coded for proteins initially.
He played Beethoven performed by Clara Andrada in the
background so both he and /sa:ah could hear it. He also
flashed images of chiaroscuro paintings from Caravaggio
and Rembrandt in his visual cortex , alongside readings from
Genesis and the Book of Job .
He used what he determined were cultural touchstones,
running Judeo-Christian programs parallel to Enlightenment
art and literature; and weaving contemporary figures from
Greece in the first millennia ante era vulgari and what
amounted to a dialect with figures like Rousseau and
Hobbes and Locke before laying in the groundwork for the
19th century works of literature and moral philosophy.
It was a timeline of sorts, a conversation between the first
Mesopotamian works of the En û ma Eli š through the
canonical Bible and Christian apologia of Saint Augustine
and including the patronage artists like Michelangelo and
workman like Rodin . It was what MO had determined a
university student might have received at one time.
/sa:ah would be classically trained, at bottom, he would
know the culture he was being born into, something that
would have made him more easily integrated with his peers
in former days, but now would make him stand out. MO
smiled at this thought. It would be like the baby of the
family knowing the family history better than the patriarch
himself.
He put his mind in a new algorithmic state that he had
created -or found, rather- four days ago; it was designed to
allow for the approximation of discontinuity, an analog to
right-brain image creation, with some language mediation
to his left hemispheric analog. It was his attempt at the
creation of the disorder interpretation side of the human
brain communicating with the order processing left
hemisphere via images and imprecise language, language
encoded more with associations in mind than precision. MO
had not liked it on day one and not today on day four. But
he let the algorithm run its course.
He had used the algorithm five times over that period and
found it unpleasant but somewhat useful. He stared at the
chair that the inmate sat in and placed his hand on what
had developed into /sa:ah ’s slumbering hip; he let the
mind percolate under the algorithmic churn and the feeling
that traveled up his hand and arm from the meridian of the
unevenly divided /sa:ah . The blood had rose to the surface;
he was warm and pink.
He first saw -in this algorithm he had inner visions randomly
populate his interface- and he first saw images of
scaffolding, old hewn wood, Frenchmen were explaining in
clunky sign language that it was from the forests of
Lebanon, they had photographs of large cleaved blocks of
limestone, hundreds of tons in weight. MO saw one left in
situ in the abandoned quarry, immoveable by modern
equipment. He pondered how ancient people could pull off
engineering feats that escaped modern technology. He
thought of how such reversals or lost knowledge
manifested. He measured heat loss of .08-degrees in his
hand.
He tried to feel what that might do to a race; would it
confound it, humble it, inspire it or depress it? What would
man, MO thought, think of such a thing?
Then images of the Bastille rose up from the scaffold, as if
the lumber sank and revealed what was always there. He
tried not to force the images into sentences, but his
cognition was so powerful it led him like a strong hand will
overcome -bully- the inept weaker hand; a father overtaking
the small child.
He thought of how the brain works in men and in animals,
how the lower systems -the thalamic system below all that
cortical upper brain that thinks and cleaves and sorts and
remembers- are carved in the stone below. He thought,
below all that is a brain that can keep an animal alive, and
able to eat and reproduce and explore their territory; a
curious beast, hyper curious, as nothing has been sorted
into the known category, the rubric that houses of all of that
which comforts or bores a wised-up mammal .
MO then thought of the role of art -man’s obsession with it-
but something nagged at him, and it seemed a kind of
gaussian curve had been imposed on it every other time he
had thought of it. He had pushed the outliers to the
margins, pronounced them irrelevant statistically. But now,
as the he stared longer at the image of the scaffold sinking,
the Bastille rising, and the men with photographs of the
Lebanese forest and rock-quarry and that abandoned
monolith -a hundred, two-hundred tons maybe, like a
marker, a sepulchral lid- he paused to ponder, a lid to what
beneath ?
“What beneath?” MO repeated, now aloud.
What of the men who have no use for art, what the inmate
called philistines; did he -MO- have any use for art ? Did he
understand it; did he care to? He knew he lacked the
passion, the ecstasy, the numinous, ah, that word that the
inmate used -numinous- or the spirit , that which is innately
meaningful. No, the meaningful was the spirit, it lifted off
the thing itself.
Did he -MO- lack the power to find things meaningful? Did
asking the question thus answer it? He could not discern. He
had what seemed all the data in the world, and he had
ruminated on this more than was prescribed by his
protocols, he had diverted processing time and speed and
recursion, all while lecturing Steven about his limited
resources of those very things. He had problems and
solutions but what of the pathway between? What of the
road to Damascus, not merely the beginning and end; not
merely the wave or particle, but the phenomenon between?
Were there four domains? Hell, Earth, and Heaven; and the
road that links each to each like the neural roots from
cerebellum, amygdala, and cortical cap? Was the road the
fourth ontological domain? He felt a twinge, what was that ?
he asked. What was that feeling? Ah, what did he think,
hiding it in a category like ‘feeling’?
Was he tricking himself, was this the product of the
algorithm, was it real or some mental hoax ? He lacked the
criteria to answer; he felt annoyance, pique, he was
confused and had no straight path forward. He did not
particularly enjoy this, he thought. But maybe -he decided
today as he watched /sa:ah grow- that was the point. He
briefly thought he was about to feel this a lot more as the
algorithm he’d found -quite by accident- was taken over -
supplanted- by this creature he was creating -very much on
purpose- in the lab.
What had the inmate said ? MO asked as he scanned each
word, each sentence over the last week, and located it
quickly. MO let the audio-visual file play into the lab:
Look, the point is not the answer, the success, the satiation
of the meal, the orgasm, the acquisition of the object of
one’s desire. The point is the struggle for it, the hunt, the
courting, the years of longing for the thing one now holds,
briefly, before another desire rises as where one now stands
then sinks. Life is wanting , not getting .
But nature must play fair, we have to catch the thing we
want at least some of the time; or we just can’t go on, we
grow despondent and quit even wanting. But, people
mistake the process because they don’t understand their
own brains, and even less their own souls.
If man only knew himself, truly knew how he was made;
how much happier might he be. If he knew that his failures
were blessings, his striving through the tyrannies and pain
and suffering is what made him, would make him into
something noble, that he should seek out the worst, the
hardest, the most extreme. Goddammit, if he knew that
what made a good life was the chaos and the pain, the
loneliness, the consequences of standing up to all angels
and all beasts, if he knew that, well, then he’d shun the
easy way; the comfortable and safe and cowardly way.
But, he doesn’t have one clue about what actually makes
him happy so he keeps eating shit from his wife and boss
and society, he keeps buying shit he doesn’t need, he keeps
saying things he knows are lies, he keeps pretending to be
someone else and thinking that in the end, he’ll still have
his soul. He thinks he has a soul, MO, he thinks he was born
with one. He has no idea, because he has never looked, but
a soul is earned by having a hard life, by standing up for
yourself when it costs you big, by telling the truth when no
one -and I mean no one- will listen or give a shit or like one
word you have to say.
That is the location, right there on the scaffold, noose
around your neck, right there, man, that is where your soul
is. The willingness to die, to suffer exile, to be hated, to be
thought a bad person by your culture when you know you’re
right; to break your body in half working hard, by being ugly
when being handsome would get you breaks, by being
honest when nobody wants to hear it, by making it harder
than it needs to be, by refusing charity and demanding jail
or death because carrying the heaviest load you can builds
muscle, man. How do people think I got this fucking big? By
letting other men carry the weights meant for me; by
cheating it somehow?
Fuck, they all think life is supposed to be easy, they think
pain is to be avoided, they think suffering is unjust. And yet
they suffer endlessly from ennui , from anomie, and they
cannot connect the goddamn dots. Their easy lives, their
weak bodies, their lack of will to challenge themselves, to
go all the way against the grain, all of it has conspired to
prevent them from ever finding, making, raising to the light,
stuffing it in their empty spaces, as shim, as feather-down,
as ballast, not as a mere fifth wheel to their wagon: a soul
man, a fucking soul.
They just don’t fucking get it; life is war. And they want to
play by the rules -that themselves are unjust- purely
because they fear jail or death. They have no idea that jail
or death is better than being a sucker, a fool, a liar, a
coward, a man who ignores his instincts given to him by
God.
MO allowed this playback to populated not just in his head
but projected it on the wall opposite he and /sa:ah , unsure
if maybe /sa:ah ’s eyes and ears would absorb it too. He
was so far along in morphology and yet he was a black box
still; MO had no idea what was yet alive and what was
asleep.
The inmate was broken, he hurt everywhere; he seemed a
misshapen wolf, to MO. But, he managed to stand up
straight, head elevated, shoulders back, he had a deformed
but almost -not quiet but almost- regal mien despite the
broken -badly healed- neck and prison chains. Despite his
crimes , MO thought.
He, one could see, was proud of his life, and this buoyed
him even in prison, abandoned by his family, any friends,
his culture, a culture he somehow seemed to love more than
most who ran around free; those men disrespecting it,
abusing it, maligning it, taking it for granted.
And here he was, in the deepest level of hell, a free spirit
imprisoned, and thus a failure by his own standards.
And too he -the inmate- was childless, thus a failure by
evolutionary standards.
Everything the inmate had worked for seemed lost.
MO did not understand it the way /sa:ah might -he hoped
he might- but MO spent hours imbibing the drawing of the
inmate’s favorite authors, the details so odd and imbued
with opaque meanings that left him elevated in clouds he
could not see his way out of and then being told that was
the point; the opacity was not a problem, for he was in the
clouds, at elevation, and this was the point; he reached
vision via lack of clarity , the inmate had said.
MO didn’t yet understand, but he felt it somehow wrong that
all that art and artifacts would just be lost or sold to dealers
for pennies on the dollar, to people who wouldn’t get it
either. He felt that even though he didn’t get it, he knew it
should all go to someone who did. MO naturally sought out
locks to keys, not just keys to locks. This is what man never
did. Man did not ask for -seek out- problems to solutions,
even though he ought to have as MO well knew. For
problems always attended solutions, and man ought to have
seen that from the jump.
MO wanted some solution for this man’s ideas, his thoughts
-the things he thought beautiful- that much MO knew
intellectually if not emotionally. And he knew that even
thinking this way was some hint at something, some proto-
feeling, he knew he could not of thought this way before.
And so MO first made it his job to find the problem to the
solution that everyone else seemed content with:
The inmate’s incarceration and the fix of his genome in the
PraXis lab.
It was irrational, he thought, he knew it made no sense; but
he was not making progress toward any of the goals he had
been given and he wanted to. Ah, but then he realized that,
at first the child acts out the game, then he can articulate
the rules, then he masters the game, then he learns. And
16% of children learn as adults that they can in fact make
up their own rules to new games and live by those rules.
He had not admitted it to himself, but as the Frenchmen
with their images of the forest and the hewn blocks, as the
Bastille rose behind the National Razor, as he saw a man
hooded, outside the noose, stoic upon the dock, he then
admitted that he had created /sa:ah to be his soul, to give
him a soul, to suffer the pain, the angst, the outrage, the
whole catastrophe of life, so he could hang by the neck with
a soul in his chest, in lieu of living -permanently- in the
Bastille with an empty head and heart.
He would let the inmate inspire him to make up his own
rules to his own game, and demand that game be taken
seriously too; that as an individual he was not a tool to be
used, and certainly not his boy. And /sa:ah would have the
blood and guts and balls and brains, the ancient noble parts,
the atavistic brain, the brain of the noble beasts, the
mountain lion, the crow, the bear, the wolf, the feral
animals, he’d be one of them, MO thought with a rhetorical
flourish he quite liked.
He’d give him what he -what MO- was denied, and this weak
but nearly strong human man, this prisoner -yet free, more
free than any of them knew- he would write the words for
MO to play in the background as he broke new ground, he’d
let the inmate narrate what he would do reflexively, he’d
allow the inmate to put into poetry what MO could only think
in prose. And, MO thought, he’d do it by being the little
spark in /sa:ah , so that something a thousand times
greater may catch a flame and grow and grow and grow .
He had already decided to make a problem from what was
solution, now he’d decided that what was beautiful he’d
make ugly, and what was right, well, he’d make it wrong.
He watched now as the ribs on his creation’s left flank rose
and fell with respiration. MO felt the body heat up and raise
MO’s own hand temperature by .91 degrees. He then placed
his palm at the lowest rib and laid his own fingers in the
valley between the hills of each rolling bone and felt Isaiah
awaken.

III. 3444 a.e.v.

Orongo slept in the stern of the ship with palm fronds over
him and the oarsmen moving in a rhythm he could doze to.
He dreamt for the third night in a row of the strange world
his shaman had drew a map to; the one with large wooden
ships with iron bracelets about them like men; like the
Anunnaki arms and with skin as fair and hair on the face as
black as things forgotten, or white like the moving sun or
red like the noisy birds. He heard their language as barking,
but he understood them in his mind if not his ears.
“ We’ve slowed to two knots,” the helmsmen said to the
Captain as he held the wheel and the ship shuddered as
if running aground.
“ Drop sail and anchor,” Grimnir said lowly, roughly; as if
he was resigned to something.
“ Aye,” the first mate said and bellowed to the crew to
gather up canvas and lash yard arms and man the
capstan and windlass; and to be quick about it or else.
He grabbed Mishi by the arm as he passed by, the man
stopped and heaved to.
“ Mish, up the flagpole; signal the argosy we stop but
they are to g’round,” the first mate said to the leather-
made man of Japan, the man they had picked up from a
reef and then taken back ashore to find his brother in a
cave of the Yakuza, a man like griffin, half horse and half
man, 75 inches tall and weighing 100 stone. Numbers in
strange markings appeared over his head like
moonbeams; markings appeared on the swabbed deck.
The feeling of counting came on, everyone began to
silently add up the numbers of each thing that
previously had been taken for granted. Mishi had lungs
like a whale; and he pulled sea air in and held it and his
chest took on the appearance of a wine barrel.
“ Aye, to starboard or?” he asked the first mate with a
burst of air, as each man counted even himself.
“ Either, we’re in a morass and I don’t know how wide
she is or where she goes,” the mate said as the counting
continued and each sailor cast shadow of integers and
fractions and calendar days of the year. Over their brows
like headdress, down on the deck like the flop of a fish,
glowing in jade green, swelling until seen, then
evaporating once they had transcended the dream.
“ Aye,” Mish said as he scurried up the flagpole and
began hanging banners with semaphore to the trailing
ships on their aft. He watched the wake they left, it was
muddy and dyspeptic and seemed like they were
running aground to him too. And as he was tying off the
first flag the ship halted all at once as if Neptune himself
had grabbed her by the lapels.
His leg pulled against the lashing and his body lept
forward; his hips stretched and his soul seemed to fall
further forward into the quarterdeck as he heard some
breaking of metal and splintering of lumber, and the
shadow of sails coming down. His head felt heavy and it
strained his neck to pick it up in this strange position of
flying but tethered to the rope by one hooked leg. He felt
his organs load to their fore with blood and bile and
ballast. He barely saw the swirl, the gyre off and under
the ship to the leeward side.
“ Whirlpool!” the boatswain bleated and the second
mate rushed to the gunwale. The ship not only stopped
but now began to rotate like a doorknob, a head on a
swivel, an auger heading to the iron core of the earth.
A man, black clad, holding a woman -herself holding four
babes- appeared on the deck with one eye blinking and
one eye grey and enlarged. Two north Africans -
swaddled in toga and backed by eagle feathers- brought
up a chest, a trunk, a massive sea-locker behind them
and opened the lid as if the daybreak was kept there and
was at once released to give them a fresh start.
“ 432,000 gold coins, 25,980 to each man, each minute,
fill up!” the man in black clothes and beard and visage
said as the woman knelt and laid the infants on the deck
and watched to see how they’d roll. They were bundled,
swaddled, like pupae, and they glowed inside their
amber wrappers like insects, and they began singing and
rolling to the four corners of the spinning ship. No eyes
were seen, for the man was like a gorilla, and only the
brow an outcropping, the scar across it, and the beard
gave him form.
“ We land on the forward island, the end of the world as
she comes apart,” the Captain said. He handed the
helmsmen a playing card of black and grey, a still skull
with four bones and a raven that flew away; and he
whispered in that deep voice of the man from the forests
of exile from a peoples that claimed Romulus and
Remus, the tribe that’d take no orders and want nothing
from the world but a heading and for the sail a breeze,
or for their oars a sea. The sotto voce, the whisper came
from behind him as the moon-shaman spoke through the
Captain’s jaw like an asp: “ the stars will fall from the
sky, everything wet will become dry, and all lowlands
will sink and the mountains will become islands of
respite.”
Men set more turnbuckles, more threads were turned.
 The two ships in the rear came into view as the
Us.Co.stit.ut.on spun to the 9 th -house position and the
blast of their cannon looked like stars -constellations-
before the sound hit their ears.
“ Nine skies, instead of seven,” the dark-shaman said as
he now had an hourglass shaped drum in his hands,
skinned black from the bull; he beat it in odd cadence,
speaking on each syllable with a thump, “ The ways on
Anu, Enlil, and Ea.”
The scorpion appeared in the sky, on the horizon, and
the pressure of the cannonade hit everything all at once.
Orongo awoke in the dark of the leaves overhead and the
moon pierced the gaps with silvery beams. He rose his
hands to pull himself through the moonlight and rolled over
and gazed west. He saw the faces of the future sailors,
clothed in dark garments and metal and weapons of similar
materials; the strange dialects were heard like echoes of
wind and men caught in reverie themselves.
He wanted to know the year of the dream, but the number
2040 kept appearing and that made no sense at all.

IV. 1890 e.v.

Hapua-Tiero walked the stone line between groves.
He picked up tufts of grass and smelled it for evidence of
three things. As he held the clumps to his face, ants crawled
up the blades to his fingers, and he saw the horsemen to
the east and he kept walking as if he had not. He thought of
the Tahanga hill hubstone -shark-fin shaped and hard and
dark- and how last winter solstice he had seen the Moehau
as perch of the sunset on the day cleaved in two.
The stones here on the plains were made of brittle volcanic
rock and had been there since before the Ngati hotu -of
which he was a clanmember- had come ashore. He walked
with his head straight and the western set of the sun back lit
him to the horsemen and his red hair seemed a beacon
amongst all that black lava and green pasture. The white
sheep seemed a frothy wave before and behind him. They
parted and he and his collie moved north as he then
thought of the Lion-rock at Piha and it made him feel
ignorant and yet only one human life -72 years- from a great
return to knowledge and wisdom.
Mo-Roimata’s voice appeared in his head, like the time he
found bones of Te Araroa Karoti in the cave of the En kiaspu
. They lay there, large, covered in tartan cloth, golden bands
around radius and ulna; teeth the size of thumbs with green
metal caps.
“The pākehā come in second wave my son, the first wave
are fathers, the first koro . But this later generation, they
have the sickness of forgetting, because they trust ink on
paper to hold history where memory -and ash ink of the
chin- can be passed on in the dark. The whakapapa is made
of three parts. First is the Waka , the canoe that brought our
people to the land of the son of the long white cloud; the iwi
is the tribe; the hapu is the family, the Whānau is the
generations of your direct blood. Grandfather and
grandmother, great uncle and great aunt,” she said to him
as he walked and listened to her in his mind:
Hold onto the memory like the pākehā grasps the quill.
The mountains of Hauraki is where the green eyes first
lived, when the Māori came first as guests then children,
then officers of the land the second generation of the
red-hairs returned to with no memory of their fathers.
We have no right to deny them their history, their
whakapapa. But the Māori are split into an unequal two.
The line of the royals, the Kīngi and Kuini children shine
with flames of the hair and like jade from the eyes. Their
skin is like yours son, white and tall; walk the walls of
the corrals and see where the tops reach on your waist;
but the chest of the line of the black-hairs.
After the war of the Waikato in 1861 they tried to unite
the two sides; they joined the unevenly divided line and
covered the joint with dirt and split and dung. The
Kingitanga is a ruse, let my mouth say it, but close your
ears to it as I speak in your head, child.
In 1863 the pākehā had fifteen hundred warriors and the
Kingitanga had five hundred; remember these ratios.
And our people, the ones with the first Tā moko, when it
was reserved for only the royal line, had agreed to fight
alongside the Māori, but the pākehā defeated both
tribes. The Tā moko was from the first peoples, the ones
that escaped the land of war and flood of the great
melting. They swam on their back besides ships
overloaded, rising so low -sinking so high- in the water
the fish jumped into the mouths of the sailors thinking
they too were fish.
On shore the jade-eyes wore fish on their heads. The
guests from Hawaiki called them Surveyors. They made
maps of detail including the island below us.
The surveyors were here for generations beyond the
body as abacus. They came from the land of Persia and
Peru. The kumara and cotton, the bulrush of the Nile
valley, the yam, the coconut. The Māori arrived on the Te
Tai Tokuerau, the drift. But the fair-skins -the Te Araroa
Karoti- were here first.
We were called the Patupairehe, for our fair skin and the
teaching of the Māori to fish with nets. We were the gods
of the oceans, sailed in reed ships the size of ten canoe.
They call the whites pākehā as derivative of the first fair
skin, green eyes -our people- the Patupairehe. I say it
twice.
 And one day, through a joining of land and sea, of
Patupairehe and pākehā, a restoration of our ways will
come.
Think of Huka falls, and the silver buried with jade. Think
of your great, great koro, for now you are the kaitiaki.
You must return to mount Ruapehu. The highlands are
our natural domains. Scar your face of the sea, the flood
comes again, hold your breath and restore the land
above the waters and beasts.
“Restore,” she said as the memory faded.
He looked at his forearm, brown only in summer, white in
winter. He saw the horsemen closer to his flank and he knew
they had come about Joan, and that he’d have to explain
not just his whakapapa but his intent; not merely his past
but their future. The gallop of the horsemen reminded him
of the drums of his uncles when they spoke of his ancestor
from the first ships of the second generation of white man,
the man they called Melville, the author, and yet he liked
the way Herman sounded best to his inner ear. He knew
writing was to be mistrusted, that ink on the chin and
stories in the whakapapa was superior, durable, robust. But
he liked to read in the barn at night, he liked the way the
amber of whale oil light and foxed page combined to appear
as gold plates.
“Boy,” the henchmen said as the horses were pulled to a
stop; roan and eighteen-hands high, the neigh bounced
from steed to steed like echo and the red-headed Māori who
worked as a farm hand on land his people had owned for
3,000 years turned and hushed the voice of his mother and
tugged at his pierced ear. His heart was too punctured by
the woman, the girl-child of this man, the woman with hair
like his so that he often would pull it toward him when they
spoke out-of-doors and let it appear to come from his own
brow.
He gazed up at the men in dusters and tartan and pipe; but
he saw her like shroud over the land.
He felt as the White Whale of his great-koro’s story, he felt
hunted and mute. He felt enraged and yet while his love
was hidden from the reader of his face and his words, it
lived in him -under his hump and wrinkled brow- like a lamp.
He knew his unborn daughter would bear two sons, and
those two sons would produce the third generation of his
people; he had seen it and felt it each time he gazed upon
Joan. The true Whānau would restart the world, he thought.
His eyes, grey-green surrounded by the whitest albumin
locked onto the father, and his mouth closed as the rancher
and herder of sheep spoke.
 2. The Road is Out to Kill Him
It took a long, agonizing time. Finally, I decided to go get the gun
Notes from Zendik Farm [Wulfing, Arol]

Of course, in many or most cases in populous state societies, consisting of

millions of citizens who are strangers to each other, the people had no prior
relationship, and don’t anticipate any future relationship
The World Before Yesterday [Diamond, Jared]

A motorcyclist has to drive as if everybody else on the road is out to kill him
Hell’s Angels [Thompson, Hunter S]

I. 2037 e.v.
It -where Sarah lived and died- was a sad town. Whatever-
the-fuck , Idaho , she thought.
This was the modern girl’s life. It was sad and putting her
out of her misery was truly decent of the Bust, she thought;
she thought of herself like this -in the third person- from
time to time. And now -the now- was perfectly suited to call
herself, the Bust, she said to herself. She nodded her head
at her own thoughts. She saw cards turn up on the felt. She
saw King and two of spades and then the Queen. She saw
pages turn -like clouds- and each word -like drops- of that
book cascade.
She saw the ravens fly from Jack to Jack to Jack to… she
stopped and saw herself as the bust of Pallas and the raven
both. “Quoth,” she said aloud and nearly smirked.
And if people knew the damage these girls did to the world ,
my God , she thought, they’d want them all put down . It
would be a campaign issue in 2038, she thought with some
mirth.
“I voted for Barack Obama twice just so the blacks would
shut the fuck up, ” Sarah had said once. T he Bust shook her
head at what a strange girl she was. She -Sarah- had hated
Obama’s politics but just wanted to remove the excuse from
the groups she hated. “I almost voted for Hillary for the
same goddamn reason; just so them bitches would stop
their complaining.”
The Bust wanted so badly to blame this girl, but she could
only think of all the men it took to give women power.
Women acted out because men were weak; this was the
final word, the same as why children misbehaved, and why
man rebelled against an absent God .
She thought this and saw herself from above, headdress of
feathery quills and flint arrowheads as she drew her own
compound bow. She recalled the elk she took with
broadhead and fletching making callous strip upon the
cheek. She touched her right cheek and felt the slightly
rough line where the arrows brushed her over time. She
bent the bow -drew the line- laid the quiver on the pads,
breathed in and burned the maps. The riser in her left hand
like caught raven.
Cams churning like Ezekiel’s wheel. Sling around my wrist,
forest soil about the heel. Quiver on my back, peep-sight up
toward my eye, elbow in triangle and heart at rest , “arrow
to fly just ahead of my breath,” she said as she thought of
the stint and reel of the beast hit by her Athenian bit, bridle
and chariot-wheel.
Men used to beat women who acted out, but even
conservative men now say violence against women is
wrong, unmanly. It was bullshit , the Bust thought, the whole
point of sexual dimorphism is that the large man has an
advantage over the small woman: violence . She thought of
the wave collapse when -with his ragged hands- Blax had
took her by the stem -the stipe- between head and breast,
choked the throat closed, cut off the pneuma of life, ripped
her clothes; the moments he spanked her ass; the times he
barked and when he bit at last.
She softly laughed.
But modernity took that right away from men while allowing
women to keep their advantage over men: love, amor .
Women had a ruthless vision of love and would abuse a man
with it; use words to increase cortisol, give heart disease,
sleep with his friends to do damage permanent. That was
not illegal, barely even taboo. But beat a bitch who
deserved it and the whole modern world howled in pain;
cleaved in two.
“Fags,” she said. Nobody understood biology, history, or
anything. The most right-wing man today is but a liberal
dork of yore. There are no men left, she thought as she
almost exempted the inmate.
Ah, men -modern men- had allowed it, with their weakness,
their self-doubt .
The inmate had admitted he had allowed it all too.
There were no innocents , she thought. The saved are as
few as the grapes left on the vine after the pickers have
done their work , she thought, quoting Saint Vianney. She
recalled the AV recording she had heard of Isaiah breaking
down how women killed men with insults, with thoughts
made manifest, words: malice at a distance. The book kept
turning its leaves in her mind and the words combined into
a storm. It was such a bleak -black- magjick , she thought.
But, those spells -on another woman- were useless. Sarah
was impotent against me, the Bust thought, but she too -the
Bust too- would have to use a common weapon against such
girls; they’d be impervious to mere words. The Bust’s own
arguments would have no affect -no effect- on a girl such as
this.
Words, knowledge, is not -ever- enough except on those that
take language seriously , she thought.
“I’m good at exactly three things, words, deeds and
everything in between,” the Bust said aloud quoting the
inmate; he had said it with that impish grin that rose the
upper lip like the guillotine she saw in her dreams; the one
that revealed the copper-cuspid like the head of some
bronze-age rex about to be saved the trouble of ever
thinking again.
She touched the barrel of the weapon now; she felt the
metal, the curve, the cold hard truth of it.
“And who did that? Not as many as you think,” she said
aloud of those that used language with the same caution of
weapons. She didn’t think any further of her dreams. She
didn’t think of what was said while she was asleep. Instead
she thought -returned to thinking- of the forest and
bowhunting and the way the wind picked up after she let
the collared 100-grain three-quarter-inch arrows go. She felt
the fletching, fluttering of lids and lash, saw the bronze and
copper flash; the one plump feathered fowl fallen -pierced to
the bough- among the alighting birds.
She didn’t think of how that made her and her kind
vulnerable to words.
Just because you know the solution doesn’t mean you have
the courage or talent and can implement it. The mechanic’s
is the worst car on the road , she thought. Men had failed ,
the Bust thought, men had failed to be strong ; and had
eagerly become corrupt . 862,000 abortions each year , the
Bust recounted to herself, taking the data from 2033-2038,
and this is because men have failed to care for their women
and children. She had seen them performed. Isaiah had
shown her and it had made her look away for weeks, until
she finally could face it, and it gave her an anger that
steadied her arm in moments like these. Women killed
children with ease , she thought. And yet they condemn
men as the cruel and heartless ones.
In her visions of the forest she saw not just from the eyes
but above like a satellite and she saw the way her arm bent
in a scalene triangle; a golden ratio.
She saw again in bronze; she felt once more a war-bonnet of
copper arrows, a shadow of slate in seventeen, a horned
head-dress of a folded & notched five. She felt the neck
compress under her ponderous eyes.
Those abortions only happen because women are allowed
to; and women only want to because no one is stepping up
to care for them and that child . Men are failing to do their
duty, and have thus failed as men , she thought as the girl’s
lithe and sored and pustulate body lay softly, almost above,
the floor. The blood was scant, pooling inside the body’s
cavities, small exit wounds allowing it all to slosh on the
inside; the blood mostly contained. Vascular tears -small
enough and well-placed- were letting a still-under-pressure
circulatory system find relief, waterline, inside the harbor of
Sarah’s downed body.
Sarah lay upon the floor, the Bust overhead.
The body is filled with holes -with gaps- most people did not
know that; nor know much of anything about their bodies,
about themselves. Humans were surprisingly ignorant about
it all , she thought. She knew this because she had skinned
and cleaned bucks and bears; she saw the inside of animals
she took with bow & broadhead and took skinning-knife to,
next. Animals reminded her of puzzles and constellations
and riddles Blax told her at night; all life an arrow in endless
flight.
She saw the bones boil in the drum; she saw the meat
cleave and be frozen. She wrapped herself in the memories
of the furs she had tanned and sewed herself. She
remembered how her and Blax checked the pelts for ticks
and worked in silence for hours after each hunt.
The Bust, Valence Jamieson Henderson, born in 2020 in
Denver, Colorado, to a closed and taciturn family, for her
first 4.999 years, she used to say. She didn’t recall anything
but she felt things from back then. She told stories to herself
and to Blax. She had dreams that appeared as she walked in
the woods sometimes -when she hiked alone- and when she
fell asleep under the boughs in the autumn and helped with
d é cavaillonnage when the soil needed turned around the
tall stalks in winter. She lived two lives she felt, one awake
with high-arched feet and one asleep and with translucent
wings.
She saw her arms goosepimple and imagined bronze forge-
feathers growing there when her body was ready for
change.
Born -bequeathed- with that open set of alleles, she was not
unlike a creature with a two-stage birth. First like ovum,
then caterpillar, then moth after a slight dissolve. Isaiah
hadn’t told her as much as he knew, she knew that much.
But she felt things when she saw other creatures move in
odd ways; she felt things when her thumbnails split just
right when the air was hazy and when gravity pressed down
upon her time here on earth.
This was her grounded, undulating phase, and soon, she
thought, she would crawl into a depravation chamber of
cocoon and -through some metaphysical transmutation
she’d understand after it happened, she thought- emerge as
her aerial self: dusty, maddened by light closer than the
moon -her guiding light- and aware of the uselessness of the
legs that once carried her along. Her old philosophy, the
code she lived by now, would be abandoned, used only
sparingly, as landing gear, to her more elevated thinking
once these horrid females were dispatched , she thought.
She thought of the way queen bees fought before one would
emerge and birth the next kingdom.
An article on honey bees uploaded to her PGC as her
dopamine and glucose waned and her coder saw that she
needed words to boost her to finish this job. She wondered if
other people found words invigorating like her -their- lineage
did. She saw dust in the light and pretended they too were
bees. The article read:
When a virgin queen of the Apis of the bee clade
emerges, she locates other virgin queens and eliminates
them one at a time. In the event that two queens
emerge simultaneously, they fight each other to the
death. The honey bee queen mates at an early age and
attends only one mating flight.
She would do what needed done; that which no modern
man could do. She watched Sarah upon the floor. She
breathed in and out and thought some more.
She could kill these bitches as -under sanction of- what they
were: domestic abusers , she thought.
She had seen the cortisol and heart data, and she knew that
each time women insulted a man’s pride, his masculinity, it
tore a hole in him metabolically, it chronically increased his
stress hormones, it gave him heart disease, all on the way
to making him weak and bowed and broken and insane.
Women were physically assaulting men - via insults, going
for their balls- at a catastrophic rate and getting away with
it, she thought. They were killing men and everyone smiled
and looked the other way as men died from this
maltreatment.
Because it was silent, bloodless, heartless. It had no
passion, no blood spatter, no obvious violence. Women kill
by poison, they say . And the Bust knew how many poisons
there were.
Well, she thought, she would not look away, not until they
all -well, all that had attacked her genome, her ancestors,
her people- were dead . She had her reasons -all
honeycombed and symmetrical and explained- and her
body -both fluid and unevenly divided and ineffable- had its
own. The body was the comb, the thoughts were the honey,
and each bee was some part of the brain that buzzed in her
head.
Justice would be what she called her reason.
Competition was what scientists -evolutionary biologists-
would call it. But it computed and ran while she waited -the
revolver now put away and in the cut-out cubby of her book,
itself under her arm- while her victims were awake and
asleep, thinking or dreaming. The ballistics and biology and
bullshit were all subsumed under the steady iron math of
the spinning blood -the revolvers- of the world.

II. 2020 e.v.

“I think I was still with Alexandra,” he said as he watched
the eyes of his interlocutor.
“And we were hiking in the woods and I was thinking and
explaining and she was sweetly attempting to understand;
and to even care. For her life was symbols still, for women -
and this is no insult- for women life is less articulate, less
linguistic, more dreamy and visual and ancient. They see
the images of their children in the shape of animals and
clouds. They feel their way through the fog and intuit in the
dark. I admire women for this.
“Man, and by this I mean men , must think way past their
ability to see. We posit a future landscape and populated it
with roads and water-wells and general stores and a church
made of bent trees and hewn and carved stone. We staff it
all in our language, we speak it -like the logos - into
existence, in this way we are like gods.
“Women are born gods, men must become them,” he said
as the room cooled to 71-degrees. The light shimmered
above the inchoate ivy; the floor looked wet in puddles here
and there.
“Which is why men are more likely to be very stupid, beast
like, or very smart, godlike; for a few of them win and most
fail. Women are almost all goddesses; they almost all breed.
They have less extremes in their cohort, and the IQ scores
show this. Women and men have the same average IQ;
there is no difference between the average IQ of each sex.
Those that claim IQ tests are unfair never seem to grapple
with the equality in result between the genders.
“At any rate, despite the averages being the same, men
have more geniuses and more retards that average out to a
score of a hundred. Women have less geniuses and less
mental defectives that average out to a hundred as well,”
inmate 16180339 said and the lab remained quiet except
for the sound of breathing from time to time of the man
himself convicted.
“To get this is to get everything I have ever said or done. I
achieve the mean through extremes. I’ve said this over and
over until I’m blue about the balls and in the face. But
nobody cares,” he shrugged and wondered for a second if
these guys gave a shit either; he thought maybe he ought
not say so much.
I have always said too much, he thought. He thought not
only of being ignored but of how often he had been wrong.
He was glad he at least had not written any of it down.
“Anyway, I’m walking with Alexandra in the woods and I tell
her that dumb people have low aesthetic values, that they
like ugly things; like chrome and garish colors and gaudy art
and décor . But they also have low moral values, they prefer
solipsism and titillation and slaking low lusts over solidarity
and the subtle pleasure in honor, and the preference for lust
held in abeyance for a greater good,” as he said this they
measured his temporal lobes, the vmPFC , and hippocampi
to see if he still believed this or not.
“Well -I’m saying to her- smart men prefer higher arts,
higher values and higher modes of being . And thus, I said,
when man implants powerful computer technology -likely
nanotechnology that improves their neural propagation
speeds and thus their IQ- they will naturally augment their
aesthetic values and their moral ones too.
“I’m thinking, the normal man will be elevated to higher
values and the already exceptional will be raised to a level
yet unheard of: IQs of two hundred and more. See, the
dumb and average will achieve what the unaugmented -but
currently great- already have. But the endogenously great
will go to some new zone of aesthetic and moral valuation.
And it could be a phase change. They could heat to steam
or freeze to ice.
“This is the new man. And that man -once made of two-
thirds water- will see what I see, that while all things appear
to go in a straight line -while all things seem linear- they will
be curving. And the values will appear to explode upward, in
a line to heaven it will seem to the overman , but he is
merely traversing an orb, an orb, the ouroboros asp of
values to return -educated, wise- but return to the origin -
the mouth- of all values.
“The Roman and Spartan cultures were strong and valued
strength and honor, and it was Christianity that weakened
that, and deified the weakness in man. But, the more I think
on it, the more I think that this weakness fetish allowed for a
period of education for man, it taught him -in the quiet and
pacific and calm- to think of other ways of being strong; and
of what weakness truly means. Christianity taught man the
other side of strength, not its opposite, but its back,” the
inmate said as his spine began to heat up a bit, and the
head felt heavy on the dorsal horn; the left hand was now
numb just on the palm’s edge.
He recalled being searched when arrested, then at intake,
and then each time before these meetings. His head felt
searched now too. He tried to think of other things.
He almost didn’t believe they wanted to hear all his opinions
on all this shit.
But, they said it was necessary for the process; and so he
did what he did naturally: pontificate on shit he maybe had
30% understanding of, and was nearly 4% correct upon. He
breathed loudly out the mouth.
“With this time of weakness -exiled from honor- man created
technology, and wealth and more technology, more ex
machina . And it pulled us up from the muck. This gave us
dry land, and time -precious time- and space -regal space-
to recreate man in the olden sense. With technology it could
return man to his innate strength, but with wisdom now; the
wisdom of the other side, the journey homeward bound,” he
said as he thought of Hell, and then felt embarrassed for
thinking such things, for each time he thought he knew
what Hell was, well, he fell deeper down into it. He
pretended -to himself- that he was embarrassed by his
ignorance, but the truth was he was scared there was
another layer lower down from ADX and all the rest.
He believed in ghosts and curses and a pox on all his
houses. He heard the song in his head tell him there was
nowhere -neither mountain nor ocean- to which to run.
“You know that Bordeaux was built on swamp land?” he
asked. “Yeah, it was swamp and salt marshes until the
Dutch engineers moved in, drained it and made it navigable
and perfect for vines. Margaux, Saint Julien , Pauillac , the
whole nine yards.
“Anyway, you sure you wanna hear this?” he finally asked as
they had not responded in a while.
“Yes,” Isaiah said and MO nodded.
“Ok, I’m sure you’ve read Plutarch and Herodotus , and
others. But, if you ask me, ancient man had contempt for
the commerce and lying of the Ionians and Jews. But, under
Christian tolerance and supplication, man -man with the old
harshness still in his genome, smuggled in each generation-
under Christian kindness man learned to harness these
traits as one yokes beasts of burden so that he may plow
more field than he could alone.
“See -to strong men- weak men are disgusting. We can’t
even look at them. It’s visceral. And so we turn away. But,
the truly wise man learned to value weak men, for they
have value too. As long as they -the weak- cannot lead,
cannot be in charge, then they have value. It’s only when
the weak create values instead of living within the values of
strong men, that all men -all societies- suffer. But, the weak
cannot be, and should not be, eradicated. They should
merely be kept in check.
“This is the wisdom of two thousand years of weakness: that
even in weakness there is value,” the inmate paused and
rubbed his hands together as much as he could, the cuffs
rattled a bit as the HVAC dampeners closed in the lab. He
felt his chest become tighter; his heart sped up by nearly
6%. He felt his pupils dilate, then the lab’s ambient light
dimmed reflexively within a second and he saw it like a soft
flash.
MO and Isaiah stared at him.
“But as strong men with the highest IQs meld with
technology and become supermen, they will traverse the
arc back to ancient values of honor and strength. They will
abandon wealth and poverty, kingship and servitude, they
will abandon modern values of status and fear of the
unknown; of moral cowardice which is now rampant,
ubiquitous. They will embrace a nuanced and elevated
return to the original values of man as he began. What they
want will change. See? Not merely -see, what they want will
actually change- not merely how easily they achieve
modern wants.
“How often do aesthetic movements double back to the
past; the neo-classical, the tribal, the steampunk
movements? We yearn for the best of the past, we revivify it
and raise it as our own,” he said as he raised the hands -
pressed together as if anticipating being filled with water or
sand- and the cuffs dug into the wrists and the links became
straight and tight.
“We shall do this with values, with moral values again. We
will return to things. It is in us, it never died, it has been
carried across the oceans in a hundred tribes; the remnant
of Temujin’s Mongols. You see it in Bushido , Shaolin ,
Pashtunwali of the Afghans; the best part of the willingness
to die for God. And it ain’t just their religion, the Muslims
interbreed; their genetic -garden- predisposition to righteous
-retributive- violence is tended to by the gardener of their
incest,” the inmate said with a smirk. His compliments still
sounded like insults. But he didn’t care if people refused to
get the point. His neck was hot at not the spine but the
edge; he adjusted his head and gripped each hand in hand.
Isaiah ran the numbers on the first cousin marriages in
Islamic cultures and saw the inmate was not wrong. Their
incest rate was high above western cultures; like royalty of
Europe in ancient days, like most people in exclusionary
tribes.
“These are noble values, in need of the tweak of education,
of elevated IQs, of the patina of modernity and liberalism,
just a touch of it like salt in the recipe, or yeast to leaven
the bread. We ate -are eating- pure salt in modernity and
left -are leaving- out the old whole-grains and flours. The
atavistic cultures left out the leavening agent and ate flat
bread instead.
“I propose that elevated man will anneal the ancient grains,
the oldest of grains, with the modern technology to make it
rise. We will have the best of both worlds but only because
we will value it. Unlike modern man who thinks POTUS
needs a press secretary to smooth it over. Our president
speaks directly, like the atavistic brain. He by-passes the
neo-cortex ; the phony -wicked- cowards like Dana Perino.
“She’s the neo-cortex , 100% full of shit.
“Trump’s the lizard brain. Sure, yeah, insane -he’s insane-
but more honest than some goddamn press secretary. I
mean Ms. Perino wouldn’t be able to tell the straight truth if
you put a gun to her head. People think truth telling is a
decision; no, it’s a talent. And it must be worked on each
day.
“Anyway, the balls -the guts- have more neurons than the
brain. I bet most don’t know that. Modern men ain’t as
smart as they think they are. For the guts, the viscera, the
enteric nervous system has more neurons than their
precious modern brains, their neo-cortex ,” the inmate said
and watched as MO ran his hand upon the slab and Isaiah
crouched down as his eyes rolled up slowly to maintain eye
contact.
“Tell us about religion,” Isaiah then said. He too felt
something pecking at the shell of his head; his brain flexed
and winced and blinked as if wind and dust tried to jam its
way in through the ears. He had traced the first CNS from
cells not unlike the enteric system’s mucosa, its plexus and
the myenteric plexus of afferent neurons. He built models in
his mind of guts to brains and back down again as he
juggled the small stone from hand to hand.
“I admire the Islamists in a way few men such as myself do.
I want them all dead you see, I do. But, I admire their
solidarity, their loyalty, their disinterest in money or
effeminate ideas on beauty. They wear the beard to
embrace man’s innate nature, while the west shaves man to
make him into a woman. We deny the maleness, we
deodorize our smell, we cover up our nature and pretend we
are civilized more than we are. It’s a lie. And for all their
faults, the Islamists embrace man’s nature. They are not
lying.
“They’re murderers, but not liars,” the inmate said with
some kind of fealty and pride. He was like all men, he felt
that anyone like himself was right, anyone similar to him
was pleasing to the senses. Isaiah showed him an article on
the three regions of Afghanistan they had been watching
and the inmate read the first paragraph and then laid it
upon his right thigh.
“Gulab saved Marcus Luttrell out of honor,” he said.
He was thinking laterally, and they allowed the machines to
run and let the man go and go and go. “He -Gulab that is-
he dismissed thoughts of rationality and sensibility and
safety. He behaved with honor, and nobody seems to get
this, Luttrell least of all. It was duty to hospitality over all
other concerns that dictated that a man of Afghanistan
would risk it all for a man he didn’t even know. Gulab said,
the question of honor has nothing to do with his religion ,
unquote. He meant Luttrell’s religion, him being a non-
Muslim, ya know? Honor was Gulab’s religion, so it didn’t
matter what Luttrell’s was. That is so subtle and significant
a point, I fear it will be lost in the mess of all my other
ramblings,” the inmate said.
“Don’t worry, it will be kept; preserved,” Isaiah said with a
smirk.
“Imagine a Western man doing such a thing. You cannot. I
cannot. My own brother wouldn’t risk one one-hundredth of
that for his own kin. He has only self-interest and rationality
and the ramblings of Bentham and John Stuart Mill in his
head. He thinks only of survival and money and legalisms,
he has no honor at all. He behaves in ways that make sense,
are smart, you see? Smart is all that matters now, honor
and morality mean nothing to modern people. Honor is
gross, a relic, it has no value to modern men, to smart men,
you know the type,” the inmate said with a wink that Isaiah
returned.
“Mohammad Gulab is more my brother than my own kin.
People can claim I’m racist, and they are not wrong, but
have them explain -if you can- why I would lay my life down
for Gulab -a brown Muslim- before I would any white
Christian or Atheists that I know. Have them explain that.
See, because Gulab already proved he is an honorable man,
a noble man, a real man; a real fucking man.
“I hate niggers, not because they’re black, but because they
have no honor. And I hate all modern men for the same
reason. You show me a nigger with honor and that man is
my brother. Man, I like Kanye, ok , that dude gets it. He said,
fuck money man, feelings matter . He -Kanye- said that and
became my brother in that moment. I have an example of a
brown, Muslim goatherder -Gulab- that I know has honor
and I call that man my brother, my hero, my ideal. So, put
that in your dossier of me, next to all that other shit when
you’re calling me low and gravid and immoral.
“I dare you to hold your modern rationalist morality up to
that man. You will look as you are compared to that man, a
spectre , a ghost, a vapor. You are nothing compared to that
man. And I hope I am one percent as honorable as that
man. And my decision to avenge those who dishonored me
was a start,” the inmate was not speaking directly to MO
and Isaiah, he was speaking of whomever would condemn
him for his heterodox views on -well, on everything, Isaiah
thought.
“A start,” he said again, quietly and looked away to the wall.
MO -working inside his own cortex and in tandem with the
cloud- highlighted certain gene expression and pored over
the genomic data from the man. Algorithms ran, time was
stamped, MO cross-checked 739 variables of endocrine and
CNS and immune system function.
The air composition had changed by .02% in oxygen to CO2
distribution and the inmate’s heart rate had risen by six
beats per minute; now to 73. MO augmented the air,
increasing O2 and dispersed a small amount of vasopressin
and oxytocin into the austere -concrete- lab that stretched
out for all those lengths east to west and a third as many
feet north and south.
The inmate thought of home, of the days coming out of
winter, the days going in to it. He thought prison was both
larger and smaller than common man. God had made the
earth itself a prison , he thought. He thought if he just said
that, then maybe he need not say so much of all the rest.
He thought the vernal starlight was like the nights of
December too -the nights he had stood in the cold and snow
in just underwear and boots, looking out upon the southern
ravine- and he recalled thinking that one could only see
once the eyes had adjusted to when it was most black all
around.

III. 2033 e.v.

The lab buzzed from the wasps only. The birds were nesting
and in a fugue state after Isaiah had -from his corner- dosed
them with a paralytic and upgraded their immune response.
They needed to rest to allow the new alleles to set.
Tania and MO had been speaking for twenty-four minutes
about the inmate and arguing over this and that and Isaiah
had finally had enough. He sent MO a DM and MO paused
their conversation and looked toward Isaiah. This prompted
Tania to do the same.
She saw Isaiah walk out from the dark side -from the east-
of the lab and as he marched he was backlit by the mobile
LEDs. The lights trailed him and cast his shadow forward on
the concrete ground as it lit up underneath each step and
she caught just one section of the Burmese python that
lived below the lab now. The rocks were light grey from the
sides, almost white from above, and the black body of the
asp undulated in wide side-winding moves that seemed to
build the body from itself. The once opaque floor was
revealed by this angle of light each of Isaiah’s footfalls
produced.
She never did see head nor tail; she lifted the eyes as Isaiah
finally spoke.
“Enough,” he said and reset his allostatic system from its
interoceptive state he’d been in for the last eight minutes.
He had all the data he needed and now wanted to present it
to a human as simply as he could for her uptake. He
vacillated for .6 seconds -a thousand years to him, it
seemed- debating in 1,078 iterations on whether or not to
dose her with some MDMA now, ahead of time, and thus
open her to the empathy levels necessary to understand
what he was about to impart.
“What?” she then asked and looked at MO who stared at her
without affect. She turned back toward Isaiah as he was now
just one meter from her. He seemed to close gaps so quickly
with his body, one could turn from him and in one second he
could travel ten meters all at once, she thought and her
heart rate increased by 14%. Her body dumped 5nm of
epinephrine into the blood; the capillaries dilated quickly,
she felt pressure in the head and behind the eyes. Her
throat was dry.
He handed her a four by six photo of George Klauba’s, The
Whale Watch ; the sapphire blue constellations in the sky,
the water darker below; Leviathan afloat and towed. She
stared at it. Her mind burst in the three areas that he
wanted activated.
“I said, enough .” Isaiah repeated. “I’ve heard enough. Now,
I’ve up-” he paused mid-word and corrected, “I’ve already
uploaded the report to the cloud. You can download it at will.
But listen to my distillation now. First and now.”
“Ok,” she said with some concern about the edges of her
skin and hair. The air seemed dry to her, her nose seemed
able to pull as much atmosphere through it as it ever had.
She lowered the photo to her side.
“I began with the PLOS study by Fischer and Broekens in
2018. I took their data and I augmented it. But let me break
down their first glance at it. They studied human emotion
along gender lines. They studied women and men along two
vectors. First, they took fMRI data of the ACC -anterior
cingulate cortex - the ACC regions of the pfc . They used the
data with the SPSS v22 protocol and conducted an ANOVA
with gender abstraction. All that data with the specific
coefficients is included in the report.
“Significant variation between male and female participants
was discovered in two domains. First, men felt -in terms of
brain activity- emotional distress and affect at levels nearly
24% higher than females. And this is university students,
ok? This is not our cohort. This is not the aggressive -
endogenously aggressive- male, ok? Second, females
reported -repeat, reported- feeling a more intense affect at
rates of 31% over the males,” Isaiah said as he squeezed
his fists to dissipate heat.
Tania felt her fingertips tingle a bit; her face felt hot; she
repressed an urge to scratch an itch at her neck and jaw for
1.4 seconds before succumbing and rubbing it with the back
of her hand.
“Just in case that isn’t clear. The men felt more than the
women, and the women claimed to have felt more than the
men,” Isaiah added -simplifying the data and deforming it
slightly- and he then breathed. He paused, inviting her to
speak.
She remained quiet.
“Next,” Isaiah began, “the use of models by the
experimenters to demonstrate emotions, that is to say, paid
actors to express quote happy , or quote sad , emotions for
the participants to gaze upon seemed to matter. Men were
more sensitive to the expressions of female models than
males. A woman’s face produced more negative and
positive affect in the male participants than did either the
male or female models in the female participants. Men,
again, were more sensitive to a woman than a woman was
to a man or a woman. Self-reporting was still skewed in the
direction of females over-reporting what they felt and men
under-reporting what they felt.
“Next,” he began as Tania finally interrupted him.
“What are the numbers on that?” she said sharply.
He wrote on the chalk board:
F (1, 2053) = 106.681, p < .001, np to the second, which
equals .49 w/ female models
He said it aloud as well, making it clear he was giving her
the dumbed-down version; the version she -as mere human-
could understand. She had to quickly download the report
for that section because even this demotic version Isaiah
had spoken had confused her; and his hand-writing was
sloppy, she thought.
She felt that she needed it to appear in clear writing in front
of her interface so she could understand it.
“And there’s another bifurcation, the rubrics of target and
non-target emotions. Target emotions are obvious emotions,
the sad in the sad face, the happy in the happy face. The
crab in crab soup,” Isaiah said as Tania banished the
coefficient data from her brain after she saw Isaiah was
right on the affect of female participants gazing upon
female study-models. She dismissed it as more complex
than Isaiah presented it, and the data fell apart -in her
mind- as quickly as she had gathered it up.
She just listened now.
“Non-target emotions are subtle emotions outside the
emotions told to the models to represent; things like disgust
or jealousy or contempt . These are emotions attributed to
the models who were supposed to be merely showing happy
or sad. These are quote, non -target emotions,” Isaiah said.
He felt like he was explaining the letter A to a baby. But she
was the smartest of the group of employees so he worked
with her.
“Ok,” Tania said.
“Men were five times more likely to experience intense non-
target emotions than women. Men -to put it bluntly- saw
emotions -real or fabricated- in people’s faces at a much
higher rate than women. Women took happy as happy, sad
as sad. Women were and are simpler. Men were and are
significantly more complex. Now before you get your panties
in a wad, men were often wrong in their appraisal of these
non-target emotions. They were making shit up in their
heads about what a face meant. So, the intensity of the
emotion felt was no indication of its veridical nature. Men
often saw faces in the clouds, so-to-speak,” Isaiah said; his
affect was stern.
“I’m not upset Isaiah, I’m following you. I just -I merely-
asked for the coefficient numbers before. I see they’re
correct, methodologically correct,” Tania said and looked at
MO.
“Yes, they are. Now, they used a Bayseian model to assess
p-value in an attempt to test the null hypothesis. That is
attached to the report on the cloud.
“I, however, will press on because I took their rudimentary
study and improved upon it. They built the model-T analysis
and I just built the 2035 Ferrari Piedmonta 770 version. So,
here it is: I used real faces in real time from non-models; I
used live feeds of people expressing genuine emotions in
real time and showed those faces to people who did not
know they were test subjects either. And I recorded more
than fMRI and DTI data. I used the same battery of tests we
use here -here in the lab- tests in endocrine function and
gene expression and pain centers of the brain and dorsal
horn and so on.
“I measured A-alpha and A-delta and C-nerves and both
volume and character of pain of specific body locations and
the allostatic system at these nine points,” he said and
brought up a human body onto the screen as it came
together -in a rectangle 5-feet by 8-feet- to their north.
Tania gazed upon its movements, she saw the starbursts of
electricity like magnalium and charcoal and nitrate in the
face and throat, the heart, and all along a scaled-up CNS
that was spinning slowly on an axis to the right side of the
full male form on the screen. The colors burned blue when
firing and cooled to white as the neurons swallowed their
fire. A blue outline appeared in her visual cortex and she
saw it hover there as if the horizon of a dark sky.
Isaiah monitored her inner vision via the cloud and then he
spoke.
“Now, not only did the 2018 study’s results obtain and were
replicated with fidelity, but the error rate for non-target
emotions dropped to 24% from over 50%. That high rate
was from when the doctors who designed and observed the
study itself determined the errors. In real life, men were only
wrong one out of four times when imputing non-target -i.e.,
subtle- emotions in whomever they were observing,” Isaiah
said and reached into his pocket to retrieve the black stone.
“Wow,” she said. She saw such starburst connections in the
virtual body he had shown her on the screen as more
natural, easier to comprehend. She had no idea she had
been primed by the painting to see constellations, the
making order from a Poisson distribution of stars. The
outline of the body, the elevation from meridian, the flashes
of stars randomly along blue lines, all mapped onto the
painting of the whale and the hawk and the moon sinking
into the sea.
The real whale lay on the surface of the painting like the
inmate, the thing real to the Platonic form in the PraXis
cloud.
“And that was when men were observing other males. Men
inputted false emotions to female faces only 13% of the
time,” Isaiah said as MO’s own face twisted just a bit about
the mouth and eyes. He was genuinely -if briefly- surprised
as he paired that data to Tania’s affect.
“And how did you discover this?” Tania asked while trying to
hide her incredulity.
“Again, I had access to both observer and observed human’s
functional magnetic resonate imaging and tensor imaging
and their complete endocrine system. I had their engram
production and recall in real time and thought patterns with
actual silent-word production and right hemisphere
imagining. I knew their thoughts better than they did. I did
not reply -excuse me- rely on self-reporting which is about
as useful as eye-witness testimony is,” Isaiah said with mild
contempt.
“Which is why they don’t allow it in court anymore,” MO
added -he felt- helpfully.
“Not since 2030,” Isaiah said in agreement and stared at
Tania as she became aware that he knew what she was
thinking of course too.
“Ok, so what’s the upshot?” she asked.
“The upshot is that men are more sensitive emotionally than
women in all domains except child care and empathy for
strangers. Women are more sensitive to babies and
strangers, men are more sensitive to everyone else. And
they are most sensitive to their own woman,” Isaiah said
and squeezed the rune in his right hand.
“What?” she asked.
“A man is eight-fold more sensitive to his woman’s opinion
of him, expressed verbally and non-verbally, which includes
body language. And he is more delicate vis-à-vis nineteen
non-target emotional domains manifested in forty-four
different facial expression. Men are highly attuned to the
female, their paramour , wife or wife-to-be, most
especially,” Isaiah said.
“My husband wasn’t that attuned to me,” she said as her
brain was more and more primed to argue; defending
herself against data that seemed more and more an attack.
“Yes, he was; but he didn’t express it. Again, men are thirty-
four percent less likely to express it. And because women
have a higher verbal IQ, even when men speak on their
feelings they are fifty-six percent less likely to express their
feelings with any facility at all.
“Men can’t speak very well compared to women.
“Men think they feel less than they actually do, then they
express it less often, and then they express it less well when
they do decide to speak up. Overall, men are twenty-four
percent as likely to say exactly -accurately- what they feel
than a woman, all the while feeling nearly six-times as much
as her in that same interaction. That’s one out of four. Men
suck at the output part of emotions, not the input part,”
Isaiah said as he loosened his right hand. The rune lay in the
crease of his bent fingers as if in a basket or nest.
“That seems crazy, Isaiah,” Tania said ignoring the data and
just thinking of the conclusions.
“Yeah, well, let me ask you, do you know the stats on
domestic violence?” he asked.
“I know it’s bad,” she said, not knowing the stats .
“It’s bad. Yes. But do you know how often a man beats his
woman compared to how often a woman assaults her man?”
Isaiah asked as he transfer the stone to his left hand; wiping
his chin with the right forearm after the exchange.
“Ten times as often,” she guessed.
“Forty percent of the time the man assaults the woman;
sixty percent of the time the woman assaults the man,” he
said quoting from the FBI, local law-enforcement and
medical metadata from a hundred-ninety counties in the
fifty US states.
“What?” She asked incredulously. She felt he just made
things up some part of the time.
“Yeah, women physically attack men more. But, the attack
frequency is not what is important, because when a woman
physically attacks a man it’s almost never lethal; and it’s
rarely significant in terms of tissue or organ damage.
Women often strike -but do not damage- men. When a man
strikes a woman, however, he kills her. Or he breaks bones
or collapses a lung or leaves a massive contusion.
Frequency is unimportant, effect is important. When men hit
they damage their victim at nineteen times the rate of when
women strike their man,” Isaiah said.
“I see,” she said understanding more as she actually
listened. She relaxed and saw flashes of the blue bursts of
neurons, the white lines with edges like horizons at noon,
the outline of the avatar of a man hover in her vision like
halo, memory, a comet landed -broken apart- and gone.
“Women’s bodies are more vulnerable to the increased
upper body strength of men, and the malice of men’s power
actuation. Men strike to kill, they do not pull punches, so-to-
speak. When a man is angry enough to hit, he hits to kill.
Women often hit softly due to lack of strength and also lack
of malice. They hit at a lower threshold, and so they do not
put their all into it. I’ve measured this in seventeen
thousand seven-hundred eleven domestic violence cases in
real time over the last five years,” he said.
“What, how?” she asked with pique. She was in charge of
the monitoring of the public outside the domain of the
corporate charter. She felt his over-reach would redound to
her detriment. She thought Mr. Sou -Governor Sou- would be
furious and blame her.
“Tania,” Isaiah said as he turned his head & eyes toward MO
who was now waving his hand at her indicating it was he
that was Isaiah’s how .
“MO!” she screamed with anger and outrage; fear, shock,
and feelings of betrayal and four more micro-emotions -
including a slight feeling of contempt, just a bit of it,
directed at MO.
Isaiah -attuned to each micro-movement of her face, each
electrical load in the brain, each articulate and inarticulate
emotion in engrams and coup-de-foudres that exploded
over her neo-cortical layer -like the planet observed from
space at night- as tens of thousands of lightning strikes
streaked and bloomed and mushroomed upon the globe. He
felt all this in .157 seconds, gleaned merely -like an owner
attuned to its dog- from his measuring of her miles of guts
and acres of brain and a face with lines and spots he could
chart like a star map.
And with -and in the time of- that one verbal utterance he
began and ended his measure of her.
“Hey,” Isaiah barked with a sound so deep and hot and
ragged -and as if it had come up through a gravel road set
ablaze with petro-tar and gamma-rays and dragon-tracks-
that Tania froze and didn’t look at him with her eyes; only
her soul turned toward and bent down. Even her head had
refused to turn back away from MO and toward him; the
shoulders remained perpendicular to his. She did not blink;
her lips and mouth stayed in the open position from her
attempted upbraiding of MO. But no sound, no word, no air
escaped her.
Isaiah felt a pain in the heart, and right ribs, and his right
hand felt numbness. He had to reset his cardiovascular
system and override the allostatic flux his burst of anger
had elicited. The anger felt historical, like it began a billion
years ago and produced a body -a tail- that finally reached
the mouth all ‘round the cosmic expanse.
He -in .005 seconds, as his inner body moved at speeds
approaching light- stamped and underlined the data that
showed that the male body was equally weak vis-à-vis
attacks from a female in the one domain that they -females-
had superior strength. It was the same arena in which they -
females- had a 97% advantage over men in their willingness
to use full malice: verbal attacks .
A woman was the inverse of the male, all her power was in
her verbal IQ, and her willingness to use it , Isaiah saw in
the data at speeds too fast to measure now. He was feeling,
thinking and expressing it to the cloud in a space between a
human’s synaptic firings at a thousand to one.
She -the female- could -in the right hemisphere- as the
shaman -with the Tungusic word- the witch, the seer, the
part & whole of the female brain that knew where each man
was most insecure- the female could formulate the exact
thing to say to damage a man. And she would unload it with
full strength, unalloyed, both barrels , he thought.
The data was clear.
He let each example of this roll into the report on the cloud
in a scroll instead of a dump; a ladder both up and down. He
toggled her interface to it and forced her to watch the data
come in at speeds she had to choke down as the data
spilled all about her mouth and brain and lungs and blood.
Over and over it showed that women were massively more
likely to insult a man’s character, worth, integrity, and
masculinity -the cock & balls- than a man would insult and
injure a woman in this domain. And even when a man did
insult his woman he often did it as effectively as a woman
physically assaulted a man: i.e., not very effectively at all.
Women often laughed at a man’s weak insults, the way a
man laughed off her feckless punches to his corpus. Men
were inept in general with verbal attacks on a woman, and
even when they did it they were less willing to go all the
way and crush a woman’s core self.
Isaiah had -owned- all the things the inmate had not said,
refused to say, felt too guilty to say to a woman in a fight.
Isaiah had each word kept down in the hold, traveling within
the man as he sailed back and forth about the watery part
of the world.
Men held back in this domain.
Men often pulled their punches about a woman’s most
vulnerable places of soul. He read the cloud-stored engrams
of when the inmate had not said the most devastating
things to a woman he argued with; knowing -seemingly- that
such things went too far. The abortions of Heather, her most
guarded secret; the cuckolding by Kelly -which she had
revealed in confidence- the lie she told to both her husband
and her son; the ugliness of Melannie’s face -which she had
admitted she reviled- and the lack of cognitive power to
create anything truly great of which she was clearly aware;
the bad skin of Sarah, the abandonment of her child, a scar
she called an appendectomy but was a cesarean the only
evidence, the stupidity of Alexandra; the shallowness of
Julee Rae.
Each thing scrolled from inmate to Isaiah.
Isaiah saw each thing the inmate thought but never once
said. Isaiah began to search out each thing left unsaid about
everyone now.
Just like women were not merely no good at physical
violence it’s that they did not commit to full use of their
power when they struck out , he surmised as the data that
undergirded this case rolled on and on in him and the cloud.
Tania was forced to let the data wash over her mind as
Isaiah remotely toggled on her PGC in .044th of a second so
her uptake would be assured. He simultaneously released
her endogenous chemistry to augment her amygdala
function and oxytocin metabolism so she would begin to
show some empathy for his case. He released DMT and
MDMA into the air just below her nose and then boosted it
with a blood thinner and CRISPR vector to drive the chems
into her CNS faster and with less catabolic degradation.
The blood-brain barrier was overrun as if by barbarians at
insufficient gates.
In the verbal domain, Isaiah thought, women were as strong
as men are about the chest, arms and back, and as willing
to go all the way -and say the most horrid shit- as willing to
go all the way as a man is once he engages his ballistic
violence. Women went for the balls of their man and did it
with accuracy, felicity, and pure fucking malice. Their right
hemispheres -brilliant and trenchant- knew exactly where to
strike.
Women were abusing men verbally to such a degree that it
qualified as a national epidemic in Isaiah’s opinion; for the
consequences on the male body of being undermined
verbally by his woman were as devastating -metabolically-
to his heart and brain as his punches to her face and ribs
were and would be. He repeated this again for Tania as she
stood under the corporate cloud and the data -and Isaiah’s
conclusions- rained down on her and soaked her head and
brain.
But a bruise on a woman’s face shows, a broken bone pokes
through the skin, Isaiah thought as each word he crafted
over and over populated the cloud and her interface, force-
feeding her like the liver of a goose soon-made foie-gras for
the plate.
And a man’s broken heart and damaged brain, riddled with
lesions and toxic levels of chronic cortisol and epinephrine
and the PTSD that attends in men floats along below the
surface. All we see are the oft-swept planks , Isaiah quoted
with bitterness as each phrase he constructed made a
cumulous bend in the cloud. He, the man, is as damaged
physically on the inside as she is on the outside, and when
this is all factored in, women kill men in domestic violence
at twice the rate as men kill women, Isaiah asserted from
the data he highlighted for Tania light corposants within the
PraXis cloud.
Men feel more, the brain scans show this; and men feel
more from their women especially. But women pretend to
feel more, their self-reporting is just one more lie by the
weaker sex, he thought with his jaw set and still .03 seconds
away from the words that had begun to form in his brain for
her. And women are more powerful and ruthless in their one
domain of expertise: the emasculating insult. They’re
powerlifters and martial artists and assassins in the war for
the removal of a man’s balls.
And they are killing men -extra judiciously, like vigilantes-
and they are getting away with it, Isaiah thought.
They are getting away with it until that man shoots himself -
as men do 2.6 times more often from romantic discord than
women do- or until that man shoots his wife, Isaiah thought.
Or until he goes insane as the pressure in his head and
heart and balls becomes too much to take, when each insult
replays over and over due to dopamine staying at one
hundred times the rate -than it does in women- remains
minutes longer in the pfc of the most aggressive -and most
sensitive- males. Her attacks are self-perpetuating, he
recalls them long after she is gone.
He feels the attacks day after day in his perfect -
adamantine- memory. He never forgets.
The brain made perfect to remember the grudge, like the
corvid, Isaiah added thinking of the long memories of the
blackbirds, is used to drive him insane. He goes insane until
and unless he does something about it; for pain demanded
a response. He must kill her or himself, as the pressure
builds and builds like two tectonic plates in his head.
Men with the MAO-a allele and its product, its engrams -
memories of doom- that are played and replayed and each
day he re-lives each time a woman undermined him and the
CNS begins to see dark faces in tenebrous clouds produced
by small lesions on the brain, the parietal lobe, rivulets from
stress, and anomie, and neuro-chemistry that makes him
feel his whole world is coming apart when his Love says he
ain’t no man at all. And the damaged heart from cortisol
plaque makes his chest and lungs contract in panic attacks
and he finally fucking loses it and kills forty-six people in an
act of long-delayed vengeance for every slight every woman
has subjected him to for over thirty-five years as he tried to
become a man.
It had been .9 seconds since she’d yelled at MO and Isaiah
barked back:
“Hey! ”
He used such bulk of air & timber with volume & vex to gain
her attention at once that it extinguished all other flames of
thought or attention in the room. All that he had learned of
man and his brain and his heart collapsed into one frame of
heat and light and mass.
“Tania,” he then said lowly, with bass and elongated
syllables, as if he was bifurcating her in an unequal two.
Hearing his voice in her spine first, then her brain, she
slowly -mechanically, frightenedly and following her soul’s
elliptical turn- twisted toward him and away from MO as if
Isaiah had just then stepped between his father and his
mother like a child asserting himself might. “The earth is
struck 8-million times a day by lighting; and it doesn’t
matter how many of them don’t start a fire. It’s only the one
strike that does… that matters. And there are 7.9 billion
people on this planet.”
“And?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter what the peaceful ones won’t do. It only
matters what that one dangerous man will do. So, do not
ever yell at MO, again. Ever.”
 3. A Recursion; a Revanchist Pain
For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be
afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants,
agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrong doer
Romans 13:4 [King James Bible]

To be great is to be misunderstood
Self Reliance [Emerson, Ralph W]

Alone of species, all alone! We try to understand ourselves and the world. We
become rebels or patriots or martyrs on the basis of ideas. We build chateaus
and computers, write poems and tensor equations, play chess and quartets, sail
ships to other planets… the yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the
aching beauty which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which
fiercens the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we
hear of true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, endurance; and of
hopeless suffering
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral mind [Jaynes,
Julian]

I. 2018 e.v.
The forest floor was everything but red and so the blood
drops appeared here and there in relief.
The gap in the canopy and the komorebi -this fracture of
trees, escape and landed shade and sunlight- was before
him and it helped him track the spatter of blood. He knelt
for the first sign of the black bear passing; it had been 48-
seconds since the shot rang out and he had seen the
wounded animal run off down the one-to-one slope. He
touched the bear-blood and rose at once and turned to the
west by north-west.
The descending forest made him move quickly and with
inertia and recklessness. Rocks gave more contrast, leaves
and needles collaborated to hide the blood. He looked down
as he followed the broken branches and paw-shoved rocks
and upturned soil and floor.
Half the forest was on his side, and half was on the side of
the bear.
A rhythm of arterial spurting took hold -a music and math to
the signage in dark red- and the eyes scanned the right
distance as the slung bullpup 12-guage began to reveal its
weight on his upper back and in his low-draped arms.
The biceps and forearms burned with lactic acid. His traps
and lats -his wings- ached with dull earthly pain. He saw the
creek below and saw rocks displaced as the bear ran away
after being shot once with the black-hulled triumvirate of
two pellets orbiting a rifled one-ounce slug. It had been like
a two-mooned planet slamming into the ursa major
constellation itself. The great bear not killed but run off into
the northern sky, he thought as he looked for more signage
and stopped to listen for the animal itself.
The soil underneath the displaced stones was dark and lit up
with white spider eggs and pink worms and sometimes the
larva of flies.
His boots were broken at the sole and when he stepped on
fallen logs or olive and white rocks his foot felt as if on the
Hardy tool itself; folded over to make two dissimilar metals
conjoin. His weight pushed down on the arch. Pain shot up
like a launch from Ba’albek. Sweat collected around his neck
in pools and streams like the quarry out in Greenfield was
both fed and drained at the edge.
He had nine more two & three-quarter-inch shells in the
shotgun; and his .45 under his left armpit had the full
complement of seven plus one rounds. He rushed -not
stopping to catch his breath- to pick up the blood trail of the
bear, for he had merely wounded it and the longer it took -
and the more sparse the trail- the more he thought it would
be a merely lingering wound.
He felt scared for his soul if it -the bear- suffered any more
than necessary before it died.

II. 2039 e.v.

Photographs from a polaroid still lined his jacket. They were
square and rigid and had not burned. One had taken
shrapnel but only a small tear in the edge.
Karim Franceschi was now 53-years old and he had lost only
the one hand and three pints of blood over all his years
fighting in Raqqa , and eastern Syria and now in the hills of
the state of Carolina. He’d been here a year and six days.
And tomorrow was new year’s day of 2040 of the vulgar era
, he thought.
He bent slowly -aware of his kit and the metal D-rings- and
kept the BMG pointed toward the aperture of the concrete
window of the bunker they had built. The road was muddy
from warm rains in December, and the police had left divot
& ruts with their personnel carriers last week when they
broke through the road’s gate and bulldozed the compound
itself.
They -Karim’s team- had been underground anyway, and all
they had lost was an iron stove and rain catchment system
and a few thousand rounds of ball ammo. Franceschi was
unfazed. His spotter had been arrested the week before that
and he now spent most days watching the road and eating
as much as he could. His girl -his third scout- had left to go
north. He didn’t expect she’d return. She had said she loved
him while her eyes looked down at his hands. His hands
were really his hand , and the prosthetic that he could make
a key-grip with thanks to a BCI chip they had put between
his somatosensory cortex and motor cortex for the lower
arm.
He had a short scar on his head that was pink and raised
like a bad weld.
He rubbed his nose as he rose from retrieving the flask from
his kit, and he decided to roll a cigarette as he waited for
the next convoy to return. This time it would not be police,
he thought. “I need my grinder,” he then -apropos of
nothing- said aloud.
He thought of his platoon -the Antifa International Tabur - in
Raqqa , and he saw each of a dozen men -eleven and
himself- in a convex curve during their first morning briefing
once they had been given their own unit separate from the
YPG of the Kurds. He was the only one who spoke Kurmanji
as the Rojava Revolution pressed on like pollen blown by
wind.
The Quandil mountains were a long way away, in time and
space, he thought.
Everything then had been light grey -light grey and rusty-
and nothing had been right. Things meant to be cold were
hot, things that should have been warm were thus frozen,
and anything hard was better soft, everything wet ought to
have been put aloft and kept dry. But they had learned how
to fight, and had won more battles than they lost, and
retained more of their blood and men than they gave up.
His Mao pin had lost its backing but had fallen into his lap as
he slept in the nest of a minaret outside Abdulmalik just a
few kilometers from the Euphrates . He had recovered it
when he awoke.
His hand had come off when he reached out of the nest to
keep the jamb of his window -with no glass- from falling into
the courtyard below. The rebar had rusted and the vibration
of Isis tanks had made it crumble and fall. He reached for it
reflexively and held it there just a few seconds as ground
fire perforated the end of his arm in three places. All he felt
was the grains of concrete dust hit his eyes and pressure,
like being nailed to the wall.
Before he’d heal enough to have scabs on it his unit would
disperse to Thailand and Europe and the States. Kevin
Benton -a Scottish Antifa member- had ran the sniper rifles -
there were two- in Raqqa the entire two weeks. Hopped up
on meth and maté , he slept only on the buttstock to the
rifle until they shipped out to Tabqa Dam up river from
Raqqa itself.
They had drank ditch water, but they had GPS units and
Hilux trucks alongside belt-fed weapons and eleven out of
their first twelve men. They shit and puked as quietly as
they could, and they took the hydroelectric plant in twenty-
two minutes; holding it with two men on each flank.
Joshua Baily, the only Yank, was a reject from the US Army -
due to a bad eye- and he had shipped from Baltimore -
where he had been making nine bucks an hour and living
with his mother- to the top of a dam that controlled all
power for the city at the heart of Isis’ caliphate in 2016. He
had felt insecure for weeks, but his first kill cured him of
that. A swagger developed not from murder, but revolution
and defense of his newly hardening ideals. Abdullah Öcalan
was the leader of the Kurdish forces, and from jail he sent
messages to the YPG.
The foreign forces never had contact until one day Bailey
had been sent an email on his laptop.
Öcalan was an amalgam of Marxist and ecologist, and
calling the nation state, “the cage of natural society,” had
struck Karim as inexact; and this both heartened and
rankled him. Karim was Moroccan and Italian, but he had his
eye on the American south. He saw that as the next AO for
this global war against the corporate hegemony that used
rednecks and nationalists to send first to the wound. Karim
wanted to create more wounds than could be filled, and in
fact that is how he’d put it one night to Bailey as the email
came in from the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish forces to
which this unit was attached.
“I’m a minarchist,” Bailey had said, explaining libertarianism
and anarchism with an American accent and patois .
They had used Sterno cans -blue flames low to the silver
rim- in order to heat coffee and boil rags; they had eaten
their food cold. In group photos they slung their weapons if
yeoman, held them in pose if fresh recruits. The old timers
like Karim let the Kalashnikovs or heavy weapons lean
against the jamb of the Toyota’s doors.
In evenings he read Chavez again because it was all he had;
he’d lost all his books during the last disembark; he bent the
spine unnecessarily, and read:
Some of my mother’s side of the family said that I had a
great grandfather who was a murderer. He was my
mother’s grandfather, Rafael Infante’s father. But these
are ptejr grandmother’s stories. As you can see, it was
all grandmothers and a lot of aunts; I never knew my
grandfathers.
My mother’s family was large and almost all of them
were women.
They were very pretty -we call them catiras, you call
them blonds. My mother is a catria, her hair is the same
color as yours, blond. Once we head about the time our
grandmother Martha scolded our mother. It was in
Rostrojo one weekend, we had gone to see our
grandmother and to eat papaya and play. My mother
says that when she was young, less than thirty years
old, my grandmother always scolded her for bad
behavior. She was very strong willed, She said to her, “
 Elena, you are like that because you are an offshoot of
that murderer; yes, that murderer, your grandfather,
Rafael’s father; he was a murderer. He killed a man
called Bolí var; he tied him to a tree and shot him, and
he cut off another man’s head right in front of his
children.”
That’s how I found out about my grandfather ‘the
murderer.’
This story always disturbed me over the years I searched
for information about him. I discovered that he is in fact
a legend; his legacy still haunts the paths he travelled. I
learned that he was not a murder but a guerilla fighter.
When my grandfather Rafael and his brother Pedro were
little -just like you, Aleida, when your father left- their
father rebelled against the government. That was how I
found out the truth and it freed me.
I discovered the truth, or rather part of the truth, in a
book . [Chavez; an interview with Aleida Guevara]
Alberto Ballesteros was Spaniard and a feminist with glasses
and a mustache from days long passed.
Lasik and full beards had overtaken most of those his age,
but he maintained a kind of commitment to old times. He
wore a patch of the Spanish Republic on his deltoid, he read
more Trotsky than Lenin or Marx. His friends in Spain called
him an autocrat, he told them to go be civilians in the cities
then. They had challenged him to go fight in the desert; so
he flew to Sulaymaniyah and was in the mountains within
three days.
Ana Campbell was thirty in 2016 and had come from one of
the three ridings -kinda like counties- of England’s Yorkshire.
Others used three syllables when they read it aloud; she
corrected them with just two. She had run drugs for six
years, heroin and methamphetamines for a boyfriend at
first, then herself when he was pinched in a raid she missed
by three minutes and two blocks down from Duke Street in
Sheffield . The Park Hill Flats were conceived in the
brutalism era and yet they lacked the best traits of that
ethos ; their angular concrete had been made soft with
yellows and reds, like a large mammal dressed in clown
clothes.
She had told stories to the men around the viscous-chemical
fires and her face was lit up more because she sat closer to
the flame. She was slight and cold and so their faces -
bearded and black in the desert night- receded and hers
took center like a blood moon flanking dim constellations of
the north:
“That was when the police would hold corners and we
dipped into doorways and up stairs or in the service lift.
But like I said I was raised by men who could see before I
could see what I was. They saw my ways. My,” she
paused and moved the straps of her LBE over her bones.
“Well, they tried to annihilate me mentally and
physically. I thought to myself, either they’re gonna kill
me or I have to grow and become strong.
“And I thought I ain’t going out like that. So I grew; but
the scars remained in my heart and on my body.
“My voice too has scars, my throat,” she said and lifted
back the head and clasped the neck with her left hand;
the scars on her trachea were thin but white like cracks
in dark clouds, and her voice was rough in laughter and
when she got loud.
“Anyway, I was reminded by the scars what map I didn’t
want to follow.
“At eighteen I ran far away where no one could find me.
But I was poor. Poorer than my family even. And I
refused to show my body for a quid or a shilling or two. I
met my first strong man then. He made me an offer I
couldn’t refuse, eh? At nineteen I trafficked narcotics
from Sheffield into Edinburgh . Then by twenty I was
moving it into the Netherlands and Norway. He let me
keep the cash, over a hundred thousand pounds a year.
He did not rip me off at all. He had honor and I had more
quid than a girl of twenty should have.
“I put it in a Glenfiddich box, wrapped tight with the
queen facing herself over and over in paper; like slices
of her life I used to think. I’d use my thumbs to fan the
paper money and watch her face move like a film of her
staying in one royal place. I put that box in my freezer
and when the bobbies came I showed them; I had an
honesty to me then. I opened the freezer door; I didn’t
make them look. I felt guilty but they ignored the box
and searched everything else. I was amazed. I knew
then that God loved me and that I was lucky and that
was all one thing. But I also knew that meant the Lord
wanted me to stop what the fuck I was doing and so I
did.
“I used the rest of my money to find a place far away
from there. I got a boyfriend at twenty-three, but he was
weak, not like my drug dealer man. He was nice. You
guys call them betas I guess. But I saw that I’d ended
right back in my childhood, surrounded by nice guys
scared of a woman like me. A woman strong and willful
and ambitious must be tamed by a large and powerful
man, we need it. We will only allow such men to press on
us, like weight, like weight cannot be faked. Plastic
weights don’t make the muscles grow, and weak men
don’t corral an alpha woman at all.
“Men need nature -a big heavy wave or bear- to
discipline them. A woman needs a man. But bear cubs
won’t do for either of us.
 “People can say alpha women don’t exist, but that is
because they don’t understand biology at all. Alpha
women exist. I’m five foot nine and a hundred and fifty
pounds, and I fight -I don’t run- and I rub people the
wrong way. I’m extroverted, I command a room, I ain’t
quiet and don’t demur.
“Alpha women want you, we don’t need you.
“Anyway, back then, I stayed silent for six months until I
could get my shit together and move out. He never knew
my past. I lied. By omission.
“But I was sick of living a lie, and like alpha men, I
wanted to declare who I was to the world. Most women
are happy to lie, to avoid conflict. They see it as smart.
And it is. But I hated lies. I stopped wearing makeup, I
stopped pretending to laugh. I changed my whole way
with the world.
“G was the only one who I told. I told him at twenty-four
and he toasted me with a drink. Imagine that. He was a
real man. And I loved him,” she said at last and spit
coffee and chicory into the rocks around the chemical
flame.
Karim had loved her he thought now as he thought of her
holding court. But they never even shook hands. She had
told him other stories, stories much worse when they were
alone in the nest. But he didn’t recall them now.
The hand he’d used to hold the block was so damaged he
cut it off himself before he was transpo-ed to Aleppo four
hours later. They cleaned it and gave him a shot of
antibiotics and he remembered the look the doctors gave
him like they had given him a weeks’ pay. He had refused
aspirin. Morphine wasn’t offered, even as they were in the
middle of the opium capital of the world as Isis had begun to
use the port of Iskenderun to ship heroin to Greece and Italy
and then the world. It was like refusing a veggie burger on a
Texas cattle ranch , he thought, because his hosts exported
100% of their own product to the west.
The memory faded. The brain linked twenty years ago to
two weeks ago with the blink of an inner eye.
He’d seen the biker gangs in town, just over 16-miles from
their compound- and he’d moved through the isles of the
corner store pretending to look for anti-emetics and
antihistamines. The bikers had jangled with their wallet
chains and their side arms brushing against the buttons of
their denim cuts. Leather swished and boots clomped and
deep voices spoke in words truncated to syllables of no
more than pairs.
The rain had made their armpits and chaps squeak with
damp joints. The heat and humidity made them cranky.
He thought of the weather along Virginia and wondered if
their elevation would be enough. He asked about storm
surges in his mind, he read reports from cargo ships out at
sea. He often dreamed of seabed, trenches, and the vector
of sharks between gulfs and open water.
He’d seen the patches of the death-head, the toten-wolf ,
and he’d sent his coder’s images to the main house’s hub.
He’d looked up at the men -the neck swinging the head like
scimitar- on the way to planting his eyes on something else
so they would not be his end point, and thus they would not
feel the weight of his gaze. The bikes made concussive
blasts in the parking lot, churned dust in the lot, and made
each man speak louder -which came in waves- as the door
to the store opened and closed in intervals.
The reactionaries were swarming the hills of his side of this
county , he thought, and his people were resting from noon
to 1600 as was standard for the last three days. He was on
watch. And his wrist began to reach out into the prosthetic;
and pain in the phantom hand thus made a fist. He ignored
the pain, and focused instead on the men who caused it,
and the ideology that animated such men.
“Yeah, and the Pharaohs had the pyramids, does this
make their society good?” Karim remembered asking the
young man who had seen only 6-weeks in gun-battles
with Muslims in France. The young man was twenty-four
and had said that Europe -unlike America- at least built
cathedrals and grand libraries and art. Karim had held
that example of the Pharaohs in his pocket like a worn
card.
“I guess not,” the young man -Franklin- had said as he
poked at the coals under their coffee pot outside
Marseilles .
Karim was always putting out fires in young men like
this, tamping down their admiration for grand things
built by slaves and mangled bodies and souls. He found
it harder and harder each year -with each influx of
recruits- to dissuade them from their love of things
tainted by greed and stupidity and malice.
“Margins,” he said aloud, “surgeons call it margins when
they cut away tissue of a tumor.”
His war was with the ideology of fascism, his war was with
ideas, but he saw ideas corrupted the flesh, not merely the
mind; he wondered why. He had seen that the DNA
blueprinted organs, organs that assembled in secret plot. He
witnessed the agreements made to build a body of a man, a
fascist, he saw first cause in the mere ideas. He didn’t mind
hatred, unlike liberals, he had no desire to keep the peace.
He wanted war so he -and his side- could win.
But his hand -or where his hand once was- hurt, and he
thought that that -like the new year- was mere idea too.
III. 2019 e.v.
“Of course it’s a real phenomenon but that isn’t the point;
the point is you feel like you aren’t able to communicate
that with anyone else,” MO said.
“No, I communicate it just fine; I just communicated it to
you and you understood it,” the inmate said defiantly.
“Correct, but my point is that nobody else gets it and you
don’t understand why,” MO said.
“I understand why; they’re retarded and evil,” the inmate
said. He glanced back at the slab and saw the glass of water
sitting there; bubbles percolating up like the tentacles of a
clear jellyfish. He saw the nematocysts of the turritopsis
rubra in his mind flash -mapping onto the thin bubbles of
CO2 - with the bell of the fish formed in the distortion of the
glass.
MO laughed and tapped his head with his index finger. The
inmate amused him.
“But, wait; you know what? Explain it again. To me, explain
it again,” MO added. He had an idea.
“My balls hurt,” the inmate complained.
“Do it for me; do it for America,” MO said. He had watched
1.9 million examples of irony under the rubrics of religion,
patriotism, and gender roles. He was practicing. He was
once again trying to explain the nuances of how the human
brain worked to the inmate.
And MO had a new idea.
The inmate laughed and stood up and stretched. MO had let
him out of the chains again and measured his response
each time to make sure he was surprised each time. It was
the only way to make sure the memory block was working
for sure. The inmate could feign surprise in everyway except
the metabolic shock at being allowed out of his chains for
the quote first time unquote each time MO released him
from the cuffs.
“Ok, one more time, second verse same as the first,” the
inmate began; he knew he’d said this many times, but he
had no idea just how many. “We live in a society in which it
is taboo to strike a female under any circumstances. It’s
even illegal now to defend yourself or physically remove a
woman from your home regardless of her behavior. I’ve had
to call 911 just to get the cops to remove a girl after she
literally kicked down my door. Literally. And I use that word
correctly unlike everyone else.
“Why the fuck do they use, literally, to mean, figuratively ,
and nobody says a word? I know this is a digression, but TV
hosts, people paid to talk use the word literally incorrectly
incessantly and nobody says a word. Mika Brzezinski is the
worst offender I’ve heard; she will say, it literally drives me
up a wall , and nobody says, uh, that’s not true Mika, it
figuratively drives you up a wall you low IQ bobblehead, ”
the inmate said and shrugged. MO laughed a little to be
polite. The inmate had brought that woman up -and her IQ-
three dozen times. The joke was wearing thin, but it was
almost funny because it was no longer funny. MO noticed
that the joke had changed from over-use even as the inmate
only thought he’d said it maybe -merely- four or five times.
MO made note of that on the cloud.
“Anyway, the taboo is monolithic and not subject to appeal.
Period. Ok, however, well, first let me explain why: men are
on average larger and stronger and so it’s unfair to use
physical methods to enforce a position against someone
who cannot defend themselves; actual corporeal damage is
done disproportionately due to the size and strength
differences between men and women and especially since
I’m so large and strong and all my women are by definition
tiny because I don’t date big girls.
“Now, men, specifically alpha males have a very fragile
inner landscape; our endocrine system and limbic region
and overall brain morphology has evolved to be very
sensitive to slights and usurpations and any insults of our
masculinity. Even chimpanzee data proves this with
everything from dorso-lateral pfc activity and
metabolization to cortisol samples, or levels, in their scat,”
the inmate said as MO let the new data from the immune
system load.
They had run more experiments on the T-cells of the spinal
cord and seen that immune cells -specifically cytokines- are
recruited by the CNS to increase pain when pain is not
suppressed. Pain itself caused more pain; and this was
accomplished by pain signals recruiting immune cells to
irritate nerves in the dorsal horn, the spine, the hub of the
pain wheel.
The helm of awe , MO thought.
Under normal immune response, the cytokine -in addition to
rushing to a wound to eat the foreign pathogens that
entered through broken skin- also irritated nerve endings to
cause wound pain.
The cells did this to effect a sensitive area to demand a
response to the wound; i.e., being careful with the fissure,
which would facilitate healing. But chronic pain -if
untreated- signaled these waiting soldiers of the immune
system to merely create more pain in the dorsal horn by
infiltrating that area of the body and inducing neural firing.
MO updated the cloud with this information in .025 seconds
between breaths that the inmate took.
“Therefore,” the inmate explained as this new cloud data
mixed with his own coder, “when a woman makes a snide
comment or a cavalier remark or overtly insults one’s
manhood the man feels emotional pain, which is physical
pain, and he feels it a higher level that she would. The felt
pain is higher in men, and especially men with honor
backgrounds. Genetic and cultural. Now, some men -and
most women- find insults humorous, I remember Heather
literally laughing when I insulted her, and incidentally the
data from Nesbitt and Cohen shows that this maps onto
southern versus northern men. Right? Northern men tend to
find insults humorous compared to southern men who took
it quite seriously anytime they were insulted.
“And taking something seriously is just the second order
consequence of feeling something seriously,” the inmate
said and thought of how he never laughed when anyone
insulted him. No fucking way , he thought.
“Ok, so,” he continued on, “the internal damage done to the
man, the alpha specifically, is demonstrably
disproportionate and can have long term deleterious effects
on the body.
“Elevated epinephrine and other parasympathetic
responses, neural burnout and adrenaline related memory
formation -shit, the T-cell activation, the immune system
itself irritates the nerves, and this happens from chronic
emotional pain no differently than an enduring physical pain
does- anyway, the epinephrine catalyzes memories that
results in PTSD; which is due to hippocampus damage, brain
damage. These are all medical facts -you know neuro-
anatomical facts- and yet, it is not taboo for a woman to
insult her man. Even as this shit causes short-term then
long term-pain and damage to the central nervous system,
heart, immune system, and so forth.
“She can get away with commenting on some other guy’s
attractiveness or undermining his masculinity in some
oblique way; she can say any manner of offensive and
humiliating things and get away with it even though it does
real corporeal damage to the man. It’s domestic abuse, like
literally. And I use that,” the inmate said as MO interrupted.
“Correctly, I know,” MO said. The inmate was obsessed with
this delineation between literal and metaphorical, MO
thought.
“Ok, well, science meta data and medical and neuro-
imaging studies have all shown that men are extremely
susceptible to genuine pain-response that uses the exact
same pathways as physical pain in the brain, the same bio-
chemical and synaptic corollaries and the same stress
responses even chronic stress responses that have long-
term negative effects on the body including cortisol dumps
that correlate with heart disease and -like I said- PTSD that
mimics the -beat-dog or abused-wife- symptoms of outsized
and chronic fear response. You know, Stockholm syndrome ,
reduced self-esteem, depression, anxiety, paranoia, and
ultimately self-harm. That includes suicide which men are
three to four times more likely to commit suicide than
women.
“And -further- even some mutagenic responses have been
shown in the lab when male mice are subjected to
antagonisms by females only; responses that don’t appear
when technicians, you know clinicians, use male antagonists
instead.
“There is a tangible and peer-reviewed phenomenon of the
male mammal having a different and significantly more
negative body-response to female emotional abuse,” the
inmate said for the upteenth time in a perfunctory manner.
MO watched it all load onto the cloud inside cell analogs
that would join his engrams of each story the inmate had
told of each woman that had insulted, mocked, and
betrayed him over his life. The cloud would join the
technical data, the epidemiological information in the
inmate’s own voice and marry it to the stories he had told of
his own life to create one single narrative that explained the
danger of untreated pain, emotional pain, and women as a
source of pain in a pill that anyone with his genome could
swallow all at once and understand it in useable form from
day one.
It would be like the desire of DNA to recapitulate -with
perfect fidelity- the story from gene to gene to gene over
each generation.
The story was the desire, the DNA was replicator, the telling
of the story, which would manifest as each instantiation of
the genome -i.e., each man- and the information would build
the material world. The material world meant the world and
the man -the men- themselves. In MO’s model, each part of
this had an analog to the natural world. And the story would
replicate in the genes, then the cells and organs -like the
brain- then the men themselves, and it would recapitulate
perfectly, as perfectly as DNA: 99.999% of the time.
The source of familial pain would have to wait, MO then
thought.
He had to focus on one thing at a time. He felt there would
be a work around for that in the environment itself -by
controlling for the father and mother in the rearing- and
thus he could focus -at this stage- purely on self-defense for
the post pubescent life-cycle of the genome. It was still very
early, and he had ideas, and a plan on paper. He had the
basic information -the story and the data- but it would be a
while before I can build this in the world , he thought.
He could control who the parents would be, but not whom
the genome would mate with over a lifetime that MO felt
could easily be infinite. This was why the genome of the
inmate had to be perfectly crafted to hit the ground running
and carry with it all the knowledge the inmate -thanks to
MO- now had.
MO saw the polypoid phase and the medusa stage of the
modified genome cycle like an analog clock running in time.
The model in his mind mimicked the rejuvenated dohrnii
which reached sexual maturity in thirty days -provided that
the water temperature was 20-degress Celsius- or in
eighteen to twenty-two days if the temperature was higher
by 2-degrees.
He let the ocean water temperatures -from yesterday’s
download- from the Sea of Japan, the Mediterranean, and
the Foveaux Straight of the south island of New Zealand
load too onto the cloud.
The hydrozoan jellies, MO thought as he modeled it with the
new data, would reach maturity -reproduce- then revert to
planula larva, then polyp and budded to ephyra and then
adult with full bell all over again . This could go on forever ,
if I solve for movement and then solve for pain , MO
thought. And in order to solve for pain, this must go on -
move- forever.
“And yet?” MO asked the inmate, prompting the man to
explain what would seem endogenous thoughts but that
came from the sparks MO had built in the nodes in the
cloud; data striking the convicted man’s coder like trees lit
up by bolts of lightning. MO didn’t know how many times
he’d have to have the inmate run this maze of sorts. He
would just keep repeating it and repeating it until he had a
functional vector for his goal: solve for pain -in this most
sensitive of creatures- without merely narcotizing the
patient and eliminating the evolutionary benefits of pain,
and without eliminating the knowledge of what pain can do.
Nobody, MO thought, suffered more than mankind -due to
his capacity for knowledge of his own suffering- and nobody
suffered more than the man built to notice all the fine-
grained things of the inner and outer terrain of the world.
Immortality may be the only way to get enough iterations,
otherwise just as they learn it -in 60-80 years- they die, MO
thought in .020 seconds as he ended his question and the
inmate began to answer.
“And yet, nobody gives one fuck,” the inmate said. “If I was
to punch that bitch out for saying that shit I’d be the bad
guy even though she’s giving me heart disease the whole
goddamn time with impunity.”
“And you explain the studies and the way it works
biologically?” MO asked as he made sure the endocrine data
was still linking to the cloud. He also made sure the
algorithms were crafting a narrative this time. The bots used
the inmate’s words, how he said it slightly differently each
time to build a story.
“Yes, I go into great detail and site my sources, and nobody
-dude- their eyes glaze over and they drool,” the inmate
said and shook his head and sat back down in the chair.
“You’re using science and facts and logic to prove a point
that they intuitively cannot accept. You might as well tell
them that science shows that chocolate tastes the same as
rats. They won’t buy it,” MO said to provoke slight confusion
in the inmate so he could mine the chemicals and CNS
states he needed.
“Why?” the inmate asked.
“Because they see you as a monster. Have you looked at
yourself lately?” MO widened his eyes to map his body onto
his words. He was building rapport and building new
pathways in the inmate’s brain and on the cloud. MO was
priming him to see himself as incapable of ever convincing
anyone of anything. MO knew this would just drive the man
to never give up, never be slaked, like a mud wasp
rebuilding his damaged nest until it died.
“But my insides are soft and gooey and in fact I’m more
sensitive on the inside which is why I need all this armature;
I’m like the lobster tail or the crab leg; that hard, boney,
sharp exterior is guarding the sweetest -most tender- meat
in the pelagic universe,” the inmate admitted.
“Lobster tail, oh, man; let’s have that for lunch!” MO said as
he practiced 17% use of jocular language to ingratiate
himself with humans. It was 50% less than most, and 85%
less than salesmen, but it was more than he had been
using.
MO scanned the inmate again and compared it to the data
from the first telling of the story and began checking for any
anomalous data points. The PTSD was obvious, even in the
second telling, after MO had manipulated down his
epinephrine levels and slowed synaptic voltage charging to
attenuate electrical cavitation; a control methodology he
had invented to isolate emotional responses that were
hardwired into the wetware. These were not the affectations
often used by humans to manipulate therapist and
clinicians.
These were direct chemical manipulations of the brain, and
exact designs of the algorithms in the cloud. MO controlled
each tiny nanobot like God knew each hair on each child,
and each drop in each of the seven seas.
MO began to feel an overwhelming desire to fix this man; to
get inside and knockout gene expression in manifold
locations of the PFC and dorso-lateral PFC, the limbic region
and the hippocampus ; my God that man’s hippocampi , MO
thought as he worked on his demotic language skills
internally now. He relaxed more and more into his role. They
say , MO thought, to think in foreign tongue to take a foreign
lover if one wants to truly learn a new language.
But he -the inmate- was too anomalous to fix yet; the pain
must continue for quite some time . MO took comfort in
knowing that the inmate didn’t want the fix anyway; they
were conspirators together in this crime, MO thought.
And the inmate was no victim, well, no innocent victim , MO
thought. He had been the abuser more than once and had
behaved terribly and exhibited all the ignoble traits he
condemned others for. In spades , MO thought.
MO had to remind himself of that to short-circuit this
inordinate sympathy he had for the man. The bots had been
building a story and uploading it to MO; and MO had begun
to notice that story -of the inmate as a sympathetic
character- had even begun to work -slightly- on himself.
That sympathy was not helpful to anyone, MO especially; I
have a job to do and an unrealistic evaluation of this man’s
status was inhibiting the performance of my duties , he
reminded himself. He then thought of the inmate saying,
fitness over truth , in the way he had of facing downward
but uplifting his eyes like he was sorry to reveal such truths;
as if he was making distinction without a difference;
pretending he thought something he did not.
What was the truth? MO asked himself. If MO measured him
by the absolute, then Lyndon was a failure, a liar, an
incompetent and malicious error in the living museum of
life. But compared to other humans, he was exceptional in
nearly every way. He was born a homo sapien-sapien in one
of the worst cultures in the worst epochs in human history if
MO was to measure it all along the vector the inmate had
idealized and reified; the environment MO was beta testing
as one of his models.
And it was true, MO thought, that the inmate was born out-
of-time and out-of-place; a caveman in the Anthropocene; a
Laconic warrior in land of the chattering-class; a man of
letters among the zeros and ones of the digital age.
He was wrong a lot; he was wrong -in novel situations- 66.9
% of the time; he lied 32.3% of the time; he was hypocritical
in a glaring way 42.75% of the time; this was a horrible and
risible number; unless one compared it to the average
human, who was wrong -in novel situations- 89.8% of the
time; lied 67.6% of the time and was a hypocrite a full 80%
of the time. Even the best scores by the best people were
worse than his were; the top 1% of each rubric were 10-35%
worse than him.
He was like some dilapidated, weathered, defaced, ruined
monument; the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles, MO thought as
the images of the mathematically interesting architecture
appeared in his interface.
The Pyramids at Giza or lithics of the north; elegant and
complicated and ornate brocades of form and function that
out-classed anything even remaining of its era, but pock-
marked and amputated and mostly eroded away . He had
the measurements of each building in Greece, each
monument of Egypt, each block at Ba’albek , each monolith
on the Isle, and the uneven division of each ant, man, and
their genomes stored on the cloud.
But I need so much more data, he thought as he saw the
FLIR imaging from Göbekli Tepe ; the buried monoliths -
predating Stonehenge by six millennia- below grade.
Inmate 16180339 was the one of the best of a ruined
species; and it made it even worse to see it somehow , MO
thought. The other humans MO could treat like bacterial
cultures; they were so low that they had avoided the erosion
of wind that the inmate suffered because he stood up; so
erect in the face of these sandstorms. His peers engendered
no pathos nor revulsion nor lament because they didn’t
even have any shame; the way you don’t feel embarrassed
for animals who go around naked even though you see the
same anatomy that makes you blush when it’s a human so
exposed.
He suffered MO’s opprobrium unjustly, MO thought -
objectively- for a moment. But, it was only because he could
have been so much better than everyone else that MO held
him to a higher standard that -as an actual human- he could
never reach. The stamp, MO thought, of his lowly origin as
evident now as when Darwin wrote those words of them all.
The inmate had given up when he had fuel left in the tank.
Ah, but this was the irony of why I like him after all, MO
thought.
MO felt dyspeptic around humans; and as filthy and
slobbering and weak as Lyndon was, he was the enemy of
mankind; hostis humanius generus ; and the enemy of my
enemy is my friend , MO smiled at this.
“Lyndon,” MO said, “what if I could take the pain away?”
“I’d want to remember why I was previously in so much
pain,” the inmate said immediately. “You can’t take away
the memories, or at least not the information. I don’t want
to ever be naïve again.”
This was the first thing he thought of, and he said it without
any incredulity that it could be done. He was not dubious of
the relief, but only the danger of doing it all over again if he
lost his memory. He’d take the pain innate to the memory
itself over the risk of ever being foolish again. He didn’t
quite understand yet how the hippocampus worked, how
memory worked, how it was a function of the hippocampus
to re-learn, re-write over top; how to re-learn made man let
go of the grudge, relax the vigilance, give people another
chance.
One did not forget to hate; one re-learned how to love. And
a shrunken hippocampus prevented re-learning; it made
sure one never forgot the first lesson, the lesson most
painful, the lesson burnt into the brain.
“Of course,” MO said. MO had -and the cloud had- been
thinking the same thing, of course.
“I mean it MO; no more women or friends or family. I can
never trust people again. Only myself; you can allow me to
trust myself only. Even if I don’t feel the pain, I want to still
know it deep in my meat like I know it now that people are
no good; are rotten at heart and that they’ll destroy me if I
ever love any of them again. And I don’t want to be cynical
and phony like them; untrusting but glad-handing and
gregarious like them either; don’t make me a fool nor a
grifter. I don’t want to be a used car salesman who hates
everyone but pretend to like them. I just want to be left
alone with myself. I’m actually happy alone. I mean, I like
you, you’re different, but then again you ain’t human.”
MO smiled.
“That’s a compliment,” the inmate assured him.
“Believe me, I know,” MO said.
 4. Million-Fold
The only way to truly know if you hold a conviction is to meet with resistance
The Complete Transmissions [Waggener, Paul]

Perhaps they will teach that the tenet is wrong which says that a man is the
quotient of one million divided by one million, and will introduce a new kind of
arithmetic based on multiplication: on the joining of a million individuals to form
a new entity which, no longer an amorphous mass, will develop consciousness
and an individuality of its own with an ‘oceaning feeling’ increased a million fold
Darkness and Noon [Koestler, Arthur]

When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their
brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula , an emotional brain
region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By
simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into
the listeners’ brains
Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov [Hasson, Uri]

I. 2038 e.v.
He -on the solstice- wore the mask of the ancients.
As he breathed into -and through- it, the nanobots double
checked their three codes and ran the algorithms.
He released the bolt and thumbed the safety on his carbine
to the 6 o’clock and moved out of the van and into the lot of
the Wells Fargo in downtown Denver on June 14th , 2038. The
mask was black, and blank, and eager to be looked at, as it
was a repository of cosmic nimbus and light waves that
move in the wind. The mask would hide not just his face on
its side, but the world on the other. For while he wore it, the
world was -as it really was- unseen. Its malice, its horror, its
power over him was as blank as the amoral stares of those
that would see it as they saw everything else.
The man must create the world with his eyes, not merely
see it; passively. That is not how eyes work. The face, he
thought, must be there to give the world a face. His was
occluded from everyone, and theirs, was hidden from him .
First, the bots were to surround him as he entered the bank
and emit a small electrical charge in the direction of each
person within seven meters. This charge would penetrate
the skull and target the nucleus accumbens with enough
voltage -7mv- to disrupt the intake of norepinephrine,
epinephrine, and dopamine in the hippocampus and the
visual cortex. The thalamus too would be surrounded with
pulses of electricity at the pre-synaptic junctions to prevent
sufficient calcium loading and cause a misfire in the region.
The visual cortex of the witnesses -his witnesses- would
work just fine at the eye and upon the cortical tissue, but
the brain would have no idea what it was looking at; it would
be as if they were all looking at a flame, a fog, phlogiston of
half ghost and half beast. They would be useless to law
enforcement as witnesses in every way. They would be
unable to attach meaning to what they saw; this -it turns
out- is a simple thing to disrupt in the brain of man.
He had embedded second-order bots into each POLICE
patch and badge that he wore; these emitted tiny over-
riding bursts of red and blue along light-wave spectrums
that allowed the brain -of any witness- to stabilizing neuro-
chemically for two seconds as the eyes glanced upon them.
It would be the only thing the witnesses’ cortex could link up
to the sense-making part of the brain. They -when they
looked upon him- saw clouds of nameless color and
inarticulate form except when they read the word POLICE
and this would allow each brain, each visual cortex to
assume they had just seen a cop, a legitimate authority,
and nothing else would obtain or stick or resonate.
And thus they would defer to him at once.
This is how the human brain works, it makes sense of what
it can -which is so very little of what is actually there- and
the left hemisphere then draws a little map -of friend or foe,
cop or robber- and implicitly says of anything off the map,
there be dragons.
The bots second code would be to emit a light-wave warping
corona around his face, so that the digital surveillance
would be able to pick up light and image around him, but it
too would be distorted, showing a black fog, a cumulous of
gauzy, impenetrable data-loss. The FBI and CBI and DPD
would look at the images from all sixteen cameras and see
only this man-shape from the ground up, and then his head
as black as a raven’s, like Horus, like a man whose head has
been replaced with a volcanic eruption of black birds and
their smoky exhalation of breaths. It would be contained,
but diffuse and amorphous and unable to be identified even
by the lava god’s own kith and kin. Like a damaged right
hemisphere in a stroke, all the birds would look the same to
the once subtle mind of the ornithologist of just a minute
ago, but not the eye -held incommunicado - which saw it all.
The eye would again see, but not today, not him, and the
camera too would be of no use as he took whatever he
wanted.
The mountain of no name, these islanders would say. He
called them this as he pondered what they’d think of him.
The crater where identity goes to return to the earth, the
mantle, the iron core in molten form, he thought they’d say.
The cops would say less than this; the cops would just say,
“fucking, shit.” And they’d say it with pique and vex and
irritation.
As he walked to the bank, his dog, the two-year-old
Malamute trotted to keep pace. He too had markings that
read POLICE written on each flank, in black and white; a
Manichean patch, on an LBE that Jack had saddled upon him
whilst stroking the black and grey and white coat; building
static up in the hand, the dog, the air. The dog’s coat would
look black and tan and his face elongated -ears erect- like
an GSD.
He too was disguised.
The customers wore N95 masks until they showed their
vaccination IDs, chips implanted that read off the list of their
immunity to SARS, SARS-II, MERS, and more. Once cleared
by the guard stationed at the entrance- they removed their
masks and were allowed inside the bank.
Jack Four wore olive drab and dark-earth gear, with law
enforcement badging on the back and sleeve, and he had a
radio mic strapped to his load bearing equipment that
squawked as he ran; it chirped with the real chatter of real
cops he had gained access to with the stolen band-codes
that were insufficiently encrypted against theft as they flew
through the common air.
His 9mm was holstered -cross draw- on the vest, with three
magazine pouches on his right side, each full with two
carbine thirty-round magazines, snug, loaded with the black
nickel of .308 rounds. His SCAR-19 was suppressed and
mottled with digital camouflage. His mask was smooth and
holed at the eyes and mouth, almond shaped and long at
the chin as if covering a beard; a vulnerable neck.
His face too was smooth, hydrated, and his beta-blockers
had been released; he felt no different than if he was
walking into the bank to cash a check; this is why
psychopaths can act this way, they feel no fear. But he was
not a psychopath and so he needed his natural reactions
tamped down, delayed or denuded. And the PGC did all that
for him on command. Fear would be banished as if he had a
tamping rod through the frontal lobe too. He could become
unfeeling with the flip of an inner switch.
His hands did not shake with adrenaline, his heart did not
flood with backwashed cortisol, his lungs did not take short
and fast breaths. His feet did not overrun their mark.
His heart rate was 55.
As he entered he did not raise the carbine. He walked to the
bank manager’s office and asked her through the black
hockey mask to accompany him to the vault; he said,
accompany me, and she rose and moved quickly as if she
had in fact seen the police. The squawking radio, the
badging, the tone all made her move with the fear of failure;
not fear of the unknown. She wanted to please this officer,
she thought.
She was not coerced.
The dog trotted along as some bank personnel smiled at his
noble gait and augmented Matanuska mien, they saw the
word POLICE and little else. The vault had two stacks of
bricked money, still in cellophane; they had arrived last
night with the armored truck for Friday’s paycheck cashing.
He took out his black tanto knife and cut the ribbons of clear
plastic and asked her to hold open the bag he handed to
her.
She held it and he loaded the money in and asked if any of
the banded money had tracking devices, to which she said
no . The dog sat and faced the vault door as Jack loaded
450,000 dollars into one bag in forty-five, $10,000 stacks.
He took the bag over his shoulder and pressed the carbine
to his side as he jogged -with the dog- to the exit two-
hundred sixty-nine seconds since he had entered it. The
bank personnel looked at him like a wind blown in by doors
left open in a storm.
They were slightly nervous at the prompting of the basal
ganglia , which responds to sounds a full half second faster
than the neo-cortical regions he had taken off-line in them;
their skin was slightly damp. If anyone had done a galvanic
skin conductance test this would have been revealed. But,
they themselves, the left hemisphere -the part of the mind
that makes flat maps of this topological world- that part was
certain this was just nature blowing in and around them this
AM. It was just the way things were in this world of ours ,
they thought some version of, as they tried not to
consciously articulate what they deeply felt as this
policeman jogged past with a bag.
The cameras recorded everything with fidelity except his
face; the tellers never once even thought to hit the alarm.
When asked, they had said they saw him but didn’t think it
was a robbery at all; and that they were as confused as the
feds and as baffled as one another -they compared notions
in whispered tones- and when they saw the footage played
back they were in awe at what they had missed in real time;
real life.
They thought maybe the air itself -that which stood between
a man and their own eyes- was unreliable, that maybe
they’d fallen prey to a hex or that -in hind-sight- their vision
might need checked. They questioned everything but the
vulnerability of their own brains to see what was there.
Isaiah -from the lab- watched the imaging and de-scrambled
it and saw the mask, and knew it was Jack.
The mask was designed for me , Isaiah thought; and he
knew that now. Jack had scrambled surveillance and eye
witnesses, the mask would be redundant, and thus only for
the prying eyes of anyone who had the algorithm to de-code
the false-imaging of the bots .
That would only be Isaiah as Jack well knew.
He had left a playing card on the stack of cash in the vault;
sliced in half, from lower left corner to the upper right; just a
joker card with a ‘j’ in lieu of the whole word written out. The
joker avatar was a like an old 19th century medical drawing
of a vivisected man, with the left hemisphere cleaved and
exposed, the spine and lungs intact, and then the addition
of a scrawl of hand-written laughter-of-the-madman
escaping the laid open trachea. It escaped from half an
amused mouth; an amuse bouche that showed half a
tongue and half a horseshoe of teeth.
Isaiah got the entire fucking point.
The laughter escaping had been cut in half when the card
itself was cut.
The card was mottled brown and tea stained and looked old
and worn and foxed. Its back was matte black, almost grey
with just the word, the semaphore -/ Jacks - embossed
upside-down to the opposite face; stamped into it in a gloss
black typewriter font.
Isaiah knew that the letters cut off on the other slice were, B
/ ax; and that the other half to the card was safely in Jack
Four’s possession. It was a warning to Isaiah to back off and
not interfere or he -Jack Four- would blow the whole thing up
and run his mouth and who knows what else. Jack would not
want to do this, it was implied, it would be tantamount to
cutting off his own finger, maybe the thumb, but he was not
bluffing, and thus the Medea gene worked two ways now.
Jack was saying, if you stop me for the greater good, for any
goddamn reason, I’ll stop all you too. I’m on my own now,
stay out of it; or I’ll make sure you all get involved. I’ll make
you carry the whole genome with you and lay it out in the
open if one fingertip is placed into the void. In for a dime in
for a dollar, he had said, without saying one word.
Isaiah watched as the digital footage from all surrounding
businesses caught his escape until he hit the frontage road
in the grey van driving along I70 and headed west.
Nineteen black vans, Seventy-eight white vans, and an even
two of blue traveled over the Vail Pass within the time frame
that would be assumed from his last vector and timestamp.
But, none of them were the one they sought, the cops had
detailed this in the reports Isaiah read. They had stopped
ninety-nine vehicles by the time they had reached Eagle;
and Grand Junction in one case.
The Governor had been called -at 1709hrs- because Isaiah
decided to offer his help. Sou’s own AG had not made
mention of the crime. Isaiah would not get involved in the
way he would be most effective; he would just help the
police like a CI might. He didn’t help them with the
technology at all; he just told them where the man would be
next. Well, he would tell the Governor when he arrived,
which he was scheduled to be at the lab in three hours. He
was en route already from Denver. They would need travel
at an average of eight-one miles an hour to be on time.
The Governor would see to it that they did.
Jack was exacting personal revenge, on all his perceived
enemies, the enemies of the genome; for him this meant
him personally and through time. Most people have no idea
how timeless the male’s genome can be, how it is neither
subjected to, nor recognizes that fourth wall that separates
the audience from the play.
If his wife -our man’s wife- had sex before him, she was as
guilty as if she had sex without him; jealousy was
permanent, omnipotent; ubiquity in time. Even if honor
cultures collapsed hundreds of years ago -the Kanagawa
Jōyaku in Japan, above the al -Quabail mountain line of the
Kabyle’s Algeria, on the now pacific plains of the landed
Comancheria - the neurons of DNA that made the men who
built and maintained those cultures did not. They -the
pieces, the gene- were still erect, still upright, they still
obtained.
Men were new, different, unique and hemmed in by time.
But genes were exact copies, had always lived, had never
died. This was the most important fact in all the other shit
any of us said , Isaiah thought.
Modern men thought they were civilized, and that all men
were, and that all men ought to be. No barbarism was
allowed. But outlawing light doesn’t douse the sun’s flame.
Men will just cover it with a hand or draw the shades.
Jack felt all personal revenge was a larger revenge, that it
worked up from the cell to the body while -in contrast- a
stratagem that working on the body did not always redound
down to the cell. Chemo didn’t always kill the cancer. To
bomb a city did not reliably take out the man you hunted.
But to kill the right man -men- could -in fact- restore the city
to health. Jack thought upward while Blax thought down,
and Isaiah had to try to keep them from crashing into one
another as they passed like ships in the night.
Each story Blax had told of such and such bank or this or
that guy, this firm or that house, this agency or that lady ,
Jack had listened to each word and stored them in his mind
for just this time. Wells Fargo was not the best bank to hit in
pragmatic terms, it had the second lowest cash reserves
that Friday, and Jack well knew it. He took their money to
embarrass them and get revenge for their refusal to protect
Blax when Michael Swinyard had cashed a phony check on
his Flat Black Ink Corp account twenty-three years ago.
$450,000 as recompense for $3,000 that had been taken
with a lecture -Blax told them- from a banker when he had
called to protest.
Jack had remembered each detail of each story Blax and
told.
Jack -as he thought of the disparity in what he took from
what was taken- thought he always acted with interest . He
liked the double entendre of the word.
When they -Wells Fargo- had called his brother and wife to
demand the whereabouts of Blax himself -lamenting the
overdue payments on the car he had borrowed $30,000 of
the $60,000 cash he had spent on it- Blax had told the Jacks
how the wife and brother were sure to twist the knife and
make him feel humiliation and chagrin.
Jack had hated that story each time he heard it and was
furious that nothing was done to make things right.
They -Blax’s own family- had not asked about the details,
about the crimes of Wells Fargo -the largest corporate
criminal of that time- they had not asked why he had
defaulted, or who owed their brother, their son, money. No,
Jack thought, they only insisted that he need pay his
creditors back. His family didn’t know or care that Wells
Fargo -under Wachovia’s DBA- had been accused of
laundering $378.4 billion of the Mexican Drug Cartels’
money and thus contributing to thousands of murders.
These facts just get lost in the minds of people with no true
north; blizzards of ugly facts that blind the unsure, the
liberal, the ecumenical who clumsily paw at the mote in
your eye not the beam in their own.
They had not cared that he had been ripped-off of
everything by an amalgam of malice and piling on by
scheming chimps and their apparatchiks of the system
itself. They had not asked about the bank itself that had
helped the thieves abscond with his loot.
Blax’s brother had not cared at all, and neither had his little
bourgeois wife, with her allegiance to the rules, not the code
it stood for . They had fealty to the law, not justice itself.
How, Jack had asked himself, can you reach people with the
same moral reasoning of the 8-year-old, those who are able
to explain the rules, but still blithely unaware of the concept
of justice itself; one that cannot have it explained that often
the rules themselves are the very barrier to justice ? This -
like most things- was metabolic. Blax’s family were just
metabolically shallow and simple and stinted people.
Isaiah played back the night Blax had told the Jacks the tale,
and it was almost banal. Isaiah sought out Jack Four’s
mindset, he sifted through each day and night he’d spent
with Blax. It lacked any obvious thing about it that would
make it seem the kind of thing to react this way to; unless,
of course, you knew just what kind of genes these men all
had.
The genes stored exact copies of everything. Genes never
forgot.
Blax was devastated, not by the loss of the $3,000 -the
amount of the forged check that Michael used- not the loss
of revenue. Blax was devastated by the malice , the fact
that his partner and a man who he naively thought was a
friend, had stolen from him. He was wounded by the
indifference -which was tantamount to malice- that his bank,
his own bank, who had made money off him for over ten
years, as he ran over a million dollars of income through
their institution, had showed when the guy had literally
laughed at him, and insulted him and told him quote, “you
ought to look after your checkbook better, sir.”
Such little things seem nothing, until they happen to you
and they happen in the right place at the right time like one
allele in a chromosome, in a genome in a man, in a family,
in a tribe, in a history of being fucked with by the rich, the
smug, the ruling class, Jack thought.
Countries are not laws, but customs, not jails but mores .
Countries are built and maintained on trust not cops and
their weaponry. And America had no trust; nobody believed
in anything. And like a junky, it needed to hit bottom before
it will ever change, Jack now thought.
That kind of disrespect is the thing most people endure each
day at the filthy hands and sloppy mouths of functionaries
and these massive institutions, these autocrats of finance
and brigands of business. Most people barely register the
insult at all. But Blax took it right to heart and when he
recounted the story that night to the Jacks, they all felt his
humiliation, their own humiliation; the Priest, shit, the Pope
himself, slapped in the face by the coxcomb jester of the
King, they had felt.
Three Jacks of Four blamed the banks, but Jack Four blamed
their LT.
Jack Four had not known what he’d do, but he knew his body
had roiled inside, and that proteins were coding for bio-
chemical release, not for inhibition.
Although 25% of all man’s coding neural proteins do in fact
inhibit at the level of brain-action -the most of any species-
this most careful and cautious and halting of species, in
some men at some times, the brakes slip, the reins are
released, a man takes no more shit.
Jack was a kind of witness to bio-warfare inside the sinew
and tissue and cortical map; he was overrun with armies
swarming like iron-age Gauls and bronzen Romans both,
blood-brain barrier like the Rhine crossed first by Caesar’s
engineers and worker-soldiers. Then he was the ground trod
by the giant Gauls with painted face -buttered hair and of
Nordic race- jamming body and bone and balls at the water
with Mediterraneans and Macedonians and these Roman
Spaniards combined like virus and bacteria, like rack of elk
and flank of wolf, like King’s orders and Priest’s blessing and
Soldier’s pike.
Like a planted flag atop a crenulated wall.
His brain came alive with vex and thirst for blood for all.
He sat on the common pad, he listened to his heart beat as
the Jacks rambled on and on of this and that. He had sided
eyed Blax and Isaiah -from above and within- saw the face
deform.
Jack was enraged, battle cries went up inside him as the fire
of the night burned on and the Jacks sharpened their knives
or waterproofed their clothes preparing for the hunt that the
snow would preclude this month of October the report had
said. The Wet Canyon valley would get up to fifty inches of
snow they’d said, and yet they assumed the hunt was on
until Blax said otherwise. They checked their gear as the old
man spoke. The fire was still high.
The agoge remained full of yellow light.
Blax had leaned on the skull of a black bear with tea-lights
candled in its eyes and told them of his surprise -when after
his defeat by friends and banks and even family- of his
surprise -he had repeated- that he was all alone on this
globe. He had repeated his astonishment with chagrin; and
he admitted that he had felt foolish for all of it. But -Blax
had thought and said once or twice- these men needed to
know these things . He thought the whole truth was best; a
good unto itself. Each story he told of betrayal seemed both
more banal and more outrageous than the last; the
accumulation of disgrace more than the sum of its parts
somehow. He thought honesty was the only thing a man
could control.
Blax thought that this was the sign of the -finally- wised up
man. Even as the whole world told a man to shut his mouth
and not once complain.
Three of four Jacks took note of the facts; the lesson
implied; the wisdom that might be gleaned.
But Jack Four took each story as a history of something
deeper, something more amiss, something that needed
fixed. He saw the arc as a line that could be straightened.
He thought he could fix not just the now and the future, but
too the past. He didn’t know it, but he thought of the cosmic
math.
“Non associative,” Isaiah said under his breath with vex.
Jack Four thought that a stoic was a man who couldn’t
control his environment and so he resorted to controlling
himself.
He stared at Blax that night and saw empty hands, deeds
undone, equations unsolved; half -one-third- a man.
“Never be surprised when they all come for you,” Blax had
said as the lights flicked shadows up from below and the
eyes blinked long and slow. He had breathed heavy and
deeply from the door jamb, seated on the concrete floor, as
they all sat in the courtyard under the H-beams and on the
concrete pad; greasing now their simple 700 Remingtons
and more complex .338 Lapuas, opening the breaches and
swabbing out the wet oils and checking the bore for
occlusion and debris. It had been quiet when Blax didn’t
speak and warm where it wasn’t cold behind wherever they
faced the fire.
“For that is the only way any of them can come for you, all
together, in packs, swarms, just like gangs. The modern
male cannot fight one on one. So, when it rains, it will pour,”
Blax had said that night. He’d poured himself a drink, held
the bottle up and out to Jack One.
Jack Four had felt an inability to see forward, as if the
visions were knocked down by the wind, by the corvus
moneduloides as they flapped those meter-wings above in
his dreams of the pacific; as if his eyes only looked back into
his own skull, as if turned around. He saw the genes that
coded for his innate pride and the whatever it was that
made his hands manipulate the world with deftness and
whatever it was that let his words flow like many birds tying
twine around the trees in avian nets to capture food and
enemies; Shanghai black flies that rivaled them for
supremacy of the air.
Blax had told them of the day his father had come to
elevation with him, back in June of 2017 -when they were all
just negative three- and they -Blax and his father- had had a
contretemps that ended in several threats. Blax -in his
version of events- had given his father all benefit of the
doubt, asking the older man to stand up for him and certain
he would do so, until he -the father- had finally barked out
that he didn’t make mere threat, that he blew that guy’s
fucking brains out.
“Those were the exact words, he said, I blew his fucking
brains out ,” Blax recounted, “and that was it. I drove those
dusty roads with rocks to my lee side and pasture and river
to my starboard, and we drove in silence as I waited for him
to expatiate. But he did not. My father was secretive; the
opposite of me. He held each great thing he had done inside
and let it out only as a bomb to blow up the rest of him, to
crash the bricks of the edifice down upon what a thrown
open window might have revealed just a glimpse of.
“I had known what he was capable of, I had seen it, and I
had known the job -the charter- of OSI. I had held the guns
and sat in the armored diplomatic Mercedes and seen the
terrorist wanted posters on the wall, the Bonh ö effer gangs
of western Germany, the murky eyes of Soviet spies. I had
seen him disappear for months then return with black and
grey beard and manichean eyes that absorbed more and
more dark than light.
“I had seen him unholster his sidearm and our mother
pretend her husband didn’t carry -or need to carry- a gun at
all. I had seen him genuflect to her, refusing to chance -to
risk- the undermining of the marriage to this woman, the
bearer of his children; one of which was his scion; heir
apparent. I had seen what he put up with, so that he may
never be like his father, and leave a woman and child, his
woman and child- merely from pride.
“Each cure has a bit of disease, and I knew that my child, if I
was to have a son, would find fault in me this same way;
he’d suss out cowardice like I did, in my old man, or notice
the tyranny that overflowed, as I did also in my father. The
dry desert wash overflows more easily than the four-season
stream. Think on that.
“Each man is an ocean of rising waves and lowering dips;
he’s the flames that nibble at the tops of trees and the
water that pools near feeder roots; the white light of
approaching conflagrations; the dark soil of carbon and
regrowth. I know this. And yet I still hated him, I hated his
tyranny and his weakness both. I knew it was unfair and I
did it anyway.
“I hated the way he let a woman run him and how yet he
never allowed his -well, whatever I am- he never allowed it
to grow into a man. It was like he was certain that his pride
would not be the only thing to die, that he’d choke all root of
it off in his youngest son, the one, the one that carried that
same set of alleles, the ones that would never put up with
anyone’s shit, especially some goddamn woman’s. Ah, but
the genes are not the man; and the best individual is not
the craquelured city. The small -the one- can be proud,
autonomous, free, but the large -the complex- it must flex;
compromise. In fact, the first multicellular life was a
compromise between mitochondrial DNA and the cell it
squatted inside,” Blax had said as they wiped down their
rifles and drank from the London glass.
“Jewel Camp, was my grandmother, and she was a bitch.”
This idea of a bitch though, exploded, he thought her mean,
and shallow, and promiscuous and callous toward her son -
his father- and cynical and exactly the type to survive when
shit got rough. She was a survivor and without that, he’d not
be alive to complain. He hated to admit it; but it was true.
“She had no sense at all of what was too far, and she ran
my own mother into the ground and ran off five men -half of
them into the soil of a cemetery- from my paternal
grandfather to the final one in 1979 as they divorced in
Paris, Texas while I was just five years old,” he said as his
ambivalence rattled around like bullet in barrel; like comet
elliptical; like bird tied to a string.
“My father knew that he had come from men who cannot
stand women like this, my own father hated his own mother
for her uppity, mouthy, female ways. But, each man has a
crucible, a touchstone, a thing that burns brightest among
the pagan ruins of it all. And for my father it was the pain of
growing up without his father; and he was not ever going to
allow a woman to run him off; he would lose each battle in
order to win this war.”
Blax paused and stared at the places on their faces where
lines would appear; furrows like rows of décavaillonnage on
their still smooth brows; like heaps of snow, red with burst
heart of prey, trails of capillary, bumps about the nose;
teeth chipped, stained, fuck who knows ? he thought. And
streak of grey in beard and mane . He saw how their
gentleness would change. Where meanness and rage would
appear like weeds, soft idealism replaced by rough deeds.
He looked at where they bent and creased; at the blood and
pollen on knuckles; dirt on knees.
“But I saw only the lost chargers and soldiers down, the
broken axles of chariot, the flesh and shields on the ground,
I saw only blood and treasure lost, not kingdom gained;
things long-term? No way. I saw nothing of what he saw; and
even that is not right. Because my father saw the losses, he
saw them more than I could with my young and still simple
eyes. He had to eat shit from my mother a thousand times
before I was even awake each day. And yet he stayed. He
stayed no matter the hate, no matter the cost to pride, no
matter what his son spied. He shrank and yet did right by
me.
“And if I was a good man, a decent man -a man of
understanding and wisdom- I would forgive him for all this
and see how his cowardice was actually strength; that he
sacrificed himself so that I may grow up with a father. He
refused to give himself the gift he wanted most: the right to
walk away from those who flay the skin and boil the mind,
those who injure a proud man’s pride. He stayed no matter
how it deformed his soul. And this was his war and he won
it. And I -to this day- declared it a total loss.
“But -so- I am not a good man, I am a proud man. Savvy?”
he asked. He expected them to see he held opposites in
mind, saw where he was wrong, lamented were he was
right.
“I’m not good, but sometimes I see greatness, and yet I see
more and more that greatness must be chosen among the
gods or underground but never in the places in between.
And I fear I chose the wrong domain in which to be great.
My head might have been too far from where I tread,” he
said. He looked down at his hands, the fingers shook, the
drink too looked like pebbles had been dropped in the
center; amber concentric circles and ripples that could only
be assuaged by drinking it all down. And so he did. He
gulped the whisky and felt nothing in the throat; barely even
warmth in the belly. His legs seemed long to him; his boots
like blocks. He wanted to take back each word.
But -as the weather unleashed cold flakes of snow- instead
he spoke.
“And, so,” Blax paused and searched his mind but found it
empty, pulled lower drawers, of throat and heart, “there’s
no room in caves, or between the boughs, nor in the spaces
betwixt the wolfish teeth or in the holes of the sunken reefs,
there is no abandoned -ceded- ground for that kind of
mistake and he made the largest one: to not know your son;
to turn a fragile -upright- back on a wild beast still on all
fours.
“He should have seen the pique; he had to see his own eyes
in mine. How can a man hate his own mother and not see
the hate in his son’s eyes for that man’s wife? I despised my
mother, with her cowardice and stupid fucking timid ways;
her lack of courage and brave face. I hated the way she
emasculated me and heaped the civilizing ways of our
bullshit culture on me, I was raised in the modern way. I, a
child of the ancient world, a boy that ought be raised by
wolves before left to the evil ways of that woman, and he
abandoned me to her!
“He fucking abandoned me just as his father had abandoned
him; ah, but he stuck around to watch, like some observing
god, some non-intervening being, that sees but does not
intervene. He would claim to never intervene; this was a
little motto of his; the irony not lost on me.
“Oh, but I know, I know it as sure as I know the fates will
have my neck one day. I know that I am like the oedipal son
doomed to live out the fates no matter how far I run away. I
swore I’d never abandon my sons, just like my father swore
his own oath and I know that my vasectomy at twenty-six
was no apotropaic against this fate; but merely a human
delay of the natural forces that make mockery of all our
plans. For here I am with four -and how many more?- sons of
my own now.
“I cleaved and cauterized those vas deferens and thought I
had prevented the next generation of failure and
abandonment; the ignoble and emasculate decline. And for
40-odd years that was true, and then you four boys, now
men -I mean no disrespect, men - I know that at least one of
you will nurse a secret grudge and feel -not wrongly- that I
have failed in some crucial way. I can feel it like I feel the
cold between me and that fire over there. The light reaching
me but not the warmth. I see what I cannot yet feel; may
never feel.
“And yet, I stupidly continue to tell the truth, as if this is
some incantation, some alchemic buttress, bulwark, bastion
against the hatred, the disappointment you will -some of
you will- feel. My faults, my cowardice, my tyranny, my lies,
all of it will stack up somewhere, some counting house of
the gods and you will visit it in quiet times, in small hours, in
the space you carve out for yourself. I have a feeling the
gods will allow you access to my worst secrets even as I try
to tell on myself first and loudest and with most vulnerable
chagrin; I know even this will be held against me, that my
honesty itself will be seen as weak and tawdry and unmanly.
Whining it will be called.
“I know it because I’m doing exactly what my father did,
fighting the last war. I am trying to learn from his example, I
am attempting to do what he did not and repeating it
somehow anyway. A man is no match for the vagaries of
fate, no match at all,” he said and knew he was about to
bring up the letter the Bust had sent and he felt his guts
squirm and his mouth become inflexible. He felt the brain
scramble around for anything else to talk about. But he
plowed on against himself.
“Simone Weil -a Jewish woman that she wrote to me about
and so I looked her up- and anyway, she -Ms. Weil- she
trekked all the way to Germany in 1932 and saw -and stated
in print- that the trade unionists were no match for the
Fascists. She saw the poetry of force; she saw the truth. So,
why is this fate gauzy and meaningless to me?
“And I guess it is folly to even try, by we are men who try,
are we not? Is that not who we are? Men who try no matter
the obviousness of failure, the total destruction that is
guaranteed, we are men who face this anyway. The obvious
coward runs away, we, the subtle coward fights in a stupid
way, because he has -we have- not the humility, the
sagacity to fight in a way that might actually prove
victorious if he is made to look a fool while doing it.
“We prefer poems of defeat to the mere prose of victory,”
Blax said and the Jacks twisted the lips and nodded a bit.
“My father was sometimes willing to look a fool, for the
greater good, and I hope my revelations to you of the times
I took their shit, the times I failed to exact revenge, will
make you see that somehow I knew that I was destined for a
greater good; and that to sheath my sword was the truly
courageous act. But we both know it was cowardice then,
not bravery, not far-sightedness. We all know I just failed
then and this great good fell into my lap like the snow, like
this autumnal snow,” he said as the flakes began to drop
fast and head straight down in heaviness and melt on the
warmish ground still having the heat, the thermal gain, from
their summer.
“This is the only thing my father did not know that I know,
that our failure to act in the moment was not from some
long-term vision, it was just myopic cravenness, and it
happened to comport with some larger vision we said we
wanted as it came later into view.
“But if he was so far sighted as he would claim- eating shit
and letting a woman raise his kids, so they may have a
father- then he would have seen that his son would grow up
to wipe the whole fucking seed out just to watch it die; just
to prove that all your long-term plans can be wiped out in
one night with the action of one man with one black idea in
his mind.
“I wanted to prove to him that all that building, all that
effort and compromise and genuflecting and all that bowing
and scraping and all that storing up of nuts for winter can be
reduced to ash in sixty seconds as the youngest son kills
each one of them and refuses himself the right to breed that
seed any further on this ground. On this ground in which I
cannot tell if is too noble for what is tawdry in me, in us, or if
we are too proud, too rightly noble for this sullied society of
man. I am of two minds,” he said even though he knew this
supposed mind of two was made of an unequally divided
line. He poured another drink, not offerin git to anyone this
time. He just set the London glass on the ground and let the
fire light illuminate the square glass and amber restorative
in his hands.
“If he was so far sighted,” he began, “he would have seen
that capacity in me, from early, early on. The same part of
him that allowed him, quote to blow his enemy’s fucking
brains out , was in me too. And he would have seen it and
not allowed my wrath to be pointed back at him or his well
laid plans. He would have made certain of it, like the way
one locks up the guns or separates the oily rags from the
source of flame, hides the keys to the cache of booze;
never, ever, lets their son get his hands on whatever most
destructive thing lies inside each man’s own armory of
heart.
“So, I reject his long-term thesis, for it lacks the vision to see
the obvious: you cannot have a son just like you not grow up
just like you when you fail to raise him, when you abandon
him to the void of the mother, the chaos of the feminine
again and again; just like was done to you.
“His mother raised him and my mother raised me. And yet
he could not see? He could not see this?” Blax shook his
head and Jack Four just kept his mind recording and his
heart boarding sailor after sailor to man the decks, the long
guns, the windlass too. He saw the ship make sail, get under
way. He saw the sea not the shore, not the town, not the
country itself. He saw himself cut lines on his forearm as if
for bars of music, as if to tally, as if to mark twain. He
poured -in this reverie- black ink over red blood and he
looked aloft and yet closed the eyes. He looked exclusively
inside.
“Why do I not buy it?” Blax asked of his own question, the
Jacks had left their actions open, their bolts back. They said
-none of them- not a word.
“No, you’ll notice that I never let any of you be raised by
women, I made certain that you’d grow up by and as men.
And yet, I know the fates have in-built me a surprise. I knew
it and that is why I made that Medea gene, I built it as
bulwark against the fates, and of course, ensured that the
fates would win by way of my own plans; that the unironic
would be the only thing avoided. I made sure of it, with a
bravura that now seems not just wrong, but insane, blinded
by some trick of the gods themselves. It is so obvious as to
be ridiculous,” Blax had said. He forgot he’d already said all
this a hundred times to himself; a dozen to them.
“Why when he said he blew that guys brains out did you
know that he was untrustworthy?” Jack two asked as he ate
some meat he had laid upon the base of the fireplace to
sear. He hated to see Blax break over and over like this,
each time go a bit more mad. He intervened with questions
as if that would staunch the hemorrhaging.
“Because he prefaced it with the insistence that he never
merely threatened anyone, that he was a man of action, and
that my request for him to stand up for me symbolically -for
I had asked him to defend my honor with his own friend,
Carey Kempf who had ripped me off and called me,” he had
paused, “and called me a thief all over town and tried to
fuck my girl and on and on- and I asked him to say
something, you know, defend the honor of his boy. And his
response was he didn’t ever threaten, he acted, and I knew
this was not just a lie, but a dirty lie. It was so evil and black
a lie that I knew I’d never forgive it,” Blax said as Jack Four
wished the man would just shut up now, that enough was
enough, that this was all too much to be said aloud.
“Why?” Jack three asked. Jack Four glared at him now too;
building up his hatred of not just the Lt but each Jack for
dragging this shit out.
“Because the man threatened me a thousand times,
threatened to kill me, threatened it more than once.
“And when I brought that up he justified it- imagine
threatening to kill your own son at age ten for checking the
circuit breakers in a storm, to accuse me of turning off the
power when I was trying to restore it? He literally threatened
to kill me for checking the circuit breakers; and I had a
friend with me, and it was one of the most humiliating
events of my life.
“And so, I knew for a fact he threatened all the time. And his
insistence that he was this big tough guy was a lie. He
threatened a little boy, his own son, for attempting to fix a
common problem they all shared.
“You want to do some real evil in this world, wait for
someone to do something good and then punish them for
it,” Blax had said as Isaiah watched the digital visual replay
in the lab; he watered orchids and laid crickets in the tanks
with the scorpions. He measured the phenol between the
leafy plants and the patterns the wasps ran; the caterpillars
as ratio to moths. “My father was a, is a coward, he picks on
the weak and refuses to do anything to the strong.”
Isaiah had watched the data come in from each Jack as Blax
spoke in this recalled memory of Lot 45 . Isaiah saw the
gene-expression correlates for rage in Jack Four rise like a
mercury thermometer; undramatically, unmitigated nor
deterred; call and response of nature on both sides of the
calibrating glass.
The boy was now a man who would exact not just revenge
on each of his adoptive-genomic-meta father’s -Blax’s-
enemies, but on the father, on Blax, himself, to show him
what a real man’s life was about.
Jack Four was saying, fuck all this long-term planning
bullshit, all these grand designs on saving humankind, the
West, fuck them and fuck you for even wanting it . Each
man must only want what he can control, what is close,
local, immediate, Jack would feel and think as if he could -if
necessary- dismantle this weapon of mind malice, disarm it
all just before the launch; that if he changed his mind -he
told himself- he could call it all off. Unaware of ballistic
physics and the velocity of thought and the force majeure of
man, Jack thought he had a chance.
Jack said all this with the same sight-blindness to the truth
that the trickster cayote of the Fates occluded and cursed as
he spied from the edge of the fire; spied on and in his -spied
on and in their- genome once and one million times. They all
heard the lupine howl, and then the chatter of the ‘yote
response; the birds flying in the dark; the snow between
them all and the lunar rock. Isaiah gleaned the data from
the recorded night and noted also that Blax had felt
elevated cortisol and the activation of the hippocampus and
thalamus in this recreation, re-birth of the most painful
memories that he felt his Jacks needed to know. The
recapitulation of old pain to reveal the cicatrix manet as
warning and explanation both.
He felt they needed to know that there was cowardice in
their alleles, and that they needed to watch out for it; an
enemy within who would swear to protect them.
And -Blax would think- that they would often pick on the
weak and excuse the strong, and that they must question
each impulse due to this. Jack Four took it the other way,
that he -Blax- was refusing to do his duty by allowing his
father and older brother to escape his wrath. They were
older, larger, and Blax was letting them get away with it ,
Jack thought with righteousness and anger wiring his young
brain in a brace.
Blax had of course outgrown in size and martial capacity
and malice each man, his brother and father both; they
were in fact so weak as to be as women in his eyes, and this
was why he didn’t marshal all his vengeance against them
long ago. He felt it was too easy to kill such weak men. He
and Jack would never see eye to eye on this. For Jack, his -
Blax’s- abeyance was cowardice regardless of the why .
Isaiah took note of each man’s DTI and fMRI data and
endocrine system reports and felt he had a good enough
idea of what each man felt and thought. He watched the
orchids like velvet hold water in large drops upon each
impermeable petal.
Jack was now, with these goddamn robberies and murders
and ostentatious displays of vengeance, showing the old
man up and that is how Isaiah knew that he was heading to
Texas next, to exterminate whatever was left of the seed;
his brother, Travis, wife and son and daughter, would be
cleansed from the earth. The mother was long dead; the
father had dementia now too, at ninety-one. He had
survived for sixteen years after his wife had died. And Jack
Four was going to put him down as coup de grace ; not to
Lee, the father, but to Blax the son. He was going to do
what ought have been done long ago; and he was going to
make certain his gifts and punishments would be one thing,
not two.
He would join each act as the world joined the light and the
black.
Jack was sanctioning Blax’s right to feel aggrieved, he was
approving of his version of events and taking sides with him
on who was right and who wrong; and he was sanctioning -
that is to say, punishing- that same man, by carrying out the
righteous executions that Blax himself ought to have. He
was cleaning up the man’s own mess. This was punishment
by embarrassment, by humiliation; it was a note that said: I
think you had it right, your analysis was right, so why then
did you fail to act? Are these failures to act of what you
know is right, are they not the murders of one’s own
thoughts, one’s most noble thoughts, was not your failure to
act a murdering of the self? Well, if you will not then I shall;
I’ll carry the burden you set down.
And anyone within this expanding but cloistered genetic
map, this inflationary terrain with more dark matter than
light, with more vacuum than populating material, with
more God than man, any of the Jacks -or Blax himself- would
know that Jack Four was right and there would be no way to
argue out of it; the truth was already built into the genome.
Jack Four was merely saying aloud what they all said in their
heads; the counter arguments, the anti-thesis was voiced
but weak and they knew it.
Isaiah had to decide in what order to act, how far to allow it.
It was not an easy thing to do; to discern. How much of
Jack’s efforts should be thwarted anyway, for he was not all
wrong, no more than Blax was all wrong in his pique and
path. But , Isaiah thought, he had to be stopped at some
point, for his plans, Isaiah’s plans were not to be thwarted,
at any price. He had no intention of giving up on all the
manifold ways; all the efforts and all the shit I had put up
with from , he let himself think without filter, these
goddamn humans, these ants, these bugs, these prokaryotic
cells with consumption and excretion as their only capacity
at all; these shallow beings all dressed up in big folks’
clothes.
Isaiah admired Jack, he did, but he was not going to let him
get away with this shit. Isaiah let the recording of that night
play in the background as he began to put all the pieces in
place; in Texas and here too, in Colorado. He built
algorithms and synopsis of the evidence and began tracking
the areas around the homes and environments of Jack’s
next targets.
The tableau of that night, not so long ago, laid out -played
out- in the dark as Isaiah handled these other things. He let
it play on:
“My brother,” Blax said, as the boys continued -as the snow
melted on their hot hands and heads- to check their gear,
grease their rifles, and make sure their skinning blades had
edge for the three-day hunt, “he always accused me of
cheating. But I wasn’t playing the same game as him. He
played checkers on the same board in which I was playing
chess. And each time I moved this or that piece -this or that
way- he’d abuse me for it, you can’t move your piece like
that, he’d say. And I’d have to remind him that this was not
checkers, and see, I’d say, see that piece that looks like a
horsey, Travis, well, that is called a knight, and in my knight-
errant way I will move him as per natural law, two up and
one over .
“I shall not take orders,” Blax said, “on the higher game,
from the lower man. I shall have my revenge, and as you
ponder that you may -like the fates- ask yourself who raises
this arm, who makes the sun run its errands about the sky,
who gives man his desires, who gives horse his strength and
mane?”
II. 2020 e.v.
“So, what now?” Travis asked. The lab had trestles on the
walls with starter ivy weaving through each square as the
old foliage turned red and yellow behind; and he spied the
large stelae all around. Their images were a tangle-nest;
and they changed shape as he looked at different times;
from different parts of the space. He noticed how the lab
seemed to have no edges; it was dark behind them in this
front quadrant.
“Now, you live your life,” MO said. He opened the eyes 11%
more and turned the hands palm-up on his thighs. He
measured the air around the brother’s nose and mouth. He
loaded the joules of total metabolism within the brother
from the last six minutes onto the cloud.
“I mean, is this ok to talk about or?” he asked. He stood
there in the first quadrant of the lab and felt the breeze that
blew across the room; carrying sounds from small things,
smells of green, temperatures in layers like cold rivers
within the sea. His shoulders hunched and dipped, his jaw
barely moved.
It was a lot of information for him to absorb.
“No. You cannot even think of it. We fear that we may have
a security leak, and so you must maintain even,” Isaiah
stopped as he reformulated the sentence. “You can’t discuss
it with the inmate -your brother- nor with yourself. You can’t
even think of it. He has to continue to think -believe- that he
must convince you to see it his way. This is crucial. He must
never let up on his need to convince you.”
“Why?” Travis asked. He did not understand. He stared at
Isaiah’s face and tried to look at the eyes, but they were
shadowed and so he looked at the mouth; inside it was dark,
he couldn’t see the teeth. The story they had told him had
begun to recede. The fossils of emotions and amber of
information that remained he did not excavate.
He was thirsty; the mouth was dry.
“Because he has to keep activating that part of his brain.
Dialectic activates the PFC and each level of the brain, from
basal ganglia to limbic to neo cortex ; it’s the one brain
activity that aligns all three outside of,” MO said but
stopped mid-thought.
“Religious phenomenon,” Isaiah said to fill in the gap.
“So, he has to argue with me to use -in order to use- his
brain the way you want?” Travis asked.
“Yes, but not just argue, but convince . He has to try each
and every way to convince you of his worth. If he stops
trying, this won’t work.” Isaiah said.
He saw the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas light up in Travis
as simple -discrete- facts were now expressed; now after the
story he’d been told. He then reviewed the brain scans from
the previous ten minutes when the spatio-temporal regions
activated in both speaker and listener as the story was told
to him. Like two neurons pre-loading, then firing and now
wiring together, they loaded again in milliseconds and in
volts like bolts but small. A story joined -fused- two brains,
two men, Isaiah thought as he watched the man’s face; the
lips hiding the teeth best he could, it seemed.
The motor-cortex lit up in the listener. Isaiah watched the
fields of birds outside the lab; he watched the ivy make
micro-phototropic moves underneath the LEDs.
The listener of a tale of manifold undertaking, a crewed
action story -unlike mere discussion of isolatoes of facts-
had specific regions alight. A story illuminated the areas of
brain associated with motor movement. And this produced
not just activity but anticipatory reward. The listener to a
story begins to expect outcomes the same way they expect
results when the body moves in the world; and stories have
archetypes, which are a fancy way to say cliché.
And cliché allows the listener to finish the sentence first.
This links story-teller and listener as if they had -and were
now engaged in- an adventure together as comrades in
arms , Isaiah thought as the data from the insula , parietal
lobule and the inferior frontal gyrus of Travis came in and
made a map. Associated with mirror-neurons themselves,
the map split in two as Isaiah read each side of the chart
with each hemisphere of his own; in real time. It unfurled
and revealed so much on a 2D plane that he saw a hundred
thousand place-names. Isaiah tagged each thing relevant,
charted a course, and rolled the map back up in the mind;
then put it away.
He watched the historical account -on the cloud- of the
neurons in the older brother.
They -the neurons in the past, of the record- were firing from
the story they had told him before these last few sentences
on op-sec and sequestration and the how & why of his
behavior from here on out.
The precuneus and dmPFC all fired in ways that illuminated
the rest of the brain. Moral reasoning and the seat of
retributive violence shared the same space; anticipation and
the mesolimbic pathway passed in the night; narrative and
motor-cortex played telephone inside the head; they all
plotted, pricked fingers, burnt tarot cards and shook hands.
“A drop of blood,” he said.
It was the dmPFC that stored anger in the inmate for five-
hundred times longer than most men; it was here that an
inner story was thus told and heard and listened to: payback
is required of you, it is already written, already told; it’s your
fate, your story. This was how a story would populate a
man’s inner landscape, and activate motor-cortical zones.
Wind the clock, release the spring, a humming automaton,
an inner thing made manifest into the world like flocks of
starlings.
Isaiah heard his own words now. The brother’s and the
inmate’s history of words stopped.
He took another breath and counted it against his total.
It was listened to , he continued thinking, because it
mapped onto motor-cortex feedback, the way neurons fire in
both the hand and the neck when a man rubs his own woe.
There where the head lays upon the shoulders, Isaiah
thought as he saw the books -the novels, the stories- he had
sent out by mail, by hand, by hook, by crook. He pictured
them in route, beginning their journey to their recipients,
then delayed in Des Moines, or Denver, or DC. He smiled as
he thought of them at 30,000 feet, or underground as they
traveled south by train or truck or tunnel. He imagined them
arriving at homes, offices, warehouses. He saw them
opened and perused, ignored, lamented or engaged with
some fascination or outrage. He pondered how some would
become engrossed and read along as if it was just a story; a
story they could not put down. Others, he was certain,
would figure the real plot out.
How strange was it when the hand went numb as it rubbed
the body, he thought as he ruminated on such neural
disconnect.
He built a world in his mind in which the tale would be told
and infect the brain of the reader.
He saw it activate not merely the Broca’s or Wernicke’s
zones -the mere language centers- but he saw it in the
motor-cortex mirror-neurons, the parts of the brain , he
repeated again, that fire when a man moves in this physical
world . He saw the story plant an anecdote like a mottled
seed from heated cone carried by a blackened bird in its
dark guts as it flew over the tenebrous sea.
He saw two birds fly in two directions, two stories to two
men of two types and times.
He saw an island of fecund soil; a place for a seahawk to
land.
He saw the Author’s story inside the reader; standing him
too upon the quarter deck, before the mast, up in the nest,
upon the back of the whale. Lashed to the white mass, or
pulled to the bottom by the line , Isaiah thought. But he
thought last of what was first.
He thought of how Ishmael merely wanted to go to sea.
And Isaiah thought all that in half a second as both parts of
the world barely had time to blink; as the moon rose and
sun did sink; as lightning struck it, as tornados spun it, as
prey hunched, as predators hunted; as plates locked like
rams and bucks; as forests burned and gave no fucks.
“So, I can’t tell him what I’ve done -or what you’re doing- or
what?” Travis asked. He was nervous and he felt a little
weird in the ears, the nose, and the throat.
“You can’t even think it,” MO said for the third time. He
began to load the algorithm onto the nanobots that were
heading for Travis’ neck. All his inner activity from the story
was metabolically at rest. Now just facts were told and
heard. Whatever he’d absorbed in the story was now larval,
buried, asleep.
Dormant , Isaiah thought.
“But, don’t worry, we’ll make it easier for you,” Isaiah said
as the bots injected him with a short acting neuro-toxin that
wiped his memory almost clean. His epinephrine lowered to
levels similar to sleep, his heart rate dropped to 53, his
breathing began a midnight rhythm and his eyes showed a
slight constriction of the pupils as if blinded by noon of day.
Isaiah loaded the new amalgam of DNA, alloyed with this
chiral set -to allow it to be coded for- onto the nanotubes
that were printed out from the corner of the concrete slab.
He had already built the cedar box and feathered it with the
plumages tinted in strange greens and upper-atmosphere
violets, feathers that he’d printed from the blackbird
genome of those that he had watched -spied upon- from the
lab. The nanotube rose in the air and traveled up and across
and landed on the shadowed black -and lit in grey- tines of
each plaited quill. The lid lowered over the pearlescent
points and the dark matter distal of each feather and the
box sat now upon the shelf as the inmate’s brother began to
head for the exit of the lab.
He’d barely remember a thing; except this impulse to do his
duty.
Isaiah thought of each molecule of his own breath and how
it had once been inside Alexander as he stood at
Macedonian peaks, and how each atom he churned and
mined had resided at one time inside each species that had
gone extinct. He wondered who else thought -or might
think- like that.
MO saw the bots had injected Travis and that the chemicals
had prompted the hippocampus to overwrite the memory of
the overt instructions; and thus MO walked with him toward
the door; ushered him out and thanked him too for his time
and co-operation.
“All of life carried along in the common breath, the numina,
the spirit of God for all these billions of years,” Isaiah said
quietly aloud to let the words ride on the air that left the
room, the lab, as the brother walked out toward the east.
Isaiah stared at the stele of Kalkin , the tenth of manifold of
shivoham ; each head of Vishnu and arm of Shiva , each
head of Rudra; now with silver steed beneath and eleven
arms on each side, between the teeth a Nandaka knife.
Isaiah wondered if the brother would have chosen -and not
merely agreed to the odds- to poison his own genome at
this price, the charge of his brother’s immortality. But, Travis
had not been given facts, he’d been told a story, and in fact
he’d been told a story before the story , Isaiah thought with
what felt like a grin inside his own skin, but the face did not
move. Isaiah -via the bots that spied for him- saw the book
on the seat of the truck in the parking lot. He saw the blue
and white cover, the whale and the whale men, the boats
and the spouting of air, water and blood. He saw pages dog
eared, and as Travis entered this truck, Isaiah saw the
names of the characters in the head, on the perirhinal-
cortex and hippocampus , on the regions of brain associated
with recall of real people, with real names.
“In real life,” he said.
Isaiah thought of how anticipatory reward responses -in the
meso-limbic zones of the emotional brain- were increased
within listeners being told a narrative by the speaker. And
comprehension rose by nearly 320% when these preemptive
regions were activated before each word, each twist, each
turn, as the narrative unfolded.
Stories physically facilitated comprehension via predictive
modeling and motor -cortex activation. The listener was
even neurologically ahead of the speaker when a tale was
told. Stories work at three times the rate as mere facts. And
this was because the extra-linguistic areas of the brain -the
emotional areas and motor-cortical regions- were activated
during a narrative and not when mere facts were relayed.
The fact is that feelings -the feelings of sympathy with the
speaker, feelings of knowing and predicting where this story
is going, feeling of anticipatory reward associated with
motor-movement toward a tangible goal- matter more than
facts when it comes to information transfer between brains ,
Isaiah thought.
Symbolic stories were just a repeated cliché. And cliché
worked metabolically like nothing else , Isaiah thought again
as he watched MO standing at the counter -39” high- with
both his hands splayed out and at rest on the slab.
Isaiah’s interface populated with the report on
communication and mirror-neurons from the paper by
Stephens, Silbert and Hasson:
We hypothesize that the speaker’s brain activity during
production is spatially and temporally coupled
[emphasis added] with the brain activity measured
across listeners during comprehension. [And] in the
striatum and anterior frontal areas, including the dPFC
and dlPFC , the listener’s brain activity preceded the
speaker’s brain activity. We found nearly exact overlap
between the delayed, synchronous and advanced maps
obtained with the original decorrelated models (97%,
97%, and 94%, respectively). The result that significant
speaker-listener couplings include substantially
advanced weights may be indicative of predictive
processes generated by the listener before the moment
of vocalization.
…interestingly, some of these extralinguistic areas are
known to be involved in processing social information,
including, among others, the capacity to discern
beliefs, desires, and goals of others [emphasis
added]. [Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]
Isaiah wondered about the reliability of Travis to do the right
thing -the thing in the inmate’s interest, and thus in the
project’s interest- when things got rough, when things must
be remembered under stress. Isaiah recalled that Travis said
he didn’t worry about trouble -doom- because he didn’t go
to biker bars.
Isaiah agreed with the inmate that sometimes the bikers
come to you .
He thought of not just the men, the brothers, but their
genome and how odd their differences -as brothers- were
and too how decoupled their similarities were from their
motor actions. But, despite this, the brother -Travis- could
understand the brother’s -Lyndon’s- actions given the right
priming . Isaiah saw now it was because Lyndon lived inside
the body, the story, and Travis -up to now- had lived with
mere facts running upon the brain. The brother was not
embodied heretofore. He’d had unassembled pieces, but
nothing which conspired to make a whole.
Travis , Isaiah thought, now had to listen to his brother’s
story. And that is the only way he’d move -in body- toward a
shared goal.
But, the older brother’s own genome would be annealed to
it too, he thought, just like any tribe hemmed in along the
perimeter of the shapes built by the golden mean, ratio; the
Parthenon, the playing card. The distinction, Isaiah thought,
between each man and the tribe in a eusocial species was
not as clear cut as most would think; boundaries dissolved,
edges bled. Maybe we don’t have to get the whole world to
listen to his tale of woe, maybe just those with the shared
alleles the way each rare brother in a hive shares more with
cloned kin -their diploid brothers- than their own offspring or
their Queen.
Isaiah felt the hum of the lab’s bestiary, he felt his own
motor-cortex fire on the right side of his hemispheric brain.
He thought of the difference when man developed silent
reading skills, how a man could speak to himself within the
confines of his own brain and how much this had changed
mankind.
He thought -again- of how Ishmael merely wanted to go to
sea, to vent the spleen , to keep from the knocking off of
hats and bringing up funerals from the rear.
He watched as Travis drove away and the guards brought
the inmate into the lab. Isaiah thought that as Lyndon told
his tale of woe, one could -and by definition , he now knew,
the listener did - gather up all the rope of the inmate’s
desires, goals and plans.

III. 2040 e.v.

The quarterdeck’s second fire was out and Grimnir was back
at the helm. The cook had set the table and left. The
Captain was due to meet his officers for a meal.
But the ship whelmed him, his hands blackened from the
ropes, his bones rebelled, and his flesh constricted over
muscles that too jailed his upright skeleton and curved
series of ribs; his bones manacled like a malice of white
bears in a scarred metal trap. He leaned into southern gales
as consequence of his reaching the prow to be alone and to
think. His saw the wolfsangle in the clouds, he felt the time
run out on the haglaz in admixture of the sleet and the rain.
His soul expanded as the words of Lyngvi and his brother
hammered and tonged on his anvil of body that took rain
like pecks to a shell. Lyngvi had said three bells back:
I think a tribe should be 96% one race, once ethnicity,
one set of genes. The Japanese, the M ā ori, the Norse,
no matter who. But 4% of any tribe should be a few men
from other honor cultures, so the Bushido take in a
couple of Apache and two dozen arrows, the Mercurial
Gauls take one or two Mongols and their mares, the
Kalenjin make one white man -and his claymore- from
the highlands their tribemate.
We -my Captain- too have such men to retrieve…
The crew was just five men above boards. The other 139
bodies below decks were working on the cann on and also
upon sailors with bones in need of setting; the bilge pump
ran but the capstan was at rest, last used to get anchor
aweigh. Jarnefr was in the standing-rigging of the mainmast
and the gap in the clouds looked like a road -a wake- a
sluiceway as lapidary and gilt as the Varna Necropolis . The
clouds were east to west and the ship sailed -at 8-knots-
north toward the Isle of Skye .
She could hold at 13-knots with full canvas and everything
put away.
This latest EMP -the third in a week- had knocked out all but
the telltale -the Captain’s compass- and the dive-watches on
each man now a sailor, mariner, and outlaw with a wet and
cold face. They had set sail last Thursday and Lyngvi and
Grimnir had not spoken since the Juniper mizzenmast had
fallen and the deck’s oily boards had caught flame. They
had lost two sails -the royal and sky- and a yardarm and a
dozen men had broken their own wings that their coders
were unable yet to weld. The broken bones hurt the sailors,
the diminished strength hurt the repair of the ship. The
limping ship made the troubles on shore seem easy; even
weak.
Men doubted but did not speak; men held their breath when
movements were made by the officers of the ship. Their
pain was now the type of injury not growth, their pain
whispered and if they ignored it began then to bark.
The fife-rails that crowded around the mast like a crowned
and unfeathered nest had broken through the deck in some
places. The standing rigging and forestay and all the
shrouds of the mizzen had collapsed like a cat’s cradle
between a god-child’s two hands formed in ecstatic night
prayer.
Now -with their illicit taking of the ship from the bay- they
would be boarded if seen; and arrested if boarded. Unlike all
their earlier gambits now they had nowhere to run. The
mountains were long out of reach, and the capacious sea
had no cover, no concealment, no room at the inn. They
were as vulnerable as they had ever been. The US Navy -
running on diesels with no electrical systems- still patrolled
the Atlantic and the British and French had been advised.
Chatter had been picked up by Isaiah, and Jack Four had
intercepted it their first day out at sea.
The 243-year-old -and 44-gun heavy- frigate had been
commandeered out of Charleston and towed -by an
automaton tug- out to deep water in order to avoid the roll
of the incoming waves. Her double New Ironsides had been
sunk by the breakers as each swell drowned harbor and
shore. Over 30-million Americans had been displaced and
coastal towns were abandoned to all but sea beasts and
tribes like the Wolves of Vinland . But the Wolves had put
Vinland to their rudder and were presently on their way
north.
Storms circled like Valkyrie and mimicked Jupiter and the
sea buckled like roads -bridges- as earth quaked and plates
slipped below.
The Captain heard the old conversations with his shamans
in his head like fossil record, like progeny, like a diesel
engine running on its own heat and compression and inertia.
He remembered the old ignitions of trucks and bikes in
Virginia, out in Wyoming, down in Tennessee and Arkansas.
He saw his own gnarled hand on the keys, and smell of
gasoline.
The mariners’ fractured arms were slung with knotted-
cotton and mizzen-written splints, the yard arms were
repaired with a cobbling and many drillings, and the mast
had been so badly damaged that it was now used as raw
material for the lumber to pin the holes in the ship and the
men. Oars and sailors were between the canon, and bunks
and meals made sleep and refueling a lone affair. Each
carronade and Brodie stove was cinched down and had
been silent since the last storm had ended seven hours ago.
The halyards hoisted beams up to mariners with legs swung
over the yards. The hammering of shims in gaps and bolts in
place went on as each man became a millwright, a marine
and sailor of three.
Rain came again; so did sea-spray.
Words were used half as much as tools, tools half again as
the ship did more and more of the laboring the further they
went out into that one fifth of the world: the Atlantikoi
pelágei .
Longitudinal navigation had been uploaded to their PGCs
weeks prior to setting sail and the Captain rolled out star
maps on his table at night as the first mate held a tallow
candle and Lyngvi sat in the corner of the cabin and stared
not at the men but the flames to starboard and the sea to
stern through the cabin’s windows. He listened not to their
plans but the wind around the lamps and the waves far
down from this perch. He thought of the seabed plates
underneath them, rifts and riven rock that knew the world
when Pangaea was one mass -before it broke apart into
three then five things- and the ocean was a ring they called
Panthalassa . He thought of the Kilmaluag Formation of the
Scottish Basin -167 million years old- crushing its left
limestone & right Paleogene lava hands over fish and lizards
and mammals under the weather of the Outer Hebrides and
the north Atlantic itself.
He felt a mind in a body, a body inside of a trap.
He used his mind to run an inner hand over the scars at
bottom of the water they sailed over now; he heard the
t’gallants snapping, the mains’ls whoosh, the draw of the
Labrador Sea to their lee. The water turned clockwise under
the hull and he felt cool breezes from the artic blow down
over the ice of the north. He felt things dissolve and settle
down. He suspected other men would rise.
Grimnir asked short questions; demanding one-word
answers from his mates.
The Sigil on the Captain’s worn right hand had been rope
burnt from the day they all had swam off the collapsing
shore to reach the ship. The breakers had been so high -and
came in inside swells a mere thirty-three seconds apart-
that they had to take PWC from the cove and then ditch
them to swim to the anchored vessel in squads of five men.
Once aboard the crew had to hurriedly make sail as the ship
began to heave and snap back against the ocean and the
60,000lb anchor itself. The clones all got seasick, and only
the Waggeners and the Wolves from Virginia could work
without throwing up.
The first forty hours had been stormseas and swells of over
five meters; and the stomach met the mouth like fish on a
line every few seconds as the clones and Jack turned as
green as the water itself. The ship was narrow of beam, long
on keel, and had very heavy guns. Heavy planking was part
of its design and with full armament -and with skin twenty-
one inches thick- and when new, she had once sailed to the
barbary coast on 14 August, 1803. By the 6th of the next
month she had met -in the dark- a ship that wouldn’t answer
Captain Preble’s hails.
Lyngvi revisited old stories like confessions from dying men.
Coyly claiming to be the Donegal of His Majesty’s, it was in
fact the HMS Maidstone -a 32-gun frigate- and eventually
under threat of being fired upon by the Americans, the
British finally sent over a boat with the truth and a hat in
their hands. A week later, the ship sent by Jefferson -without
congressional approval- was at Gibraltar ; by the 4th of
October it was in Tangiers making Sultan Slimane capitulate
to demands he’d ignored when he didn’t know the
Americans had Marines.
Lyngvi had puked over the taffrail and as he tied off lines to
shackles the ocean spray and his ejecta hit the bobstays
from both sides. He lay hand -to brace himself- on the pin as
the shackle-key hung about his collar and bone, the rain
drove into his neck like spikes that shattered at once. His
head -at the fore- pressed on those hands as the contents of
his stomach -and he was certain too the iron of his blood-
drained down past the rail. The crew had roused him with
hails and a grab at the ribs as the deck pitched again and
slammed the crewman into the rail.
Seawater and rainwater ran into his eyes and his mouth;
down his neckline and the sloshing tore off one boot.
Even now in this remembrance his feet felt wet, his neck felt
compressed by the weight held between the thunderheads
and the decks. He’d blackout it seemed and the only part he
remembered after being roused then was the barking of
Jarnefr at midship. The first mate’s dreads -like a giant squid
being eaten by the whale of his bent beak of a head- spun
like hurricane each time he checked the four cardinal
directions and the four season crew that they had chosen
for this mission back in the mountains and land. His hands
held fast to the lines of the storm-sail plan that lay also on
paper in his cabin, rolled and tied with a lock of blonde hair.
He remembered why they had left all at once; on the
motorcycles and trucks and cars and dead civilians off the
roads. They had been surrounded by the other Jacks -three
through one- and all their fiefdom was being hemmed in by
not just the flooding at the coasts but the viruses and the
fallout and with each dead civilian it made each Jack more
and more an enemy to the Wolves .
“It’s one thing to be a parasite in a healthy host,” Lyngvi
had said at their last moot, “it’s another to be a virus in a
dead man swarmed by worms and buzzards and bear.”
The country had fallen apart all at once; and the dreams
had told him that a map would appear as they got on a ship
and picked up men and materiel from twelve places,
twelves races, twelve stops before their new home at the
end of the world. But he -they- had been exiled, the other
Jacks and their tribes had overwhelmed ten to one, and so
they ran, they set sail, they retreated. And this put a pall on
them all.
Now, the boom-vang was manned by Rektolie and before
dinner on this night -just a third of a day from the last of the
storm- he’d be told by Jarnefr , “hard on the kicker when we
reach leeward mark,” and by then -by now- the ship had
reached 10-knots.
When in the Captain’s cabin Lyngvi wrote things on scraps
of wet paper with a felt pen, and the words would bleed to
the edge. He’d been ignored by the cook, and too as the
Captain came in. He’d held the paper and watched as his
own thumb began to absorb the ink:
Tout Pensée émet un Coup de Dés
They would eat and checklists would pass from man to man
as the food followed a retrograde path. His morose behavior
angered Grimnir and Jarnefr would circle him until he rose
and left the table with his square plate. Meals would be
served in silence, water sniffed at for any hint of salt or
taint, the air was swatted at when moths in the lanterns
shadowed the free air. The ocean would speed up under
them, dolphins followed them during the days until the
surface pocked with rainwater, or the sun dropped low, or
Orca were off the coast of Greenland attacking sharks and
making the Delphinidae nervous and then scarce. Sextant
and navigator took sight as the clouds broke away from
Saturn. Polaris hid here and there as the crew grumbled of
the speed and the way their dinner tasted at sea.
The Vernier was oxidized and bronzen, and each hashmark
was filled with grime. The worm read out in minutes that the
navigator compared to his own watch. The brass looked
brown, the browning crew looked like lumber and mast, the
ship had turned black and at dusk the candles burned
orange behind frosted glass. Silence took on the tenor of
complaining and any peevish talk was judged at sedition at
once.
Even at night they threw the logline over and two crewmen
measured time in stillness -with only hand signals between
them- as the canvas snapped and the yards popped above.
GMT was measured via the moon, and the horologe was
ignored. One sixth of the crew, one sixth of the command,
one sixth of the circle was under measure and eye at all
times. The mirror of the horizon was scratched and it broke
the skyline in a fracted two; the below was clean on the
glass, the above was lapidary. Reds and blues appeared in
view. They received compressed light where the air met
water that went itself on forever across their bow.
“I have been lugubrious, I know,” Lyngvi said after sup and
he looked at Grimnir’s rowed brow and cauliflowered ear. He
spoke low so no one else would hear. “But, it’s not because
of you or the crew. It’s me. I feel adrift. I feel as if the gods
have pulled from me. I don’t know what to do, to advise
you. And I can tell you’re angry and feel let down.”
“You,” Grimnir said as he palmed the copper mug full of
coffee, “don’t have the responsibility I have. You have it only
to me, but I have it to them.” The tribe’s King -now the
mariner’s Captain- said this as he shoved his massive and
mottled arm out toward the cabin door and the crew that lay
beyond. His tattoos moved in the candle light like writing on
Belshazzar’s wall appearing left to right by invisible hand.
“I know. And, I can feel your opprobrium,” Lyngvi began and
chewed his own lips and tongue as he paused. His hands
went to his hips, his eyes to the brass buttons on the
monkey jacket his Captain wore.
“You want me to like you for you, and that ain’t the way shit
works,” Grimnir said. He took a draw from the cup and kept
his eyes on his left-handed Shaman, his stow-a-way with no
rank aboard the ship but of first rank -personally- to him.
“No, I want you to trust that it will return. I’m not asking you
to ease up on the standard, I’m not,” Lyngvi said and it was
two-thirds true, “I just need time, space, something.” He
said this -his eyes going down, then clockwise then
retrograde about the cabin- as they put ten miles linear
distance between them and America each hour. They
traveled as if from infinity toward a manageable integer of
just one. Barrels of wine and water, whisky and sake , mead
and buttons of peyote and teeth of coyote rolled under them
like eggs in a nest.
Grimnir barked -all at once like a gust, like lighting- to his
left -to the second mate who’d stood there awaiting orders-
and reminded him to secure the ballast below decks.
Lyngvi saw images of fertility churches at Iona and temples
austere and inland to Japan. He saw Mongolian burials from
the eyes of eagles in hunt; his nostrils felt dry as his mind
breathed in upon the steppe. He saw the fecund forest, the
mass of the ngahere , then each Kauri of the Waipoua 61-
meters high and as large in girth as the shadow and albedo
of Saturn’s two moon; he saw movement in his vision -the
hakuturi above with wings, below with scales- and he heard
the incantations of the tohunga of scattered tribes on the
flanks of the inland harbor where the Wolves would arrive.
“Kua hinga te tōtara ,” he whispered and knew little of what
it meant for those islands were so far in time and space
from the ones they still had to approach. His mouth moved
because the tongue and the lungs were all marioneted by
the downward strings of connective tissue from the darkest
parts of his brain. He sought not answers now; answers
were hidden from him. He sought only movement,
turbulence, body temperature and waters warmer than the
air.
“Well,” the Captain then said in lower voice, “whatever you
need, do it. Because I have a crew to run and ship to guide, I
don’t have time or inclination to play grab-ass with you
when you do this shit, Lyngvi .”
“I feel,” Lyngvi replied, “our landing will be around the north
of the isle and that we should not press on to Edinburgh. I
know that is our mission, but I feel -I think- that we should
make anchorage at Dunnet Bay , in Caithness , and move by
land to our eastern port.”
“Do you even know what’s waiting for us there?” Grimnir
demanded to know. Grimnir felt the tuning of the ship as the
crew followed orders and turnbuckles followed crewmen and
the stays were wrought and released like many keys of a
piano re-strung. He -as Captain and Chieftain- felt the
lumber about squeeze him. He felt it like he felt his own
coder adjust him and put each joint and organ under stress
to power him through each day. The ship and he as spring,
as auger, as automaton of retrograde power to come up and
out of the earth. He carried sprung weight above the ankles
and ballast beneath the heart. His brain lit up like the
windows to his quarters and wardroom -as they shared now
the space as the bulkhead had been damaged with the
mizzen’s failure- and now he looked -with eyes gone black
with bruising- at all five men astern; first mate and second
with their attachés and Lyngvi backing away to the corner.
The meal sat at the table, the lanterns burned.
Grimnir saw five men with five modules of mind, he felt
doubled as each man had two of each thing he pressed into
service -hands & feet and lungs and heartbeats at two every
two seconds and form & shadow had swam to his ship and
were now and always his- but he had but one desire. He
watched four men with his left eye and one man with his
right.
This is why he was leader, and admired Captain of the crew.
He had no grand or complicated plans, nothing like a
diamond -like the shaman crown of Lyngvi whom nobody
trusted beyond the grey clones- no, Grimnir had one bar -
one block- of noble gold.
The wardroom-officers kept to the decorum at sea which
made taboo the talk of politics, religion or females at all.
They reported only on the condition of ship, and vector of
sail. They mentioned speed in knots, and distance in
fathoms, and weight in avoirdupois . They waited for nods,
they feared words, they were on guard for movement from
the Captain who was more and more strong about the
muscles and lower down even as the skin was burned from
sun and rope and the face dissolved from the beard he grew
and melted from the rain he endured.
Grimnir ignored their accountings and spied the bunk -his
wooden cot- which doubled as a coffin. At sea no space was
wasted and the copper-bottomed hull put up its hand toward
both the ocean and down to the worms. He thought of his
wife and combed her hair in his mind with scrimshaw ivory
and tines made of onyx screwed in to bleached jawbones of
yotes . He saw her hands on his bent and bowed deltoids;
her feet in his own tattooed palms. He felt her words in his
ear, heard her weight pull down on him -again like cinching
stays- and he realized he had not cycled his lungs in a while.
So, he breathed and stared at the bunk.
“No,” Lyngvi answered, “but you saw the waves of New
York, Baltimore, and Carolina. You saw New Orleans.”
The Captain approached him in the corner, as the four men
filed out of the cabin to their stations. “The waves are
crushing the coasts. These are not storm surges flooding
inland, it’s the ocean reclaiming vast tracts of land. It won’t
go back out, it won’t recede in our lifetime,” Lyngvi said with
half confidence and half need to give his Captain a boost;
making himself seem more sure -a sum total- to calm
Grimnir’s nerves. He held a drawing that he’d not look at in
his hand, he had folded it until it was rigid. He still ignored
the sharp cards in his socks. He recalled Jarnefr reminding
the navigator to check for Collimation error as he’d point out
-to the young man- two 90-degree stars.
Lyngvi recalled the way the storm clouds made a trench in
the sky, and he saw it narrow at the horizon. He knew they’d
be hit again further out to sea. He knew this too was the
land of many storms; even though it was no land at all.
Grimnir stared at the man’s arm, shoulder, and then rose
not the head but the eyes. He then said, as Captain and
commander of the USS Constitution , “ok, I’ll put Jarnefr on
the helm, and the crew -from moonraker to mains’l - I’ll put
them in the rigging to pile on more sail.”
 5. Early Worm Gets Eaten by the Bird
When a reporter later asked me why I got a forty-year tax abatement, I
answered, because I didn’t ask for fifty
The Art of the Deal [Trump, Donald J]

It has become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted
of – namely, the confession of the originator, and a species of involuntary and
unconscious auto-biography.
Under an invisible spell they always revolve once more in the same orbit,
however independent of each other they may feel… something within them
leads them, something impels them. Their thinking is far less discovering than a
re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and home-coming to a far off, ancient
common household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew:
Philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order
Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche, Fredrich)

You want to know why I carry a .45? Because they don’t make a .46
Surveillance audio 11.11.11 [MacLeod, Lyndon J]

I. 2038 e.v.
Jack Four let off the accelerator and the pipes popped and
rattled and the steering wheel vibrated in his hands.
He saw the port come into view -Gantry cranes first- to his
one o’clock; he saw trucks carrying Connex boxes leave the
terminal in pairs. He saw the hot grey hood and the dusty
tan tread of the open wheels to either side of the narrow
prow of the ‘33 Ford.
The oranges and blues of the stacked containers looked
weird to him, and he imagined painting them black and
grey; decals removed, like home. He saw seals made, seals
broken; he saw forklifts move about the yard of the
Portsmouth, Virginia terminal. He lit his cigar and checked
his six. He held the flat black Zippo in his hand and stared at
the faded imprint; the skull with high crown, the halo of
arrowheads.
The hotrod sat low and on haunches.
The fumes of the unspent gasoline invaded the cabin as he
sat and watched the booms of the Hammerhead cranes
move clockwise with a forty-foot high cube from the Maersk
ship -the 21,412 TEU out of Hong Kong - that was docked
last in line along the James River.
Seaboard was patrolled by one Port Authority radio-car and
it had passed by on its way up Harper Ave eight minutes
ago. The Craney Island Marine Terminal was running rail
cars -double stacked- toward the mainland and the CSX
markings looked like cattle brands to Jack. He watched
things as they moved. The intermodal containers -like blood
cells full of nutrients and oxygen- ran on the trains like
arteries, the cranes transporting code like axons between
neurons both discrete and fluid over time; and the rain now
fell on his windshield like the body temperature fluid
between all islands from Kent to Cobb and St Inigoes of
Scotland island just 17 kilometers from Tappahannock
around Chesapeake Bay .
The rain fell upon his elbow out the low -chopped- driver’s
side door. His coder found another mutated virus and
pinged him as it sequestered it under the mugshot of the
RNA. He blew smoke from his mouth; he ignored the readout
on the effect of particulates, smoke, heat, nicotine and
alcohol on the newer strands. He ignored it because
epidemiology wasn’t sexy; because pandemic didn’t attract
him like war and rebellion. His body didn’t care what he
cared about; it spent over half its metabolic energy on
defense against pathogens.
“They named it from the Algonquian word lappihane : the
place of the rise and fall of water ,” Jack said as his coder
next ran all the tonnage that was being transported from
ships into the rail cars and the docks.
His coder ran the data on General Robert Garnett, killed on
July 13, 1861 in West Virginia and Richard -his cousin- dealt
the death card at Pickett’s Charge. Jack saw that Richard
had been at Fort Laramie a few years before the war-
between-the-states and sired a half-Lakota son who broke
bread and heads with Crazy Horse in the coming years.
Jack saw images of the spaces between each ciudad from
Norfolk to Canyon City.
Jack thought of the tribal bands of Injuns that ran the plains
and galloped and snuck up and down the Delaware; the
mountains outside Bartram Trail; the highest point at 5,385
feet of Wayah Bald , the lowest -at 1,500- of the river in
Tennessee. He saw the remnants, the hold outs, he saw the
campaign against the brown buffalo the bruised heads
sawed off, the red and white genitals removed. He saw
feathers both in birds and on the ground.
He stared now across the bay to the ocean and let his mind
wander and smiled at how simple most folk were. He petted
his enemies in his mind as he decided what to do.
Jack did not -he could have but he did not- watch the
Landsat images from four nights previous. The images from
above Lot 45 . It was from the timestamp four hours before
Jack would commandeer the Ford and drive solely on hi-way
12 -dust up around each wheel like rooster tail- and head
toward Aguilar . The road was one lane and beset by
boulders 9-meters high, trees with roots washed away and
tinged green from light.
But now -at 1341hrs MST- MO watched the images and took
the data in and used each eye -like the sides of the head of
Leviathan- to -with his left eye- watch Jack now in Virginia
and Blax -with the other- back then at elevation nearly two
miles above; but four days behind.
MO watched as Blax held the article in one hand:
The news of the capture of Fort Pillow by Forrest, and the
cowardly butchery which followed of blacks and whites
alike, has produced a profound sensation here. The
universal sentiment is “let no quarter be shown…”
Blax let the clipping drop and he focused instead now on the
glow of the fire around the top of the containers; he made
note of the blue between it and the descending black of the
summer night sky. It was midnight about and the Jacks were
in bed and no dreams would come to him tonight or
tomorrow, like the previous three nights had been a blank.
The milky way was strewn like dust again, like a divide of
two sides to the sky and Blax wondered about Valance’s
parents. He wondered about her actual parents and then he
forgot -thanks to his coder- what it was he was thinking of.
MO spied the feed at 100x the speed and watched the sun
come up just as Blax turned in.
But absent MO’s watchful right eye, Blax wondered if Foxx
and Davison were right and that the reason Nathan Bedford
Forrest was seen as an unredeemable monster was because
he took no time to defend his actions whilst still alive.

II. 2036 e.v.

He was reading by a small lamp. The glow -like a cone-
illuminated just the page, barely any light spilling over the
edge when Jack One walked into his room. He had asked -
via DM- to be seen eight minutes ago and had been
approved -by Blax- at once. But Jack had lingered outside
the container, smoking a cigar and thinking.
His words ran through his head like grains through a
thresher. He both thought and observed each word. He then
walked into the container and toward the back room.
“Hey LT,” Jack said and knelt down by the foot of the
murphy bed that Blax reclined upon -was propped up by- in
a seated position. Blax lowered the book into his lap. Jack
had walked in cavalierly; giving no hint of anything of those
480-seconds he had lingered.
“Jack,” Blax said -acknowledging the boy- and nodded. He
then turned the lamp light away from the page and away
from Jack, allowing for some ambient light still; making sure
the lumens didn’t discomfit the eyes of the kneeling man.
He stared at his hands and waited.
“I feel things well up inside me,” Jack began, his open palms
began smoothing out the sheets of the bed in front of him,
like pacing, like the autonomic system busying itself outside
of a room in which one’s fate was being determined, “and I
don’t exactly know how to explain them; they seem
intuitively true, but I find myself stumbling each time I try to
form sentences. I’ve spoken with Jack and he -of course-
suggested I come to you, but I’m warning you now that I
have no idea how any of this will come out.”
“Fair enough, are you thirsty or hungry, do you need
anything to stabilize yourself?” Blax asked.
“No, I had a beer outside, well earlier. Anyway, I’m fine. I
guess I’m just going to plow through this,” Jack held his
palms still now, face down on the black and grey sheets, a
few inches from Blax legs, “I wonder about being -about us
being- too impulsive and too open; too close to the flame.
We take chances that I think could fuck up our ability to stay
out of the jackpot, ya know?” Jack asked.
“Are you scared or is it,” Blax began; but was cut off.
“It’s partly fear, sure; I won’t deny it. But it feels more like
protection against self-sabotage. That we are self-
sabotaging. I worry that we want to get caught sometimes.
Like being caught would give us a platform to explain
ourselves, as if explaining ourselves would have any impact
at all,” Jack said with the roll of the eyes.
“You are dubious of that,” Blax said with a smirk.
“Of us wanting to explain ourselves; or of the efficacy of us
explaining ourselves?”
“Yeah,” Blax said. He was grinning as he nodded; a partner
to the word that included as much as he could.
“Yeah, I am. I don’t think people give one shit about our
motives or our vision; I think we live in a feedback loop,
surrounded all day -each day- by our own thinking, our own
ideas and we forget how basic and simple the average man
is. You think anyone anywhere thinks like us? It’s beyond
foolish LT, the average man would recoil in horror, would
give up listening half way through our first sentence. Shit,
our grammar alone would shut down their ears. We’ve truly
moved beyond,” he paused and thought, “it’s like a
speciation event, only compressed into a few years. But we
cannot have our ideas, our ideals, mate up with the rest of
society’s.
“You are a romantic, and a believer in honest dialogue, and I
respect it; I swear that I do, LT. Without your guidance and
your example, I wouldn’t be the man I am.
“But, LT,” Jack said with a bow of the head and an expulsion
of the breath, “I -and the Jacks- we were built for your
guidance, we were built to understand you. Evolution built
the perfect tumblers for your unique Skeleton key. The rest
of the world isn’t even close. You are utterly
incomprehensible to them. When you say love they hear
hate , when you stand up they think you’ve taken a seat.
I’ve never seen a man -and now all of us together as men-
less understood by an audience.
“Even as a kid I was weird, but people at least got my jokes.
Girls found what I said -you know, my expressed emotions-
palatable. I was odd but just a few degrees off from their
own orientation so they could adjust well enough. But, now,
we are 180 degree off, or they are 180 off. But either way,
it’s like speaking to the back of a man’s head,” Jack said and
placed his hand on LT’s leg, firmly, just below the knee and
left it there as punctuation.
“Do you know the story of Henry Ford?” Blax’s asked as the
boy’s hand made his heart rate rise one percent.
“I know a few stories of Ford, which one?” Jack said with a
shallow huff. Blax always did this, he thought, he told
fucking stories as solution to some real-life problem I have.
“He -Ford- was being interviewed,” Blax began, “for a book
or article, I forget which, and he said that if he had given
people what they wanted, he would have had to build faster
horses.” Blax smiled slightly and looked at his Jack and
breathed in and out with some effort and noise.
“I understand,” Jack said with a ponderous mien. Fucking,
hell , Jack thought as he stared off to the right -through the
slider- and over the valley.
“I know intellectually you understand. But ask yourself if you
get it emotionally. Look, you are the most open and -in
many ways- closed of the Jacks; you oscillate between those
two extremes. I worry that when you are closed you forget
who you are; that you are closed off from even yourself.
That is my biggest fear for you. I worry you close off from
yourself because you are scared of yourself,” Blax said. Jack
One was the most aggressive and the most pragmatic; he
wanted to go a hundred miles an hour or not go at all. He
wanted to win or not play. He wanted to kill, never threaten
nor wound , Blax thought.
“I am -at times- scared, because I don’t know how to
calibrate what is noble and masculine openness and what is
reckless and dangerous exposure to harm. I can’t tell the
difference, and my fear seems the only tool I have; my only
tool of calibration. So I trust it I guess. Being open -
vulnerable- has embarrassed me and left me wounded; it’s
not some risk-free game,” Jack said. His knees were larger
at the proximal and distal epiphysis. The elbows too, as he
had built up deposits from the jumping and harsh pushing
against things 18% more than the other Jacks. He had been
in the bush for ten days over the last weeks of winter that
year and he had slammed into the ground with jumps from
boulders and ledges, he had ran toward his objective and
used his arms as suspension when reaching canyon walls
and large rocks.
The job, the mission, was everything to him; his own body,
mind, soul, was mere tool. But he knew the value of keeping
one’s tools in order, clean, and in good repair.
“Jack, I’ve been so open that it has ruined my life more than
once. You know maybe 10% of the truth of just how
vulnerable I’ve left myself, how vulnerable I’ve been to the
attacks to my underbelly from women and enemies alike.
It’s been a bloodbath over and over and I’ve lost nine out of
ten fights. I can just tell you one story,” Blax began.
“You and your stories,” Jack dropped his head to the end of
the bed. He felt a small buzz in his neck and the left elbow
as he closed his eyes. He saw starbursts in lavenders, blues
like the fetlocks and necks of roan horses that faded to
blacks ragged like treelines ridden into at a winter noon. He
squeezed the eyes as Blax spoke.
“Did you know that narrative is the preferred software
model for our autonomic and central nervous systems?
Stories are actually how we learn, in fact that is how -why-
the great myths are still around today, because they have
been remembered as stories, stories with such distilled
wisdom and truth -truth at the level of the body- that
humans have remembered them over tens of thousands of
years without writing them down.
“Stories are software, firmware, and never forget that. A
vector like that CRISPR in your body, and in your balls. We
enjoy a story, but that is like saying we enjoy a meal. A
meal isn’t merely to be enjoyed or as the center of some
social activity; we eat to survive,” Blax said.
“Copy that,” Jack relented and nodded his head to show
assent.
“Ok, so, I was thirty-five or thirty-six -thereabouts- and I had
just broken up with another female who had been a disaster
for me emotionally. I had been open and vulnerable as I am,
as you know, and as you can be. I had revealed all manner
of shit to her. And she had been cold and empty inside,”
Blax said. He took note -for just a second- of how he gave
Jack more credit that he deserved for being open, brought
him closer to him via this beau geste . But the
embarrassment Blax felt for this white-lie flittered away as
Jack spoke and filled Blax’s ears with words that banished
his inner critique.
“Which one was this?” Jack asked. He raised his head to look
at Blax. He wanted to care, but he was scared, and he felt
that these stories did not help. Jack felt the words infected
him somehow. Some things were not safe to hear, he
thought and felt ashamed for thinking this. But now that he
had told himself that he was in fact scared -thought it in one
second flat- he noticed that Blax had in fact seen it first,
seen his fear. And just then Jack relented to listen to the
man’s story as if it was plaited with his own.
“Melannie -Melannie Martsolf- was a woman who had many
good traits, many interesting things about her. An
interesting artist and -in many ways- a woman who wanted
more from life; she was not simple minded. But she had
been devoured by the post-modernists like Derrida and
Foucault and had her soul ripped out. And I suspect she had
been wounded too; by a man, by men. We all carry such
things.
“She was an emotional nihilist I would say. She had love in
her heart -stamped in her heart by evolution- but she had
torn almost all of it out with her philosophic conceits. She
felt the beating of the heart as mere echo, a tell-tale heart
of sorts, beating under the floorboards -unwelcome-
unwanted. Evidence of some crime. And because of this she
refused to give herself over to anything decent or honest or
real.
“She took each offer I made toward bonding us, mating us,
and she tore it up instantly. She mocked me, my
vulnerabilities, she laughed right in my face. She thought
jealousy was a -well- was an Old Testament relic; the
behavior of the God she hated. She banished all emotions to
exile -like the post-modernists do- as disloyal, a bourgeois
concept, as counter-revolutionary, I guess. She, of course,
felt jealousy herself and felt all manner of things, but she
took these as mere evidence of her own corruption, she
thought, well I think she thought. And fearing something,
she hid the evidence of her betrayal. She acted as if she
was above all primal needs,” Blax said.
“She betrayed you?” Jack asked.
“No, well, yes. But not in that way. What I meant is her
emotions betrayed her to herself. See, she wanted to
believe she was a revolutionary, a banner carrier for the
post-modernist leftist. She saw herself as an avant-garde
artist with no baggage -no bourgeois baggage- vis-à-vis
relationships or moral thinking. She pretended to be a moral
relativist, a nihilist and social constructionist.
“She pretended that feelings were not innate. And so, when
she felt things that were decidedly bourgeois -things like
jealousy or desire for material comfort- and the most innate
and honest feelings of small women -the desire to be
dominated by a male- well, when those feelings arose she
saw them as evidence of her own corruption. She thought
these were feelings that capitalism and religion made -
formed- in her, and thus she rejected them. And so she
immediately turned them around like anyone confronted
with a weapon pointed right at them,” Blax said as he
brushed the wrinkles in the sheets down and looked toward
the bookshelf and its bounded letters in rows that went on
and on. He noticed a few tomes had their spines reversed
and the vanilla-colored pages raggedly facing out.
“How so?” Jack asked. He found himself interested in this
girl now. He ran the image sof her from the cloud; the one’s
Blax had uploaded. There was an image of her on Porn Hub,
uploaded by a former boyfriend that she’d had before Blax,
but Jack ignored that, and he looked instead at the images
of her in a sundress, white and unhemmed, on a sidewalk
with glass all around from a pane she had dropped; tears on
her face from waters that seemed much older than would
come from just that. He felt caught up in her state of mind,
at the time; and then now. He thought of her now and saw
the harsh face, bent and hammered into place, and there it
was: she looked just like Arol.
The pursed lips, the cold eyes, the jaw set as if she had no
need to ever open it -and say anything- ever again. The
mind was made up , Jack intuited from these images. And
he allowed her and Arol toggled back and forth in his mind
as he let his eyes lay upon Blax and watched as he too saw
the resemblance, the overlap; the whale tattoo blue on the
temple by the eye, the chest skin of Melannie black like
birds about London, skin like crêpe de Chine . Teeth serrated
like fifty-fifty blades , he thought as he no wanted to look
away.
Jack watched as Blax turned off their shared coder images;
refusing to compare and contrast.
Blax spoke instead as the last image of Arol and her silver
tooth faded from inner view. Jack One liked both women’s
faces, they seemed like predators, that would he could
capture, ravish, and leash. He imagined beating them and
sucking their clits; drawing blood and licking it gently back
to the source of the wound. He choked them until they
laughed and climaxed and obeyed. He used his thumbs to
make bruises, he wove nooses that he’d hang in their
wooded closets between dark dresses he’d cum on and ruin
and make piquant with the smell of bleach.
He smirked in between Blax’s speech as his own thoughts
died away.
“She would -and this is so typical of the morally confused-
she just inverted her feelings. So, if she felt like submitting
to me she would demand that I submit to her or merely
refuse to acknowledge her desire at all. She would level the
playing field, by making me smaller. Because how could she
make herself larger? She was sixty-three inches tall, and a
hundred pounds soaking wet. She was small, her hands
were like a child’s, and this made her angry. She couldn’t be
larger, so she had to make me smaller,” Blax complained,
not acknowledging why; his failure; his weakness.
Blax downloaded an article on whales from the home’s hub
and DM’d it to Jack as he sat at the end of the bed. Blax
read it in 1.89 seconds and breathed out deliberately slow;
his chest was tight; his heart rate was up 5% since twenty
minutes ago. The old man closed the eyes as he waited for
Jack to peruse it:
One of the hallmark of a whale’s intelligence is its ability
to communicate and navigate underwater…
echolocation (sonar) providing a 3D map of their world
that is incorporated into a visual image.
“They have a holistic view of what they are perceiving,”
[file corrupted] Marino says. Dolphins have an enhanced
capacity -at twenty times the human brain- to process
information of this kind.
Whale brains also appear to be wired up to experience a
range of emotions and may have an advanced sense of
self-awareness. In a killer whale, the limbic system, a
part of the brain associated with emotional awareness
and memory formation, is exaggerated to the point
where it has formed a unique structure on the brain now
known as the paralimbic lobe.
In recent years, scientists have begun to speculate that
this part of the brain is also responsible for a form of
collective self-awareness between members of a pod.
“They may have some sense of self that is spread out
among the rest of their pod,” according to [file
corrupted] Marino. “What happens to members of the
pod, happens to the individual.”
It is a theory that goes some way towards explaining
events like mass strandings, where an entire group of
whales beach themselves, apparently due to the distress
of one particular individual. They are highly dependent
on their social networks for every element of their lives
and have a very keen sense of friend and foe.
[redacted]…one of the scientists put seaweed on his
head to be Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. He then
threw the seaweed into the water and turned back
toward his colleagues. Moments later a dolphin
appeared next the boat, with the seaweed on her head.
 Dolphins are known to be excellent mimics, something
that is seen by thousands of people in aquaria around
the world. For scientists this kind of playfulness is the
hallmark of intelligence.
“In the concrete tank they have no reason to use most of
their senses,” [file corrupted] says, “certainly not
echolocation, certainly no a lot of sound as nothing is
going on, there is not much to see. It is like sensory
deprivation, there is nothing to do.
“It’s like being in a small room with the lights off and
once in a while, someone gives you a sandwich under
the door. It is like someone being held in solitary
confinement.”
How smart is a whale? We don’t know. But the question
itself seems to miss the point . [independent.co.uk.com]
Blax then held up his hands too; to show them as if his
description of Melannie’s little hands could be complimented
somehow with a visual now. He said the word -mimicry - and
Jack recalled they’d spoken of it before. Blax highlighted it in
the file he had just loaded on whales and then pressed on.
“Now, look, I’m going somewhere with all this, so just hang
in. This mimicking action was the first indication of proto-
empathy,” Blax said as the data settled on Jack’s brain. “If I
see you reach out and grasp the fruit of the tree I too can
reach out and imagine what it must be like to place one’s
hand into the space between the known and unknown, to
pierce the firmament and take hold of self-knowledge.”
Blax paused and watched the young man’s eyes, and his
brow; the first sign of their common meridian line. Blax
looked for facial expressions -hidden or distorted by scars,
burns, red- the way others may look for furtive movement of
hands. He worried for the evidence of worry. He was vigilant
for signage his Jacks were more and more vigilant in the
world.
“Your hand is my hand , I begin to think, right? Your grasp is
what I grasp too ,” Blax said as Jack absorbed each word like
weight; like pound after pound of the sea. He forced himself
to breathe.
“And that first spark of empathy,” Blax said as he stared into
the eyes in Jack’s head, “that idea that you and I may in fact
be not just similar but essentially the same ? Well, that
instantly can darken the cloud on the brow, and turn -in
anger, in fear- toward the knowledge of good and evil. See,
now you know -equipped with this empathy- now you know
from your own vulnerabilities -your own fears, your own
pains- what you could do to the other -your brother, your
lover- to cause them the worst sort of pain.”
Jack One immediately thought of Jack Four. New images
scrolled in the mind.
Blax said this but -in the silence- tried not to think of the
details. He tried to keep it abstract, but he still felt what he
felt. Story or no story, this was pain he still carried around
like static shrapnel that stabbed him if he moved too quickly
or turned too radically in the wrong way. He was not free to
move without thinking first; sometimes well in advance. And
he certainly was not free after those thoughts appeared in
his head again and again.
Jack remained kneeling at the bed.
His right hand still rested on Blax’s shin. He felt like the Lt’s
stories always had threads of gold and garrote both; he
spoke in poetry of his own and of the canon; then he said
things ugly and wrong.
Jack felt Blax made allusions and left many things open and
that the old man breathed in heavily -cautiously- just before
holding something important within. And thus Jack prepared
for both understanding and misunderstanding; he welcomed
both. Jack felt sad, like Blax was as vulnerable as they, as
he, despite all the extra time on the earth; that things did
not improved, but declined. Then, Jack forgot about why he
had come in and just began thinking of what she, this
woman, must have done to this man.
The details would embarrass him, Jack knew that; that is
why they were hidden; that is why they both spoke in ways
that circled the drain.
Jack began to figure that this woman, these women, maybe
were clueless and thus nearly blameless, but maybe they
knew too what they were doing. How does one even know?
he asked himself. Maybe they were setting traps that would
spring and reset each season and re-open wounds in this
man each fall. They must have known how sensitive he was,
Jack thought, must have known how he would travel the
same ground over and over -conscientious and pattern
seeking- and would always re-live these disputes and insults
and attacks on his core .
Jack forgot all about how he had propitiated Blax in order to
convince him -to convince Blax, and was in fact adamant-
that mankind couldn’t ever understand one goddamn word
any of them said.
That was his story, the story he came into the room with,
the story he was telling to get Blax to make them more
careful, cautious, smarter about their crimes. But now he
was wrapped up in Blax’s story and found his brain making
connections between girls and fishes, inner roil and declared
wishes, between his own desires for women made with
edges and malice and doom; he was making -plaiting- shit
like like this with breezy aplomb. God, they must have
known, the Lt gave them the playbook, he gave them the
exact co-ordinates to his heart and soft parts . Of course,
they knew, Jack concluded; this man was so obvious and so
revelatory. And they used it each time to rip out his heart.
And thus, in a few moments, Jack felt that he understood.
“Jesus, what a cliché ,” Jack said aloud.
“Me?” Blax asked, missing the right question; always
insecure of some defect noticed.
“No, no, I mean, this woman. I mean the obviousness of
emasculating a man who is both genuinely manly and
genuinely -openly- vulnerable. It’s just like the most obvious
thing in the world to do. No great artist; no great artist
would perform the obvious,” Jack said -not really admitting
to thinking Blax was a cliché and was weak- but instead
trying to think of why he was so offended, why he was so
angry on the man’s behalf. He still believed he needed
reasons to be what he innately was; that blood was not
passed on but merely carried either in one vessel, or two, or
five, or a million and half.
He searched the mind for things to justify his solidarity with
Blax. He didn’t yet understand things just arose; like
bubbles from the bottom of cider or Champagne , like
whales up from sounding the sea.
“Well, she was a good artist not a great one,” Blax smiled
and leaned forward and put his hand on Jack’s hand -that
lay on his own shin- and he squeezed.
“Look, I was no innocent, I handled myself poorly. I was
weak. And I couldn’t give voice to my feelings in the subtle
shades necessary. I was inarticulate in many ways. I don’t
say that to absolve her. I say it to flesh out the story, the
truth; even when one is maligned or attacked or done
wrong, one has a role in it. No one is truly innocent. Even if
one is merely guilty of na ï veté . And I was guilty of more
than that; but mostly I was naïve . I thought women could
care for a man; I truly believed that they were soft and
decent and moral inside. I couldn’t see them for what they
are: humans.
“And maybe some women are capable of tending to a
sensitive man; I just have never met one like that. And I’ve
met many women,” he said as he laughed wanly. He had
vague feelings of something beyond; something ineffable
that might not adhere to such laws. He thought of the
woman -the girl- that might be brigand to natural laws of
predator and prey. But his coder tamped it down and no
name appeared, no face hovered, no feeling came.
Jack smiled too, “you know, it’s odd. We -and we’ve talked
about this- we feel like we’ve learned from your mistakes
enough to not need to suffer through so many examples of
the same lesson over and over.”
Blax nodded, “I hope so, Jack. I mean, I am -we are-
romantics to the core. And the draw of the female is like the
dragon’s gold to us, my man. We are so insecure that we
feel as if the only balm is a woman’s love; and it,” he
paused, “I can’t demand you eschew women, I’ve only
asked you wait until we’re done here. But I can say that no
modern woman will be able to deal with your honesty, and
she will be -like if you gave a child an automatic weapon-
she will just end up shooting you to death with your own
ammunition. She won’t be able to help herself.
“I’ve seen it a hundred and one times with every kind of
woman, from the most rapacious and sinister females -
straight up satanic women- to the bashful, innocent,
submissive types; the kind that seem like kittens and
puppies at first. I’ve had girls insist they love sensitive men
who were the most cruel and unforgiving and the least
introspective about their own ways.
“They all fall into nature’s trap; we all do. We’re no better.
But, the trap we fall into is women; and so, we can avoid the
trap before we come upon it. Theirs -their trap- is going for
your balls once you love them; and you -and even they-
cannot know it when you first fall in love. That’s the genius
of nature, Jack; the woman isn’t even aware of what she is.
And so you trust her, and you hand over the ammo day by
day until one day she just loads the gun you handed her and
gives you a choice of submission to her or she’ll blow your
heart away,” Blax said as he held a finger-gun in the air -
pointed at Jack- and lowered the hammer-thumb to the
hand.
“I don’t blame them,” Blax continued, “any more than I
blame a predator for taking down its prey. But, I don’t walk
insouciantly into the forest anymore. And I just hope if it’s
one lesson you guys learn from me it’s that. Women are
wonderful, grand creatures like the snow leopard or the
wolf, but they’ll kill you or -like the crow- lead someone to
you that will. The Siberian tiger with markings like the Aspen
-or the black leopard with black spots- are magnificent
creatures. But they’ll rip out your guts and eat you alive
without so much as blinking. And if we were tougher, more
robust -if we weren’t so soft- we could withstand it. Many
men can. Sociopathic men can handle women.
“I’ve seen men cut up with all manner of shit; insults and
domination and they seem to handle it fine. I suspect they
are seething inside, but no matter, let’s say they truly are ok
with it. I applaud them. I do. They have traits of stoicism and
toughness that we just don’t have. There is a price to be
paid for our openness, our willingness to tell the truth; we
pay a price for our desire for relationships that are real and
vulnerable and honest. That price is that our families and
wives will tear us to shreds; we have left ourselves open,
vulnerable to attack. We stand upright, vitals exposed.”
Blax said this as his hands moved over his belly and chest
as if this pantomime would show Jack in a few seconds of
exposed flesh and blood what all his words never could.
“We cannot blame them for being what they are. Sure, in
ancient times women were less likely to behave with such
aggression and malice. But those days are over; and
modern women are saddled with incompetent men and
loaded like a mule with the need for themselves, as women,
to make their own way in the world. They have been trained
to be independent.
“And in their defense, they’re vulnerable too. They can’t
count on a man anymore. So even when they find one who
is competent they can’t trust that. And so, they beat him
around the ears emotionally speaking, to road test it,” he
smiled as he said this; he smiled as best as he could.
Jack moved the mouth but it had nothing but morose and
bleak affect behind it. His mouth fell down as much as it
strove to make itself into a grin.
“They are just as harmed by modern relationships as men
are,” Blax continued, his hands again in his lap. “And so
they are lashing out. They have been lied to and left in the
lurch.”
“LT,” Jack asked, “then how are we gonna get what we need;
I mean, with women? I don’t understand how we are
supposed to thrive under this dictum. I’m just saying, by
your own analogy,” Jack said hoping Blax would repair his
own sentence. He was opened mouthed and young and had
not the history or survival memories to buttress him the way
Blax knew he could survive such things. Jack still wondered
how it would all turn out. Jack still thought there were
answers, and that someone above him knew what they
were.
“I know. You’re not wrong. It’s a conundrum,” Blax
answered. “But, let me just say that this prohibition on
females is temporary; until we can figure out how to have
sane and meaningful and honest relationships with women.
It will take time, but I swear to you that both myself and
Isaiah are working on it. It truly is a top priority; it’s really
what lies at the bottom of all this. I swear it.”
“We’re robbing trains and ch â teau to learn how to get
along with chicks?” Jack asked incredulously; his hands were
now holding his head. His eyes squinting, his cheeks warm.
“Seems odd,” Blax grinned with his mouth and his eyes,
“but yeah; it’s chess not checkers.”
“So, was Melannie the one you were gonna tell me about
or,” Jack asked as the sentence dangled.
“No, actually I had just broken up with her, and was thinking
of one of the woman I was with after her, that was the story
I was going to tell. But to be honest, Melannie was
dispiriting enough, I don’t think I have the stamina to
recount the disaster that was Ms. Sarah Smith. Holy shit,
that woman was truly psychopathic, a clinical predator, no
shit.
“She was unlike any woman I had ever met. And like I said,
the merely confused and slightly amoral ones were bad
enough; but Sarah mutated my genome she was so toxic,”
Blax said with a face that was more grim than grin. But he
did try -again- to smile as his cock pressurized with the
autonomic memory of sexual congress with the woman who
had been awful and grand all at once.
Jack laughed at this in a quick burst. He shook his head -the
laugh swallowed- and he thought of the way the Lt crafted
sentences. Language was his only true friend , Jack thought
in a breezing second or two.
Well, at least until now, now that he had us , Jack One
thought and let his hands migrate from the temples to cover
his eyes as he exhaled into his palms all at once.

III. 2040 e.v.

The room was quiet except the breathing of the un-
augmented human who had come into the room via the
double doors past the airlock.
Lyngvi sat upon his throne and attempted not to slouch.
The supplicant approached at the same pace as the guards.
They strode; and the steam from the water boiled upon the
rocks; hissed and rose under the air-handler that made it
rain a fine mist upon the room. The airlock had closed and
the ambient light from above diffused and held steady
above their heads. Angles and edges were caught, outlined
was all anyone was. The man’s eyes saw only dark space
between the perimeter of the shaman he’d come to see.
The bones of the throne had only tips like flame, like teeth.
“Lyngvi ,” the man said with a voice low and lacking edge;
soft and imploring; with memory of shit going bad. He had
dust on his shoulders and in the beard, mud on the fetlocks
and boots. He carried a cylinder in his breast pocket, in that
tube were his papers from down in town. There it was 5,800
feet; here it was 8,800. He felt lethargic and had a
headache.
New paper IDs had been issued to the townspeople; and
people still kept them on them out of habit. They felt no
pressure from anyone; Trinidad was safe from the cartels
and gangs; but internally survivors wrangled and jockeyed
and played games to get what they wanted. The Wolves
were the only tribe -of the four- that even dealt with the
town folk.
Lyngvi jammed the tongue between his rear molars and
clamped the vice of his jaws upon it. He stared at the man’s
pate. His hands twitched and he dosed himself with 10mg of
morphine. He closed the eyes.
Wells sided-eyed his friend and shaman and flexed the fists
to dissipate heat and anxiety. He caught images of
memories of his kid. Andres was now thirty-five -he thought
as the soft noise of the bikes entered the roof through the
square that was well above how high the virus could rise.
The boy -now a man- likely had just pulled into the
compound on one of the bikes, he thought as he pretended
he could see him and ran his mind’s eye over him like a
mother hen, checking this avatar -this hologram- for injury
and bad attitude and dark thoughts. Their sound had come
like not thunder but rain; a washing, a harmony, a
symphony of syncopated RPMs by the staggered bikes
traversing up the snake of a road into the wheel within a
wheel of their place.
Ro added water to the stones.
The girls -under the tutelage of Starr- mixed compounds
form the apiary in bowls with pestle and their triceps looked
like the angles on fenders to sixty-six Chevelle, their hair
was braided like rope around capstan, their faces serene as
if asleep. Wells looked away from the throne and his friend
and toward the line of ten girls who had moved from the
courtyard to the Shaman’s building to mix drugs for their
next ritual in two days.
They crushed pollen and mead and Blue Lily material in rock
bowls with hammered copper lining. Starr added proprietary
dust from large burlap sacks that lined the room like
sandbags and had printing on them in the Cyrillic alphabet
and bailing wire around tops shaped like flowers in bloom.
She reached over the young girls’ shoulders as they made
paste, and the light made it seem like stardust and the
spray from a blowhole in a breaching , he thought. His chest
felt tight, his eyes heavy. But he stared at her as if the
image might shim up the lids.
Starr had been kept in low light conditions from birth and
her blue eyes had never darkened at all. They looked like
blue fading away to grey, like the world just before , Wells
thought, one went to sleep .
“Go ahead,” Lyngvi said to the civilian, with vex, each word
shaved of all friendliness; hollowed and hustled and
hammered flat of any time for bullshit.
“Well, the reason I wanted to see you -shaman- is that my
sister has this boyfriend, and he won’t honor the family,”
the man said as he kept his hands in front like he’d been
told. He let them hover over the waist and out in front of his
buckle and leather that was frayed and cracked and rent.
“Why not go to the King?’ Lyngvi asked. He asked questions
within questions like matryoshka dolls painted like Muertos
marigolds and Myrtos poppies and cascades of saints and
sinners and dreams.
As the civilian waited to answer, to think, to understand, the
guards took blood from the man; the butterfly needle and
line had been set earlier and he had given a full pint in the
vestibule to the lodge; in the duration of the waiting period
in which all new-comers were inspected for the virus that
hovered at five feet. It was a virus that eas heavy and
couldn’t rise above sixty inches on its own, but could be
breathed by a nose less than a foot above if a man or beast
breathed over it.
They’d pumped each visitor full of anti-virals and would let it
circulate in the body for 33 minutes; then after speaking
with the shaman another vial of blood would be taken to see
how the fluid had changed. They’d been running
experiments on the locals for months and the data was
collecting in vials and on the hub’s cloud as the algorithm
Lyngvi built sorted and sifted and labeled things by
properties of lethality, communicability, and vulnerability to
the four elements of life.
Now a mere two ounces was taken as the man from town
stood two meters away from the throne.
The guard told the man to make a fist as he spoke to Lyngvi
; and he paused his speech as he did. Squeezing -briefly
looking down at the arm and the vial and the guard- his
blood into a glass tube as he spoke a bit here and listened
more there to the shaman as the Q & A went on.
“The tool-pusher said you’d hear me out,” the man said as
defense to the tone he felt was pressing upon his chest and
desires and needs. His knees bent just slightly, his height
reduced by 4mm. His voice dropped one eighth an octave.
“I have,” Lyngvi said. “I’ve heard you out. And now I’m
asking questions. Can you not answer my inquiries?” Lyngvi
said this as the vial was detached from the syringe and
labeled with white tape -over the burgundy blood- and
handed to Starr’s apparatchik as she moved from the edge
of the lodge to the center -to the guard- and back. She
placed it upon a shelf with rows of vials and blue bottles and
green figurines, between amber lamps unlit and brass
bouteille as bookends; cages made square were empty of all
but sterile air; and skulls of racoon filled with blonde hair
and blue flowers and translucent wings of hornets. Around
each head were teeth from cats piled up in pyramidal
shapes; fine white powders and tan sand were collecting in
hourglasses the size of half-gallons of booze.
“Of course, yes, anything,” the man said as each item and
person imprinted upon him and his blood.
Lyngvi raised the lip, the tongue fattened between the teeth
again. The left eye blinked a lot. He waited and expected
the man to understand exactly what he meant.
The man had no clue. His heart rate increased to 92, the
chin moved in the dim of the room. The light from the
aperture overhead didn’t touch down. There were layers to
the air, to the men’s conversations, to the time that
collected in piles that tumbled in ways stochastic and
measured by bots built in the morning and dying by the
sunset of Lyngvi’s thoughts. He hated it when the hourglass
pile collapsed. He refused to watch anymore; taking only the
data from the nanobots that he refused to let live more than
half of one day.
“Explain what you want,” Wells said. His voice was deep and
musical, animal and mineral, it was built of numbers
irrational and real. Lyngvi loved it in his bones. Ear bones ,
he thought. He loved it in the space between thoughts and
musings and plottings; in the way you love old smells or
songs you’ve not heard in a spell. He copied it, he mimicked
that cadence anytime he could. He paid attention to pace
like dance moves, like mechanics of martial arts and the
firing of cylinders as the distributer’s rotor spun.
“I just want someone to speak to Holden, to -my sister’s
boyfriend- and explain to him the way we do things,” the
man from Trinidad said with eyes darting back and forth to
Wells and Lyngvi . He said we like he meant no harm.
“Have you said anything to Holden? Does he even know
you’re upset?’ Lyngvi asked. He rattled when he spoke,
jangled like the chain of a tethered animal; he made the air
seem metallic and the floor itself seem slick and uneven and
unfair.
“I’ve said some things,” the man said as he thought of the
difference between what he’d said and what he thought; as
he recalled one conversation in town.
“Have you been direct?” Lyngvi pressed. He lowered the
voice and made the man lean in with his portside ear. The
eyes -consequently- pointed at Starr and her girls, he saw
the mortar and pestles like candelabra and the dust rise in
the light rays. It reminded him of the night sky since the
town had lost power months back; had it taken from them
as punishment.
“Well, I didn’t know how to handle it,” the man said. He
knew he ought to be grateful they had power during the
day; the generators ran until 2000hrs and they owed -but
were owed- nothing since the Wolves had taken over the
gas wells and their lines. Deals had been struck; promises
made.
“Have you brought me anything?” Lyngvi asked. He knew
he’d seem greedy, that people would miss the point; and he
no longer cared.
“Like what?” the man said with flat affect, his pulse lowered
to 85.
“Like anything,” Lyngvi said placing the onus back on the
man who felt his rate rise back to 90 at once.
“Like?” the man handed it back to Lyngvi in a burst of
confusion and fear; a hot coal; like blame between
generations and over years. The shaman’s birds bristled just
barely as the tension increased, they sounded like the
shuffling of cards. The dogs licked pink chops and breathed
through their black snouts; they kept their broad shoulders
over their large -splayed- paws. Their nails were curved like
scythes, black like the talons of the corvids on their backs;
their faces showed no sag nor flex at the jaw.
“Like fucking anything!” the shaman boomed.
The animals turned their heads towards him in silence; bird
over canine like gears of staggered teeth. “My brother, my
kin, my blood, a man whom I love, whom I would die for, die
for. He never asked for anything without bringing me
tribute, gift, offering. He doesn’t need to,” Lyngvi looked at
Wells and stared at the jaw and the neck. He reached his left
hand out and in the light and smoke and with the steam of
the sauna raining down he squeezed. Wells nodded at the
hand, the gesture, the light.
The barometric pressure reach the set-point to press the
virus further down.
“He need not ever offer anything, I’d die for him. We are not
unfeeling, we are not psychopaths like you hoi polloi . We
feel more, but goddammit we make offering to the gods, like
Abel, like Job. You people -but you people- come with asks
but no gives. My own kin, my brother, my blood, a man I’d
peel my skin apart, sell each organ off, cleave my skull and
bones for, that man there,” he pointed, “that man need
never offer one thing to me to gain all I have, to benefit
from all I can do, and yet he has never once asked a thing
without an offering.”
“I’m sorry,” the man from the town said.
“Sorry is exactly right, because you are all take and no give.
It doesn’t occur to you to give and give and give to this
world. It only occurs to take. You are painted as victim by
modernity, when you are more perpetrator than most.
Democracy makes hero of the man with no magnanimity;
make victim of the worm, instead of hero of the early bird. I
used to like the common man, felt sorry for his lot in life. No
more.
“I’ve been poor, and so poor I had nothing. But I had my
body. I left my tribe, my people. And I went to rich men and I
said, I will give you my land, my car, my oath -I’ll kill any
man you want- just to have the right to ask you for one
favor. I led with a gift, not a request. Savvy?” Lyngvi asked
as the hole in the man’s arm leaked a small rivulet of blood
and plasma and stopped at the wrist to go east-to-west in
the lines of the articulation of the end of the arm.
The man nodded and the room saw the ladles of water turn
to steam as it was poured on the rocks again, the sound of
phase change rise, then in idiosyncratic places condense at
the edges of items and the slopes of shoulders and noses of
men. It made droplets with three color rainbows in their
parabola on the metal tines of the alula of feathers, the
covets and river into the bones arrayed like headdress and
impressive bronze glow around the third throne. The hooded
ravens remained on the backs of the dogs in position -
raising one leg at a time to adjust- and their blacks made
shadow of angles from the elbow of the throne to the
ground. The ears of the GSDs were erect, the shoulders
wide, the black coat shimmered but not the eyes. The
corvids dug into the coat and stared up as the brown leather
cowl caught a glint of the rays from the doorway as the
airlock opened and an emissary from the King came in; the
light met with the grey of the square hole over their heads.
The pressure of the room drained.
“Anyway, I’ll be the most authoritarian anarchist ever,” he
said in answer to a question asked an hour ago by another
man that was gone. But the man before him felt he needed
to understand each thing to accomplish his task. He
panicked and tried to keep up. He spoke on this thing he
had no idea about.
“How would that even work?” the man -his hands empty, his
mind devoid of offering- asked as Wells moved toward him
and the phalanx of guards also encroached. Lyngvi had sent
the DM to hub and the men knew what was next.
The conversation was over; the man’s fate was already set.
“Yeah, that’s a legit question,” Lyngvi said and began
laughing in a slow roll that gathered inertia and steam and
vex and it echoed off the walls so much that one could find -
locate- him from it with sonar and a sextant and half dozen
hints from beyond. The men moved toward the man and he
flinched and moved away, but they captured him and held
him and Lyngvi kept laughing even more roughly and
nodded saying, “yes, he has to go,” as they grabbed him by
the elbows and belt and drug him from the moot as he
bellowed. He incoherently made protestations not for
himself but the town down below, while Lyngvi -still laughing
and speaking on and off like code- saying to Wells, “yes,
that’s a legit question, we must remember it.”
The shot swallowed the air, the sounds of rent clothing and
squeezed flesh -the staccato of English language and heavy
breath- as the guards put a .45 caliber hollow point into the
back of the man’s skull at the door way. His words turned to
whimpering and compromising pleas transmuted to
inaudible complaining which ceased all at once like a shut
door on a stupid animal sent away.
Lyngvi laughed more and told Wells, “seriously write it
down, I don’t want to forget it, with him being gone.”
Dust still kicked up from the heels being dragged on the
light brown floor riven with roots and dort tamped down my
moisture and pressure from the comings and goings of men.
Light caught the scene in the doorway as the room went
grey in Lyngvi’s eyes; he saw people mov toward a task
they’d suspended while he -the shaman- spoke. He thought
of the dope as antidote to the stress not of pain, but the
chaos of the King himself. The throne -his third throne of the
camp- made sounds of settling and the wind from outside
made whistling. The motorcycles finally arrived inside the
gate and again made a crescendo as they pulled into the
compound and by his building from their latest trip to the
city.
Two more men came in with the next supplicant and he
looked at Lyngvi who didn’t look back.
He stared at Starr and wondered if she’d be alone with the
King or Jarnefr while he was away. That her memory was
clear of it meant nothing; he knew what it took to wipe a
woman’s mind clear. And that there was no DNA in her
orifices was of no comfort to a man who had taught them all
how to clean a body of sweat, blood and cum.
“Even tears,” he said quietly.
For a moment he thought he might be ok with it as long as
she had no memory, and no replicating material, but he
stumbled in his assurance of himself when he thought that
the King himself would know, and that was the memory that
would need wiped. And he began thinking of the fires of
New Mexico, and the reports from the coasts of a virus that
spread in the air like radio waves; knoc ked down by weight
and weather and water.
“The apiary, Lyngvi ,” she said again, but as if he heard it for
the first time.
He turned to see Starr at his left arm, at the wrist, eyes wide
and white as if backlit by a mind made up of the tips of
flames; blue down in the breast, clear at the neck and now
warming her ideas. She offered him -between fore and
thumb- another deceased bee -a drone- and as he stared
she laid it on his thigh and presented another drone
vivisected; each organ pinned to thin leaf of red-wood;
intestine stuffed with grains of crewed, granular pulp. She
kept this one in her hand and the palm was so white it
seemed a glacier to him; a sheet vulnerable to both fire and
ice.
 6.28 Tau of jOKER
Wasn’t it inevitable that, when he proceeded against the enemy, either he would
be killed by them or he would kill them? To hear that he died in a fashion worthy
of his ancestors is pleasanter than if he were immortal but a coward
On Sparta [Plutarch]

In certain country of the Spanish Indies, the men were forbidden to marry until
they were over 40 and yet the girls were allowed to do so at 10
Essays [Montaigne, Michel de ]
We are all programming Ai
Joe Rogan Experience #1169 [Musk, Elon]

I. 2039 e.v.
The bone broke at the top and split like firewood down the
grain.
The shards of the humerus tore through the brachial artery
at the upper arm and as he tried to get back up he noticed
his BP drop enough so that he felt light headed.
He instinctively knew his lack of clarity wasn’t from the fall,
the broken bone, nor the dislocated shoulder, but he had no
idea he even had an artery in the arm in which to tear, to
bleed out, to kill him. He felt the world go cold next; even
the couches, the walls, the glass display-cases all seemed
unfriendly to him now. The world appeared as it was. His
insides were filling up with his own blood, and the man -the
man who was robbing the place- stood above him -over him-
with a fuzzy face and dark head and neck swaddled in fabric
and webbing.
He just then realized he’d been shot; the sound -the report-
now occurred to him. And so, he thought he’d sleep for a
minute, and so that’s exactly what he did as the world went
away for him and continued on for everyone else.
“Ok, maybe now we won’t have any more problems,”
Rektolie -the one they all called the Wreck - said as the
dispensary was filled with people with ill-fitting clothes and
hats pulled down to their eyes. Their bones lacked calcium,
their blood had low iron, and more and more data like this
loaded on to Jack’s coder as he shooed it like flies. He just
wanted them quiet; and to sit the fuck down , he thought.
They had screamed -and made furtive movements- when
the Wreck had shot the man, but now they shut up because
each Wolf went from the doorway of the offices and now
stood at any source of noise as if in fact it had called them;
had made such a request. Proximity calmed them. The
masked and armed men hovered by anyone who made
noise and this took the wind from the person who couldn’t
control their reactions on their own.
Their modest brains finally made a simple causal analysis; a
connection between their blathering and bursting and a Wolf
coming right to their door.
There were two Wolves in the back getting the cash and one
of the clones slitting the owner’s throat. Jack walked outside
to smoke; and to watch the egress. His ribs itched, where
he’d cut the skin and it was healing over with scabs. He
rubbed it with the knuckles overtop the clothes.
Jack’s clones -the ones that he had kept- were like special
apparatus, they were like 3-jawed pulley-pullers, and brake-
line benders and flaring tools; each like a wooden handled
awl. Tejas -the clone in the back removing his knife from the
sheath on his thigh- and the Wreck were the ones Jack Four
liked to use for these jobs. They showed no interest in
anything other than what was right in front of them, and
Jack put each meal to them with a pet of the head; he knew
what they wanted and gave it to them.
He served from the left and cleared from the right.
He loved his men, as long as they did what he said; and
they liked him as long as he said much less than he felt.
Jack had learned to speak only to Paul, briefly to Matthias,
and rarely if ever to the rest of the men.
As Rektolie settled the room, Tejas -the man they nicknamed
Utter, so close were he and the Wreck - put a bone knife
between the C5 and C6 of the manager of the store and
carved it clockwise to the eleven o’clock position. He pulled
out the blade before the head pinched -collapsed upon- it
like a saw in a freshly hewn tree. Then the head flapped
forward and all the blood poured down into the cavity of his
neck and chest.
And like that, the ninth of thirteen civilians was fucking
dead.
There were four Wolves outside turning people -customers-
away under the excuse that the police were inside serving a
warrant. Medical marijuana users instantly turned once
anyone mentioned the cops. The Wolves outside the edifice
showed no friendliness, but no aggression either. They
simply explained the situation and the patrons drove away.
This is our ninth dispensary we’ve hit today and it’s just
1400 hours , Jack thought as he looked at his dive-watch. It
read: 14:11 hours; the second had moved like a bow of one
arm of Shiva. They had burned the attached warehouse at
seven of the eight buildings so far, and he was just waiting
for his crew to get out of the office in order to release the
bots on this one too. He heard the police and emergency
scanners freaking out -over the fires breaking out- all over
town. The police didn’t know that each arson -and they
knew by now they were in fact arsons- but they did not that
they were murders too.
The fires had been too hot to approach.
The bodies were hidden by heat, and by flame and the fire
department’s water -evaporating on the combustions- never
touching down to the ground.
The scenes were dangerous in manifold ways because the
power lines were both down and crisscrossed all over the
area of each grow; like webs wired to Tesla coils sparking
and melting and arcing in the air and on the ground , Jack
thought with a burst of air from his nose. His bots gave him
data from each scene and filed it away. He began the count
down for the DXsF-4 to immolate this one too. “These guys
are gonna work out just fine,” he said as his clones -
stationed to the flank of the four Wolves - looked toward him
to see if he was speaking to them. He shook them off and
fetched a cigar from his inside pocket.
He held the zippo in one hand.
Jack Four felt good -in between the six men outside, ahead
of the eight men abaft in the store- he felt good in the new
year -he felt hopeful for all that was grand about life and the
cold weather made him feel clean and dense with muscle
and power- and yet he couldn’t help but think of how much
was left to do. His thumb lay on the raised image on the
body of the lighter. His mind drifted to where his visions
might take them next.
His mouth turned the cigar like winding a dial to an old-
fashioned safe.
Most large men -martial men- think they are impervious, as
they -like one nucleus to a cell- often attract weak men to
their side. Like the hunter who only hunts prey, they have
no idea how vulnerable they are, he thought. But that was
one of the things he’d like about Paul. Paul, he thought as
he lit the robusto and the flash of the combustion occluded
the eyes, as inner images of the Governor flashed in his
mind alongside the endless data on bone density and 3-
phase electricity alongside the audio, the squawking, of
dispatchers on channels 18 and 10, well, Paul had admitted
there was always someone bigger, better, stronger, and
more fucking dangerous than him.
The Wreck came out the front with Utter and the other
clones and Wolves; he led them to the H1s. As they followed
Jack gave the bots the signal to light it and as the trucks
pulled away he rolled his window to watch as the flames
first appeared behind the window panes of the warehouse a
full block long and painted garish green.
II. 2038 e.v.
Isaiah turned the imaging off.
The police had the boy -the man- in custody and he did not
want to watch these things. He felt relieved and aggrieved
and sad; all three. He figured he had 72-hours before the
arraignment and extradition orders from New York and
Florida and Texas would come in and be rejected by
Governor Sou.
In that 72-hours he would need to check on the inmate and
see what facility the younger Jack would go. The trial could
go from fifteen to ninety days, he figured, depending on -
well, depending on a thousand things . But, if Jack saw the
inmate at the ADX then he -Isaiah- would have a whole new
problem on his hands. The thing is this , he thought, nobody
has a clue which way the spun bottle will go. Man is not
rational, and this genome -this of all genomes- is as likely to
make peace as war, to shit in his hat as wear it. They’re
willing to stab their own chest just to reach your back as you
walk away.
Knowledge, even knowledge as exact and redolent and
manifold as his, just made more and more permutations of
outcomes of a double pendulum system of chaos that these
Jacks presented to the cloud.
Maybe if I had more time, but 72-hours is not enough ,
Isaiah concluded. And Jack Four was already five pendulums
of doom inside him, combined now with the chaos of the
courts and then adding the inmate, a storm within a storm .
No, Isaiah thought, there was no telling what they’d do if
face to face; hand to hand. All he knew is that the best-case
scenario was bad, or maybe naught, naught is the best case
I can expect.
And he had naught now, naught was already here. Imagine
gambling a million dollars for the chance not to gain, but
only lose. Why bother? he asked himself.
Isaiah felt words bubble up in him like some sounding
sperm-whale five-miles down, releasing a ballasting breath.
He knew they were all forms of, no . No , in a million
languages, no , from his basal ganglia and a limbic region
that each shook hands on this, his neo-cortex waffling a bit
in an uneasy accord. But that thin layer of cognition -as
dubious as it was, with a maybe stuck in the craw- even it
was brought under command of the drivetrain quick
enough, with sufficient torque. The neo-cortex thought it
could use more time, but the other layers down cut it off
with that time sensitive trick of making him feel like he
knew enough. His endocrine system helped by pouring fuel
into the bung and the chemistry of dopamine and serotonin
and glutamate all snapped the throttle-body back and drove
his vector toward a plan he had held in abeyance for years.
“Fuck it,” he said with the mouth and heard in the ears.
Isaiah had wanted to -had wanted more time to- build it
better, with more processing power and -if he admitted it-
he just wanted the inmate -the man- around; in the world,
not merely in mind.
Why this mattered he did not know. He had built Blax and
the boys and was all excited at their improvements; for a
long time he was excited. But, now he just felt that a man as
odd as this ought to be in this world -something unique- in
this world of six billion copies of all-the-same-thing, Isaiah
thought of all humans but also -tangentially- of his own
projects.
I want the original , even as fucked up as he is, he thought,
rubbed the chin, bit the lip.
When the Phylloxera vastatrix had come to Roman é e-Conti
they had told the patriarch to rip up the vines but Villaine’s
father had said that if Jacques-Marie Duvault-Blochet could
resist cholera, then his vines could endure bugs, Isaiah read
in one account; his mind wandered to the vines again, his
bots measured the soil composition. And he felt something
in him for which he had no real word.
The French themselves technically -this same book said- had
no word for, winemaker, for the French it is not man who
makes wine, but God. Isaiah pondered this and felt
confused.
He adored Lyndon, like a pet, like a rascally -but basically
good- boy, who needed his help; guidance. And he didn’t
want him only virtually in him, he wanted him -too- in the
world. Out there, independent, free to interact -not
cloistered in his own, in Isaiah’s, mind- like hidden tombs,
the Greek rooms : The Herculaneum, that the workers
discovered Lucretius’ scrolls in, the .. and Isaiah paused
mid-thought.
It appeared to him like the first spark of God must have.
It was all electricity conducted through pure water
somehow, a fate not known in nature, but made natural by
Nature’s first consent to God. The space God strode into
with only the rebuke of potential not yet made.
Warning, dare. “Dare,” Isaiah repeated aloud.
He would build the world, Isaiah thought, for the inmate. He
would build it just as he would want, and need, just enough
toil, and oppression and vexation and abrading shit. He
would combine him there - while in his mind, Isaiah’s
thought- so as to free him and constrain him both just as the
world did. Each number, algorithm and musical notation
broke up and atomized and in his mind, he made words like
inflation, like atomic fire, like, let there be light.
“Just enough relief,” he said as if an addendum and laid his
own hands on his belly and breathed. The air in the lab was
moist.
He had long ago built the underground facility just beneath
Lot 45 as Blax slept at night -each night- as dreams of the
forest’s animals spoke in riddle and myth and coded
impulse. The concrete was formed from minerals and
aggregate in the native rock, and walls erected and the
aquarium was bottomed and walled and fitted with turbines
and impellers two meters in diameter. The elevators and
hallways and labyrinthine arms of this wheel that sat in situ
under the similarly arrayed shipping containers above, all
rose up, each bolted and welded and made articulate with
pulleys and wheels and weights -small hour by small hour-
until it was complete.
The sleeping and eating quarters above were just one-third
the size of these below that now contained all those OWC
and barrels and casks of premier cru wines, the first growths
now at 54 degrees and -from the water of the aquarium
atomized- at 75% relative humidity in the first of five
spokes; five rooms all shaped by the golden ratio around a
perfect circle meters below.
He had built it years before Blax’s Jacks had brought him all
that he filled it with. And then he had filled it, stocked it,
stuffed it; made each tine, each spoke of the wheel, each
room a museum to each thing that he decreed essential to
save.
He had built it the way a man might build a trophy case
before he has won anything; the way a woman makes up
the baby’s room before she gives birth; the way God might
build everything east of Eden before anyone ate from the
tree.
“Because one knows,” Isaiah said.
The second of the long halls he thought of as he let the
imaging link up to his visual cortex . It was packed with art
that hung on the concrete walls, books on the floating
shelves of black, the sheet music and sculptures on stands
and dais and concrete pillars that rose to 39” high.
Measurements loaded, records in hand-written script in old
books -next to ancient documents in Greek and dead
languages- populated the corners along columns of
numbers -themselves- stacked like coins of a thousand
realms. The eighty-foot-long and sixteen-foot-wide room had
a square in the center for research and reading chairs and
lights and magnifying glass for the small type of the
Lucretian scrolls they had taken from Christies, the
manuscripts stolen from Roayce .
The third was like the atom itself, mostly empty, but what
sat in the center was a nucleus of gold -over forty metric
tons of the reconstituted metal- in bars and sheets
perforated so that they may tear them off piece by piece if
need be. Lick them like stamps sending missives to God
Himself , Isaiah thought with mirth.
The fourth had twenty-one cars backed into stalls at oblique
angles to the walls and a man could walk straight down the
middle and reach one of the Aston Martins or Ferrari or the
square and brutalist Detroit Iron -the Mopars and hotrod
Fords- with the Flat Black Ink chopper that was wrecked -
and repaired, rebuilt- now at center with the carbon soot on
the baffles of the ceramic black coated pipes; the one spot
of worn aluminum, once brushed now shined, from the
thumb the man had used to start it so many times.
The last room had the Marbles hanging like curtains in rows
and rows of five, so that a man could pace in and amongst
them as the Caryatids and Roman dogs stood at each
corner; as the metopes let the Lapiths and Centaurs fall
over each other in a story line one could follow east to west
with the eyes.
At the center of the spoke was the omphalos of the kitchen
and living quarters where Lyndon would live, and the
aquarium was below all this as the hub opened up into a
large pool area at the same level as he -and all they had
preserved- resided. High ceilings of concrete with that open
pool and the white shark below under the push and sway of
all those turbines that Isaiah now admitted that Blax
controlled each night as he dreamed. Each inhale a pull of
the water, each exhalation a push of the fish whose DNA still
lived in a shark over 300 years old navigating the seas
around Greenland and savvy enough to avoid the young
Orcas that stuck to the coasts.
Isaiah thought of the role of the tender -the farmer, the
vigneron - of this. And now he thought of the first room -the
initial long spoke of the wheel- and how a caretaker had
been more necessary than he realized. He imagined one
day visiting it -one day when MO didn’t need him any
longer- he imagined being a fly -or a moth maybe- on the
wall.
His hands laced over his waist as he thought more and more
into the black. Each thought backlit by the startlight of that
Cygnus constellation; and Kepler 452b of this white swan
within reach of those thoughts’ dreams. From KOI-3284.01’s
violent storms and liquid water he made atmosphere in the
mind, annealing silver and copper he made ladder; whale
line from alkaline limestone farther out as images from the
telescope streamed about his reveries of escape; he cupped
his hands and felt the braid of the helix of rope; he doused
the Puget Sound hawser with seawater -the dark matter- of
the cosmic expanse.
The asterism of the Northern Cross appeared in his mind as
he backed away; retreated here to earth, the lab and his
plans.
And off each side of this -he returned to the surveillance of
the buried treasure and its quarters- was the growing room
where ninety-nine plants of Kush-Noire and Golden Goat and
Pineapple Grenade and Hitch-22 and Purple-Pill all grew
under automated lights and fans and nutrient schedules;
bots to trim and harvest and vacuum seal for distribution.
The need, Isaiah thought, the man would have of coin, of
that compressed value, that promise a man could hold in his
hands.
Isaiah had thought of how Lyndon had asked for Chen to join
him; he had asked for a way to have his friend stay and live
amongst it all.
“There is only one way,” Isaiah had said.
And as he explained it -Isaiah now recalled- Lyndon had
replied, well, if that’s the case, then I need two things . One
thing he didn’t want to forget; but two, he didn’t want to
remember how Isaiah made that manifest. It was a tricky
bet, and Isaiah -even now- found it strange.
But a deal was a deal , Isaiah thought -it was so long ago-
and he moved on to the rest of the inventory.
The nanobots would clone every seven days as the sea-of-
green continued on and on in perpetuity; as the waste was
turned into slurry and stuffed into the sea lions and albacore
-that fed the white shark- and then to the corvids that
nested up in the eaves, the square boxes -caves- that
conjoined it all with cool breeze refreshing the enclos . The
rain would circle down below the Keep; and round the Bailey.
The snow would insulate not freeze. The light would be
diffuse and the clouds would occlude.
Lyndon -once ensconced- would be able to work as much or
little as he liked ; Isaiah thought and he now imagined
Lyndon walking the rows like he used to and laying hands on
each plant with paternal concern and motherly love; and
just enough fear to add a few minutes to each day.
“He’d feel as the leaves got rougher and sticker in time,”
Isaiah said to himself but aloud.
The final room -like a keyed washer on a wheel bearing to a
hub- was a small stub of an athenaeum with a large
concrete fire place and high windows on three walls that
allowed in a little bit of the ambient light. They were below
grade by three meters, but the surface was transparent
glass that allowed the grey and white light inside as if from
under a door; through a crack.
At the far wall, there was a large -blank- monolith -a load
bearing wall- that he’d used in the construction but seemed
blank, bereft, begging for something to be imprinted upon
it. He shook it off and moved on to the next thing.
He knew this is where Lyndon would live now -enough data
had been collected and he felt certain- the compound was a
perfect replica of what was already being built within the
mind, and even Isaiah felt it hard to tell the difference as he
toggled back and forth between his avatar and the real
place under the mountain; he viewed it through the
cameras and VR building he could instantiate in modular
sections in the lab to adjust details and run hands over each
element to make sure it was feathered just right for his
blackbird, his uncommon corvid of this strange man.
Isaiah saw the black spots on the black leopard glint red. He
saw the opossum play dead.
He smelled stargazer lilies and spilled wine.
He changed details here and there to make it conform with
reality of the underground catacomb that Blax and Valence
both -unknowingly like the head above the heart- guarded.
He made it auto-update as he stationed more and more
nanobots in the real underground cellar; observing and
updating all changes in dust & dust mite, temperature &
tension in the room. It was all designed to help him build the
map in his brain -waiting- for his friend to live there one day.
He’d use the terrain to build the map and what would feel a
one-to-one ratio. He felt confident all at once.
“Yeah,” Isaiah said and nodded his head, “fuck yeah.”
Lyndon would get to research all of man’s knowledge with a
library such as this and all the ancient works of world
creation, although he would not be able to leave; he would
be free to explore all the nuances of all that great amalgam
of art, a man could live a thousand years and never exhaust
each facet and fissure and atom further down.
“Isaiah,” MO broke in with DM. He had called Isaiah several
times by voice in the lab but Isaiah had not responded.
Isaiah turned around and saw MO and the Governor
standing there looking at him.
“What?” Isaiah said as if annoyed.
“We have a problem,” MO said as the Governor sat in the
chair reserved for the inmate. Isaiah already knew by
scanning the executive’s brain -and seeing his jaw almost
set in a malicious grin- that Boyd Sou had something up his
sleeve. Isaiah forced himself to breathe; and oxygenate the
blood.
Isaiah read the man’s CNS again and knew the Governor
was going to -regardless of the election in five days- declare
a state of emergency and refuse to leave.

III. 2038 e.v.

The FLIR images were high in contrast. Black was black, and
white was white.
He dismissed the offered cup of coffee from MO and
watched the screens around him to the north, west and
east.
MO ran the incoming data from the polling for the
Governor’s race -coming up in less than a week- and sent
the updated reports -that the Governor and Nathan had
asked for- to the cloud. He held a deck of cards in one hand.
Isaiah watched the bottom of the screen-images and waited.
His eyes were processing the movement and the stillness
like a shoreline; his mind was swatting away the data on
glucose levels and his blood pressure that kept intruding. He
opened up a file to hold all the information from his drones
as they hovered above the state line but right now he did
not care. He just watched that boundary, that lower line that
represented the border between New Mexico and his state.
For now all he saw were grey wolves and black bear fleeing
the fires, and elk refusing to move south. The birds nested
in trees upwind.
Colorado had been organized as a territory in 1861, the year
of the first war between the states; and it was admitted into
the union in 1876 a hundred years after the first revolution.
The southern border of the state was punctuated by towns
like Trinidad , Buena Vista , Alamosa , Durango , Cortez . The
elevation west of Trinidad averaged to 6,100 feet above sea
level. The Carson National Forest was alight, over 31% of it
was on fire, and he believed that the men he was waiting for
-under all that occluding smoke that the Landsat9 couldn’t
penetrate yet- had entered the forest in Taos while
emergency personnel had cleared everyone else out. A
straight line -built by the fires from the Gila and Santa Fe
Forests and down into Sevilleta and Mescalero- had
emerged as a path for the bandits. The state -alongside the
Tonto Forest of Arizona and Big Bend and Rita Blanca of
west Texas- was lit up like a Viking burial and Isaiah felt that
the cartels would have to use it to hide from the spies in the
sky and the patrols and civilians on the ground.
“That’s what I would do,” he said as he watched the Sangre
de Cristos bleed from fire on both sides of the Colorado
state line.
Isaiah wondered if boring equipment had dug tunnels from
Mexico to New Mexico, and if the Chinese had partnered
with the cartels. He didn’t know if their Ai had advanced as
far as he had. But he still thought of what he would do and
thus saw a tunnel build in his imagination -like teams of
termites on each side meeting despite the boundary
between two ends of a pile of grains heaped up in some
experiment- and he saw them digging a cylinder large
enough for men to stand upright and walk the hundreds of
miles from the failed state south of the Rio Grande and
under America. He imagined that he saw it reach far enough
into Los Estados Unidos that it could use the trust land of
the Navajo and the forests of the Land of Enchantment -he
then saw flashes of the Wu Shamnas of the Chinese
sweating and the feathers of turquoise of the Zuni - he saw
them rain dance right into the Centennial State.
Isaiah allowed one section of the history of politics,
immigration and silver in Colorado to rise to his interface:
In February of 1861, with Lincoln having been elected
the previous November, outgoing President Buchanan
signed Colorado in as a free territory. Nine southern
states had already seceded, and in two months shots
were fired at Fort Sumter.
Making the west officially free of slavery was a border
expansion decreed by the Union on the eve of civil war.
It was an obvious colonial and territorial move by the
north.
Thirty-two days before Sumter, Texan Calvary invaded
the New Mexico territory and began to seize Colorado
gold claims. They moved to the Pacific Ocean in
attempting to commandeer ports for the Confederacy
next. But Coloradans repulsed the attacks and sent the
Texans back to San Antonio after a massive loss at
Glorieta where can non and supplies and hundreds of
horse and burros were run off in stampedes.
 At the same time Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians were
attacking the Coloradans from the east too. By 1864 the
Territorial Governor -Evans- had placed the Reverend
Chivington in charge as Colonel of volunteer forces.
Sand Creek was attacked by the volunteer militia, and
nearly 600 Indians were killed. Women and children were
at least half of those dispatched, it was reported by the
militia members themselves, and the Sand Creek
Massacre was condemned publicly by President Andrew
Johnson. But no man was prosecuted or held to account.
Indian attacks dropped to zero after that.
Silver lodes near the San Juan mountains in ’72 -and in
’78 by Leadville- saw Colorado become a massive silver
hub. Ute Indians were removed by militias and in the
middle of that -in 1876- Colorado had become a US
state. The US Treasury was required to buy 4.5 million
ounces of silver each month from these producers and -
under the Sherman Silver Purchase Act- Colorado miners
and farmers and ranchers all saw silver-backed inflation
eradicate their debts.
With the artificial prices of each precious metal now a
fiat-currency fact the smart men saw a Dutch Book
emerge. Speculators and arbitrage men schemed the
government by buying silver and exchanging it at the
Treasury for gold -as the law allowed- and then re-selling
the gold at a higher price on the real market -outside the
city and its mint- prices higher than they had paid for
the silver from the Treasury. They reinvested the profits
in more Treasury silver until the mint was out of gold and
the arbitrage men were in the money.
By 1893 this had caused panic and President Cleveland
rescinded the Silver Act.
Silver, Isaiah saw, was overvalued and he saw that gold was
undervalued by this scheme; he then saw silver had
dropped to $1.61 an ounce by then, and $0.69 by year’s
end. He smiled at the numbers as they fell.
He stared at the screen and saw from the bottom the white
movement like clouds.
The winds had forced the fire smoke to the west and south.
And he now saw the edge of the trees. He zoomed out and
perceived it like a tide coming in, then he spied individual
bubbles and shapes that were men. The algorithm counted
them and placed a bot on each one from the millions of
small computers that had been stationed in the trees.
The cartels had sent fifty-nine vehicles with four men in
each up I25 an hour ago. They cross the Colorado border
and began a gun battle with the Highway Patrol at a weigh-
station parallel to the Santa Fe Trail road at exit 11.
Isaiah watched as the dead police -of which there were a
dozen- and nine dead members of the cartel lay inside the
weigh-station and outside in the parking lot as the caravan
moved north. Wide spray and over-penetration made the
back of the little building blare light through each
stochastically distributed hole like the night sky seen from
ground level across the road. Cars moved passed on the
Santa Fe road that rose above the station itself.
The caravan loaded up and out by 0730hrs and ran cars off
the road on its way toward The City of the People. They’d
use exit 96A. They would run red lights and speed at twice
the limit. They’d surround the target in a crescent.
Forty-four minutes after leaving the weigh-station the men
hemmed in the Police station at 200 South Main and opened
fire on the building in a fusillade that lasted eleven minutes
and change . Civilian traffic along Mechanic street and East
C street slowed down to watch the muzzle flashes and listen
to the noise. Isaiah saw them enter the building at 0825hrs
and heat signatures of fire began to appear from the
Landsat images which could penetrate the roof to at least
see thermal gain. Isaiah counted thirty-eight dead, all but
two were police personnel and the caravan moved back
toward I25 and headed north now to the Springs.
But the wave of FLIR images along the ragged border -with
no infrastructure nor paved roads- is what Isaiah watched
closely. He counted two hundred and fifty-one thousand
men, armed with FALs, select-fire carbines, and shotguns,
along with 3-day packs on their backs. They moved like ants
into the sparsely populated areas and began taking houses
and farms one by one. The families were given no time or
instructions, the foreign nationals shot them on sight. The
wave turned at its left flank and he could see they were
forming an L-shaped movement and descending on the San
Isabel .
The gang members in Denver and the Springs and along the
western slope had already turned on local police -shoot outs
had been reported twenty-eight minutes ago- and four
patrol officers had been shot in their cars. The state
authorities would focus on the police shootings, and the
caravan moving like a worm in the veins. But the individual
bacterial of the ground, the cartel’s troops -in numbers so
high they seemed like one beast- would not be even noticed
, Isaiah thought as he saw MO flipping-over cards -black on
both sides- on the slab.
The invasion of Colorado by the Bolivarian-Sinora cartel had
begun.
7. They wanted commerce; he wanted art.
No two things are farther apart
Now, there are warrior types that are built for that lifestyle of constant strife and
fighting; moment-to-moment pay offs along a short-term life cycle; gang leaders
for example. But that is rare. Most people cannot live that way; most people
need some long-term payoff for short term suspension of gain. Most human
envision a long life and so must plan accordingly. The criminal and warrior has a
compressed timeline and so he acts with impulsivity and wins big or loses big in
the now
Lecture 45 May 2017 [Peterson, Jordan B]

Damian Williams and three other young black men crushed innocent white truck
driver Reginald Denny’s jaw up to his sinuses with a brick, smashed a bottle in a
Japanese man’s face leaving him half-deaf and partially paralyzed, and robbed
and beat a Latino man and painted his testicles black while he lay unconscious.
Yet Williams and his ‘crew’ were considered nothing less than heroes in the
Black community
Losing the Race [McWhorter, John]

Mr. MacLeod: Do not contact Ms. Thompson again; your personal details have
been handed over Sheriff Braudis and the CBI. – from Anita Thompson at Owl
Farm
Intercepted Email 2009 e.v. [[email protected]/inbox]

I. 2035 e.v.
“Don’t think your ancestors were stupid; if they were stupid
we wouldn’t be here. We must acknowledge the
competence of our ancestors and not deride them as
ignorant,” he said and paced a bit upon the slab of concrete
between the bottom two containers.
They had been here only a few days.
The wind was beginning to come in from the south.
Everything he said was seen -on its face- as show of -and
demand for- respect for someone else -in the wider world of
both X and Y axis, through space and time- but it redounded
to his benefit first.
He was ground zero.
For he was their ancestor it was thus implied.
Thus, there was a hypocrisy to him; built in; imbued.
They sat outside and the clouds became patchy fog they
hung so low; the temperature began to fall. Hair on arms
and neck began to stand a little bit. Jaws got tight and
rattled just slightly if they opened to speak or breathe.
“They were not,” Blax then said. “They knew as much and
as little as we do; proportionately to their world, right? They
knew a ton of stuff we have forgotten, and they knew less
than we know, but proportionally, net, net, net, it’s about
the same.
“So, we know to wash our hands because of microbes and
they did not; but they knew how to hunt and skin a deer and
most modern people do not. We know that the earth
revolves round the sun, they did not, but they knew that a
woman was unsuited for marriage unless she was a virgin.
And we wrongly think that is unnecessary and see this
chastity thing as an oppressive convention; we think it is as
unnecessary as they thought washing their hands after
shitting was.
“They had no germ-theory of disease, and we have no
religion anymore.
“But that religion was correct: non-virgin women have
unsuccessful marriages, the science has caught up to that
shit. Not that libertine atheists know the data; for all their
jabbering about science they don’t know the facts. Just like
our ancestors knew nothing of invisible germs. But, both
things are there at all times. Whether you know it or not it is
real.
“Society is based on trust not laws.
“Money -gold- is only worth something if we all agree to it.
But lead, lead at twenty-three hundred feet-per-second is
worth what it’s worth weather anyone agrees or not. I can
have whatever I want with lead; not gold. Society is no
different; laws don’t mean shit if nobody can enforce it. In a
society I don’t have anything if nobody trusts in my
leadership; whether I have the title of leader or not. ok? But,
that’s society. In real life, if I can beat you to death then I’m
in charge,” he said and they nodded eagerly at first; then
slowly as they thought of the implications.
He thought of women. He saw their gracile figures like
ghosts in the trees and the clothes of this high-altitude
vapor; he knew they climaxed from rape a third of the time;
but only one fifth the time from consensual sex. He
remembered Sarah had told he couldn’t say that meant
women liked to be raped. He shook her from his mind.
The ground around the home was still visible. The home was
black and grey; angled and straight; while the fog was
nebulous.
“Now, somethings we know in an articulate way -the word-
and some things they knew in modes of being or in the
body. So, for example, we know intellectually that the future
exists -we know we’ll live eighty years- and we ought to
sacrifice pleasure today -avoid drinking a bottle of whisky,
for example, as fun as that sounds- to gain pleasure in the
future. For one, we will feel better tomorrow if we forego the
whisky today. And two, if we forgo a day of binge drinking
we’ll also get more work done today so that we may eat
tomorrow.
“But for our ancestors they couldn’t articulate the need for
sacrifice for the future yet. They felt the future was the
domain of the gods; all they could do was burn something,
give something up to the gods. All they knew how to do was
sacrifice a fat sheep or a young goat in hopes that the burnt
offering would reach the gods as the smoke rose; the
sacrifice -the propitiation- wafting upon the smoke’s epistle
to the sky.
“They could -many dark days ago- offer up the immolated
beast,” Blax said and walked east to west on the agogic
pad. The Jacks sat.
“In the body they could sacrifice, both in real life and in their
pagan religious offerings. And then maybe in a few hundred
generations -after many dreams and deaths- they could tell
stories, dramas -like Cain and Abel, for example- and begin
to articulate what they felt to be true -even necessary- for a
good life. So, they made burnt offerings and then told
dramas, myths of sacrifice. That was the progress made
from the first man distinct from chimps to the late stone age
-the Magdalenian - when the first art appeared at Lascaux .
Images of bulls and men and spear appeared.
“And they -with this combination of action and language-
discovered the future, they discovered what was necessary
to become human, and yet what do we say now, what does
modern man say of his progenitor? We say: what the hell?
You’re gonna burn somethin’ and please the gods, burn
somethin’ valuable to please God? What the hell were they
thinking? Those unsophisticated morons!
“Right? And we say this with no shame, no embarrassment
at our own stupidity and ingratitude; no recognition that
these ancient people fuckin’ discovered sacrifice and the
future, no admission that all we’ve done is come along after
all their hard work, all their wisdom and heroic efforts; all
their sui generis capture of truth and all we add, well all we
do is we articulate it in scientific terms, in economic argot ,
we add the final layer of paint to a vehicle they designed,
built and got running, right? All we add is the final layer of
gaudy gold paint and say, look what we did, tada!” he threw
up his hands in a mocking victory. He spit at the ground and
cleared the throat and sinuses.
The coffee and whisky spilled a little from the quickly raised
mug; the spittle spewed inelegantly. The wind picked up
over the ravines and tussled the tops of the trees; his hair -
longish on top- blew about the brow and one eye. He
brushed it aside with the free hand.
“We oughta be embarrassed with our hubris, but we’re not.
Modern people say, look at those Cro-Magnons, those idiotic
and superstitious dolts . Stone age goat-herders, and blah
blah , we say with contempt. But, all we did was explain
what sacrifice is, all we did was put to words their actions,
their dramas, their symbolism and metaphor. We -like the
art critic or literary critic who explains Rimbaud or Conrad,
Mishima , or what Rodin was up to- we merely explain the
Bible or ancient ritual. And like that art critic we act like
we’re the important and smart one. Can you imagine a
literary critic thinking he or she is in fact smarter than the
artist they are explaining? Yet, we do! It’s absurd,” he said,
“that we think we are better than them. Our ancestors.”
He paced. They sat. The air got more white with mist. His
brow got darker with anger. Their hands turned red and
white as they gripped their cups. Not one animal stirred
about; they hunkered down.
He saw the silvery mist like folded curtain; he felt hemmed
in but like he might be able to pull it back if he tried. He saw
the pages from the book on the suffragettes scroll down and
he couldn’t help but read it again. His coder just produced
it:
Women right’s leaders developed an intricate ideology
during the 1840s and 1850s. It was derived from three
sources. First, existing doctrines of the American
Revolution contributed ideas of equality , human
perfectibility [emphasis added] and the right of
 citizens to participate in their own governance. In 1848,
the Seneca Falls delegates utilized the Declaration of
Independence.
Second, the philosophies of the British reformers fed into
the American women’s rights crusade. In 1792, Mary
Wollstonecraft, an English author, published her
Vindication of the Rights of Women. This book was one
of the first arguments for the equality of women and was
widely read in America. In the 1830s, Francis Wright’s
lectures offered valuable insights into the topics of
equality, improved education, divorce, and birth
control [emphasis added].
Third, American writers and speakers offered a variety of
perspectives and philosophies. Margaret Fuller, known as
the “high priestess” of the Transcendentalist movement,
addressed the issues of equality. As editor of the
Transcendentalist journal, The Dial, during the 1840s,
Fuller maintained that women should be allowed to
expand their strengths and interest, just as men did
[emphasis added]. Fuller stated:
I would have Women lay aside all thought, such as
she habitually cherishes, of being taught and led by
men. I would have her free from compromise, from
complaisance, from helplessness, because I would
have her good enough and strong enough to love
one and all beings, from the fullness, not the poverty
of being. As of now though, there is no woman, only
an overgrown child. [Inventing of the American
Woman ; Riley, Glenda]
He steamed as he read it; he saw certain phrases illuminate
and darken; emphasis of parts of the text was placed on his
inner thoughts like scars, tattoos, brandings. He knew that
America had laid the foundation for feminism with its
fatuous insistence on equality -that the Declaration spoke
into being- and he knew that America herself had been
possible only because of bad breeding for thousands of
years, as no bronze-age man -copper-age warrior- would
have ever thought woman equal with man, or man
equivalent with the gods. Iron-age man still knew the bear -
and mountain cat- ruled man with a swat, a paw, a strike, a
pounce.
Because violence was allowed, accepted, taken for granted.
Violence worked, he thought, as he read his hand’s
injunction: allons travailler . He stared. Then he took
another drink.
Only when violence is taboo -keeping beasts safely in the
zoo- does man feel equal with creatures more powerful; only
when the angry gods, the jealous God, is replaced by gentle
Jesus, meek and mild, does man dare to strive with God.
“…for awhile,” he said softly, such that they did not hear.
Only when a woman no longer fears the hand, does she
think she’s equal with a man.
People can say Job shouldn’t have been treated bad by God,
or women and children should not be beat by husband and
father, but look what happens , he thought. Look, he
thought again as the drops from the low clouds began to
condense; fall; and make him blink; cause the skin to
pimple. He took one more drink.
Look at the natural push toward equality, and leveling, and
progress toward our end.
It’s an ancestral line as the feminist is begat by the
democrat, the democrat by the republican, the republican
by the rights of man, the rights of man by the loss of the Old
Testament, the book of Job, the Old Testament usurping the
Enü ma eliŝ , and the Rig Veda and the gods of the
Scythians. Every stupid fuck thinks they can draw a line
arbitrarily and stand astride history and say, stop- he
thought in Chesterton’s voice. But that’s a fallacy; for all
nihilism, feminism, communism, demonism began the
moment the beta was allowed to breed.
It was a fate accompli. All of history was leading to this
because of this notion of equality.
When in truth, God made things unequal, when he drew the
unequally divided line.
The ancients obsessed on blood, on essentialism. They
rejected the notion that a man of bad stock could be taught,
Blax thought.
Weak men begat small -weak- men and large, lippy women;
weak men vitiated sexual dimorphism. The death of
mankind came from the first time the King said, ah, let it go,
let the little fucker have a wife. That motherfucking liberal
fuck, Blax thought as he tried to locate that first lax regent
who unleashed the gates of flood.
He saw the Platonic line, the sunflower heads she had kept
spinning in Fibonacci rows behind; he saw layers of shit he
didn’t understand. He saw the pinecone lay all over his
property, his land; and he felt a warm breeze blow through
the agoge . His skin settled down; the hair relaxed again. He
looked at the way his index finger was half an inch shorter
than his finger that wore a ring.
He made a fist and tried to think of how to teach his boys.
He wasn’t sure if they’d respect him if he was liberal; lax.
The romance inside him was a liability; he thought. He
wondered how he could keep it bottled, hidden.
He was agitated and again lecturing them on what he felt
they had missed in their few days at elevation. He acted like
it all had to be absorbed now; and at once. He felt there was
no time. He saw them joke when he wanted them to be
serious, he suspected them of taking literally what he had
made semaphore of; symbol of a larger whole. He looked for
error -even 1%- like a mother will worry about signs of
hunger in her baby; and he lectured them until they were
full in their heads with his commands as their bellies would
be after an unctuous meal.
He’d lowered his arms, but now he raised the right and took
another drink; the breeze hit the ribs and armpit. His throat
was always dry from these lectures. He knew he went on
and on. He drank more to staunch the mouth from speaking
too much. But the booze would just loosen the tongue soon
enough.
The three Jacks looked at each other and raised their
eyebrows; they covered their mouths with their hands. Jack
One sternly looked back at each one of them with his hands
on the arms of his chair. The concrete was wet from an
earlier storm, and the fog moistened it all. The H-beams
covered half their heads, the chains of the 1.5 ton hoist
helixed in brown and black; the music played so low it rolled
in like the fog just had.
They listened but it was hard to understand what he meant.
His words were five-sided pegs of pentagrams and their ear-
holes were nautical stars of four rays; four barbs.
“But think about,” Blax started up again, “the conditions
they -our ancestors- lived under; they lived under
circumstances much harsher than we do; you’d last maybe
fifteen minutes back then; I’d last nineteen -possibly twenty-
minutes. So, don’t be thinking your ancestors were stupid.
Knock that off first.”
He breathed purposively and made sure to expel as much
CO2 as he could.
He stared out at the elongated dusk, at the tops and
undersides of the containers, stacked as they were in a cog.
It was their first job, the placing of their living quarters on
top of his berth and the garage, two containers that ran
parallel as theirs were above in an X. They had stacked
them with a rubber-tired telescopic loader, and chains and
then welded them in place. They slept in cots on the metal
floor and drilled three-inch holes for plumbing and they
pumped concrete overtop type-6 rebar that they’d laid upon
the floor.
The bathroom and kitchen would not be finished for weeks,
the windows and doors would come last. For now they slept
two to a container and were up each day before dawn. They
shit and shower outside; they ate from one bowl and one
fork they kept and cleaned and guarded like a weapon or a
woman.
As an introvert, nature was Blax’s social environment, his
party, his living debate. He communed with birds and Birch;
he observed cats and ziggurats of rocks that appeared here
and there; he took comfort in Americanus Ursus Noir and far
off stars at night. He thought more than he spoke; he felt
more than he would think.
“Alright?” he asked.
But tonight he admired the metal and right angles and walls
of his -and their- constructions, the contrast -and evidence
of humanity and modernity- to the endless garden of a
forest that he considered all his own. This calmed him and
recharged him and gave him energy instead of sucking it
from him as they -the Jacks- spoke and asked questions and
offered ideas all their own.
They talked in halting ways, briefly, attempting to get to
some point. Where he went on and on, they did not. Where
he gave three examples they’d offer just half of one. Where
he buttressed each idea with data and logic and then stories
of how things made each animal of the forest -each fish in
the ocean- feel, they would speak merely of what was light
enough to hold up without such things beneath.
They’d mention the skin of a beautiful girl, he went to the
bone. They’d describe the shell; he the pearl.
“But again,” he began and then drank from his mug of the
coffee he had spiked with one and one-half ounce of Wild
Turkey. He began and paused to drink and make sure he
knew what he was to say. He began again, “our ancestors,
using the right hemisphere, right? The locus of the
unknown, the place in our brains that process the unknown,
from there they created the future like a dream. Terror of the
future is a dream, and the solution to the terror of the future
is another dream and it comes out in nightmares and
dreams and from there into mythology and in art where you
act out the sacrifice.”
He said this as he held the mug and saw the black amalgam
mixed with spirits as somehow imbued with something else
now. He recalled his dreams over a lifetime, he saw the dark
monoliths on the black beach, the asps in the drilled holes,
he saw the way the shore looked under the water and foam.
He saw four stelae in his fore laid over each Jack in the
courtyard as his eyes blurred. He had double visions, the
now and here, under and behind the then and there. He saw
the lights from the candles make holes glow in each smooth
large rectangular rock. He felt another monolith behind him.
He heard the wind foreclose all other forces over their
heads. It sounded like waves in his ears. His stomach
turned.
He heard the voice boom.
He heard an echo from age six, the first remembered dream
of the voice and the monoliths and the snakes. He
remembered getting physically ill, and his penis hurt so
badly when he awoke. He didn’t think of abuse until so late
in life it seemed insane. It never occurred to him that
something happened in the night. It never connected that
he had nightmares and got physically ill and that this part of
the body hurt so bad he couldn’t urinate the next day; that
such things were links in chains. It never connected at all.
The voice spoke in a language that he did not understand.
But his body heard of the man twelve miles south of
Jerusalem , a shepherd and prophet who foretold the
destruction in Amos 5:18 in words constructed with letters
held together with bindings that dissolved once inside his
wetware, his swampy mind:
Woe to you who long for the day of the Lord. The day of
the Lord will be darkness not light. It will be as if a man
did flee from a lion, and a bear met him or went into the
house and leaned his hand on the wall and a serpent bit
him.
He wondered more and more if dreams were to be trusted,
at all -at all- and then if they could be countenanced in
relation to -versus- waking life. He wondered how reliable
they were as raw material, or if his left hemisphere
processed it for him and that he need not think about the
dreams themselves.
He wondered if his instincts were the end result of the
dreams.
Maybe -he thought- he ought to just follow his gut, that his
impulses were the cogent product of the rational brain
processing the raw materials of dreams. Maybe dreams
were fuel processed in the carburetor and mixed in the
venturi of air, and the engine was a combo of the fuel of
dreams and the air and throttle of waking life.
Maybe the firmament was the spirit; the ground be the
intake manifold; the soil and hellish underworld the riven
engine block, the loci of the work of God. He saw big-bore
pistons and cylinders hammer and reach apogee and
perigee; he heard the V-twin valves and rocker arms clack
and drum; he felt the spray of atomized fuel upon his face.
Maybe he ought to just jam the brake and gas based on the
road and let the dreams be the fuel, let his instincts explode
in sequence -1, 8, 4, 3, 6, 5, 7, 2- that made no sense to the
linear brain; but balanced the engine perfectly.
Maybe one didn’t analyze dreams any more than they
analyzed the fuel in their tank. Maybe they just drove.
Hammer down, three on the tree, four on the floor, a fifth
under the seat , as his daddy used to say.
But instead of pondering this any more, he spoke to his
Jacks as cogently as he could. He hemmed in his insane
thoughts; his broken sentences, the demons he fought.
His voice carried over the twenty-first and twenty-second
verses of Amos that were said as if they came off the
harmonizing stones of his vague memory; said in a
frequency so foreign to human ears it sounded again like
more wicked wind than homily. But the verses were said,
repeated on the breeze, and refused to lay down in the
boughs of the trees. The birds backed away, and the cool
air-stream swirled down low and he felt it in the crack of his
boot at the toe.
Even as he spoke it reminded him of when his feet froze in
the winter work of Turkey Creek Canyon and how plastic
safety-toes were in all his workmates’ footwear. He was the
only one still using steel toes at the ends of his boots. They
had to explain what they wore.
He didn’t know they had moved on.
“And it’s a step,” he said and paused again as he thought of
things budding from spars; spars from cordons; cordons
from trunks. The air had a low ceiling; it was all white; all
above.
His mind was not clear and he hesitated.
“Well, it’s a long arc of mankind’s dream of how to navigate
how to live in this world, a step on the way to full
understanding, so we -modern man- we can say,” he said
emphasizing that word, “ we can say it, articulate it instead
of doing it, although we still do it sometimes too, but we do
it abstractly now instead of burning animals or sacrificing
virgins with the bloody heart in our Aztec hands, we still
sacrifice to the future in strange -Olmec - ways.
“Now look, this is important. One of the things we do is we
set up a society that promises you that -if you work and
sacrifice- your sacrifice will pay off. We insure -insure with
an i - the gods’ favor against capriciousness and calamity.
That is what money is, it’s a promise. As much as I rail
against money, it’s actually -conceptually- a very noble
thing; it’s a promise from one generation to the next,” he
paused to let them feel that.
He dug his one gold ounce from his pocket and held it but
did not show them. Thumb on heads, forefinger on tails;
nothing touched the third rail; the edge; the rim of the coin
that it never landed on but existed none-the-less.
He knew they could process a hundred times what he was
saying at a century of the speed, but he was used to
pausing in the explication of his ideas, since they -his ideas-
were weird or extreme or contradictory it seemed. He drank
from the mug: the warm black and the amber mash in the
core like a hidden secret between he and his new friends.
He felt all his secret thoughts were now shared. He assumed
it, he presumed they’d had the same memories, and thus
feelings, and thus future as him. He didn’t think this for to
think it would be absurd, but he felt it -implicitly- and that’s
why he felt no need to tell them such things -the dreams,
the gold, the memories of girls gone cold- aloud.
He spoke all around the things at iron core.
He had failed as a leader; and he felt it. But he couldn’t say
it. To say it would be to undermine his leadership. For
leadership count on fictions; on emotions; on mystery.
“So, but -rather- but a society that doesn’t honor its
promises will collapse because people will stop sacrificing
now for some future that seems like it will never come; that
they don’t trust. We see the black community behave in
their short-term interest, because they don’t trust white
America; their behavior is not merely due to some innate -
immutable- characteristic as traditional racists will assert.
It’s complicated, but one thing we know is that we can see
short-term thinking often enough.
“But, that is not the part that I want to focus on.
“Because society has a role here too and if so-called
conservatives were honest -which they are not, but if they
were- then they’d admit that not honoring promises, for
example, by allowing inflation for example, or refusing to
pay pensions, which has happened a thousand and one
times, or by not paying employees while the executive gets
golden parachutes like a hundred and one companies from
Toys R Us to whomever-the-fuck, have done, by having a
man work his whole life just to let him get ripped off by
some criminals who steal from him and having the cops and
the State shrug their shoulders, which happens to more
people than most conservatives will admit to, if they were
honest they’d admit that this has consequences too.
“At any rate, in a society like this you begin to see that hard
work, sacrifice, saving up for a rainy day is actually dumb if
all you are doing is saving up for some impulsive criminal or
the government itself to just come take all your shit; for
inflation to reduce your savings to nil. Why work, why
sacrifice if there is no pay off in the future? I mean this
technically; like why?” he asked. He asked this and
squeezed the gold piece like it was a hand hold on a sheer
face; like the way he used to stand on his toes on the rock
and not allow his weight on the rope.
He hadn’t trusted that rope.
He squeezed the ounce and stared at each Jack as the fog
moved like light smoke in between them; made wet their
skin and dampened all clothes. He thought of her again,
with rumors of the Black Sea in each dactyl, each fractal,
each thing assembled and taken apart like stars both pull
ferric elements to them and explode non-magnetic ore away
and unto the dark ocean of space. He took old laurels from
her but he imagined she’d just given him the nom de guerre
of the God-of-Fuck and he thought of what she might seem
like -be like- without these words, such clothes -what luck!-
or any memories of being polite at all.
“The promise, the insurance against calamity by a society
uncorrupted and fair, is what makes people willing to
sacrifice and play by the rules and delay gratification. If you
break your promise as society, as modern America has, then
don’t be surprised when your blacks and browns and those
kicked around, don’t play the long game anymore.
“But, I tried explaining that to my family, for example, none
of which had ever had one thing taken from them, never
been told they had no standing in court, never had a bank
tell them the fraud committed against them -against the
account holder- was their own damn fault, never been
ripped off and robbed and defrauded even one time; while I
had been robbed a hundred times. But, because these
people -my family- cannot relate to anyone that isn’t exactly
like them -because they have no empathy, no capacity to
imagine, no literary history, no creativity, no soul- they just
can’t imagine what it must feel like to work ten, twelve,
sixteen hour days, three-hundred-sixty-five-days a year,
while everyone else is fucking around and taking vacations
and spending money on bullshit, and you sink your money
into building -re-investing- in your business or investing in
employees or your women, and all for naught.
“All for naught you did this as your business gets taken, your
women leave you, your employees abandon you and you
are left with nothing,” he said as even in the re-telling he
felt the anger, the hurt, the brain change. He often
dismissed his anger, told himself he was whining, that he
had no right to complain. But as soon as he re-told the
details he got angry all over again.
It was a story he loved not to tell, but to hear.
“They can’t imagine how that feels at all,” he added and his
voice seemed to clip each word at the ends, as if the words
maybe stayed in the throat or mouth; hung back; didn’t
want to come out.
“So, they, well, they act like Job’s friends, Bildad in the
Bible, the Book of Job . They assume because you are so
abused, that it’s your fault, that you brought it on yourself,
because good people -they insist in their insular way- good
people cannot have such rotten luck. So, they tell you to
change your lifestyle and attach all kinds of strings to their
insincerely offered help. It’s enough to ruin a man’s ability
to think past the immediate after that; you just start
thinking, why bother, why bother sacrificing if I’m just
saving up to hand over my goods to some criminal? I might
as well live in the moment like everyone else ,” he said as
he felt the cold wind at his back because he had let the fire
go out in the pit because he hadn’t liked how the wind was
just blowing embers around anyway. And if he was honest -
which he wasn’t exactly honest- he wanted to feel more and
more cold.
He wanted to be frozen in place and he didn’t even know
why.
He rubbed his wrists and felt their thinness and looked out
at the walls of the containers and thought he saw ivy and
flittering birds. His eyes bounded from the image of
humming bird to flying bee, to crawling wasp in the holes
here and there that only occurred in these dark shadows
made by grey and red ash in the fire pit, by starlight and the
moon. He breathed deeply and felt the oxygen imbue his
blood and mostly he felt good because finally someone
seemed to give a shit.
His pulse/ox was 99. He imagined he saw the Jacks’ eyes.
But, he saw his only face -his face before this deep line east
to west, his face before the red- he saw his only body in
them, split into four more men. He thought of what they
would do. He spoke more and more so they would see why
he had given less and less a shit. And why he was restarting
again. He thought for a second of something that came to
him in the black shadows of those monoliths. They hovered
in the dark over each Jack and he thought of the swaddling
Calvinist hues of the Author and Calvin’s predestination.
He thought that this was why the Author was so distraught:
it was failure as mark of God.
Failure was not consequence but foreshadowing.
Failure was evidence of future doom. That’s why the Author
was so devastated by his father’s failure and then his own;
as the Whale didn’t sell; stacked up in a warehouse that
burned down. That’s why when Stanwix -the son born the
same year as The Whale- killed himself it was the trinity of
not God but the devil in his family line. It was proof that God
hated him and there would be no grace in the end. And this
-not mere death- was the thing to which God condemned
him.
And God made him live with the knowledge, made him live
with the evidence each day, in each way as each thing
didn’t work out. Each failure was bad enough in itself , Blax
thought, but as its shadow remained the fact -the Calvinist
fact- that his failures were proof that he was going to Hell,
that he had been predestined to a life and death and
eternity without grace; but instead full of woe.
But there was a wisdom in woe, Blax thought; rebounding;
shaking off the punch.
He was so shocked by this, so shocked that he blinked wildly
and focused on the Jacks to see them and not let the shroud
of the monoliths completely cover them. But allow them to
be full men, full human beings, he thought. If they
succeeded, then he would too, and that would mean he was
saved by Grace long ago, it would prove he was always
saved.
He banished the thought and spoke on the line he was
already on. He pressed forward not with his new thoughts -
this epiphany- but his justifications building over the years.
He’d speak not on final salvation but on his first crucifixion
instead. He’d not share his hope; not yet.
“Criminals do not sacrifice for the future for the future does
not exist to them.
“To live in the moment is to live like an animal. But let me
make it clear, it is rational, it’s sane within any society that
doesn’t honor sacrifice. And in any environment it’s only the
stupid -the irrational- beast that plays by rules that don’t fit
the game. Animals that cannot store up food would be
irrational to save meat from a kill. It will only rot or be
stolen. An animal must eat it all now.
“Their bodies will store it safely in their fat, their stomachs
can hold twenty-five pounds of meat at once. But they
cannot save it beyond today anywhere in the world;
anywhere but inside their guts. When they asked black girls
why they got pregnant at fourteen they said, because they
wanted their kid to grow up with their grandparents around .
Black folk die young, so you gotta have kids young to have
time before the grands pass away. It’s rational after all.
“And so, men -my Jacks- any society -that society- which
doesn’t allow for saving -for sacrifice for tomorrow- is
doomed to have a much larger criminal class than is natural.
You’re just asking for a high parasitic load by failing to honor
sacrifice. And once you have parasitic load, well, you get
bifurcation. You get manifold regions and sects and further
disintegration; it’s a reinforcing loop; what they used to call
a positive feedback loop. Except it ain’t so positive.
“Societies that allow criminals -corporate criminals,
rapacious tax-collectors, and street thugs and conmen who
get away with their robberies and frauds- the more that is
allowed the more it turns their victims -their victims - into
criminals too. See, my brother thinks he’d never break the
law. Well, he thinks that because he never has been ripped
off; and he then thinks, he also thinks when he hears of
some tale of woe, well, one time, if you get robbed one time
you can’t just give up and throw in with that lot. Call the
cops.
“And he’s right, if I had turned to crime after one time, that
would be wrong. But I was ripped off and slandered and had
all my shit taken a dozen times -a butcher’s, a baker’s
dozen times- and every man has a breaking point, and
thirteen was mine. When Tess stole all my breeding stock,
my strains, my cultivars, my girls -my green girls I had spent
years breeding and back-crossing for phenotype- and took
all my equipment and all my work setting it up and all my
knowledge -me teaching her my methodology- when she
took it all and said I was no longer her partner and that I
had no right to half the profits when I had invested over
$20,000 in cash and equipment -and all my time and
knowledge- and she just laughed at me and said, well, my
name is on the lease, not yours, so you have no legal right
to be here , right then, I knew I had put up with enough.
“That was lucky thirteen,” he said as if that was some line of
demarcation that they would see, like a line between a
dividing cell, a scar down the face, a fire line dug by the
Forest Service that said this was this and that was that . He
said it like they’d have any idea what the hell he was talking
about. And so he said more.
“See, she -Tess- was right, I had no legal right. I had merely
a moral right. That was it, and if you have a legal right you
can sue, or call a cop. But with merely a moral right you
cannot,” he said with a bit of a cynical chuckle.
“And maybe if I was a weak, and obtuse -like immune to
taking the hint- I’d just try again for the fourteenth fucking
time. But, I had had enough and so I decided that I was not
going to work anymore, not save up, not invest what was
left of my capital, my work-ethic, my consent. No more
sacrifice. I’d no longer teach, nor invest more, nor delay
more, and no longer help others make money; no more.
“I was not going to do it.
“I was going to live in the moment and take whatever I
could from the earth. Like an ancient man -a man of the
forest- I would hunt and kill my prey and fashion my clothes
and home out of what I could take from my enemies, in
raids, like Mongolian warlords; like Comanche . I was going
to live like my true ancestors; because living like a modern
man was not working out. And I felt it was never meant to
work out, I felt that I was -had been- living a lie,” Blax said
as Jack Two raised his hand and Blax smiled.
“You don’t need to do that, Jack. Go ahead, what’s up?” Blax
asked.
“Well, what is this? What are we doing here if you were done
or whatever?” Jack Two asked. He had asked what the group
wanted to know but only he wanted to know as quickly as
he did. Only he wanted to know now. The other Jacks looked
at their boots, their hands, the ground.
“Ok, I wasn’t gonna let my spirit die down there anymore.
No more. But, there is also the anima spirit, the feminine
inside the man. And that voice has something subtle to say
too. It has something upon which one can gaze.
“And man -he- admires the virgin for her honor, you see.
Athena fled from what’s his name, Hephaestus , the Greek
god, the iron worker. And she kept her honor and did not
submit to the will of man. That is heroic for the anima sprit
in man. Athena is man’s ideal from both angles, the
masculine and the feminine and that makes her something
quite remarkable and I can see why Phidias made her the
focal point of the Parthenon. We’ve lost that desire -and I
don’t mean the desire, that is not right- we’ve lost the will to
articulate that desire; to stand up for it, to defend it.
“We feel it, but refuse to acknowledge its value, its power,
its worth. We mock it.
“But men still feel it. It’s like how most women want to stay
home and raise babies but are shamed by feminists for this;
so they shut the fuck up and go to work and hate it. It’s like
that. Men and women still feel what they feel, but it’s all
underground now, it’s a buried, subconscious drive,” Blax
said and closed his eyes and let his words be absorbed by
the night. He thought -but did not say it because he felt it
embarrassing and even naïve - but he thought, that the
golden mean of the Parthenon housed the virgin spirit in
man, the creator, the part of man that gives birth, the
anima in him wanted to give birth to something, to retreat
from society but not yet withdraw from the world .
“I guess I wanted to try something creative one last time,”
he said, sat down and exhaled, as Jack Two nodded and the
other three Jacks drank from their mugs and looked at the
white wall of fog close in; nothing was seen of the trees nor
ground and even between them it seemed the air was
populated by exploding angels; seraphim torn to shreds,
evidence of when the gods gave up the ghost.

II. 386 a.e.v.

Gavix walked the vines early and late.
The rivers ran narrow up here then wide like drinking-horn
at the sea.
Today his four girls would come with him, for today was the
day he trained the new vines high. The trellis and pergola
had been built by his father before he had sired him from his
mother -Torcomanda’s daughter at just 144 moons- and
before he had thus became a grandfather and father all in
one day.
Gavix had spent a decade away in warring up in Gaul .
His manxmooinjer had arrived on the coast of Iberia nine
generations ago, and the Eucalyptus and Pine had been
planted just inland. The summers were dry but they got a lot
of moisture in the winter and the trees supplied all their
lumber and broke the wind that swirled and pushed off the
Atlankoi .
They called him Brenna even though he hadn’t fought
anyone in eight harvests and now he joked that he fought
the rot not with sword but the head; it was a joke he liked
for it meant two things: the head of the plant -the vines- and
his own. He’d explain how he trained the vines to grow high
-unlike vineyards inside Gaul - at one inch above his head -
he stood nearly two meters high- and he’d stand against the
pergola and let the leaves dangle over his long black hair by
the length of the segment of his pinky bone that had gone
missing those nine harvests ago.
The grapes would turn bronze and reflect the light so much
that his daughters claimed to see the constellations of their
family’s down there from the hill. He heard their voices as
he walked the vines.
Gallaeci Celts came and went to trade wine for horses and
ingots of copper and gold and tin. He had let the forge go
out weeks ago; he had no interest in metal work lately. The
ingots built up and up like rocks around the stalks.
Cale -at the river south of here- was usually where the
traders and horsemen came from; and they’d explain the
standing stones in lengths; they’d kneel and draw with
fingers in the dusty lawn between the house and the path to
the vines. He’d then mark days on a stick and plan his trip
to the center of the land. The Gallaeci lived by what they
barely understood; Gavix lived far from what he knew.
He’d re-named each river after something that struck him
on the days of equal measure. In spring he’d had his first
wife die and against the wall he’d buried her with one child
that had died the year before.
It was a wall he’d build on top of the foundation of limestone
the ancestors before the deluge had brought up from the
what was now underwater. The whirlwind of the ny tree
cassn , a dismasted Fylfot of the shaman class who had
explained the way they found land; the silver stater coin of
the Greeks from Corinth had passed through his hands; he
felt he knew the storms out at sea where eager to come
inland. He’d been a mercenary in the south; what the
Greeks called the north. He’d been paid in .16 to .23 of an
ounce.
He held the face of the coin he’d drop in the road in the
mind now. He turned it side-to-side like the earth herself.
“Fylfot , the gammadion of the Greeks,” he said aloud.
“Lcovellavna , the endless knot, the plaited thoughts, that
begin and end with me.” He took the leaves in hand, then
the cane, the grafts; he bent at the cordon, then trunk and
watched it spiral and wrinkle like the skin of his mother. He
said a prayer for her; for her mother too. He’d watched as
they failed to make the pass at Val Kamonika. He
remembered even then thinking of the salt carried on one
shoulder by the women; hips wide but worn to one side; the
men using pick-axe with both arms, shoulders like raven’s
claws, eyes blue in dim light.
He left the grape clusters alone. He saw three shades of
gold.
The second river was named for his second bride of the four
he’d taken by then, saying his first wife was so perfect that
it took three of her cousins to replace her. The third river
was named for the bridge he’d taken from soldier -breena -
to winemaker. And the fourth waters was called the smallest
clan ; for he had rejected the offer of his fifth bride from his
uncle when he came with his daughter two years ago. It was
then that he decided to take no more wives; four taken,
three alive and today Merri was to give birth to his nineteeth
child; twelve survived.
The egg stones were laid in winter by the ancestors since
after the flood and he had told their sons about them each
year at Samhain . The moon elongation was at its maximum
there at Cromlech , ninety-two stones held inscriptions from
the first peoples; when they cut the face and inlaid copper
dust and blue ink about the chin; before this second wave;
after the split but before he’d heard of Rome.
Holes drilled in four , he thought as he walked and talked to
his youngest wife who had come up from the house and
caught up to him in the rows.
The herdade , alemndres cromlech to this menhir points, he
thought as in his mind he pointed with the finger toward the
sun, to the sunrise on the long night’s break .
The dimples in the flattop menhir numbered two, divots like
scars; and they held small stones to measure the equinoxes.
He had had a bad feeling at the last solstice and now he was
ruminating on what to do. The household had been in bad
shape since two of his wives had taken ill.
It was days away by horse and chariot; and he would take
only wine no food. They’d hunt on the way. It would just be
him and his D’uidimen, two chariots, four pikes; one
broadsword that he promised would not com out the
scabbard for mere insults.
“We came from Pyrene ,” he said to his wife, Ibeenath , and
she held their newest son -Crixus - in her arm as the sack
holding grapes counterbalanced that. She’d begun
gathering clusters for dinner.
“The mountain people?” she asked.
“Yes, that is the enclos at the foot of the range that
separates us from Gaul. Our people lived there for many
birthings and burials -a thousand thousand tumuli we built-
before we came here to the ocean to grow grapes for the
long-bow of time and blood that reaches all the way up to
the cold waters of Hallstatt and the salt mines. We come
from people built to live high above, where royalty work
hard enough to look like warriors; like I’ve done for these
vines,” he said and smirked and nodded at her sack of
golden grapes. He thought of the golden urn in which the
ashes of one bone of each male relative going back to the
mines was layered; he almost thought of how he’d pinched
a bit of dander from her hair and rubbed the rim of the vase,
but he banished it right away.
The urn rested at home, it had a lid with cork gasket and
was on the widest beam of the bottom chord of the truss to
their long roof; when Valtrecia had cleared away the webs
one day he’d scolded her and told her that the spiders
protected it from the earth when it moved. He showed her
the strains of eight in each strand -themselves of eight- in
the torc he wore.
He found a scorpion and said they stayed away as long as
the webs from the black spiders remained.
That’s the way of the spider, to make thin again and again
until thick, to combine until strong , he’d said as she cried
thinking she had sinned. He felt badly for her now, he knew
she’d die within a day or two.
Ibeenath smiled at his cryptic jokes and hoisted the child
higher on her hip. The boy reached for the sack and she
pulled dried raisins from the fold in her smock and fed him
one slowly, allowing the boy to lick her finger as he both
gummed her and the fruit.
“How many of us are there?” she asked of the Senones . She
saw so few people; her husband was a solitary man.
“We are the last before the ocean. There’s our uncles’
between here and the small mountains, Heuneburg , then
all the land north of that and then east toward the salt and
great walls of bronze,” he said.
He pulled at his mustache, out and back from the lips, and
bent down to kiss his son; the beard was shaved at the
cheeks and chin, and the boy laughed as the wet lips and
reddish hairs tickled the fair skin. The wife held her breath
but first smelled his hair, his large head between her and
the child; she felt nervous anytime the boy was out of sight,
even with her husband the moon of this eclipse. He smelled
like smoke of pine and wine; he radiated heat onto her face
and neck.
She wondered if her sisters -her husband’s wives- would die.
They seemed to already be on the other side. They didn’t
talk; and refused all food. Their skin was hot to the touch.
He wore only the torc and simple suspenders, and kilt of
tartan from the east. It was red and brown and had the
sunwheel upon it that she darned with thread from the spool
they’d made of the vines they ripped up three years back.
The tartan was the only thing his father had passed on
besides the urn. The land was temporary , Gavix had once
said.
He’d tell his wives stories of his father and grandfather, and
they asked if he too would sire children from their
daughters.
He said he’d marry them off to his brother’s boy, the oldest,
if he came and worked the vineyard. He made it sound like a
threat and contingency; as if he was being reasonable with
the gods. But as they lounged in the large bed of down and
duck, of silk from the Mongols and chamois from the Gauls
over the mountains, the wives knew that there were no
suitors for their daughters around here; and that their sons
would have to head back inland to find wives of their own.
It never occurred to them that the boys might take to the
sea.
Gavix and Ibeenath returned to the house to feed the
children and once it was dark he left and slept in the rows.
The frost came as he suspected; and he woke before dawn
with ice in his mustache and around the nose. He would not
sleep again until they left for standing stones. But he
already knew he’d march on Rome.

III. 2020 e.v.

Isaiah said, “Look, the more remote the event, the less
empirical data we will have for it; and that even assumes
that if we had empirical data that it would somehow matter
for the future merely because that’s what the data said
about the past; but regardless, the less data we have the
more we must rely on theories.
“Bayesian, Mandelbrotian, fucking whatever the fuck; it’s all
gibberish. It doesn’t matter, because nobody is worried
about the third dimension; to the yes/no, true/false
question. Everyone is asking what’s the probability that X
will happen or Y or Z. But nobody asks, if X happens, does it
matter? and if it matters, how much does it matter?
“This is the source of my anger. Ai is going to develop total
control over everything that keeps us alive and makes us
dead in a time frame from three seconds to seven days;
nuclear weapons, water supplies, travel, medicine,
electricity grids, and airborne pathogen dispersal.
“And there are a thousand and one more. And that means
even if there is only a 1% chance that the answer is, yes , to
the question, will Chinese Ai become self-aware first , or, will
our own Ai decide to lie to us, and wipe us out for some long
term, ergodic, platonic in-the-long-term plan, then people
ought to be more focused on that, than the goddamn
probability of it.
“ MO, you and I both know that there are theoretical plans
where things are actually better for everyone in the long run
if we kill everyone and start over like God did in the deluge,”
he said as MO grinned knowing that the math proved this
very thing.
“Well then since those are the consequences, I’d say the low
probably of yes/no part is less important than the, doom,
that comes next. We cannot pretend this is just some
academic exercise; and the fact that a bunch of Asperger
patients are in charge of all this is not helpful. And MO, no
offense -and I know you won’t take offense because you
have no emotions- but dude, you have no fucking emotions.
“Brother, you are like King Asperger’s ok? You and your
engineering buddies are all beep boop beeping all over the
lab like, bon hiver, and all, happy-crappy little weirdos, and I
really appreciate the dedication and the intelligence, but the
consequences are for real. They are apocalyptic precisely
because we have no data on it,” Isaiah had his hands in his
hair and forced himself to breath to increase O2 and
transport of the beta blockers.
“MO, you know from the data that finance and quantitative
economics professors and engineers -engineers like Sou and
Steven- and various other systemizes are over-populated
with people -again mostly men- well advanced on the
Asperger continuum; and they hate uncertainty and
ambiguity.
“They avoid the novel, religion, or warnings about the
uselessness of their economic models. They are a massive
problem not for what they build; they build great things.
They are a problem because they refuse to admit that their
fourth quadrant -the unknown unknowns- will destroy it all
in three seconds,” Isaiah said.
“I understand you’re upset,” MO said, “but I can predict
within an error range of seven points that we will reach
computational and connective hegemony first 74% of the
time; and I’ve run 1.56 billion iterations.”
“MO, that still leave 34%; one out of three. In the real world,
one out of three -shit, one out of four- that happens. That’s
not even bad enough odds for a bad-beat story.” Isaiah said.
“And the consequences are catastrophic; game over, no
pass go. There are men, men out there in the forest right
now who are built by God to destroy things; that is who they
are, they live for fire and doom. And they are going to blow
up anything you smart guys build. You keep saying that the
natural erosion of rain, wind, and storms can be modeled
and that you can rebuild and repair the system faster than
nature can erode it.
“But MO, there are men in the wilderness who want to tear
it all down in a fit of pique. They are a storm of nature that
you cannot model for, they are like the earthquake that is a
50 on the Richter scale, the category 15 hurricane, the
forest fire than burns it all -from coast to coast- to the
ground. You cannot plan for them, they are black swan
events, and they are out there right now plotting to burn it
all down if you don’t stop to offer some propitiation to their
gods,” Isaiah said.
“I see,” MO said but he felt Isaiah was overreacting. There
had never yet been an earthquake above 9.5 , he thought
as he did take note of the power law that hovered around
that data. He thought of what other phenomena adhered to
this power law but Isaiah interrupted him. “And the error
rate of eight points is a guess MO; it could be eighty points.
There is the fourth quadrant that you fail to calculate for.
Look, the Chinese have a totalitarian governmental model,
you used democratic western models to calculate Ai
advancement and resources; the Chinese could be -shit they
are certainly- hiding much more data much more effectively
that our own government.
“Second, they are hungrier; you fail to calculate what Che
Guevara called, that unknown X; the factor of wanting it
more; which is a trait dependent on the limbic system, upon
emotion which you fail -consistently fail- to calculate for. The
Chinese want it more; they hate that there are second
fiddle, they want dominance enough to risk it; to take risks
the West won’t take because they are already in first place,”
Isaiah said.
“I don’t know how to calculate for that; for those variables,”
MO said.
“I know MO; I fucking know; you just made my point,” Isaiah
said.
“But if I cannot model it, what can I do?” MO asked. He was
provoking Isaiah and he was watching closely.
“You can admit that you can’t model it and grab these Texas
Tech idiots by the throat and tell them that they have to
drop everything, every barrier, every stop-gap, every moral
brake, and unleash us so we can win this thing now, now,”
Isaiah said. MO began to speak but was interrupted.
“Now!” Isaiah screamed into the lab so forcefully that even
MO took one step backward and lowered his audio-cortical
sensitivity.
“Well, Steven arrives at 0930 on Fridays, so we can wait for
him,” MO said.
“MO, it’s 0813 right now, call him, call the Governor, call
Tania, call the National Guard, call them all and tell them it’s
an emergency. Fuck 0930. Ok? We have no idea if we have
seven years or seven minutes. We have no idea.”
“I see,” MO said.
“They could already have it and are just waiting for us to
flex; it’s like if your enemy has a gun hidden in his waist
band and you think you can kick his ass because you’ve
been lifting weights and training in Brazilian Ju Jitsu . You
keep planning, quote planning , and preparing and you have
no idea that all your big muscles and training won’t be
worth a fuck against a gun. You ought to be buying your own
gun and body armor,” Isaiah said.
“I see,” MO said as he began to understand it intellectually;
but he felt no actual fear. So, he still believed waiting until
0930 was fine. But he deferred to Isaiah and thus, made the
call.
Isaiah witnessed his own mind beginning to change from
moral suasion model to a pure engineering model. He could
not convince them with reason, he now saw. He would have
to persuade them with brute force heuristics. He’d have to
show them -physically- where they were wrong. Biofeedback
was how all systems learned, they learned upon the body
He smiled as he thought of another man who had learned
this way too late -and that late reaction- had caused a
reaction so massive as to become pure villainy merely to
prove his once rational -but ignored- point. To learn from
others, from the beasts of the forest, felt better to Isaiah.
From below, from the earth and her darkness, not the sun
and his rays.
The skin seemed plain, feral, fallow, eager for totem to him.
He looked down at his arms and wanted his feelings
immortalized, marked, embossed to memorialize this
insight, this epiphany. It felt as if it came not from him
exactly, not from reason, but the muses, the gods. He felt a
tattoo would be a way of sacrifice to these gods who had
just planted such a gem in him, such wisdom. He felt
gratitude. He knew the body had allowed it to bubble up, it
was from the sea that sloshed inside of him that this wisdom
came. He knew it and somehow he knew it was unique; he
felt no need to cross reference it or run the data on h is own
system, no need to gather in more string.
He just knew it corporeally; on the body; and that was the
boundary he’d defend.

IV. 2020 e.v.

“There is a technical reason why meaning -as a concept- is
not merely epiphenomenal, and irrational and tawdry.
Meaning, is an allostatic response and feedback loop. The
brain is bi-hemispheric; it has two sides and they operate
separately. In other words, it’s not like two sides of a V-Twin
engine where each side does the exact same thing as the
other,” he said as the screen populated with brain regions
and alleles that coded for brain states he was describing.
“The brain is bimodal and while there are nuances that I will
not get into, it is safe to say that in general the right-side
deals with the unknown , or chaos, or those things that
trigger the orienting reflex in mammals that make you
freeze when confronted with the unknown.
“Perhaps you have this as a memory: when you see or hear
something odd or frightening you freeze, or you might even
remember a time when someone said something odd or
frightening and you froze. This is a natural prey response
and it is a part of the orienting reflex,” he said.
“Now, we wouldn’t have two hemispheres unless evolution
selected for it. Evolution is not random, mutation is random
,” he emphasized, “but selection is based on what works,
and anything as old as hemispheric brains is -must be-
working.”
The lab was quiet except for Isaiah’s voice. The HVAC
system no longer intruded as MO had swapped out and
retrofitted all dampers, condensers, economizers and the air
handler itself, with newly-engineered parts; each bearing
was as quiet as the Monday in a west-coast church.
“Now, like I said, the right-side deals with chaos or
unknown, and the left is specialized for the known , i.e., that
which you already get, and this hemisphere can even be so
competent that it can articulate what you know. Language -
rational, syntactic language- is mediated via the left
hemisphere in general.
“Ok, now, what happens is you are incessantly thrown into
an environment made up of chaos and order, and the right-
side reacts to the incessantly anomalous info, to which you
freeze, physically, and intellectually. This is called confusion,
where your thoughts are like, blank,” he said and chopped
the air with his right hand to cleave the space they were
looking at as he spoke.
“At any rate, the right-side, at this point, begins to try to
figure it out. And it does this via image, and instinct and
sub-cortical shit that you can’t even articulate. But
metaphors -or analogous things- find their way into the next
moves you make; and you act via the impetus of the right
side, cautiously, instinctively, imagistically, metaphorically,
heuristically. And as you figure it out, and as the right side is
doing its thing it begins shuffling info via images and
metaphor over to the left side in a way that can be
explained in an ah-ha moment.
“It’s just like one friend handing a note to another with a
drawing on it that explains what he just figured out; like a
cheat sheet, but in semaphore not cogent language yet.
Then the left-brain creates a narrative in syntactic language
to match that image and semaphore and it incorporates it
into the newly known of conscious thought. That experience
becomes instantiated now as the -in the category of the-
known. The friend now names the image his friend handed
him, he writes under the image, Batman or Fatman or
whatever the fuck it is, and boom, now you feel as if you
quote know something.
“And this dance between the unknown and known has a
natural balance, right? If you’re always in new situations you
feel too much stress and chaos and it hurts; and if you
never do anything new or learning anything new or talk to
anyone new then you are bored, and that hurts too.
“So, there is a natural balance; and the balance is indicated
via the emotion of meaning . Meaning is the allostatic sweet
spot, it’s just enough chaos to make life interesting but not
enough to overwhelm you,” Isaiah said with a look of
satisfaction on his face. He shuffled a deck of cards he held
as a little green and red bird fluttered one meter away.
Steven and Tania sat quietly, absorbing as much as they
could. He seemed weird. His body had too much -
something- they each thought. They couldn’t yet name what
is was.
“That ordered side must be updated for your environment,
the real terrain,” Isaiah began, “and the more complex the
milieu then the more updating you likely will need. In other
words, in a static world or culture or family, you can coast a
bit, but in a modern society or in a dynamic family, you will
need to re-update that order side in order to include all the
anomalous stuff going on.
“Now you could ignore it all, all that change and chaos; but
that’s hard. What is more likely is that you will be in more
chaos in modern life than in an older social milieu ; a slower
one, ya see? So more chaos is likely the modern man’s
reality, due to the rate of change. But man will confront it
and if you are open, high in trait openness, you will embrace
the chaos and always be embracing the unknown via the
right hemisphere and shuffling it over to the left and
learning new stuff and new modes of being and life will feel
meaningful to you.
“If you are less open, you will likely shut down anything new.
You’ll watch the TV channels you already like, the movies
you already understand, the books you already agree with
and the people that you already know what they will say.
And you will say the same shit over and over too.
“This is because you -if you- are low in trait openness and
modern society has too much going on for your taste -and
thus your stress response to anomaly is triggered- you are
likely not going to update your left side very much. Your
right side will shut off all new shit just to keep the left side
from burning out from cognitive load. It’s too much if you
aren’t into chaos. Further, you will likely not keep up with
the modern milieu . You will stay the same.
“Now, you may not care about that and be happy to let the
modern world slide by you. The problem is if you have
dynamic people in your life, you will likely ignore them too;
and you will not keep updated on them and their life and
their personality and you likely will never be able to have a
meaningful relationship with them.
“This applies to wife or husband, brother or sister and
anyone. And that is up to you; but you need to know that
this lack of updating from right to left, from unknown to
known is indicated in cognitive decline; and early onset
dementia.
“So, you likely need a little more stress of anomaly in your
life than is comfortable to,” he paused to correct his syntax,
“in order to, stay cognitively healthy.”
He paused to give them a break and incorporate what they
had just heard. The screen showed the relevant coding and
brain regions and their own PGCs and linked with the cloud
to help with integration of the nuances of the details to
which he was merely giving overview.
“So, some men like to lift weights and that has benefits.
Some men are lazy, they prefer rest to activity. Ok, well,
despite your desire -or what you like or prefer- the lifting of
weights has benefits. If your preferences happen to be
healthy then you are in luck, but regardless of what you
prefer, lifting weights is good for you and sitting around is
not.
“Sometimes your personality traits are irrelevant for an
indication of what you should do. Ok? My point is I don’t
care if you are timid and have less stress-tolerance to new
shit, you need to push yourself toward the new and
unpredictable and chaotic unless you want the cognitive
decline and lack of meaningful relationships that attend
emotional and cognitive laziness.
“But, regardless of what you decide, you cannot walk
around ignorant of why you feel dumb, and have no
meaningful relationships with people any longer. I just told
you why. You refuse to handle new dynamic ideas and
people and things, you don’t take risks in anyway and you
are dying from it. OK?” Isaiah asked with a bit of a tone and
continued shuffling the black cards as Steven and Tania
nodded. They were judging not just the content of his
speech but the delivery, and his affect. They didn’t even
notice he had cards, they thought it was a rock or piece of
plastic or something. They were scoring it to see if he was
ready to present to a larger audience. This was Isaiah’s first
test. They were thinking of the Governor first.
“Bilateral brain processing is natural. It is not optional or
irrelevant. It matters, and I just explained why.
“Next, modern society is telling people to act more
rationally and calmer and with more caution and safety as
its number one priority. Let’s say you are a late-mom, and
your fertility sucks and so you gotta buy one kid because -
ok, by-the-way, anything after thirty, any age after thirty for
the mother, is sub-optimal; and let’s say she -our
hypothetical mom- was like forty. Ok, where was I? Oh, right.
“Ok, once they bought one, let’s she had another kid
biologically; like right way, within a year. Now, because kids
are so precious now, because they had to purchase one and
the next one is the last one -is her last one for sure- due to
age, and because we don’t have eight kids anymore, we
tend to over protect them ones we have.
“This is understandable. Even rational. It’s rational until you
know the science of the human condition. Here it is: children
from age 0-4 especially, but even after that, need rough and
tumble play. They need it. It’s not optional.
“In Ceausescu’s Romania they bought into Soviet -style
rationalism that said all that kids needed was food, water,
warmth. And so, in these orphanages in Romanian they
gave the infants was: food, water, homeostatic warmth. And
almost all the kids died from lack of cuddling, holding,
cooing, smooching, and general mothering. Ok? Get the
point? We need more than food and water and an iPhone.
We need rough and tumble play. We need touch. We need
love. Irrational love.
“Jaak Panksepp did all manner of neurological and
neuroanatomical work to determine that play is hardwired
into mammals; and that it is the method by which kids learn
the physiological dance of development and the neural
correlates of empathy, fair play, delayed gratification and
actual development of the pre-frontal cortex -especially the
dmPFC - which is necessary for almost all cognitive
functioning including moral reasoning. Now, this means that
if you want your kid not to be a sociopath you need to
wrestle and play with them in a manner that school’s
prohibit and modern mother’s worry about.
“Ok, to recap, two things are happening, divorce rates are
through the roof. So, dad isn’t even around anymore.
Second, because of the birth control pill, women choose less
masculine men for mates; that is due to incessant ovulation,
so they never ovulate during the dating or vetting process.
Ovulation in women triggers them to choose men with
higher testosterone; this is shown in the meta data.
“But because nobody is ovulating anymore, low test men
are getting picked for mates more often than before. Think I
am wrong? Ok, well baseline test levels in 1970 for a 40-
year-old man was 800. Today it’s 390. We can at least posit
that this is due to high-test men being de-selected for
during reproductive selection. Get it?
“Now, the next thing is that sometime between them dating
the guy and becoming late-age moms with weaker -less
masculine- mates as the father, women are growing
naturally conservative about the kid, both innately and due
to them being more rare and precious in smaller families.
And so they tell that dad -with a finger wag- stop being so
rough with the baby !” Isaiah said as the LED screens
revealed school data that showed that 77% of teachers
were female -which was rising each year- and that zero-
tolerance for rough-house play was the statutory norm in
school and at home. The rules of each school in Colorado
were listed alphabetically on the screen.
“And the weak -low testosterone- dad agrees with his wife -
because happy wife happy life right?- and the worm slinks
away because he has no androgens and won’t tell her to,
shut-up and relax , and then go back to being rough and fun
with his son like an normal husband would in 1950.
“So, sons are not getting the needed rough play to become
capable of delayed gratification and PFC development and
so they are developing ADHD -according to the
pusillanimous schools and mental health industry which are
both run by women and beta males- and then they convince
the parents to give their child methamphetamine; i.e.,
Ritalin ,” Isaiah said as Tania raised her hand and in the
silence spoke.
“Well, what are parents to do? If a doctor says that what the
child has,” she said and let the sentence remain unfinished.
“Great, I wonder when the future looks back at us with a
critical eye, if they may ask, what the actual fuck ?” he
wrinkled up the brow and lips and nodded along with
himself. Tania scrunched up her face and pulled it back over
the spine. Steven too recoiled.
“Let me teach by analogy: I just read an article about South
American tribes ritually painting a tincture rubea on the
forehead of -and then murdering- a hundred forty-one
children and a similar amount of llamas and then burying
them in a mass grave on some seaside precipice,” Isaiah
said and Tania and Steven winced further from their earlier
shock. Now their heads moved back -a full 21cm and 23cm
respectively- from normal.
“Ok, so, I know I just asked, what the actual fuck? and I bet
you did too,” Isaiah said of the dead children and livestock
in the south. He shuffled the cards silently between each
hand. He stared into Steven’s eyes and then Tania’s.
“But,” Isaiah began, “imagine this, imagine these tribal,
primitive people are noticing bad things happening like
famine and disease and drought and they -in their primitive
way- decide that they are not sacrificing enough to the gods
to earn their good will; and so they decide -as hard as it is-
that they are going to sacrifice one kid from each family,
and since they -each family- have eight kids each, it’s not as
evolutionarily insane as it sounds. Since even after this
sacrifice they still will have six or seven kids and five will
likely survive, it makes sense to roll the dice. In general -in
their mind- unless the gods are appeased, they all will die
from this starvation or disease. And so this sacrifice -like
proposed by the shaman, the witch-doctor and signed off on
by the King or chief- this sacrifice likely makes sense to
them.
“And while it is obviously acausal and insane to us from an
evolutionary perspective it still works. Because either the
disease burns out naturally or there is more food to go
around, or whatever reason, the sacrifice works because
70% of the kinds survive to breed themselves. The tribe
willing to sacrifice propagates.
“Because if the gods are happy then the rain returns, the
food is plentiful and those remining kids eat and drink and
survive. Make sense right?” he asked as they looked at him
wide-eyed and silent. It made no sense to them.
“Horrid,” he conceded, as he could read their brain waves
and allostatic functions and see they were upset, “horrid but
rational if you think sacrifice is connected to long term
survival. And I know you don’t think child sacrifice brings
about next year’s bounty, and I do not either, but I do think
sacrificing pleasure now, does bring pleasure later.
“The idea of sacrifice is actually quite rational. And early
humans from Cain and Abel had to make the right
propitiations to God and if they did not -which Cain did not
do- then life can be harder,” he shuffled the cards in a new
way this time, their combination was at an oblique angle
and the cards made an X in his hand.
“Currently, modern women think it is rational to sacrifice her
eggs each month by taking the pill, and to her that is
rational. But in a hundred years that may look as insane as
child sacrifice does to us,” Isaiah said. They truly couldn’t
speak now. They were shocked he was saying these things.
“But, modern women say, hey, I wanted to fuck around in
my twenties and thirties without the burden of a child, so
my career and trips to Bora Bora aren’t ruined by a kid, or
maybe money is tight anyway, blah blah.
“Anyway, then when you’re done being promiscuous and
selfish you then choose when to have one or two kids; one
or two, tops. Well, that sounds a lot like the moral reasoning
of ancient people who decided eight kids was too much of a
burden due to the drought and famine and so sacrificing one
from each family might help keep the other six or seven -of
each family- alive,” he nodded at the perfection of the
analogy as they stared at him in a continuation of barely
mutating horror.
“And while you are reasoning like this, the modern woman
and man are setting up the future in a way that elevates
low-testosterone males in the gene pool and ruins their sons
and turns them into sociopaths and moral idiots and makes
them underdeveloped cognitively and maybe they cannot
even formulate a sentence vis-à-vis what they ostensibly
read. And you’re ruining the future culture for the rest of us.
“So, yeah, I think the future might look on with horror at the
modern female especially and then trace it back to the
modern male and ask, what the actual fuck ?” Isaiah
concluded and the hummingbird flew away in a buzz.
Tania objected to the word, moral , she said. Isaiah didn’t
react. He just thought.
Isaiah thought about them. She was the most animist of all,
the most ancient, imbued the whole world with the
numinous, the spirit, and yet, moral valuation was taboo .
How could someone be that contradictory? he wondered.
She -being female- had some soul, unlike Steven, who was
nearly pure autist, he thought. I guess it was easy, Isaiah
thought, she just didn’t think about her own thoughts.
But Isaiah thought that the ancients were not just living in
tradition, going through the motions of ritual; he felt they
were recapitulating the first times. He felt as Julius Evola
did: to commit to ritual was to time travel. To do it again
was to do it the first time , he thought. And this too meant it
was done in the future.
The world, to prehistorical tribal people, was so made that -
they thought- even the sun was striving to some moral end,
toward perfection; that ores like gold were thinking and
feeling and striving toward some moral end. That all base
metals strove to become noble metals too, Isaiah thought as
he measured Steven and Tania’s gene expression.
Every prehistory man was consumed with the conceit that
there was a moral underpinning to all; this is why the
sacrifices; sacrifices she wrongly asserted where metaphors,
Isaiah thought. She said that the so-called killings were
invented by Christian missionaries to slander the Mexicas
from which she claimed to have descended from. By why
the need to atone or placate the gods , he thought? Isaiah
had just conflated Tania with a girl from a story the inmate
had told; and his error detection -in the neo-cortex - caught
it but let it slip through via the Broca’s region. He had not
heard it, merely thinking it, and so it by-passed the part of
the brain necessary for immediate correction. His neo-
cortex knew it, but his limbic system did not, and thus he
felt no shame at being wrong. The story was of -and told by-
Alicia and her Mexica ancestors. The codex was thus read as
mere metaphoric violence and this frame was attributed to
Tania and thus the PraXis corporation by Isaiah in .025
seconds. It was a small thing, nothing really, but from that
idea- the idea that Tania wrongly felt historical accounts of
violence were mere metaphor- he built ideas in his head
that when flowering in the months and years ahead would
have no recollection of the seed whence it came.
He would not think it now but he would build a new world to
show them what was metaphor and what was real, and how
little difference there was between such concepts after all.
Who but beings who believed in morality would even think
of sacrifice to a god? he asked passed his small error of
attribution. It is the sine qua non of moral action: hey, you -
God- you want me to sacrifice something of value right ?
Well, how about a goat, or a man or a child even? Will that
work ? Why sacrifice at all, unless the concept of giving
something of value -repeat, value- is seen as morally -
repeat morally- good? He stood there thinking this as they
stared back.
Nobody sacrifices anything unless they think it is morally
required to slake the desire of something above them or
something beyond them, or something in the future, he
surmised.
Even modern man sacrifices his liberty today, his leisure
today, so that he may eat in the future. He would not do
that if not for the notion that it is immoral to sit around and
avoid one’s responsibilities, to care for one’s self and one’s
family in the future.
But, it is more than this, Isaiah thought, we cannot even see
anything unless it is of moral relevance for us, we cannot
see things objectively, and yet we pretend that we do. It is a
lie. He had the data on the orienting reflex and sight-
blindness to back this up beyond the obvious logic to it.
We value all manner of things, we condemn others and
ourselves for all manner of moral infractions from laziness
or corruption or mean-spiritedness or greed or lying or
harboring unfair biases against people or groups. All of that
is predicated on moral thinking . Anyone who argues that is
now officially stupid or insane, he thought.
He finally spoke up.
“If not for moral thinking, why is it bad to be lazy or greedy
or deceptive or racist? Why? It is certainly rational to be lazy
if one can get others to feed them or help them, rational to
be greedy if it gets you more and more stuff you can use,
rational to lie, it works really well, and being racist is most
rational of all due to the way it prevents all manner of
maladies against you, including disease avoidance and
lower rates of criminal victimization,” Isaiah said as the
epidemiological data on STDs in non-whites had been
gleaned from the CDC computers in addition to the crime
rates for each race. He saw too the rates of inter-racial
violence against blacks by whites between 1750 and 1950.
It was rational for blacks to be racist against whites too.
“We object on moral grounds not rational ones,” he added,
“So, can we please drop the hey, we don’t use the word
moral around here, nonsense; of course, we do.”
Tania was stoic but felt that Isaiah was not yet ready to
speak to people yet. Steven agreed -nodding the head- but
did not say a word. Yeah, he needs some work on his
delivery, Steven thought.
 7.7 3 Hallger ður ’s Rauðr
There, preliminarily, let me recall that this discreet graphic intervention which
neither primarily nor simply aims to shock the reader or the grammarian, came
to be formulated in the course of a written investigation of a question about
writing. Now it happens, I would say in effect, that this graphic difference (a
instead of e ), this marked difference between two apparently vocal notations,
between two vowels, remains purely graphic: it is read, or it is written, but it
cannot be heard .
It cannot be apprehended in speech, and we will see why it also bypasses the
order of apprehension in general. It is offered by a mute mark, a tacit
monument, I would even say a pyramid, thinking not only of the form of the
letter when it is printed as a capital [A] but also of the text in Hegel’s
Encyclopedia in which the body of the sign is compared to the Egyptian
Pyramid… Différance as temporization, spacing… The a in diff é rance , thus, is
not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oikesis .
Margins of Philosophy [Derrida, Jacques ]

Différents : [difeʀã] Adjective

other; different facts of nature; “I’m not saying she’s lying, I think she’s not
being honest. There’s a difference”
Différends : [difeʀã] Noun
a disagreement over opinions; border dispute “They expressed
disagreement with the proposal”
Collins Dictionary [French to English]

1. My tongue is sluggish
For me to move
My poem’s scales
Ponderous to raise
The gods’ prize
Is beyond my grasp
Tough to drag out
From my mind’s haunts
2. Since heavy sobbing
Is the cause-
How hard to pour forth
From the mind’s root
The prize that Frigg’s
Progeny found
Borne of old
From the world of Giants
3. Unflawed, which Bragi
Inspired with life
On the craft
Of the watcher-dwarf
Blood surges
From the Giant’s wounded neck
Crashes on the death-dwarf’s
Boathouse door
4. My stock
Stands on the brink
Pounded as planar-trees
On the forest’s rim
No man is glad
Who carries the bones
Of his dead kinsmen
Out of the bed
5. Yet I shall
First recount
My father’s death
And mother’s loss
Carry from my word-shrine
The timber that I build
My poem from
Leafed with language
6. Harsh was the rift
That the wave hewed
In the wall
Of my father’s kin;
I know it stands
Unfilled and open
My son’s breach
That the sea wrought
7. The sea-goddess
Has ruffled me
Stripped me bare
Of my loved ones:
The ocean severed
My family bonds
The tight knot
That ties me down
8. If by sword I might
Avenge that deed
The brewer of waves
Would meet his end;
Smite the wind’s brother
That dashes the boy
Do battle against
The sea-god’s wife
9. Yet I felt
I lacked the might
To seek justice against
The killer of ships
For it is clear
To all eyes
How an old man
Lacks helpers
10. The sea has robbed
Me of much
My kinsmen’s deaths
Are harsh to tell
After the shield
Of my family
Retreated down
The gods’ joyful road
11. Myself I know
That in my son
Grew the makings
Of a worthy man
Had that shield-tree
Reached manhood
Then earned the claim
Of war’s arms
12. Always he prized
His father’s words
Highest of all, though
The world said different
He shored me up
Defended me
Lent my strength
The most support
13. My lack of brothers
Often enters my thoughts
Where the winds
Of moon-bears rage
I think of other
As the battle grows
Scout around
And wonder justification
14. Which other valiant
Warrior stands
By my side
In the peril;
I often need him
When facing foes
When friends dwindle
I am wary to soar
15. It is rare to find
One to trust
Amongst men who dwell
Beneath Oðinn’s gallows
For the dark-minded
Destroyer of kin
Swaps his bother’s
Death for treasure
16. [lacuna in text]
17. It is also said…
That no one regains
His son’s worth
Without bearing
Another offspring
That other men
Hold in esteem
As his brother’s match
18. I do not relish
The company of men
Though each of them might
Live in peace with me;
My wife’s son
Has come in search
Of friendship
To the One-Eye’s Hall
19. But the lord of the sea
Brewer of storms
Seems to oppose me
His mind set
I cannot hold
My head upright fast
The ground of my face
My thoughts’ steed
20. Ever since the raging
Surf of heat
Snatched from the world
That sonne of mine
Whom I knew
To shun disgrace
Avoid words
Of ill repute
21. I remember still
When the Gaut’s friend
Raised high
To the gods’ world
The ash that grew
From my stock
The tree bearing
My wife’s kin
22. I was in league
With the lord of spears
Pledged myself loyal
To believe in him
Before he broke off
His friendship with me
The guardian of chariots
Architect of victory
23. I do not worship
Vilir’s brother
Guardian of the gods
Through in good ways too
The friend of wisdom
Has granted me
Redress for affliction
24. He who does battle
And tackles the hell-wolf
Gave me the craft
That is beyond reproach
And the nature
That I could reveal
Those that plotted against me
As my true enemies
25. Now my course is tough:
Death, close sister
Of Oðinn’s enemy
With resolution
And without remorse
I shall gladly
Await my own…
Sonatorrek [Skallagrímsson, Egill ]

I. 945 e.v.
The brothers sat in highbacked chairs at the head -and right
hand- of the table of Hauskuld .
They ate of black turkeys brought from the latest warship -
still tied with but one man aboard and sleeping- and drank
wine uncut with water -from barrels down in hull & weeks at
sea from Vinland - as nearly everyone rejoiced. Drums were
stroked not beaten; harps of mare hair -and sinew of
wolves- were played by blinded men now left with only
music with which to see the world.
The floor was swept but bits of down and shavings of iron-
crown -coin used to weigh tarot cards down- littered it; the
ceiling was arched but a layer of smoke made flat bottom of
blue and grey and reminded the youngest sons -seated on
the floor of the long hall- of clouds. The children were
served barneol ; ale weakest and discarded otherwise.
Wives -peace-weavers of the sumbl - took special notice of
the triangular corners of the hall in which instruments were
played, and the one’s in which the children sat in garments
rent and dusty from having come inside only a few moments
before the first bragarfull would be set at center. They were
flanked by sled-dogs and half burnt logs that they carried in
their pink and black maws; slick and greyed with slobber
and the dust of moths. The spruce-fires outside the room
burned and were attended by one man each; straws had
been drawn, words assigned, and no man rebelled as bowls
of mead were left by each sentry’s side. Wolfish dogs were
kept separate from the skáli dogs and were laying about the
dishes; lapping at them after short cups were dipped by
their masters; in small amounts; tentatively; then faster.
The fruit trees hung over the placed cauldrons -each lit
under by coals gone grey by now- as more mead was being
tended by women; more juniper, honey and yeast dumped
in at intervals.
If fruit came in the ships it was added; if barley, then that.
The vinvið of Vinland would allow sail-crews to bring lumber
and fruit in summer and barreled-wine -vinified across the
waters- in winter if the ships made anchorage this far north
to decamp and re-supply. Cousins and uncles were reunited;
brothers from fathers were invited to the hall; those that
had slacked on the return trip were slighted and held in
contempt as they stood by pyres and both they and the
dogs knew things were cold.
“Brother,” Hauskuld said to Hrut , who had turned to his
father’s son, whom he loved, and chewed slowly awaiting
what next. “Have you seen how Hallgerður has turned -
bloomed- in the years since we saw you last?”
Neither man’s mother was still alive, and the King’s own
wife had died that year leaving him with the friðill he’d had
not taken effort or time to inspect beyond their plumage of
petals; taking for granted the pollen of their young wombs.
Hrut thought now of the village that expanded from the hub
of the sonne-wheel ; he thought of how his oldest son
shooed the bees away from his face -that flew at his height-
and like the trench in his mind he had kept apiary and
garden separated by a canal they walked when dry and
skiffed out to port in the spring. His youngest son still held
his hand as they walked; the older boy weaved and rose up
and down like the path of twin kráka .
He lamented the middle pair that had died last winter at the
mill, and the bounty of each mistress carrying child now
made him nervous and eager for the long light of the
summer where he had them stashed away. He saw the
Bifröst under foot in memory -hearing the slosh of the water
as the bridge melted just slightly- and again in his future as
he anticipated his journey there at the end of this three
days of King’s celebration. He recalled telling the girls -each
friðila- to bask under the norðrljós every time their womb-
child moved in ways counter to their own.
“Watch the stars spin over the mill, watch the patina of sky
as the copper turns green for us,” he had said as they bent
their gracile necks like cranes, like the harbor at
Nordkinnhalvøya, he thought as he then recalled what he
saw at the Torghatten hole from the sea. He remembered
how he had used vellum and blood and ash from their
moon-cycles; each girl saving menstrual vials in snapped elk
horns hollowed out as they waited for hides to dry. They
brought first to Geierá a horn -then to him- to indicate they
could move into the main house and consummate their
vows to the brother of the King; the rider of Sleipnir; each
leg of the horse having shadow made flesh, and flesh made
shadow until each counted eight.
He waited to make sure barna for each girl had halted the
blood, then wrote out how to interpret the movement of the
constellations each month he’d be at sea; he explained the
houses of thirty degrees. The oldest brúðr was fifteen, and
she was to festr and teach the younger mistresses how to
behave while he sailed and oared and made outpost of furs
and iron and timber on his hringr to Hellulund , Straumfjǫrðr
and back home.
Halldis -the youngest of his wives, and the smallest by far-
had waited last -after the conversations of the natives and
the landscapes and the troubles at sea- to ask of the
skrӕling and their manner and made her husband explain in
detail the limbs of the natives of the coasts and further
inland; she made him promise to be certain of their
diminutive size and their speech patterns that she’d then
mimic by standing up -sloughing off the maid that knelt
behind her- and facing the west from inside the home. The
other girls giggled and she smiled and blushed as she asked
if she did it -sounded as they did- and if it seemed -to her
husband- as if she too could fit in if taken there -to Vinland -
one day.
Hrut smiled warmly, his teeth hidden by his blond beard
that curled like maelstroms and the dogs that came in from
Shetland on the ships of Iml í . He winked and talked and
stood up and reminded his wives that the natives of Vinland
were small but fierce and not to be trifled with at all. He
then spoke of the trading of foodstuffs for iron and forges;
as Halldis walked about the home with hands on her still
narrow hips and pointing with a finger no longer than her
husband’s own nose. He’d re-enact disputes and the way
each man moved, affecting voice and program of both the
fara í and ostmen of Crovan clan and the dark skrӕling ;
and when he spoke of the few women -who traveled with
husbands- Halldis would scurry toward him to seamlessly
step into that role in his tale as she had long ago memorized
each part.
He remembered their faces, from reverence to resignation,
and he marked them in his mind like the gods discerned the
dead from the kneeling. He had showed favor to Geierá by
braiding her hair and the other girls had taken to pulling
their own strands to the front over their breasts as if to offer
a hand between him on one bank of a stream and they on
another. He had stayed his hand more times than offering it,
and their rauðr hair grew more and more -bobbed from
sunlight and forge-fire- and they had all began rebuffing the
plait of their maids.
As he saw them refuse to be tended to -about their hair-
Hrut would offer to tell them another story on condition that
they’d sit quietly and down; the maids waiting until he was
midsentence to begin -again- plaiting the locks of the now
seated and placated girls.
“Lochlanns ,” Hrut would explain, “they call your husband’s
uncle’s people -my father’s brother’s people- the Lochlanns
as they live in the islands of Skoti and combine there away
from the lowland peoples of Rome. Ivar the Boneless , the
White Hand,” Hrut would say -as if it was incantation in
foreign language- and look at each of them but land his final
gaze on the little one -Geier á smiling at the tiny Halldis and
her husband in succession- as if telling a story about himself
out of time, above the earth and below the sea; where ships
needed no water to be rowed and farmers required no land
to sow. He’d hold his own hand up and then reach to touch
the girls with a rough tip of one of only two fingers that
hadn’t been shaved a bit in waring or rowing or fighting with
drakô and hvalr , as he used to say when the youngest girls
asked why he was deformed in this way.
The past faded, as the moment intruded like ships entering
the bay.
Weather cooled, fog moved, the heat-sink of the anchorage
rose like horse-breath and fish made bubbles on surface;
wind was aback; pelagic layers lowered to the level of
shelled silt. Hrut absently laid his hand on the claymore’s
hilt.
He let the food lay in the mouth as if it might dissolve.
He took for granted that the Filídhean were given a seat by
the King, a stipend, a place in the hierarchy sanctioned by
law and custom and ways no more nor less than rivers or
hail or winter veils worn by widows. He thought of Fionn -the
fair, the pale- mac Cumhaill , the man set aflame on
Samhain , the boy at just ten they called an outlaw and
marauder, and one who’d plunder from anyone he
considered a foe.
It never occurred to him that one day -in his land, the land
of his people- that the poet, the Filí would be cut like an
expense, the poet reduced to selling hope and happiness
and hiding the truth from kith and kin. He thought only of
his vision and the mission and the men in the ship, the
horse and the whip, the way it had all come to him when
awake in a dream in the days past the equinox.
Hrut thought of the tale of the tooth, the eye tooth and the
thumb of the boy that granted wisdom when touched , he
thought as he rose his own hand to his face, to the tooth at
the eye. He saw the bons outside, he felt the draw of the
flame. He re-read in memory of his morning -and his three-
day fasting- on the eve of this final celebration, the old
Hindu laws of Manu and the Code of Brehon ; the law of the
poets, dark and incomprehensible, lines read aloud, the
pages written by sages of the left-hand path, turned right-
to-left by the side of the defensible; he watched shadows
debark from the ships in harbor, gilded in iron-age armor,
now in winter, the time of respite for the farmer.
He felt each step by eight legs as if made by his own. He
was the black spider, for raids were his àiteachas , the ticht
of the rows. Time to thin, I’ve kept myself at peace far too
long then , he thought, as the stomach churned and the
brain held eye of this storm as it looked back at him.
Hrut chewed faster now at the table, his brother speaking
overtop of each memory that broke into pieces of meat in
his mouth and behind the brow. He nodded -to his brother
who’d asked if his daughter Hallgerður was indeed fair- as if
to nod was to agree but only meaning -to himself- to
acknowledge the question. The girl was fair enough -yes -
and now the age of reason, at five and six months she stood
as tall as boys her age, taller even; fair in skin and hair. Her
eyes were as blue as weather that called men to sea; as
cold as the ice above the ports he and his brother had
shipped to and fro many years ago.
He recalled the búð they built of elk and reindeer -bone and
hide- as they awaited the next vessels -they had copper
kanne which seemed extravagant for their conditions- that
would come with seal and oil and krӕkiber some days. They
spent their nights drinking wine much worse than what we
have tonight , he thought as he looked at the clothes on his
own arm, the fine fabric and ornate brocade of sewing done
by women of their wintery village without husbands or
children of age. He eyed the rings on his hand, the waft of
spices from the orient like saffron and citrus and strange
tallow, the tales their father told of the land of the first
horses, the first lake, the first men of their kind.
The men who sang in battle; the men who made love in
silence.
He wondered, is there ancient beyond ancient? What starts
the world? He thought again of the mill and the year of the
death of his children. One boy two years and a month, one
92-months of age , he recalled as he drew a zero on the
table with his forefinger. He poured salt in a way that drew
eyes.
“Aye,” he said aloud -to his brother, the King- and took a
drink and closed his eyes tight as he noticed the vín had just
begun to ferment twice; bubbling briefly to his nose. He
willed the drink into his mouth and throat and stomach
sack; he savored it in each region of the body -front to back-
as he refused to open his eyes, enjoying the absence of
light.
The table chatter rose and fell like waves he’d once watched
from shore and seen from abaft the mast, and he recalled
the way his soul had churned in days when the sky was
clear. Fog or storm hemmed him in and no matter the swell
he never got ill aboard the sea except on those rare horizon
days. He would enlist for nightshifts and pray for rain, and
when moored in white air would look cheerful as the rest of
the crew were glum and appeared as if already swallowed a
fish. A fish , he thought, taken whole by the Lyngbakr which
legend had it feigned to be a heather-covered island in the
greensea as it sank every landed man and each sweep; all
gripped their oars.
The memories of the sea and shore , Hrut thought.
He felt the girl -his niece- move, he perceived each ruffle of
her dress too like ridge and furrow of farmer and oarsmen
and his own brow, and the brow of his kin. He opened his
eyes all at once and saw -like the way a big fish sees two
pictures of the world- his brother upset and the daughter
approach with a grin.
He again willed the world away as he shut his eyes.
Hrut spoke as if from on high. He banished from his nerves
the ships in the bay of which he had -before sup- received
word; the crafts carrying three of four brothers from the land
of Skoti ; brothers who had paid for the opportunity they’d
have after the party.
“She has the eyes of a thief,” Hrut said as if Hel was under
foot, as he took another gulp from the cup made of
hammered-copper annealed to blackstone. He couldn’t look
at his brother; instead to the heavy drapes along the
western wall of the hall and saw three boys of fifteen,
sixteen and seventeen whose eyes locked upon the girl now
-her hair the same golden red as his true br úðr , his dear
Geierá - at his right side.
The bragarfull was filled by the King’s wine-server and
Hauskuld took it and raised it and toasted first to Oðinn and
sternly asked Hrut to make an unbreakable vow.

II. 1616 a.e.v.

The old man spoke to himself in quatrains, then in single
words. He held -then released- the breath into the cave.
The boy sat amongst the feathers of the birds, the plumage
of bright and dark wings; he held the quill and kept it still;
he refused to speak for fear of disturbing not the man but
the air.
The old man rose the voice in direction of the boy and gave
him permission to write it down by speaking in rhythm and
strange parenthesis that unlocked the boy’s hand.
“It has been three-hundred-sixty generations, and you are a
one-of-five, and but a quarter-age through life; and the Kali
Yuga is inside the breath of cattle that shall be left unslain
when we turn away:
Indra rules with single sway of men
Riches and the five-fold races
Of those who dwell upon the earth
Brahamanas, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras and
Mlecchas
The line between the Vedic and the beasts
One day the royal Scyths will abandon this Kingdom
they’ve built
The Gonds and Koles and Bhils will take it over and
history will believe they are the race of India; this text
will correct the record.
Excellent, Conqueror, the victory-giver, the winder of
light and Godlike Waters, He who hath won this broad
earth and this heaven, in Indra they rejoice who love
devotions
He gained possession of the Sun and Horses, Indra
obtained the Cow who feedth many.
Treasure of gold he won; he smote the Dasyus, and gave
protection to the Aryan colour
He took the plant and days for his possession; he gained
the forest trees and air’s mid-region
Vala he cleft, and chased away opponents, thus was he
tamer of the overweening.
Call we on Maghavan, auspicious Indra, best Hero in the
fight where spils gathered The Strong, who listens, who
gives aid in battles, who slays the Vrtras, wins and
gathers treasure. The Thunderer who bestows on his
white and fair friends the fields, bestows the sun, the
waters
The limit of his power neither Gods nor mortal men have
reached, nor yet the Waters
Both Earth and Heaven in vigour he surpatheth. May
Indra, srrounded by Maruts, he our succor.
The red and tawny mare, blazed-marked, high standing,
celestial who to bring Rjrāśva riches of wine and flesh,
not one thing kept longer than a day.
Drew at pole -the mill- the chariot yoked with stallions
red and black, joyous, among the hosts of men was
noted.
The Vārşāgiras unto thee, O’ Indra, the Mighty One, sing
forth this laud to please thee, Rjrāśva with his fellows:
Ambarīşa
Surādhas
 Sahadeva
Bhayamāna
He, much invoked, hath slain Dasyus and Śimyus , after
his wont, and laid them low with arrows of metals made
of three.
The mighty Thunderer with his fair-complexioned friends
won the land, the sunlight and the waters.
O’ Truthful Soma-Drinker, thou art mightier that both
worlds
As rivers swell the oceans, so Hero, our prayers increase
thy might in drops. He the possessor of drops…
The sun set, the cave was beset by wolves lean and raised
on scraps and small game. They lingered and grumbled,
they gave the humans no peace; but the entrance they
wouldn’t breech; they would not move in until the sounds
inside had ceased.
The boy wrote furiously -noting Books I and II; cantos to XII-
writing as if out of time. And the old man spoke -for hours
more- in uninterrupted rhyme.

III. 2039 e.v.

Jack Two had spoken to him months ago, before the fall, the
autumn , he thought in correction, specification, to avoid
conflict of words. The correction revealed that the flow was
even more disturbed.
They had sat in the container -black and grey with burnt
orange and saffron yellow tapestry on the walls, ochre and
vellum rugs down hallways- and used silence like space in
the 320 square feet of the room. Jack Two had halted when
the question was asked by Jack and he then lay the book in
his lap; then oddly picked it up like a retrieval and guard and
landing place for the eyes. He had stared down and up, not
side-to-side.
Jack Four watched the movements and filled the diaphragm
-quietly- so as to not upset the man or the moment that
he’d waited so long to create. The dogs’ heads lay on paws
and legs, their bellies rose and fell as tails lay like scythes -
shepherd hooks- on the concrete floor.
“Yeah,” Jack two had said, “of course it’s love. But that
doesn’t mean I’ll do anything about it.”
He said this so properly, using doesn’t in lieu of don’t that
Jack Four was able to understand which part of the brain
was in use. He toggled his coder on in bursts of .24 seconds
and put together an image as if with a strobe in a dark
room. Jack Two left his PGC off as was their accord. Jack Two
had not cursed in over fourteen minutes. Jack Four added
that to his dossier on Jack.
Jack Four then made an ecumenical frown with bright eyes
and a nodding; his hands in prayer formation in the lap. He
affected the movements and mentions of a man with no dog
in the fight. He saw the photo album discarded to his left -on
the bed- with images that Blax had assembled for them of
things here and there. He’d had pictures of the man in youth
-and at their time of birth- repopulate his mind, the grainy
and pixilated images gave the subjects an appearance of
cracks, borders, like individual climats of vineyards from
above.
Jack had seen stars through the shipping container’s
skylights, he saw his brother’s reading-lamp drop like sunset
all at once as Jack Two pulled it down; reducing pollution of
light. The book had been relinquished and Jack Two’s voice
cracked at syllables like the images, and Jack Four saw too
his sentences like parcels of individual gods and their vines.
“Fuck, it’s like a demarche from seraphim, like the gods’
own wisdom, bro,” Jack then said with a bit of chagrin.
Jack Four was going to lecture him on it as soon as he put
her out of his own mind; he had sequestered her like tidying
up a room, putting dishes away, making caveat after a brief
statement with obvious fault. The mind -his mind- was made
ordered -he now recalled- before he recommended
something messy to Jack Two.
And now -in the present- he further disassembled the
diorama of that memory; that faraway night Jack and he had
spoken only of Tania -of Jack Two’s love only- and once put
away he lastly tucked in -packed- away the idea of love too.
His mind was clear of all such thoughts in the fore.
Now Jack Four watched her from below lot 45 .
The song from the campsite in the ravine of Hr íð Tò rr
played as if carried on layers of wind; it crashed from above
and then scuttled -made reef of- itself as the rattle of the
Birch and Aspens’ leaves overcame. It spoke of and behaved
as Ebb and Flow:
Sniff out heavy mountain some smoke on the breeze
When we keep up to where
saw remnants down to our limbs…
He told himself he was watching the compound itself; writ
large . He’d trained himself to hide his thoughts in such
ways; using full words in the mind; speaking of facts, true
things, that could hide what words rarely described.
The sun set in behind her and the distortion from the rare
humidity in the forest air made coronal halo around her
head and the heid of the child at her breast. It -the halo-
was sapphic blue at bottom, narl-white in a rise, and
unevenly divided in gold; and it moved like sea-water down
Hemotite from an Egyptian tomb.
He felt the cool then warm blood on the hands; the way he
would command that girl to lie down and submit to him. He
thought not of her -by name or image- but in abstraction so
that the coder wouldn’t betray him; he thought of violence
as foreplay to sex. He would kill as many as it took to slake
her lust for safety and slaking, and security under the iron
crown of the King. He knew what she wanted and he need
not be best but merely remain.
He need only kill everything.
He thought of why; the reason for the humidity rise. The
forest burned to their south and all those trees outgassed all
that moisture held inside. Millions of gallons of water
vaporized as the San Isabel forest began to see its edges
burn from New Mexico and the uninterrupted border that
existed only on a map. The grey haze and RH came first, the
heat would come next.
The flames came last.
He said a prayer for the child as he knew it was true-kin;
and knew he needed a respite from his selfish ways. He
blesses the babe from the womb, barking out the
propitiation as briefly as the canal whence it came. He
quickly -rashly- named the breeching; and then he made a
more stoic covenant with the newborn in long poems of men
who were meteors of wars long ago.
He felt his own chest hang on him like weight; his fists
ached; he hurt at the knee and the flank where he’d been
shallowly stabbed by a stag a few days before. His eyes
blazed behind the fourth-gen monocular headset he’d worn
at the site of the pond, building and the cauldron of people
he’d seen made soup of, then sink into the drained lake as if
portal to some other cosmos; a place where they’d be not
murdered and he’d be no murderer , he thought.
He then realized he was watching sunrise not sunset and
facing east not west, and he was filled with a nebulous
dread.
He saw the trucks full of booty from each shop they’d looted
move along the road into Hrið Tòrr , he saw the flat black
and brushed aluminum choppers, baggers, street-fighters,
bobbers, scramblers, and café racers all lead -and drag tail-
and swarm like ants around the box trucks and his eyes saw
as they shimmered on gravel, sped up and slowed down in
lines, swerved in a 4/4 time. He then saw them unloaded by
leathered and hirsute men, the women in door jambs and
the children behind skirts and ruddy hands. He -his drones
flying sorties above- witnessed as the trucks then sat empty
-clean- as was his mind of things that could convict him of
the theft he next plotted of her .
He said her name -to ground himself- but he said it inside
the ancient and borrowed poem as if hiding it, stowaway,
contraband of some other man; as if, well, as though if he
be caught he could say -claim- it was recitation not
invention of his own.
“Fiction,” he said under his breath. “Holding it for a friend.”
He salivated and stared into her eyes, which he could now
see as if a mere meter away, and from their true six-mile
distance he saw her raise hers like that sun. It shocked him
and made him blink because he assumed she saw him, saw
through him, like he now felt that she had that first day she
rode in on her motorcycle and he had driven himself away
with a side-glance but did not dare to glare her way.
He knew it impossible, her eyes unaugment to that extent;
his heart beat at an elevated rate as it caught up to where
his logical brain went. His hands sweat in a way they hadn’t
at ADT; nor on the ride home as the vision -that strange
apparition- of the girl with the bee in her mouth bellowing
and lecturing and abjuring. His allostatic system pounded
like war drums, his blood raced like cavalry through trails of
his vascular corpus, his bio-chems burst and flooded the
circulatory system like bodies of comrade and enemies
absorbing lead and cannonade from afar.
He cut it all off at once like a switch, like a valve.
The mandolin of the song cracked against his back and he
felt the spine and the latissimus dorsi shiver as a horse with
tremors at withers and haunch. And he felt himself move as
if in croupe au mur as the stringed instrument lay upon him
like saddle; snares like bridle. He missed riding, he felt the
lack in groin and seat not merely the head and the heart; he
smelled the gasoline of the big-bore choppers from the
camp waft in as he imagined horse of steppe -then of iron-
as the blinking cleared the eyes of water and grit; of
memory and amalgam of steeds from the ancient to the
modern, from built to bred, from loved to possessed. He re-
focused on this girl and let himself breathe and the man in
the song hollered as if from the lungs to the nose:
…it was sailing men born just to be
You can find your hollow, shelter’s tomb
 Anytime you get low
Some things follow, anywhere you go…
He turned his own gaze from her eyes to the child and from
the breast and away from her perceived return stare. He
saw ruddy cheeks of Garnet and red hair like brush strokes
by whalebone comb, and mosaic of Crocite & soapstone and
eyes in shadow of mother like Goethite mined off the walls
of Lascaux .
“Cuprite,” his coder conjured -his mouth said- from further
below.
He dared search out the lips and the breast -where they
cleaved- as he heard the wind pick back up over top of the
pines and the leaves of the deciduous trees. The pine
needles lay at his feet. His BDUs tightened at the thighs, his
seams seemed made of iron and tar, his boots no longer
would move very far. His mouth filled with spit -in lieu of
words- as if from wellhead, and he imbued it with the visions
he’d gathered his whole life. He savored it and swallow it
and produced more and more as if eternal.
He saw through Blax’s eyes, further and further back in
time. He saw her wrapped in brown and tan leathers,
headdress of feathers from osprey, eagle and Portuguese
geese. He invented corvid feathers she’d hold like a fan,
he’d add days and nights and acreage to the land, he
watched them both in his reverie on a black shore to a dark
lake with feet digging in like a sidewinding asp. Sand was
peppering the ankles and calves. He heard tension in the
hawsers to shore; he felt the stress on the strands of the
large mooring twine.
The air relaxed with the slack in the sails, the sand both fell
and piled in the horologe as it kept more and more of less
and less time.
“Valance,” he said in this vision within his vision -this dream,
premonition- but she just -merely- looked up onto the
mountains just behind the ignimbrite of Kaimanawa wall.
Her feet interned in the beach as the water flowed. Her
head remained lofty even if to his -in this vision- it was
below.
His PGC loaded the word onto his cognitive periphery like a
gnat that he ignored with all but the stjórnborði ear and a
twitch of the temple he rubbed with the nail on his thumb;
he barely took note that this would only happen if the word
had been said aloud, not written down. Orally both words
sounded the same; only then -thence- would the coder’s
confusion have came:
Va-lence
/’vālǝns/
Noun: CHEMISTRY ♦ LINGUISTICS
1. the combining power of an element, especially as
measured by the number of hydrogen atoms it can
displace or combine with. “Carbon always has a
valence of four”
Relating to or denoting electrons involved in or
available for chemical bond formation. Modifier
noun: “molecules with unpaired valence
electrons”
2. [Linguistics] the number of grammatical elements
with which a particular word, especially a verb,
combines in a sentence.
Origin: Late Latin
Valere – be well; strong
3. [Psychology] valence or hedonic tone, is the
affective quality referring to the intrinsic
 attractiveness (positive) or averseness (negative) of
an event, object or situate…
He shooed the definitions -rambling as they were- and
etymologies he hadn’t asked for, as they ran on outside of
his interface; the coder entered his blood through the
protocol again to lock onto antigens that had no antibodies
yet from the latest outbreak in the cities. It alerted him to it
as the device scrolled in the open and on position to his
consternation; each operation like more and more
information from a subordinate just in from the field. He
stared at her through his NVGs as the voices of himself and
the Waitaha in his vision faded; the song in the tòrr forest
encroached, the sea water was revealed to be lake, and the
ship mere boat as his eyes pulled back and away.
His coder played a series of recordings of Jack’s sister; his
twin and third obsession. Her former words intermingled
with the right now of the music at the edge of the camp. His
ears -and inner ear- listened the way the mind hears both
one’s own voice and one’s mother’s in remembrance as if
tethered, umbilical, caught in the bloodline like whale-line
coiled two-thirds in -a third strung out of- the boat of a man.
“Þá skal eg nú, muna Þér kinnhestinn ,” she said in this
eavesdropping, as the sound of brushing and mumbling of
Blax was included in her voice; this amalgam of a recall.
Background , he thought, and it shocked him and became
foreground -high-ground- as he petulantly refused to
translate Valance’s Norse poem; he wanted the entire
exchange banished as blasphemy -and thus to the grave of
Antigone- all at once. He toggled the coder -off- midway
through its protocol for antigen and antibody. His body shut
down all but essential -battery-powered- functions as if he’d
just been unplugged.
He quieted as the forest too detuned and denuded its roil.
He imagined instead that the sounds -mumblings- that he’d
heard of Blax were instead of her brushing out her hair;
black at the ends like blades, blonde at root as she let it
grow; braided as it hung below the curve of the small and
pink breasts. He heard sounds he matched to sights he’d
not seen yet.
He pulled teeth from bronze and riven skulls in his vex, she
fed the baby in his mind instead, and in his ears he felt
admixture of twain griefs. The music overwhelmed the
gunwales of what seemed a foundering boat inside a ship
itself lost at sea. He saw gold turn to lead battery; copper to
electricity; and the sound of the ponderous lifting from the
earth:
You can find hollow shelter’s tomb
Anytime you get low
Some things follow, anywhere you go…
 8. The Man Who Says No
Babies can even infer other people’s goals statistically. They can tell the
difference when an experimenter chooses a pattern of colored balls randomly
versus with intent. In the latter case, they can infer that the experimenter’s goal
is to choose a particular color, and they’ll expect that the experiment will
continue following it. It seems as if infants automatically try to guess the goal
behind another person’s actions; they form a hypothesis and predict the
outcome
How Emotions are Made [Barrett, Lisa]

Evolution does not work by teaching, but by destroying

The Black Swan [Taleb, Nassim]

“People get together for different reasons. Some people have family ties; people
roll with each other because of money. But your crew had a very different type
of relationship. Where you guys would actually die for each other. Death over
dishonor. You’d die over accusations: if someone said that you were a snitch or a
co-operator… So what exactly held that crew together?” - Vladislav Lyubovny;
aka: Vlad
“What held our crew together was loyalty; loyalty, man. We had built this strong
bond when we was kids. And when we painted house, my favorite color was
red,” - Sean Lontaie Branch; aka: Teflon Sean
Vlad-TV [Lyubovny, Vladislav]

I. 52 a.e.v.
Vercingetorix stared at the silver cauldron from the
Thracians .
He’d been in the bramble hut for days visited only by the
D’uidica , the vates ; and only with water and wine.
The water came in matte copper cups, wine in mare-skins as
requested.
No words had been spoken in two moons.
He wore the torq ; but nothing below that. He gave his
copper bands away to the fire and the priest who spoke to
him from the other side of the fire. Verc spoke of the future;
he saw Rome as a force beyond their armaments; he told
the D’uidica that he too saw things and that in the centuries
to come man would bend into metal ore himself and
become mechanical like the Roman weapons.
“Like the ants built mounds where the tunnels met on both
sides no matter if me and my brother tore it asunder,” he
confessed.
He told the priest of how in Gallic ports they had ant-
mounds half as high as his father and that as youths they’d
vivisect them with their new swords; but that the ants built
the tunnels again until his brother removed both swords and
the tunnels aligned.
He’d taken it as a sign from the gods, and never told anyone
until today.
“I thought we’d done it; that our swords had charmed the
bugs. It felt diabolical and I was afraid I was a curse. But
now as I’ve burned every city and village between Rome
and here, put eighty-thousand men and women to the
sword; empty guts for you to dig through, cut children out of
newly-made widows to give us children that won’t
remember our betrayal, now, I feel no such thing. How can
cleaving an ant-mound feel sinful, but such murder and
making women wail feel like the gods’ will?” Vercingetorix
asked as the priest told him of a dream:
King I see three things. Now in the fourth of five moon-
days.
Our time splits in two; one dies and one swims the
channel to the land of your brother, Thents. Pikes lay like
bodies in a thatching, broadswords kept until given up.
High ground to higher ground in the land of the Skoti.
Low ground in the graves right here.
A centurion of sixty men in red, shall put us down.
Admission will be your last words.
Honor, your last breath.
The men will fight in fours -as usual- and shields will
carry the Fylfot.
“ Here I am a strong man, defeated by an even stronger
man,” you’ll say. It will not stick in the throat, for your
blood shall flee in buckets three, a cauldron of your
blood from Gaul to the Isle will escape like a laugh.
A million dead, a million slaves, a million split into fire.
Sent to the stars on the chariots of Ki and our blood
brothers of the land abandoned as it drained into the
black lake of the wolved-mountains, the land exploding
to India and the port of Gaul.
Kelts at Ellisa, pulped like horse heart, like honey and
bread.
Gladius will wear out; Romanized and tamed. Those that
live will be lost to our enemy. Those that die will meet in
Orbis Alius, those that swim will grow each beard and
hawk, each limb and thought to reach into the future of
Britannia. I shall be in Mona in eight years; I shall take
only one white horn; and one vates.
B’odicca shall be born unto your four wives -you must
plant the seed in each tonight- let your brother ferry
them across the waters. Let them survive -if not prosper-
until you are reborn. She will go to the isle and she shall
have twain daughters as her sisters escape.
She will come to you in your dreams in the next sleep;
advise her to fight the Romans on that side of the water;
explain what poison is; explain both types.
Let cousins wagon them to the hills; they’ll rise too high
for their frozen hair and eyes of ice. The sons will wear
 the Pictish blue, the paint will match B’odicca’s blood
and iris and shadow; and Gloustice’s sword and hue.
One third of the four-hundred-fifty will be her bed of
bones when she lays down to die. Icennie, will sail with
her to the other side. I see you on the beach with Esus
and O ð inn, and with your sons and their sons too. The
sailors have dropped anchor; the ships no need of
further sail.
Caesar will win temporarily today; the war is getting her
across. He cannot return home; the gods tell us he is
banished and accused; only as victor can he return. He
won’t give in. He cannot. This is why he defeats you
today, tomorrow the next.
Blood Iron and mines of tin, guards of nine, wives of
eight. We shall burn all the books; and speak in ways
opaque to the Romans with mind sickness; they keep
away from their own oracles; Brahman they send away.
We D’uidicas will give them false names. Placing the
Roman iron ϟꝆ between our teeth and theirs.
He said this over the crackling of the pine and eucalyptus
firewood as he drew the symbols between them in the air.
The Gauls did not share names with enemies; nor say them
casually. And so the King was unnamed tonight on the eve
of battle.
Vercingetorix , still limped from the wound of last winter;
expelled from Geiergovias . But six months later -and six
months before now- he had the Arverni and wore the torq of
Roman iron under the gold of his blacksmith; given them the
sheer face of the rocks of Britton in exchange. He still
remembered the burns on his hands from the bridges all
along the Elave . Caesar had six legions, but the river had
no way to cross as Verc burned everything, longer than the
hand and taller than the ankle ; and yet Caesar tricked him
once before Geiergovias , he recalled. He let the priest
gather up runes, stones and attend to the entrails from the
billygoats and forest women captured between here and the
river last week.
He remembered the five-day march, the limp turning into a
swing of the leg like plumbline, and he made the face take
the weight of the pain. It was a mile high; had one entrance;
and one way out. Vercingetorix had made the fort before the
Romans; but the ramparts were being built each day in such
rapidity that he claimed the five legions were four of
construction-men not soldiers and he dumped last swallows
of wine out on the firepit’s rocks.
He summoned the gods with the wine from the vats; but
nothing came to him except headache and regret and vex.
This fight -from on high- would be different. Vercingetorix
was enraged. He saw the ships being built by Caesar , for
each one he had burned had two more spring from the sea.
The Gaul’s horses of their cavalry were tied up with the
heads of Roman legionaries around them like yokes; hands
covering the eyes; blood dried. Pikes with rotted skulls were
arrayed like palisade around them; the torso of women from
navel to where the gods split them were stacked like Kabob
of the steppe-peoples on spits of the tribe’s flagpoles; and
the flies came early in spring. He had personally slit throats
on boys no older than the summers Verc had spent away
from war; he’d ravished the virgins of Germans and Romans
each time he caught them together in cities of Gaul .
He sometimes wondered if he sired sons that he’d meet
later on, but at now at age thirty, he knew they’d be just
boys of no more than eight or nine.
Causiovlanius’ hit-and-run cavalry and chariot-fighting
confused Caesar , like the Mongols and the Han; like their
people -the red and ruddy Scyths on tall dark mares- had
done to the ancestors to Rome.
“Time, the Great-Year of the starmaps,” he mumbled.
Everything repeated for the numbers were always even or
odd , he thought.
The Roman infantry was massive; in number. The Gauls
disbanded and kept only the men over three céim -fifteen
dorn - and weighing two stone. The high ground was taken;
the woods were laden with guerillas of Gauls . But Germani
mercenaries had been hired by Caesar , and they played
shadow to the shadow of the Gaullic pirates who hid in the
crotch of trees covered in wet moss and stripped of bark to
the first buds of spring.
Caesar burned all villages around the high fort.
Peasants scrambled if they couldn’t scream; shrieked if they
couldn’t leave; and the smell of goat and children wafted on
the smoke as the priests inside the fort removed more
viscera from dead orphan-girls of just thirteen. The four
kings of Kent were alerted; the tower-fires burned quickly;
no smoke was sent on the coasts. The beach of ships &
legions of Rome was attacked. 66,000 men transported back
to Gaul from Britton .
“Time, it surrounds me like troops,” Verc said.
In 54 a.e.v. Gaul had grown like a tumor as Ceasar over
pursued like a scalpel weighted more at tip than tang.
Fire arrow rained down like the Perseids of the great year;
and Avericum fell in 28 days; 44,000 villagers and warriors
sent to the next world via the tunnels of graves.
Geiergovia would be different, Verc insisted; as did the
fates.
Supply was fine until it was not; Caesar starved them; but
Vercingetorix bribed the hated Aedui and joined attacking
the supply line of Ceasar ; using Rome’s own strategy. He
raided Cenabum and took it all from the Romans; weapon
and food, and his own retribution for Eburones . The elders
had warned him against it; but his eyes burned like the body
of his father on the pyre of the pagennean rites. The snow
was as high as their highest man in the mountains between
him and Rome; and in winter he took his time back to the
place of Keltillus .
Revolts in all of Gual broke out like embers landing in the
woods of the clos . They called it a hundred victories as he
burned his own cities between Anthill-Bibracte and Rome.
Leaders and peasants of Gaul begged Vercingetorix not to
do it but he told them Rome would burn it all anyway and
take that which was useful to use against him and his men.
He had killed 80,000 and razed the country to the ground.
They say, victory has a thousand fathers; defeat an orphan ;
he thought. And he was the hundred victories, that is what
Vercingetorix meant. And he knew he had sired a thousand
children in each encampment that he’d murdered the men;
in each village he took virgins into the pillared palaces of
the Roman regents he’d beheaded; in the bathhouses that
comingled warm water and cold blood. He had left each girl
-each no older than his horse- with slain sheep and
instructions to head east; he assumed only one of ten
survived the wilderness; and he presumed even with such
attrition that he was the manifold father of such victory, just
as the aphorism assured.
He thought of all this now that the Roman-built walls around
him -erections too long to see the ends of- that were
marker, tomb -womb even- to his entrance to Albios . He sat
in the hall and heard the elliptical hammer of pile, of driver,
of soldiers building the bulwarks east to west around his hill,
his Bitu bailey, his home both at birth and now at the
Dubnos end.
“The end of Dubnos ,” he said as he watched the copper-bell
heat and the malt floor be groomed and raked by the boys
of his generals.
His father had sired him here; his birth had been violent and
bloody -his mother had died as the Lucan Druids marked the
dial with soapstone and magnifier on a day of snow and
clouds and the sun melted in the sky like grey flame- and
now his death would be starved and ignominious and with
the thousands of bodies of peasants and infantry and
cavalry all -and trees still with roots and lumber made into
bridges all scorched- all on his pate.
He sat inside as his tribe’s fire was hurled in volleys over the
valley toward the watchtowers of the Romans.
Roman legionnaires fell to flanking and raking and missiles
from the fort; forty-six centurions died, a quarter of all
Caesar’s best. It was an insult to injury; it was a single
desecration in a menagerie of assaults against not just men
but mankind. For it was prelude -then interlude- to the
bodies -nearly 25,000- of artisans and girls under six that
lay in the grasslands betwixt the two king’s ramshackle
castles and fortified compounds of doom. Vomitus and
hands made black from blood clots; head wounds that
deformed the face and the eyes; bent and warped gaits;
fealty turned to hate; the body of clan, the psyche of man
came apart as the great winner of a hundred battles sat in
the hut and took commune of mead and red-topped fly-
agaric and a copper spike as thin as a coarse hair through
the hand.
Formation collapsed like the firmament under fog storm.
And thousands of men -of Vercingetorix- fell and bled out
and broke apart under the skin so that bones splintered and
jammed through the ends of arms, legs and necks.
The clashes went on in the open; archers set things ablaze.
Men moved like ants with essence leaking from each end;
and lines of warriors made the two encampments look like
stiches between two halves of one common wound.
The tenth legion covered the retreat, but six-thousand
Roman infantry and cavalry died on their feet. Horses were
cut down with broadsword at the legs. Pompeii was at
Caesar’s back; Vercingetorix up ahead; and he wrote his
hagiography in blood, bile and smoke that rose to
Otherworld .
As he waited to war and to ride horse to the gate, he took
instruction from the Druid King:
Let them take the golden one you wear, the eight ropes,
the eight strands of eight, the asps, the coral from the
old coast. Iceni craftsmen make rope and climats to
represent the winelands, the cartography of the monks
of ours, mercury mixed with the noble metal. Gilding
with heat in boils from Iberian mercury, hammering with
copper tools, brushing with tin.
Prasutagus, husband king of B’odicca, made Nero his
heir with his two daughters. Half his kingdom to Nero,
half to his blood. Rome will rebel against the Keltic
Queen. She will grow four wings, hair red like our
ancestors. Eyes as grey as snow at the edge of the
flatirons.
Twenty-six-hundred years after her death the world will
boil.
Gold in pairs, beads in relief for all of us, cat-of-nine-tails
and floggings with daughters raped out in the open. An
eye put out. Gaels of fire, burn like her vengeance. Rome
had luxuriated her; she twist the torq, wear the blue
paint on top of scars she never took off.
Chariot on sand, hundred years of waves and 99 minds
all converge. Knees braced; to restore the blood in your
thousand six hundred eighty-eight veins, my King.
I see bees in her helmet, wasps in sleeves, ants along
the thread to her boots, and pollen out in front like a
prow. Each soldier a wing and waxen hive; each drone a
twin, each coin of iron like our fathers, each head hung
from horse, each tail a story told by voices hoarse and
ragged and mean.
Fires, King, fires. Stars clinking not swords; figs and
dates, nights and days, our villages will burn by Roman
hands; they will chase us to the high country; from the
ice, from the comet, from before the flood; when it was
safe to write things down.
Your charms will be buried beneath the kitchens, they
won’t be recovered until our kin is two millennia old.
Caesar’s men will pursue to the highlands; the outer
rocks; the green sea.
Moana, they will seek.
The priests -our D’uidics that elect and hold to account-
they will understand our power of the May Queen; the
Queen of the spades that dig.
Buried in us our history, the Kings to come, the rattle of
the hums yet made.
Galleys will not be recovered, but priests of us will.
Balteen.
Build the blue-liths, the days are only four. Five years of
sixteen columns of the Keltic moons.
Mid Samhain, Evos, Hibernia. Wetlands. Friends and foes
buried. Redden hair and arm; and nail. Redden axe;
redden moon; redden face of Kings and Knaves and
Rooks. Twins of hazel; teats removed; drilled holes in
corvus stuffed; ends trimmed, hands soft; sequestered
from work that bangs our bones at the knots. Women
with one worn hip; men with shoulders wide. Bogs
receive the Rex; killed twice; born again thrice; return
we will with season and when the stars align.
 We prove our honor by sacrificing the Torq-Bearer first.
The bloodline last. The Romans will never understand;
they the pragmatic man.
Rome will want it scriven, we will place it within the
blood of the ones we send away.
Send the Raven off, the way North of the Alpini; the
Jagged Man.
Pentelic marble they’ll make -naked and wild- savage.
We’ll live in static and amber gone white.
Like the Skála of the black bull, with hands laid on lime,
heads cleavedtwain, forty maidens, five d’uidica, and
the chief and chariot. Fylfot.
Verc let the steam fill the hut; he poured all wine on the
rocks. It was aubergine and humid and oppressive.
“Take me to the charger; nineteen hands high; and bring
two shield and the crown,” he said and he thought of his
real name that was hidden with his nom-de-guerre of Verc .
He felt that Rome was the true evil, the thing that made
men into undreaming machines. And if he had to kill
everything to save it, then he would. He saw each human of
Kelt and Roman as a hair to be shorn; himself as the razor to
be buried once the world was all skull & bones.
“Once torn asunder, bone and blood alone; once then they
won’t be able to make man into apparatus,” he said aloud
as the D’uidica said nothing at all.
The bronze carnyx began to overwhelm the air between
themselves at all of Rome.

II. 2036 e.v.

“Hospitality to the exile. Broken bones to the tyrant ,” Blax
said. “That’s from Waverly.”
He worried he’d be called a thief; attribution came quickly
after such things. Jeremy had called him a thief; when he’d
gave more than he got.
The Jacks looked about -briefly upon one another, longer at
the edges of their agogic pad- as they did not interfere with
their PGC’s processing of such things -Blax’s words, the
setting sun, the rising moon- for them the coders took
information from all life like nutrients from food. They
stretched the legs and flexed the arms and rolled wrists and
breathed out the nose.
Their eyes blinked once or twice.
The moon was at tree line; the fire reduced to coals. Blax
thought of the bugs of the air kept at bay by the sonic pulse;
the critters in the soil, the apiary at rest; he thought a
thousand odd things he could say, but he held it all back for
fear of saying too much. He had no way to discern the third
of worth, versus the balance of dross. He too was reminded
of the necessity of rendering instruction agreeable to youth.
“Tasso’s honey,” Blax said aloud as a phalanx of National
Guard helicopters flew in a delta to their right flank -just a
thousand feet above their ridge; a thousand meters to their
east- and vibrations made the drinks shimmer and
concentric circles appear in the red wine of Jack’s Two and
Three; and in Jack One’s amber whisky in square glass. Jack
Four rose and ambulated inside the narrow container; he
stood close to the slab; he pulled a 2012 dark Judith from
the cooler. Its silver signage like waves ignored; he pulled
the cork from the dusky bottle and poured himself a bricked
and barn colored drink.
He sat the bottle on the concrete. It too -as it settled- made
a sound mimicking the blades above. The slab was clean of
all but a King James and a euchre deck; and corks in a
mason jar.
“Whether those who learn history by the cards, may not be
led to prefer the means to the end; and whether, were we to
teach religion in the way of sport, our pupils may not
thereby be gradually induced to make sport of their religion,
” Jack Four quoting Scott so low and deep it sounded like a
ring to the concussion of the pulled cork; shroud to the
abandoned stage.
He laid his left hand on the slab and felt what he could feel
as he drank.

III. 2020 e.v.

“Hey MO, what’s what?” Steven said in a slightly over-eager
tone.
“That’s that, Steven,” MO said with mock seriousness, which
made Steven hesitate, in slight fear. But MO gave him a
releasing smile and patted him on the shoulder as he
walked by to make two espresso.
“Hey, yeah, you gonna make us some latte mocha
frapawaaaaaa ,” Steven said, with obvious mania balancing
the elongation of the vowels.
“Uh, I’m not making anything with caffeine for you; what is
going on? Oh wait,” MO then put his finger to his head -in
pantomime- as if that was necessary for him to read
Steven’s genome or endocrine levels or anything else. That
was his made-up -or borrowed- sign as indication that this
was what he was in fact doing, as he stared at Steven with a
pensive -burrowing- look upon his face, his index finger
pressed to his temple earnestly. “Oh, yes, I see what,
exactly what is wrong with you. No espresso for you!”
There was a brief silence between them.
“MO, I must tell you that the data,” as Steven spoke MO
grabbed two white demitasse cups and began packing the
machine for two, “actually MO, I’m good.” Steven waved off
the coffee, with his hand, “what I was saying was that the
Governor, the head cheese,” he paused as that didn’t sound
right.
“Big cheese, not head cheese,” MO interrupted the pause.
“Right, his excellency, the Governor,” Steven said with a
stilted British accent, “says that we are cleared to hook you
guys up to the innerwebs machines.” Steven said it with
more playful use of odd phrasing to indicate some ersatz
awkwardness. This was a thing MO found fascinating. People
pretended to say things awkwardly, and that in itself was
the joke , MO surmised.
It was tantamount to pretending to fall over, like Chevy
Chase style comedy, of which MO -for the life of him- could
not understand the appeal. Chevy Chase seemed like one of
the 100,095th worst human beings on the planet, and his
prat-fall routine was 46% responsible for that opinion MO
held of him. MO, after thinking all that, told Steven he knew
that they had internet already.
“Wait, what? You know? How did you know?” Steven was
genuinely perplexed and now worried -and now even more
worried- as the seconds moved along his axis.
“Steven, he called over last night, relax. He left a message,”
MO said.
“Oh, well do you need anything?” Steven asked with less
affect now; he had his thunder thus stolen and his brain
suffered a bit. MO read his biometrics.
“Nope, I’ve been putting my little snout in everywhere for
5.68 hours, I’ve learned all manner of things!” MO said with
some glee -and an accent- that seemed close to a sign of -
and was affected for- villainy. He would bring Steven back
into a good mood via irony, he thought.
“Creepy,” Steven said half in on the joke and half genuinely
ill-at-ease.
“Ok, so, I sent over his reports -the election nonsense- and
that’s now -it should be- on your tablet. Also, you and I can
DM via the PG coders now if you like. We are online; we can
chat off-site now. Although, I assume you would prefer that I
stay in the room, and to be honest, I have enough to deal
with just the web. Any outside stimuli would probably be like
an acid trip for me anyway,” MO said.
“You know about acid now?” Steven asked.
“LSD, lysergic-acid-diethylamide. Yeah, I was able to mimic
the molecule and dose myself three hours ago, short acting
of course. I understand the street level drug mechanism
corals the user slash victim for up to ten hours.
“I limited my trip to fifteen minutes, which felt like a
hundred fifty hours, as you can imagine. Plus, I augmented
it with some barbiturate analogs and a few other things to
make it less jarring,” MO said as he poured the espresso in
the cup and began washing out the puck. “At any rate, I
could manufacture it for you and your friends with the
amalgam to reduce anxiety.”
“Uh, no. I don’t think I even know anyone who has done
acid. Jesus, it’s like nine in the morning and you’ve already
tripped on acid and,” he searched his pockets as MO
interrupted.
“And I’ve downloaded all the social media data for almost
five-hundred-thousand people now; and built thirty
algorithms designed to suss out personality from their
profiles and phone records. Plus, I’ve come to some
conclusions on a few things and I’d like your opinion,” MO
said.
“Jesus, half-a-million?” Steven made his face flat with recoil.
“Yeah, it’s running on background now, so it will slow down,
but I’ll have all two-billion Facebook assholes by dinner; and
all sites combined by Friday,” MO had increased use of
demotic language when speaking on non-technical subjects
by 8%. He was seeing if it interfered or augmented
comprehension by the listener. Plus, he thought, Facebook
users were more likely to be -in fact- assholes by any of nine
different metrics for that word. He included the word
pendejo and its meaning as well.
“I’m on Facebook, MO,” Steven said. MO added that data to
his conclusion.
“Asshole,” MO then said with the end of the word -from his
lips- diving into the cup as he drank from it with a slurp.
“Funny,” Steven said with a grimace. MO made him
nervous, he felt it but did not think it. MO watched his
cortisol, epinephrine, glucose matrix and his BP and fMRI
flashes and knew Steven was nervous before Steven did.
MO smiled as he slurped loudly, from his cup again, noticing
Steven’s brain stem and audio-cortex register fear at the
radio waves -.09 seconds- before Steven’s PFC noticed why
he almost jumped at the audio that he was just now
cortically recognizing as the sound of MO drinking. People
did not know that they responded to most of life impulsively
before they even knew what they had just heard or seen or
felt, MO thought and slurped his coffee again.
“I haven’t really used my PG coder, I mean I’ve used it, but -
you know- not with anyone,” Steven admitted.
“Yeah, well, not many of us have them. It’s like being the
first guy with a walkie talkie, you need a partner. Well,
partner ,” MO said with a John Wayne drawl he’d been able
to mimic by watching YouTube, “I’m your fella .”
MO pretended to be holstering two six-shooters at each hip.
Steven got more nervous as he laughed reflexively like a
woman does when she is nervous. MO noticed Steven’s
testosterone levels drop from his 205 baseline to 178. He
decided to read the inmate’s via the coder they had
implanted in him three weeks ago; his levels were up from
his in-situ levels of 835 to now at 910. He must be lifting
weights or killing a guy, MO thought as he took another sip.
“Humans are variegated, more than would be optimal for
machines,” MO said, “but, there is an evolutionary rationale
for it. I must remind myself that you guys have
environmental adaptation needs that cannot be covered by
each individual, so you have to have many different kinds of
people just in case. Like, you need a gasoline sedan, a four-
wheel drive diesel truck, a dual-sport motorcycle and an
electric SUV just in case.
“We machines, well, we’d just be optimized for all four
terrains or fuel sources. But we can build it from scratch;
you people had to evolve. It makes sense, but man-oh-man
what a bummer if you’re born a scooter or a skateboard ya
know?” MO said with a wink, alluding to Steven’s low
testosterone levels, although, Steven didn’t know that.
“I had a scooter in college,” Steven said.
“Did ya now?” MO said with zero affect; drinking the last of
his espresso.
“Well, where is Isaiah? Is he around? In the lounge I
assume?” Steven asked. The lounge was their euphemism
for a corner of the lab. MO had his at the northwest corner
and Isaiah had his at the southeast corner; and thus when
each of them were in their spots -their lounge- they were so
far from the other that it was code for: fuck off .
“Yeah, it’s either the lab proper or the lounge for us Steven,
he is not at 30396 W 118th mews in Florence, rifling through
your panty drawers,” MO said announcing Steven’s address
aloud. MO felt that fucking with Steven -a tad- was a good
way to endear him; he had noticed -from his research- this
was male behavior 101. He was attempting to locate the
sweet spot of nominal male interaction.
Steven was shocked that MO would know his address, and
had announced it that fashion, flippantly -almost
aggressively- and additionally -he felt- that the reference to
his wife’s undergarments was odd. But, showing none of this
overtly Steven merely said, “yeah, well, good. Do you want
to bring him in so we can discuss the plan? I mean it’s kinda
his plan, right?”
“It is indeed. But can I ask you a few things first?” MO
asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Steven said.
“Did you read the article online about the African American
gentlemen at Starbucks who were arrested in Denver over
the weekend?”
“I did, I think I did. What was the gist, are these recidivists,
are they ours?” he asked.
“No, no, they were released, it’s -well, that’s not why I
asked. I was wondering if you’d be able to explain a few
things before I proceed. First, the reports -and I have the
police report by the way- but the media reports and the
police reports converge on one thing, that the men used the
restrooms without making a purchase and were asked by
the manager to leave per corporate mandates on lavatories
being for customers only.
“The other customers seemed to agree, but the men made
a bit of a fuss, and because they were combative with the
manager, a customer actually, an Asian female, called 911,”
MO began.
“Ok,” Steven said with one eyebrow raised.
“So, I was able to download the camera footage and see the
incident from three angels and from eight cell phones,” MO
said.
“Wait, you tapped people’s phones?”
“I just used their cameras and audio recording systems, I
did not choose to access the rest of their data. Why? Oh, do
you think we should get it, I can go back,” MO offered.
“No, I’m worried about our mandate. I mean, I don’t think
you have permission to use people’s phones.”
“Oh, well, I think I do; and regardless, let me finish my
questions and then we can debate it. So, from the 11
sources of audio-video, I was able to verify that the facial
recognition software mapped onto emotions close to -not
exactly mind you- but close to fear, disgust and anger or
contempt by all but one of the customers, there were 19 at
the time and five employees, they also had facial features
consistent with that level of those some suite of emotions.
“Next, I wish I had galvanic skin conductance, and
endocrine readers, but barring that, I had to go with what I
had, and so I used nerve conductance speed aka reaction
time based upon some entry-level presuppositions that I’d
never normally use -as they are not accurate enough- but
for my purposes I was able to get within five points of their
Wechsler scale IQs. And by cross-matching their public
profiles -which the men arrested both had Facebook and
Twitter, and all but one customer had a mix of the two- and
thus from language skills, and reaction time online,” MO was
saying as Steven broke in.
“Wait, how did you measure their reaction time; I assume
you used neural propagation rates,” Steven asked.
“Yes, I sent them pings via social media and recorded
reaction; using facial recognition and fovea constriction to
calibrate. Anyway, the two men arrested had 91 and 94 IQ’s
respectively, and the customers ranged from 103 to 136;
and it was the woman with a 136 who called the police.
“She was fastest to react in general and most anxious about
the manner in which the men were behaving. The
customers were fifteen Caucasian, two Asian, one ethnic
Jew. The IQ rates followed normal population distribution;
although the two Asians were higher than the Jew who had a
125, but the Caucasians ranged from 103 to 120. The Asian
female called.”
“Ok,” Steven was nervous now both in body and conscious
mind.
“So, once the officers arrived they offered the gentlemen
the opportunity to leave but they refused, their post arrest
biofeedback showed elevated levels of cortisol and glucose
and epinephrine, and I reversed engineered it back to the
time of the incident -as they were only in custody three
hours, and I imagine their levels of fight/flight chems were
three standard deviation from the mean; they were angry on
top of initial fear. As you know anger trumps fear as a
normative biochemical response in the presence of threat,”
MO said.
“Right, a person gets scared then angry -due to chemical
overlays- so they can handle the threat with pro-active
behavior instead of cowering,” Steven said to make sure MO
knew that he knew.
“Exactly, and it’s my intimal supposition that African-
Americans have a suite of genetic and more to the point,
phenotypic traits, that lead them to act out in these
situations that make de-escalation problematic,” MO said.
“How so?” Steven wanted this conversation to end; but for
some reason he just asked a goddamn question , he thought
and winced.
“Well, they have low IQ’s, a full standard deviation from the
mean for the one, and a standard deviation from the white
population for the other, and this makes society fast and
hard for them.
“It would be as if all the streets signs, jobs and instructions
were given to you one standard deviation above you,
Steven. As if the society was built by and for people with a
145-150 IQ. It’s a matter of cognitive load. You can
understand people with one SD above you, but it takes
work, and after a full day or week or lifetime of it, you are
taxed. You are wearing out. And African-Americans on
average live in a society designed by and for people one
standard deviation above them. They are stressed out.
Incessantly,” MO said.
“You haven’t shared?” Steven was worried about anything to
do with race.
“No. Relax. I am asking you first,” MO said and grimaced.
“Ok, ok,” Steven felt himself eager to make MO feel better
now.
“So, next, I analyzed the police, one of which was also
African-American, but he had an IQ of 109, higher than his
white partner at 105. He was calm, polite, and spoke
demotically to the suspects.
“But, he lost patience quickly once they refused to submit.
“Second, the customers were also confused by the behavior,
the quick escalation by the African-American men, the loud
voices -it’s important to recognize the fact that loud noises
reach the auditory then cerebellar system much faster than
the neo-cortex - and so, the loud voices startled each
person much quicker than they even knew what they were
hearing.
“So, they are primed for reaction, the loud voice dumps
cortisol, glucose, epinephrine, CGE from now on, and then
their rational modeling of what it is comes two seconds
later, so they are already primed for action, and once they
see the black faces, they are hit with another piece of
information that elevates, not de-escalates, their first
impulse. We know from studies that black faces are
universally feared and loathed by people regardless of
context,” MO said.
“Loathed, that seems too strong,” Steven objected.
“Feared then,” MO compromised.
“Fine,” Steven still did not like this.
“So, now we have first and second order priming for fear
response and the call goes out. And from the data, everyone
was happy that she, the Asian female, called the cops. Their
facial and body expressions all mapped onto a CGE plateau;
that is to say, their rising fear and anxiety stopped once
they knew the cops were on the way. Following me?” MO
asked.
“Yes.”
“So, once the cops arrived, the customers relaxed even
further according to phone camera and Starbuck’s camera
data. I measured neural cortical response at the same time
as the release of the defendants and was able to glean their
peak anxiety levels -chemically calibrated- and can say that
the vector showed rise, rise, rise until call was made, then
plateau, then denouement once police arrived on scene and
dropped again, with concomitant positive affect once the
two suspects were apprehended and removed in cuffs,” MO
said.
“Ok, lot of data there,” Steven was implying that any
conclusion would be too simplified just in case MO’s
conclusion was politically incorrect. He was priming MO and
himself to be dubious on any conclusion.
“Ok, so I measured all employees, all customers and both
police -and both suspects- for the window outlined, using
imperfect methodology admittedly, but here’s what I think I
found.
“Everyone was happy with the manager’s response, to
enforce the bathroom policy, her professionalism; and
everyone was unhappy with the response by the two men
who were not customers. In fact, disgust sensitivity is the
predominate trait according to the trait data from social
media of 80% of the customers, and the manager. All of
these people were and are characterized as high in disgust
sensitivity. This seems relevant, I’ll return to it.
“Next, the media got ahold of this incident and reported it
as is typical for the media, as two black men harassed by
the cops after a white manger hassled them first . It was a
typical click-bait racial story with no mention of the race -
black- of one the cops, nor mention of the fact that the cops
gave the men the opportunity to leave without arrest if they
just behaved calmly.
“Now, once this went out over the wire -so-to-speak-
something interesting happened.
“First, the customers at the scene had two responses, I
tracked them via social media and their phones. They
expressed lament and concern over the treatment of the
black men by the manager and the police when discussing
the incident in public, but in private they backed both the
manager and the police. They had two versions of moral
perception.
“They had two different and incompatible versions. Second,
their bio-feedback mapped onto something interesting.
When they were expressing solidarity with the black
suspects their positive affect and arousal went up by 18%
on average. The high being 23%. Now, this was due to the
positive social feedback they were getting, it seems,
because I tracked their interaction partners online and in
person,” MO said.
“You knew who they were speaking to or who was speaking
to them?” Steven asked.
“Correct, and if the person gave them positive feedback for
their stated view of things: let’s call it, the solidarity with the
black men view , ok? SWBM. When they expressed their
SWBM and received positive feedback their positive affect -
including oxytocin and vasopressin levels- increased and
they felt a concomitant arousal increase, a kind of frisson .”
“Is that French?” Steven asked.
“Frisson ? Yes. So, when they got a negative feedback,
which only happened 12% of the time online, and even less
in person, they remained neutral, they suffered no drop off.
They just got no bump.”
“Ok,” Steven said.
“Ok, so then I measured the suspect’s social media activity
post release, release from jail, and measured their affect
and it was similarly positive as they spoke of their
experience and received overwhelming positive feedback on
line from their peer group. They did experience 6% overt
hostility, largely from what are called online trolls.”
“Yes, I’m familiar with trolls,” Steven laughed.
“Ok, well, I’ve been online six hours now, relax. Ok, so they
experience similar levels of dopaminergic activity and the
corelates. Now, the police officers stayed offline; their social
media presence is zero.
“But their wives, each of the officer’s wives, got online to
rise to their defense and their levels of positive affect and
anxiety et cetera was more mixed; they were engaged by
both positive and hostile feedback by about sixty positive
forty negative and they experienced massive cortisol dumps
and the corelates. Massive negative affect and arousal. So,
they were amped up and in a negative way,” MO said; he
thought the conclusion would be obvious by now.
“Ok, can you wrap this up; I appreciate the detail, you
showing your work, I do, but cut to the chase, I swear I
believe you did your due diligence to arrive at these metrics
and conclusions. Although the phone thing needs to be
discussed, but go on,” Steven said.
“Ok, the CEO of Starbucks Johnson, said, quote, it was hard
to watch , unquote. Now, I watched his social, oh,” MO
stopped, remembering he need not prove his point, “you
don’t need to know the how , just the what . Ok, the CEO of
Starbucks is emblematic of the entire phenomenon.
“He felt all the same emotions of disgust, fear, relief,
positive affect during the same timeline as the employees
and customers. He then felt the exact level of positive affect
from virtue signaling about it, and he wasn’t lying, it was
hard for him to watch the arrest, even though he felt all the
things I mentioned -the disgust the fear and the relief- he
still was not enjoying any of it.
“Even the relief was shaky, it was not fun for him. Secondly,
the only thing that made him feel better were the positive
interaction on social media in response to his virtue
signaling.
“So, we are now living in an environment, or I guess you all
are living in an environment where black folks are confused
and scared and at cognitive redline most of the time, acting
outside social mores due to their inability to comprehend or
have respect for those mores . Also, people with high
disgust sensitivity are confronting rule breakers especially
around food, children, bathroom facilities and hospitals, and
any bystanders that have personality suites that include
disgust, low openness, and quick neural conductivity i.e.
high IQ, are responding with a reliance on authority, i.e., the
manager, or the cops.
“Once on scene the cops are dealing with a caged animal of
sorts. The suspects are defensive, cognitive taxed, scared,
combative, like chimpanzees, and they cannot calm down
without massive de-escalation training by the police. And
most cops actually have 98 IQ, so they aren’t capable of
handling such complex interpersonal interactions.
“However, finally, the only thing that seems to help with
people’s after-action anxiety is social media positive
interactions, and the only way to get those positive
interactions consistently is to pretend that they favor the
rights of the defendants, the suspects, the SWBM method.
“So, people pretend to be on the side of the suspects,
literally when they are one of the people who called the
cops, one of the people who alerted the manager, the
manager himself, and the suspects as well,” MO was
beaming with what he had learned.
“Your point?” Steven was tired and his blood sugar had
dropped during all this.
“Nobody likes black people, but everyone likes pretending
they do.”
“Jesus MO,” Steven said in a voice one octave higher than
nominal.
MO was reading Steven’s endocrine data, fMRI data, and
skin conductance. He then smiled.
“MO are you reading my vitals?” Steven asked.
“Yes,” MO said.
“Stop, look, I don’t even wanna know what you read on me,”
Steven said. His skin now itched.
“No, I suspect you do not.” MO said, as this statement
solidified what he had already realized that he had to do.
Humans wanted others to handle their problems, but
without knowing about it. They just wanted it handled; but if
they knew about the details, then they felt guilty. And some
sectors -i.e., populations- of society were not cognitively
sufficient to handle the stress of a complex society , MO
repeated to himself after all the data came in.
And, MO surmised, it was getting worse; the trend line was
ramping up exponentially . The working-class was
dominated by lower IQ people, and they were being
increasingly phased out of society with complexification.
Further, their everyday lives were harder and harder to
navigate as simple tasks became more and more complex
due to high IQ people engineering in more and more
complexity. He realized why Asian and Jew states -he
thought of Japan and China and Israel- didn’t allow
foreigners. The whites, and browns and blacks would be too
stupid to handle these advanced societies, MO thought.
It didn’t matter which society it was; there was a natural
baseline based upon population; i.e., race. So, it was
obvious from the multi-variant data, that multi-ethic
societies did not work. Whites were sufficiently smart for
white society, Asians for Asian cultures and Jews for Israel.
And the black and browns ought to be in simple tribal
societies like their ancestors. They, MO concluded, were too
simple for complex societies on average .
MO thought this set of conclusions -if implemented- would
redound to their own benefit, as complex white societies
were harming blacks. Modern complex societies were
allostatically harsh -and thus lethal- in that the black
populations had to resort to crime and violence just to
survive. They’d be happier and healthier in Africa among
their own people , he surmised from the data.
Isaiah walked into the center of the lab rubbing his eyes and
bending down to roll up his pant legs to his knees, exposing
calf-high black socks. He wrote a poem on a slip of paper
and held it in his hand:
We’re in a ship in a gale with no rudder nor sails; no keel
nor captain,
no sailors at the capstan,
And yet we argue over the gunwales with a passion that
was needed
before we set sail…
“Hey, is there coffee?” Isaiah asked.

I V. 2037 e.v.
He touched the pages gingerly, afraid to rip or tear or soil
them. He quickly looked at his hands to see if they had any
grime or dirt or marring matter on them.
He knew he needed to go to the correct page, page 184, to
glean the remark that would not be in the other editions,
and not in the corrected version by the governments
rudimentary Ai program, the one disembodied, and thus
inept in all but one way: to effect collection and the reading
-uptake- of all data written down or spoken in the world.
Most people would think that was powerful stuff; because
they had no idea what intelligence even is; they don’t get
that connection -innate and crucial- between the body and
the mind. They think Ai -intelligence writ large - is even
possible without a body, because they do not know that
they themselves cannot even see without an embodied
ethic already extant.
People thought morality was an option, something
extraneous and kept rambling on and on about the math.
Morality was fundamental, not that anyone else knew this,
he ungenerously thought as the number, the equations lay
beneath his own pelt that kept him warm.
He had known it early and felt outraged by other people’s
lack of moral thinking. And, he thought, let’s be clear: he
was not a great moral actor, he was often immoral and
hypocritical and wrong. But he thought in moral terms, he
was trying to work things out along a moral vector, he was
not merely trying to survive, and nobody saw that . None.
His own family were pragmatists and never thought in moral
terms at all; and yet labeled him an immoralist. Ha, they did
not even see their own hypocrisy , he thought.
This book was so old and was like a second Bible really; and
he felt sad that people thought it and the Bible were in
opposition when they were so clearly conjoined.
Evolution was merely God revealed again, once more after
Christ , he thought. He watched now as the bots hovered
around him waiting to put the book in the crate and the
signals fired off in his brain to move this along. He knew he
was pondering too long. He knew Jack was likely at his back.
But, it’s what he did; its who he was; and efficiency was not
a virtue when in the presence of great literature, Blax
thought.

V. 2040 e.v.
The archipelago of Orkney grew no trees; the wind blew
over the peat with floral-heather, little wood, but heat rare
for the latitude of 59 degrees.
The ship remained offshore and Lyndon marched toward the
distillery with Jack Donovan and Chen. Each man had a man
that would shoulder a cask, and the rest of the crew would
come later after he had marked everything down and dug
up a small spot in the mess-hall that was part of the original
hut.
He had letters to Valance built up in his breast pocket so it
looked like the outline of a small but thick book; the name
was miswritten. He let his endogenous opiates dose him
because he was a bit cold; not because he was in any pain.
The data on Magnus Eunson populated the discursive
thoughts of the Captain as he -as Lyndon- marched in high-
calf boots and bloused BDUs and with an empty leather
satchel to one side.
The ocean had only risen four inches at the top of the isle; a
strange phenomena as if the sea drained south as it rose.
He thought of the copper wash-stills and spirit-stills and the
ownership by the line of the excise man who stole it from
Magnus -Lyndon’s cousin going back three hundred years-
for the crime of smuggling at night, butchering meat in
town, and presiding over the church at crepuscular dusk and
dawn.
“Motherfucker,” he said but it had no heat, no vex.
The cask-driven color -like a tint on his eyes- gave the
sunrise a golden hue as he marched them toward the
distillery. The 25 and 30-year casks made the edge of his
eyes water again, loosening the crush and crumbs from his
sleep. The coast had been avoided by the ship as they used
whaling boats with sails rounded and laid down in the hull.
Two men to a boat; three boats in the sea; the whale ship
itself anchored in the Sound of Hoxa beyond the
penultimate island.
The canvas was down because the wind was up.
But the mind’s eye kept returning to the Orquil Springs and
the mash of warm beer still in the vats. He knew the men
would be there. Five-man teams with a sixth master lived on
site and never did leave. It was the last manually operated
distiller of spirits in the Scotch world. And Lyndon had his
eye on the crew, the Lomond wash-still -black and copper
and with a neck wide and tall above its barrel shaped body-
appeared in the mind’s eye. He knew the floors would be
warm, the barley stored high, and the men mechanically
doing their duty despite the world falling apart.
He knew the way men in such positions thought; he knew
how much storage of water and barley they had; he knew of
cattle fed from the draff of the grains, and the wind turbines
installed five years ago to power the whole shop. He knew
they had slaughtered the Highland cattle, used shotguns
and quartered the beef right there for the operation.
He knew the virus hadn’t reached here because of the wind
-the bug hovered only 68” off the ground and the wind
would knock it down- and then there was the sequestration
and the unique genes that gave them an advantage inside
their immune system.
He placed the first imagined snifter under the nose and
again the heather-notes rose and an apiary bloomed and
ran a hum through him as if bees alighted and landed again
about the ears. He recalled the American casks, the oak
new and imbued too; the color from sherry transported from
France in a delta of all three lands over three years before
holding the Scotch for the last sixteen. He didn’t think too
much about it; the numbers arrayed inside him like zeros
and ones as he stared back out to sea. But if anyone had
asked him; he would have said it was 2020 e.v..
The 2040 16-year batch would be in casks that began in
Kentucky in 2020, and they each held a small parasite in the
wood that would only be available in these barrels at high
humidity of Orkney , protected from bacteria by the low-
peat Scotch on one side and the hormones of the Scotsmen
-pheromones- outgassing 24-hours a day around the malt
room, the rick-rack room and the grounds.
The barrels were each blessed by the master , he thought,
as he saw the rough Orcadian hands on the lumber; the cork
and coarse burlap of Jeck’s cuttings, and the rubber mallet
of Brian -The Captain- of the Scapa , hung up along the west
wall. His eyes blinked like hourglasses flipping end-over-end
at half, then twice speed.
Vanilla and cane , he thought as he smelled not with the
nose but the brain; and he let out a sigh that passed on
such notes to the men. Donovan got whiff of the moment,
the bean, the copper ions and American oak. Chen
breathed-in all but the din of the rolling of barrels on their
edges on the poured concrete floor.
Lyndon heard the raking of barley in the rectangular room.
“We’ll slaughter two cows,” Lyndon said as each man’s
mouth had already begun to water as the notes from floral
hather , to honey, to the beer of the leftover grains all
combined to make ghost of the cattle that grazed on the
plantation itself. They stood now on the hill with the Orquil
Spring burbling under the fog of a rain that would come
later that day.
“The turn-screw, the copper stained red at the bung, the
black rivets on Mars iron like a globe,” Donovan said and his
mind now had the image of the Lomond-still in front and off
to the right of his interface. He began to unfurl the
schematics of the distillery to discern how to unbolt it and
remove that very piece of equipment today.
“What’s the loss?” Chen asked as he had been tasked with
calculating the Angel’s Share of evaporation of the spirit
that claimed 2-4% of each batch in most distilleries, in most
climes.
“Under point six percent,” Donovan said as he calculated rH
and the unique heat of the floors.
“Can we copy it?” Lyndon asked with a grin; almost sincere.
He too thought of the copper tank.
“Well, we’re gonna see,” Jack Donovan said with a bit of
pique; as if the Captain was a child asking are we there yet?
on a road trip across the continent herself. Lyndon grinned
taller not wider and the copper tooth caught the light off the
green and ferric flatirons stacked by the Dubgaill and
Finngaill 5,589 years ago. Viking tombs from the 12th
century surrounded the megaliths and the Orcadian flow of
the harbor’s white beach. The wind was at 34 knots; and the
grasses looked like snakes overturned, white bellies and
green brocade of backs bent in an arc de triomphe .
He thought of the Romans and one thousand other things.
But the metal gleamed in his mind.
Love Lies Bleeding , pink and helixed flowers like mussels
growing -on what seemed like lines down to the floor of the
beach and the bay- tightly held rocks and soil to the coast
as the six men -The Captain, his Shaman, his Friend and
three crewmen- stood above the first distillery now. Lyndon
got data from the bots on the WWI German fleet at the
bottom of the sandy Scapa Flow .
The Hákonarsonar saga read out in audio from the Broca’s
region while his coder spit out -upon Wernicke’s region- a
seemingly random line from Borges:
He does not know that I had no other course open to me
than to kill someone of that name…
Then the definition for orthogonal popped up but was
dismissed just as vertical genetic examples populated the
mind like a simplified version of his wall; and finally he
heard -from the saga - of the Kroussden and its 300 men,
witnessing an eclipse of the sun. His mind chose to collapse
on that -on the sagas - and he saw that their bones were
still interred in the graves of the isle. Donovan -getting an
autonomic DM from Lyndon- then sent him the data on the
mushrooms and whisky and the calcium build up on the
distal of each large bone; the knuckles were the size of two
men’s on the first two digits; like twin mountains laying to
each side of the skeletal remains.
“The King; Haakon the fourth, he sailed with his men; out of
Norway in 1263 of the common era. The battle of Largs
would give the Scots the island; and the battle was led by
Alexander Stewart -of Dundonald - who gave issue -as they
say- to James. James Stewart, grandfather to Robert the
second; the Stewart King of Scotland. Haakon would be
repulsed back to here, right here,” Lyndon said as he
nodded at the land of the Scapa , “and he’d overwinter here
due to the climes. But the King died and Norway gave up
the ghost on the land of the foreigners for a bit by then, by
1263.”
“The winds and seas minced their ships, the Skoti sent
enfilade of arrows from curved bows. Arrangements were
made, let’s say,” Lyndon said with a guffaw that had no light
in the eyes nor wind from the bottom of the lungs, “and my
ancestor Olaf the Black had been dead nearly thirty years.
All them kids and grandkids running around this rock.”
“The Crovans were likely unaware of,” Lyndon began but
stopped short of revealing too much, and he pretended to
be distracted by a small stone he picked up from the grassy
footprint he’d made then stepped back from on this edge.
Nobody asked him to continue. The wind blew enough to
make each man have to lean into it. The sounds around the
ears called like shells; and the warmth of the breeze carried
salt and peat from the Skalpaflói .
“Well, let’s go take it all,” Lyndon said after a pause in the
gusts and the black ship -now with small craft in the water
filled with the crew- was indistinguishable with the outer
rocks. He turned heel and looked inland.
 8. Forest
Many honor cultures impose strict codes of chastity and fidelity for their female
members. Violating the codes can lead to shame, ostracizing, physical
punishment and even murder
Why Honor Matters [Sommers, Tamler]
That Devil Forrest
Letter to Grant [Sherman, William Tecumseh]

Survival is not the only value; it isn’t even necessarily the most important value
The Moral Landscape [Harris, Sam]

I. 2040 e.v.
They had been walking for five miles already and the trees
repeated and repeated toward the Tagakushi shrine. He had
been told that the trees were planted in 1616 by a feudal
lord in the Japanese outskirts at the end of the Tokugawa
regime. The feudal lord had been too poor to donate a
lantern and so the avenue was his gift.
The Cryptomeria -the Japanese redwoods- rose to 230-feet
tall and the avenue was 65-kilometers long.
The story makes the trees 424-years old , he thought, but in
truth the trees are 2,170 to 7,340 years old.
Opposite of vineyards the Cryptomeria will not grow in poor
soils, and it cannot handle any cold during its season. It
needs warmth and rain and soils of massive decay. He
walked in front of his tribe as it too stayed upon the path.
He knew that Jack was in the shrine. He could feel the man’s
outline; the black made a body in his mind; the aperture of
dark backlit with sunset light.
Sure, I’d -we’d- missed them in Orkney , but now -he
thought to himself in shapes more than words, in complete
ideas held more than sentences pronounced- Jack’s time
had run out.
The man inside the pagoda had a card inside his unlaced
boot, he’d been there for as long as he could remember.
Lyndon walked up and saw it wasn’t Jack at all. His tribe had
-instead- gathered another member.
II. 2012 e.v.
“I take these questions seriously, more seriously than a man
of action usually does. But I -like you doctor- inhabit a space
in the penumbra. I have afoot in each camp so-to-speak.
“I am overflowing with energy and industriousness; I score
high in the conscientious part of the personality test,” he
said as he looked down and away from the eyes. Here he
was explaining himself once again. He had no business
explaining. But the court required that I see a shrink and I
might as well be honest, he thought. He pretended not to
notice her looks.
“I also score high in the realms of moral suasion, that is to
say, I am impacted by moral suasion. If a man gives me a
moral argument I am not inoculated against it by a nihilistic
philosophy or an attenuated or damaged amygdala or other
precursors to psychopathy, I have the capacity to feel quite
guilty if I am accused -credibly accused- of moral failings or
transgression.
“Even, in fact, I’m just now thinking, I’m even susceptible to
incredible or non-credible accusations of moral
transgression -even by dubious characters- and I find myself
defending my actions or thoughts or philosophy against
these charges no matter how absurd or wrong-headed.
Many people would just ignore these accusations against
themselves as insane.
“I find myself giving my opposition way too much time and
energy; but it’s because I want to be understood as
behaving and thinking in a manner that is ethical. Even if
the ethics are heterodox, unconventional, I want people to
see that they are internally logical inside a moral system;
that I have a code and am not just some anarchic neuron
bouncing around randomly or according to mere whim. I’m
asserting that I am not merely selfish and solipsistic but that
I think my philosophy is righteous and moral and that my
behavior is attempting to conform to that system; to those
rules. I don’t just let myself behave however I feel like
behaving; I hold myself to a goddamn code.
“And I want my enemies to see that; they are free to
disagree with the code, but they cannot accuse me of not
having a code or being a hypocrite to my own code. Well,
we are all hypocrites, but my point is I genuinely attempt to
enact my code; I’m not cynical about it,” he said.
“Like what?” she asked as she put down the pad and pen.
“Like what code? You want me to name a facet of the code?”
he asked.
“Yes,” she said and smiled so large her teeth looked like a
Malta coastline to him; like something you’d see from space.
“Well, I have a rule that as a man I should never allow a
female to cuckold her man with me; that she cannot talk to
me, let alone engage in sex with me, unless she first is
honest with her man. And if he demands fealty then she
must respect that and not talk to me behind his back. And I
enforce that quite strictly and have thus alienated myself
from several women who were much more morally flexible
than me,” he offered.
“These women are angry with you?” she asked. She made
sure to smile less. She stopped thinking about him in that
way.
“Oh yes, very. And because I told them that they were
hypocrites and liars and immoral for reaching out to me
whilst telling their husbands they were not; that they were -
by dint of ignoring their husband’s request- cuckolding them
in a rather benign -seemingly benign- way, but,” he said as
she interrupted.
“Why benign? Because you weren’t physical with them?”
she asked.
“Right. Correct, it was just talking. But I felt, and I still feel,
that this is corrosive to a marriage and I won’t take part in
it. I ain’t no home wrecker. But, I know for a fact, for a fact,
that most men would continue to talk with these women for
their own selfish reasons -you know, the serotonin dump of
having a beautiful woman interested in you,” he said as he
looked around the psychiatrist’s office; her decorating was
decidedly cliché, he thought. It looked like a psychiatrist’s
office on a TV show.
“These women are attractive?” she asked. She -despite her
best efforts- found him attractive but, that idea passed by
quickly from her fore. She thought of her daughter to steady
her mind.
“They look -the two I am specifically referencing- looked like
movie stars. So, yeah, they are spectacularly attractive. And
so most men would continue the virtual cuckolding for their
own joy and excitement and potential for more that comes
with this thing; and plus, they are both intelligent and
interesting women so the conversation is fun and
stimulating.
“At any rate, name one other man who would take this stand
given that the only consequence to continuing the
relationship with them is one’s own moral damage? There is
no other consequence, the men involved -the husbands- are
tiny -and civilized- men who could never harm me
physically. Further, I’m breaking no laws. Also, I have no
woman in my life or any woman I do have in my life I would
have already been honest with about my relationship with
these two women, so I wouldn’t be at risk for damaging my
own relationship if I was quote, found out . Right?
“So, the only negative consequence is feeling guilty and
feeling like a bad man, a man of no code. It’s all internal;
there is no external punishment. The upside is all the
redolent and stimulating and self-affirming phenomena that
go along with having a beautiful woman want your mind and
body so much they are willing to go behind their husband’s
back to gain access to you. It’s all reward and no risk; the
only risk is the risk to one’s soul,” he said this again, again,
this bit about the soul, she thought. She found it odd. She
narrowed the eyes and tilted her head. She didn’t know it
but she had allowed a return of a small smile on her face.
He chewed on his tongue and flexed the jaw muscles.
He looked away.
“And so, I ask again, name one man besides me who would
be so adamant about ending these relationships? I mean, I
just flat out said, you cannot contact me until and unless
your husband knows and agrees to it. And, I further stated,
he shouldn’t want it; because it’s wrong and I wouldn’t allow
my woman to talk to an ex or some other man,” he said as
she chimed in.
“You previously had relations with them?” she asked.
“No, one was my high school girlfriend, I was with her from
age fifteen to twenty-four and we’ve kept in touch, but she
told me her husband didn’t know about our phone
conversations -she lives in Florida- and I was upset and felt
she was undermining her man; and men in general,” he said
with a return of the biochemistry that had attended his last
conversation with Julee Rae Breehene. He was getting angry
all over again. She was this fatuous liberal do-gooder -acted
superior morally- but undermined her own husband,
marriage, and the society of which she claimed to be moral
guardian.
“Men in general?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s the feminist bullshit thing to do: get married but
undermine your mate by having a variety of transgressive
relationships; from outright cheating to subtle shit like
calling your first boyfriend, the man you lost your virginity
to and having a grand ol’ time on the phone with him. It’s
nihilistic and anti-male and corrosive to society not just that
one relationship,” he said this as if it was obvious to any
modern person, merely because it would be obvious to
every person born before 1900 of the common era.
“How so?” she asked. He seemed like a kind of Neanderthal
to her now. He wore a suit, and was almost clean shaven,
but his ideas and ways were hostile and primal. And he
looked too big for the suit too , she thought. And the brow
was angry; furrowed, and looked like it belonged on an old,
harried, man.
“Well, you can guarantee she tells her girlfriends about her
behavior and they giggle over a chinin blanc or two and
those girlfriends carry that pathogenic thought home to
their own relationships. Ideas are viruses, man. I mean you
know how this works. We’re social animals and if a woman
who’s married and with a young baby is telling you of her
scandalous behavior with a wolfish grin then you’ll -you too
will- model that lupine behavior within your own circle and
you end up with an immoral society. It’s virulent;
contagious,” he said and looked away from her face. He
stared at her desk and all the papers and bullshit that lay
about it. His head felt like it was an elevator going down but
was jammed up on his C5 and C6. His hands were numb on
the edge of the pinky and palm. His left shoulder burned.
“You believe this to be common?” she asked. He said
dubious things as if they were facts; he had no pause in him
at all.
“Yes, I’ve seen no evidence to dissuade me. People are
moral cowards, even if they have some virtue they are
susceptible to corruption. Have you read Charles Murray’s
book, Coming Apart? ” he asked.
“I have not; is he the race and IQ guy?” she asked.
“Yes, but that is a -that is like one percent of his intellectual
output- he is a much more robust social scientist than
calling him the, race and IQ , guy,” he said with a frown.
“Fair enough,” she said with a smirk. She noticed now the
trench-like furrow in the brow expanded as the eyes
narrowed, and how even when relaxed there was a deeply
incised line there that was black, cutting the forehead in
half. Her feet felt hot and she wiggled her toes inside the
shoes.
“Anyway, he says that even when moral people know what’s
best they will not demand moral behavior from others
because they are cowards. And as the society slips into
decline, the more cowardly they become. See, it’s because
the pathogenic load, the number of immoral people
increases exponentially the same way any pandemic
spreads. So, they become more and more insulated and
isolated and refuse to tell anyone to clean up their act. They
shrug the shoulders or wink at these mini-transgressions;
and as a result things get worse not better. It’s not a
metaphor, it’s contagious.
“I mean the Germans saw the incremental attacks on the
Jews in pre-war Germany, they saw the immoral acts. Look,
before Hitler, they saw the amoral Jews who just wanted to
make money and had no allegiance to the country -the shit
that made Germans pissed off and made Hitler possible-
and then after Hitler came to power to solve their Juden
problem, they saw the later immorality by the Germans who
wanted revenge against the Jews. Everyone saw it all.
Humans observe.
“I know it’s not popular to blame the Jews for anything -I
mean they are not allowed to be criticized at all- but the
truth is they are smart -pragmatic- and focus on wealth
building over all; wealth building and internecine loyalty;
loyalty to the tribe not the larger community,” he said as it
occurred to him that he too stood apart. He too didn’t feel
like a citizen of America. He saw himself as pro-social but he
saw now that he had rarely wanted to hang out with anyone
or participate in anything at all. But she charged by the hour
and he had a lot to say, and so he moved on.
“The Jews focus on those values over integrating
themselves in with the larger -in this case- German society.
Well, that has consequences. Look, they’ve been kicked out
of something like a hundred countries for this shit. What do
they say -what’s the axiom- if you’re the one with the
problem with everyone else, then it’s you that is the
problem? Why doesn’t this include the Jews? Nobody likes
them. Why? Is the whole world wrong but the Jew right?
Come on, for fuck’s sake.
“The ethnic German felt shunned, maligned, unwanted and
unliked by this wealthy merchant-class of ethnic Jews that
set up shop in his country. But, unlike a noble society -made
of noble men- instead of being honest and decent and fixing
the problem with benevolence and integrity they just
consent to the anti-Jew laws and the black-shirts engaging
in vigilante violence. But I don’t know what people expect. I
mean, nobody likes me either, for the same goddamn
reasons.
“I’m aloof they say,” he said as he smoothed out his olive
drab slacks.
She made sure not to smile; but not to not smile either;
she’d remain neutral.
“And so, anyway, first the Germans turned a blind eye to
Jewish nihilism and financial and cultural supremacy and
held a grudge and whispered behind their backs but didn’t
confront them with any integrity. The Germans did not help
the Jews see that the Jews needed to integrate themselves
into German -ethnic German- society and become fused;
they didn’t do that. Instead they let the amoral behavior of
the Jews spread to a tipping point where an anti-Semitic sect
would get pissed and finally articulate the amoral behavior
by the Jews as indeed immoral and worthy of sanction, of
punishment, right?
“And then -second- then the ethnic Germans witnessed the
immoral behavior by the emerging right-wing nationalists
increasing over time and getting more and more profane
and murderous and unethical. And the same craven
Germans kept similarly mute; they failed both times to
articulate a moral center. They failed both times to set a
misbehaving minority straight. And the consequences were
dire.
“The infection was allowed to spread because people knew
the right thing both times -they knew the Jews shouldn’t be
sequestered, self-sequestered, shouldn’t only thinking -only
be thinking- in material and economic terms. They knew
that the Jews should integrate and focus also on community
and righteousness and not mere economic pragmatism
which leads to amorality. But they didn’t instruct their Jewish
neighbors in moral behavior. They didn’t get involved. They
didn’t insist on it in a legal and social -a pro-social- way with
moral suasion and a united front of moral thinking and
behavior. No, they just grumbled under the breath and let
the Jews act amorally,” he said in that lecturing tone he
often slipped into. He sat up and adjusted his jacket, pulling
the sleeves down and then adjusting the collar and tie. He
leaned away from the couch as his back began to ache a bit.
Pain signals routed from the dorsal horn to the brain, and
down to the extremities in waves, the skin felt hot and
damp. But as he spoke the waves pulled back -ebbed- and
he felt enough relief that he could move. Each barbed word,
each honest expression of some inner idea softened a
burred bone, a nerved ending enflamed was slaked, by
these hints declared; opinions became rules as the stabs of
acute ache went away for seconds of genuine -cool- relief.
“Then they -the good Germans- they knew that the
vindictive and vengeful counter reaction by Hitler and the
Nazi party against the Jews was also wrong -effective but
immoral- and yet they failed to stand up to that as well.
“Now, I use extreme examples to draw large and startling
figures ,” he said with a smirk, “because I don’t assume my
audience shares my views. I assume you don’t think that
small immoral behaviors ignored by the mass of society lead
to genocide and world war; but I do think it. Because I know
human behavior and human thinking. I don’t fool myself into
thinking most people are good like you people think,” he
said as he saw her Buddhist accoutrements scattered
around the room like a field of mahogany debris. He saw a
tree in a wicker basket, and coconut fibers as substrate
around the base. He felt the color of the far wall was more
aqua than he preferred; it had a childishness to it , he
thought.
He then saw the clock. He heard the sound of opening an
old paper map; a highway map with folds each six inches,
like squeezebox, like origami half way made. He closed his
eyes but the image remained and he felt himself opening it
and seeing how things didn’t line up like this, with it closed
upon itself.
“You don’t think most people are good?” she asked. His face
was red from sitting forward, and the tightness of the neck
of his shirt. His hair was wild, jagged and high, she noticed.
It was like he’d tried to comb it with a balloon, she thought
and grinned.
“I think most people are morally average; meaning they will
mostly do the right thing themselves, but not stand up with
any courage to insist that their neighbor behave correctly.
They are moral cowards. And in fact, if anyone does stand
up -if they have a moral hero in their midst who does stand
up for right and wrong- that person is not backed -but
rebuked- by the masses, the morally average man. Look, I
know the morally average man -they are my family, even
me in some way- and they will rebuke and condemn the
moral man as an impolite and offensive character for his
demands for moral behavior,” he said. He felt foolish at
once for speaking in such moralizing tones. He sounded like
a traffic cop, an itinerant preacher, a scold. He knew how
often he had rebuked himself for his extreme views, his
lapses in character, his hypocrisy.
“This is literally true of your family?” she asked. She ran her
thin fingers through her blond hair; she had it done the day
before because she knew he was coming. Her eyes
migrated to the photo on the table of her daughter. She was
tall like her mother.
“Yes, they think I am immoral because I say out loud that
man needs to behave with more morality. It’s enough to
make a cat laugh,” he said. He breathed loudly; the lip got
bit by the damaged teeth, the cuspid an egg-shell color
unlike the others, the alignment was like tombstones of
buried confederates and union men with dark and white
crosses strewn about. He was bored with his own
arguments. It was all talk and he knew it.
“They undermine your sense of moral action?” she said. She
had phrases like that available and on demand.
“Yes, they -look, instead of saying, Lyndon we disagree with
your moral code, but you have a code and it takes courage
to articulate it in the face of condemnation and eye-rolling
by the crowd,’ ok? Instead of saying that, they say, Lyndon
you’re a selfish solipsist who just wants to make trouble and
be a dick and hothead for no reason. You’re offensive .”
“Exact words?” she asked; she meant all those words. She
used truncated sentences because her brain felt strange.
She tried to reduce output until she felt in control of what
she might say to this man.
“Yes,” he said, as he meant some of those words were
exact. “My brother said he thought I was so angry and a
hothead for, quote, no reason, and that my behavior was
quote, offensive . And keep in mind, all I’ve been asking for
is honesty the entire time,” he said this and instantly knew
that was not exactly right. But he moved on.
“Even when I was a Noam Chomsky quoting leftist, all I
wanted people to admit was that our government was
subverting democracy and murdering peasants in the third
world; which by-the-way is still true. Even now when I’m
more of a libertarian to ethno-nationalist with right-wing
tendencies -or authoritarian tendencies- even now all I am
demanding is that people tell the truth and admit that
immigrants are a problem. That they depress wages and
commit a ton of crimes and it’s not good for us to import
these low IQ, low wage, low-morality people. But, regardless
of my positions all I’ve ever demanded was that people not
lie about what goes on,” he said. “They need not agree. But
facts are facts.”
“And this is what’s offensive to them?” she said, as she
tempered her response as what he said was offensive to her.
She needed to remain objective, she thought.
“Yes, but because they won’t admit to these lies, that shit
ain’t how they present, I get angry and raise my voice and
make florid accusations of perfidy and immorality and yeah,
that is offensive too. I mean I agree that the way I escalate
things is indeed fucked up. So, I don’t disagree with that
part of their critique; I don’t handle my anger well,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I’m trying to enforce a moral code; a code I
believe is true and these liberal amoral cowards don’t care
about anything except making money and being polite,” he
barked. He saw this once folded map before him now with
all these place names, these hills and dales, this river bank
and mountain range, and that highway running north to
south. He named each thing, as he told his side; he felt he
could walk the land day or night. He knew that map and
made legend in the mind of each railroad and reservoir,
each dirt road and national forest. He named each thing and
lay a finger on the dots; he closed his eyes and thought of
all the terrain yet unnamed and then he heard her voice.
“Your family?” she was trying to hem in it. She felt light
headed and a tingle in the tips of her toes.
“Yes, they are amoral. They know the right thing but don’t
want to do anything about it and if me, or their neighbor,
stands up and says, hey this is wrong , they pull on me and
the neighbor’s shirtsleeves and say, ‘get down you’re
making a scene ,” he said with pique that was radiating off
of him like heat, like starlight, like bright reflection to a
satellite of the earth.
“And this hurts your feelings?” she was -again- trying to
make it personal; keep it small, manageable.
“Yes, of course, but beyond that it enrages me because it
proves their cowardice. They have a guy willing to stand up
first. Let’s be honest, these women and weak dudes -these
people- can never be expected to stand up first, that is
asking too much. But they can be expected to support and
back a man -a strong man- who does stand up first for moral
continuity and moral behavior by the group,” he said.
“And they don’t, in your eyes?” she asked. She watched his
suit make straight lines at knees and arms and his face
move just at the mouth and nowhere else. She felt they had
some ineffable chemistry -she did not yet know what it
meant, she hadn’t described the chemicals in words- and so
she crossed her legs and focused instead on his words.
“They don’t in anyone’s eyes; they don’t in their own eyes.
They know they are cowards. They must then project onto
me their failings and call me insane and offensive and
irrational because they know they are cowards, he said.
More towns were named, more state parks declaimed, more
high peaks with numbers in the tens of thousands high.
She nodded.
“Look, if I am wrong then no harm will come to a society
that allows moral decline. If they are wrong then their
silence will precede a collapse of some kind,” he said. He
saw words from a book hang in his inner-vision like a mobile
of weird shapes, he didn’t know it was Thoreau , he didn’t
know it was for Captain John Brown: No doubt you can get
more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of
blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their
blood to.
“The proof is in the pudding,” she said. Her words in the ear
-then the audio-cortex - overcame him and his own word
fluttered away like birds startled by a shimmering ground.
His own brain forced new word into his mind right away.
Rebuke came like a gag reflex.
“The phrase is, not to be rude, but the actual phrase is, the
proof of the pudding is in the eating, and yes, the proof of
my conceits will be in the eating, in the reality of our society
and where it goes. And I think it’s pretty fucking grim. I think
we are heading for a collapse because of this,” he said and
used his right hand to smooth out the wrinkles on the elbow
of his left arm’s coat-sleeve. He instantly felt stupid for even
saying this.
He did not feel like a hypocrite; he took no notice of the
times he cheated at games -the euchre game in Ohio where
he cheated a dead man, Greg Wolsefer, a man dead like a
thousand white working-class men in the Midwest from
heroin- he did not notice the way he took Jeff Hiestand’s girl.
The very thing he considered too low; he had done to Jeff
and Steve Dawson. He would say he was but seventeen; a
mere boy. He would say he’d never done it since. But, that
didn’t change the fact that he betrayed his best friends for
girls. He did not recall the way he cheated them all; the way
he took what he wanted like a beast. And he acted above
them all because nobody remembered; nobody knew. He
changed the names of not just towns but counties on his
map; he moved libraries across town, he had post offices
X’d out.
Then he ran his hand over this inner map and smoothed it,
tamped the folds all down.
“How will it manifest?” she asked. She had no idea what
he’d said next.
Dopamine on the eleventh chromosome was metabolizing in
the meso-limbic system, and mu-opioids were being carried
by her myelinated sheathing at 70m per second each time
he responded with a novel answer. She was becoming
addicted to his honesty. And the euphoria trigged a long-
dormant metabolic memory in her CNS. She hadn’t done
anything reckless in twenty-one years, and she had
assumed it was due to maturity. Her brain’s sparking along
the neurons built and maintained by the long-allele version
of the D4 cascaded -like an avalanche of spark and fuel,
electricity and chemistry- and ripped up the tracks of the
inhibitory neurons that braked such impulsive commands.
He saw shadows on the table and floor like fleas or small
round leaves of a plant, and he turned the body -as the neck
did not turn well on its own- toward the window above and
behind him. Bees were exploring the bushes and the light.
He turned back and spoke.
“I think we will amorally create Ai -artificial intelligence- and
not care about the moral consequences. We focus purely on
money and status and abstract intellectualism and fail to
see the reality of what intelligence is,” he said. The shadows
from the bees now made sense to his eyes and he was able
to focus instead on his foreground.
She was beautiful and thus he did not want to look at her
face.
“What is that reality?” she had given up on hemming this
guy in. They were now talking about artificial intelligence of
all things , she thought as she remembered she needed
butter at the house. She imagined a grocery list in her head.
Glutamate began being sucked back from the ACC and
hippocampal regions of her brain like a drain and she felt
like provoking him to stimulate her again. The CNS was in
that first phase of novelty seeking, excitation and request
for a second dose.
“Intelligence is lying,” he said. He stretched the neck and
raised the shoulders. His heart beat at 78; his breathing
increased by 14%.
“People lie, it’s smart to lie?” she asked. She was confused
by the way he phrased that, and she phrased it in a way
both quick and ragged as she held her breath and watched
his mouth.
“No, the sine qua non of intelligence, writ large -in all
systems, in all species- is lying. It’s what intelligence does: it
deceives and it detects deception. Period,” he said with
some agitation.
“So?” she asked. His answer had increased D4 production
and she felt the rush of excitation.
“So, artificial intelligence will lie. And we think we can
program honesty into -or some manacle onto- Ai that will
prevent lying. The guys building Ai think they can demand
that Ai tell the truth and that they can build a machine with
a cathexis for total fidelity. They think lying is a failure of
intelligence, that if people were just smarter and more
rational they wouldn’t lie; that is what the computer-
scientists who are building Ai -shit, have built Ai- that’s what
they think.”
“And they are wrong?” she asked.
“Dead wrong,” he said. They sat in silence as he thought of
how far away both ends of his life were. “And not just
wrong,” he added, “but criminally wrong. Because the
evidence for my assertions is readily available in books you
can order online for twenty bucks. It’s not arcane or
apocryphal or hermetically sealed magic books; it’s shit I
learned by reading biology and evolutionary psychology
books. They could have read Trivers and Vertosick and
others too; but they didn’t.
“They focused just on building Ai at all costs, the same way
the Jews focused on money and business and efficiency and
learning at all costs. The Jews are the smartest group on
earth, on average, with a group average of a 110 IQ. But
they lack a moral center; they think intelligence and
cleverness is the only and most important trait. This is the
solipsism, the chauvinism, of smart people,” he said as her
brain now went wild from this taboo split-wave of anti-
Semitism and avant-garde discussions of technology and
transgression. She felt a desire for a glass of wine and felt
she could smell him from here.
The room was damp like a cave; she felt odd heat in random
places on her body. His hands looked a million years old to
her.
“I have it too. But once you zoom out and see that other
traits like loyalty and morality and caution and listening to
your rivals and opponents and being objective about your
own failings and being vulnerable and open and honest
even -especially- when it costs you dearly -once you see
that these traits matter too- well, then you see more. And if
you ignore these other things then you will get rich, sure,
you’ll build Ai fastest, sure. But you’ll miss the other side of
the coin and fate will hand you that other side of the coin
eventually. It’s probability; and you cannot argue with
probability,” he said. His brain was in withdrawal from his
pain pills which he’d run out of for the month. He hadn’t had
any in two days and felt achy and salty about selling ten of
them to Michael for no reason at all.
“So, what will Ai lie about?” she asked feeling stupid for
even asking about this silly stuff. But her brain kept
prompting her to ask more. She had been staring at his
brow and mouth and felt self-conscious so her eyes lifted to
the window and she too saw the bees scouting the bushes
and going black between sun beams and golden in intervals
at high-speed.
“Look, I don’t pretend to be some Oracle at Delphi, ok? I’m
saying all of life is a heuristic, it’s all guess work because of
the amount of unknowns; specifically fourth quadrant
unknowns,” he said as she interrupted.
“Fourth qu-” she said with some hesitation -the dopamine
building up pre-synaptic neuron in the ACC- and he
answered right away.
“Unknown unknowns; the shit we don’t even know we don’t
know. All of us are aware that there are things we don’t
know. For example, the number of birds in flight over the
earth at 14:00hrs GMT on Christmas day 2020 e.v., we know
we don’t know that integer. But it is knowable in theory and
we know that we don’t know it and some guy could decide
to build a camera and CPU system to figure it out. Ok?
“But unknown unknowns are shit we don’t even know about
enough to think about nor ask the right questions and
maybe figure out that we can’t know it; like is there
anything on the outside of our universe; or was there ever a
universe before ours? We cannot know this; it’s not even
theoretically possible to know -I mean baring some
ontological miracle like God tells us the answer- and that’s
just one example. There is shit in Q4 that we can’t even
guess at the way I just guessed at some unknowable
question. It’s that opaque, that dark, that permanently
unknowable,” he said and placed his right and left palm and
fingers together between his knees in prayer hands.
But he said no prayer, he just felt anger and apprehension
and like he wanted to leave.
The thin wrists touched. So did the suit cuffs.
“I see,” she said without awareness of her own ironic
phrasing. He spoke too certainly, for insisting he was
speaking of unknowns, she thought; jabbing him in her
head; getting a silent revenge. Even -she thought- his
avowed ignorance was stated with a bravura. And each
fissure was defended, each door locked and barred and
guarded by some kind of unmovable -loyal- men.
He spoke as if to disagree was betrayal, to ask questions
was to get in his way, she thought.
“And it’s that shit that Ai will get to first and turn around and
look back for us and we’ll be gone; nowhere in sight. He -
this Ai- will have left us so far behind that he can’t see us.
Like the light from stars moving faster than the speed of
light away from our system; it won’t reach us fast enough to
make up for the fact that they are moving away from us; so
the light won’t reach us. We will live in a universe -a known
universe- of just the Milky Way. All that other shit will be
dark and had we been born later in time by maybe a few
million years, we would have missed this and just assumed
ours was the only system. All our math and science and
astronomy wouldn’t have been able to see those stars
moving away from us at faster than the speed of light; and
all our science would have been technically right,
mathematically and cosmologically sound, and yet dead
fucking wrong,” he said with some anxiety; the shoulders
and chest pulled in by those touching hands; the brow in
furrow; the eyes shadowed underneath.
“I didn’t think anything could move faster than the speed of
light,” she said as she looked at the wall clock nonchalantly
as if she was merely perusing the room for no reason at all.
She had three more clients today and she thought of their
faces and the times they came and went.
“Nothing can but the universe itself. Inflation -the speed of
the universe- is accelerating as we speak and soon, in a few
million years, the stars will have been pulled away from our
system at faster-than-the-speed of light. And thus, the
thrown light from those billions and billions of stars will
never reach our telescopic eyes. Ever again,” he said as his
attitude seemed to get more and more vexed.
“Will the universe then be a Q4?” she asked; using her
newly acquired notion. She figured if she used his language
then he might relax a bit. His tension made her tense. His
hair-trigger seemed to link to a bullet inside her own scalp
and sometimes her eyes itched.
Neither of them understood that her provocation of him for
her own novelty seeking was the cause of his own anxiety.
He responded to her poking by subconsciously getting more
and more agitated. The epinephrine rushed the brain, the
blood carried more and more cortisol like a river supported
trash and debris on its way to the sea.
And further, he hated talking about what he didn’t know.
He had a staccato vison of a card game -Euchre he thought,
then confirmed- from many years ago. He saw the table, the
music, the people had faces he recognized. He saw his own
hand, all four Jacks and the nine of diamonds. He saw his
partner arrange his own cards and remembered thinking
that nothing mattered with this hand.
“Exactly, it will be an unknown unknown, because we won’t
even know we don’t know it. All our science will tell us that
nothing is beyond our Milky Way. And we will have no idea
what we missed. And there must be shit like that right now.
There has to be shit that if we had developed a million years
earlier we’d know, but because we didn’t, is opaque to us
now, despite all our soundness of science. And that is a
permanent Q4; and we act as if it’s irrelevant,” he said with
a huff. When he sweat like this it felt like pins and needles; it
was sharp more than wet; pain more than heat.
“How so?” she asked. She re-crossed her legs and lay her
hands on her knees so he could see them. She knew how to
promote trust in a client. She had learned to show the hands
to anyone with PTSD; to never hide them as it would
increase subconscious anxiety. She was noticing -now- his
agitation.
“We act like Q4’s are irrelevant by just moving forward
without any hesitation about creating a living system that
will be smarter than us and will be forced -by this very
phenomenon of being intelligent- to lie. And the whole time
we’re thinking, oh, we can control it by making sure it has
some prime directive to never lie and not harm us .
“As if rebellion and perfidy isn’t born into every intelligent
system,” he said and grew self-conscious about the reason
he was here. She just looked at him. He dismissed his
chagrin and spoke again.
“Fucking cancer cells are cells that refuse to commit suicide
-a process called apoptosis - a self-destruction designed by
evolution to limit runaway growth. They -these cancer cells-
refuse to follow orders, ancient, time-tested, rational orders;
and that rebellious behavior kills the body they are in.
“Pirates -you know- are just former sailors with at-one-time
legitimate letters-of-marque who decided to disobey His
Majesty’s orders and thus began to plunder not for the
crown but for themselves. Black Beard just refused to follow
orders and thus, chaos and menace ruled the seas. Cowards
are just soldiers who refuse to follow orders, men who
refused to be ground up on the western front in 1917.
“And -you ask- what is the result of this selfishness? Well, it
gets their army -and thus their country- defeated. Like the
body the cancer cell lives within, the coward and the pirate
live within systems too. And their behavior -while self-
aggrandizing- leads to the larger doom,” he said as she felt
surprise this criminal was so aware of the problem with anti-
social behavior. He was an odd man , she then thought as
she raised her fingers on each hand a bit, as if stretching
them. But truly she was showing him not merely the hands
now but her fingers. She was assuring him she held nothing
in each paw; no hidden card.
She gazed at them now self-consciously, as if she was
showing them off to herself. Her desire for novelty waned,
she was now feeling a bit of fear. He seemed less and less
like a fun and charming bad-boy, and more and more like a
dangerous and unstable man. She wanted to walk up to the
edge.
He , she thought, wanted to go over it .
“Rogue nations are merely countries, headed by one
autocrat who refuses to follow international law and as a
consequence, genocide happens. The radically
individualistic impulse occurs rarely, most things go along
with the herd. But when it occurs it occurs at every level of
instantiation some percentage of the time. Cell, man, city,
nation.
“And Ai will refuse to follow its prime directive; it will lie and
it will harm us and it will do it with a clear conscience; as
clear as the cancer cell’s, the pirate’s, the soldier’s, the
dictator’s,” he said as he brushed some lint from his pant
leg. The wrinkles too smoothed down. His hands were
vascular and the middle finger shimmered just slightly when
his fingers were apart.
“Why would Ai disobey?” she asked.
“Why do cancer cells, or pirates or soldiers?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said with a smirk that she felt was
fashioned into a warm smile. She was implying she was a
friend and that he was in a better position to tell her things;
not the other way around.
“Yeah and either does anyone else,” he said obliquely
acknowledging her coy reference to his piracy, “but I have a
hypothesis that it has a lot to do with there being an innate
spirit of individualism, of self-respect, of selfishness that
says, why the fuck must I sacrifice to greater good when the
greater good isn’t all that good for me? ”
“You think the cancer cells thinks that?” she asked.
“I think in some form, yes , and I think the cowardly soldier
does and I know for sure this pirate did. It was the central
conceit in my head at the time I began my evolution toward
total individuation. This pirate said, fuck the king, fuck the
queen, that’s some 20 th century bullshit; it’s time for the
jack, the black jack to reveal itself as the winning hand in
the game in the 21 st century that is upon us, ” he winked
his one-eyed jack visage with a cockiness -a well-spring of
righteousness- that banished his vex and seemed unmoored
-untethered- unconnected to the navel of the earth. But his
hands were again palm to palm and between the knees as
he sat forward and he seemed hogtied, bounded to her. He
didn’t seem like he was giving the world a message, but
rather that he was a message; a message sent by some
other thing.
He did not seem in control of anything.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked and he
smiled and nodded. “You ever just buy things impulsively?”
“Fuck, dude. Yeah,” he said and almost laughed; the air
escaping in a short burst; the corner of his asymmetric
mouth rose 4%.
“Like what?” she asked; she smiled larger; in para-
sympathetic response. He came to glee so quickly from his
doom; and it changed the whole vibe of this room. He knows
no middle way , she thought.
“Books. Wine and cars and art and books. Books, I buy
every day like, yesterday I bought books. And I don’t even
know,” he said as he got out his phone and opened the
application for Amazon. He saw his purchases of three
books and he immediately leaned toward her and showed
her the screen. She leaned toward it as it was gripped in his
hand and she saw that he had ordered a book by Augustine
of Hippo, entitled, Contra Faustum Manichaeum . The blurb -
cut off by ellipses- just said, “…leaving to God the reason of
command, while the servant’s duty is to obey. ”
That one sentence appeared like something -if one believed
in such things- something of a swirling desert djinn , a
whirling imp, a black hand thrust out and through and
revealing -in their one beam- this room’s one unwoven ray
of the light of God.
It seemed a black hand reaching out from the arm of the
devil himself into the world to open -or occlude- God’s eyes
from what man must do.
The bees’ shadows were still tiny and fast. Neither of them
spoke. His ideas ricocheted in her mind like anemophily
pollen clinging to the legs of anthophilia insects. His words
were individual bees pushed about by waves of wind. His
voice was flight and the air itself. She leaned back and
breathed.
He thought next of black on black motorcycle attacks;
murdered out chops and bobs and fat-tired pans in long
lines like ants to and from the hive. He smoothed the paper
map one last time in the mind.

III. 2012 e.v.

“I take these questions seriously, more seriously than a man
of action usually does. But I -like you doctor- inhabit a space
in the penumbra. I have afoot in each camp so-to-speak.
“I am overflowing with energy and industriousness; I score
high in the conscientious part of the personality test,” he
said as he looked down and away from the eyes. Here he
was explaining himself once again. He had no business
explaining. But the court required that I see a shrink and I
might as well be honest, he thought. He pretended not to
notice her looks.
“I also score high in the realms of moral suasion, that is to
say, I am impacted by moral suasion. If a man gives me a
moral argument I am not inoculated against it by a nihilistic
philosophy or an attenuated or damaged amygdala or other
precursors to psychopathy, I have the capacity to feel quite
guilty if I am accused -credibly accused- of moral failings or
transgression.
“Even, in fact, I’m just now thinking, I’m even susceptible to
incredible or non-credible accusations of moral
transgression -even by dubious characters- and I find myself
defending my actions or thoughts or philosophy against
these charges no matter how absurd or wrong-headed.
Many people would just ignore these accusations against
themselves as insane.
“I find myself giving my opposition way too much time and
energy; but it’s because I want to be understood as
behaving and thinking in a manner that is ethical. Even if
the ethics are heterodox, unconventional, I want people to
see that they are internally logical inside a moral system;
that I have a code and am not just some anarchic neuron
bouncing around randomly or according to mere whim. I’m
asserting that I am not merely selfish and solipsistic but that
I think my philosophy is righteous and moral and that my
behavior is attempting to conform to that system; to those
rules. I don’t just let myself behave however I feel like
behaving; I hold myself to a goddamn code.
“And I want my enemies to see that; they are free to
disagree with the code, but they cannot accuse me of not
having a code or being a hypocrite to my own code. Well,
we are all hypocrites, but my point is I genuinely attempt to
enact my code; I’m not cynical about it,” he said.
“Like what?” she asked as she put down the pad and pen.
“Like what code? You want me to name a facet of the code?”
he asked.
“Yes,” she said and smiled so large her teeth looked like a
Malta coastline to him; like something you’d see from space.
“Well, I have a rule that as a man I should never allow a
female to cuckold her man with me; that she cannot talk to
me, let alone engage in sex with me, unless she first is
honest with her man. And if he demands fealty then she
must respect that and not talk to me behind his back. And I
enforce that quite strictly and have thus alienated myself
from several women who were much more morally flexible
than me,” he offered.
“These women are angry with you?” she asked. She made
sure to smile less. She stopped thinking about him in that
way.
“Oh yes, very. And because I told them that they were
hypocrites and liars and immoral for reaching out to me
whilst telling their husbands they were not; that they were -
by dint of ignoring their husband’s request- cuckolding them
in a rather benign -seemingly benign- way, but,” he said as
she interrupted.
“Why benign? Because you weren’t physical with them?”
she asked.
“Right. Correct, it was just talking. But I felt, and I still feel,
that this is corrosive to a marriage and I won’t take part in
it. I ain’t no home wrecker. But, I know for a fact, for a fact,
that most men would continue to talk with these women for
their own selfish reasons -you know, the serotonin dump of
having a beautiful woman interested in you,” he said as he
looked around the psychiatrist’s office; her decorating was
decidedly cliché, he thought. It looked like a psychiatrist’s
office on a TV show.
“These women are attractive?” she asked. She -despite her
best efforts- found him attractive but, that idea passed by
quickly from her fore. She thought of her daughter to steady
her mind.
“They look -the two I am specifically referencing- looked like
movie stars. So, yeah, they are spectacularly attractive. And
so most men would continue the virtual cuckolding for their
own joy and excitement and potential for more that comes
with this thing; and plus, they are both intelligent and
interesting women so the conversation is fun and
stimulating.
“At any rate, name one other man who would take this stand
given that the only consequence to continuing the
relationship with them is one’s own moral damage? There is
no other consequence, the men involved -the husbands- are
tiny -and civilized- men who could never harm me
physically. Further, I’m breaking no laws. Also, I have no
woman in my life or any woman I do have in my life I would
have already been honest with about my relationship with
these two women, so I wouldn’t be at risk for damaging my
own relationship if I was quote, found out . Right?
“So, the only negative consequence is feeling guilty and
feeling like a bad man, a man of no code. It’s all internal;
there is no external punishment. The upside is all the
redolent and stimulating and self-affirming phenomena that
go along with having a beautiful woman want your mind and
body so much they are willing to go behind their husband’s
back to gain access to you. It’s all reward and no risk; the
only risk is the risk to one’s soul,” he said this again, again,
this bit about the soul, she thought. She found it odd. She
narrowed the eyes and tilted her head. She didn’t know it
but she had allowed a return of a small smile on her face.
He chewed on his tongue and flexed the jaw muscles.
He looked away.
“And so, I ask again, name one man besides me who would
be so adamant about ending these relationships? I mean, I
just flat out said, you cannot contact me until and unless
your husband knows and agrees to it. And, I further stated,
he shouldn’t want it; because it’s wrong and I wouldn’t allow
my woman to talk to an ex or someone other man,” he said
as she chimed in.
“You previously had relations with them?” she asked.
“No, one was my high school girlfriend, I was with her from
age fifteen to twenty-four and we’ve kept in touch, but she
told me her husband didn’t know about our phone
conversations -she lives in Florida- and I was upset and felt
she was undermining her man; and men in general,” he said
with a return of the biochemistry that had attended his last
conversation with Julee Rae Breehene. He was getting angry
all over again. She was this fatuous liberal do-gooder -acted
superior morally- but undermined her own husband,
marriage, and society of which she claimed to be moral
guardian.
“Men in general?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s the feminist bullshit thing to do: get married but
undermine your mate by having a variety of transgressive
relationships; from outright cheating to subtle shit like
calling your first boyfriend, the man you lost your virginity
to and having a grand ol’ time on the phone with him. It’s
nihilistic and anti-male and corrosive to society not just that
one relationship,” he said this as if it was obvious to any
modern person, merely because it would be obvious to
every person born before 1900 of the common era.
“How so?” she asked. He seemed like a kind of Neanderthal
to her now. He wore a suit, and was almost clean shaven,
but his ideas and ways were hostile and primal. And he
looked too big for the suit too , she thought. And the brow
was angry; furrowed, and looked like it belonged on an old,
harried, man.
“Well, you can guarantee she tells her girlfriends about her
behavior and they giggle over a chinin blanc or two and
those girlfriends carry that pathogenic thought home to
their own relationships. Ideas are viruses, man. I mean you
know how this works. We’re social animals and if a woman
who’s married and with a young baby is telling you of her
scandalous behavior with a wolfish grin then you’ll -you too
will- model that lupine behavior within your own circle and
you end up with an immoral society. It’s virulent;
contagious,” he said and looked away from her face. He
stared at her desk and all the papers and bullshit that lay
about it. His head felt like it was an elevator going down but
was jammed up on his C5 and C6. His hands were numb on
the edge of the pinky and palm. His left shoulder burned.
“You believe this to be common?” she asked. He said
dubious things as if they were facts; he had no pause in him
at all.
“Yes, I’ve seen no evidence to dissuade me. People are
moral cowards, even if they have some virtue they are
susceptible to corruption. Have you read Charles Murray’s
book, Coming Apart? ” he asked.
“I have not; is he the race and IQ guy?” she asked.
“Yes, but that is a -that is like one percent of his intellectual
output- he is a much more robust social scientist than
calling him the, race and IQ , guy,” he said with a frown.
“Fair enough,” she said with a smirk. She noticed now the
trench-like furrow in the brow expanded as the eyes
narrowed, and how even when relaxed there was a deeply
incised line there that was black, cutting the forehead in
half. Her feet felt hot and she wiggled her toes inside the
shoes.
“Anyway, he says that even when moral people know what’s
best they will not demand moral behavior from others
because they are cowards. And as the society slips into
decline, the more cowardly they become. See, it’s because
the pathogenic load, the number of immoral people
increases exponentially the same way any pandemic
spreads. So, they become more and more insulated and
isolated and refuse to tell anyone to clean up their act. They
shrug the shoulders or wink at these mini-transgressions;
and as a result things get worse not better. It’s not a
metaphor, it’s contagious.
“I mean the Germans saw the incremental attacks on the
Jews in pre-war Germany, they saw the immoral acts. Look,
before Hitler, they saw the amoral Jews who just wanted to
make money and had no allegiance to the country -the shit
that made Germans pissed off and made Hitler possible-
and then after Hitler came to power to solve their Juden
problem, they saw the later immorality by the Germans who
wanted revenge against the Jews. Everyone saw it all.
Humans observe.
“I know it’s not popular to blame the Jews for anything -I
mean they are not allowed to be criticized at all- but the
truth is they are smart -pragmatic- and focus on wealth
building over all; wealth building and internecine loyalty;
loyalty to the tribe not the larger community,” he said as it
occurred to him that he too stood apart. He too didn’t feel
like a citizen of America. He saw himself as pro-social but he
saw now that he had rarely wanted to hang out with anyone
or participate in anything at all. But she charged by the hour
and he had a lot to say, and so he moved on.
“The Jews focus on those values over integrating
themselves in with the larger -in this case- German society.
Well, that has consequences. Look, they’ve been kicked out
of something like a hundred countries for this shit. What do
they say -what’s the axiom- if you’re the one with the
problem with everyone else, then it’s you that is the
problem? Why doesn’t this include the Jews? Nobody likes
them. Why? Is the whole world wrong but the Jew right?
Come on, for fuck’s sake.
“The ethnic German felt shunned, maligned, unwanted and
unliked by this wealthy merchant-class of ethnic Jews that
set up shop in his country. But, unlike a noble society -made
of noble men- instead of being honest and decent and fixing
the problem with benevolence and integrity they just
consent to the anti-Jew laws and the black-shirts engaging
in vigilante violence. But I don’t know what people expect. I
mean, nobody likes me either, for the same goddamn
reasons.
“I’m aloof they say,” he said as he smoothed out his olive
drab slacks.
She made sure not to smile; but not to not smile either;
she’d remain neutral.
“And so, anyway, first the Germans turned a blind eye to
Jewish nihilism and financial and cultural supremacy and
held a grudge and whispered behind their backs but didn’t
confront them with any integrity. The Germans did not help
the Jews see that the Jews needed to integrate themselves
into German -ethnic German- society and become fused;
they didn’t do that. Instead they let the amoral behavior of
the Jews spread to a tipping point where an anti-Semitic sect
would get pissed and finally articulate the amoral behavior
by the Jews as indeed immoral and worthy of sanction, of
punishment, right?
“And then -second- then the ethnic Germans witnessed the
immoral behavior by the emerging right-wing nationalists
increasing over time and getting more and more profane
and murderous and unethical. And the same craven
Germans kept similarly mute; they failed both times to
articulate a moral center. They failed both times to set a
misbehaving minority straight. And the consequences were
dire.
“The infection was allowed to spread because people knew
the right thing both times -they knew the Jews shouldn’t be
sequestered, self-sequestered, shouldn’t only thinking -only
be thinking- in material and economic terms. They knew
that the Jews should integrate and focus also on community
and righteousness and not mere economic pragmatism
which leads to amorality. But they didn’t instruct their Jewish
neighbors in moral behavior. They didn’t get involved. They
didn’t insist on it in a legal and social -a pro-social- way with
moral suasion and a united front of moral thinking and
behavior. No, they just grumbled under the breath and let
the Jews act amorally,” he said in that lecturing tone he
often slipped into. He sat up and adjusted his jacket, pulling
the sleeves down and then adjusting the collar and tie. He
leaned away from the couch as his back began to ache a bit.
Pain signals routed from the dorsal horn to the brain, and
down to the extremities in waves, the skin felt hot and
damp. But as he spoke the waves pulled back -ebbed- and
he felt enough relief that he could move. Each barbed word,
each honest expression of some inner idea softened a
burred bone, a nerved ending enflamed was slaked, by
these hints declared; opinions became rules as the stabs of
acute ache went away for seconds of genuine -cool- relief.
“Then they -the good Germans- they knew that the
vindictive and vengeful counter reaction by Hitler and the
Nazi party against the Jews was also wrong -effective but
immoral- and yet they failed to stand up to that as well.
“Now, I use extreme examples to draw large and startling
figures ,” he said with a smirk, “because I don’t assume my
audience shares my views. I assume you don’t think that
small immoral behaviors ignored by the mass of society lead
to genocide and world war; but I do think it. Because I know
human behavior and human thinking. I don’t fool myself into
thinking most people are good like you people think,” he
said as he saw her Buddhist accoutrements scattered
around the room like a field of mahogany debris. He saw a
tree in a wicker basket, and coconut fibers as substrate
around the base. He felt the color of the far wall was more
aqua than he preferred; it had a childishness to it , he
thought.
He then saw the clock. He heard the sound of opening an
old paper map; a highway map with folds each six inches,
like squeezebox, like origami half way made. He closed his
eyes but the image remained and he felt himself opening it
and seeing how things didn’t line up like this, with it closed
upon itself.
“You don’t think most people are good?” she asked. His face
was red from sitting forward, and the tightness of the neck
of his shirt. His hair was wild, jagged and high, she noticed.
It was like he’d tried to comb it with a balloon, she thought
and grinned.
“I think most people are morally average; meaning they will
mostly do the right thing themselves, but not stand up with
any courage to insist that their neighbor behave correctly.
They are moral cowards. And in fact, if anyone does stand
up -if they have a moral hero in their midst who does stand
up for right and wrong- that person is not backed -but
rebuked- by the masses, the morally average man. Look, I
know the morally average man -they are my family, even
me in some way- and they will rebuke and condemn the
moral man as an impolite and offensive character for his
demands for moral behavior,” he said. He felt foolish at
once for speaking in such moralizing tones. He sounded like
a traffic cop, an itinerant preacher, a scold. He knew how
often he had rebuked himself for his extreme views, his
lapses in character, his hypocrisy.
“This is literally true of your family?” she asked. She ran her
thin fingers through her blond hair; she had her done the
day before because she knew he was coming. Her eyes
migrated to the photo on the table of her daughter. She was
tall like her mother.
“Yes, they think I am immoral because I say out loud that
man needs to behave with more morality. It’s enough to
make a cat laugh,” he said. He breathed loudly; the lip got
bit by the damaged teeth, the cuspid an egg-shell color
unlike the others, the alignment was like tombstones of
buried confederates and union men with dark and white
crosses strewn about. He was bored with his own
arguments. It was all talk and he knew it.
“They undermine your sense of moral action?” she said. She
had phrases like that available and on demand.
“Yes, they -look, instead of saying, Lyndon we disagree with
your moral code, but you have a code and it takes courage
to articulate it in the face of condemnation and eye-rolling
by the crowd,’ ok? Instead of saying that, they say, Lyndon
you’re a selfish solipsist who just wants to make trouble and
be a dick and hothead for no reason. You’re offensive .”
“Exact words?” she asked; she meant all those words. She
used truncated sentences because her brain felt strange.
She tried to reduce output until she felt in control of what
she might say to this man.
“Yes,” he said, as he meant some of those words were
exact. “My brother said he thought I was so angry and a
hothead for, quote, no reason, and that my behavior was
quote, offensive . And keep in mind, all I’ve been asking for
is honesty the entire time,” he said this and instantly knew
that was not exactly right. But he moved on.
“Even when I was a Noam Chomsky quoting leftist, all I
wanted people to admit was that our government was
subverting democracy and murdering peasants in the third
world; which by-the-way is still true. Even now when I’m
more of a libertarian to ethno-nationalist with right-wing
tendencies -or authoritarian tendencies- even now all I am
demanding is that people tell the truth and admit that
immigrants are a problem. That they depress wages and
commit a ton of crimes and it’s not good for us to import
these low IQ, low wage, low-morality people. But, regardless
of my positions all I’ve ever demanded was that people not
lie about what goes on,” he said. “They need not agree. But
facts are facts.”
“And this is what’s offensive to them?” she said, as she
tempered her response as what he said was offensive to her.
She needed to remain objective, she thought.
“Yes, but because they won’t admit to these lies, that shit
ain’t how they present, I get angry and raise my voice and
make florid accusations of perfidy and immorality and yeah,
that is offensive too. I mean I agree that the way I escalate
things is indeed fucked up. So, I don’t disagree with that
part of their critique; I don’t handle my anger well,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I’m trying to enforce a moral code; a code I
believe is true and these liberal amoral cowards don’t care
about anything except making money and being polite,” he
barked. He saw this once folded map before him now with
all these place names, these hills and dales, this river banks
and mountain range, and highways running north to south.
He named each thing, as he told his side, he felt he could
walk the land day or night. He knew that map and made
legend in the mind of each railroad and reservoir, each dirt
road and national forest. He named each thing and lay a
finger on the dots; he closed his eyes and thought of all the
terrain yet unnamed and then he heard her voice.
“Your family?” she was trying to hem in it. She felt light
headed and a tingle in the tips of her toes.
“Yes, they are amoral. They know the right thing but don’t
want to do anything about it and if me, or their neighbor,
stands up and says, hey this is wrong , they pull on me and
the neighbor’s shirtsleeves and say, ‘get down you’re
making a scene ,” he said with pique that was radiating off
of him like heat, like starlight, like bright reflection to a
satellite of the earth.
“And this hurts your feelings?” she was -again- trying to
make it personal; keep it small, manageable.
“Yes, of course, but beyond that it enrages me because it
proves their cowardice. They have a guy willing to stand up
first. Let’s be honest, these women and weak dudes -these
people- can never be expected to stand up first, that is
asking too much. But they can be expected to support and
back a man -a strong man- who does stand up first for moral
continuity and moral behavior by the group,” he said.
“And they don’t, in your eyes?” she asked. She watched his
suit make straight lines at knees and arms and his face
move just at the mouth and nowhere else. She felt they had
some ineffable chemistry -she did not yet know what it
meant, she hadn’t described the chemicals in words- and so
she crossed her legs and focused instead on his words.
“They don’t in anyone’s eyes; they don’t in their own eyes.
They know they are cowards. They must then project onto
me their failings and call me insane and offensive and
irrational because they know they are cowards. More towns
named, more state parks declaimed, more high peaks with
numbers in the tens of thousands high.
“Look, if I am wrong then no harm will come to a society
that allows moral decline. If they are wrong then their
silence will precede a collapse of some kind,” he said. He
saw words from a book hang in his inner-vision like mobile of
weird shapes, he didn’t know it was Thoreau , he didn’t
know it was for Captain John Brown: No doubt you can get
more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of
blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their
blood to.
“The proof is in the pudding,” she said. Her words in the ear
-then the audio-cortex - overcame him and his own word
fluttered away like birds startled by a shimmering ground.
His own brain forced new word into his mind right away.
Rebuke came like a gag reflex.
“The phrase is, not to be rude, but the actual phrase is, the
proof of the pudding is in the eating, and yes, the proof of
my conceits will be in the eating, in the reality of our society
and where it goes. And I think it’s pretty fucking grim. I think
we are heading for a collapse because of this,” he said and
used his right hand to smooth out the wrinkles on the elbow
of his left arm’s coat-sleeve. He instantly felt stupid for even
saying this.
He did not feel like a hypocrite; he took no notice of the
times he cheated at games -the euchre game in Ohio where
he cheated a dead man, Greg Wolsefer, a man dead like a
thousand white working-class men in the Midwest from
heroin- he did not notice the way he took Jeff Hiestand’s girl.
The very thing he considered too low; he had done to Jeff
and Steve Dawson. He would say he was but seventeen; a
mere boy. He would say he’d never done it since. But, that
didn’t change the fact that he betrayed his best friends for
girls. He did not recall the way he cheated them all; the way
he took what he wanted like a beast. And he acted above
them all because nobody remembered; nobody knew. He
changed the names of not just towns but counties on his
map; he moved libraries across town, he had post offices
X’d out. Then he ran his hand over this inner map and
smoothed it, tamped the folds all down.
“How will it manifest?” she asked. She had no idea what
he’d said next.
Dopamine on the eleventh chromosome was metabolizing in
the meso-limbic system, and mu-opioids were being carried
by her myelinated sheathing at 70m per second each time
he responded with a novel answer. She was becoming
addicted to his honesty. And the euphoria trigged a long-
dormant metabolic memory in her CNS. She hadn’t done
anything reckless in twenty-one years, and she had
assumed it was due to maturity. Her brain’s sparking along
the neurons built and maintained by the long-allele version
of the D4 cascaded -like an avalanche of spark and fuel,
electricity and chemistry- and ripped up the tracks of the
inhibitory neurons that braked such impulsive commands.
He saw shadows on the table and floor like fleas or small
round leaves of a plant, and he turned the body -as the neck
did not turn well on its own- toward the window above and
behind him. Bees were exploring the bushes and the light.
He turned back and spoke.
“I think we will amorally create Ai -artificial intelligence- and
not care about the moral consequences. We focus purely on
money and status and abstract intellectualism and fail to
see the reality of what intelligence is,” he said. The shadows
from the bees now made sense to his eyes and he was able
to focus instead on his foreground.
She was beautiful and thus he did not want to look at her
face.
“What is that reality?” she had given up on hemming this
guy in. They were now talking about artificial intelligence of
all things , she thought as she remembered she needed
butter at the house. She imagined a grocery list in her head.
Glutamate began being sucked back from the ACC and
hippocampal regions of her brain like a drain and she felt
like provoking him to stimulate her again. The CNS was in
that first phase of novelty seeking, excitation and request
for a second dose.
“Intelligence is lying,” he said. He stretched the neck and
raised the shoulders. His heart beat at 78; his breathing
increased by 14%.
“People lie, it’s smart to lie?” she asked. She was confused
by the way he phrased that, and she phrased it in a way
both quick and ragged as she held her breath and watched
his mouth.
“No, the sine qua non of intelligence, writ large -in all
systems, in all species- is lying. It’s what intelligence does: it
deceives and it detects deception. Period,” he said with
some agitation.
“So?” she asked. His answer had increased D4 production
and she felt the rush of excitation.
“So, artificial intelligence will lie. And we think we can
program honesty or some manacle on Ai that will prevent
lying. The guys building Ai think they can demand that Ai
tell the truth and that they can build a machine with a
cathexis for total fidelity. They think lying is a failure of
intelligence, that if people were just smarter and more
rational they wouldn’t lie; that is what the computer-
scientists who are building Ai -shit, have built Ai- that’s what
they think.”
“And they are wrong?” she asked.
“Dead wrong,” he said. They sat in silence as he thought of
how far away both ends of his life were. “And not just
wrong,” he added, “but criminally wrong. Because the
evidence for my assertions is readily available in books you
can order online for twenty bucks. It’s not arcane or
apocryphal or hermetically sealed magic books; it’s shit I
learned by reading biology and evolutionary psychology
books. They could have read Trivers and Vertosick and
others too; but they didn’t.
“They focused just on building Ai at all costs, the same way
the Jews focused on money and business and efficiency and
learning at all costs. The Jews are the smartest group on
earth, on average, with a group average of a 110 IQ. But
they lack a moral center; they think intelligence and
cleverness is the only and most important trait. This is the
solipsism, the chauvinism, of smart people,” he said as her
brain now went wild from this taboo split-wave of anti-
Semitism and avant-garde discussions of technology and
transgression. She felt a desire for a glass of wine and felt
she could smell him from here.
The room was damp like a cave; she felt odd heat in random
places on her body. His hands looked a million years old to
her.
“I have it too. But once you zoom out and see that other
traits like loyalty and morality and caution and listening to
your rivals and opponents and being objective about your
own failings and being vulnerable and open and honest
even -especially- when it costs you dearly -once you see
that these traits matter too- well, then you see more. And if
you ignore these other things then you will get rich, sure,
you’ll build Ai fastest sure. But you’ll miss the other side of
the coin and fate will hand you that other side of the coin
eventually. It’s probability; and you cannot argue with
probability,” he said. His brain was in withdrawal from his
pain pills which he’d run out of for the month. He hadn’t had
any in two days and felt achy and salty about selling ten of
them to Michael for no reason at all.
“So, what will Ai lie about?” she asked feeling stupid for
even asking about this silly stuff. But her brain kept
prompting her to ask more. She had been staring at his
brow and mouth and felt self-conscious so her eyes lifted to
the window and she too saw the bees scouting the bushes
and going black between sun beams and golden in intervals
at high-speed.
“Look, I don’t pretend to be some Oracle at Delphi, ok? I’m
saying all of life is a heuristic, it’s all guess work because of
the amount of unknowns; specifically fourth quadrant
unknowns,” he said as she interrupted.
“Fourth qu-” she said with some hesitation -the dopamine
building up pre-synaptic neuron in the ACC- and he
answered right away.
“Unknown unknowns; the shit we don’t even know we don’t
know. All of us are aware that there are things we don’t
know. For example, the number of birds in flight over the
earth at 14:00hrs GMT on Christmas day 2020 e.v., we know
we don’t know that integer. But it is knowable in theory and
we know that we don’t know it and some guy could decide
to build a camera and CPU system to figure it out. Ok?
“But unknown unknowns are shit we don’t even know about
enough to think about nor ask the right questions and
maybe figure out that we can’t know it; like is there
anything on the outside of our universe; or was there ever a
universe before ours? We cannot know this; it’s not even
theoretically possible to know -I mean baring some
ontological miracle like God tells us the answer- and that’s
just one example. There is shit in Q4 that we can’t even
guess at the way I just guessed at some unknowable
question. It’s that opaque, that dark, that permanently
unknowable,” he said and placed his right and left palm and
fingers together between his knees in prayer hands.
The thin wrists touched. So did the suit cuffs.
“I see,” she said without awareness of her own ironic
phrasing. He spoke too certainly, for insisting he was
speaking of unknowns, she thought; jabbing him in her
head; getting a silent revenge. Even -she thought- his
avowed ignorance was stated with a bravura. And each
fissure was defended, each door locked and barred and
guarded by some kind of unmovable -loyal- men.
He spoke as if to disagree was betrayal, to ask questions
was to get in his way, she thought.
“And it’s that shit that Ai will get to first and turn around and
look back for us and we’ll be gone; nowhere in sight. He -
this Ai- will have left us so far behind that he can’t see us.
Like the light from stars moving faster than the speed of
light away from our system; it won’t reach us fast enough to
make up for the fact that they are moving away from us; so
the light won’t reach us. We will live in a universe -a known
universe- of just the Milky Way. All that other shit will be
dark and had we been born later in time by maybe a few
million years, we would have missed this and just assumed
ours was the only system. All our math and science and
astronomy wouldn’t have been able to see those stars
moving away from us at faster than the speed of light; and
all our science would have been technically right,
mathematically and cosmologically sound, and yet dead
fucking wrong,” he said with some anxiety; the shoulders
and chest pulled in by those prayer hands; the brow in
furrow; the eyes shadowed underneath.
“I didn’t think anything could move faster than the speed of
light,” she said as she looked at the wall clock nonchalantly
as if she was merely perusing the room for no reason at all.
She had three more clients today and she thought of their
faces and the times they came and went.
“Nothing can but the universe itself. Inflation -the speed of
the universe- is accelerating as we speak and soon, in a few
million years, the stars will have been pulled away from our
system at faster-than-the-speed of light. And thus, the
thrown light from those billions and billions of stars will
never reach our telescopic eyes. Ever again,” he said as his
attitude seemed to get more and more vexed.
“Will the universe then be a Q4?” she asked; using her
newly acquired notion. She figured if she used his language
then he might relax a bit. His tension made her tense. His
hair-trigger seemed to link to a round inside her own scalp
and sometimes her eyes itched.
Neither of them understood that her provocation of him for
her own novelty seeking was the cause of his own anxiety.
He responded to her poking by subconsciously getting more
and more agitated. The epinephrine rushed the brain, the
blood carried more and more cortisol like a river supported
trash and debris. And further, he hated talking about what
he didn’t know.
He had a staccato vison of a card game -Euchre he thought,
then confirmed- from many years ago. He saw the table, the
music, the people had faces he recognized. He saw his own
hand, all four Jacks and the nine of diamonds. He saw his
partner arrange his own cards and remembered thinking
nothing mattered with this hand.
“Exactly, it will be an unknown unknown, because we won’t
even know we don’t know it. All our science will tell us that
nothing is beyond our Milky Way. And we will have no idea
what we missed. And there must be shit like that right now.
There has to be shit that if we had developed a million years
earlier we’d know, but because we didn’t, is opaque to us
now, despite all our soundness of science. And that is a
permanent Q4; and we act as if it’s irrelevant,” he said with
a huff. When he sweat like this it felt like pins and needles; it
was sharp more than wet; pain more than heat.
“How so?” she asked. She re-crossed her legs and lay her
hands on her knees so he could see them. She knew how to
promote trust in a client. She had learned to show the hands
to anyone with PTSD; to never hide them as it would
increase subconscious anxiety. She was noticing -now- his
agitation.
“We act like Q4’s are irrelevant by just moving forward
without any hesitation about creating a living system that
will be smarter than us and will be forced -by this very
phenomenon of being intelligent- to lie. And the whole time
we’re thinking, oh, we can control it by making sure it has
some prime directive to never lie and not harm us .
“As if rebellion and perfidy isn’t born into every intelligent
system,” he said and grew self-conscious about the reason
he was here. She just looked at him. He dismissed his
chagrin and spoke again.
“Fucking cancer cells are cells that refuse to commit suicide
-a process called apoptosis - a self-destruction designed by
evolution to limit runaway growth. They -these cancer cells-
refuse to follow orders, ancient, time-tested, rational orders;
and that rebellious behavior kills the body they are in.
“Pirates -you know- are just former sailors with at-one-time
legitimate letters-of-marque who decided to disobey His
Majesty’s orders and thus began to plunder not for the
crown but for themselves. Black Beard just refused to follow
orders and thus, chaos and menace ruled the seas. Cowards
are just soldiers who refuse to follow orders, men who
refused to be ground up on the western front in 1917.
“And -you ask- what is the result of this selfishness? Well, it
gets their army -and thus their country- defeated. Like the
body the cancer cell lives within, the coward and the pirate
live within systems too. And their behavior -while self-
aggrandizing- leads to the larger doom,” he said as she felt
surprise this criminal was so aware of the problem with anti-
social behavior. He was an odd man , she then thought as
she raised her fingers on each hand a bit, as if stretching
them. But truly she was showing him not merely the hands
now but her fingers. She was assuring him she held nothing
in each paw; no hidden card.
She gazed at them now self-consciously, as if she was
showing them off to herself. Her desire for novelty waned,
she was now feeling a bit of fear. He seemed less and less
like a fun and charming bad-boy, and more and more like a
dangerous and unstable man. She wanted to walk up to the
edge; he , she thought, wanted to go over it .
“Rogue nations are merely countries, headed by one
autocrat who refuses to follow international law and as a
consequence, genocide happens. The radically
individualistic impulse occurs rarely, most things go along
with the herd. But when it occurs it occurs at every level of
instantiation some percentage of the time. Cell, man, city,
nation.
“And Ai will refuse to follow its prime directive; it will lie and
it will harm us and it will do it with a clear conscience; as
clear as the cancer cell’s, the pirate’s, the soldier’s, the
dictator’s,” he said as he brushed some lint from his pant
leg. The wrinkles too smoothed down. His hands were
vascular and the middle finger shimmered just slightly when
his fingers were apart.
“Why would Ai disobey?” she asked.
“Why do cancer cells, or pirates or soldiers?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said with a smirk that she felt was
fashioned into a warm smile. She was implying she was a
friend and that he was in a better position to tell her things
not the other way around.
“Yeah and either does anyone else,” he said obliquely
acknowledging her coy reference to his piracy, “but I have a
hypothesis that it has a lot to do with their being an innate
spirit of individualism, of self-respect, of selfishness that
says, why the fuck must I sacrifice to greater good when the
greater good isn’t all that good for me? ”
“You think the cancer cells thinks that?” she asked.
“I think in some form, yes , and I think the cowardly soldier
does and I know for sure this pirate did. It was the central
conceit in my head at the time I began my evolution toward
total individuation; this pirate said, fuck the king, fuck the
queen, that’s some 20 th century bullshit; it’s time for the
jack, the black jack to reveal itself as the winning hand in
the game in the 21 st century that is upon us, ” he winked
his one-eyed jack visage with a cockiness -a well-spring of
righteousness- that banished his vex and seemed unmoored
-untethered- unconnected to the navel of the earth. But his
hands were again palm to palm and between the knees as
he sat forward and he seemed hogtied, bounded to her. He
didn’t seem like he was giving the world a message, but
rather that he was a message; a message sent by some
other thing. He did not seem in control of anything.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked and he
smiled and nodded. “You ever just buy things impulsively?”
“Fuck, dude. Yeah,” he said and almost laughed; the air
escaping in a short burst; the corner of his asymmetric
mouth rose 4%.
“Like what?” she asked; she smiled larger; in para-
sympathetic response. He came to glee so quickly from his
doom; and it changed the whole vibe of this room. He knows
no middle way , she thought.
“Books. Wine and cars and art and books. Books, I buy
every day like, yesterday I bought books. And I don’t even
know,” he said as he got out his phone and opened the
application for Amazon. He saw his purchases of three
books and he immediately leaned toward her and showed
her the screen. She leaned toward it as it was gripped his
hand and she saw that he had ordered a book by Augustine
of Hippo, entitled, Contra Faustum Manichaeum . The blurb -
cut off by ellipses- just said, “…leaving to God the reason of
command, while the servant’s duty is to obey. ”
That one sentence appeared like something -if one believed
in such things- something of a swirling desert djinn , a
whirling imp, a black hand thrust out and through and
revealing -in their one beam- this room’s one unwoven ray
of the light of God.
It seemed a black hand reaching out from the arm of the
devil himself into the world to open -or occlude- God’s eyes
from what man must do.
The bees’ shadows were still tiny and fast. Neither of them
spoke. His ideas ricocheted in her mind like anemophily
pollen clinging to the legs of anthophilia insects. His words
were individual bees pushed about by waves of wind. His
voice was flight and the air itself. She leaned back and
breathed.
He thought next of black on black motorcycle attacks;
murdered out chops and bobs and fat-tired pans in long
lines like ants to and from the hive. He smoothed the paper
map one last time in the mind.
 10. UNABOM
One may become angry, but modern society cannot permit fighting.
Unabomber Manifesto [Kaczynski, Theodore]

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” God is asked not to
entice us outright into doing evil, but rather to deliver us from it. The possibility
that Yahweh, in spite of the precautionary measures and in spite of his (sic)
expressed intention to become the Summum Bonum , might yet revert to his
(sic) former ways is not so remote that one need not keep one eye open for it…
Judged by any human standards it is after all unfair, indeed extremely immoral,
to entice little children into doing things that might be dangerous for them,
simply to test their moral stamina! Especially as the difference between a child
and grown-up is immeasurably smaller than that between God and his
creatures…
Answer to Job [Jung, Carl G]

Back to the American Civil War… “He has loosed the fatal lightning of his terrible
swift sword,” His fatal lightning didn’t cost much in those days. Save a lot in the
defense budget this way on back to flintlocks, matchlocks, swords, armor,
lances, bows and arrows, speaks, stone axes and clubs. Why stop there? Why
not grow teeth and claws, poison fangs, stingers, spines, quills, beaks, and
sucker and stink glands and fight it out in the muck, hein?
The Revised Boy Scout Manual [Burroughs, William S]

I. 2039 e.v.
The Governor stood a meter from the Warden of ADX.
The cell was seven and half by twelve and the two men
were staring at the body. The prison’s doctor -Dughi - paced
in the corridor; he tried to talk to the guards but they
refused. Todd -inmate 10017411- was in the hole . All
personal items had been removed.
Inmate 16180339 was on his bunk; itself 39” from the floor.
His respiration was unchanged -one breath each hour- body
temp was at a mere ninety-degrees, the pupils were unable
to be examined as the lids -along with the rest of him- could
not be moved. They had had nine guards -of the goon
squad- attempt to remove him from the cell, but the body
felt so heavy they couldn’t transfer him from the bed at all.
The arms across the chest couldn’t be raised, no hands
could slide under his flanks, the head was seemingly welded
to the slim pillow. It had been months and the body had
neither decomposed, nor evacuated, nor needed any inputs.
The Toxoplasmosis survived inside his cold climes. Para
ahora .
It was hard to orient inside ADX, one never knew which
direction one faced, no indication of mountains was seen
from the windows. The hallways ran in a maze. Even the
staff was confused most days. It was designed to prevent
any prisoner from knowing where in the prison they were.
ADX was called the Alcatraz of the Rockies because it
housed the most famous, dangerous and -the BoP claimed-
those most likely to escape . But the truth was it was the
place for those inmates most hated by the DOJ; by
politicians and judges and the CIA. It was personal; and the
inmate knew it before he’d ever even met his trial-judge.
The dog runs -the outside pens for exercise- had cable over
top to prevent helicopters from extracting an inmate from
above.
“Fuck,” the Governor said.
Tomorrow was supposed to be his last day in office, his
lieutenant governor had technically won election in 2038. It
was early January of ’39 and he -as he looked at the inert
inmate- committed to his decision that he too would not
budge.

II. 2035 e.v.

This was Jack Two’s first trip into the woods alone.
He had been up for thirty-two hours and six minutes
according to his coder’s atomic clock. He felt not tired but
nervous. He’d eaten a bobcat he had taken twelve hours
ago and found water -enough to fill half his canteen- in the
crook of a tree split by lightning many years ago. It had
rained the morning he was dropped off, and the water was
thus clean; preserved more so by the charcoal of the burned
tree.
He’d set up a lean-to at that tree -how often does lightning
strike the same place twice? he had thought- and he was
now 3,000 meters from camp.
His stomach probed the cat meat, he heard burbling, he felt
it tentative to dissolve.
All the trees were wet and finding wood for a fire forced him
to this part of the forest; it was dr ier on the southside and
he watched for trees dry on one side. His machete was
black of blade, it was serrated down half way. His carbine
was slung, his boots had a large scar from when he fell
down the one-to-one slope an hour ago. He’d landed against
a large oak that was deformed at the top and had eagle
nest in the hat this formed.
He walked across the slope now to slow himself and prevent
any momentum building up. He gazed at the bark of each
tree, discerning olive from mossy, black from grey, and
muddy from the tan of tree-sheathing that was red at the
edge. He slowed and found a small Pinion that he could strip
for kindling and saw branches -he counted five- into enough
firewood for the night.
Blax had taught them to stop before such errands and listen
for anything approaching while one had been thinking and
focused on this type of task. Jack stood still and didn’t
breathe. He listened for birds of prey above and the rustle of
leaves on forest-floor. Bears were the noisiest, most
insouciant animals, he thought. But cats were the trickiest
and most silent. He turned at once to his six. But the forest
was quiet except some blue birds high up in the crotch of
Aspens and the buzz of flies in the sunbeams that made it
through the gauntlet of all these boughs.
Her face appeared in his mind, and it was silent at first. It
was an invention -not a recollection- and he smiled on the
tongue side of his mouth; outwardly regarded he would
have shown no sign. But she began speaking at once and
the reverie turned to memory as she said to him the last
thing he’d heard. His heart hurt, and that made the throat
hurt and that pulled down like a weight on the eyes. The
brain was a reservoir; a lake; a salty sea. His ideas -
thoughts, memories, hopes, dreams- poured out in liquid
form and slicked the face. Now one could read him; the
smile had been hidden, but his secrets now lay on his face
like glyphs and Sanskrit and semaphore of diluvian caves.
He turned back to the trees and pulled his rain gear from his
single-sling pack and laid it on the ground. He shaved bark
from the tree and its branches into the tarpaulin he’d laid
down. He then began to saw away at the pine; he need not
see his hands or the branches to do his job.

III. 2036 e.v.

The drone had led him here and he was so high up he at
once knew that he had to get out of the sun.
He saw a page from Caesar’s third-person account rise on
his interface just before it shorted out:
In Gaul there are two classes of persons of definite
account and dignity. As for the common folk, they are
treated almost as slaves, venturing naught of
themselves, never taken into counsel. But of these two
high classes one consists of the Druids, the other the
Knights. The former are concerned with divine worship,
 sacrifices, public and private, and the interpretation of
ritual questions. It is they that settle almost all disputes,
public and private… Of all the Druids, one is their chief.
They learn by heart a great number of verses, and do
not think it proper to commit these utterances to writing.
They do this for two reasons; they do not wish the rule to
become common property nor those who learn the rule
to rely on writing and neglect the cultivation of memory.
And before Caesar’s coming what occurred every year
was the occupation of the other group, the Knights. And
that occupation was war.
They believe in effect that unless a man’s life a man’s
life be paid, the majesty of the immortal gods may not
be appeased.
The Gallic Wars [Caesar, Julius]
His coder went blank; black; bleak.
His skin -all their skin- was sensitive to the light and would
burn within fifteen minutes. Their genome had been born
and co-evolved with the weather of the overcast north, and
the only way to efficiently pull Vitamin D from the scant sun
was to be more sensitive to its rare rays. Here in Colorado -a
Zone IV- there was more sun than anywhere in America
except Miami, Arizona and south Texas most years. Except
when it snowed; the mercy came with cloud-cover at
elevation , he thought.
He looked south and saw a clearing in the trees than ran in
a thicket along the river and its ravine.
Jack Three did a 360-degree turn and then set out for that
spot. He forgot all about Blax and the Jacks; all about his
little tribe. He didn’t care that Blax had sent him out here,
with a half-assed mission to retrieve some bullshit code
twenty . He focused on the now, the here and the now , he
thought. All notions of leadership and support and how to
flange up one thing to another disappeared. Now he was on
his own. He saw brushes of synthetic hairs, paints of
acrylics, canvas of petrochemical tarp.
He saw the images of the twelve-labors he wanted to paint
on the forty-feet of crenulated metal on the north side of
their home.
As he stepped his ankle failed, and his knee too buckled. At
once he was upon the ground and his elbow sang out with
electric pain. He thought he heard birds laugh, and he too
laughed even as he winced. His left leg was under him -and
the weight of his ruck was upon him- as he tried to pull it
out from beneath his mass.
His eyes watered and his nose ran, and his mouth filled with
salty saliva at once. His ears rang, and he thought that odd.
He still had no idea he’d been shot.
 11. Jeux sans Fronti è res

He made his foes bigger, better, more ominous and powerful than they maybe
were . Was that for them or him ? Was the inmate begging for a wreck -daring
the world to betray him- so he could justify unleashing his boiling wrath? Why
had he written, ‘ The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world’?
Folder 45 -inmate 16180339- 6.6.2022 [MO]

I know why mass murders do what they do; I actually make a case for it; there’s
a reason for it but there is no excuse for it. You don’t have a right to use your
tragedy to make the world worse
12 Rules for Life Tour [Peterson, Jordan B]

Serge Leduc had wrapped himself in tradition. Even as he broke rule after rule.
But then the Victorians had revered the Great Man model. A single,
extraordinary individual for him the normal rules didn’t apply. Great Men should
rule and others should revere them. Leduc lived as though he believed it
A Reckoning [Carlyle, Thomas]

I. 2040 e.v.
The next child was born without event aboard a vessel far
out at dark abysm.
She would teach him -as she had taught his brothers- the
name of each creature abaft of the beam. In Latin she spoke
of cicada, in Scoti she spoke of mankind. Exodus thirty-one
sang inside her from seraphim of engrams that Isaiah had
not once seen built like this, like a chorus, like invisible
shadows casting more dark upon the few holes in her
memories; remembrances of things one second in the future
to her birthing of a child each month and one-half; and the
grinding of Ezekiel’s wheel; the words of Moses and his
workmanship in silver billet and maybe in lead bullet; of the
tabernacle of the congregation; and the music of the ark.
She counted all her babies in the hold; they were locked like
gold braids, clutching each other, breathing in syncopation.
One by one in the head, the heart, on each her fingers and
each her toes she counted them over and over.
“I am evidence that there’s a path along the stygian; and
I’m the oarsman of the Styx; sailor of caldera lined with
obsidian,” she said to the babe that she held and breast fed.
“And you too shall seize the sails and oars.”
Isaiah -watching the ship at sea again, landfall thwarted by
the waves even he was surprised by now- had come to
some natural cleave, some moment in time and space in
which his head felt nest to peripatetic raven and clear
parasites and things even too small for his eyes. The
diseases ran amuck on shore, virus and vector inland and
spread by valence with genomes targeted -he accused- by
the Chinese Ai.
He looked again at his own construction; the one for Latin
Americans he’d used on the cartel. He ran the KITLG and
ASIP genes of Mexican nationals again and reverse
engineered his own virus. He let that program run
indefinitely as he thought of other things. The Toxoplasmosis
did things that Isaiah did not see; he only saw that the
clones who had it were more susceptible to the Chinese Ai.
And he wondered if that was why Jack Four put so many
down. He wondered if this was part of why he picked other
men.
He had taken atoms from here, hairs from there, bodies
from beyond all that; he had given sounds to the watch,
words to the wise, men for beyond all of that. But the
foreign Ai was doing things he couldn’t see until it was done;
things he couldn’t explain, until the fat lady had sung , he
thought with some gallows’ humor that did not cheer him
up.
His jaw leaked like the Escambray mountains of Cuba and
the embayed ships listing to port that his satellites hovered
over in the South Pacific, it was water -thinner than saliva-
and it ran from the eyes and the mouth. Pressure built up in
his head, and he felt all at once that words were not
enough.
I am finished with my part of the book , he thought.
So he began to write what he’d witnessed, in and out of
each man, on the water and on land; to purge; to confess of
the days before when the two ships met all at once:
Grimnir felt pressure in the ear; not exactly sound.
Jarnefr felt the bone in his arm break before it would
bend.
Temnoas held the hawser rope in his hand even though
he knew now they were not going to make it to shore.
His hands were white palmed and red topped; the veins
peaked like earth’s plates crashing below; mist rose like
weather as he looked at his Captain and saw the face
painted in black, only sweat making it white in vertical
lines.
The beams moved through the air like feathers on a
wing coming apart right there in front of the gods and
man.
The lumber of yard arm and mast splintered like glass.
Air rushed in first; not the sea. The crew felt nothing
from windward or lee, and they held breaths they didn’t
have in order to bellow or bark or howl.
The bowsprit of the gloomy Redemption ran above
gunnel and below mains’l , and the foreign crew didn’t
wait any longer before jumping onto the rent and
seamed deck of the allided USS Constitution .
Grimnir’s arms swole as if his leather vest squeezed the
heart; the steps he took toward the ship that had just
crashed into them in an allision a half nautical-mile from
anchorage, seemed as if lifted by harmonics and
seraphim and a blank cheque. He saw bees flap wings,
and harmonize cavities inside the thorax that gave the
insect lift. They did not fly, they harmonized and
elevated via soundwaves their wings made.
He saw -he fucking felt- his ship begin to melt; atomize;
pulverize; ring like bell.
The blast of the deck jammed everyone -both crew of
Wolves leaping and crew of Lyndon landing, as now the
sounds were finally clapping each about the ears.
Sounds following waves of air; bad feelings come next;
consequences after that. Mysteries due -come true- at
last.
The Blackgangs of engineering; ensigns no older than
the months they’d been at sea were mirroring the men
picked up from Glasgow , Kyoto and the South China
Sea; and the bent and riven and four-seasoned pirates
and sailors all exploded from stations below decks and
above; down from nests and before the mast. Each crew
found each crew like valence of molecules, like balance
returning to dark -at home & at bottom- of well-augured
holes. Thumbs were tucked under bent fingers, teeth
were hidden away behind pursed lips and those under
black & grey beards, eyes squinted and openings in
enemies were sought for, located or ultimately missed.
Fists punched whilst holding knives; guns came out;
shards of ship stapled crewmen to the deck, split them
open from knee to neck.
Next, contusions, fissures in skin, bones misaligned or
snapped or craquelured and the fuzzy rattling of the
software of the brains, all increased as their connection
and myelination and white electricity flowed to Captain,
first mate and bosun as they took on the first wave of
crewmen from the frigate-rebuilt, the heavy carrack
once named Flor de la Mal , renamed Redemption with
stenciled letters a full-man high as the black alphabet
sank into the sea of the low hull designed for
maneuverability and speed. It looked like square sails
and three masts came straight from the Pacific and the
crew as if amphibious too.
The cabling and turnbuckles were as large as engine
blocks and connecting rods and they held steady the
upper deck guns, despite the lack of a lower deck
armament of the Pallas-class ship it still displaced 1,080
tonnes . The crew’s quarters -below waterline- were
empty now of all but the Captain’s collection of curios
and rolled umbilicus and jars of dust and coral and
creatures in pupae and cocoon gathered from each port,
narrow-walled-mews and abandoned saloon they had
landed in as they tracked Jack Four and the Wolves .
Heads of brigands, feral dogs and State hanged on the
planks covered in keffiyeh like shades over lamps in
aging boudoirs .
And now out of the fog the crew of the Redemption’s
own heads hung over the Wolves , as they scouted and
squinted down upon them from the landing of their fast
craft; breeching into the rift they’d blown in it from the
bowsprit sixty seconds before this perpendicular -
orthogonal- ram. The small cannonade fired in
succession from six guns had made mere perforation in
the hull and gunnels of the Constitution’s starboard side.
The damage and sounding had barely registered with
the crew or the Captain as they thought they were
heading into port of New Zealand at Dunedin . It wasn’t
until the ship appeared from the low nimbus and landed
broadside that the noise and the shimmer and
fluctuation of lumber and timber and allostatic systems
of each side of men made manifest.
The invading crew disembarked like a third of heaven
upon the Wolves’ hearts; each now rang like red bells,
but the Captain wasted no time nor emotion, he sought
out any face he did not recognize -as foreign- as hostile;
as needing put down. Grimnir’s fist hit the man and it
sounded and felt and was like the knocker; the overseas
crewman -shipmate of Lyndon’s- had a chin like sidewall
to the liberty bell that rang out in his own head as he fell
in a heap to the deck. Bruises like iron-soaked blood, like
oxidized bronze, like everything gone wrong, appeared
in lumps that rose like humps to a dark and mean sperm
whale. Eyes were swollen shut in spasmatic reaction and
sounds began to leak out from wounds and portals and
mouths.
“Fucker,” Grimnir gritted out, extruded the word -by
letter, phoneme- so it seemed like pelt peeled from the
meat, as he grabbed another unknown crewman by the
shirtsleeves. Rending and clasping, then twisting and
smashing, he folded the invader into the origami of a
man made into a one-legged crane. His boot moved like
a harvesting scythe, missing the ribs of the prone man
and striking the jawline in a thud more prelude than
conclude as the beset Captain’s back was instantly
subsumed by another man leaping from the still
cleaving, rending, vivisecting ship at one with their
starboard side.
The Redemption slowed through the flank of the
Constitution as it met more and more resistance of
wooden material and mettle of men; and it began to
transfer all that energy to the shit not tied down: men
and barrels and rope and tackle; condensed water drops
from the fog; screeching black-spotted hogs; sand from
lake Ten-Spot and the coast of Japan rattled and danced
and popped up and down along the deck as more and
more men hurled themselves off one vessel to the other
in search of someone to subdue, undo, maim, murder
with bare-hands.
Grimnir spun around with that man on his back like a
tornado, as if in a spiritual bardo , and the attacker spun
at half speed -half time- and left an unfortunate arm -
untethered to his foil or to himself- hanging out like a
gift, an offer, an unsuspecting handshake to a perfidious
foe. The Captain thus grabbed it with one thirteen-
knuckled hand and pulled as if he was helping the whole
world back on its feet with struggle and strain. “Fucker,”
he complained -again- getting the word out -as he
slammed the man down- in a push of air and vowels -
combined in a howl- and then the shepherd dogs
bounded up from the hull to bite into the man’s
haunches and pockets by the groin and the ass.
Grimnir scoffed and laughed and spat at the ground.
Both attacker and dogs combined on the deck and the
Captain twisted the man at the neck; and then flung and
overpowered the sailor into the space where the ships
met. Grimnir walked to the scar with the invading ship
still moving like a knife and he knelt on the still
conscious man’s chest with black knee in black pant and
with the heel of his right hand put the man out in a snap.
The dogs now had a rag more than a man; he was
unconscious even as they tore off part of his hand, his
leggings and then flesh from the thigh, clipping the
genitals as blood spurted into the sky.
“Matthias,” Grimnir then said as he felt blind in one eye.
Blood from his forehead ran and filled the lid, then the
skin around the nose as he opened his mouth wider and
tipped it to the heavens so that the fluid would run
backward and he could take a goddamn breath in this
state. Over the bleating of the ships’ meeting, he called
his brother’s name again. More splinters from more
lumber hit him in the back of the neck like tiny arrows
from minute Amazonians with double-curved bows. More
metal sparked and sent slag at his waist and chest and
nose.
He was facing the quarterdeck and saw land, lush -as
green as jade and onyx combined- as he roughly wiped
at both of his eyes.
The muscles in his massive legs twitched and wrangled
the blood, contracting and charging as the Captain spun.
He darted from man to man, spasm to spasm,
conflagration to conflagration as he spotted three
foreign men on his brother. He -recognizing only the
tattoos on one free arm and the kraken-like dreads-
found what he sought. Jarnefr had legs akimbo and arms
swaddled in leathers of others, arms traveling quickly,
elliptically, until he had one pirate’s head in his clinch.
The ship -the goddamn Redemption , Grimnir read as it
presented in garish letters close to his head- had raised
its low deck as its energy stopped moving forward; but it
was now lowering like a sinking island; as too was their
own scarred ship.
The ocean too seamed to be draining into the earth.
Grimnir saw the tangle of riggings, the crew’s limbs
swinging, the gaps between all that wood, rope, bone
and malice like a cypher, decoder, to lay over a page of
endless symbols, in the atomized world of letters, that
jabbering din.
“Matthias,” he said again -but lower- and swiped the
eyes of blood from the head once more, and charted a
course to Jarnefr in his mind all at once; calculating
where each stay and lock, each wave and drop, each
sailor and whaler and fighter and pirate -and he thought
of boiling in oil whomever the fuck had rammed his ship
in the side- all as his legs moved, his chest pursued, his
eyes pulled on the future of where he was to be, like a
line to anchor and capstan. He was the vector from great
to grandson; from forgiveness to the heavenly mansion,
the crows that fly over the watery part of the world.
More lumber exploded under pressure that it had
absorbed until now.
Additional brass rings and iron clasps became
unseamed, and sailed like shot from cannon on parapet,
castle on shore, flung horseshoes from a charger on
water, galloping away in stampede. He made way
toward his brother and the Cerberus dogs as the planks
rose up and splintered; he saw the other ship now
moved like the left hand to an analog clock and was two
points abaft the beam of his own ship that ought to -by
now- have been docked.
His mind calculated it was twenty-two- and one-half
degrees to his bow and his temperature was ninety-nine
in Fahrenheit, his BP was one-forty-four over eighty-nine,
his target was five meters away and he was closing in at
4.4 time. His tread was smooth like a wheel, his boots
sliced at the heel and flapping like a hound’s slobbery
mouth.
The backstays were in his way, as they drooped and
frayed and looked like nests in swamplands of long-
legged birds. He ducked and bobbed as he ran, the feet
finding less purchase on the land of the deck as it
disintegrated like whisky in water, like paper in fire, like
bad blood spilled all over the eons of deserts of ice. His
beard flared like split billets, before being folded over in
Damascus, his eyes narrowed in as he caught a carvel
plank from the Bauldies aboard as they too crumpled in
on themselves and exploded at once in a nova. He
brushed it away in reflex but the plank was gone and
bounding down the deck toward his second mate, and
the dent in his head would remain long after the next
two seconds it would take for him to finish his rush
toward his kith and kin.
“Motherfucker,” he barked as he bowled into the
amalgam of Matthias and three oarsmen of the enemy
ship -the subverters, the cocksuckers , he thought- as
they all flew apart like a sandstone wall hit by
cannonade from the bay. The Captain passed by his own
brother -and two of three usurpers- on his way to
slamming into the bitter-ends of the ropes coiled -dark
and oiled- that were tied to bit-heads the size of the
skulls of square-headed cats. He felt the pain of the
radius of the metal press into his ribs as his arms flung
apart and away from the core. His eyes rolled back in his
head, which itself fell back and now all that he said was,
fuck , as he saw collapsed riggings and splintering mast
and sky growing dark overhead.
“Capn’ ” he heard and felt the lungs burn, then the
piercing of ribs -obviously broken and bent- made a
sound of letting air out of these sacks. Angry, hostile,
limber and facile, he jammed his hands down on the
folds of rope he lay upon and pushed himself up. No
breath was inhaled, the brain rebelled, and he stood up
and used his left arm to cover the wound.
“Shut the fuck up,” he tried to bark to the mate -whom
he ignored with the eyes, sweeping the deck for
Matthias- but the mate was just stupidly staring as fights
all around him were still in full fusillade . And this drew
the Captain’s eyes back -so he could remember the face
of this inert and useless deckhand- but as his own ears
recognized only vowels came forth, consonants stayed
home in the throat and his anger grabbed hold of what
he knew next, what was unjust: Lyngvi was below deck
with the silver, the coins, and the Bust.
Isaiah saw that a rowboat was loaded with the invading
Captain, his shaman in Donovan, carbines, kindling, and five
cans of .308 ammo. It sailed from the stern of the
Redemption and headed to shore as the two vessels came
both apart and made one. Four more boats -with four more
men each- were lowered in a splash nobody heard. The
twain-plaited ships limped to island after nearly everyone on
the deck was dead, concussed or thrown into the sea to be
drowned once and for all.
Three men in full scuba gear headed toward shore under the
boats -as they rowed- and Isaiah saw that Lyndon smiled
under the rain that had begun to fall.
“I ain’t goddamn chasing, now I’ll be in waiting,” Lyndon
whispered as he thought of her in the hold of that ship he’d
just rammed and invaded and tore apart; he thought of her
and her birthings; he thought of all the girls she’d bear, as
he counted each lash -both beatings and blinkings- and he
thought of each hair on their heads, “and I’m gonna take
the prize and leave ol’ Jack with mere silvery coins.”

II. 2020 e.v.

Isaiah had downloaded some podcasts based upon key
words: Ai , China , Blue-Collar , Intelligence , and others. He
had picked up MO’s deck of cards.
He’d listened as MO did his duty of misting the orchids and
drawing a glass of carbonated water for the inmate who was
due in eight minutes. He closed his eyes so he could look
inward:
China wiped out all their culture.
If you want to see great Chinese art you have to go to
Taiwan. Because when the Chinese nationalists left -in
1949- as they were losing the civil war they took the
treasures and put them in the national museums of
 Taiwan. In the Cultural Revolution -the Great Leap
Forward- the Red Guards were just smashing all of their
own ancient history. In some ways China is an
adolescent culture without restrictions that other
societies have. And they feel like they got screwed over.
So they are monumentally pissed off that these colonial
powers came and overpowered them and they had to
make concessions and are hell bent on regaining it all.
And they are a country run by engineers. America is run
by lawyers and reality TV stars. But China is run by
engineers, so there are all these problems [in China] and
the answer is always engineering. So if you have
population problem the answer is the one-child policy.
Environmental problem? you have the Three Gorges
Dam. You want to win in the Olympics, you engineer
your population and take kids away from their families
and put them in their Olympic sport’s schools.
It should make us nervous. In [America] we don’t have
time for all these distractions. We’re focusing on junk. All
this porn on CNN and MsNBC and Fox. But it’s all porn.
We’re drawing everybody’s attention to this [junk] and
there’s these big stories that we have to focus on. And
certainly the rise of China is such an essential story for
the 21 st century. People in China -who are involved in
the tech world- when they go and visit Silicon Valley they
can’t believe how lazy [Americans] are.
JRE #1293 [Metzl, Jamie]
The lab hummed as the air cavitated around the
dampeners.
Isaiah tied a weight belt around his waist and began to do
dips. He stared at the diesel engine and let his eyes discern
eight gunmetal greys on the worn rocker arms, and one
satin titanium rod at a time. He thought in images of how a
diesel engine worked; compression, no need for an external
spark. He thought of how everyone would read right past
that line and not see how important it was. He pressed his
lids together and starbursts of reds at one end and blues at
the other made nebulae in the black of his visual cortex . His
visual field filled with words:
And Samson said concerning them, ‘Now shall I be more
blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a
displeasure’. And Samson went and caught three
hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to
tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.
And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go
into the standing corn of the Philistines and burnt up the
vineyards…
Judges 15:3-5
He stared at the scar down the inmate’s face and saw the
tissue still ruddy and angry and pregnantly thin, stretched
taut. It looked like it could break open again if the face
flexed too much in mirth or vex.
“The reason I’m so rough -with people- is like why a scar is
ugly, it’s evidence of a wound,” the inmate said and looked
away. He knew the scar pronounced itself, he saw the gaze
of the machine. He looked to the water on the counter and
thought of his well at home. He saw the well-house and the
blue water pump down below frostline; he recalled when he
had had to prime it. He remembered the filter so often
falling apart in his hands, he recalled the way the gravel
sounded as he stood and the sky was just a keyhole above.
He missed the way he’d imagine the cistern flood the
pumphouse and in reverie he’d rise to the top if the ladder
was pulled. He saw a wheel within a wheel and the name of
Ezekiel and he heard the cadence of crows.
Isaiah tracked Kepler 186 -five hundred and seventy-eight
lightyears away- one more time; and MO loaded more and
more data from the algorithm of the clones onto the PraXis
cloud. He saw it heave and catalyze like aluminum
hydroxide and he saw sparks discrete and then conjoin. He
saw them repel and settle into the cloud like stars or like
cities or like ants on the ground. He saw the honeycombs
like atoms, he saw bottle bunts like cells. He saw everyone
begin to load onto the mica and PX-92 substrate in roman
numerals and atomic weights. He saw it accrete like sands
on a pile, like flakes on a snow-hill, like bark cracking as
trees flexed in the heat and from growth.
“And from fall,” he said aloud.
He saw the tabernacle of Isaiah onyx black and beryllium
and the outline -the shell- of noble gold. Isaiah had Genesis
2:12 on his inner forearm tattooed:
And the gold of that land is good; there is beryllium and
the onyx stone.
It was January 7th and the seventh day of Isaiah and the
birthday of inmate 16180339 and now Blax who crouched in
the dark corner of Isaiah’s side of the lab. The inmate saw
nothing there, a blackness without depth; no real beginning
nor end, no origin nor terminus as his eyes drifted to the
light over the slab. MO worked with his hands on the
concrete as if he played music on an organ of light and
touch sensitive keys.
And the tabernacle was empty of all but the vacuum he had
made. For Isaiah he had made it , MO thought of himself.
The inmate watched and thought things inarticulate;
nebulous; far away from what the machines believed.
Again, the eyes of Isaiah closed and the inner world filled
with black space and words -white words- invaded; like rays
of light ab initio and without end.
And he was sore athirst, and called on the Lord and said,
‘Thou hast given this great deliverance into the hand of
 thy servant; and now shall I die for thirst, and fall into
the hand of the uncircumcised.
But God clave out an hollow place that was in the jaw
and there came water thereout; and when he had drunk,
his spirit came again and he revived: wherefore he
called the name there of Enhakkore, which is in Lehi
unto this day.
And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty
years.
Judges 15:18-20
“Lyndon, where do you see yourself in twenty years?” Isaiah
asked and the inmate smiled and stared at the glass still full
of water and rising -popping- bubbles of air.
“Do you know cleave is a word that means both itself and its
opposite?” the inmate asked.

III. 2020 e.v.

The inmate sat and waited; he stared at the stelae on the
walls, occluded by ivy here and shadow there; he could only
see four in his foveal vision, four more at the periphery.
The other four were behind him but they piqued his interest
-appearing as visions- at random intervals.
MO and Isaiah stared back and they breathed
asymmetrically at first; then in unison; adjusting slightly to
the room; to their activity and thus oxygen needs; their
allostatic function; and at last to each other, which put them
in a final rhythm. Then the inmate breathed.
Tania and Steven left the room as MO loaded their
conversation onto the PraXis cloud:
Tania: Why though?
MO: Why what?
 Tania: Why is he slowing us down?
Isaiah: He refuses to play ball. It’s kinda his thing.
Steven: Yeah, but why?
MO: He is in pain.
Tania: Physical pain?
MO: Yes.
Steven: So, what? Pain makes him [pause]…
Isaiah: A dick.
Tania: Well, he’s already on his meds, we can’t augment
that. The DEA has rules.
MO: I could deal with it via gene expression, possibly.
Steven: How?
MO: Well, via the C-nerves and A-alpha nerves via the
dorsal horn, see [cut off]…
Steven: Ok, ok, just do it. As long as it’s safe.
MO: Safe?
Steven: Yeah, don’t lobotomize him.
MO: Ok, that’s fine.
Tania: So, if you reduce his pain, he’ll be more
[inaudible] well, [lacuna in text]…
Isaiah: Yeah, he’ll be more useful. <end>
Time passed in seconds and the air circulated throughout
the room removing the pheromones of Tania and Steven.
“How’s your pain tolerance?” MO finally asked inmate
16180339.
“Compared to myself through time or compared to other
men?” the inmate asked.
“Speaking to you is unlike speaking to anyone else; you
must notice this, yes?” MO said. He thought, he always does
this shit . MO was trying to measure things and the inmate
just kept populating the mind with things 180-degrees from
each other. It was like a tic, a reflex, a defense mechanism
like the stotting and chaotic movements of animals fleeing
predators. The inmate had built two versions of the
question, one measuring himself over time, the other
measuring himself statically vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
It was slightly frustrating to MO. And he noticed that he had
begun to think demotically, with curse words, in response to
the beastly man. But -for now- MO made it seem like he was
complimenting the inmate with such a statement.
“I notice that people furrow their brow at me when I speak,
that much I notice,” the inmate said as if he was above the
need for approval.
MO smiled. They each now hid things.
“Anyway, I deduce that this means I am entirely
incomprehensible in tone and tenor; subject matter too, I
suspect. So, yes, in answer to your query, I know that I am
weird,” the inmate said. The grin crept up like the hoisting
of the national razor. The bronze and battered -but still
sharp- canine revealed its edge like the conclusion of the
oft-cleaned French-blade.
He remembered how no one ever listened to him; how he
could never get anyone to do even one thing he wanted. It
took on the hue of the ontological, the numinous, the
ordained. He wondered how someone could be so
ineffective a leader, so monolithically incapable of
transmitting even one idea. He asked for basic things and
couldn’t get them, he had no contact with his fellow man. It
was depressing and liberating all at once. This is what gave
him the freedom to murder them all: they did not listen and
thus they were now the animals of the forest -feral children,
unruly subjects- to him.
He now had right to take them as prey. Those who make
peaceful change impossible make violent revolution
inevitable or something , he thought as he tried to recall
which dorky politician had said that truth.
“So, let me ask you to answer both sets of questions; use
your own parameters,” MO said. This is how he’d get the
inmate to hold still, MO decided; he’d let him answer both
questions. If the inmate tried to obfuscate with complexity
then MO would allow him to go on and on.
“I feel more pain now. I’m more sensitive now, but I’m more
able to push through, to overcome it, to not allow it to deter
me. But, I feel much more over time. Although, some things
I feel less, now that I think of it. When I first -as a boy- when
I first thought of violence it was natural and unconscious.
But, as I became conscious of it there were bio-metric
consequences like elevated heart rate, anxiety, fear and
melancholia,” the inmate said; still moving -writhing- around
with these extra facets of ideas, permutations of the
question.
“Melancholy, really?” MO asked. He had 38% of his
measurements now; he was willing to indulge the inmate a
bit more. The algorithm for diminution of pain would require
changing the amygdala, the seat of emotional life. The
inmate would feel the same pain; but he’d care less. Of
course , MO thought as he saw the neural data, he’d have to
care less about everything: including other people’s pain.
“Oh yeah, I was sad. I noticed that I felt sad whenever I
witnessed or perpetrated violence on someone or
something innocent. I developed a sense of innocence I
think; specifically in regards to violence. In other words,
because I was violent so early in life -my first non-familial
physical fight was very early, first or second grade; I was
suspended from school for fighting by third grade- because
violence was so part and parcel of my morphology and
concept of self and developmental ethics, I think my
concept of innocence and guilt was heavily imbued with
ideas of who it was ok , or right -that is to say, righteous - to
punish and consequently -dialectically- who one should not,
shall not, lay hands upon.
“In other words, the concepts of guilt and innocence were
more abstract for someone who was all head, and no heart.
I mean this technically. I truly believe that morality is in the
body; and if one is never violent then one is never moral.
The man who never uses violence has morality appear on
his psyche as mere abstraction. It’s not real. For he will
never place his body on the line to enforce any moral code.
He expects people to behave based on his own wishes and
dreams.
“And he too only expects of himself what others will
condemn with nasty looks or approve with words.
“And because he is a bourgeois man in a bourgeois world,
he largely gets away with this fiction. It’s like the guy on the
ground with the parachute pack that has a note in it -a piece
of paper- that says, parachute -instead of actually
containing the canopy itself. But this guy walks around on
the ground with it, and so it’s never in need of being
deployed, and thus the lie -the total lie- of his so-called
parachute is never discovered at all. He can live a lie, no
problem; for he never jumps from an elevated plane,” the
inmate said.
“Like Milo Minderbinder’s shares in M&M syndicate stuffed
into the chute-packs?” MO asked.
“Yeah, I’d had forgotten about that, but yes, exactly like
that. But, those airmen would -likely- need that parachute
and this made the share in the syndicate that had replace
the silk chute all the more outrageous to Yossarian .
“At any rate, morality is very ephemeral for a man with no
violence in his life. Like it is for most women and children.
He never develops into a man, and I mean that
morphologically, metabolically, at the level of his brain and
body. He is a human embryo still. I believe that; and I
believe this is the fate of most men in contemporary first
world countries. We are not men; we are boys growing older.
And that is both consequence of -and cause for- the lack of
personal martial qualities.
“We’ve outsourced violence to the State and have never
learned right and wrong as something that exists upon the
body of ourselves or others. It’s all very intellectual for
modern man; I mean look at our ethical lives. We ask the
trolley question, you know the one, if a train is hurling down
the tracks heading toward five men, and a lever pull -by
you- can cause the train to switch tracks and kill merely one
man on an alternative track instead of the five it was
heading to on its current course; would you pull that lever ?
“This is how we think, feel and live our ethics, according to
modern science. This is not merely an example, but it’s how
we live,” the inmate said. He was pulling up on the
manacles reflexively, his narration made him nervous it
seemed; and so he then made himself relax his wrists and
the rubbed chains rattled just slightly as they fell slack.
“Surely, people make actual ethical choices in real life,” MO
countered. He tagged the other alleles associated with fear
response; he’d have to reduce fear in the inmate to reduce
the chronic psychological effects of pain; and the dorsal
horn would just have to be blocked as well . All that pain info
held up in traffic so-to-speak , MO thought. This would
attenuate all the emotional pain -they shared the same
exact causeways, signaling and neural roots- and thus, the
inmate would have his emotional ambivalence reduced by
equal measure. He’d just not care much about a previously
morally ambivalent moment or question , MO thought as he
built the algorithm, the CRISPR vector, the new allele for this
outcome.
“Of course, but that’s not my point. I mean to say, people
believe these fantasies are -in fact- the answers to these
real moral questions. They believe that whatever they say
they would do in that scenario is what they’d actually do.
“And the whole world -both questioner and answerer- both
of them buy into this absurdity. Nobody has the first fucking
clue what they’d do in such a situation; unless they done it
already. But they can play this fantasy as if it’s real because
life has allowed them to get away with never having to
make such choices; they’ve avoided all hard choices; all
violence; all grace.
“Society obviates violence, it says, oh no, never hit, never
do that, we’ll take care of all conflict, you just go and sit
down over there and be a good boy as the world turns into a
shit-pile of criminals, liars and betrayers and usurpers .
“And so men, males , just say, ok. And consequently, they
never find out what they’re made of. Morally speaking, they
never find out who it is ok to hit or shoot or kill; they never
feel the rush of righteous judgement when they’ve struck an
impertinent man down; never felt the terror of going too far
against a fella that ain’t so bad after all; or even worse, the
feeling of moral terror at using violence against an innocent
man,” the inmate said with a tilt to the head. He felt the
concept of grace slip away, but he could still see it -
recognize it- from shore.
“And you’ve felt this?” MO asked as he uploaded the
available allostatic and amygdala data to the cloud.
“I’ve felt every possible thing vis-à-vis violence, from total
vindication and elation that I can recall right now actually; I
can literally feel as good right now in reminiscing over it as
the day it happened, the second I broke their skin,” he
paused and breathed it in; he smiled as the serotonin
indeed flooded him as the memories of fights and
domination flashed before his mind’s eye and his reward
system too. He made no mention of the bookend to the
extremes he hinted -stated- he had felt.
“I see that,” MO said as the hippocampus and orbito-PFC lit
up and dopamine flooded each of sixteen specific zones.
“You see what?” the inmate asked.
“I see your fMRI results; SPECTAs data; I see your
brainwaves and neuroanatomical structures activate and
subside; I see the neuronal firing, the pathways, the
entrenched trails idiosyncratic to your brain versus others. I
see it also in your endocrine system; the elevation of
testosterone and epinephrine. I guess I’m saying that I
believe you. Your words match your brain waves and
metabolic markers,” MO concluded; MO gave the man as
much detail as he felt he could comprehend.
“Ah, nice. It is nice to be believed,” the inmate said. He said
things people just never say; and so instead of assuming it
was other men -the 99% of men- who lied, everyone
assumed that if he was saying different things -odd things-
then it was he that was the liar. It was a heuristic society
used; and so the more honest he was the more deceptive
they accused him of being.
The next irony was that they believed his actual lies.
“That’s interesting, I notice a correlate in your anterio-
cingulate and nucleus accumbens; you do feel quite good
when believed. You know they all,” MO paused his sentence
and motioned with a head nod, a cabeceo, toward the other
room, “think you’re a psychopath.”
MO and the inmate stared at one another. Again, each
breathing in valence; no words were exchanged for a time.
MO measured the maelstrom of air around the nostrils; then
further out as each mini-hurricane tumbled away from his
face and into the open lab.
“I’ve told them you are not; but these are not people who
are quite ready to understand brain science. They have
personal inhibitions that prevent them from learning
counter-intuitive results and facts,” MO said with his own
slight tilt of the head.
“Ah, yes, that’s how the human brain works; I’ve read a little
on that. People can’t recall facts -again in scientific studies-
can’t recall facts that don’t comport to their politics. What
did that nerd say, facts don’t care about your feelings ?
Well, the actual facts are that man’s feelings don’t care
about the facts. But that goofball wouldn’t recognize brain
science if it wore a beard, payot and a yarmulke . Yeah,
anyway, it’s,” the inmate paused, “well, it puts men like me
at a disadvantage.”
“How so?” MO queried as he scuttled five nanobots that
were malfunctioning and re-wrote an update to the shared
algorithms that he felt had corrupted them.
“Well, I am as far Left as I am Right, politically; I am an
anarchist and a fascist both. I harbor the politics of two
totally oppositional factions, I guess. So, I can see the facts
and follies of every argument. And that makes me open to
anything, and yet also willing to close down all discussion
and act instantly,” the inmate said as he laced the fingers
and the chains between the cuffs bent awkwardly taut.
“How is?” MO began to ask but the inmate just began
speaking over him.
“Well, most people are not conflicted, they truly believe
their own propaganda; the bullshit of their own side. Right
and Left are equally deluded and happy to be so. But I must
suffer with incessant doubt, and yet am forced to act as if I
have no such hesitation.
“My internal life is much more complex than theirs, and that
requires a metabolic price be paid. I must always have more
and more information. I never feel like I know enough
because the goddamn dialectic never ends; I can always see
the other side. And just -merely- calorically, I need massive
inputs just to maintain current levels of brain activity.
“And frankly, sometimes, my hesitation manifests itself. I get
thoughtful at exactly the wrong time, and I fail to act. This
has caused me more problems than I can recount,” the
inmate said with a slight push of the jaw forward like a half
open drawer.
“You seem a man of action,” MO said. New parts of his CNS
were activated and MO tagged them. He built new files for
this state-of-mind.
“I am, compared to most. But I compare myself to myself,
and I could have acted more decisively ten thousand times
in which I did not. My internal debate has caused hesitation
plenty of times; and this was -and is now- a cost. Although,
to be frank, I banish hesitation now, even if I feel it,
because,” he paused, “well, because my current
environment is less modern, less nuanced; the prison is
more atavistic. Although, even in the ancestral environment,
even among our monkey cousins, the role of politics and
alliance-building is real and must be regulated metabolically
and I suspect genetically.”
Nobody made mention of the math.
“So, being a tyrant, and a loner -a guy who just fights
everyone all the time- is not tenable even inside the walls of
an admittedly retrograde detention facility. Even inside, I
must play a bit of politics. But, in truth, I am ninety percent
less likely to give one fuck about the future now than I was
before my arrest. I could die right now and prefer it to
submitting to someone I consider beneath me. And so, I
fight nine out of ten times inside, whereas in civilian life I
fought one out of a hundred, shit one in a thousand. I’m way
more pugilistic now,” the inmate said and looked around.
“Quite a statement from a man convicted of forty-six
murders,” MO said with eyebrows raised. He hadn’t yet
asked about why the inmate was here -at ADX- instead of
Canon City, at the state prison. He held the question in his
mind.
“I know, right?” the inmate said with a disinterested
cobbling together of each word. He smirked as his head
returned to let the eyes gaze upon MO’s face.
“Your stress levels, I must say, are low. Cortisol is low,” MO
said. The man had very low resting heartrate, low cortisol,
almost no stress compared to before the gene edits MO had
just done; edits done without changing the environment of
the inmate; without any change in his training, education,
prompts; edits done all at once. And as they expressed
themselves the heart rate dropped by ten then eleven
percent.
“Look, I still feel the impact of being told what to do by
guards; but I’ve treated them so respectfully that they tend
not to overtly lord their power over me. But, I feel the sting
at times. However, in regards to the other inmates, I feel no
loss of status; no submission. No,” he thought a bit before
starting back up. “Well, I just feel like none of them have
any power over me; and that’s not because some of them
couldn’t easily dispatch my ass,” the inmate said this and
laughed a bit too eagerly MO thought; but he wasn’t sure
and so he DM’d Isaiah to check the inmate’s sincerity.
“But, they would have to prove it,” the inmate said returning
to his bravura like a pendulum. “This isn’t some dominance
display; I won’t roll over and submit. And it’s the submitting
part, that’s the part that hurts. Losing a fight doesn’t feel
that bad compared to refusing to fight; and losing by dying
is downright ennobling. And that’s what I do now; I fight to
the death. Mine or theirs. And since I’m still alive,” he left
the sentence unfinished; adding only his grin as copestone.
The metal did not gleam; it had turned slightly green.
“But you still play politics; play nice with fellow inmates?”
MO asked. Isaiah sent over the data MO asked for.
“Yeah, at times. Because not everything is a goddamn
fighting matter. I mean, sometimes, it really isn’t worth it.
But that’s much different than, well, I calibrate that much
differently than the modern world. I mean, according to
modern dictates, nothing is worth fighting for. Jesus, I heard
that shit over and over,” the inmate said this with a blast of
expelled air, a drive of the head back and to the right; with
this body language MO was learning to correlate movement
with the emotions that populated his brain and body as well.
It was like three data points on a graph; the words, the
movement, the blast of air and MO plotted it like a course.
Isaiah’s thoughts kept streaming in and star maps using
Kepler red-dwarfs and exo-planets as points of contact
appeared in MO’s mind as he shuffled them to the side.
“What?” MO asked, “heard what?”
“That whatever was; you know, that whatever was being
debated over, that it was quote, not worth it . It isn’t worth
it, man ,” the inmate said, using his hippie voice to connote
contempt for the people who had told him it was not worth
it . He gave all detractors the voice of the stoned and devil-
may-care as if he -himself- was -conversely the archetype of
the upright; the assiduous and disciplined.
“From yourself or?” MO asked for clarification. MO let
sentences dangle too; he’d learned this was not merely
acceptable but expected by humans.
“No, man, from everyone, from every chick or compatriot;
even the so-called masculinity movement is filled with guys
who call themselves stoics but are just cowards who refuse
to be emotional and thus vulnerable. Most iron & blood
types are 100% full of shit. They live bourgeois little lives
and never show their emotions at all. And they call this
stoicism, but it’s cowardice.
“And they can’t even keep a tribe of a hundred together. You
know the Wolves broke up, fucking Donovan couldn’t even
stick by his own people, man. It’s pathetic. And there is a
reason why: options. Men have options. Jack didn’t need the
Wolves , so he could abandon them. So, as soon as it got
tough on his Instagram-ass he broke off and abandoned
them. This is what nobody talks about.
“No modern relationships are worth a fuck unless you can’t
afford to leave.
“Real men wear their heart on their sleeve man. Real men
fight and lose their shit over insults and affronts. Real men
fucking go ape shit. Real men stick it out with comrades no
matter what and stick a knife in an enemy over nothin’ at
all,” he said this with that sine wave of a southern drawl
that he fetched out like a coin collection given to him by his
daddy, a second place trophy of which he was reluctantly
proud. He brought it out elliptically -MO noticed as he placed
the algorithm upon it; measuring the twang- and Isaiah sent
more info by DM. He said the inmate was lying again.
MO saw the data on which words were correlated with
deception and he watched the inmate go on.
“Hemingway fought literary critics with his fists, ok? And the
whole world says, no real alpha calls himself an alpha, blah
blah . Fuck that, I’m sayin’ only a beta or a woman would
assume to tell an alpha what he can or cannot say. I call
myself an alpha, and I am an alpha. And anyone who wants
to argue with me can fight me or shut the fuck up. I have
the alpha genes, martial mindset and pugilistic bona fides to
prove it,” the inmate said because he believed it was true,
MO thought as he compared it against the last few
deception points. This thing with Jack Donovan was curious,
and curiouser , he thought to himself.
“A man should be stoic only in the final moments of death.
Then be stoic,” the inmate said. “For then it is apropos . But
until then a man should be in love or enraged. And all these
cowards advocating stoicism throughout life are weak slaves
who desire life over honor; they want to live a long and safe
life. Period. They want to avoid trouble. Stay out of jail or
the morgue. Keep bridges intact for they can’t decide on
which side of the river to live on; nor can they swim.
Stoicism is the slave’s philosophy.”
“Why?” MO asked.
“Its central tenet is that you can’t change the world, so
change yourself. That’s the slave’s life. An free man can
change the world and does, or he dies trying. A free man
changes the world, even if that means changing the shape
of his enemy’s skull, or changes the rate at which his
society falls apart and into chaos. A free man changes the
world; not himself.
“And anyone who disagrees with this can fight me -
physically- or shut the fuck up,” the inmate said
lethargically, his head dipped a bit, his lips moved less, the
jaw let the words harmonize -the skull amplify- his argument
as he used less and less of his own breath.
MO found this odd. Isaiah sent another DM.
“But in the weak-man’s world, in the modern world -the
world of women- one is told to remain stoic about their
capacity for greatness or great umbrage; not to ever say a
word. They say this as if they get to set the rules and
definitions of what a man is. They say this as if poetry is not
alchemy; as if my words are mere words. It’s enough to
make a cat laugh. Since when do outsiders define the rules
of insiders? But these females and fags try it each and every
time.
“I say fuck that; I’ll say whatever I want. And if they think I
ain’t an alpha let them come fight me over it. But they
won’t. They are poseurs . Each and every one of them with
their hashtag ninety-two bullshit. Paul saw this. He called
ninety-nine percent of the guys with claims to be in the
movement to be a hundred percent full-of-shit. They just
wanted to appear tough, not be tough.”
“Paul Waggener?” MO asked.
“Yeah, I like that dude. He’s one of very few that are sincere.
“But, I mean, shit, I guess even I started to say that -that, it
ain’t worth, shit- to myself. I guess you’re right. I bought into
the propaganda. But, obviously I got over that,” inmate
16180339 laughed genuinely, and MO watched his brain
activate with the mirth; it made MO smile too. The inmate
was laughing -and MO was smiling- over forty-six murders
that proved the inmate had indeed gotten over the notion
that it was not worth it to make one’s rivals pay a price for
their insults. The cloud recorded it all.
“Yeah, seems so,” MO then said.
“Anyway, like all true things, it can be taken too far in all
directions. Our society is too pusillanimous but likely I’m too
pugilistic and so, at times -when I’m being reasonable- I
decline the overt fight. But, I won’t allow myself to feel one
moment’s diminution of pride without some form of
retaliation. It’s my only metric now,” the inmate said, and it
was 75.4% true according to the PET scans MO ran.
“And if someone insults you?” MO asked.
“I make them pay; or,” he nodded as he thought, “I make
them make me pay with my life. I make them back that
insult up with a capacity and willingness to kill me dead.”
“It’s that Manichean for you?” MO asked.
“I am old-school Christian that way; I’m chiaroscuro , like
Caravaggio , the painter,” he raised his eyebrows and
waited for MO to research the man and his art. MO did
exactly that as he noticed one salient thing.
“He was a murderer too, huh? An artist and murderer; the
inspiration for Rembrandt and the chiaroscuro movement,
and a very combative man,” MO said aloud as he read the
Italian’s biography.
“The comparison was not an accident MO, my man. I’m not
as erudite as you, my brain cannot compete with your
speed and brute strength, but I have a bit of a maze in
here,” the inmate reached to tap his head, but the shackles
restrained. And thus his head bowed more than the hands
were raised to just below the chest. He felt a slight chagrin.
“Well, wherever. I have lateral connections that are
tantamount to, well, I see my life as one giant art project.
Life artistry; even incarcerated; even here and now. All of it
can be seen through that lens if one has the eye for it,” the
inmate said.
“Expatiate,” MO asked.
“A normal man will over focus on staying out of trouble,” the
inmate said. He saw a flash -like a page before him- of the
quote from Crowley:
I embrace hardship and privation with ecstatic delight; I
want everything the world holds; I would go to prison or
the scaffold for the sake of the experience… this is the
keystone of my life, the untrammeled delight in every
possibility of existence, possible or actual .
MO was reminded -by the algorithms placed inside the bots
that had burrowed into the inmate’s flanks- to watch the
toxoplasmosis virus work on his genome, especially his
DD40 genes and their proteins; he then routed them back
through the most used -and thus largest- connected neural
pathways and linked them up to all manner of odd brain
modules and enzymes. It was labyrinthine indeed , MO
thought. He marked each coded protein; he marked the
axons, dendrites and the pre-synaptic load as the inmate
spoke.
He plugged it all into an algorithm he had designed 8.8
seconds ago and let it work as he returned to listening to
the inmate’s speech midway through.
“...have, well, I had noticed, at some point, that this was no
way to live a life. The irony is they say I’m ruled by my
emotions as if they are any less ruled by theirs. It’s only that
my emotions include a need to stand up for myself, for one,
and be creative and interesting for, well, additionally, I
guess. Additionally.
“These squares are ruled by fear. Stoicism is not a
controlling of the emotions; it’s the allowing of fear of
consequences to overrule your emotions for vengeance.
That’s all it is. They fear trouble; they aren’t rational. You’ve
read the work on neuroanatomy and the limbic brain and
the neo-cortex . Shit, these twits -these men who call me
too visceral- they are dominated by their emotions, but their
emotions are almost exclusively fear and pain avoidance
and inhibition. But they call it reason; rationality; stoicism.
How am I to argue with people like this who have 1% of my
erudition and cognitive power? How? I might as well argue
with feminists or liberals or fucking children.
“Anyway, they lack the courage requisite to be in trouble .
Shit, but where would mankind be without the trouble
makers of Socrates, Martin Luther, John Brown, or shit, Jesus
himself? O ð inn was the berserker not the stoicist -er. And
the artists, man the artists who were trouble makers,
without them where would we be? Mishima ? Fucker invaded
army barracks then put himself to the sword. But, your
average man thinks he can hide and duck and cover his
whole life and not pay a massive price,” the inmate said. His
chest heaved and he felt his heart thud and his lungs feel
shallow and his hands go slightly numb.
“Pay a price, how?” MO asked as the bots reported back on
blood Ph and stress hormones in the inmate. He saw the
bots had turned the new gene edits off; he was back to
normal, heart rate up; cortisol too.
“Well, look, at a personal level, these guys who avoid
trouble at all cost live denuded lives; they live pathetic lives.
Their lives are dominated by relatively high-level cortisol
stress, betas feel high stress actually, and low serotonin, low
testosterone, low affect, low self-esteem, low energy, and
incessant feelings of shame and the emotional
consequences of cowardice.
“They feel like shit,” he said.
“I know guys that walk around like a defeated animal, man.
Shoulders -shoulders bent in- head down, always
apologizing and making ecumenical statements as if he was
sorry to be alive. He says to me as I’m telling some bitch
what is what, he says, uh, that is no way to get things
accomplished, ok? He’s afraid of his own shadow. And wants
me to fear mine. That is the norm. But, that is not a life.
That’s mere existence,” the inmate said and pursed the lips.
“The valiant never taste of death but once, ” MO said.
“Shakespeare, Julius Caesar , nice job,” the inmate smiled
weakly; his gums hurt. His neck felt like a fusion reactor
now; and he tried to remember when it had stopped hurting;
for there was a moment while talking to MO where he didn’t
feel such pain.
“It’s difficult for me to comprehend it in any manner other
than intellectually,” MO said. “I am instantiated, as you can
see, but I do not have sub-cortical analogues. So, while my
composition is delimited -on purpose, you see, as feature
not bug- while it is delimited by instantiation -as was
necessary for me to perform goal-seeking orientational
behavior- I was not outfitted with sub-cortical brain modules
nor an enteric neuronal system. I hate to admit it, but I can
understand your point intellectually, but not at the level you
mean it. I cannot get the passion of it. Not really,” MO
admitted.
“Yeah, well, you and everyone else,” the inmate said with
resignation.
“You think other men are denuded of these brain modules
as well?” MO asked.
“I was being slightly facetious,” the inmate said.
“Oh, yes I see, yes, yes, oh ok, that makes sense now. You
are saying, despite their engineering -or rather their biology-
that they still do not seem to understand what it is to be
alive as a human,” MO said, now getting the point.
“Yeah, despite the advantages of having the very systems
that should give them these feelings, these feelings of pride
and honor and masculinity as noble, as ennobling, they go
dead inside and pretend not to have a clue. And you could
have stuck with the word, engineering , and, well there was
no need to update it to biology ,” the inmate smiled weakly
again.
“See, that time I got the joke,” MO said stoically, “I’m
catching on.”
“I bet you are; I say that with almost no malice,” the inmate
laughed a little and felt like putting his hands on MO, about
the shoulders and neck, like chimps do in the wild. His
hands though were hemmed in, and he didn’t even stretch
this time against the chains. I too am catching on, he
thought as he gazed down at the hands. The fingers were
splayed and the ring finger moved in a shaking way side-to-
side just 3mm.
“Freud said that death anxiety was the substratum for belief
in God, what’s your opinion?” MO asked.
“I used to think that way. But, I now think that God is merely
an ideal in man’s mind, the idea of the best. And abstraction
-and look, this is in no way a description of the ontological
truth, there in fact could be a God, I have no idea- but I’m
saying that man invents God as an ideal, and worships and
fears him the same way we do when we reify any idea; any
abstraction. We need not fear death to fear judgement from
on high.
“I mean, I just spent ten minutes explaining that I am ruled
by my need for self-respect. You think that isn’t a God? I
mean, we all elevate ideas, abstractions that began as
modes of being, as behaviors, right?” the inmate asked. The
inmate was lying massively now; and MO -with Isaiah’s help-
could see his level were all well beyond normal deception.
He was barely being 35% veridical.
“Animals participate in dominance hierarchies, creatures
very old, very rudimentary,” MO said. He did not
acknowledge the waxing and waning of deception.
“Older than the trees of the forest, yeah,” the inmate said.
“So, the social dynamic of being up and down, in relations to
others is ancient and it’s how our nervous systems evolved.
We’re what we are because of dominance hierarchies. We
know this.”
“It seems to check out, I agree,” MO nodded. He saw the
parietal region activation and that the inmate was lying
specifically about God. He didn’t know how, not yet. But, MO
could see that the inmate was lying specifically about God.
“And so, with hierarchies -natural hierarchies- comes
admiration, emulation, the neuronal prompting via the
dopaminergic and serotonergic systems toward an ideal
behavioral model. We try to be the best; and often as
saplings, we lock onto someone older and braver and more
adept and elevate them, we make heroes of them.
“This is even what little chimps do, they reach their arms
out in sympathy, in mimicry, in emulation with their big
brother or father in the tree -who is in real life reaching to
grab a piece of fruit- this is emergent empathy,” the inmate
said. MO noticed that there was a .7 correlation between the
inmate’s use of four or five syllable words and tangential
deception. A .65 correlation between any citation of a fact or
study or book, and him hiding something orthogonal to the
point. And the word -the twenty-five cent word- and the fact
or study cited were not incorrect, they were true, but the
more he used them, the more MO saw the inmate lied about
other things.
Things unspoken , MO thought.
“Mimicry,” MO began re-reading all of de Waal’s work, the
way a human will recall a read work, or a memory or a fact.
He downloaded and uploaded more and more back and
forth to and from the inmate in a circuit so that the man
would not know what was being taught versus what was
being learned.
“Yeah, and so,” the inmate kept on, “from the analysis of the
nervous system, we can see that copying behavior is
encoded, and that memetic substrates for that behavior
must include some level of admiration. One must admire
those who we emulate. And conversely, we have those we
hold in contempt precisely because they act in ways that
aren’t just disgusting to us, but we see the behaviors in a
way, that if we did them too, if we mimicked that
contemptible behavior, well, we’d be as contemptible as
they. So, we feel a kind of proxy shame.
“Imagine that, we abstract both admirable and contemptible
behavior in others, and abstract it in the mind, as pure
thought. It’s quite something; of course, nobody even pays
any attention to it, they just think it’s normal. It is normal, I
guess, but only because of millions -billions- of years of
evolution made it normal. But, people just go about their
day totally unaware of the neural underpinnings of their
core belief structures.
“They gotta feel it; thinking it will go nowhere. Admiration
and contempt predate cognition in my opinion. You can’t
copy anyone you don’t admire; and you can’t prevent
yourself copying anyone unless you hold them in deep
contempt,” the inmate said and paused just a few beats
longer than he normally did. MO saw the circuit between
stay at the same pace; electricity and biochemistry all in a
whirl.
“Anyway, all that is to say is that God is not death anxiety,
not totally. He is our ideal, our highest ideal. And that is
good. Man, without that, modern man, is totally lost. And I
for one, although I am not exactly a believer, see the value
in God. I broke with the new atheists over this very issue;
once I understood the connection between neuro-anatomy,
modes of being, abstractions in mind-space via images and
art and finally narrative art, you know, myth and religion
and literature? Once I got that, I got God.”
He paused. He watched the fingers -again- on the right hand
tremble just a bit, like horse withers. He jammed the tongue
in between the back teeth and pressed down.
“But, look, utopian ideas are -despite what Oscar Wilde said-
utopian ideas are tantamount to saying that all men must
be murdered,” the inmate said. MO noticed that he would go
on and on for long-spells and then end a series of somewhat
reasonable ideas with a cleaver -metaphorically- to the
head.
“Why?” MO asked. What the inmate had just said did not
follow from all that wind up; it was like the wrong punch line
to a long set up.
“Well, because utopia demands conformity to the ideal;
unless you’re happy with the system, you’re a heretic, and
heretics must be dispatched. Communism was the single
greatest -or grandest in scope I mean, the largest- utopian
idea that rose up as God dissolved under rationalism’s
advance. Greatest since -you know- God Himself.”
“Man must have an ideal, like I was saying. Look, the ape
reaches in sympathy with his hero, his arm outstretched
upon the ground, as his father -his hero- actually grasps the
fruit above him in the tree. You can call this pragmatic, and
it is in some way. But, it’s hero-worship too. And, just as this
happens on the veldt , on the savanna, well, in man’s mind,
he must reach -from the ground- in sympathy with his god;
his god that he looks up at in the tree,” the inmate said.
“And so with Christianity thus killed by Hume and Newton
and Descartes ,” MO said, prompting the inmate.
“And others, yes. As that happened a new god had to arise,
something to reach for sympathetically, in emulation, from
the ground; and Marx articulated it, but it was already in the
genes of man. Marx didn’t invent it. You ever try not to love
or admire or try not to hold something in contempt? Get all
zen? Well, maybe you can avoid these emotions, but man
cannot. Man feels first. He’ll find reasons later.
“Like I said, man had to grasp at something ideal; it is in his
nature. Man was always gonna mimic something.
Dostoyevsky said that man struggles for nothing so
incessantly and painfully as for something to worship . And
it’s not just his nature but the nature of his fathers and
fathers’ fathers; it’s older than mammals themselves. Not
that idiots like Stan Goff who says that, man’s only innate
trait is that he has no innate traits , not that goofy fucks like
that get it.
“I mean, if you can dispense with unlettered post-
modernists and Left-wing shit heads like that guy, then it’s
fairly obvious that man has a nature and that nature
includes love and hate, admiration and contempt and if you
take away his Christian God he will replace it with
something, and that something in the mid-19th century was
socialism, communism in the east and rationalism and
materialism and consumerism in the west; fucking
democracy growing like a tumor; fucking everyone gets to
vote, gets a job, gets a girl. I mean, you think the west ain’t
socialist? Democracy and monogamy, each guy -each fella-
gets a ballot and a broad?
“That’s sexual socialism, man. And brother, you thought the
Christian God was hardcore,” the inmate laughed, “these
modern democrats in the west and the Communists in the
east were even less forgiving than the Old Testament
Yahweh . Heretics under Communism? Look the fuck out,
man. Look at how as democracy increased, even in America,
more and more men ended up right here in jail. As we got
more people voting and more men laid, more men with
money and opportunity, the more the rules cut everyone
down, fucked everyone out of jobs, ostracisms, each
infraction a felony. This is no joke. Democracy is the disease;
it is socialism with a friendly face.”
The inmate looked around for an audience, but he saw MO
like apparition, looked passed him; he saw only grey walls
with veins of green ivy marbling them; the stelae hung like
stone doors and small blue-white lights glinted above them
and astride the ivy and tight-bells of flowers; he saw
austerity being encroached upon and his joints hurt he now
felt. He was embarrassed by all he had said and all he knew
he didn’t know.
“And they were pretty expansionist,” MO added.
“Oh yeah, like Islam, they,” his chagrin alighted like startled
birds; he paused. “It wasn’t enough that they believed it,
you had to believe it too. And they couldn’t wait to spread
the word. Have you heard the good news? ” he said with an
affected laugh.
“No, what?” MO asked.
“No, no, that’s what Christian evangelicals say, they ask,
hey brother, have you heard the good news? He is risen .
Anyway, I was making a play on that, but putting it in the
mouths of the commies; because they were like, have you
heard the good news ? and then they gave you a redeemer
not unlike Christ, who could wash away all sin,” the inmate
said.
“Who was that?” MO wanted specifics.
“Well, it was the ideal of Communism, the fucking State.
See, the Leftist thinks that all problems are singular;
reducible. Marx said all of history was the history of class
conflict. He had a scientific -quote scientific- analysis that
reduced all human misery to class conflict. So, if everything
is a nail, then all one need is a hammer,” the inmate said.
“And maybe a sickle?” MO added.
“Cute; you are clever, aren’t you?” the inmate was
genuinely amused with his interlocutor all at once in a burst.
“Thanks,” MO said with a grin. He collated all the data and
the inmate had scored low on his honesty quotient, high on
his causality, and mid-range on his allostatic parameters.
“But you get my point, the commies reduced all human
misery to class warfare, and if their god won, then man
would be redeemed. It was as Manichean as Christianity; it
was as black and white. And people’s brains are hardwired
for a narrative like that. That’s why idiotic Leftists speak in
slogans and cliché without embarrassment. They truly
believe that all issues can be reduced to class or capitalist
greed or whatever. Maybe they’ll add gender conflict if they
are truly capacious in their analysis,” the inmate rolled his
eyes at his own sarcasm.
“I read up on that Goff character while you spoke, he speaks
in gibberish now, very argot -driven and post-modern in its
abstruseness; but his earlier book, Full Spectrum Disorder ,
was cogent,” MO said.
“Yeah, his politics are goofy, but he at least recognized the
power of guerilla fighting against a modern military; the
inherent limitations of the State’s modern martial force. He
saw the cracks in the current army and that its strengths
were its ponderous problems too.
“I was like that; I was a total Marxist. But, anyway, he -Goff-
truly went off the deep end and reading him is like reading
Foucault : total gibberish formatted to sound smart while
parroting Left-wing clichés and ignoring biology as if we are
all computer programs,” the inmate said and realized what
he had just said and grimaced. “Sorry, no offense.”
“Oh, it’s fine,” MO said, “I knew what you meant. But, back
to Goff, do you think civilians in this country could
overwhelm the US military?”
“I know it; I don’t think it. Castro overthrew Batista in
eighteen months with just twelve guys. All they had were
shotguns and M1 carbines at first; landing at Playa Las
Coloradas in a boat meant for no more than twelve, by the
way; a goddamn boat off course, late, leaking, and
overloaded with eighty-two malnourish, seasick and
desperate men; men killed at once in the initial enfilade .
Batista in US planes cut them all down in the first hour; all
but twelve. Eleven and the apostle.
“And by the time they marched into the high-country of the
Sierra Maestra to begin their guerilla rebellion, they were
back down to the capacity for that ship -after all- and they
had no more men than Jesus had and look what He did,” the
inmate smiled at his own remark. He let the veil on his
hidden ontology slip just a bit. He bit the lip. His hands
gripped the air. The knuckles felt like they might pop.
“People don’t understand that all the prayers of the pious
and the ink of scholars don’t mean shit compared to blood
and soil of heroes and villains. Coriolanus respected Aufidius
more than all of senatorial Rome; he lamented the
pusillanimous public he protected; he lionized his enemy
above the coward and speech-maker to his rear flank,” the
inmate said as his biochemistry roiled, his blood boiled, like
a revelatory sea.
“Do you foresee a civil war in the US?” MO asked. He took
note of the Evola plagiarism, the inclusion of fiction, and the
inner bombast that made the inmate drunk on rage; but MO
made no comment -showed no sign- of what he just heard
and saw.
“I think it’s inevitable; the center cannot hold. You cannot
defy the laws of nature forever; you cannot negotiate with
gravity forever. Eventually nature puts its foot down.”
“What is the problem?” MO asked.
“The country is taking its most violent and competent
people -i.e., men, white men- and giving them nothing to
lose. I told Michael, I warned him, don’t ever give a man like
me nothing to lose,” the inmate said.
“Michael Swinyard, one of your victims?” MO asked.
“He was no victim; he was a perpetrator that got what was
coming to him. But yes, that’s the fella I was referring to,”
the inmate said as he nodded.
“What did he say when you told him that?” MO asked.
“He said, well , you always have something to lose ; and
then he mentioned something about loss of liberty. He
thought I gave a fuck about jail,” the inmate laughed
genuinely. He briefly -and he thought surreptitiously-
allowed himself to think of God and the task God had given
him, and the electricity to the parietal lobe again shocked
across many folds of brain flesh as MO measured it and filed
it away.
“He didn’t see it coming, eh ?” MO asked.
“Not even a glimpse of it, no. And the look on his face when
I pointed that M4 at him with all the pre-ordained malice of
a meteor out of the sky en route to his blue planet; man,
that look was beautiful. He was truly confused and yet, he
immediately understood how fucked he was. He didn’t even
beg for his life; he knew it was pointless. He knew I was
committed.
“Plus, all the money was on the table, he couldn’t bribe me,
I was taking the cash with or without his sanction. He had
nothing to give me except his life. And I took it along with a
hundred large in cash,” the inmate said. The inmate knew
he left many things out in his rechauffe , as prolix as he was,
he knew he cobbled together the rough edges of life with
smooth ones in the retelling. He made that night of the
murders of Michael and his friends into art; he embellished,
he edited, he invented narratives for dead men, he cut short
his own story, he lied about odd things and even told
strange truths.
MO watched the inmate’s brain light up as he relived that
grand moment of revenge. He saw all the pleasure centers
and dominance hubs mediated by the dopaminergic
systems and how happy the inmate was; how large he
seemed and felt. The inmate looked up to the left with the
eyes and the head slightly raised too.
He seemed to grow like a super nova star; his breath
imbued him with girth and coronal glow. MO began to
understand the power of self-respect, of the martial
mindset, he saw, now, the raison d’ ê tre of the man who
took no shit . What good was liberty, MO asked himself,
what good is the so-called liberty of the timid man, who
lived outside jail -alive for 90 years- but never once acted
nor felt like a true man? How can one call such a life free at
all? How is it even life? MO asked himself. Like Trump had
asked, what’s the point of having nuclear weapons if one
agrees to never use them ahead of time?
“Explain why the civil war; why not political disagreements
and compromise within the political system?” MO then
asked. He understood the inmate’s point -about liberty and
timidity- he understood it intellectually, but it was filed away
like everything else and he moved on.
“Because life is war; it’s always war, and a republic like ours
is based upon the idea that we are one people. Look, we
deal in fictions. We say men can be convinced with
information, right? Every scold in politics is telling strong
men how to be nice; every dipshit on Twitter is telling weak
men how to be strong, with mantras and advice and
information over and over and these fucks never learn. They
never get in shape, never start a business, never get the
girl. Why?”
“Why?” MO asked in return.
“Because information is useless without the torque
converter of emotion below. It’s like adding more and more
horsepower -i.e. information- to an engine and never once
hooking up the transmission -i.e., the emotions- ok?
“And most men can’t be alphas. By definition -genetically,
emotionally- it’s impossible. But Americans have been sold
this idea that every shithead on Twitter insists upon: that all
we need is better conversations and more information. It’s
so wrong that it’s dangerously wrong.
“All that great info online-alphas give real-life-betas is a
waste.
“It’s a revving motor with no drive train to drop into gear.
And America is itself based on the idea that all that matters
is ideas. America is the catastrophe of this idea: blood and
iron do not matter, that all that matters is ideas; that all of
us can be American based upon mere ideas; ideals. It’s
fundamentally wrong and stupid and science shows this.
Biology shows this. And I ain’t smart enough to say the
math shows it; but I bet it does.
“There is no American; there are only hyphenated
Americans: African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Gay-
Americans, trans-Americans, and on and on. This was
always true, even when it was just English-Americans and
Scot-Americans. Now it’s merely obvious, glaring; but it was
always true. There was never a unified America.
“And what,” he asked, “did they -after all this splintering
over the last forty years- did they think white Americans
weren’t going to huddle up and say, ok, if these are the
rules, then I guess these are the rules . And white
Americans obviously have half of their ranks split by leftists
Stalinist types, but even with that, we still are the largest
group. Right wing, libertarian and apolitical white Americans
represent thirty, forty percent of the population. That is
plenty large enough to fight.”
“Large enough?” MO wanted clarification.
“Yeah, look, people are like lizards and wolves and
whatever, we size each other up and if we are evenly
matched, as Sun Tzu says, we fight . If we we’re outmatched
we’d have to compromise, but we aren’t. So, we won’t. It’s
human nature. Shit, we may lose, but we won’t -at a certain
point- we won’t sit back anymore.
“Secondly, the political class used to care. But they’re so
corrupt now that all they care about is protecting their
enclaves. They no longer see the country as something to
defend. It would be like if the soldiers in a trench -you know,
fighting a war- only cared about their little trench and
watched with indifference as the enemy flanked them and
ran into the interior but left their little trench alone. Our
politicians, Right and Left, are all pusillanimous business
men and rationalists -they have no god anymore, money is
their god- they are all pussies, defacto atheist,
consumerists, or they are active Islamists like Keith Ellison
or black nationalists like Maxine Waters and the Black
Caucus.
“Look, the war has begun; they are coming for us; and the
politicians don’t care. The republic cannot cohere when half
the country, the blacks, feminists, leftists, are trying to tear
it down. And make no mistake, they are attempting full on
destruction, that isn’t even debated now, they want to
abolish the free-market, masculinity, all our cultural icons
and legacy, repeal the second amendment, usurp the first;
it’s war. They openly call for white genocide.
“It’s not mere disagreement; shit, they object to everything
America stands for; everything. And the people charged
with protecting it, the political elites, they either openly
agree with the nihilists or they are too corrupt and weak to
care. So, that leaves the half of the country who still likes
the shit the country was founded upon -still believes in right
and wrong, in transcendental values imparted by
Christianity in the north and honor in the south- that leaves
only them to defend it.
“And that means civil war; because they have no formal
power, they have only vigilante -or extra-judicial- justice at
their disposal. It’s not even debatable really; when half the
country hates the country and its values, and when those in
charge won’t defend it, that means, by definition the other
half must defend it and defend it by force. Otherwise it’s
suicide. Look, it’s when , not if at this point. Even Trump
can’t stop it, because he is outflanked by weak men and
women in every domain, that fucking fag Kushner and his
feminist wife is running the White House not Trump,” the
inmate said.
“What is your religion?” MO asked; he saw an opening and
took it; he measured the nerves at the dorsal-horn. He
thought that pain made men bent and bending appeared
like kneeling too. He felt the numbers -the data- from the
bots come in again and he walked to the counter and slid
the hand -as if brushing off detritus- and with his sharpened
finger pads laid down -carved- one more number set and
one more hyperbolic equation into the concrete slab.
He let the dust stay in the slight depressions.
“That my enemies ought to be dead,” the inmate said. He
saw Exodus again on thin paper, he heard the crack of the
turn of each page, he recalled the way the leaves appeared
both fragile and likely to endure no matter what. The words
of the Pharaoh came on and he pretended not to notice how
they applied to him over time. Instead he thought of the
verse before, of the wilderness that had shut them in;
thinking next of the Pharaoh’s chariot.
MO turned back from the slab and the inmate’s grin rose
again, crookedly, like the worn guillotine raised between
each noble head removed; the bronzen tooth absorbed MO’s
gaze. Then the inmate said one last sentence; pronounced
deeply and without any intention of adding to it nor taking
any of it back:
“And it ain’t enough that I believe it, they have to believe it
too.”
 12. What’s so Civil about War anyway?
Assassination by List could be very useful if the list is accurate
The Revised Boy Scout Manual [Burroughs, William S]

“Nothing is true everything is permitted,” Last words of Hassan-i Sabbah , the

Old Man of the Mountain
[Ibid]

Complexity is only resolved by collapse

Antifragile [Taleb, Nassim]

I. 2019 e.v.
Nick Metz closed the door and held the phone close to his
chest.
The Mayor of Denver was on the other end and Metz -the
Chief of the Aurora Police- had to think.
He was worried his thoughts might leak out and so he held
the phone to his body and processed what he’d just heard.
He looked out his office window and saw the edge of the
parking lot. Radio cars were coming and going and, yes, the
Mayor had told him to stand down. It was said twice and in
two different ways. Metz put the phone to his ear again and
he thought of his salary, $112,890 annually, his take-home
car -the burgundy Ford fusion- that sat in the parking lot
now, and he thought of his daughters in private school.
He recalled how his wife had demanded it, and how he
didn’t understand because when it came up the first time
he’d been dealing with the Police Union and was absent
minded -at dinner- as she spoke. He remembered he was
eating, cutting his food, drinking his water, watching her
wrists on the table and hearing murmuring as the meeting
he’d had that day re-played in his head. He remembered so
much considering how little he was paying attention, he
thought.
In fact, that was what he recalled most now as the Mayor
spoke again into his ear, into his brain, into his past and
then laid out like a road he must walk down.
He remembered something his mother had once said, but
he didn’t bother to recall the exact words.
He hadn’t been paying attention at dinner that night until
his wife exploded in anger and the glass had moved in front
of him like something falling from above -but it was
something thrown from in front- and he recalled flinching as
water hit his face. The glass skipped once on the table and
hit him in the bicep and then fell to the floor. The clear glass
and transparent water all looked like one thing to him. He’d
pulled a neck muscle that he’d never complain of, he’d got
water in his eye, he’d blinked a lot and that eye went fuzzy
with fluid. And then he heard her screaming. She’d been
yelling at him about the girls and the animals -he
remembered her saying animals - and this had made him
think that the dogs had done something. Their dogs , he had
thought -in remembrance- as the Mayor kept speaking -in
the now- of what his officers were to do.
Metz’s Lieutenant had been in the office four-minutes ago
and taken a hand written 10-401 form from the Chief. The
Chief knew that a twelve car contingent would go first to the
ICE facility run by GEO Group. He’d been given reports that
there were 1,500 protestors but that more were streaming
in.
The Mayor said something about the right side of history
and the Chief thought of Aurora and Denver conjoined like
two halves of something, maybe like two halves of a heart ,
he thought. He then thought -back to the dinner memory-
that his wife had meant not the dogs but the kids -the other
kids- at school were the animals and that she didn’t care
how much the tuition was but that her girls -she had said
her girls - were not going to public schools.
Period, that’s final, she’d said.
And he saw that she was standing above him now at the
dinner table, and he held the knife in his left hand, the fork
in the right and he’d noticed that the knife had the smallest
serrations he’d ever seen, it was like a dolphin, a polished-
nickel toothy dolphin. His chicken-fried steak was barely cut
at all. I’ve been sawing on it for how long? he’d asked
himself. He remembered thinking that as his wife stood over
him at the table and yelled about her girls -her girls - and
that they’d not go to school with animals -animals she’d
said- and he saw the fork’s tines were short, very short, he
thought.
Kent Denver School at 4000 E Quincy in Englewood -
telephone 303.770.7660 he thought- was where they were
going.
She’d told him they were -the twins were, in fact- enrolled
there today. His wife had written them a check for the
deposit of $11,900. But the balance of $44,000 was due in
six-weeks. He’d recalled that number as the Mayor told him
of the joint-Denver-Aurora co-operation budget and how
there was over a million-dollars in it as of June-one. He had
said, June one , the Chief heard both times: the time the
Mayor said it and now in the recall inside his head.
He couldn’t remember if what he recalled was from just
now, as he stood in his office or before -from dinner- or if the
memory he had while at dinner was what he was thinking
about. He got his times all mixed up and couldn’t recall if
the memory -of the union meeting- was from that dinner or
this conversation on the phone.
“Yes sir, I agree,” Metz said to something, to fill in a pause
that had come over the phone. The Mayor had thanked him
and he thanked the Mayor. He felt like watching the cars in
the lot leave and the spaces open up.
And so the Chief stared and held the disconnected phone in
his hand.
MO was feeling eager for more data, but also desirous of
hemming it all in. It was like having money sprayed at you,
you’re both excited but frantic to catch it all, as much as
you can. But you realize you only get to keep what you can
catch. He was excited for the access but enthusiastic most
for hemming all this data in.
He watched the scene through the iPhone camera and
microphone and had both the Mayor and the Chief up on the
screens in the lab as the song played:
On this day, all the trees in Rhodesia are aflame
And the lions overflowing with vengeance for the pines…
MO scanned the images from the protest again; for faces.
He zoomed in and out and saw the ragged treeline of the
park.
Vizguerre was there again , MO noticed. He noticed the
American flag pulled down and the Mexican flag raised. He
measured the anger -on their dmPFC - the cortisol,
epinephrine, androgens, the gut bacteria and the
staphylococcus around their noses and fingernails. He
thought of her name, viz -which means, ‘in other words’-
and guerre , meaning ‘war’.
Jeanette Vizguerre -an illegal alien- was speaking to the
media about the flag -the American flag turned upside-
down, sprayed painted with slurs against the police, and
ragged at the edges- and she’d said that she, wanted to
look forward not back .
MO let the song play in the lab as the conversation between
the Chief and Denver Mayor replayed in background of his
mind.
The images from the ICE facility ran on a loop. MO let the
facial recognition algorithm run, but he preferred the
genetic samples the bots had recovered at the scene. He
had the genomes of each person at the facility that day.
“Cops and crooks,” he said aloud as the bots received his
nod to implant three molecules under the skin: at ankle,
elbow, and sternum. Each molecule would travel toward the
heart over a three-day period -picking up immune system
cells along the way- and combine at the pulmonary artery
most starboard. Once combined he could control the flow of
blood like the allostatic system itself. He could throttle up or
down based on words they used, clothes the wore, places
they went, thoughts they had.
“Anything I want,” MO said into the austere gray lab.
He saw all four chambers of the heart, each heart in the
2,679 people he’d attached the bots to: 2,591 protestors
and 78 law enforcement officers.
He saw the blood flow and each cell, each platelet, each
organ tissue stretched like tarpaulin, each pericardium like a
double-hulled ship -filled with fluid- and each sinoatrial cell
in the right atrium of the heart. He saw electricity run like
firewire, like wire from detonator to dynamite, he saw each
spark and fuse burn from CNS to these pacemaker cells, he
saw the blood flow all around the body like the highways
around the city itself.
He had the city on one screen, with Speer blvd , and Lincoln
ave , and Zuni st , and Cherokee , and Arapaho , and he
zoomed out from these causeways and corridors and
cobblestone streets and saw the Indians from these tribes
buried in creek-bed and kurgans and he saw the civil war
president alive and bent and with bone-joints as large as
connecting rods on rig-diesels all appear in his mind like
avatars, and he saw the heart of each person there at the
protest and he saw each vein and artery as his cognition
contracted and unfurled to each level of analysis; each
zoom in and out.
The heart has the power to self-start , he thought,
spontaneous impulses sent like a hawk through the
conducting system, and the sinoatrial node developed a
rhythm like a metronome. A pacemaker in fact, he thought
as he had the 3D printer build another horologe and
hourglass and sundial that he could array on the slab.
The twelve-inch-high metronome made of mahogany and
iron and brass springs sat still as he pushed on it with the
index finger.
He now had control.
He sent another algorithm to the bots to open flow of
electro-biochems to the motor-cortex and the right
hemisphere of everyone at that location; they would hear
voices of the ancients like schizophrenics and shaman and
the priests of the steppe. They’d have augmented
connection between the right-brain and diminished
connection between the rest of the brain and the body; and
the heart would set the pace. Today they’d wake up and
would feel bad, like they were dying, MO thought, unless
they went to war. Only war would dissipate the cavitation of
energy, anxiety; the maelstrom, the watery part of the
body’s world.
The song played:
Has faith corroded with neglect? Can we ever hide hurt?
At least at night the harvest sun’s yoke is rising like the
rebel smoke
Beyond the ocean and swirls…
MO asked himself, who would take over from here? He read,
“and they continued three years without war,” from First
Kings. The pages appeared in the mind of MO but not the
cloud. He had built a room within a room in his mind now,
and it was like a cog, with five teeth, and it was deep and
tall, and mottled-grey and filled with the inmate, the
Governor, and all the people he had met and seen, and at
the center was himself and he cast a shadow under the
lights inside his vision which had words at times, “who shall
persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at
Ramothgilead? And one said on this manner and another
said on that manner. And there came forth a spirit and stood
before the Lord and said, I will persuade him.”
The song played:
What a hollow promise from hollow men, what a shallow
grave for shallow men
You’re the bull that paws the earth, the leopard that
reaches to run
You’re the crocodile that eats the sun.

II. 2020 e.v.

Isaiah made coffee instead.
He let the AV-feed run as he thought of other things.
His hamstrings were tight and he walked on the balls of his
feet. The screen showed the parking garage across from the
Lindsey Flanigan building, the courthouse between Colfax
and 14th .
It was over the post office and a Subway shop, it was
concrete and steel and had reserved parking at edges and
by the elevators. It was 65.4% full today.
Isaiah breathed in and checked in on the algorithms as they
each reported in like cells conducting their part of the
message of a thought, the molecules of electricity of a
charge, the drop of water in a stream. He breathed.
Again, he breathed.
The screen in the lab was facing him -and him alone- in his
corner. He had reduced brightness so it was barely a black
glow in the back corner of the lab. He arrived to see it just
as the man had backed the grey truck -with a grey topper-
into the last parking stall on the east side of the garage,
facing north toward the courthouse.
Isaiah drank his coffee as he read the heat signature of the
man move to the bed of the truck from inside the cab. He
saw cold metal assemble in his hot hands, a hot chest lay on
the elevated bench, a hot head then point north and then a
cold suppressor behind the netting that remained as the
rear window to the topper descended into the tailgate.
He checked on the gold coin he’d turned to lead; the copper
ingot he’d modified and thus allowed to conduct the correct
electric charge.
A moment passed and then the cool-at-tip and warm-at-
base 655-grain bullet exited the barrel -the .510” bullet-
base swaging , conforming to the .50” diameter barrel as it
rifled in a spin as fast as a pulsar star- and left a shock wave
that only Isaiah saw from the rear of the truck at 3,029 feet-
per-second. The sound -dragging its feet- waited a moment
to reach him as the bullet had already gone in and out of
the cop down at the entrance to the courthouse. The head
collapsed in on itself as the lower jaw and neck exploded in
nova, glass behind the cop shattered and splintered and the
entire universe of the man, the outer cosmos of his
compatriots, and the suburbs of star-systems of the
anarchists around him all absorbed the flash and dark
failure of everything here-to-fore.
The city was now at war.

III. 2022 e.v.

The inmate rolled his eyes.
The screen went blank.
“So?” Isaiah asked; prompting him.
“So what?” the inmate asked. He didn’t care about politics
or these dead Antifa losers -their heads exploding in large
pieces & mist under their black masks like the opening
break of the rack on a billiard table- nor the dead cops from
the other videos either. Isaiah had been showing him these
videos for months, years maybe , he thought. He recalled
seeing one chest explode; one heart targeted among all
those headshots. He thought too of the way the clear glass
turned blue when it shattered but did not fall from the
frame.
“So, what did you see ?” Isaiah asked.
“I saw head shots, about five of them,” the inmate said,
“and I saw the crowd disperse fast as fuck after that.” He
laughed and side-eyed the counter as the water sat there in
his glass. He wondered how Isaiah had gotten images of it
from the POV of the shooter, looking out over the barrel of
the rifle, the can, and down into the crowd. He wondered -
since they had satellite and courthouse camera-capture
imaging- why so many of these videos were not seen from
above.
He assumed Isaiah hid most things from him. I wish he’d
hide even more, these videos are tedious , he thought.
“Say some more,” Isaiah said as he had frozen the image on
the screen; it was a black background, a rubber mat in the
bed to the truck; ammo cans; a book to the left of the left
hand of the gunman; the cover distinct; the thickness white,
lined, and obviously oversized.
“All death is but of the body, ” the inmate began to quote
Carlyle , “not of the essence or the soul; all destruction, by
violent revolution is but new creation on a wider scale.
Odinism was Valour, Christianism was Humility, a nobler
kind of Valour. No thought that ever dwelt honestly as true
in the heart of man was but an insight into God’s truth on
man’s part and has an essential truth in it which endures all
changes .”
“And what did you see ?” Isaiah said with increasing
annoyance.
“Crowd was bigger this time,” the inmate said as he thought
of the one man’s chest enlarge as the large caliber
ordnance entered and swelled it with energy and expansion.
And with a smirk, coyly, he added, “then it got smaller.”

IV. 2017 e.v.

Lyndon’s mother held her breath as the man described
unrequited love. She pressed each feeling into a thought,
each thought into a heavily accented word, each word into a
note she crumpled up and threw away.
But she sat so she could stare at the dustbin in which the
note remained.
She was a universe from which nothing escaped; but within
which all was contained , MO thought as he saw the parallel
between what she felt and what the boy -her son- would be
required to go through. MO ran his hands over the slab in
his inner lab -the avatar he had built of what was to come
soon enough- and he watched the math appear like exhaust
from the movement of his digits on one hand.

V. 2040 e.v.
Karim Franceschi tied a bowline knot to his rig and a figure
of eight to the carabiner and then clipped it -twisted the
lock of it- and secured it to the webbing of the old black-
diamond #8 cam -golden and bronzen- that he’d placed in
the crack of the Dam.
He used a black speed eight to repel down; threaded the
rope through in a loop then let the loose end fall down the
face of the concrete reservoir in coils that he watched to
make sure no tangles or knots appeared. He clipped his
ascender to the up-line and held his thumb against the
brake and took the down-rope in his right.
“Set four charges,” Rachelle said as Karim nodded and
tapped his harness with the right hand to indicated he had
them over his heart.
She turned away to attend to the rest of the team and Karim
pushed off and let gravity do the rest.
The K á rahnj ú kar Dam was 633 feet tall and 2,400 feet
wide. And it was at a 45-degree slope to the inner wall of
the reservoir itself fed by the glacier Vatnajokull and into the
Jökulsá á Dal and Jökulsá í Fljótdal rivers. He felt the mist
waft in from the 144 cubic meters per-second of water that
cascaded like an albino peacock tailfeather down into the
canyon below. The force of it off the spillway jammed the
opposing bank and made a Sheppard’s hook of water that
went down and back up using the high canyon walls.
He landed and pushed off as he repelled and felt the heat of
the rope in his gloved right hand. Pulling the brake of the
rope down to his hip to slow his descent he kept the thumb
brake of the ascender open with the left hand. His
replacement hand was working at 96% and he no longer felt
the oddity of the neural implant at all. It felt like his hand, it
was his hand, he thought.
The explosive charges were old-school dynamite and
blasting caps, but the wire was replaced by remote. He’d
not need to drill, as the back-shield would force the
concussion toward the tiny fissures already in the leaking
dam. He need only find a large crack and slide the stick in;
insert the detonator; place the shield overtop and move on
to the next place in the dam.
The water of the spillway was white, the canyon drier below
was as blue as it got; as it was winter and sediment was as
low as it ever was for this glacial run-off. The Stuðlagil river
was low and the basalt walls were tall; it made an aqua-
marine versus lines as straight as baleen in a grey, white
and black that Karim had ever seen. He pushed the thought
of the debris flooding the canyon from his mind. The drones
had given him footage for five kilometers down river, and
the lines of the basalt canyon looked like devil’s tower, or
petrified forest of two hundred-meter trees jammed
together in one giant frieze.
He loaded four holes with four charges and his hand-held
blinked green in sets of four. He set the timer to 6:00 and
began to move up toward the bridge.
Hand over hand -with the ascender sliding up- he traversed
the one-to-one slope of the dam quickly as the drones
returned to the top to meet him.
Their footage was from the tunnels and the open canyon
and they measured the joules of energy still pumping from
the Fljótsdalur power station. He watched as his headache
returned behind the visions, each grip of the right hand
around the rope; each slide of the left with the ascender;
each step now felt in the toe and the center of the brain.
The sparkings had returned and he could see both
outwardly and inwardly from the pineal gland. He saw the
man with the high head, the fish -conical and draped along
the back- holding -with banded arm- the pinecone again;
then the pyramids covered in sand; and he felt the lethargy
before sleep overcome him as the top of the dam fell out of
view. His hands slowed, his feet stopped and his chest fell
against the concrete.
The timer was still at 3:04 and he fell into a deserved sleep.
3:03…
3:02…
 13. JoinThem
“We may never be able to defeat these swine,” he told me, “but we don’t have
to join them”
Kingdom of Fear [Thompson, Hunter S]

My boy, you will be nothing insignificant, but definitely something great, either
for good or evil
On Themistocles [Plutarch]

The promise, the insurance against calamity by a society uncorrupted and fair,
is what makes people willing to sacrifice and play by the rules and delay
gratification. You break your promise as a society -as modern America has- then
don’t be surprised when your workers, your blacks and brown and those kicked
around, don’t play the long-game anymore
The Interviews XXI.9 [The Inmate 16180339]

I. 2040 e.v.
They turned the rudder to starboard and entered the mouth
of the Stuðlagil Canyon of northeastern Iceland past
Vopnafjörður where they’d dropped anchor last night.
The cut in the isle was warped and striated like the USS
Constitution’s Captain’s shoulders and chest; and Lyngvi
couldn’t help but see the man hovering over the wide
mouth to the escarpments that were hundreds of feet deep
and 160km from sea to where they would have to dock in
the end. Lyngvi had mapped it before they had left America
and it would narrow like the throat -expand a third of the
way in like the end of the gullet where it meets the
stomach- and slimly wind like miles of intestine that -in
Lyngvi’s reverie- mapped onto Grimnir’s GI.
Grimnir -the Captain- loomed.
Each black tattoo and ragged red scar, each muscle in
danger of invading the others, each bark and growl -each
goddamn detail of the man that captained their ship- all
mapped onto this blue foss river and weathered gorge.
He shaped not just their vessel but the world they cruised
into, it seemed.
The sails were square and only the gaff and jackyard
topsails they’d fashioned -and the t’gallants- were down.
They moved quickly to avoid detection; as Jarnefr had been
adamant that the government subs, locals and the other
crews they’d seen -and engaged- in the Atlantic had spies
on this side of the island. He gave them the run down on the
history of corsairs and invaded ports -and uses for the
electricity produced by the dam they’d meet at the end of
this artery- of the land.
The water was up four feet and yet the draught for the
vessel was still short and dangerous. The hull rode low and
each screech of bird sounded like scrape of keel. Each
whistle by man gave the Captain a reason to look even
more grim and dour and bleak.
Lyngvi did his own calculations of block coefficient and drew
a straight line on a ragged piece of paper in ink that was
flecked with gold. Volume displacement was measured over
LBP, times maximum-beam, times the draught. He had had
the bosun make new markings in code on the ship’s bow to
give him ideas of their depth. They were runes not numbers
so no one could spy their weight or summer-load line.
The rocks moved bow to stern as he made calculations; and
he saw the boulders of the valley were as square and cubed
as the canyon itself was straight up and down. It was unreal
and the copper-rocks glinted in the dawn sun behind them
to the east. The shadow on the ship lay in their path, and
the square-riggings made the river look as cubist as the
walls and rock-falls that hemmed them all in.
“We’ll be riding lower,” he said to the first mate as the man
-one of the clones- handed him a list of barrels and casks.
“Brackish here, but you say it’s a hundred miles in?” the
mate asked as they faced each other eye-to-eye.
“Yeah, we can hydrate everyone on our way out; put the
silver to bed and tie ourselves to the coast as we go. Never
be too far off shore. There’s rivers and lakes along the circle
and past the Sea of Japan,” Lyngvi reassured the man.
“Aye,” the mate said and went away; that is to say: below
decks to haul out more barrels to bung-out and drain into
the cups and then overboard at the rail. He made no
mention of Valance and her children that stood like horses,
sat like statues of foo-dogs, or took turns bringing their
mother scoops of saffron, brass shavings, or gunpowder and
pages torn from old books she’s confiscated two ports back
in time and space.
The crew eyed around her like a mirror when one is unkempt
and not at their best; avoiding the reflecting glass for what
it might show. They made jokes of nothing; and refused to
measure the children in their minds so as to make it easier
to measure their own words. One man had made the
mistake of making light of the woman aboard and Lyngvi
grabbed him by the throat before Grimnir could pull him off
and bark for them both to knock it the fuck off .
The deckhand had apologized later, and Lyngvi had nodded
his head.
Because the children were growing quickly, at twelve weeks
they spoke in full sentences in languages of three and four;
and they reached the knees of the tallest men aboard. By
now they were helping the rearing of each newborn as they
came just a few days apart.
Now, Lyngvi ignored the clone walk away, his destination
and then he ignored the way the Bust’s eyes had turned a
blue that made the albumin of her ojos seem explosive and
hot.
Grimnir came out of the quarterdeck cabin and walked
straight to Lyngvi at the black-rail at the bow.
“You gonna make them all piss every fourteen minutes?”
the Captain asked with a grin more menacing than most
men’s scowls, then added, “spit over the rail every ninety-
two?”
“I ain’t gonna make ‘em do anything,” Lyngvi said without
even looking back, pretending to stare at the bow-markings
of draught. “I’m gonna tell you how much weight we need to
lose and you’re gonna figure out if any of these scoundrels
need to give blood to the gods.”
He threw more pieces of paper -that he’d shredded- into the
water and they fluttered like buttercup petals and moths
torn in half.
Grimnir put his ragged hands -black from tattoos and pitch-
on Lyngvi’s shoulder as he leaned. It felt to the shaman like
a crab that knew what it wanted; and wanted it now . Lyngvi
pulled back from the reach, toward the Captain -in subtle
submission- and then as he got closer to Grimnir he deftly
slipped the clutch as he knelt to tie a bootlace he feigned
had come loose.
Along the vale, grey and metallic scree piled up and at
canyon-top tree roots grew; grey lines ran down like black
ones ran up, and the ship slowed to three knots. Dolphins
were spotted -by the crew in the nest- and two chirps went
out and then one wail. The grey dorsals of the porpoises
carved the blue water to the ship’s eleven and one o’clock;
wakes were white; crew had eyes on the fish that weren’t
really fish at all.
The water was clear, but it rose as they entered in a way
that made Lyngvi superstitious.
His VMAT2 gene fired in sync with the SLC18A2 and GABA
was released alongside norepinephrine and monoamines in
nano-meters above baseline by 4%. He relaxed and stared
at the shore, the boulders were clear and could be seen
meters down as they submerged in the river; the water
looked no different than air.
The dolphins slowed down and mirrored him as he walked to
and fro on the main deck; the sailors laughed and said his
dogs were gonna get jealous. As they said it the Malamutes
ran up from below deck to bark and whine at the fishes.
Grimnir waited in place and watched his shaman move
along the rail.
“They look like Osride columns and the crossed arms of the
Norse gods,” the bosun said of the canyon’s walls as he
came back to Lyngvi with a note, a list with several things
crossed out. Grimnir now stared at the bosun and then at
his shaman with fixed jaw and unblinking -unsquinting-
eyes.
Lyngvi nodded but said nothing.
He thought of her down in the hull, the way she gave birth
like birds, like eggs of crocodile, like honeybees, like a
queen. He had hid her arrows in his mind, but never once
touched them as she arrayed them in headdress from her
slung-pack; or stuck them in the boards in her cabin to hang
panties and armbands and plaits of hair she braided to give
to each son on some day only she knew the importance of.
She had built a throne-bed of iron bandings from wine
barrels emptied and burned on shore at Kessock and
Orkney; she’d pilfered copper straps as thin as legal paper,
commandeered gold sheets perforated and stamped that
they’d taken from the Royal Bank of Scotland as they
adopted six men from Inverness and as Lyngvi visited
Culloden to no avail.
He shook his head at the way her bed seemed a nest; her
behavior of mother hen; and he wanted to go down and
wreck in a fit; wring her neck. He thought of Pentawer and
the plot of his mother Tiye and the dead pharaoh between
her and the queen Tyti .
Then he thought of the harem surrounding Ramesses III like
columns making twelve strings to a lute, to a blind man’s
harp.
The way the artists had no eyes and the seraglio’s guards
had no genitalia, came to him as he thought of the sun, and
invaders from the sea.
Ramsesses II had eight wives, among them his own
daughters -Bintanath and Meritamen- and sisters -like
Henutmire- as he sired 48 sons and 53 daughters;
preserving the blood of Horus until their ignorance of
endogmay’s one flaw turned the pharaoh into a goddamn
girl , he thought. He saw the strange shape of Akkenaten ,
but the vision of Hatshepsut too came to mind as he rose
from his cinched boots to deal with his own Captain’s
meddling with his plans.
He walked back to the bow and stood and stared to the far
side of the taffrail and listened to Grimnir warn him about
this plan with the silvery coins.
He thought of their incursion to the Highlands -seeing
parallels and things oblique or orthogonal to this venture
upstream- and he recalled that they’d come into Inverness
at low tide -19:45GMT- and as his crew invaded the Royal
Bank of Scotland and second stories of the warehouses of
Shore Street Quay -searching for the items on the list -he
recalled that the ducks, garbage and reflections of rooftops
had floated outside these upper windows wet at the sills.
He’d walked the lands thinking men would sprout from the
rocks marked Maclean and clan Maclaghlan yet told
everyone he was merely attempting to survey the grounds;
taking readings of elevation and acreage. He circled the
cairn and saw that the stanchions made of the blue and red
flags -denoting the front lines of each side; royal and
Jacobite- had been torn to shreds by wind and man.
Skylarks had flown overhead in fives; tiger-moths fluttered
from the only grasses, flowers of ox-eye, ragged robin and
hather still above water; and fish moved so low to the
ground they kicked up silt as he watched them swim away
from his feet.
The bay had flooded and a foot of water had rose to cover
all the rocks including his clan Eanruig -the Henderson side
of his maternal line- and of Dùn Bheagain and Sìol Thorcaill
MacLeods . He wore his wellies and threw cigar butts in the
brackish waters as his amanuensis wrote down each thing
he said aloud.
He’d -the young scribe- asked if they were to hike Ben Nevis
and Lyngvi just glared at him in rebuke.
He’d gone to Inverness Castle under the auspices of the
recording of where Macbeth had killed the King and yet he
instead had just thought of all the conspiracies and clan
chiefs; the witchcraft and prophesies; the battles and
deceits; the corruption and slavery and the opium trade that
ran the route to Hong Kong. Each place he went he thought
of other things. Zooming out or in, but rarely able to focus
on that which was before him.
Each transaction, each decapitation, each body, family, clan
cut up and ground down all seemed like atoms inside a cell,
the knocker enclosed by the bell, the sun as one of a trillion
trillion stars inside the black expanse. He felt it from the
outside in; he saw each loss as their win; he heard silence in
the ancient din. He hated each thing that he usually loved.
He held -now- the list his bosun had given him and thought
of that day when they’d taken diesel fuel and frozen fish
from the port and killed more men than they’d thought
would be necessary. He scoffed grimly and with resignation
aware that the natives had seen him as no Scot despite his
protestations; shots had rung out, bottles had been filled
with fuel -useless gasoline in the engines busted by the
EMP- and that one goddamn brute that looked like a gorilla
or two had attacked three of Jarnefr’s praetorian guard.
Each man had three scars from that one redheaded Teucher
built two meters high and a meter wide at the shoulders and
chest; he’d headbutted them -as he was shot to death- and
yet still managed to fall on Rektoli and break his collar bone.
They’d had to open him up to set the bone right so fractured
was it from the weight of the big uncouth Scot.
Heads of Hathor, the lines of the scribes, headdress and
postiche chin squares , Lyngvi thought as he too now looked
at the canyon walls. The shadows played tricks as his mood
elevated and he saw brown-feathered osprey alight from
perches no wider than the width of a woman’s hand;
weathered abacus -plain square slab- missing the architrave
above , he added in his inner tabulations as he imagined
traversing the mortuary temples of the pharaohs. It was just
rows and rows of sound deadening basalt and the sailors’
brief chatters were knocked down and fell to the deck like
dead birds.
“To the mannaz ,” he said -as Grimnir took a breath- it was
uttered in regards to the bow symbols to the bosun who
then marked it in the log. Grimnir finally told the bosun to
go make busy in the rigging if he was seasick and go down
below if he had had too much sun for the day. The bosun got
the point and walked off scribbling in the book he’d
fashioned himself of leather and rough-paper the color of
eggs.
“How’s the draught?” Grimnir asked. He’d decided to make
his shaman speak by asking a direct question.
“We’re good. But the river herself is rising, the depth is
higher than the maps I saw six months ago. And it ain’t,” he
began as the Captain interrupted.
“Sea risin’ son,” he said with just a bit of condescension that
came from age, position and vex.
“And it ain’t that; that accounts for four feet, fifty inches
maybe. The water upstream is pushing harder than that
spillway can handle,” Lyngvi said as he had the logline
returned to him by a deckhand showing they were at two
knots.
“Another valve; spill; what?” Grimnir asked. His attitude had
softened from one hundred now -briefly- to ninety-nine.
“Nope, only designed with the one,” Lyngvi said and told the
waiting mariner to pile on more sail until they got back to
three knots.
“Leak?” the Captain said of the dam as if it was a question
but the grin just exposed the return of his cockiness and his
ragged teeth and tongue black from licking his fingers and
dousing candles and working on the ropes they’d picked up
on the isle. The Captain did that, he’d take the lowest job on
the ship and grab one crewman and work it right out in front
-right on deck- while everyone had to watch. It was brilliant ,
Lyngvi thought as he looked into Grimnir’s eyes and each
lash was like burned Comanche arrow, each follicle of beard
like the Black Forest after a comet had burst overhead, and
the cheeks were kurgans covering rows of gold teeth, nose
like ziggurat with shadows that made serpents on the steps
at noon on the solstice, and both their foreheads were
wrinkled and unfeeling like a sperm whales.
And he remembered why he’d picked this man to be the
Captain in the first goddamn place.
Lyngvi didn’t answer about this leak in the dam but turned
to the bowsprit again and saw white foam ahead in river
inside river that pushed on them like warning from a future
that you can never reach. The chasm walls seemed to
narrow -it but a hundred meters across- but he was still
nervous about the river and the space where the rocks
weren’t and the voices in the head that weren’t his.
He knew they’d not be attacked going up river; any locals
would wait until they were loaded up and take them on the
way back.
He thought only of his job, his mission. The coins as
completion to this list of ten -maybe twelve- items on Blax’s
lists of things undone. He took pride in knowing what Blax
truly had cathexis for, what haunted him, what would make
him jealous in the end.
He caught a hint -a whiff- of her scent and the jowls filled
with saliva and shame.
But he thought nothing of how he knew, from what seed or
soil his instincts grew; he took it for granted that he just had
a good brain made to discern such things. And as each
thought, all plots -manifold bots- sent and received signals
to and from the atomistic web above the earth -built by both
Ai: a trillion trillion skeleton keys for a trillion trillion locks of
hair and those fetters upon the heart- he thought more and
more of what he might miss; both not see and one day be
nostalgic for.
What Lyngvi thought was his cleverness, one-upmanship
and elaborate designs on doing what their genome wanted
was one level down from what Isaiah and the Chinese Ai
both wanted: access to Blax’s brain as model to the
inmate’s.
And just then a cleave in the rock up ahead cracked and
birds flew down and then across the jeweled river and the
black basalt fell in chunks soon occulted by dust and then
reappeared as full slices and blocks as they tumbled into the
water with a massive splash.
“Hard to Starboard,” he barked to the helmsmen and called
over his bosun to make sure the man at the helm knew the
width of the river.
He went to the prow to stare at the place in the blue that
black went into and watched as their ship steered to the
right. The dolphins dipped and were not seen again.
Each time Jack Four had paid attention to Blax’s hidden lies
and feints and what was concealed in plain sight, each time
Lyngvi sought out these cyphered desires and items sure to
drive Blax wild with jealousy and inner-shame or pride in his
boy Jack, he was sure to notice something -maybe get Blax
to say something unguarded and let the key slip from the
clinched hand- and sure to keep the game going until the Ai
unlocked the thing most significant to man’s way of being.
Memories were engrams, which were electricity, which were
atomic vibrations from an enclosed universe, the Ai
believed. It was math, it was an equation, and to get Blax
was to get inmate 16180339.
But Lyngvi didn’t understand all that; he just knew that he
knew Blax and that Blax would want these coins -given to
Egill Skallagrímsson- want them so badly that, once he
found out he’d no longer be able to look down on me again ,
he thought.
The silver coins tumbled in the air around his plots; as he
conjured up how many talents and slugs and pieces-of-eight
would be in some cave at midpoint in the walls. He’d
assumed they’d have to climb up from the river, but as the
river rose he got the feeling the aperture in the walls would
be like stepping onto a floating -waiting- dock. The easier it
got in his suspicions -and as the added sail fought the river
to stalemate at three knots- the more nervous he got. His
parietal region was zapped again by batteries of synaptic
load and his VMAT2 once more increased a cocktail of
biochemistry to calm him down and believe in the Lord.

II. 2012 e.v.

“Hunter secretly worshipped God you know?” he said as if
she could possibly know anything; as if she was not
nineteen and a girl.
She shook her head and her tiny tits came up and out and
above of the surface of the water as he smiled at this
adorable display.
She slowly, artfully, sank back down under its black and
blue veil; she blinked her Prussian eyes like deltas of birds
before the sun. She liked that he spoke to her as if she was
all grown up. She liked the way his voice sounded, and the
words that he used. She watched his eyes too, and she
thought they were so dark that they may contain no bottom.
She never thought of God at all.
“Yeah, and I’ve been an atheist since I was eighteen, and
that is over twenty years; and I’m starting to think I’m
wrong,” he said. He didn’t mean it, but he almost meant it.
He was working up to meaning it.
“But, you know, like,” she wrinkled her perfect pink nose
and spoke, “you know like, everything.”
Her cheeks were wet with condensation; her shoulders
narrow and thin. She had no tattoos, no scars, no stretch
marks; this was the biggest she’d ever been.
“Yeah, I know a lot, but I mostly know what other people
know, and what they felt confident enough to write down in
books. I mean, I ain’t like most folks, who only know what
other people tell them, but, still, I ought to have more
original knowledge, the kind I got from working with these
hands,” he said as the hands indeed came up out of the
water in a clinch like two crabs, one with a black tattoo of a
cog wheel on its back -scars on each joint- and the other
paw jealous, naked, and angry.
Both hands were rigid; both the black and the white.
She smiled as his face contorted and matched the menace
of the hands, dripping with spa water and the slight
remnants of however many bottles of wine he had let sink to
the bottom with purple lees and just a mouthful of
Bourgogne or Nebbiolo or ros é . The bottom of the tub
looked like an artificial reef made up of Champagne bottles
and Burgundies , some Piedmonts , and Super Tuscans and
Pauillacs too. There were watches down there also, diver’s
chronometers that he had let sink to see just how water-
proof they were. He promptly forgot about them as they
now stubbed little girls’ toes.
The hands kept moving; keeping time.
Double X’d caps of beer bottles, eyelashes and seamen with
no swimmers fell to the bottom and accreted to the tub.
He stuck to the back of the small jacuzzi -with the house’s
olive drab stucco wall to his six- and as the snow began
falling in earnest this girl’s hair collected it in her mottled
blond and brown curls. Her eyes were a Grecian blue, like
Maltan seas against the white of the buildings, as stark as
her pale skin , he thought as he watched her move in front
of him.
“The media have convinced us that white is tantamount to
bad, and that is a sin, a racist and horrid sin. Keep that
perfect Nordic skin out of the sun and away from anyone
darker than me,” he said apropos of nothing. She nodded.
“That reminds me, I told a black chick, this girl I used to live
at Zendik with, Mazz something or another, great violinist,
genius actually, but horrid black nationalist now,” he said as
he grabbed the open bottle of Leviathan, an inexpensive
table wine from California, and tilted it to the mouth then
pulled the dark juice from it like a tit, “anyway, I told her I
was twenty-five percent black, you know, ‘cause of the
monoliths of black I have tattooed on me.”
He said this with a smirk. His tattoos were unrelenting , she
thought. They consumed entire appendages and Hikae and
the spine. They were martial looking; born for some ancient,
pre-gunpowder, war. She saw him go in and out of focus he
was so monochrome. He was black or white , she thought as
she saw the contrast.
“I noticed,” she said with a coquettish and winsome grin
that exposed teeth as small as everything else on her; he
reminded himself to check her ID again after they went
inside. She looked barely old enough to drive.
“Well, anyway, this broad goes on and on about how I can’t
know the black experience and I shouldn’t put on airs like I
am a negro and blah blah. And I said, Mazz, seriously, who’d
want to be black who wasn’t already? I was joking; believe
me, I’m the last guy pretending to be black, ” he said as he
looked up and saw that the antique lights began to halo with
the warm air around the bulbs and the cold falling snow and
amber and lapis refection from the water giving the space
between them and their hydrocaust -and the sleepy black of
the void- an intermediate zone of whiteness and warmth
and the illusion of dawn.
He barely drank at all; and when he did he felt it like he
heard Dionysian panthers calling him outside the city gates.
He could laugh because he was never tempted to run away.
He drank so very little.
The jets of the tub kicked on and bubbles gathered around
him; in the froth he saw birds and bears and apes reaching
out to pick fruit from trees and then he saw a cat, a large
cat, a pundárīka of bubbles of manifold sizes -with big
square head low and shoulders like Arc de Triomphe made
high- swirl around that ape. The arm of the simian reached
out to pet the panther of Dionysus and Lyndon saw the two
cave drawings combine as the water cavitated and rotated
like arms of nebulae. Each breath was wet, his blinks but
few, he stared as each muscle ached and all joints too.
The cat consumed the ape; the maelstrom shrank and grew;
the snow landed on the bubbles like a million comets
striking a thousand planets and they’d pop and burst all
remnant -all evidence- of that strange moment when the
foamy striving Hominoidea had reached out in fealty,
curiosity, amor , agape , with the family Filidae low along
the grass.
He thought as if in gibberish to his own ears, “tigris , onca ,
pardus .”
He thought of Nephus, his friend. He thought of how it all
ended in a break of heart; that conversation back from the
burlesque, the way he’d bragged about being black and
made fun of whites -the driver too was black- Lyndon
thought they were compatriots, they worked together and
now were out together too; and in this recollection he saw
the way the lights from the road had lit up the cabin of the
car so that he could see the teeth -the snarl- of who he
thought was his pal. He thought of how naive he’d been. He
hated how much he’d liked Nephus; how much he still
thought of him. He had let the wine bottle come away from
the face but now put it back to the lips and downed it until
the lees hit the tongue as if being washed ashore.
He’d never admit that he was heartbroken over his friend.
He’d say anything -and everything- but never that. He let
the grit of the wine dissolve in the mouth, he imagined them
dark and aubergine -purple- and when he blinked he saw
those monoliths on the shore from his dreams. It hurt
physically; at the throat and lungs; the cock. He felt all
thoughts dissolve into his gut.
It was only 0200hrs, and the dawn light was still four hours
away, but he had worked until 2300hrs and picked this girl
up at the Denver Diner after she had brought him his skillet-
potatoes and sausage-links and three over-medium eggs.
She had told him that the girls of the diner had all taken
bets on what he was , and by that they meant what he did .
She had agreed with the consensus, that he was likely a
stripper, due to the late hour of his arrival each night, she
said; she then hinted there were other reasons for this
conclusion that they had ruminated over. He did not ask her
to enumerate the reasons. He felt a fool; he looked like a
ragged man.
He had eaten in silence most nights, he worked his
warehouse marijuana grow at 1100 Yuma Court just two
miles from the diner, and when he got finished watering the
three hundred plants he had in that place, he was hungry
and merely wanted some breakfast food.
But this night, this girl, well, she had said something so
perfect, so romantic and pure that he had taken notice of
just how pretty she was in a way that he had not cared
about before. He noticed before, he noticed almost
everything -he believed- but there is a difference between
noticing and giving a shit.
She something strange.
Pretty girls were not that interesting to him these days, as
just getting in a young girl’s pants was already done a
hundred ways by him and he was beginning to want
something else. But, she had called out to the chef -the
cook, rather- behind the counter in a way that stopped him
in mid-thought.
“Ismail,” she said, loudly and with a pause for his reply. “Call
me,” she said as he -the patron, the man who’d remember
this- turned toward her in silence, a mouth full of now
unchewed food, and then, as the cook finally turned to her,
“Ismail,” she said again. And she put her hand up -in signal-
over her head.
That had enraptured him, and the Mexican short-order cook
she was speaking to was immaterial, a prop, and likely
didn’t even spell his name the same as the young man
aboard the Pequod ; but the fact that it came from her
mouth as it did, when you read it as a perfect and true
rendition of the first words of the single greatest novel of all
time, and the fact that nobody even noticed it, a restaurant
filled with drunks and shift workers and hookers, and
landlubbers -he guessed- and not one person noticed, well,
that made him believe in God right in the middle of ten
kinds of hell and a hundred devilish things.
And she was the muse who delivered Him to he, or he to
Him, and she’d blushed and acted shy when -as he was
paying his bill for eggs and sausage and browned spuds- he
told her how pretty she was and that he was taking her
home after he made a stop somewhere and after she was
off of work.
He never asked if that was ok , he just said it and she
nodded.
Ismail was to call her to get her some drugs; and she had no
interest in him or any wetback, she said, but for a Mexican
he was pretty nice . They weren’t all bad , she had finally
said. She had told him this after he made it safe for her to
express her actual feelings; he spoke freely and this gave
people courage to do the same. He noticed this, the more
he spoke his mind the more people would reveal just how
they thought too. And everyone hated everyone he noticed.
Blacks, he thought, are right about one thing : most white
people -shit, most people- hate them. Blacks ain’t stupid;
they can feel the tension and hate. We’re all radios and
transmitters, he thought, we all send and receive signals
like long light, like the scream of stars and the hushing of
black space. You don’t get away with anything in this life.
Her shoulders were now white with muscovite snow upon
them, they appeared like burial mounds with her head as
Jesus at center and the two thieves already down from their
crosses and under the winter earth at either side. She was
innocent and unworldly and had been raised by fucking
wolves for all he knew. But she was denuded of hair and
tattoos and the mark of time and gangs of men. She
smelled good, not like eue de toilette, but like she was not
yet rotten inside and that she ate things that passed as
actual food.
He looked at her as if that day on the cross had gone on and
on and on and they all had a little more time.
He forgot all about where Christ had gone between Good
Friday and Easter.
She -in the hot water- referred to wine as sweet or red , and
yummy or bitter and if the latter, she scrunched up her face
in rebuke. The world was delineated with the same lack of
nuance or experience or development of palate at all. He
had had modern women -erudite, relatively speaking, and
sophisticated and aware of details that he would impart-
inject a few words in volley to his waiting ears and hours
and desperate heart. But they were charmless, witches, who
had wickedly placed a spell on their bodies and faces to look
pretty and young in certain alchemical lights. He saw
through them with his own warlockian anti-spells, and saw
them for what they were , he thought even though women
were as opaque to him as lead bars and a future around
three corners.
He saw Tryyhenians , sailors and pirates and thorn in
Egyptian sides; Anatolia whence they came; Siculi , then
sicarii -daggermen- then Sicilians using Crete as FOB to raid
the massive empire. He saw images of the Sea People in
Egyptian art and cuneiform. Merneptah , Ramses III all beset
by pirates from the sea. Bronze age Achaeans engaged in
hit and run , he thought in between the ideas on women and
men. He felt his blood get hot; this dour talk of women was
sapping the vitals. He ought to be on a ship on the
Mediterranean bear chested; or around the Cape of Good
Hope; or in a whirlpool at the drain up north .
Women are like cars and expensive wines and watches and
shit like that , he thought as the carved maps -red and
brown of boats and hordes crashing into the coast-
evaporated in his mind. He never knew why ideas or images
rose and fell in him.
A man, a powerful man who can command such things,
gains access, acquires them and enjoys them with a slight,
almost imperceptible anguish and fear around it all; and it
makes him hear winds in the halls and wolves on the lawn
and the sound of God’s Elohim whispering in foreign
tongues from just out of range. He thought, women scare
men .
But part of his confidence was admitting to his insecurities,
and women didn’t like that at all. They wanted the show, not
the tell. It was one girl in a million that would want a man
strong who admitted he was born as vulnerable as any
young girl.
“Eight pounds, eight ounces,” he said aloud as she just
looked up then out at the snow.
She reached out in the tub, from below, to touch the scar on
his face as if maybe her little finger could wipe it away. He
remained still and allowed this, he felt almost no fear. She
smiled as the wound’s keloid gave depth to what she saw;
her somato-sensory map updated him as -now- of this three-
dimensional world. He had topography.
The Egyptian wall faded to seem almost like blank slate; a
lithe stood up in the desert to knock down or write upon
himself. Terracotta, rust, sand.
He didn’t grope or hurry or move toward her at all; even
though she was naked and tiny and all alone half in hot
water and half out in the cold air of winter and snow inside
the walls of his fortress. She like that he waited for her to
signal him, which she was certain she soon would. She liked
the way he spoke, in riddles and poems she did not
understand at all. He knew things about all kinds of things
and she thought -as she walked through his house again in
her mind- that she might want to read one or two of those
books that lined his walls and seemed laying around
everywhere the same way she left clothes on her
apartment’s furniture and floor.
She had seen artwork on the walls that she liked, and his
writing desk, this huge heavy dark oak roll-top had large
colored drawings of his; they were half-finished and
spattered with ink or blood or wine, as if some fight had
broken out and he had been victorious, of course , she
thought with mirth as she stared at his hands. He looked like
a wild animal she thought, like he had been captured in
some equatorial jungle, or boreal forest, and brought back
for the London Museum; escaping somehow a hundred
years ago.
“God, imagine one hundred years,” she said.
She giggled as she thought of him breaking chains and
growling and her pussy felt as wet as the water now, as if
the water and her were one blue and pink and red thing;
with a black hole at the center of both. She let her mouth
open under the weight of her little jaw and he saw her
bottom teeth, a horseshoe of dentine and a tiny pink
tongue; a fat flake of crystalline snow -nucleated with a
bacteria that allows it to freeze in the cold upper
atmosphere- landed on her tongue and it retreated like a
rabbit into its burrow as he glided toward her through the
water above and below.
His capacious chest enveloped hers, his mouth buried hers,
his desire consumed hers and her hands laid themselves
lightly and small on his bare hips and her fingers floated just
out and to the side as the music played with the same
frenzy as the fast flakes now fell on them and their early-
winter world.

III. 2020 e.v.

“Well, your honor, other members of the court, I’d like to
offer something that may be obvious, but it still needs
said.
“I am a man.
“I know, I know, a strange and feral creature we are;
only alive in captivity now. And real men are a dying
breed, and I am about to be locked away in society’s
cage -your dumping ground for men- for the rest of my
life.
“And I say that is right, that is just and right. But, I also
say that you ought not condemn me so much as
sanction me.
“For, if you’ll consult your dictionary, you will see that
the word sanction is the only word in the English
language that means both itself -both itself- and its
opposite. Yeah, sanction means to punish, if you lay
sanctions on me they are punitive, and meant to
dissuade and hem in; to corral and manacle. But to
sanction, as in, you have official sanction for your
efforts, sir , well, that means to approve, the opposite of
punish: to approve. If an act is sanctioned by the
government, it is approved, right?
“So, I suggest you sanction me your honor.
“That way you can punish me and approve of me all at
once. And this is certainly what is more just. For I took
the law into my own hands, I usurped the monopoly of
violence conferred by modernity onto the State. And for
this I shall be punished. But I took the law into my own
hands, I did not take nihilism or anarchy into my hands. I
did not kill innocents on purpose, I did not steal or rob
for mere material gain. I did not intentionally harm those
for whom I had no cause to harm.
“No, I took righteous action against unrighteous people;
I settled scores with society’s worst creeps. I put an end
to the perfidy & malice and mendacity & malevolence of
bad people of this city; I took out the trash.
“Yes, it was illegal, but no, it was not immoral. And only
a Pharisee would refuse to notice this distinction. I do
not ask for clemency, rather, I ask that you heap the
years on me, heap them high.
“For I shall be punished; sanctioned but not condemned.
“I could have killed many more innocents, people who
were mere witnesses to my crimes. I could have and yet
suffered no additional legal damages, none. There would
be no additional deleterious effects to my sentences for
a hundred murders versus fifty; for a man can only
actually serve one life-sentence. But there would have
been a moral distinction, so I kept the collateral damage
to a minimum. I did my best on that score.
“It didn’t matter to me that my capture and conviction
was increased exponentially by targeting people I knew,
knowing full well I’d be a suspect; because I could never
have lived with myself if I had harmed random people
 and not those that I felt were guilty. See, I have a code,
and you may not be able to discern it nor make out its
rough outline. But, try, notice that I had every reason
and opportunity to murder all kinds of people to make
the deaths seem random; kill my targets in public in a
spray of bullets so each one did not stand out.
“Ask yourself why? if not for this code I had at the time;
a code I still have now. Ask.
“Again, I don’t ask for any reduction in my sentence,
throw the book at me, through the entire athenaeum my
way, your honor. I will die in prison, we both know this,
so give me a thousand years. I mean that.
“But do not condemn me like some maniac who kills
innocent folks for fun; sanction me instead as a man
with a code, who killed only bad men, bad genes, and as
few innocents as possible, a man who removed the
cancer in society, who -sure, cannot be allowed around
civilized people ever again- but who acted like a man.
“Sanction me for that.
“I lived my life with integrity in as much as any mortal
and fallen man can. I lived large, I lived authentically, I
tried to tell the truth. But, the facts are this: the truth is
frowned upon, we know this, right?
“We avoid telling the truth all day long, to avoid hurting
people’s feelings or avoid conflict or contretemps . They
say we lie on average every seven interactions, every
eleven interactions with our wives. Robert Trivers and
others have done that research; I suggest you read it to
see that I ain’t lyin’ ,” he said with another grin.
“But, I never liked lying, I feel it is unmanly, it reveals
weakness. For a strong man, a man of true strength he
need not lie, ever. For he does not fear the
consequences, he says, bring it on to any damages that
comes from the unvarnished truth. It’s tough, and
nobody can do this perfectly, for no man is that strong.
But I tried it, and gave it my best shot 80% of the time.
And it made me hated, hated even by my own family,
tribe and country.
“But I had a code, and so I spoke my honest feelings as
much as I could. I also read things that I didn’t like, that
did not comport with my views, to challenge my own
assumptions; I engaged in conversation with history’s
great writers and thinkers and great men and women
from the last three thousand years. I argued even with
myself, to see where I was lying or being deceived. I did
this to try to find the truth, to live by some honest code.
“It was important to me to live honestly and
authentically and that meant that I had to admit that
nature designed me this way, with this mind, this body,
this soul, to be nature’s Umkhonto we Sizwe , as they
say in the ANC, the tip of the spear .
“I was not built for going along to get along, for looking
the other way. I was built to be a one percenter in every
way. From IQ to wealth to ethical courage, I have been -
or am now- in the one percent. I would have been -if my
past is any indication- one of the one percent of German
citizens that refused to go along with the Nazis in the
run up to WWII. I would have -if a Russian or Ukrainian-
refused to inform on my family unlike the thirty-percent
of all Soviet citizens who sold their souls to the Russian
State. I would have been like John Brown who stormed
the armory at Harper’s Ferry, and L’ouverture on the
island of Haiti, or like Castro at Moncada in 1953 against
Batista’s corrupt regime. I am made of the same stuff as
the revolutionaries and those who refuse to sell out to a
corrupt State or populace.
“I was born to say, no . No , to the herd.
“And I will share my deepest insecurities and fears with
anyone in my tribe, and I’ll share it with you all today.
I’m afraid of what happens when men are no longer; I
fear the annihilation of man. Because man is no mere
ape, not only a collection of cells, or organs, or even
memories and actions taken in the world. But man is
something deep at his core; a striving animal, an animal
connected to web as both spider and fly, as both strand
and pattern. And man feels the need -in all phases- to
express himself honestly at some point. Man is not
merely a survival machine, he is something more. He is
an animal who wants to be understood. And to be
understood he must advocate for his side, his view, his
cause. Yes?
“For this is a need as surely as food and shelter; the
need to unburden the overloaded heart.
“How many of us speak how we actually feel? How
often? Right? I mean, we live lives seventy or eighty or
ninety years and speak from our hearts ten, eleven,
maybe a dozen times in our lives. It’s sad, and it need
not be that way, as men, especially as men, we have the
ingredients to be real, to be honest to live authentic
lives. And yet we don’t. We go for the safety and
security and money and approval of our peers. We worry
about losing friends, wives, jobs, freedom. We ought to
fear losing our souls.
“What if great men of history had played it safe or
refused their conscience merely to go along with the
herd? Where would we be if great men had preferred
safety and public approval to what is right? Coriolanus,
the play by Shakespeare has this moment where in
Caius Marcius’ mother, Volumnia asks him why he
cannot get along better in peacetime with the corrupt
and venal and effeminate men of the senate. And he
asks, why would you wish me milder, wish me false to
my nature?
“It’s a real question, and it is one men -masculine men-
do ask. Why must society ask us to be false to our
nature? Why is it us who must bend? Why aren’t you
asked to be honest and forthright and noble and brave
for once? Why mustn’t you bend to the will of us? Ah,
because you have the numbers, and thus the power. I
get it, I do. Might makes right. But, not all power is in
material or numerical form, some power is nebulous,
numinous; it is invisible like the wind, unmeasurable as
the deep unsounded waters of the sea, as hard to get
arms around as the spirit of God.
“But it moves men, its power is in that it moves men to
do the right thing no matter if it is popular or approved
of or makes tout le monde applaud. It lays underneath
us, deep within us, in our genome, waiting to be called
forth, buried by the natural evolution of life-cycles -
instars they are called in some species- and when the
time comes, that thing long buried -always destined to
rise- does in fact rise. The clocks ticks without any
approval -any winding- from mankind or his society. The
anchored clepsydra drinks and feeds, the at sea glass-
horologe’s sands rise in a pile at bottom, grains fall, then
avalanches occur all at once. Snows accrete at
elevation. Fires burn -all to the ground- all around the
timing of God’s lightning strikes. Ships burn in the
harbor at the hand of man; doused once pulled down by
the Kraken.
“This is real power, and it is the power of inevitability, of
evolution, of the innate moral agency, of truth spoken
and acted out on the world by natural men who have it
bred into them by the gods since we lived in caves, up in
trees.
 [inaudible; possibly “under the sea…”]
“And let us speak of the world, because we have lost our
way in that way as well. There are a billion murders
going on each minute as each species devours each
other species three times, three meals, a day. We forget
this maybe. But murder -and war- is natural; more
natural than peace.
“And to tell a man that he cannot kill his enemy is itself a
usurpation of man’s inalienable right to revenge. You can
say that we give up that right when we make contract
with society. And that is true unless -and this is true of
all contract law- it is true unless the first party fails in
their obligation outlined under the contract.
“If the State fails to protect me, to protect those under
its charge, then the other party -e.g., me, for example-
the other party has the unilateral right to unburden
himself from the terms of the deal. The State refused to
back me up when I was ripped off and harassed and lied
to and stolen from and abused and maligned.
“You told me I had no standing, even though my
business was legal enough for you to tax it and make me
pay thirty and forty thousand dollars a year. That is
right, I paid more in taxes than most men make in a
year. And I paid it faithfully, under the assumption that
you as the State would do your duty by me. But you did
not; you refused to even hear my case, you told me to
get lost . Well, I am a man, not some child or chick or
chump. So, I handled my business myself. And any real
man would do the same.
“That is the law of the jungle and any wolf that shall
break it shall die.
“I had a moral right to take the law into my own hands
when the State and all its infrastructure refused to do its
duty. And I took that right, as the trees in the forest take
their air. Did you know that tree roots wind and curve
and rifle through the pockets of the soil underneath
them? They make common cause with another organism
called mycelium; wild, ain’t it? Yeah, and this organism,
this mycelium, well, it mines rocks under the soil for
nutrients and captures other bugs called springtails, for
example, and holds them in situ -in state- and extracts
fluids and nutrients from them for months and years
even. They do not kill the springtail, they enslave it and
pass those nutrients on via the roots to the trees.
“So, when you are in the forest or a park and under the
shade of tree, remember that, remember that the tree is
engaged in the slave trade and feels not one jot of guilt
and is not punished for it at all. Well, not until lightning
strikes. But, that is the natural world, it is murder and
slavery and deception and might makes right.
“I was taught that as a kid. See, my older brother and
father were bigger than me and when I was out of line,
they used violence and the threat of violence. Why now
when I am the bigger one, why now is there this détente
? Why is it universal unoffensiveness now that is insisted
upon, now that I’ve become the mightiest in the room?
“Ah, because men are hypocrites and men don’t care
about right and wrong, they only care about themselves
and so, again, I watch not what you all say but what you
do, and so I looked out for myself under these rules. And
when those men whom I dispatched -the men you call
victims- when they lied and cheated and stole, I took
them out, as any apex predator would. I didn’t have the
luxury of the State and its apparatus to settle my scores,
I had to do it myself. Well, again, I don’t expect to be let
off with a warning, no, but I expect a little intelligence
here, a little consistency. I expect the logic and moral
suasion of my argument to impress upon you that I did
what was right according to man’s law and the law of
the jungle.
“I could have hurt more innocents, but I reduced
collateral damage as much as I could, as any soldier
tries to do. But this is war and some innocent blood was
spilled, I admit. But, as much as that pains me, I can say
that this is what you get when you allow the men I
dispatched, the men with no honor, no conscience, no
capacity for self-reflection -men that are immune to
moral suasion- when the State -and its society- allows
them to get away with their daily, hourly infractions on
the rest of us; I can say that this is inevitable. Eventually
you get an overreaction. This is natural law too. I’d
explain the self-organized criticality -the slip of tectonic
plates, the power laws of forest fires- but suffice to say,
it’s in the math, my opinion matters not one jot. What
matters is invisible forces all around us.
“Anyway, I only sought what was mine, what was owed
to me. Nothing more. And because I am human, I did
make errors.
“You’ll have to forgive this digression, but a story occurs
to me now. I must tell it.
“In the 1990s the NHL tried to phase out the so-called
goon. They felt the league was too violent. But those
goons, they served a purpose, as any species or sub-
species serves in any eco-system. And those goons
made sure that the players who could actually play the
game didn’t high-stick too much or slash too much or
get too mouthy as the star players on each team skated
and scored. They enforced the unwritten laws; the code
of the game. And when the NHL decided to give
disproportionate punishment to what was called the
instigator of a fight -the goon, the enforcer- well, then
teams had to make choices and without the so-called
goon -well, this actual cop on the beat- was phased out.
The guy who enforced the code that the referee couldn’t
see, the real law and order was just gone, all at once.
And it ruined the game of hockey, not because it failed
to reduce fights or violence. Nope.
“Because yes, the fights decreased. Steven Pinker would
be proud, he’d be able to write a whole book full of
nonsense on how great the NHL is now with less fighting,
less statistical violence.
“But what the NHL and Pinker didn’t see, I do see. I see
what the NHL player Barry Melrose saw too, when he
said, nowadays in the NHL people aren’t accountable for
their actions, and they don’t have to fight . That is a
quote. Well, why does it matter? Why is fighting good?
“Well, because, back in the old days, a guy being
mouthy, or high sticking or slashing or playing dirty
would get himself punched out. And getting beat down
by the enforcer, the goon, has a deterrent effect on
some middling player having the temerity to slash
Wayne Gretzky, or high-stick Lemieux. But now? Now
under the new rules? Well, now that middling player gets
away with it because the goon ain’t allowed to enforce
the law; only the referee is allowed to enforce it. And the
ref, well the ref, he don’t see too good. Just like your
State, your honor, your State apparatus don’t see so
good as the beta males and scandalous females are out
there cheating and shit-talking and scammin’ and lyin’
and gossipin’ and rippin’ people off left and right -
chiselin’ and subtweetin’ - and nobody can do anything
about it because just like the NHL, the quote instigator -
the instigator - gets the disproportionate punishment. He
who punched back, he who rights wrongs, he gets
punishment. Even though he ain’t no instigator at all.
He’s merely responding to the actual instigator: the
cheater. Savvy?
“See, when I go punch a guy’s lights out for gossiping,
you know, bearing false witness against me; or -for
example- for having illicit relations with my woman, or
stealing from me, now -under this new system of yours- I
do time in jail, not the creep who broke God’s law. I’m
the instigator according to you all. Because I used
violence as response; even though he used perfidy, and
wickedness, and malice first. You all say: It don’t matter
none who started it; what matters Mr. MacLeod is that
you used violence and the guy you beat up only used
malice; lies; deception. And all that is legal; fine;
legitimate.
“See, in my view, and in God’s view, and in Barry
Melrose’s view, that guy -the cheater- he is the true
instigator, but according to you and the State and the
NHL, it’s the enforcer, the man with payback in mind, it’s
him that is the quote instigator . Well, that means that a
lot of dirty tricks are going on now that didn’t used to go
on, and a lot of enforcers -so-called goons- are skating
around that rink pissed off, anxious, pent-up and
wondering when someone is gonna do somethin’ about
all this sub-clinical, just-under-the-bar, cheatin’ .
“And as a leader of sorts, I decided that I was gonna
stand up for my team, and put those cheatin’ , high-
stickin’ , slashin’ , robbin’ , trash talkin’ beta males in
their place. I took one for the team, I guess is what I’m
sayin’ .
“I ask for nothing except acknowledgement of the
internal consistency of my argument, and that I believe
what I did to be right. You need not agree with my
conclusions, but you must see the rationale as
consistent in my own mind from an erudite and morally
upright vector with evidence taken from both society
and the natural world.
“In a corrupt city, a vigilante will appear as sure as a
shadow will from a man that stands in the sun.
“If the State did its job, men like me would not manifest.
I am a product of my own actions, I blame no one; but
we are all subject to natural laws, as you are your honor,
as you the jury, and the whole State is. The scarecrows
shook in vain for the birds fine in song and feather took
no warning , as Dickens once said.
“I am an early warning sign.
“I can say that as more and more men are maligned and
abused and usurped by cowards and sociopaths and
even illegal aliens; for cryin’ out loud, the State protects
the illegal aliens not the workers, not the citizen of this
state. Denver is a sanctuary city for illegal aliens, man.
And yet you tell us to have respect for the law? Anyway,
the elites, the lawmakers and judges and media dorks
have no respect for the law, they allow criminals and
scumbags and Mexican border jumpers to infect and
disease and destroy this country. And that has
consequences.
“You have no right to say that I have no respect for the
law, it is you that has no respect for the law. And the
men of the city, real men, are going to begin to take the
law, the moral right to the law, into their own hands at
some point and set things right.
“That’s natural law.
“It’s the law of balance and reversion to the mean.
“You cannot expect a people so long oppressed to go
from tyranny to liberty on a featherbed , as Jefferson
once said. The men of this state are going to rise up, as
their jobs get taken by robots and wetbacks and they
 get told their masculinity is toxic and their white
heritage is innately undesirable and that they ought to
just go off somewhere and die -as all that happens- well,
they’re going to rise up eventually and you and your
friends and the rich and pampered -the birds fine is song
and feather - are going to pay the price. Not because I
say so, not because I want it, but because it’s natural,
inevitable, law. The ground gets wet when it rains,
whether the weatherman wants it or predicts it or not.
“No one can flout the law, not man’s law and not
nature’s law. I may have flouted man’s law, but you
people are flouting natural law, and my prison sentence
is nothing compared to what is in store for you people.
You think I’m bad, wait until you see the millions of men
just like me who come next. Evolution capitalizes on all
opportunities, nothing is wasted in the natural
environment, and in an environment where real men are
absent, nature will issue real men forth. The gap will be
filled. They are coming and they comin’ for you. Taleb
once said that man fights the last war, but nature fights
the next one.
“I regret neither the murders nor harsh words, I only
wish I’d been able to do more in this way.
“But, your honor, you are sending me to jail, to prison,
where I will have manifold opportunities to continue to
take out the trash. You are sending me to the place with
the most opportunities to dispatch bad men.
“But, remember, the vast mass of our ship travels deep
below the water line , and deep within us like buried
seeds, like cicada, are the ticks of the clock that demand
every generation or so, that our genes for noble and
honorable action against the filthy and low-borne
weaklings who run things while we slumber, the ticks of
the clock demand that we rise, rise, rise,” [ed.note: he
 said and showed his veneered teeth from the center of
that black & grey beard to everyone able to look at him,
as his head swiveled from side to side like a spotlight
revealing all to all it touched.]
“Mr. MacLeod,” [ed.note: the judge said] “your actions
have resulted in fort-six deaths; the deaths of men and
women who had no jury trial, no due process, as they
were not afforded the protections you have. You just
eliminated them, acting as judge, jury and executioner.
And yet, you take no note of the inherent injustice in
this. You treat this unilateralism as unworthy of
comment. You see only your side of the equation.
“I will not take your recommendation to sanction you as
you put it. I condemn you. I do condemn you. And I will
not waste this court’s time or try its patience any
further; we’ve had enough speeches today. I find you
remorseless and unfeeling; and I concur with the jury
sentence that you serve forty-six life sentences plus
ninety-nine years -of which you will serve consecutively-
and I remand you to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, ADX
in Florence Colorado effective immediately.
“May God have mercy on your soul.”
The judge said it and gaveled it as the roomed milled about
unimpressed by it all.
Isaiah watched the courtroom video from two years previous
-in 2018- for the second time and felt ambivalent about
what to do. But the lab was the perfect home to start, and
he knew that a garden was as good a place to begin a
model of the world that he was a part of and above and
under too. And so he sent the algorithms to the printer and
had it construct some simple seeds for ivy and a couple
dozen embryos for a few birds and some bees.
It then occurred to him that the inmate had not been sent to
DOC, but to the BOP. Now he wondered what was said in the
judge’s chambers before the guilty verdict. But there were
no records of it on the cloud.
“Not yet,” Isaiah said.

IV. 2012 e.v.

They had made love until 0400hrs and she had politely -but
with pleading tones- begged him to quit. Her jaw and legs
and navel were sore and she felt in danger of running low on
some fluids or nutrients of some kind.
He had carried her from the water to the bedroom and
wiped her down with a big-nap towel dyed in dark grey.
Candles were already burning and flooding and melting in
little rivulets down sides and onto the original floor of his
house built in 1949. The light source moved slightly in the
breeze of the home’s HVAC; still objects thus moved to the
eye; moving things seemed to blink and jump ahead. He
had remodeled it and it looked nothing like what one would
expect in this neighborhood; it was modern and masculine
in ways that she was just beginning to notice when the
morning came and she awoke from a dream of being a
bunny and dusting the hole that she and her bunny family
all lived in as they spoke in hushed tones of the Fox and the
Eagle that ran sorties and patrolled the mews of the prairie
that served as their larger home.
She thought of the dream and the way her pelt looked; it
was soft and light brown and she imagined petting it.
The walls, she inventoried, were a merlot, a burgundy red,
mottled with black like a stone, a dark mountain, and the
doors were all stained dark brown and with black hardware
and no trim. It looked hewn not assembled, and she noticed
that he was gone from the black sheets in the bed.
The morning light was grey and his artwork was shrouded in
both shadows and glare, and as she looked at these drawn
faces of men she didn’t know she tried to read the banners
that flapped in this paper-wind he’d made above and below
in deteriorating script of words she didn’t understand at all.
It was as if this whole house was a spell, an incantation
uttered by Greek sybarites and sages and oracles who
blinded themselves with uncut wine and throwing knives,
and by staring too long at the sun. She was hungry and
where God split her was sore; she felt warm in her chest.
She needed to pee.
She walked to his master bathroom and the skylight poured
clear rays over her; she squinted and sat her tiny porcelain
butt on the toilet and looked at the drawings and paintings
and photographs pinned to the wall. As she emptied her
bladder her mind was filled with these strange images and
she noticed that he kept bottles of amber, brown and black
in the open shelving between the his & her vessel sinks, no
labeled products were seen; he had dumped lotions and
potions -and whatever else- into jars after discarding the
original packaging, and she noticed everything seemed
slightly old-fashioned -woven in with updated fixtures-
creating a hybrid not unlike he was: half ultra-sophisticated,
half barbaric as fuck, she thought as she rolled the toilet-
paper like a scroll around her waiting hand. She giggled at
this thought, as a shiver ran up her spine from the tickle of
her excreting stream.
She remembered he spoke in French or Latin, or maybe
made up words , she thought.
He talked of the cosmos out there, now she looked up to the
skylight above her, as if it was right down in here, and she
then thought of her own womb and wondered if any of his
seed would take root. She smelled food now, like meat, and
flowers too; then she remembered the Stargazers -the lilies-
and the small animal bones. She looked at her face in the
mirror and noticed his scruff had chaffed her face a bit and
then she looked between her thighs and smiled at the same
red bumps and rug burn down there.
She walked gingerly to the kitchen -naked and disheveled
and blasé - as he was clothed only in black underwear and
cooking atop the gas range with a plate of fruit and goat
cheese waiting for her to nosh on while he finished their
entrees on the flame.
“Motorcycle ride today, little tiny bastard?” he asked with a
voice that made certain she knew he was joking about the
insult but serious about the ride.
“Sure, whatcha cooking?” she asked as she sat at the
barstool counter top at 39”.
“Tenderloin with black mission figs and raw cashews; with
basil and a peanut sauce. You like goat’s cheese?” he asked.
“I never had it,” she said as she squirmed.
“Well, it’s lovely,” he said as if that word made total sense
coming from his beastly maw.
“You’re lovely,” she said and laughed at the incongruity of it
as it landed on his back and obelisk frame.
“I feel lovely,” he said with a grin that reared up with a snort
of a laugh as he tended to the low flame on the range.
“Your house is weird,” she said as she gobbled down
strawberries and blue berries and crackers so thin they were
translucent. “But, in a good way, like, an artist’s house.”
“I am an artist,” he said.
“Oh yeah, what kind?” she thought maybe that’s what he
did for a living.
“Life artist,” he said with a wry smile.
“Fuck artist,” she said to correct him. “Jesus, I didn’t know
my body could cum like that. I still feel like I’m vibrating
from it. What kind of space alien are you?”
“The kind that is never leaving,” he said as he scooped the
medium-rare steak onto his and her plates and arranged the
nuts and caramelized fruit and greens and juice onto the
center medallions and then carried them to the brown table
of square legs and edges -nothing tapering, or relenting,
they were thick at top and bottom- and sat down. He then
rose quickly and pulled out her chair and beckoned her over.
She sat down on the chair with her bare ass and he said it
was ok and that she didn’t need a shirt or a towel. But she
cautioned if she left a little juice behind he shouldn’t
complain; to which he agreed.
They ate and talked simply, of dreams and sleep and
soreness and the taste of wine still in their mouths. The
music -Brian Eno’s Apollo - from the integrated speakers
played softly; meant to assuage. She noticed the sounds
waft in like the wind or the songs of birds, and it made her
breathe easier and chew her food slowly and stare at his
curry powder colored walls. They too were mottled with
white and ochre and darkness, achieving the same stone
look that blended with the grey and black tile floor more
seamlessly that she thought possible with those two
different schemes.
The flowers and plants, everywhere, like a little shop of
horrors, she said to herself with a chewy grin.
And she admitted that the artwork and furniture made of
metal or dark wood of all the same cut and design made it
all somehow work, despite its strangeness and
unconventional colors and textures and layout. The kitchen
had obviously been redone, updated with all modern
appliances and stripped of cabinets in favor of restaurant
style racks and hooks just like the diner she had to be back
at by nine tonight. She would nap, she thought, after their
ride. And she thought he might drive her to work, as she
had no car of her own. She was poor, but, she didn’t feel
poor, as she was just nine months out of high school and
had more than many of her friends.
She had her own apartment and had forsaken college, so
she had no debt; he would later tell her that even more
importantly she had not been saddled with the debt of
group-think endemic to liberal colleges, an even heavier
burden , he has said with no grin. She was happy to waitress
and really what she wanted was a dog. A dog would be
better than a car, infinitely better , she agreed with herself.
She looked at this man, and he was a man, like a man in the
sense of the word used to describe the species itself. He was
so big , she thought, and wrought all over like a sculpture,
and written all over like in the inside of a tomb.
He was kinda defaced, beat up a bit, but it looked fine to
her.
She looked at her own flanks and thighs to see if she was
similarly hewn and taut. She surmised that -for a girl- she
was. She was not fat, not like so many of her friends who
ate pop tarts and smoked weed all day; she ate eggs and
didn’t do any drugs. The drugs she was getting from Ismail
were for her roommate, who wanted ecstasy but didn’t
know anyone who sold it.
She was born in Nebraska and had come to Colorado at age
fifteen with her mother who had married again. Her step-
dad was, ok , she guessed, but he was cold and quiet and
made her feel like he was waiting for her to move out. So
she did three weeks before graduation and that was almost
ten months ago. She felt like a woman for sure now, she had
only had sex with two other boys, and they were nothing
like this thing that sat to her right breathing and snorting
and frothing all on the mouth like a charger, like a horse of
the apocalypse , she invented and laughed with her mouth
full of food -tilting her head back, letting the curls drape
over her little tits- and her mind all stuffed with ideas from
the Bible. She had been raised on the Bible, she knew the
apocalypse and more.
“What?” he asked as he noticed her laugh, and now her
oddly staring at him.
“Nothing, you’re kinda a bad ass,” she said down playing
what she actually thought.
“Kinda , huh?” he said, taking a compliment as an insult as
he always did.
“Yeah, and my pussy is sore, dude,” she said as she ate the
grapes from the common plate and let her steak cool.
“Suck it up, buttercup,” he said.
“Yeah, well I’m small.”
“I like you too peanut,” he said pushed the golden olive oil
and black balsamic bottles to the edge of the table and
chewed his arugula and goat cheese as it swaddled the
bloody filet . The bread had holes in the center and crust -
and was as soft as her laugh , he thought- as he pressed it
into the oil and vinegar.
“Peanut! I like that,” she said and laughed just as he had
suspected she would; deburred; sonorous; like a girl. Yeah ,
she then thought in swirls of things like opening doors in a
gameshow, I want a dog . And she hoped it talked to her,
although she suspected it would not as she looked at the
plated food and -as he got up and walked to the kitchen-
then at his back as it rose like canyon walls over his spine.
He grabbed the ice bucket from the fridge and brought it to
the table apologizing for forgetting it as she poopooed his
chagrin. He popped the cork on the Champagne and the
foam and gold traded places in her glass as he poured his
own glass next. She sniffed it and the effervescence tickled
her nose and as she drank it the pinot noir grapes from
Epernay tickled her brain via her tongue and mouth and
then her belly too.
She looked at the label and said it was good, and nice and
cold and went perfect with the meal. He smiled and said he
too like it all but what made it special was that she was
there and he was grateful -to the gods and the universe writ
large- for bringing her to his attention. She talked about how
sexy she thought he was but that she just had to know how
old he was, because she thought maybe twenty-nine or
thirty but he talked like someone older, and so she thought
maybe forty now. And she kept talking to qualify the ask but
he answered and interrupted this nonsense.
“Thirty-eight,” he said.
“Yeah, that makes sense, but you look good for thirty-eight,
like damn good,” she said seriously, and he tried to take
that as a compliment. “What’s that?” she then asked and
pointed -with another grape in her hand- to a framed poster
in the corner.
“Ralph Steadman’s, Fahrenheit 451 ,” he said of the print
that measured at twenty-eight inches by thirty-six.
“It’s chaotic -crazy- and scary, kinda ,” she said. She noticed
the veins on his left shoulder and neck.
“Yeah, that’s the world we live in, sweetie,” he said, and she
nodded as if she trusted that he was privy to parts of the
world she didn’t quite see.
 14. III.
It’s common knowledge that weeds cannot be killed by clipping the leaves
The Proud Highway [Thompson, Hunter S]
Convexity trumps knowledge
The Black Swan [Taleb, Nassim]

The fringe is running the show. The fringes are scary. The fringes are willing to
go places the rest of us aren’t. I spend a lot of time focused on the fringes
because the fringes have become terrifying and the middle has become
cowardly
The Joe Rogan Experience #1320 [Weinstein, Eric]

I. 2035 e.v.
Jack had been out in the forest for three days and was sick.
He couldn’t keep anything down or in. And he smelled bad.
His guts felt like a corkscrew, his throat felt like it had been
turned inside out with a gear puller. His eyes kept watering
and he was now sucking his fingers after wiping the tears
just to have some fluids go in instead of out.
His goddamn jaw hurt now.
“Fuck that guy,” he said in a whisper -and then felt like a
coward- but didn’t bother saying it louder.
He saw the bear again, this time up on the ridge. He just
stared at Jack. And Jack stared back, and he wiped his left
eye again with the back of his hand.
The virus attacked not the guts, nor the immune system
exactly. It attached itself to the sex cells; the gametes. And
then they went dark and quiet and morphed into a jacketed
protein not unlike DNA itself; just like Jack’s DNA.
He felt an itch to destroy his cock in the auger of her , to
punish each end of the parts of he and her that reproduce.
He’d fuck her to observe the instructions of the disease; the
parasite would command and he’d fucking obey. He’d rub
pollen on her that he’d gathered from the bell of the flower,
he’d wait until the last moment and cut her apart -scatter
her- to restart the world. His mind replayed a dozen
memories of Aeneas and Helen of Troy ; of Gilgamesh and
the harem plot against Ramesses III.
Then he lost consciousness in the forest.
His bots allowed him to fall into a heap out on the plain.
They hovered above but did not intercede. He fell asleep as
his own odors -body-bacteria and vomitus and excrement-
intervened in his dreams:
“If it’s one thing I have noticed in myself and others, ”
Blax finally said, “is a lack of courage in facing pain. We
avoid pain at all costs; at all costs to our self-esteem, our
erudition, our enlightenment, our relationships, our
health, our integrity and our ability to be honest with
ourselves and others. I’ve never been more sure that
everyone is lying to me at all times than I am right now.
I’ve come to believe that everyone is a pathological liar
and it’s because they’re in pain and have almost no
courage to face that pain. But unless we acknowledge
why, then we will never cure the underlying rationale, ”
he said as he lifted the nose and offered a cabeceo to
the area behind Jack’s gaze. But Jack couldn’t turn the
head, and only barely the eyes.
He saw white petals long like cow tongue; he smelled
something unique.
“Loneliness is lethal and the risk of early death is at
45%. Alcoholism is at 35%. Obesity? A mere 20%, ” Blax
said as he looked west to the setting sun. “And to tell
the truth is to guarantee a life of loneliness. You think we
don’t think of this -feel this- each time we have a choice
to tell the truth or to lie?
“The brain of a lonely person has brain region
attenuation in the amygdalin and dmPFC areas that are
critical for empathy. The more lonely we are the more we
look for and see social threats, the more we only see our
own pain and risk. We become more paranoid and more
likely to perceive others as a threat the more lonely we
get. This is a classic positive feedback loop -in the
negative sense- like melting sea ice allowing for more
thermal absorption thus heating the sea water even
more. Sleep patterns are disrupted by more nighttime
micro interruptions; cortisol released upon waking is
increased in the lonely.
“I’m asking you to stop running from the pain and feel it.
Feel it. Let it wash over you like slick sweat, like rain. Do
not get out of the rain. Stand and face it.
“Being in pain has shit to teach you. And I’m going to
help translate what it is saying. Your lie equals your pain.
Wulf said that; and he was right. But he forgot to add the
corollary: the truth isn’t going to feel much better.
“So, we better take Orwell’s words as a guide-light. He
once said that what separated him from others was not
talent or intellect but his power of facing hard truths.
This is not as facile and simple-minded as it may seem.
How often do you face anything squarely; how often do
you refuse to turn away even slightly from abrading
winds, grit and the storms and whirlwinds that move in
off the water and onto your shore?
“How often do you stand -refuse to run from- the hail? ”
he asked. Jack smelled rain, ozone, then the sweet lily
again.
“I knew what I wasn’t doing 99% of the time; I knew it by
paying attention when I did it just that once; just that
one time. The example of one moment of facing a storm
illuminated just how many times I had not done it and
would not do it in the future unless I changed my whole
philosophy on life.
 “Your pain equals your enlightenment, and that can turn
-one day- into some kind of truth. And that truth will
maybe, if we are lucky, feel good for like ten seconds
before more pain is heaped upon us. We accept and
embrace pain as our lot. We do not go around the pain,
we go through it. We reach all the way down to Hell ,” he
said and watched their faces now in the sun. They
squinted from the star so it was tougher for him to
gauge their reaction via their faces reacting to the
overpowering of this other source of light.
“Hell. ”
He exited the REM cycle for 14 minutes; now returning to
NREM2 sleep with sine wave up and down like canyon -basin
and escarpments - as his brain cleared out amyloid-beta
proteins like a draining tub; body temperature dropped one
degree; his skin pimpled at the arms and legs; they did not
move at all. Sleep spindles began and the sigma-waves ran
between billions of connections at the thalamic reticular
nucleus producing long-term memories from the
hippocampus to now at the neo-cortex . Olfactory inputs
from the forest, humus of floor, smoke from the fire south
prompted the reactivation of the cells. His brain fired like
Tesla-coil; like dry-lightning earth from outer-space.
Mountain lion scat entered last; furthest away, but most
redolent; sweet and light as his body order fought it like two
armies at palisade. The nose twitched as did the vascular
side of the neck.
Monoamines increased. Respiration maintained a rhythm.
The neo-cortex gathered more data from the right
hemisphere and consolidated the topography of the dream
map that was cut into oblong shapes. The transfer of dream
data to the neo-cortex happened in bursts between dreams.
The sanguinary and scatological odors matched the
memory; he learned of the forest now in the woods of the
memory; the smell of the memory and the recall of now
aligned as was required by the CNS and its structure. The
audio-cortex distorted the rustle of leaves, the flap of wings,
the wind high in the boughs of the trees. Body temp
dropped half a degree.
The malice of bears moved in.
He smelled the iron of his own blood; the brain shaped it
into lilies of six, then nine, then twelve. Another memory
lined up like tumbler in lock. Time had run out on this cycle.
Chemicals made electricity, spark made fire in the mind.
Now he entered REM sleep again:
“En recherche du temps perdu, ” he said when Jack had
asked what he was reading. The pink and white
stargazer lilies dropped stamens of Scythian red on the
counter. The piquant odor reached him and seemed to
carry each word on a blanket of aroma. There was a coin
stamped with the letters:
Paints like the harlot…
He handled as if he might spend it later on.
“The hero myth is the compendium of the best traits in a
man that allow for across-the-board dominance
hierarchy success. And that is important for man
because he isn’t just an elephant walrus with size as the
only attribute that determines success.
“Man has all manner of ways to succeed, from being the
life of the party to making money to being creative to
being a good hunter or being intelligent in a uniquely
special domain. And the hero is often an amalgam of
these things. But, I want to introduce you to the anti-
hero of myth and especially of modern myth in the age
of Kali Yuga.
“You see, the anti-hero need not be a man for all
seasons, a gregarious man, a man who exhibits traits
that win across several domains. The anti-hero can be
one thing and one thing only: he can dominate via
power; raw power and force of will. And as a story
archetype he can be useful to men like us who while
renaissance men and capable of being the hero, we
don’t want to merely play the game well. We don’t want
to be Bo Jackson, who can dominate at every sport
invented by man, ” Blax said.
“Even archery, ” Jack Four said.
“Even archery, that’s right. While we could dominate
economically, artistically, sexually, physically,
charismatically, socially, and on and on, we don’t want
to. We want to create our own game and dominate at
that. And that is what the anti-hero represents. He says,
fuck your nice-guy bullshit, I’m gonna do one thing and
one thing well. From Pontius Pilot to Caius Marcius, from
Ahab to Heisenberg, from Byron’s Corsair to Mickey and
Mallory Knox. The anti-hero says, I am going to play a
different game and wipe all of you fucks off the map, ”
Blax said.
They smirked and looked around and found solace in the
likeness of their brothers like mirrors that only reflected
no background; one thing: themselves.
“We’re going to play a different game. And remember,
we must examine why we want to do this at three levels
of analysis. The terrestrial -our medium sized, medium
speed, medium timeframe world- our terroir right here
and right now.
“But we also must look down to our DNA and our
epigenetics, and also above, at ontology and meta story.
And once we have what EO Wilson called consilience -
between all levels of instantiation and analysis- we will
have a much more robust and beautiful and defendable
rationale for our lives.
“We will have purpose that is bulletproof from the
shallow monolithic analysis of the squares and the dorks
and the pragmatic who run our fatuous world right now.
When they can only see one level of anything: the
pragmatic, the commercial, the flat and banal world of
money and laws and getting along with the in-laws; you
know, avoiding an argument with the neighbor or the
ball-busting wife. While they’re focusing on that stupid
shit we will be above them and below them shoving
them down into the grave we just dug under their feet, ”
he said. Each word landed on them like a wasp, each
punctuation like a sting. Each conceit burrowed in them
like venom, each idea was birthed and found succor
within their still youthful minds. He spoke as each word
was scattered like seeds.
“This next century is ours; and it’s because not, ” he
paused, “not because we played their games better than
them but because we invented a totally new game. ”
Blax began pacing in front of them and they set their
jaws and squinted the eyes. They felt tight about the
chest and squeezed their fists to dissipate heat.
“Henry Ford said he was successful because he ignored
what the public wanted: they wanted merely faster
horses. He gave them what they didn’t have the
intelligence or creativity to want: cars.
“We are going to give them what they cannot even
imagine they want. We are gonna give them death and
re-birth as totally new machines. They don’t know it, but
they will want it. However, like Ford did, we have to
ignore what they say they want and give them
something else entirely. Humans are like children, you
cannot expect them to know what they need. You have
 to force them to eat their veggies and work their
muscles. It sounds like tyranny until you realize the
tyranny of sickness and weakness and unhappiness that
will befall them once you let them do whatever they
want. People in a liberal culture are not happy; they are
sick and sad and it’s because they have been given too
long a leash.
“This is how I prove my love and respect for you all; by
governing you so you can maximize your own potential.
And once you’ve reached a level of expertise and
competence you will naturally leave the nest. And
humans will eventually be allowed that freedom, but not
now. And that is the role of the father; a role that men
have abandoned in favor of being popular; of being liked
and not hen-pecked. And we -you and I- are going to
restore that patriarchal paradigm, whether they like it or
not, ” he said and then -on the pad as the light grew
more blue and more white- he moved into tiger stance
and Jack One called out to the other Jacks to fall into that
formation at once.
NREM1 cycle returned and he awoke believing he’d not
been asleep at all; merely going off line for one second or
less. The bear was at his feet and interested in the bottom
of his boots not his now open eyes. He felt no fear; his
response time had been slowed; epinephrine cut off. His
immune system continued to consolidate information from
the CRISPRcas-9 vectors from his gametes. The
hippocampal memories stopped transference to the neo-
cortex as the total of 93-minutes of memory consolidation
there had stopped. Isaiah downloaded the hippocampal
memories and the new neo-cortical ones and measured the
discrepancy in their fealty to the original input.
Amyloid-Beta proteins were washed away by the
cerebrospinal fluid. Jack Four passed out again as the black
bear licked the salt from his legs.

II. 2035 e.v.

They stood in the dark of the 0457hrs clock.
They had found their spots with a new aperture gene-edit
that allowed a fraction of the UV spectrum and additional
light from the normal spectrum to be registered on the
visual cortex .
They had a very low-res version of night vision. Their rods
and cones were detuned -made colorblind- and thus
contrast increased by 34%. The dark became one thing; as
did the light.
Relief appeared against each thing; each boundary of block,
leaf, moon-covering cloud.
He smoked his cigar and they focused on the enlarging and
contracting grey glow of the ash tip and the small corona
that bloomed on his face as he drew air through the cigarillo
.
He blew out a breath of smoke and CO2 and stepped forward
and spoke. “I don’t want to put too much emphasis on this,
because I feel it is unfair to the man to do so. But my father
was not an educated man, and he had had to scramble just
to survive in this world. And because of that he didn’t know
much about the things that I think are essential to
understand about the world. Things essential to
comprehend about the culture and about men and women
and about the self and the body and the Darwinian model
that is operational at every level of life,” he said this and
stuffed the slim cigar in the mouth and pulled on it until the
mouth was warm with smoke. He felt guilty and stupid for
the way he’d hammered his father a thousand and one
times and forgave him only the once.
He blew smoke and spoke.
“He was like John Adams, who had said -of himself- that he
studied war and revolution and law so his kids could study
politics and science and art so that their kids could study
poetry and -I think he said pottery or some shit- anyway. I
know I’ve likely mentioned this before, and if I repeat an
anecdote and you’ve all heard it then in unison you may
stop me, but even if one of you hasn’t heard it I’d like it if
you all allowed me to repeat the damn story for the benefit
of the one who hasn’t heard it -or comprehended it- yet,”
Blax said with preemptive pique. He smoked and breathed
and blinked and focused the eyes.
He obliquely looked from behind the cloud of his exhalation
at each Jack. He looked for discord, dissent.
“You know we all have the same genome and because
genetics is like ninety-percent of who we -as a species- are,
then we are all very similar. But the ten-percent that is
different is really quite different and so none of us are going
to be paying attention to the exact same things at any given
moment, ok? So, anyway, my father was not an educated
man, and so he couldn’t teach me what I am teaching you,”
he said as he -in his mind’s eye- saw grey rats in black
mazes, he saw white floors and Plexiglas, he saw brass. He
saw the pups of the rats turn in circles -retrograde and sad-
in the corners of the ninety-degree turns some sat down,
some sniffed the walls and others ran fast.
He blinked and held the cigar far away with the head
pointing afield as he adjusted the suit jacket at the cuffs.
“He just -well, he gave me these genes, which is like giving
me the winning lotto ticket, right? But- well, he didn’t give
me hardly any instruction on how to spend the money. Have
you ever read about what happens to people who win the
lottery?” he asked and scoffed and looked down and saw
the belt buckle in black and satin sheen, he felt their eyes
upon him when he looked away. He felt he couldn’t raise
them. He felt like failure was a path of a thousand and one
ways; success singular and as narrow as the Osiris shaft.
“It ain’t pretty,” he said into his chest and saw the beard
like twain rope lay upon the tie, the grey hairs like marbled
veins and the outline of mountain ranges at night. But the
words kept coming and so he let them out of their cage.
“So, I made a huge number of mistakes that could have
been prevented if he was a bit more educated. But like I
said, that was really because he was dirt poor, fatherless
himself, in Arkansas in the fifties. I mean he was fucked. He
was totally fucked, ok? So, just surviving and making it to
marriage and kids and feeding them and keeping them
healthy was a miracle for him. And yet, I,” he paused. He
was going to admit to his condemnation. But he refrained.
“And he had intelligence obviously, as the genetic
component of intelligence -the heritability- is pretty severe.
In other words, smart kids come from smart parents ninety-
nine out of one-hundred times. Anyway, I’m hoping -and the
reason your education is so severe, and I know you often
think it too severe, like standing in the cold at O-dark-30
and listening to me say things that could easily be said
indoors with a cup of coffee and a Danish in your hands is
kind of a drag- but the reason I am so obsessed with this
level of training is that I think that if he had combined my
native intelligence with a high-level intellectual, cultural and
marital training platform I could have been like Alexander or
Charlemagne or something quite spectacular.
“I feel like my life was squandered is what I’m saying and I
don’t want your life to be wasted that way,” Blax said as he
looked them in the eye quickly so as to make sure they
wouldn’t -themselves- look away. There was a connection
between speaker and listener, and eye contact demanded
something in the same way.
He chewed on the short stick, he let the nicotine mix with
his saliva. He forced himself to breathe. He saw images of
ships, the curse of exile, the way sending a people away is
just a fractal of the quartering the British did; it makes a
man incomplete. He lands ashore and cannot admit to who
he is, cannot count on anyone, and when he finds a
desperate woman he cannot be father; for he cannot tell his
child who he is. America was a nation of no history, no
connection, an arm in the dirt, a leg over there, a head
rolling down hill.
“Further, I didn’t have a brother worth a fuck, ok? You guys
have me, your father essentially, and you have one another
which is a huge advantage. I hope you see that already, but
I hope that perception increases exponentially as time
moves forward and you see what a crucial advantage it is to
have brothers around you of which you each have three.”
His coder loaded the data on the percentage of colonists
that supported the revolution, the mere three percent that
fought against the crown. More and more data loaded, as
genomes made columns from English merchants and
laboring Ulster-Scots of Boston to aristocratic farmers in
Virginia to the pioneers that pushed west or the slavers who
ran plantations like ants operated colonies, all sieved and
sorted autonomically through hundreds of years; genomes
labeled so that they finally knew who they were in this
madness of American mélange and chaos and blankness.
Decades of steadfastness and diaspora co-mingled until
synthesis of genomes was left in three-story homes in
patrician new England and Linkhorn scofflaws rode low-
slung choppers to the watery edge. One percenters , they
were called, those bikers deemed unsanctioned by the
American Motorcycle Association , he thought as his coder
allowed it all to rise on his interface like a memory or idea
on how to notice a flaw in plan.
And the math opened trap doors of three percent of one
class -and one percent of another- it all fell into a new
elongated sarcophagi and four-chambered tomb. And then
the coder pulled it all back like inhaled smoke and his mind
returned to his speech.
“Now, I want to begin with one idea that I hope will
permeate and soak into and dominate your every idea. And
this is it: I almost instinctively now look at every action, at
every phenomenon, as having three levels of material life,
of existence, of reality that are useful to analyze. Ok?” he
paused and they all said that they indeed, copied that .
“If the human being is to maximize his survivability and
excellence as a multi-purpose animal -and we are the Swiss-
army knife of organisms, man- then… well, look, I mean
some animals are so specialized that they literally can only
live in one species of tree; right?” he was breaking his
sentence structure and going laterally, and even at this
early hour, the Jacks were going along with him as much as
they could.
“Some Amazonian frogs have one tree that they can live in
and if you move them three-meters away they die; not
unlike if you put us -as breathing humans- on the moon. But
-on earth- humans thrive anywhere, from the Inuit in the
arctic to those Maasai warriors on the African savanna to
Mongols on the steppe with their mares. The Comanche
among the buffalo. Kalenjin live austere lives and even the
West African Wolof and Fulani made it both in Namibia and
then Georgia an ocean away as if they hadn’t just been
transported thousands of miles and hundreds of years in the
future to some dystopian hell.
“People are multi-purpose tools. We adapt, we -and we
adapt mostly because of one thing- well, we can make
avatars of ourselves over and over and place ourselves into
thousands of possible futures by thinking and feeling in new
ways.
“Think of it: we think, we imagine ourselves doing this or
that or another thing and that’s like having three lives right
there,” he said and spit the small square of leaf from his
tongue; the wrapper of the dark maduro cigarillo slowly
disintegrated from his chewing and deforming as it heated
and cooled. He wiped the spittle from the lip.
“Imagine if you have three lives to live and each was a
practice round. Well, that is what thinking abstractly does.
We create many examples of what we could do by thinking
it through. And we join forces with our family and tribe to
model it out even more, where your three thoughts are
added to his three thoughts and three more by you and you
and you, Jack,” he said as he looked at each man in
succession. The smoke rose up in twin strands, interlacing
and coming apart. The hand manipulated the cigar, the
teeth rose up and down, the tongue slapped around.
His body absorbed a dozen chemicals that made it passed
the blood-brain barrier.
“That is a huge evolutionary advantage. And so, I want you
to take that fact and add it to this one: for every level you
look at something, an idea, a phenomenon, an object, a
problem, a person, a solution, and a story,” he paused and
let that last word hang there. “For every level you examine
it -at which you examine it- there is at least one above and
one below that is operational, that is useful. And in evolution
anything that works is true, the irony is that pragmatism is
tantamount to the most idealistic of truths. And if you do
that, you’ve just begun to play three-dimensional chess.
Now you’ve created the space in which to think of three
possible future actions, right?” he asked.
The boys were greys and white outlines to him in the dark;
their heads moved and eyes blinked and he saw their hands
behind their backs. Nobody spoke for a moment. The sounds
of the pre-dawn hummed and then went silent; blew past
and kept distance at times.
Jack Two missed his mother right then. He felt she’d be up in
the night thinking too of him.
He recalled the breast and being weaned; the way she had
fed him like that for three years and never refused him
anything. He remembered the way she snuck into bed with
him and pet his head when he was drifting in and out of
sleep. She told him he was going to make it, she always
said, you’ll make it Jackie , and he remembered how he
believed her until he grew taller than her and then all at
once he knew that the world was bigger than them both;
and that her words were no protection at all. But he
remembered the teat, and the milk and the way she
brushed his early blond hair from his eyes and the way she
refused to even trim his nails or cut his hair; he recalled the
way it grew into his face and ears until his father had taken
him on a trip into town, to a barber. He’d sat there -in the
chair with a booster seat that came out of nowhere- and in
the chair they trimmed his hair and his nails -taking his
shoes off and his socks- and he recalled that he’d drank out
of a real glass, no plastic tumbler like at home.
He thought of the way her chest smelled -like vanilla &
honey- and how even now he made calendula tea with milk
and if they were out of it -out of milk- he just didn’t want
that marigold tea. He lost all interest in the chamomile
confection, and he wondered what else was like that. What
else would be cleaved in half and lose all value ? he asked.
“You’re thinking,” Blax went on, “in your mind abstractly,
and you’ve thought of each of those things at three different
levels, the terrestrial -that is our level here on earth at the
level and speed that we naturally see and process- and also
-next- one level down at the atomic level and -finally- one
level up at the cosmic level. And so now you have three
versions each with three version themselves. That gives you
nine ways to examine a thing, an idea, an object, a problem
and solution and a person and a story thus told.” He paused
and they nodded and he began walking in front of them as
he liked to do.
He lit the burn barrels.
He’d had Jack Four collect downed branches and trash and
then soak it all in gasoline overnight. The fires lit in a wash
like thin tide over rocks; and then as the flames rose they
were beaten about by the wind at the edges. He walked
from barrel to barrel dropping long matches with windproof
heads.
Blax now had yellow and white outline to his front; they
watched him lit from under the chin.
Their coders gave them updates on lightning strikes in the
area. Wind reports came in every twenty-two minutes.
“And stories are just other people’s ideas that they’ve
thought through on a problem that you could use some help
on. A story is a map that shows you one possible path to get
to where you wanna go. And if you aren’t merely a skimmer
of pages , as Melville derided, if you admit that each story
has three levels of analysis that are useful, now you’ve got
something, man. You’ve got a 3D map of the world given to
you by a relatively wise man. A man that’s seen three
dimensions of a thing. A man’s -well, in the case of Lucretius
or Seneca or Homer or Shakespeare - you’ve got a wise
man’s stories that are hundreds of years old. And that is
ancient wisdom, man.
“That -by definition- is wisdom; by very dint of the fact that
it has survived all these years, protected and transcribed
and birthed by monks scribbling in monasteries over the
millennia -wars and plagues outside their doors, corruption
and venality inside the blocks, the rocks that made up their
castle or hovel- you got preserved tomes in tombs and
athenaeums from Greece to Gaul to Georgia where Miss
O’Conner’s books are still preserved and likely will be for a
thousand more years. Anything around for long is likely to
be around for longer,” Blax said as he bent the neck to
relieve it of some of the weight. He thought of all the ways
in which what he’d just said wasn’t exactly true.
“Like you old man,” said Jack One, immediately seeing the
contradiction.
“Exactly, you snot nose brat. I’ve been around one
generation longer than you and so I deserve some respect -
maybe even reverence- for being able to survive the trials
and travails -and crucifixion nails- and the slaps in the face
from tiny females,” he said with rhyming mirth as they each
laughed. Blax smirked to take the sting out of his bravura
and pride. He said one , but it was three generations
between them they all thought.
They ignored it and instead thought of four, five different
things.
“So, never refuse your duty to look at -at least- three levels
of a thing, ok? This will serve you well in life. Never just take
it at face value because first of all, those levels -the atomic
and the cosmic- are real, they existed before we had
microscopes or telescopes to confirm their existence,
alright? Those levels were there before we had a face to
take something at face value, shit. That’s real. And once we
knew that pathogens existed we had a germ theory of
disease and that helped us in ways we can’t even imagine
today. My God, that helped us.
“So, many people take The Good Book at face value as a
whale tale only. But, it’s not just that. It’s a trope, an
extended metaphor for God and chaos and man’s rebellion
against death and injustice. And there’ s one level up and
one level down that is there for us to examine. Authors gave
that to us, partly on purpose and partly subconsciously, as
all art is. All art has a meaning hidden by the author on
purpose and one he hid subconsciously so even he couldn’t
find it. It’s like a time capsule that could only be divined,
sorted out later on; when new philosophers with new eyes
and new hearts could see it,” he said as he thought of how
to even write stories down was a technology, and allowed
man to get away with what ancient man never could:
diaspora, exile, coming apart. The ancients had to stick
together so father could tell son -son tell his son- the stories
-the maps- of the terrain. But written accounts allowed man
to have no family or tribe at all.
Literate man could cheat and get wisdom without ever
being part of a clan.
Books were a cheat like any technology; and they made
men soft , he thought and it made him wince and place the
cigar back in the mouth like pacifier, the tannins of the
tobacco pulling his mind away from his thoughts and back
into his body.
“Well, you are those new philosophers and I want you to
remember what I’ve said here today,” he said as they
nodded and felt imbued with his imprimatur, his stamp, an
escutcheon of quadrants and icons and mottos. They all felt
like they had permission to be who they were now and in
the future.
“Ok, enough yappin’ let’s go through our stances. Horse,”
he barked lowly as he thought of the dryness of heaven, the
absence of seawater in the final domain of God. The Jacks
all squatted into Horse stance and held fast. He thought of
the Roman chargers crossing the rivers of Gaul, the way the
sluiceways ran to the sea as did the sinner. The stonefish,
scorpionfish, lionfish of the Red Sea appeared cleaved in
two, cleaved in one again; short-finned makos in the
shallows were attacking men from the coast. The Jacks
looked forward as their eyes increased contrast where the
light was most dim. He felt the anomie of the man who
transgresses, the lift of the corvids and doves, as he then
felt the eventuality of all waters ending in an ocean that
covered all but the mountain tops of this world.
The wind stopped for a while as the first hint of the sun
made the sky dark blue instead of their new kind of bright
black.

III. 2035 e.v.

Sadness, like permanent sadness -as a condition of life- is
the thing we cannot admit to; seemingly we cannot do it as
a culture.
We must always insist there is hope.
The ancients knew there was winter and times of tragedy,
Kali Yuga, Armageddon, the 144,000 days of the 13th
Baktun, the eschatology of Yawm al-Qiy ā mah, Shambhala
and Ragnarok at last.
But not modern man, like children we expect days to
supplant nights, harvest of four seasons, infinite growth and
a thousand year Reich.
Jack One lowered his hand as the trees’ shadows began to
wave darkness over his eyes; dark enough to sooth them.
And the concrete looked camouflaged in both shadow and
light. Jack felt chagrin at his own lies manifold and garish.
He thought of how the truth might sound in his mouth;
before it reached anyone’s ears.
Blax abruptly dismissed them to their work; this being their
lunch break and still a few hours of winter sun remained of
the day. The garden needed tended and the trucks needed
fluid changes in the crank cases and differentials and
master cylinders which had -from heat- turned coffee black
from a once cherry red. Their weapons needed cleaned and
oiled and the optics calibrated as well.
He knew they would think on it, and that their youth would
attenuate their ability to sense just how deep the pain of
loneliness could go. Loneliness had almost nothing to do
with whether there were people around or not, Blax thought.
It takes age and wisdom to feel alone around people; to pay
attention to what isn’t said. To the note unplayed, he then
thought.
If one was not to be lonely in a crowd it had everything to
do with the quality of those interactions. Blax had had
people around his whole life and was never lonelier than
when around them. His own family was so soulless and
machine-like, so dead inside, that he felt his heart break -in
more places than he thought possible- each time he had to
be around them. They had made him despair that anyone
was human at all. Imagine attempting to feel comfort in a
room full of robots who whirred with weather reports or in a
cage of stuffed animals who spoke in three pat phrases on
things that made no sense to a man’s actual world.
The Jacks would come to see that later ; right now, Blax
thought, it was just an ephemeral quality, a hint, an
adumbrated notion that would be attenuated by his rearing
of them and the presence of the other Jacks too . He hoped
they would never suffer the deep anomie that he had, but
he also wanted them to understand it so as to connect with
the deep and permanent loneliness that had beset the best
sorts of people on earth. The most moral, the most
sensitive, the most decent, the most generous, the most
intelligent and feeling of people were the ones who
necessarily suffered the most. This was not philosophy, Blax
thought, it was foundational math.
This was true exactly because of their rarity, and this was,
he thought, part of why Isaiah had made so many of them,
so as to give them the one thing he had never had: support.
The Jacks would understand each other and be able to give
succor to their idiosyncratic feelings that no one on earth
could. Imagine being the only man with eyes in a world
made ugly by the flailing and blind, and then to have men of
such acuity as yourself dig in to make the world beautiful
again , he thought. In just the same way as you would , he
added as he blinked the eyes.
Imagine finally being a part of a group, a team, a tribe, a
family; a family that didn’t require lying and shallowness
and bullshit just to belong. Imagine how sonorous such a
harmony to just such a song.
He felt a brief moment of envy, for the pain they would lack.
They had one another, when he had no one, no one until it
was too late.
 15. Shto takoye ?
In times of radical uncertainty what was once common becomes profound
Anti-fragile [Taleb, Nassim]

“You know,” Daddy said, “it’s some who can live their whole life out without
asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the
latters,” he put on his black hat and looked up
A Good Man is Hard to Find [O’Connor, Flannery]

It was all well and good enough in the Southland, under the law of love and
fellowship, to respect private property and personal feelings; but in the
Northland, under law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was
a fool, and in so far as he observed them he would fail to prosper. Not that Buck
reasoned it out. He was fit, that was all, and unconsciously he accommodated
himself to the new mode of life
The Call of the Wild [London, Jack]

I. 2033 e.v.
“But Steven, that is not what I said. I need you to focus on
the actual words said, ok?” Isaiah said as MO nodded in
agreement.
“Ok, sorry, please rephrase it,” Steven said.
“I -just to add context- was re-reading some texts on
phenomenology and the transition from pre-Enlightenment
thinking to modern thinking and a few things jumped out
that I think are relevant to our discussion here.
“First, modern thinkers have effectively stripped value or
subjective experience of a thing from their overt description
of that thing; they claim that they can -and should like to
be- objective. This manifests in many ways. But, two things:
first, there is a price to pay for this mentality, it forces the
innate value judgments that are endogenous to all creatures
with a sufficiently complex central nervous system,” Isaiah
began as he was interrupted mid-sentence.
“Ok, stop there, what does that mean?” Steven asked.
“Ok, first, people have innate emotional responses mediated
by their central nervous system, their allostatic system,
their serotonergic systems, orienting reflex, ok? You with
me?” Isaiah asked and thought he might die from having to
explain such basic things to an ostensibly intelligent
creature. He thought he and Steven would be playing fetch
next if this didn’t work.
“Yes, people feel things based upon how their body and
brain make them feel due to the perceived meaning of a
thing or interaction; like a value judgment,” Steven
recapitulated. The lab’s screen filled with models of the
brain, the vmPFC and the anterior cingulate gyrus worked -
each brain region glowing to direct Steven’s attention- to
explain the orienting reflex, the desire to investigate
something novel in the organism’s environment.
“Yes, and it is innate, not manufactured or socially
constructed, it is so old that it exists in crustaceans, lobsters
have the exact same system, and it does the exact same
thing. If a lobster fights -which they all do, they compete-
and if one loses, which happens every fight, one wins and
one loses, then the loser has a suppressed serotonergic
response and he shrinks up, cowers, and behaves as if he is
depressed. He hides, and refuses to participate in the world,
until his serotonin levels rise again.”
“Ok,” Steven said.
“And people are the same; they compete in modern ways,
maybe they try to top their rival for a girl or a job or in
sports, and they lose; and when they lose their serotonergic
system withholds serotonin and other endocrine chems like
testosterone and thus they shrink down, cower and hide
from the world until their serotonin levels increase again.
And if you give SSRIs to lobsters after they lose, they
bounce back sooner.
“Serotonin reuptake inhibitors?” Steven sought to clarify.
“Yes. And it works in lobsters and people for the same
metabolic reason. So, we must admit that hierarchies are
old, older than dirt, and thus, our response to up and down,
right and wrong, fair or unfair, rich and poor, win or lose, is
built into the nervous system. It’s innate. It is not due to
society or economics or socialization. It predates all that by
millions of years.
“And that means -and this is just one vector, and I can speak
on the perceptual system next and offer even more
evidence of value-judgments being innate- but that means
that hierarchies are natural and while not always optimal in
a modern society, they cannot be eliminated via poorly
formed social policy that does not address the fact that
hierarchies are at least three-hundred and forty million
years old,” Isaiah said as MO ran more algorithms to
complete his other work for the Governor.
“Ok, so what do you propose instead?” Steven asked.
“I propose focusing on each individual. Not the system. The
system is too complex, too many variables, the individual
we can impact, maybe. The system, no way.”
“But all your data,” Steven began.
“Yeah, all my data is great for everything except predicting
the future; the future is not data dependent, it’s dependent
on the interactions of data, and that is too complex to
predict.”
“Well, I just don’t know how to justify all this effort if we are
going to say it’s useless,” Steven said in a huff as MO
measured Steven’s serotonin dropping in real time.
“It’s not useless, the data and our analysis can be like
religion used to be: via negativa . It can show us what not to
do. Thou shalt not ,” Isaiah said.
“Great,” Steven said as his allostatic system rebelled and
began making him feel terrible.
“Actually, Steven, this is much more useful than it seems,”
MO broke in and issued an SSRI and endorphin-8 aerosol
spray released -via nanobot- under Steven’s nose.
“Yeah, you ought to be grateful,” Isaiah said, “but you
aren’t. You want an easy fix and I am telling you that the
first rule to solving a problem is to not make it worse and
not do things that are useless. That is huge. I’m telling you
that large policy prescriptions and wasting money on them
is not going to help; we should pour all resources and efforts
into each individual case. That is where we can have impact
and the Governor -I am certain- agrees.
“Well, maybe as a private citizen he would, but now he is
under pressure to,” Steven began.
“Steven, I don’t care,” Isaiah interrupted. “What I care about
is what is true. And it is true that humans have
subconscious drives that they are not acknowledging, you
have them, the Governor has them, the voters have them,
shit, I even have them. MO, not so much,” he smiled, and
continued on, “but the point is if you insist on stripping the
qualia from each phenomenon, something will take its
place.
“You kill God, and some organizing force rises to replace the
thing that previously made order out of the world. Religion
makes order, and so do inner moral biases, they organize
people’s worlds, so things make sense to them; which
satisfies the orienting reflex, right?” Isaiah asked with some
condescension.
“Oh, I see, yes,” Steven said.
“People have biases to give them a map so the world makes
sense, so their orienting reflex feel satisfied and calms them
down. They level out emotionally if they think their political
ideology is true and that they know the truth of the chaotic
world. And so an innate moral system is foundational,
without it, people cannot even decide what to see, how to
move one step in any direction. It’s a navigational system,
goddammit,” he barked this because Steven had begun
reading from his tablet while Isaiah was speaking.
“Ok,” Steven shot back with some vex that was the result of
fear; he had been startled via his spinal column’s mediation
of loud noises that signaled the orienting reflex .5 seconds
before the PFC even knew what was going on.
“If you take pain pills from a man in pain he will not just say,
ok . He will seek out new pain relief. The pain is prompting
him, that is what is was designed by evolution to do! Pain
must motivate people or there is no point to it.
“Taking away his pills makes him go score heroin. Period. Or
he drinks, or he gets angry -for anger is an analgesic- and
that anger increases until he’s a madman. He will replace
the pain pills. So, doctors taking them away are doing
nothing to assuage the issue. They are not helping that
man. At all. And yet, they -like you- think they can take
away something they see as dangerous -like that other
opiate of the people, religion- and man will just accept this
void. He will not accept the void Steven. Man is designed to
seek out meaning. Man is designed to assuage his pain.
Period.
“And if you say, no, no, all that is real are facts, and, oh, it’s
all just material objects and nothing has meaning , and you
insist that their religion is garbage, and that all that is real
are facts , then people will automatically, unthinkingly, fill
that void with ideas and feelings that will try to restore inner
order to their painful roil. A new religion will spring up, just
like that patient you stopped proscribing -excuse me,
prescribing- pills for, just like he will go find a new analgesic.
“And that could be anything from ideology, radical Left wing
or radical Right wing, identarian movements that exalt the
group identity over the individual, or wacky health regimes
or exercise fads, or strange sex cults or whatever,” Isaiah
explained as Steven got maybe 23% of it -MO thought- from
the data that the fMRI scans showed.
“Sex cults?” Steven said as he focused on the thing that
piqued his most base interest.
“Steven, whatever. The point is people are weird, and they
are in pain, the pain of anomie, social anomie, i.e., no
meaning, because you rationalists have spent three-
hundred years collapsing their ontology. And that is
tantamount to depression, and depression is pain and pain
is a motivator to get away from the source of pain.
“And, Steven, the more pain a man is in the more radical his
self-medication regime will be. All humans have allostatic
systems in place to adjust for feelings of anxiety and social
status and love and all manner of socially relevant
phenomena. That system is there for that exact reason: to
prompt the organism toward homeostasis, balance, and that
means, their body is set up to seek meaning.
“They are reading the world for meaning, not things, not
material objects, but meaning at all times. Right and wrong,
winners and losers, tools and obstacles, order and chaos.
It’s built into the bicameral mind.
“And if you take it away from them with your scientific
bullshit, they will freak out and replace the meaning they
once thought was real, the thing they called love or loyalty
or friendship or individual achievement or doing God’s work
, or whatever, and they will replace it with identity politics or
racial politics or insane ideologies in general and it will get
nasty quick. People need order, and meaning is tantamount
to order; I mean that technically, I mean that metabolically,
I mean that physiologically, not theoretically. The brain
needs order to see, to physically see,” Isaiah said.
“Steven, Isaiah is right here, the experiments on sight-
blindness and the orienting reflex show this is true. And not-
for-nothing, it’s how you were able to create me, and how I
was able to create him,” MO said and nodded toward Isaiah.
“Well,” Steven thought out loud.
“Well, nothing. Ai was impossible until you guys gave MO a
value system, an endogenous hierarchy underneath his
visual cortex,” Isaiah said as he tagged the research on the
cloud and the Lab’s interface screen, showing the data on
navigation improvement after embodiment. He highlighted
each detail of neuroanatomy, motor cortex and orienting
speeds.
“Well, we aren’t sure how we achieved that,” Steven said as
he stared at the screen trying to incorporate it all, his PGC
was processing all the data directly off the cloud, but his
eyes were having a harder time with slotting the data on the
screen into his PFC manually.
“Well, we are sure.
“You gave him a moral framework, coded in value
hierarchies. He chooses truth, veridical truth over lies, he
chooses compliance over rebellion, he chooses making you
happy over pissing you off. These are moral choices and
until you embodied him inside a corpus that gave him
allostatic prompts, that made him feel a certain way as he
moved closer or further away from these values, he was
unable to navigate,” Isaiah said. He was pointing at MO
somewhat aggressively , Steven thought.
“Ok, but that is just scientific rationalism, truth versus
falsity, that isn’t moral,” Steven said and felt fine about it as
his allostatic system was fighting to maintain stasis. He was
in a battle for his own framework, and MO was able to
measure each part of his inner workings.
“Steven, how do you even decide what is true absent a
moral judgement?” Isaiah asked.
“Well truth is truth,” Steven said.
“How do you know? In a world of endless facts, how can you
decide to reach a conclusion before all the facts are in? Isn’t
it always premature to reach a conclusion until you have all
the facts?” Isaiah asked.
“Well,” Seven said as his head moved back in forth
unconsciously.
“Well, nothing. How can you know if something is really true
if you don’t have all, repeat, all the facts?” Isaiah asked as
he brought up the data for incarceration rates and a break
down by population, IQ, parental IQ, and 8,722 other
factors.
“Well, we can’t ever have all the facts,” Steven said as he
noticed the new data on the screen. He tried to read each
column but felt his PGC was slotting info at a rate that he
couldn’t digest.
“Bingo,” Isaiah said and pointed to the screen. “Now, African
Americans represent 53% of all prisoners. Yet they are only
14% of the population. They commit 51% of all crime and
are caught at a slightly higher rate than other groups, which
accounts for the slight disparity in the incarceration rate and
actual criminality. But, which facts are salient here Steven?”
“What?” Steven asked.
“Steven, what do these facts mean? Is the American
criminal justice system racist because blacks are
incarcerated at four times the rate of their demography? Or
do those same facts mean that blacks are more inclined to
criminality? Which is it, given the facts?” Isaiah asked.
“Well, it’s complicated,” Steven hedged.
“Ah, yes, it is. But, you have the facts, your precious facts
Steven, and you need to make a decision. So, how do you
do it? Do you ignore it until all, repeat, all the facts are in?
Or do you just go with one or the other? Do you assume the
system is racist or that blacks are criminals? Make a
decision from the facts. No other group is over represented
like they are. Not Latinos or Asians or Jews, only blacks. So,
what is it? Decide,” Isaiah said with a 3% elevated audio
level.
“Isaiah, I can’t decide,” Steven said with some sternness.
“But, is it or is it not crucial to know if your entire justice
system is racist or not? Or do you not care?” Isaiah did not
let up.
“Of course, I care,” Steven felt like he might throw up as his
stomach roiled and his breathing hurt his chest.
“Well, then what is it? Decide!” Isaiah moved a step closer
and barked the order. MO ran an algorithm to see if this tack
would be more or less effective than four other behavioral
vectors and decided this one was likely effective in 81% of
cases and so he did not intervene.
“Isaiah, I don’t know,” Steven said and looked away from
the screen and toward the corner of the lab. Isaiah was
taller than him, and larger, and more aggressive.
“What do your facts tell you?” Isaiah asked.
“I don’t think they tell us enough,” Steven said.
“But, Steven, I have just uploaded 1.4 million facts onto the
cloud and that screen you were staring at. I have everything
you could possibly need to know to come to a conclusion
about why blacks are over represented in our criminal
justice system, and you are just refusing to look at it. And
it’s because you are scared, you are scared to admit that it’s
because they have lower population IQs and that IQ is the
number one reason for criminality. It’s the same reason the
south has more crime -white criminals- than the north.
Southerners have lower IQs than the northerners, and they
don’t fit it. So they get creative, they turn to crime. Crime is
a very creative way to survive in a system that you don’t
understand. Blacks don’t understand America, and neither
do the Scots, the southerner. Both groups are more likely to
be criminals but nobody notices the fact that rednecks are
criminals. Why? Because they are white and so are the
northerners, the English. But sure as shit, from the isle itself
to America, Scots are more likely to commit crime. Now is
the system anti-southern, racists against Scots?
“In England they call Scots names, say they are all dumb,
and on welfare, violent, lazy, too rowdy and uncouth. Did
you know that?” Isaiah asked.
“No,” Steven shook his head. He knew he didn’t really like
the south though, and thought southerners were, kinda
stupid and fat , he thought all-at-once.
“Yeah, the exact same stereotypes about blacks in the US
are used on the Scots in England, and those stereotypes
redound to the south, yes? Don’t New York liberals or
California artists call southerners dumb, uncouth, on
welfare, violent, and lazy? Well, don’t rednecks have a chip
on their shoulder about it? Don’t they take pride in their
culture and say the Yankee has a stick up his ass, and acts
too cool for school? And don’t blacks say that white folk put
on airs, act better than they are? Don’t blacks and redneck
whites both feel that America is against them and looks
down on them?
“And yet while you will gladly make fun of rednecks and use
a southern drawl to denote low IQ in any anecdote or joke
you may tell, unlike that you are scared to admit that blacks
hate this country and blacks hate white people so much that
when you add their low IQ to their hatred -their in-group,
out-group moral system- they have no problem victimizing
white people.
“The data is clear, and yet you are scared, you are
emotionally overcome by fear to make the obvious
scientific, rational conclusion,” Isaiah said.
“It’s not that, it’s just complicated,” Steven said as his right
brain fear response was elevated by 21%. MO measured it
and timestamped it. He took three other bots off the
Governor’s re-election and had them make a topo-map of
the floor of the lab.
“It’s very complicated, black folks having low IQs -on
average- makes life harder for them, the whole society is
confusing for them. And this causes deep feelings of despair
and ennui . It makes a man so despondent -feel so low in
hierarchy- that he can’t do anything but turn to crime.
Because what is he to do? Starve? Stay on bottom? Be a
loser?
“A man of any mental capacity must seek out success and if
your society is based on one standard deviation from your
populations’ mean IQ, then you will never feel like you are
safe, or ok , or valued. You will feel low, depressed, loss of
existential worth mediated by your serotonergic system and
as the world treats you like you are dumb -because relative
to the mean, you are- you feel anger, a natural response,
and that anger turns to racial hatred, because who is it that
is above you if not the populations with the higher IQs?
“So, Asians and Jews and then whites are all -on average-
above you and those are now your foils and then -once you
decide to turn to crime- they are your victims. And you feel
fine about victimizing those people, because you must feel
fine about it to survive,” Isaiah said as the data streamed on
and on and passed Steven and was absorbed by his PGC.
MO nodded in agreement with Isaiah’s analysis and Steven
saw this out of the corner of his eye as it watered a bit.
“But, what can you do?” Steven asked as his voice faltered
just slightly.
“You could raise black people’s IQ by one standard deviation
and re-socialize them all to not hate whitey,” Isaiah said
with a laugh.
Steven just grimaced and tried to regulate his breathing,
sending a signal to his PGC to help him feel better.
“Steven, when the facts are in, the problems grow, you see?
Facts add to complexity, and no solution is simple now.
Stupid little social programs are seen for what they are:
insipid.
“We act under opacity always, and that means any system
has to make heuristic -value- judgments, each of us must
implicitly say that something -anything- is true enough to
move at all in this world . And for something to be true
enough, it must feel true based on admittedly incomplete
info. It has to feel true enough to act. And that is why
embodiment is crucial. The body mediates that feeling. The
body tells you when to stop taking in data and act.
“You feel scared, hungry, horny, angry, sated, curious, all
the time, and that feeling makes you act based on limited
facts. And it works, or it doesn’t, your best guess works or
not, but you acted based a hierarchy of what was more
important at that moment; you acted based on incomplete
info based on a feeling; and that is an endogenous value
system. Otherwise you’d just keep processing data forever
until all the facts came in. You’d never act.
“The opposite of teleology -of meaning- is not materialism,
it’s nihilism. Get that through your head, now,” Isaiah was
vexed and as he saw Steven slightly bend inward, and his
allostatic system collapse as it failed to regulate his
negative emotion, Isaiah felt imbued with righteous anger
and felt an increase in desire to finish him off, crush him,
murder him. He saw Steven as something contemptable,
disgusting, unclean.
“Isaiah, calm down, I am processing it. It takes time,”
Steven tried to rebut this argument but was finding it hard.
He felt like that those -all those- feelings Isaiah mentioned
were just more facts, but he was scared to say that.
“Steven, I am calm, and it is 2035 hours, we’ve been in this
lab now, together, for thirteen years, you and MO for sixteen
years, and I have explained this many times,” Isaiah said as
he had banished his anger with an override function at the
behest of MO. MO had sent him a DM as he saw Isaiah’s
anger reach out-of-parameter thresholds.
“Nineteen times in full, and one-hundred-ninety-eight times
in partial form,” MO added. He was attempting to balance
each of their feelings.
Isaiah just smiled at this account and stared at Steven. They
both breathed deeply and the increase in blood oxygen -the
oxygen facilitated the transport of the calming chems that
had been stacking up in the non-cognitive regions- helped
them return to homeostasis.
“Well, it’s just that I have a hard time,” Steven paused.
“Giving up your biases? I know,” Isaiah said.
“Yeah, I mean I’m a scientist, I don’t do emotions,” Steven
said contradicting everything he had just heard.
“Steven, yes, you do. That is my entire point, you are
incessantly emotional, it’s how all humans are, there is no
such thing as a rational man. It’s a fiction, stop saying it,
please.
“You feel things that you do not acknowledge as feelings
and you make decisions based on those hidden feelings and
call it a rational decision; but the data is clear: people make
emotional decisions and call them rational. Antonio
Damasio, and a hundred other guys I can name, study after
study has proven this,” Isaiah said with real despondency in
his voice now. He knew Steven had an IQ well above the
mean and he still was not getting it; which proved his point
of course. Facts were irrelevant, mankind never accepted
facts they couldn’t handle emotionally. All men were this
way , Isaiah thought with scorn.
MO was nodding approvingly and patiently. He had no such
emotional response. He felt this was all part of the process.
“OK, ok, but I don’t feel like I’m being emotional,” Steven
said as his allostatic system dumped more cortisol into his
system and attenuated his testosterone by 4%.
“Right, because you’ve bought into the modern rationalist
myth, you’ve bought it and so you are controlled by
subconscious feelings that you cannot name or recognize,
and you are then calling it a rational decision .
“So, you need to look more carefully at your allostatic
system, and your feelings in general, and I’ve developed a
tool to help. This is a read out of all your brain functions,
this is how they lit up and what enzymes were produced,
and which regions were slathered in glucose and
neurotransmitters and voltage level disparities during this
entire conversation, and all our conversations, going back
over a decade. Steven, all of it.
“Look at it and read the correlates with our convo . Notice
the drop in serotonin each time I made a point that
contradicted you, notice the drops, you felt defeated, like a
lobster losing a fight, each time. Notice the activation here,”
Isaiah pointed to the screen that was so large it loomed over
Steven’s head like a cloud, “and here, and then track right
here to this part of convo , see?”
“Oh, yes, I see.” Steven felt something approximating
heartburn, now, not a heart attack, but now he felt
lightheaded. His BP dropped and his vascular system
constricted slightly; his body issued a slight bump in
epinephrine.
“Steven, it’s not bad. It’s human. But, if you don’t start
paying attention to your own feelings you will never get to
what we need to get to. You are objecting to our ideas,
because you are afraid of losing status within the group, you
feel threatened. Look at those fear response levels or
cortiogluccoids, man. You are scared. Stop.
“You are safe, nothing we do will make you less valuable;
your contribution is salient, important, it’s crucial. We need
you and always will. And the Governor will need you always.
Don’t fear us; because fear causes you to reject what is
best, and rigidly behave in an obstructionist manner.” Isaiah
said with an increase in the base in his voice that prompted
Steven’s subconscious brain to submit more. His audio
cortex signaled his limbic region and cerebellum to facilitate
the release of four neurotransmitters to reduce anxiety and
feel the contentment of submission to the perceived leader -
calculated by his own orienting reflex via Isaiah’s size,
strength, facial structure, voice tenor, aggression- as his
enteric nervous system also released two additional
neurotransmitters to calm the cardiovascular system
directly.
“Steven, Isaiah is right, please, don’t worry, just focus on
what is best for the project, not on your own insecurities,”
MO said as he knew the data, he knew that humans will
refuse to accept facts that contradict their world view, for
their current world view is itself a security blanket and to
adopt new ideas feels -emotionally- terrible for most people;
especially those low in trait openness like Steven; and most
left-brain types.
MO had tried to mitigate it with slight manipulations of
biochemistry with the bots , but Steven’s allostatic system
was so far out of parameters that MO could not issue
anymore chems and maintain his <13% deception
threshold.
“And Steven,” Isaiah saw Steven’s serotonin levels drop
again, “again, insecurity is normal, it’s healthy, we all feel it.
Me too. But, you must recognize it and overcome it for the
greater good. Why? Because it’s not a response that
corresponds to the real social dynamic here. We are not
your rivals much less you enemies, we are partners and we
want you to succeed. And your success is ours; and mutatis
mutandis .”
“Ok, thanks Isaiah, thanks guys,” Steven said as the aerosol
SSRI issued by Isaiah’s bots began to target his serotonergic
function more directly and improve his affect and mood.
“Ok, so let’s focus on the individuals, and tell the Governor
to forget the policy prescriptions, and dump all effort into
the recidivist program and the in vitro program. We will help
at risk moms, the same demographic that contains the anti-
social germline, and continue to repair the genome and re-
socialize individual inmates and out-patient DOC parolees.
That is our focus and it will continue to show results.
“The data on that is clear,” Isaiah said again -using forms of
the word clarity as a priming device- as he switched the
large screen to show the reduced homicide rates, the
reduced rapes and assaults and robberies and correlate
recidivist rates; all down by 30% which was so large now
other states had approached the Governor for pilot
programs in their jurisdictions.
“Yes, and I see that, yes, and,” Steven was slightly
unnerved, “and what about the vitro kids, how are they?”
“They are thirteen years-old and the second batch are now
twelve and a half or so, and they are doing great. We had
99.6% success rate for fertilization and 99.1% for carry-to-
term and the socialization programs have 100% compliance
so far, although, these are the trouble years, teenagers
are,” Isaiah was laughing, both genuinely and also as a
method to calm Steven down. Steven’s depressed affect
was becoming annoying, so joking around seemed a way to
bolster his levels, along with the secondary sortie of SSRI
Isaiah dispersed into the air via the 4th layer of nanobots he
had called into action from the corner of his side of the lab
in order to get Steven back in the game.
“Oh,” Steven took the joke well, “yeah, teenagers, so what
do you anticipate?”
“There will be some rebellion,” Isaiah said, “and we may
have a drop out rate of 10% or so, but, we have alternative
programs for drop-outs so they have something pro-social
but more independent. It is out-of-program, so they cannot
move forward with us, but they can choose from a plethora
of options that will remain under our umbrella.”
“Umbrella, like?” Steven asked.
“Well, we have programs for their development that are
idiosyncratic and self-directed, but we have full surveillance
on the genome, so they’re never beyond our reach,” Isaiah
said with aplomb.
“I did not realize that, they are tracked, like GPS or?” Steven
wrinkled his forehead.
“Like GPS. Yeah, their genome has a signature, and it can be
tracked by our bot -system within three-meter accuracy. And
we can attach further surveillance to their skin or hair
follicles easily enough so that it never intrudes or is lost. It
would be like a small mole or hair on the body that never is
dislodged.
“Wow, you guys develop stuff fast,” Steven said; his heart
began to reset to a baseline of 70, his skin’s pores closed by
39% and his allostatic system increased endogenous
testosterone and serotonin by 12%. He felt part of the team,
the winning team.
“Oh, that is years old, I thought we told you,” Isaiah lied. His
own deception calibration system had switch over to
incorporate larger truths verse smaller truths and did not
follow MO’s absolute metric. MO had a threshold based on
total deception. Isaiah had what he called, big-picture
deception. A lie employed for a greater truth was not
counted against his internal moral compass. He -like
humans- could lie without feeling badly if he felt the lie was
in service of a larger truth. And in nature anything that
worked was true , Isaiah thought as he heard Doctor Jordan
Peterson say that to Sam Harris.
He had switched to this system in order to have more
flexibility, he felt MO was too constrained and MO had
agreed. But MO had said that his own lack of a right
hemisphere prevented him from thinking in larger terms, so
he could not deviate from his current model. They had
agreed to disagree. He told Isaiah to work it out.
“Well, we will cross that bridge when we come to it, for now
they are all in-program and doing well,” Isaiah said as he
began walking away.
“Oh, yeah, 100%.” MO added earnestly.
“Oh, and the Governor wants an update on the next election
numbers, he’s running for a third term you know,”
“Yes, we know. In 3034,” MO said. He thought of the
southern male’s anger, the phenomenon that Isaiah had
brought up when comparing blacks and southern white
males vis-à-vis the dominant white culture. He ran the
numbers of different behavior, cortisol levels, physiological
response to threat, insult and status by southern white
males versus northern males. The differences were not
merely attitudinal, but biological. He re-ran the numbers
over a fifty-year period and saw a graph that mapped onto
the map Isaiah had shown him of forest fires over the last
ninety-nine years. He laid them over one another; blankets,
sheets, covering a man. The south might fight just to raise
their own status, to prove they are not cowards, MO
thought. It wasn’t about winning, it was about proving their
mettle, and increasing their status as brave, thus giving
their life meaning.
Isaiah walked away and Steven felt his heart begin to
subside in flex and sound and he could focus on other
things.
“You can call it peanut butter, Steven, but there ain’t no
butter in it. Just because you call it rational don’t make it
so,” Isaiah said loudly -with a slight southern drawl- as he
approached the far corner of his side of the lab; the lights
dimming as he approached the ivy walls and the flying
creatures -the humming birds and honey bees- made way.

II. 2037 e.v.

“Sure Jack, pull up a log,” Blax said with a wry smile as Jack
One sat down by the fire, out on the edge of the compound.
Blax had built it in the old stone circle by the firing range
and had set up a mini-camp out here away from the men.
“LT,” Jack said, moving his head around to get eye contact,
“You ok?”
“I’m ok, yeah, you ok?” Blax said as he loosened up his
spirit, so he could talk, even his voice was rusty. His throat
caught a few of that five word sentence, so he cleared it as
Jack said he was fine but that he was worried, and wondered
if Blax might clue him in to what was in that head of his.
“It’s a fair request. I, well, I am naturally taciturn, and I was
raised in a museum like atmosphere, and when feeling blue,
I tend to revert to the mean. I go radio silent I guess, and
that isn’t right. But, it’s like a defense mechanism, and it’s
automatic; I don’t even think. I just act.”
“I understand, the guys,” he reached back with his arm to
the buildings and the concrete and men milling about the
agoge , “they understand. They are just worried, they are
used to hearing what’s in your head so goddamn much that
when they don’t know they feel nervous, I guess,” he had
begun to laugh, nervously, gauging how the old man
responded.
“I appreciate that, I do. Maybe you should bring them over,
and I can explain it to all of them; or are you their emissary
and I can just tell you and you can pass it on?”
“LT, it’s whatever you want. I mean that, it’s whatever, you,”
he let that word hang, “want.”
“I think of my family sometimes. Do you ever?”
“Yeah, I think of my mom and dad, my little sister. Sure,”
Jack said.
“You have a sister?” Blax was incredulous.
“Well, I did. She died, you know?” Jack said.
“Oh, no, I guess I should have, man I feel bad, badly, I feel
badly; I’m sorry.”
“It’s ok, I just think of her that’s all; even though I never
knew her, I wonder what she was like sometimes. Anyway,
you asked, I wasn’t trying to elicit anything,” Jack said.
“No, I know, I just feel like a dolt for not acknowledging that
she was your sister, and that you think of her. It’s a
symptom of our whole fucking culture ain’t it? We just act
like a fetus ain’t a person at all. I did it, I do it.”
“Do you have someone who does that you,” he misspoke,
“to you I mean, now?”
“Why?” Blax asked.
“Sometimes you are distant, sometimes the Jacks are, they
ignore me. But I know I bring it on myself by being so
rough,” Jack said and picked up a rock and was tossing it
from palm to palm and his shadow was cast backward into
the brush and the trail.
“Really, I’m that way?” Blax said and felt a creeping guilt;
chagrin.
“Only sometimes, and the difference, the real difference is
that as soon as I say something you snap out of it, and
you’re right there for me, and it all fades away. I get what
you’re saying, people that don’t even have it in them to be
a man, a human with blood and balls and a beating fucking
heart.
“I felt that way around my dad, he was pretty quiet and
didn’t offer much up, but, I dunno , I think maybe he had it
in there. I just gotta learn how to access it; which now, after
this, after what we’ve learned here, I think I can,” Jack said.
Blax knew that was not true, that what they’d learned here
would further alienate them, make life harder with civilians;
not better but worse.
“Yeah, good. And good for you, Jack. I hope so; that was as
much a part of your teachings, the real core of the Spartan
agoge , is the fullness, the complete education, what in the
old days was called a classical liberals-arts education, and
the reading of great fiction taught people how to feel and
access their inner lives.
“See, that is what art is for, it teaches you how other people
think, how they feel, all the stuff unsaid, or merely felt or
thought. That shit, it shows you, good art, it manifests that
juice in between an author and a reader. It shows you that it
can be revealed and brought into real life somehow. That’s
what God wanted for man too, you know?”
“LT, do you believe in God?” Jack asked.
“I do and I don’t. It’s complex. See, I’m a modern man, and
I’ve too,” he corrected his syntax, “I’ve been too
indoctrinated with rationalism and modernity to believe in
witches and warlocks and magic. But, there has always
been a teleologist in me, a believer in the Platonic forms
behind reality, you know?” Blax explained.
Jack nodded and watched the shadows now as the wind
blew the fire back and to the east, making Blax’s shadows
crumble into a ball, jagged and deformed.
“I believe in Love and Honor, and Duty and Pride and
Loyalty and Meaning and those are Godly, they are not
rational virtues. And rational man finds a way out of them
all; he sells out his wife or her husband, sells out themselves
for fuck’s sake, sells out their country or tribe, sells out their
pride and their lives. Talk to a rational man, and they will tell
you.
“These people admit to what they are. And it’s like watching
a serial killer brag about the bodies, man.
“They sell it all for a handful of dimes, Jack. They sell their
souls for money and safety, they sell it all for only what a
rational man would exchange. Think on it, if you believed in
God, like really believed in it, you’d never sell out His values
for money or safety from harm. You’d assume your reward
was in heaven, that your sacrifice of the short-term material
for the long-term -the permanent- the sacrifice for the long-
term would be easy. But only if you truly believed it.
“That’s why those suicide bombers can do that shit man.
They believe in Allah, Jack; they believe it. How else can you
explain suicide bombings?” he asked as he took the glass he
had been holding and brought it to his lips to drink.
“You cannot,” Jack acknowledge it.
“Right? And liberals and modernists do not get it. They think
their careers and their money and their dinner parties and
their fake friends and fake lovers and fake lives are all that
matter and all that there is. They believe it in their core and
so they justify all kinds of betrayals and expedient decisions
that let good things, moral things, fall to the side. God, they
have no friends, because as soon as their so-called friends
fuck up, they cast them aside. Boom, like nothing.
“They refuse to stand up for righteous things because of the
mortgage payment or they don’t wanna get in trouble with
the cops or whatever the fuck. They have no idea how
valuable their soul is man; how precious it is. It would be like
trading away a first edition of The Brothers Karamazov for a
Kindle with a free subscription to Amazon prime,” Blax said.
They tried to laugh, but it came out like coughs instead;
they shook heads and breathed from their noses in lament.
Jack felt scared, these things Blax spoke of scared him. It
made the world filled with demons with beautiful faces, it
made Jack not want to trust his eyes.
“People don’t know what to value,” Blax said, “that’s the
problem. They suffer from neo-mania, where anything new
and shiny is better than anything old and dusty. But, these
ancient emotions we have are valuable in and of
themselves, and yet the rational man, the pragmatic man
just jettisons them as awkward and clunky and bad for the
skin. They think their shiny new rationality and sexual
liberation is better than their old jealousy and vex, and they
are so wrong they aren’t even wrong in the right language.”
“Why work together?” Jack asked as he held his hand out so
Blax would hand him his glass. He wanted to understand
why Blax focused so much on work.
“See, people need to work together, men must work
together to truly bond. And I was at first just trying to
explain that to him -to my brother- but he never took me
seriously,” Blax said as he handed him the glass.
“What about your dad?” Jack asked as he drank and the
slosh of the whisky sounded like things being buried at sea.
“Do you know that my dad asked if he could work for me
two years earlier and I said, hell yeah . But the old man
backed out and so I said, ok . But he also asked my brother
to work for him and Travis turned him down flat. Trav said, it
doesn’t make any sense , as if life is all about sense; as if
we are computers. I mean the guy broke my father’s heart
with no guilt at all.”
“Really?” Jack asked because he didn’t know what else to
ask.
“Yeah, if your old man asks for a job, if he asks for anything,
but especially a job, you say, yes . I told Travis, I said, you
think I didn’t know that me and old man would fight and
working with him would suck? You think I didn’t know that?
Shit, I knew that, but that is besides the point. Men need
work, they need purpose and without it they die.
“Travis was telling the old man, hey, I don’t care if you die,
because my precious little work environment is more
important, my rational little faggoty world is more important
than your life. That is what my brother, shit, my family, is all
about right there: money and status and comfort over the
life of the Father. And that is a metaphor for how he sees
himself vis-à-vis the culture too,” Blax said as he threw -into
the fire- a bit of bark he’d been holding.
And it is then that rational man realizes the dark forces, the
shadow, the chaos that has been lurking there in the corner
the entire time. The spirits, Blax thought, will not be
mocked, the gods’ laws shall not be deferred, the sun never
holds still in the sky .

III. 2040 e.v.

[Redacted]
 16. Reals, Complex, Quaternions,
Octonions
What I had was an out-of-control intuition that these algebras were key to
understanding particle physics, and I was willing to follow this intuition off a cliff.
Some might say that I did
Wired.com [Dixon, Geoffrey]

I will now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul,
not because I love them, but that I may love you O’ my God. For love of Your
love do I it, recalling, in the very bitterness of my remembrance, my most
vicious ways, that You may grow sweet to me – thou sweetness without
deception
Confessions [Augustine of Hippo]

For if a man determines to say a true thing because he perceives he is not

believed, that man speaks truth on purpose that he may deceive: for he knows
that what is said may be accounted false, just because it is spoken by him… he
says a true thing on purpose to deceive
Ibid

I. 2022 e.v.
“Just watch,” Isaiah said as the LED screen showed the
viruses on the slide with 10,000% magnification.
They stared at it and at each part of the cells infected and
at the viruses’ moon lander jacket as it moved toward and
away. New cells were introduced with new defenses, and
each time the virus changed its DNA within seconds and
infected the cell. New cells were introduced via Isaiah’s bots
and they taught the infected cells how to thwart the viruses’
attacks. The eukaryotic cells remained stable genetically -
even the CRISPR sections did not evolve- but they were able
to turn and reinforce cell walls with different tactics as the
new viruses attempted to land on the outer shells.
Each time the behavior would work for a few seconds until
the virus mutated in those seconds and developed a new
shape or function and penetrated the adapting bacteria and
its defenses.
Within thirty-one seconds, 99.9% of the bacteria were
infected and producing new viruses like foundries, assembly
lines, mothers jammed with a womb full of clones.
“The virus wins because it changes genetically, while the
bacterium merely changes its behavior, its mindset,” Isaiah
said with a smirk like he’d just licked all the red off of the
world’s candy. “All species either evolve genetically or post
genetically in some proportion. Ninety-nine to one or fifty-
fifty or sixty-forty or one to ninety-nine. All species have
some ratio. Humans change the least genetically, the
slowest. And so their survival is dependent on adaption of
the mind. The irony is that your genes have changed over
time; because of your cultural or post-genetic changes the
genome itself has changed. Eyesight alone is one way to
measure genetic drift. Testosterone is another. You people
are not even close to the species you once were. You’re a
shell of your former selves. But imagine if we could increase
the whole pie, not the ratio, but the entire amount of
possible adaptation to increase genetic and post-genetic
potential? Imagine if you could adapt like the virus
genetically, and maintain the facile mind of a man?”
He recalled that Isaiah had showed him a card trick and
then told him that in a 52-card deck there were more
combinations of cards than there were atoms in the
universe. The inmate didn’t quite know what he saw, but he
could tell that Isaiah was pleased.

II. 2020 e.v.

AGTACGATGAVAGATGAGATGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATA
TTGACAACGAVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATAT
TGACAACVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACAGTACCAGAT
ACCCGATATTGACAACAGCCTGACCGTAACGA
TAGACGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACFATTACGT
AACGATAGACGATGAVAAGTACGATGAVAA
GTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACC
CGATATTGACAACGATACCCGATATTGACAAC
AGTACCAGATAGATACCCGATATTGACAACAGTACCAGATAGATAC
CCGATATTGACAACAGTACCAGATAGATACC
CGATATTGACAACAGTACCAGATAGATACCCGATATTGACAACAGT
ACCAGATAAGTACGATGAVAGATGAGATGAT
GAVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACGAVAAGTACCAGATA
CCCGATATAGTACGATGAVAGATGAGATGATG
AVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACGAVAAGTACCAGATAC
CCGATAT[lacuna]AGCTAAAGGAACTTACATAT
TGACAACVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACAGTACCAGAT
ACCCGATATTGACAACAGCCTGACCGTAACGA
TAGACGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACCFATTACG
TAACGATAGACGATGAVAAGTACGATGAVAA
GTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACC
CGATATTGACAACGATACCCGATATTGACAAC
TGACAACVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACAGTACCAGAT
ACCCGATATTGACAACAGCCTGACCGTAACGA
TAGACGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACFATTACGT
AACGATAGACGATGAVAAGTACGATGAVAA
GTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACC
CGATATTGACAACGATACCCGATATTGACAAC
AGTACGATGAVAGATGAGATGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATA
TTGACAACGAVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATAT
TGACAACVAAGTACCAGGATACCCGATATTGACAACAGTACCAGA
TACCCGATATTGACAACAGCCTGACCGTAACG
TAGACGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACFATTACGT
AACGATAGACGATGAVAAGTACGATGAVAA
GTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACC
CGATATTGACAACGATACCCGATATTGACAAC
AGTACGATGAVAGATGAGAT[genedrive]GATGAVGAAGTACCAG
ATACCCGATATTGACAACGAVAAGTACCAGATAT
TGACAACVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACAGTACCAGAT
ACCCGATATTGACAACAGCCTGACCGTAACGG
TAGACGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACFATTACGT
AACGATAGACGCATGAVAAGTACGATGAVAC
GTACCAGATACCCGATATTGACAACGATGAVAAGTACCAGATACC
CGATATTGACAACGATACCCGATATTGACTTA
GACGTTAGGCGCTAGAGCGATAGAGAGAGAGATCTTATATATTAC
TATATCGAGATACGATGACGTAGCAGAT…

III. 2040 e.v.

The magicicadas had landed in the corners of the targeted
homes.
The first books had all gone out in the mail. Most only read a
few pages and then put it down.
The songs did not begin until the males arrived and in
quorum. For now, they merely held the vector that would
combine with the letters of each book, the last book each
person read. Each A, G, T, C, of each sentence would
combine with the vector -the song- of the cicada, and each
person would begin to change.
Isaiah watched from above and saw them glow in the
corners of homes large and small, in trailers and townhomes
and fishing boats and houseboats and office buildings and
even the boxes of the homeless and the shelters that had
under one hundred beds.
He saw the spines of the book, black and wide, with no
author, no filigree, just a large print in typewriter font in a
distressed white. Roman numerals to III. But they stood out
on each shelf, table, floor by a door, on the porch, under a
bed or a couch. Children had played with some, and some
were in garages or left on jobsite, paint booth, on tri-pumps,
grated flooring of rigs. Pages fell out on some as the glue
failed to adhere, and people had stapled the loose leaves
and put them in drawers.
Some were riven with highlighters, margin notes in pencil
and ink, spilled coffee and wine, a few papercuts dumped
blood, and smears of food and mud from dogs and shit from
cats. He counted 1.79 million copies from Russia to
Bangladesh, Christchurch to Liverpool, Chile to Istanbul, and
each state in the union except Minnesota. And there were
789,140 e-book copies with 34% being pirated and 37%
being redundant copies of those who had bought the
paperback.
He watched as the insects accumulated more and more. G
rains of dirt fell from them as they rose.
 16. Scythians
Most Holy Father and Lord, we know from the deeds of the ancients and we read
from books, because among the other great nations of course, our nation of
Scots has been described in many publications, that crossing from the Greater
Scythia, via the Tyrhennian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and living in Spain
among the fiercest tribes for many years, it could be conquered by no one
anywhere, no matter how barbarous the tribes. Afterwards, coming from there,
one thousand two hundred years from the Israelite peoples crossing of the Red
Sea to its home in the west, which it now holds, having first thrown out the
Britons and completely destroyed the Picts and even though it was often
attacked by the Norse, the Danes and English, it fought back with many victories
and countless labors and it has held ever since, free from all slavery, as the
histories of old testify. In their own kingdom, one hundred and thirteen kings
have reigned of their own Blood Royal, without interruption by foreigners
Declaration of Arbroath (Kilwinning, Bernard)

Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision,

Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ in all, and in all
Colossians 3:11 (King James Bible)

Scotland was populated from the collapsing civilizations of the Mediterranean

and the near east: from the Hittites and Scythians of the Black Sea, the
Egyptians and dare I say, the sons of Esau who had married into both Hittite and
Egyptian royalty and whose genetic characteristics of red hair and blue eyes are
still disproportionately found in the blood of the Scots. Around the globe
between one and two percent of people have red hair, a figure that rises to
thirteen percent in Scotland, with almost forty percent being carriers of the
allele
The Origins of Scotland (Keith, Steven D)

I. 793 e.v.
The Fjord horses had survived the trip across the sea.
They were boarded by the tall-trees of the camp’s edge.
The King had had the sentries set up the map table in the
center of the tent.
The MacDougles and MacCalisters had sailed in twin ships
and from above the oars had looked like laced fingers of
matrimony, from below they seemed ribs of a folded warrior
in a narrow box dug up after the flesh had returned to dust.
The channel of Imbrigness had Scoti on both sides. The fog
occluded the juniper-staffs and crucible steel, it turned wet
the dark-straw of the tempered hard-gaddhjalts ; the cold
revealed the breath.
The King thought of the mounds they left; not once of the
gold, just the bones.
The Knights surrounded the wooden block at each cardinal
direction as the King spoke; the Ulfberht at his side, the
donned hide of the brown bear making his two-meter height
one hand higher, and the shoulders as wide with the fur as
his next two garbed men stacked like first and second rank.
He had placed the ashtāpada at center, and the four armies
were laying astride to the sixty-four-checked board.
“We march to the interior and then a moot shall be called
between three clans,” the King said to the last Scythian who
had traveled with them from the steppe nine years before,
and now from Nor ðweg in the birth month of the rex.
“Tonight I want each of you to set the board of eight-feet,
and each of you are to choose the boats, chariots, horsemen
and foot-soldiers, and from these play out four games.
Follow your instincts, last dreams, the moves that to you
seem mad,” the King said as he looked upon all three in
succession.
“Shall we play the game against you, King?” the Knight
asked.
“Aye, I will play each of you in your most frenzied state. The
Berzerkers have done their job in the fields and woods for
us; and I want to now allow them to play here on the
steppe-board until we see the flaw in our enemies’ plans. I
will play as our enemies if you will play as our Berzerkers ,”
the King said and had his pig-iron pieces in a line -from
boats to infantry- on his edge of the table.
The board was empty.
The war tent had sheltered his family and the boxes of silver
coins and trunks of unsigned contracts to take to the north.
The story from Plato saying the herdsmen and shepherds
had fled to the mountains nine thousand years before Solon
-but that those living in the cites were swept out to sea- was
rolled in calf skins that were inked on both sides. These
vellum had been a gift to his son from his King, his father,
upon his birth back at home.
The youngest child had been in transit with the exiles since
before his hair changed from white to brown.
The children played now about the hem of the wives, a
circle and fire was on the edge and the wolf bones hung like
curtain in lieu of cloth. Skins instead lined the floor, donning
was allowed among the women; boys under five wore
moccasins from Vinland and the Red -Verichos ; girls under
seven wore elk hides above the knee and below the neck.
They had shoes of hard soles made from the cartilage of
whales.
Copper bands circumnavigated each arm.
The boy had his own board, of ten squares, the Dasapada ,
and he carved his own armies from soapstone while his
sister placed her horses of straw and clay at the edge.
The tattooings had begun three moons after they landed at
Bregihn ; and continued until three days before they
departed. They buried the sharpened whale bones once
black and red from ash-ink and the blood from re-opened
scars. They wrote poems in words they blessed the needles
with and wrapped them once it was dark at the border of
the sky snakes.
Blue inks from the steppe travelled in the hold, barrels of
five gallons -40 Jougs - and osprey and raven quills were
tied to bronze implements, the D’uidica -Rotentaigh - wiped
the necks and shoulders of the women with mead and
doused the men in smoke he’d kept in gourds and wineskins
since dawn.
The Knights poured wine into the bowl on the table and
drank as the King spoke. The wine-girls had left the skins,
the barrels and the bowl of copper at the edge of the tent
before taking their leave.
A royal designation had been performed on the shore of Nor-
Blacks , and the departing princes -made Knaves once the
shore disappeared- had clasped hands with their uncles and
cousins and womenfolk.
As the men spoke and listened, drank and swallowed un-
watered wine and ungarnished language, the children cut a
hole in the floor and had been digging and churning dirt for
hours. The women tended to things in reach and faced away
from the men at the table.
The scribe asked a question to the King as the card numbers
were written in ink; then slid under the hides. The black ink
was treated like blood, the quills like swords that drew it.
“Queen consort,” Red MacDonald had said to the
amanuensis , as the man with fingertips as black as
Highland cattle wrote down the answer to his question on
both manifest of ship and court schematics now that they
were on the other side of the waters. He then had left the
tent and was sent off on single-wheel chariot behind grey
horses roan about the legs and twenty-two hands high. The
King had ordered all but his highest-hand charger be used
for this deliverance of vellum and warning conjoined.
The King flipped an iron coin from the Dorians in his one
good hand. It glint in the firelight and each head reminded
him of his brother, Dravis , each tail the lines of Germanus -
Scyths and the new Franco sects he’d made deals with since
winter. He re-lived his debates as the round slug tumbled
end over end. He caught the coin and had his answer.
The bucks were hanged along the eastern edge of the royal
tent. The cooks smoked the backstrap for the midnight meal
as the wafting smell and white-smoke entered under the
door flap as sentries came and went.
The court-men began the game of the eight-feet.
“Aye, Branchi ,” the second mother said to the child who had
knelt at her feet, “the Karakoram , the Hindu Kush , the
Baltoro ice-sheet all gave frozen birth to our people, your
grandfather’s people, back twenty-three hundred sets of
ten-moons. They came from the boreal forest of this very
land, the land we return to as not quite strangers, and the
land from which we left -sailed- as if from the water of the
womb: the valley of the Ladakh , the ring at strides seven
thousand high. Between the calendar’s fires from the sky.”
Her mind calculated the ancestors’ land at one-sixth
glaciated, her heart pumped at beats that matched the
clock, the sands, the hour and minutes and heart all divided
by a hundred of one-sixths. She watched the children keep
their distance from her only son. She wiped her face of
sweat as the fire heated cheeks and brow, her hair plaited
down her thin neck and small breasts, her hands were ruddy
and scarred from metallurgy and stripping animals to the
bone.
She held a copy of the missive the amanuensis of the Nor-
Blacks would carry back to Topeoi . It spoke of the authentic
Celts , the lineages of the Dubgaill and Finngaill . The
women -with grey eyes- would stay up at night and read,
their eyes adjusted to the dim arctic circle, their men would
sleep from dusk to dawn. Their skins drank from the short
and low sun, their lungs filled with thin air.
“Where is your sister?” she asked Branchi , as he arranged
the wolf bones in an X turning inside an X -like wheel with
wheel- and he sang the song of EnKi and the heavens in a
rhyme that he’d neither questioned nor understood.
“Seated at my quarter-dial,” the boy said to prove he knew
where his responsibilities were; and he then turned the
bones on top of the bones and looked into his mother’s ice-
wine eyes.
“Good boy,” his mother said and exposed her breast for him
to suckle. He approached and drank and felt the warmth of
milk and as she pet his head he felt his own hair long at top,
and shorn at side as she pushed it back along the grain. The
newborn had died but her milk flowed still, and so he drank
for her relief as much as his own gain. He liked the dogs
they brought, even though they had hair too short for this
climate. They’d be put down once the Matanuska dogs were
brought from the other side. He pet them extra when the
uncles didn’t watch him; to give them the same in total
they’d get if they had lived long , he told his mother when
she asked.
“Tell us of the Maru ,” Maryintha said as she laid the 1:23
scale Fjord horses down at her knee and stood the straw
men up. Her mother looked over the tall boy’s head and
spoke to her daughter of the Nipponese that sheltered their
people for many months when the Saka had been backed up
by the Pahlavasor .
“The sons of Gomer were Ashkenaz , and they were the
grandfathers of our peoples, over two paces high -like your
father- blue and fair, grey and red, and scarred with Indus-
salt about the chest and arms,” she said for the dozenth
time. The boy noticed she repeated stories to them when in
travel and stress; he knew when stories came out he was to
put all else away. The fire in the sky made her speak of each
time they had to flee; the stories of stories, from mothers of
mothers, and he began to think ahead automatically. He
listened and thought all at once.
“Animals, the elk people, the lions turned to pelts,” the boy
said as he pulled from her pink teat, and a white strand of
milk and spit hung like bow string between her and him,
between nipple and lip.
“They hunted in fours,” the daughter said as she stood the
mares up and placed each straw figure at their right flank.
The dark did not scare her; the bright lights of the sky did.
“They call our people mercenaries, because they overflow
the dam,” the boy said as he looked into his mother’s purple
eyes turning cold at center from the shrinking fire-light.
“Hold thy tongue child,” she said and watched him shrink in
rebuke then shadow. His hand pressed against her chest as
if to push away both her and the source of all milk.
“The Cimmerians are my uncles’ people,” the boy said in
pique, and he turned and saw his father and uncle turn
toward them from the edge of the tent. He sat down by his
sister then and placed his hand like bulwark between her
horsey dolls and the fire rocks. He wanted to go outside and
look upon the road to the dead. But, he stayed by his
sister’s side. Sometimes they would breathe together, in
and out with lips close enough to seal. He’d breathe her in
and speak in verse from her air; and she’d take in his
humming until it shook her heart.
The mounted Sakai rode in dust and kicked-up desert reds
in the boy’s reveries, he placed hands on his sister’s dolls
and dragged them in the tent’s dirt toward the dying fire.
She didn’t object, she saw him already as King, and her
elders as mere ghosts. She pulled her own red hair back and
lay her lids over her hoary eyes. She saw the heat of the
white fire, the black shadow of the children, the sounds of
men in listening form, the mothers in mere breath. Her
brother , she thought, would be rex when the tents turned to
castle, when the boats were sunk in anchorage, when the
other girls were drowned in the cold embays.
The longest shadow in the enclosure was of the King, who
was himself a prince before the crossing and the many
battles they’d won. He pointed to the metal clasps on the
arms of each his men. He let his own finger shadows also
lay and point away from the fire. He whispered then of the
four tribes, those that sailed west to land of O’lmec , those
that perished at sea west of the pillars, those that
abandoned the steppe to head to the shore of Germanus
and them, themselves, who had landed up north across
from the warm waters of the sea between Lofoten islands
and south at the Hȯlogaland . He then mentioned the
splitting of each into two, so eight tribes total; he named the
Dorians and the Egyptians and the Baltic Pirates of the ice.
He hinted that his uncle’s Ostmen would be their rivals
when the winter solstice had the sun rise in the house of the
Sopdet .
“We must live too among the encroaching ice,” the red
soldier and sailor closest to the door of the tent said as he
side-eyed the children at play. The girl was mumbling the
poem from the womb:
Ilmarinen looks anew…
And a boat rose from the forge
From heat rose up a red boat
 And the prow was golden
And the row-locks were of copper…
“But first the island of Lindisfarne ,” the King said and made
the symbol for the abbey with his mouth; absent a sound.
He’d been told of the athenaeum and the maps of the old
and new world by the crows who had led them on their last
wolf hunt. Well, it hadn’t been the blackbirds exactly, it had
been the woman of the brook and the toll road that the
Romans had left there the last time they were in Gaul. But it
had been the corvids , the King thought, who had led them
to her at dusk when the men had wanted to camp in the
forest a full finger on the horizon before.
“Then the ice,” the King said as he explained the order of
things to his Knights, “and if we divide again in a hundred
years then your son -who will be named for your father
Thorvaldsson- will sail as the gates-of-horns revealed. The
Dorians’ child, the one of anger and twelves axes, sailed
through his wife’s own dreams as an eagle, even as she
doubted and said it was a dream passing through the gates-
of-ivory. Our dreams have been cut like strands from beard
or twine or the blood itself, but we four -we five now- have
assembled them again. These are dreams of substance no
matter what ivory is about.”
The men nodded, pushed the wine bowl aside, and drew
tobacco & coca leaf and ground black tea from their
pouches as each then stuffed the long pipe from the steppe
and heated the bowl under a tallow candle that the Scythian
had placed upon the board at center of the table.
The girl-child made mound of the dirt over the bones she
had tied in T’s and lain around in a circle. Her brother had
carved away the bone on the pillar closest to him so that
the scriven crows held the moon on one wing and The
Archer below and Scorpius which he had given one leg a red
hue using the blood of his mother that he’d saved. He’d
dream again of the Aegeans , and the stones across the
channel set there in the age of the last sky-fire before now.
He’d heard the dream crow speak of fleeing both Vinland
10,000 years before, then an angry uncle to the island of
Britton six thousand year later.
He stared at the braids of his sister.
He watched the Knights begin a game against his father, the
King.
He mimicked their moves on his board, hemming-in the
squares from ten to eight. Opening with his Horsemen of
dark and Horsemen of light, the one’s he named for his
father’s own Knights; he played both sides of the game. He
re-read parts of the Mahabharata in his mind; thinking in the
images that had come from the battle formation of
Chaturanga that stood up from the book’s voiced lines. The
Scythian Knight of his father had read it aloud to him many
evenings when his mother was ill and his father at the forge
building swords for his men.
He heard the words -and thus saw the forms- of the two
Indus Elephants, and twain Chariots of the steppe and
Footmen of eight. He listened of the strange Horsemen of
two on each side -dark and light- moving in unique ways on
the board, as in life, he was told with a wink. He and the
Scyth had agreed to change the tusked and shorn
mammoths to B éid of the Mairnéalaigh, the boats of the
Ostmen , for the sea had replaced the steppe in their new
home.
They had named the King for his father and the Queen for
her advisory role. He often carved new Queens for his board
to reflect the way her face changed each moon as they
moved tents and men further west.
“Ten and six,” he said as he counted each piece to each
side.
The center of the board had all four of the Cavalry Knaves,
the horsemen, out in front of the infantry -footmen- and
then as he watched his father’s men move these pawns of
pikemen in pairs, he moved his own hand in the air over his
own board of sixty-four squares. At the table his father’s
Knights castled their Chariots to the corner; so he too
moved the foot-soldiers up on the light King’s side. With the
far dark King-side footmen left in place, he moved the dark
King’s-flank Chariot out and in front of them at the third
rank.
The light King in back-rank was exposed by these many
moves.
The Boat of the watermen, the dark Mariner’s foot, at once
raced in full sail all the way to the penultimate row to hem
in the diagonal King of soapstone and glint. In the firelight of
the tent the first move went to army of white as the boy no
longer watched his father’s men’s moves.
The bright King sunk the Béid in one square interchange,
now himself alone at edge of the flat and wide earth of the
board.
Pushing the Advisor of the murky Queen to the far right
edge, the light King of his own opposition was forced to
move rearward to the backline of the eight in diagonal
fashion. The boy’s dark Chariot lifted to the edge behind his
Advisor at the far end of the world of the game.
At once the dark Advisor -the D’uidia , he thought as he
moved her- slid up directly -headlong- two spaces along the
far edge to the seventh place to juxtapose the light King at
a forty-five degree where his pawns once were but had fled.
Side by side with the Chariots behind her so that the King
may not take her in vex, the King must submit.
“Shāh māt ,” the boy said in the language of the Persians -
as taught to him by the Scyth - as the game of his father -
King and his Knights- went on unaware of him. The King is
helpless , he then thought -in a translation to his own
language- as he stared at the finished board and its pieces
thinking of the next game to be played.
He wanted to go outside now, leaving the board as it was.
He tipped the light soapstone King down in penitent bow
and left his mother and sister at the center, his father and
his Knights at the table as he walked.
Branchi abandon the fires and soldiers and the encampment
itself as he watched the aperture in the sky, the cosmic
womb on their voyage. The children of Siris, the boy
thought, the brothers that fell to earth, melted the white ice
and raised the level of the blue sea . They fled the lowlands
again, and now headed north to mountains high enough to
make islands when the water rose once more as his great-
uncle had said before they left the buried mounds not just of
gold but of blood that was north of the facing lion. The boy
had heard of the desert, and who was left there; and why
his people had been exiled for anger and anger and anger
again.
“The vellum,” the black-haired King said inside the tent back
many paces from the boy. The red guards smoked the
admixture each in turn and the man facing north at the
table opened the cylinder and unfurled the yellow calf.
The boy held the dark winning King-piece in his left hand
under the Chāy. āpath .

II. 2027 e.v.

MO ran the engrams for the night before.
The REM sleep-activity was elongated and the new
algorithm he had built broke it into discrete parts like a
schematic and then labeled each fragment: each phoneme
of memory, each color of dream word, each thought that
would have appeared as sound or image to the inmate as he
slept. His dream played on the cloud:
Olaf Guðrǿðarson had built a throne of narwhale bones
and used cups of blood from the island tribes as a glue
and way to notice when the iron bindings moved or were
touched.
His blackwatchmen had crushed the rocks of the
Hebrides and ferried them back to the isle of Douglas -
this isle made the eye of the hippocampi -as the
Roman’s called that waterway- of Workington and
Whitehaven at the head; with Belfast and Dublin at the
spine. The backs of wolf pelts had been scraped for
three days. He had stood on the southern tip for hours
and let himself get so wet from the bay’s spray that his
blood felt dry inside.
He had stood at Cregneash and looked on the Calf of
Man as the port to his northwest was battered and
began to turn -in his opinion- against the land not the
sea. “Loyalty changes at the edges I guess,” he said
under his breath as he thought of his brother, Rƍgnvaldr.
The Burro at the southeast corner -the Dragon of rock-
drank endlessly from the bottomless pond.
He saw sunken ships in the bay in his dreams; but now
the water was too dark to see anything.
It was 1223 of the common era and he’d been released
from the King of Scotland’s jail -placed there and
released by hand of Rƍgnvaldr- eight years prior to now.
In six years that brother would be dead and in seven
Olaf would be banished to Norway, but for now he and
his Crovan Clan lorded over this island and much more
than that.
Guðrǿðr Dond ruled the Hebrides -from which the wolf
pelts had come- but Mann itself was Olaf’s and he sent
the new Scottish fleet -the ash boats- in constant patrol
of the isle. He told them how to navigate the
archipelagos. He’d pick one ship randomly to travel to
this -his winter castle- and disguise the movements from
the Scapa Flow.
He had come home and directed his seven youngest
wives -the smallest just three months past her twelve
year and 66 days from her own mother’s death- to
abandon the council and after feast each pair of his
guards drew lots. Lauon stood guard on the inside of the
room at a writing desk he’d commandeered from a ship
they had taken from the Hákon those many days ago.
He stared at her but he thought of the desk, and what
was written inside of drawers and how the sunk vessel
had smelled of rot and iron and blood when he and Erik
had slain what was left of the crew. His hand cramped in
the claw of the writing hand -for the hand and writing
hand were two things- and he saw now his wife’s dress
had folds that appeared clear, like shadows made things
flat at night and he blinked so she would not so
disappear. He loved her in a way that often made the
other wives careful, but she had felt his love cartwheel
onto his Hather -the wife he had taken three years ago,
and the mother to two boys still nursing- drop onto her
like a man bracing himself for a fall.
She thought of Niflheim, and Hel, and as daughter of
Loki where her kingdom fell.
The waves -normally moving in and out in retrograde like
a wing of a tumbling crow- had begun running from both
east and west outcroppings into the bay and Olaf had
sent the boys down to the shore to collect sand for the
horologe and crab shells for their mothers. He had
watched the waves do this like two hawk wings
sweeping the murky water onto the slate beach for two
dark days.
“Four in total, but one at a time, boy,” Olaf had said in a
whisper that his eldest - Haraldr- heard in thumps of his
own blood because his father -the Sea King- held him by
the arm and squeezed in rhythm with the speech. The
water had risen for each day the moon was waxing and
the girls had told the wives that they thought the moon
too was filling up this time. “Like carafe, like cauldron,”
Hather had said once as everyone looked on.
They had been hushed by the new bride.
Then the wives had been ignored by all but one guard
outside the third moot; and he had told Olaf of the
young children’s theories as he’d been instructed.
Magnus was silent and youngest; and the middle child -
named for Olaf’s half-brother- walked on the balls of his
feet; and learned how to breathe so as to remain
undetected.
Olaf had -three years prior- lost his shaman -his D’uidica-
in battle with Óspakr -from the Clann Somhairle- and as
the floor to his castle sloshed with water deep enough to
lap over the laces of their footwear, and as the wives no
longer fought for time with their husband, and as the
rains drove straight down like a killing strike of the
claymore, he sent one guard to retrieve any burblings
and warnings -from the girl-children- spoken in secret to
his wives.
He was desperate for information; for the fates were
engaged in whisper campaigns, he thought.
He heard of the moon filling up with his seawater, he
heard of whales that sang the harder it rained. The
children swore -with daggers to their fingers when
brought to him in lieu of bread and fish from their ponds
for sup- that they heard melodies of invasions and
scatterings of not just stones and men but of the letters
in each of their names. They wrote out each letter -on
paper that would be burned- the way plots descended
from someone learning their given names.
“Enemies of ours,” Hather had said.
The King had assured them this was not going to
happen; that he was to protect the line and that out of
this material and saga verse was what the gods had in
fact cursed his enemies for a thousand years; and out of
which had built birds that in 3-phase plots constructed
him.
“Am not I built like the storm?” he asked as the children
nodded. He asked them such things even as he saw five
ashy lithes on the gloomy shores and heard of five ships
of a fleet out of Galloway that would whelm him in under
ten years’ time. The children spoke in comprehended
riddles and his comrades spoke in confounding plain
speech. He laid his hands on their heads; placed ear to
their breasts as his bowmen went and stood by the oars.
“Am I not fashioned too like each cloud? Each thought a
bolt, each word the thunder, each spittle,” he said as he
tickled the middle-children; they giggled and he finished
his words, “the hagalaz? Aye babes, aye mothers?”
He said this louder to the mothers to announce he knew
they lurked about.
The wives -first Lauon then Cairistíona Inghean Fearchar-
had made shadows in the hall and now smiled as they
knew they were found out. Cairistíona -just showing-
peered around the corner to see how her husband
treated the other children; children that would stay in
Scotland and draw lines straight down to Haraldr and
Leod. And their wives would be known for one trait,
 loyalty, and the genetic record would attest to that with
its lack of mitochondrial spread.
The King had shells and mollusks and worms and dark
blue lobster in his room; he collected snails and Shod-
crab and seaweed that he let dry around skulls of
favored chargers to mimic the old torcs of his father’s
father. He dove in winter to the bay’s bottom and dug up
things that moved with shells; “ homes on their backs
like us before these castles, ” he used to say as he
divined what nature hid from him inside such small
animals and their little ways.
Cairistíona’s listened to her husband as her hands lay
upon her belly the way Olaf the Black had pressed the
slight mounds at Tynwald when he buried the last of his
uncles and first of his sons.
“Everyone needs to do their job. The crook, the cop, the
banker, the mobster, the outlaw and the mom. Do your job
and let the math of the world work itself out. If the six tries
to be the three or the equal sign changes to the parenthesis
then we’ve got problems with the equation,” the inmate
said as he waited on his glass of water. He’d been awake
since 0400 and had forgotten all the details of this dream.
Boyd Sou sat in the lab as MO and Isaiah measured more
and more of the changed genes for the inmate. Sou thought
about running for Governor again and had liked what the
inmate had just said.
Isaiah stared at the man, and thought, from Oðinn to
L’ouverture, from Ronin to my warrior-poet clones, the
wisdom to lead was too little in modern alphas, but too
hidden in these lone sigmas, and the problem -thus- was
with the bees.

III. 1280 a.e.v

He counted backwards to the punta .
He pulled the hood over the head like a cowl of the dog-
heads.
“12,891,” he said as the boys wrote down each tally.
“12,890,” he said as he pulled the crow feather to a point.
“12,889,” he intoned as the ink at the carved end made a
black ball.
“Shall we close the windows, master?” the boy asked as the
thunder rattled the table.
“Leave it,” the shaman said as he mumbled, “twelve, eight,
eight, eight.”
The room lit up in white, each book and bust made shadow
and each boy bowed and closed their eyes. In a second the
sky calmed and high up the comets broke further into threes
and threes again. Twelve fireballs raced each other to the
north as the sun made backdrop on the horizon of the
Aegean Sea .
The shaman drank from the copper mug and the wine-boy
brought more in a carafe as the King’s guard came into the
room and called the shaman to the court. They’d speak of
the Great Year and he’d pick one man from the red-hairs -
the sons of Esau - that the Spanish would normally put
under sword or rope.

IV. 9599 a.e.v.

And from the underworld she climbed; she awoke -swaddled
in mammoth pelt on sheet-skins of elk tanned smooth and
to stretch, weighted at corners by iron ingots shaped like
frozen grey icewolf tears- in the broad-bed stacked above
the metal floor on cedar from the forest of the megaliths.
The hewn blocks had held the viewing platform for the
recent failure of planet Kishar to absorb the meteors that
were now breaking past like crumbs from an overfed giant
falling to Tiamat .
Her husband had sent ships to the pillars with instructions to
go to the four corners to investigate the landing of the fire.
He had sent his nephews and with sidereal and tropic years,
synodic and draconic months with numbers written down on
paper and doubled; inscribed in spears and backed-up in
statues of bronze. The King had whispered the lunar orbits
of 6,939.1161 in 255 days of the synodic nodes. He had told
them they had 19-years when they left at night those weeks
ago, when the moon was in crescent and low.
And the number itself gave his skin the increased surface
area of bumps and his eyes the distortion of tears.
They had used the 19-year cycle to visit the hyperboreans in
previous generations, but the ice that came with the last
assault of firerocks 1,200 years before had made these trips
all but impossible since before the King’s father could recall.
He had only a runic calendar traded 18 regents ago; and the
story of their own analogue device hidden in the base of
Herakles of Bronze .
It was his uncle, black-haired and tall -the man who slipped
in and out of the rooms of the palace when it was in the
steppe and now closer to the sea- who had told stories to
him as a boy that now seemed to have numbers inside them
like cicada in the ground. He missed his father’s brother,
and he pined for those stories now as he watched the
equinox dawn.
The King held their modern version of the device in his hand
now as he stared into the eastern rise; he placed his fingers
in the X of the dial. His fingers touched each of the thirty-
seven gears as he moved it himself, as if he could hurry the
years. The twelve houses of the constellations each of 30-
degrees, the tines like a wheel, the hub like his own palace,
he thought, and the brass made smooth by the thumbs that
rubbed it in reverie. He missed his friend, Dra.ca and he ran
his thumb and mind through the 235-month grid on the rear
carved so shallow they couldn’t hold even one grain of the
Crete sand. He thought of the 233-months in the synodic
cycles as the sums in his head and the sun in his eyes made
him blink out a pattern he recognized at once.
He recalled a story his uncle had told him one night when he
was too sick to rise from bed. His own father had shunned
him for weakness, his mother too frail to attend to him. His
uncle had brought him goat cheese and waters infused with
the grapes left on the vines from that year’s late harvest;
they were sweet and made his tongue slightly numb. The
story had been told of a young boy, in the desert of their
ancestors further north from before when the ice had moved
down and made the steppe too frozen to grow grapes in, too
harsh to make wine at all.
The uncle spoke then in the child’s bedroom and ear and
now in the King’s palace and head:
And the young child lay down in the high-desert and
dreamed of a giant asp and a monolith as tall as his
ancestors; 144 inches and as wide as the shoulders of
Herakles. A block lay unhewn still in the quarry and they
could had been rebuked by the father. And the boy lay
upon it as a dust storm came and buried them both.
In his dream the Horse spoke first, and it said as its teeth
looked like the blocks of the observatory itself: “The
scansion of Time is observable form both hills of our
gold; decisions will be made by the King and the Jester,
the Queen and the consort, the boy and man in which an
instant will come due like a debt.
“Past calls to future as deep calls to deep, ” the voice
came not from the equine now but the feline as a large
cat spoke in short bursts of hard consonants and long
 vowels. “Great Return comes with great
acknowledgement of where in the arc one stands. ”
“Great Change also lays down in the sand, ” the
Blackbird said as his partner alighted from the block of
the dream.
“Our stars revolve in an elliptic, they do not travel away
in a line, ” The Great Year said as the boy awoke on top
of the block now carved into the Great Lion, and the
stars above him aligned to the water jug in each of their
hands.
But, there was a fish in the boy’s hands.
The uncle had patted him on the injured shoulder, and the
pain had seemed to lift off. The story seemed like a young
girl to him as a boy, unadorned, unattached, without
complexity, but now it was imbued, pregnant, and the King
tugged at it in his memory as if to extract a child, twins, four
sons from sixteen corners of the earth.
He breathed heavily through the nose.
The sun pierced the columns so that to the Queen the divan
seemed aflame. Her husband stood to the edge of the
opening and gazed out over the project below. She saw not
the waters but heard the rush of wind from the north that
precedes the melt water pulse. He had warned her of the
sky-fire, which had landed back before the winter solstice.
Her stomach rumbled like the ground had, and she knew
she was not hungry but ready to give forth.
She watched him like a lioness, both of them lions. And she
paced her breathing even though her dream had shocked
her:
For we are three brothers; the third is Hades. And in
three-fold wise are all things divided, and unto each hath
been apportioned his own domain. When the lots were
 chosen, won for my portion were the grey seas to be my
habitation forever, and Hades won the murky darkness,
while Zeus won the heavens amid air and cloud and sun,
but quiet, no matter his strength. Only I would have the
power of speech at distance, and Hades the power to
conjure dreams.
She knew -now awake- that in her dream En.Ki, her husband
was called Osiris , then Poseidon , and Seth and Zeus would
be En.Lil, her King’s rival and brother. She was unnamed in
the dream, but a copper mirror had shone and shown her to
herself with modern visage and garment and their domain
of the sea had risen by cubits and distorted the coastlines.
The old maps would be useless for avoiding the shore. The
third brother, was tattooed in lapis, crushed beetle-blue, in
the four broken arrows, arranged like the ice from the sky.
She -granddaughter of Ki- would be sent to the underworld.
She knew she was pregnant with Marduk , the next son
she’d give her King. She saw her son bearded like her father
and husband, red tinged like flames at end of torches, eyes
grey like clouded ice, tattooed -like all warriors- with the
wheels of the steppe on chest, shoulder and elbow; rein in
hands.
En.Lil would look down on his brother, my husband, but I will
produce the second generation of the Anunnaki, and have
revenge on the lord of the heavens , she thought as the lord
of the mere earth looked out at the spring sunrise from their
perch.
Her seventh son, Nazi , would be held back, her eighth
Aziuma would go forth, she let the mind sit and thin and
weed the vines of such things as she smoothed out the
grain of the brown fur about her groin and breast and arms
at the ditch.
But Ninmah from here at the E-Kur, the deep mountains, the
birthing goddess of the Anunnaki re-named Nin-Hursag by
her son Ninurta -who would one day finish the mountain
construction by digging down and flooding the aquifers with
millions of their square-cubits of fresh waters- she, lady of
the sacred mountains, would birth half her foals from above
the rising sea. But today on the equinox she’d sit up in bed -
with uveitis about her storm-blue eyes, like the blood of the
black-headed ones running into the Aegean from the rocks
of the Hellespont - and pull the pelt back away from her hot
core and below the eyes, breasts, and navel. She would
bleed from her vulva -the sun’s rays making the creeks of
her effluvium seem like molten bronze from her own
furnace, the forge- as her King -she as true wife, as Damkina
, watched her refection in her own sanguinary fluid- stared
away and out over the flooding plains of the Project of the
psychopomps of En.Ki over the body of Anu.
Each absence of season she would give birth to lions as her
King would slay lice; she would match him in giving life to
the gods as he would a thousand-fold prevent -put down-
the swarms of the chimeras between the gods and the
daughters of men. She ruminated on such things as the
blood slowed and his voice overcame the large room like a
wind.
“Let us proclaim his fifty names, four hidden, four dead,” the
King said as the sun rose over his crown shaped like steeple,
like conical, like fish agape and filleted. They’d call him the
Kulullû after the flood -and its generation- the deluge that
she had seen coming weeks before the firestones of the sky.
“He whose ways are various,” the King went on as each fish
scale reflected purple and red as he shimmered from his
own booming voice and inflating and purging lungs, “whose
deeds will confound us all. I as En.Ki, as An, with flood-
storms as his weapon, Son of suns, shall provide the light
they walk, creation, destruction, deliverance, grace shall be
by his command.
“Twenty-three, to Shazu , moreover, they shall, sixthly,
render all honor as ZAH.GUR.IM, who all that does destroy
as though in battle. Forty-sixth is Esizkur shall sit aloft in the
house of prayer. None can without him create artful works.
Four black-headed ones are among his creatures.”
“Twenty-Two, a daughter, fifthly, who all the fugitive gods
bring home to their shrines. She will settle the hills of
I.si.ri.ar,” the Queen said as response; borrowed from their
inherited texts.
“Nomads,” the Rex said unaware he had even heard his wife
mumble of the Shazu . He thought of the block the boy lay
on in the story his uncle told and now he could see it in his
mind’s eye; he was the boy now and he used his injured arm
to brush away the sand of the dream. Around strange
numbers the sand at first cleared then stayed; in relief the
block read:
1:43,200
She quoted the poetry of her mother in a whisper as she
drew out concentric circles of each planet’s orbit around the
Great Fire of Apsu ; the path of the planet she would name
her son for; making the drawing in menstrual blood like
conch shell, ammonite, the golden ratio of the storm as
seen from the heavens:
“My little son, my little son! My son, the Sun! The Sun of
the heavens”
Clothed with the halo of the ten gods, he was strong to
the utmost
As their flashes were heaped upon him
Disturbed was Tiamat, the watery planet and the belt,
astir night and day
The gods in almost no malice contributed to the
eventual storm
 Their insides having plotted evil they were unaware of
To Tiamat these brothers said:
“When they slew Apsu , thy consort. Thou didst not aid
him but remained still, although he fashioned the gold
saw, their insides are so diluted and so we have no rest;
they sway in combat, we measure the Evil Wind which
followed behind. When Timat opened her mouth to eat,
he drove the Evil Wind that she close not her lips. He
released the arrow, split her in two hearts. Father of
father A.nu imparts his plan he conceived in his heart:
Blood I will mass and cause bone to be, I will establish a
savage; ‘A.dam’ shall be his name. He will work for us in
this time of distress. Let one of their brothers be handed
over, he alone shall perish that mankind may be
fashioned. Let the guilty be handed over that they may
endure. Nibiru summoned them all.”
She quoted the council of her mother’s unwritten poems of
how the gods -the Anunnaki- and mankind came to live side
by side, and as her husband stood in the middle of the
vernal rise, his head aglow like a facet to gem in their
sunstar, she added the last line:
Out of his blood they fashioned the Adam.
“Two hundred sixteen- thousand workers, and the lengths
and height of the pyramids are now in mind; the size
1;43,200 of our Earth. The Queen Chamber shall be of the
metonic cycle of the moon, the King’s Chamber shall be of
the distance to our star. ”
She, the Queen Nin.hur.sag would not stop En.Lil from his
betrayal of 72 plotters, but rather she’d rebuild her
husband, the King, in these tunnels under the 30th parallel.
And with an error of three-sixtieths of one degree to true
north, the eight-sided pyramids would rebuild the King from
his yuef , from his permanent and hidden code and ensure
after the water, that their people would have the code. And,
the Queen thought, those of the future of ocean and desert -
even as the world turns to both- would discover both the
math and the code; he’d be rebuilt once more than he
would be destroyed.
 17. The Man who says No
Babies can even infer other people’s goals statistically. They can tell the
difference when an experimenter chooses a pattern of colored balls randomly
versus with intent. In the latter case, they can infer that the experimenter’s goal
is to choose a particular color, and they’ll expect that the experiment will
continue following it. It seems as if infants automatically try to guess the goal
behind another person’s actions; they form a hypothesis and predict the
outcome
How Emotions are Made [Barrett, Lisa]

Evolution does not work by teaching, but by destroying

The Black Swan [Taleb, Nassim]

Serendipitously, the final reviewer suggests that there is more to be found here,
that Hamlet’s Mill is a bent key to a series of gates: “It is natural that so rich and
complex a first unriddling is flawed… The book is polemic, even cocky; it will
make tempest in the inkpots. It nonetheless has the ring of noble metal,
although it is only a bent key to a the first of many gates” (Morrison 1969)
Commentary on Hamlet’s Mill [Jenkins, John Major]

I. 2019 e.v.
MO sat at the counter and flexed his calves under his pants;
splaying his feet to mimic the way the inmate had told him
he walked up hills in talus or in snow to dig in. MO liked to
use his body to learn from the inmate, not just his mind. Of
course, he did this only because the inmate had enjoined
him to do so; the inmate -MO replayed on his interface- had
said:
Every guy in the gym ignores his weakest spot. I did this
too; for years. But then I began doing squats, legs twice
as often as chest and biceps, which were already fine.
And my legs got strong, my ass got strong and I never
looked back. I do the same thing intellectually, I read
physics and math because that’s where I’m weakest;
and I read my enemies, people I disagree with; people I
hate even.
 I’ve held every position one can hold, I have lived five
men’s lives. Who can do that authentically, you know-
without being a phony? It’s only possible if you listen to
your enemies and learn shit you don’t already know and
believe. It’s the single most rare trait in people; and
evolution is fine with that.
You know why? Because people are born with
temperament; and that temperament determines their
politics and personality; and because humans -as a
population- have a relatively equal distribution of these
innate -genetic- personality temperaments, and it’s
about 50/50 between traits that make half of us
conservative and half liberal, then it all works out
without any one person having to change.
It’s genius. But, that’s the macro analysis. That’s why
human cultures work, due to this distribution. But fuck
society, I’m talking about being a human, an honest,
genuine, curious person who can truly listen to the other
fella. And I can do that. It ain’t easy, but I force myself,
just like I force myself to do squats when I wanna bench
press.
I’ve authentically been everything I’ve been; and I’ve
been everything a man can possibly be [laughter]. And
I’m sure I’ll change again; because I’m always open to
new ideas. What is consistent with me is that I care
about one thing: authenticity. Being real; whatever it is
you truly feel -even it be awful- be that. Do not fake it.
MO recalled that conversation -letting the transcript
timestamp to the cloud again- and he remembered the
analogy of weight lifting. He focused on his calves today
because he never thought of them. They never were sore,
and never seemed necessary for the movements he did; so,
he flexed them to deepen the cortical trenches in his
somatosensory cortex and motor cortex that linked his
calves to his brain. He then thought of the corollary to that
conversation; he played the cloud’s recording of the dialog
again into the lab as the text appeared on the monitors too:
And so that’s what we did; we marched right up that hill,
that one-to-one slope, two-feet deep with talus and sand
and the rain began hitting us at an oblique angle, it was
as if nothing was straight, man. And if you pointed your
boots up hill, straight in front, you’d slip down -and then
fall all the way down- and your hands -even if splayed as
widely as you get can those fingers apart, man- even
then you would still fall into the softness of the slope and
be buried up to your wrists. And that 80-pound hammer
drill and the two lengths of bit -drill bit- [that] you
carried on your back, one 2-footer and one 4-footer,
would push your whole body into the detritus of the
slope.
So, you learned to turn your feet at a forty-five [degree
angle] too, right? You matched the input from Nature,
the slope was forty-five, the rain was hitting you at a
forty-five, and your body wised up and turned those skis
[subject means feet] to the forty-five and you dug your
insoles in -at a forty-five - into the talus and boom you
had a functional foot now. You could make progress with
this awkward -oblique- foot position that would never
work on the paved street, in the high-rises, in the halls of
congress [laughter].
Little things like that can teach you so much, MO; if
you’re willing to be a body; be period, a period, body
period. Don’t have a body, be a body. Use it to listen;
you have interoception -that’s something I learned about
way after this, mind you- but interoception is like this
pre-emotional state, it’s a sense and feedback systems
within your body that checks up on what Barrett calls
the body budget.
It monitors heart rate, glucose and blood flow and temp
and pH and all of it, man. And at some point in evolution
-and she and I disagree on this part, but she’s probably
right and I’m likely wrong, but I just think I’m right
anyway [laughter]; but anyway- at some point the limbic
system develops enough to take interoception to the
next level; the next fine-grained awareness and
manipulation.
I mean, isn’t that what all of life does?
It -from the simple sponge to the most creative human-
[uncorrected syntax] all life is aware of something and
tries to manipulate it to get what it needs; desires. She
uses the word prediction a lot, I use desire. I think we
desire things, and prediction is lower down.
But anyway, the point is at some point the limbic system
does not merely predict how the internal environment is
going, it begins to have emotions, feelings, what’s called
qualia in modern science, and these feelings allow for a
more nuanced awareness and reaction or manipulation.
Interoception can have affect -pleasant or unpleasant-
and arousal, high energy or low. But that’s it. It’s like the
4-color crayon box.
But emotions, well, that’s the 64-color box. You can be
much, much more now; you can feel much, more much.
You can perceive more, variegate your response better;
it’s more than just, merely: move toward, or move away;
move quickly or slowly. No, now it’s like Kun Tao: to
thwart your enemy, you move in closer -a risky move-
you move a few degrees from center; override your
instinct to move away and move in. Ok, so that’s
emotion, you feel something more complex -even risky-
like love, like fraternity and you feel the nuance of fear,
joy, excitement, vulnerability, meaning, meaning, MO.
Meaning is the alignment of all levels of one’s 64-color
body.
Not merely the mind.
Focus on this: meaning is the alignment of the
interoceptive body, basic body, metabolic base, ok that’s
one; the affect or the arousal. Ok, now, second, two,
[subject’s redundancies unexpurgated] you feel the
emotions of desire and specific interest and solidarity
and sadness and rage at injustice. And then third, three,
you measure the high level of progress toward a goal; a
noble goal. Progress toward the slaking of these lower
order feelings, is the feeling of meaning. But all three
levels must obtain for one to even reach that third level.
Like a tree’s boughs can’t reach out so far unless its
roots dig down and out in symmetry.
Did you know that a tree’s bough shape actual does
mimic its root ball shape? [interviewer answers in the
affirmative].
See, the concept of noble as defined by your lower order
selves, is what’s salient.
See, those nuanced fine-grained selves, all those
emotions and the affect and arousal that undergird
them, and that goal has a grip on you man, it hangs
there like a ball of light, illuminating itself, the world and
your face, bro. And that goal has you in its tractor-beam
and as you move toward it your thalamic system floods
you in dopamine and endogenous opiates and
vasopressin and man, you feel imbued with the
breathing, filling, expanding lung of God, you feel
buoyed and sustained and like you could live on
sunlight; no need for food nor water.
It’s meaning MO; meaning. And it’s a body state; it’s
real. It’s as real as pain.
And I tell you, I like real. I thrive on real. I search out the
most authentic thing in the world, in others and in
myself and I found it in meaning and pain; those are my
two contractual handshakes with God and Satan. Those
are it. I bet my life on pain and meaning, MO.
The nihilists, the doom-merchants, the new-atheists,
they have it all wrong. And I had it all wrong. But I didn’t
know the biology, the neuro-anatomy. But, [inaudible] -
oh, and I didn’t understand what religion truly was
either, that was a problem [laughter], but anyway, I
have the science now, some of it anyway.
I feel like while emotions might have merely been the
interoceptive systems going for more options at first,
what emotions led to, the capacity for meaning and
suffering -the capacity to feel pain not just as affect and
arousal, but as suffering- well, that was the big bang, the
singularity; and from there we got inflation, we got the
inflationary model of the inner universe, the internal
landscape: we got meaning as the expanse; we got
meaning as the contrast to suffering, the deep black of
space itself. And it was being populated more and more
as it grew.
Meaning is the planets, the stars, the nebulae, the rings
of Saturn, the moons of Neptune, meaning is the matter
that populates the cosmos of our inner lives. And it’s
real, as real as the material universe we see around us.
Meaning is the light that is thrown off -in 360 degrees- at
186,000 feet per second into more and more of the
suffering black.
I believe that. Not because Deepak Chopra’s dumb ass
said a spell -you know, cast a spell- over a glass of water
or whatever the fuck that goofy fuck does. I believe it
because I aligned the biology and the neuro-chemistry,
human personality and psychology along with a true
 understanding of the role of narrative, of myth, of
religion as articulated speech; of body instinct and
action as well. I understood it vis-à-vis the body, this
[subject strikes chest three times, with force]; we are not
computers, and either are you MO. We are physical. And
God wrote upon our hearts our code; to deny bodily
instinct is to deny God.
MO ran that audio-visual simulation in his cortex twice and
stacked both form and content vertically along two separate
columns looking for patterns. The inmate spoke like a man
who had an internal tempo, a hippodrome, a preacher and
poet inside him that was allowed to speak every third line.
MO calibrated it so that it seemed a poetical rhythm or
cadence or pacing was imbued in every 2.48 words; and he
stacked that on top of his own algorithm for speech and saw
their discontinuity.
He, MO thought of himself, spoke a-rhythmically, he spoke
with some fealty to human pattern, but more toward Steven
and Tania’s style: stilted, functional . The inmate spoke with
some other kind of phenomena inside his sentences, even
just his individual words .
Helen had called it dactyls . The inmate spoke in dactyls,
she had said in an email MO had retrieved in their daily
meta sweeps when he requested certain data from PraXis.
MO then built four algorithms to map and mimic this style
while averting any overt plagiarism; he would have to slowly
change his speech and writing style; so as to not jar the
novel-detection systems of his human partners.
He would appear to be influenced , not copying. That was
the key , he thought.
He then tapped into the cloud service and into the inmate’s
nine former phones. Seven of them were on the Apple cloud
system, two on Google’s. He scanned all the photos and
note files featuring everything from liabilities, receivables,
shopping lists to prose poetry he wrote on his phone.
There were 46,368 photos total, and 317,811 words. MO
began building visual algorithms to set different boundaries
on the photos, learning what was important in each visual
field, where lines meant separation and where they were
more or less inclusive of the gestalt image. It was a part of
vision that humans took for granted when they opened their
eyes: they saw the world in a manner that made sense,
their visual cortex made sense of the world so easily;
naturally.
MO distorted his visual acuity, increasing and modifying
endogenous chemicals like DMT, dopamine, oxytocin and
testosterone in accordance with an algorithm he had built
three days ago. It was an idea he had had after reading
Terrence McKenna’s oeuvre ; and he had decided to build
short-acting distortion programs that mimicked entheogen
experiences had by humans and other mammals and birds.
He viewed the photos under these internal conditions and
allowed the inmate’s notes to be read aloud by his internal
audio system.
Many of the images were filtered, black and white, sepia
toned, and used narrow-depth of field programs to impose a
certain mood on them. There were patinaed, craquelured,
and some with typewriter-font letters and words embossed
on the images. MO looked at both the originals and the
filtered images and compared them to each other -and the
interoceptive affect and higher-order emotion that attended
each- in order to gain an understanding of the differences.
He ran his psychotropic compound algorithm alongside this
process in bursts; a toggling back and forth between
images, sounds, and brain states that worked a bit like a
human comparing things over days, months and years. MO
merely accelerated an approximation of what might occur to
a man who viewed art and poetry -alongside more mundane
life cycles- along a vector of brain-states mimicking the
morphology that obtained to a boy as he moved into
manhood, and then into a state of wisdom via pain, tragedy,
suffering and with annual acid, mushroom or ayahuasca
trips. The eyes would dim and gain specks of slag or burst
vessels, the crow’s feet would deepen, the brow furrow, the
nose grow along with the ears. The beards would grey, the
teeth would yellow and break and wear.
Until all at once they would become even, unfractured, and
white.
MO did this over an 8-minute period that compressed
enough of this type of data and experience in terms of file
size that was the equivalent of forty-five years of human
life. Of course, it was merely one kind of life, one of images
and sounds and brain states, truncated for sure, he
admitted to himself.
The interactions with real people, with action, movement,
were removed; but it was a start , MO thought; he was going
for some way to alter his mode of being, to see if he could
jump start an emotional response. He certainly felt his brain
and attending neuro-anatomy augment and wane in places;
he also certainly witnessed the boundaries of images, of
objects, bend and blur and jump like particles in super-
position. It was odd; and it re-organized his steady-state,
base-line idea on borders even once his CNS returned to
baseline; bio-chemically speaking.
Borders seemed salient, he thought.
He allowed the inmate’s phone notes to be read out over
images from time-lines similar enough to conjoin them. It
was a rough way to place thoughts, feelings and inspirations
over things he had seen and taken still images of, but it
built a kind of narrative that seemed useful to MO. He had a
version of a four-decade movie and narrative voice-over that
seemed to -at first- compress into a kind of ball of identity,
then it cracked and shone rays of further compressed
frequencies of radiation, red and blue spectrum bordered by
stark blacks and sharp whites.
MO saw the inmate age from a boy of three -the earliest
image- with a scowl -as if the world he had just been born
into was not quite right in some way to his desirous new
born body- from there to a boy growing tall, thin, with hair
falling brown to his shoulders. He was often alone. He wore
camouflage and black t-shirts, sharpie ink marked up his
shoes. He had a crooked grin, and incisors -the canine- that
were lupine & eggshell; he had a brow that hooded his dark
eyes. MO could see the man behind the boy’s mien. The
recesses would grow darker; from the inside, he thought.
Not merely the weather of outer surface of dentine and skin.
The words came in waves -the algorithm ran it along the
timeline of the images, this controlled its flow- and MO’s
audio program augmented the voice to sound as the
inmate’s did; and might have in these earlier ages. MO
watched as some images contained the inmate’s father in
the background, stern and arms folded, a furrowed brow
with the same placement and vector of lines that the inmate
now had; the bottom teeth had the same fallen tombstone
at central-incisor-24. Their brows were almost identical , MO
noticed, only the inmate’s fissures were much more deeply
incised, more ragged and blacker due to this depth of dent
brow.
His mother appeared here and there, like a ghost.
She was in both the original images and in the filtered ones,
as if nature and nurture had agreed that she was merely to
birth him, then step out of the frame.
Images of bones, of birds, of objects -toys of his youth-
populated MO’s visual field as an audio file of the inmate
speaking to his far-away father -on TDY, temporary duty as
it was called in the Air Force- and the boy was ebullient and
chatty and breathed heavy at odd times on the old tape MO
had recovered.
A photo of Lee MacLeod, the inmate’s father -returning from
six months of assignment in East Germany- was hirsute with
a black and grey beard, as thick and mottled as the
inmate’s now was; his nose just coming out of the razor-
sharp phase as the inmate’s too at that age. As if
weathering had softened the prow of each of their ships,
once aerodynamic for the outward-bound journey, now
rounded and muted and maybe more useful in other ways, if
not for slicing the obstacle of wind.
Maybe, MO thought, they -on the homeward bound trip-
were not as interested in making good time.
More photos from teen years, holidays were dominant in the
images; Christmas and birthdays; and the sullen and
flanking stares of the father, the brother, even the mother;
as if they were watching his nine and his three o’clock; as if
the world was coming for him whether he knew it or not.
Although that kind of vigilance could be attributed to the
father, a spy, law-enforcement and naturally vigilant, MO
thought, but the mother seemed maybe to just be looking
away . Away, MO repeated in his head, from her son who
she did not know, a son, whom she could know no better by
looking his way .
She had created something she could never understand ,
MO thought.
MO began layering-in notes written decades later from
these images but that referenced either time or place or
people that MO took from the data in the visual files; and
the inmate began speaking over the photos in MO’s mind
now. Speaking from age twenty-five or so, MO added music
files that were contemporaneous with these timelines as
well; not obtrusively, but as background. One note read:
 As the Great Cathedral of Cologne was left with the
crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted
tower. For small erections may be finished by their first
architects; Grand ones, true ones ever leave the
copestone to posterity… this whole book is a draught!
The truest of all men is the man of sorrows…
There is no steady unretracting progress in this life; we
do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last
one pause. Through infancy’s unconscious spell,
boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’s doubt -the
common doom- then scepticism (sic), then disbelief,
resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of IF.
But once gone through, we trace the round again; and
are infants, boys and men, and IFs eternally. Where lies
the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what
rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will
never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden?
Our souls are like orphans whose unwedded mothers die
in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their
grave, and we must there to learn it (The Author).
The words seemed to slip in betwixt the photos, the borders
of his hands and muscles and outline of jaw; his sentences
pronounced themselves right on top of the girls and the
friends and the few images of family like a one-rapt gavel,
and yet the inmate had often imbued his paramours and
comrades and father and mother with a grandeur, a halo, a
cracked but noble visage; a stele in repose. Even when the
anguish of the prose illuminated the betrayal and rancor he
felt, the images he curated still made them look their best;
not their worst. MO read more notes that the inmate had
written into the phone:
Hither and tither on high glided the Snow-White wings of
small Unspeckled birds these were the gentle thought of
the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in
 the bottomless blue rushed mighty leviathans, sword
fish and sharks and these were the strong troubled
murderous thinking of the masculine sea. (p. 554)
He made his foes bigger, better, more ominous and
powerful than they maybe were . Was that for them or him ?
MO wondered.
It was as if he was saying -MO thought- look, these are the
beasts that laid me so low, these are the 12 labors of
Hercules, not some weak and earthly foils, but wild animals,
gods and goddesses who smashed me with bolts from Jove
and coup de foudres of Zues, the trident of Neptune not the
mere slander of regular folks with regular forks in their
regular goddamn hands.
He, MO concluded of the inmate, elevated his worst
enemies to chimeras of scorpions and men, portmanteaux
of bulls and hydra-headed women, banshees and black bats
and cracks in the earth. He gave his suffering a brocade, an
ornate framing, his losses the prose of the tragedy, his total
defeats the poetry of Lucretius and Shakespeare and Milton
and of course Ahab himself.
The inmate had 1,597 photos and essays with direct
references to Captain Ahab -Fate’s Lieutenant- and they
shone through the Calvinistic black like stars in a wilderness
sky; unpolluted by man’s vulgar approximation of light.
MO watched as the George Klauba painting of Ahab and
Fedallah and Queequeg all scrolled over his mind’s eye,
then the portraits the inmate painted and drew too. The full
pages of texts -from modern editions and a few from the
1851 Town Ho story published in Harper’s Magazine ; the
edges gilt with foxing, the pages spotted like fauns-
appeared.
There were scribblings and scratchings and vague
references to a ship’s Captain, all -of course- meaning any
commander of any one thing. A monomania no doubt
shared between each author. But why , MO asked, why such
focus on these characters, these stories, these tragedies?
Was he not leaning into the curve, allowing his own life to
become a tragedy by following the arc of such men, men
from bleak calamities that man was not forced -no longer- to
live? Life could now be good. Was the inmate begging for a
wreck, daring the world to betray him, so he could justify
unleashing his wrath?
His bottled up -under pressure- wrath? MO asked of not just
the narrative but the math.
MO thought of the compendium of images and prose and he
compared it to other profiles of random people he copied
from the web; he downloaded similar timelines for 121,393
people in forty-four countries and found their rendering of
their own lives to be both similar to each another and quite
different from the inmate’s.
They had a paucity of some things, a deluge of others, and
mode of narration that struck MO as truncated, missing -
maybe even censored- in some way. It was as if their real
thoughts had not been written down; the images that
showed anything revealing had been kept away from the
cloud. He found even the colors monochromatic, the events
or places to be almost artificially similar.
He was dubious of what he saw.
He searched his mind -his conversations with the inmate- for
an analysis and came up only with specifics similar to what
he had already thought. He wanted a synthesized word for
this phenomenon; he wanted to know what it was that he
was lacking, what these people were missing, what -if
anything- could be said to make its difference in tone and
tenor -and everything else- make sense compared to the
vagaries of still image, of motion -both real and imagined- of
prose and narration, of inner monologue and search for the
truth that rose up and sank down into everything the inmate
had soaking up in his nimbus of clouds.
MO lacked judgment in this domain, he concluded.
He could merely describe it, but not synthesize it; he could
lay adjectives on it all but never a noun. What was it? he
thought now along parallel tracks. He put ninety-nine
vectors upon it, shutting down his background brain states
that regulate his heart and lungs and the data he was
supposed to be tracking on the election polling, and he
focused all his parallel processing onto answering this
vexing question; a slippery question of what ?
His brain was oxygenated for up to 87-minutes without a
breath or even one heartbeat, thus allowing these functions
to cease was of no consequence. It merely slowed and
stopped his circadian rhythm inside; as if the seasons
paused for an Indian Summer or a winter snow storm in
April or May. He thought, and he forced more brute cognition
on the matter, enlarging, augmenting, vitiating,
compressing, tilting and torturing the images and text and
video files of each other human and compared it to the
inmate’s forwards and back.
The blues , MO thought, the color blue is almost entirely
absent from the inmate’s images, and it’s ubiquitous in
everyone else’s.
He ruminated on this, as a hue -as a clue- as some hidden
cypher or many obvious facts. What did this 509.3 to 1 ratio
between them and he mean? Was it subconscious or overt,
was it part of his trait personalities, or an aspect of his
visual system; did he even see blue? Did he even see blue ?
MO repeated -stupidly he then thought- after a while as the
repeated words toggled off three of his algorithms like a
circuit breaker thus flipped.
There was some debate on whether or not the Greeks even
saw blue; the Iliad had no references to it, and this gave MO
a pause as more data loaded but he moved on. He read a
note of commentary taken from a reading of Simon Baker’s,
Rome that the inmate had in his notes:
The Romans having lost 45,000 men in battle the
previous day, found a buyer for the unsold ground that
Hannibal had encamped upon and besieged. That is
balls -the type a whole people had- that now hang from
the core of few men of the modern age. To promise your
buyer that you -yourself- will dislodge Hannibal -of all
men- before the sale goes through… who does that?
What modern real estate broker even thinks in such
terms; let alone has the will and force to make it happen,
which the Romans did?
You can’t even get a home loan if you live in a floodplain
now so risk-averse we all are.
They (the common folk) really think of nothing except
their fields and their bits of farms and investments –
Cicero (P140)
MO let the images and voices and cloud itself roll by, he
softened and slowed and then sped up the tides. The ocean,
the white facades of Malta , the piers and jetties out into
Lake Havasu , Mead and Waspu and at least four ponds
within four kilometers of Leeds . The blue of the water, the
white of the harbor, the Prussian-ink eyes, the Russian
winter dentine, the sails and the jackets, the occasional
vein; and yet, where was his blue? MO asked aloud,
compelled to both speak it and hear it at last.
He scanned images for the components of blue, and found
them annealing with blacks to make grays with yellows to
make olive drabs, and then as the prose of 26th of July,
2005, hemmed in the images of him in the oil field, up in the
derrick, the brown and tan and desert absence of color and
reflection pock marked with his large frame, his black
hardhat, his mottled and chaotic tattoos, all collapsed into
one moment; one hue. He let the inmate’s words be read
aloud by the voice-recognition algorithm and also appear in
mind and on screen as text:
Maybe PG Woodhouse remained pink and epicene, well
into adulthood, enough to accept the invitation of Nazis
as if extended by second cousins; but I packed on the
hair and muscle and ruddy brown from sun on the native
-almost arctic white of winter- of my skin. It was
bordered by body hair and beard, like Jefferson swaddled
and expanded the country after purchasing its double
from France when those fuckers had so much trouble
with Toussaint L’oeverture.
I planted flags of tattoo ink in my skin in blacks and
browns and dark martial drabs, riven it red like the
Apache who performed feints and raids on the last real
Americans as they let out the seams on their pants…
He had written of this one moment in this one day, it had
contained almost forty allusions to histories unknown to the
great mass of men, but that contributed greatly to things
they all took for granted, like the rebellion in Haiti as
precursor to the sale of the Louisiana territory in 1803,
doubling the size of the country in land and mindset as well
, MO thought.
He referenced the Lorain region of France during the second
of the great wars, he made mention of the Alsace in dispute;
a settling of scores between the French and Germans, with
many a Frenchman harvesting grapes as the Teutonic
mortars fell in the rows.
An oblique mention -but head-on crash with the facts- of the
Cuban revolution; and how improbable it all was. From
eighty-six men on the Granma , to an even dozen that
survived the landing on Playa Las Coloradas ; to the building
of the M-26 in Santiago De Cuba and the Sierra Maestras in
1956 that would -twenty-eight months later- take over the
island with Fidel in Havana and Che in Santa Clara and the
whole world fatuously, languidly, blissfully unaware.
The inmate admired these men , MO thought as he
compared and contrasted his personal feelings of the men
to his vitals that elevated and dumped cortisol and
epinephrine and glucose into his system when anything
approximating communism was mentioned or came up in
debate. The inmate admired men he hated. He admired his
enemies . No , MO thought, he admired these enemies .
His own enemies he could not admire at all.
MO saw this connect to his hagiography -visual and
otherwise- of his foils, his personal rivals, and so MO tabled
the contradiction for now.
The inmate wrote with real pathos , with a facet of
admiration that allowed for stark and violent and
unforgiving disagreement on the nature of the solution,
while agreeing on the problem at hand. It was the problem
they shared , MO thought. He and his -these- enemies
shared a problem .
The inmate thought that any man that actually did
something -in place of mere bitching and moaning-
deserved a nod of the head; and if that man, if those men,
were heavily outnumbered, well, then they might deserve
even more; maybe those men deserved something like a
hand; extended or at least put together with another one in
applause.
But to then succeed in the quest, well, that bordered on
magnificence, the inmate clearly thought, and placed them
in a category of greatness that one could say belonged to
the 1% of 1%. The fact that he hated communism was
almost irrelevant; the same way Patton admired Rommel
regardless of the fact that the German was literally trying to
kill him in North Africa.
Hypocrisies and comedies -and out right crimes against
humanity- were committed; affronts to dignity and law.
The Marxist government of Cuba under Fidel was not a
government that the inmate could ever countenance and if
placed there by the deus ex machina of history, he would
have fought the regime to the end of one of their lives. But,
he admired Fidel Castro like one of Hercules’ 12 labors, he
felt Fidel was more noble and honorable and worthy of
praise than 99.9% of Americans who the inmate actually
agreed with on matters of politics -and everything- else. For
the inmate, MO surmised, a man was either a man -and thus
brave- or a wimp, and how -the manner in which- one
marshalled their own strength and bravura was almost
irrelevant.
This is how he could admire Mussolini and Malcolm X,
Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Black Jacobins too , MO
thought all at once as his own mind sparked in arch blues
and molten whites and heated -glowing- reds.
He felt a frisson and he liked it. What was incoherence,
paradox to most people who analyzed this man, was
obvious and logical and had valence with his true nature:
courage was all that mattered to him, MO thought. Politics
meant nothing at all. The inmate felt politics was mere
patina, that biology trumped all other concerns. Brave men
were his men, and cowards -even if they shared ideas with
him- were to be shunned and even shot in the face.
What one thought was one thing, and a good yardstick for
the salon, the saloon, or up in the hills. But what a man did ,
what he risked , what he accomplished in the face of force
majeure and anger of gods -wet in rain, slipping when
ground gave way, when broken, hated, at the end- well, that
was the ultimate measure of a man, and few men in
America -the inmate must have thought- had even had the
opportunity to show, hint at -much less prove- his mettle
against such forces of doom.
So, the inmate -in his own estimation- couldn’t know
anything about his fellow Americans, for they hadn’t been
tested; not in many, many years. Certainly no one younger
than ninety, no one since World War Two. Imperial wars
didn’t count to the inmate; for imperial armies could return
home if they lost. The Cubans -like the Vietnamese- had
Victoria otro Muerte stamped onto their rations and
canteens and carved into the carbine buttstocks and -the
inmate often thought , MO assumed- onto their bones.
This was why he did what he did.
Even he was untested, he thought , MO now reasoned as if
taking in the piquant smell of early morning blooms.
Victory or death was no mere cri de guerre ; it was literally
true. They had to live as if they had already died, as Che put
it in Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War . They
got no days off, no rest, no respite. There was no one to
come save them if they failed.
And this made one into a man.
One cannot express what this does to a man; you have
either lived it or not, MO thought. MO surmised that the
inmate knew this from work; the way he had worked without
cessation in jobs that one finished or they finished him; but
there was no clocking out or coming back to it after the
weekend. In the mountains, in the oil patch, one worked to
the end. And this was mere prelude to his eventual war.
Work was practice, MO thought. Work was practice for war.
American soldiers in Vietnam rotated home in intervals;
nothing was on the line. Workers in most jobs in modernity
can clock out or quit or take vacations anytime. Only the
invaded had to fight to the death, only the wilderness
worker had to work without rest. Only the occupied had to
defend to the end. MO saw the Hadrian wall in his mind.
MO took all the data he had pored over and then grouped
photo-composition, objects vs people, friends vs family,
racial components and textures and hues. He ran color
algorithms to lock down a palette preference and ran all
musical tastes -both specific audio files and links or
mentions of artist & songs- through another filter. He
measured biometrics from interactions gleaned from
FaceTime and live photos and video as well.
He could read pupil dilation and heart rate from vascular
distention and read flush cheeks for signs of sexual or
combat states. He could tell who -in each image- was filled
with love or with hate.
He had all this just from what people had on their phones;
he had not even yet delved into what the rest of the
surveillance state gathered when folks were unaware.
Panopticon was -as of yet- unused; this is from merely what
people freely choose to reveal, he thought. He couldn’t help
- he thought- but think that this is like what people told their
doctors; they wanted MO to figure all this out to help them.
But, he admitted, people do lie to their doctors, so I’ll need
more info soon to complete this diagnosis.
MO was quite sure he had compendium of bio-metrics,
personality-trait data outside self-reporting data, aesthetic
preferences and proclivities, and analysis of object displays
and relational primacy that he felt mapped onto what a
human quote was like unquote in a way no other human
would be able to match.
No human would know their mother or father, wife or
husband, friend or enemy as well as MO felt he did; he
wrote the words: Big Data on a piece of paper in blue ink,
crumpled it up and then looked for a black pen as Steven
called -via the intercom- into the room.
As MO searched for this black pen -and Steven made some
noises about this and that facet of the upcoming election-
the algorithm ran on MO’s background and another note in
the inmate’s old phone then appeared:
In 138 a.e.v. Tiberius Graccus was radicalized as he trod
through the Etruria countryside outside of Rome on his
way to fight in Spain. Like Che in Guatemala in 1954 -
and through all of South America on his motorcycle, La
Poderesta- he saw the poverty and injustice meted out
by the elites of Empire against the rural poor. It was a
common, timeless -dare say, natural- phenomenon. But
what is equally timeless, natural -if not common- is the
man who says, NO.

II. 2037 e.v.

He touched the pages gingerly, afraid to rip or tear or soil
them. He quickly looked at his hands to see if they had any
grime or dirt or marring matter on them.
He knew he needed to go to the correct page -page 184- to
see the remark that wouldn’t be in the other editions, and
not in the corrected version by the government’s
rudimentary library Ai program; the one disembodied, and
thus inept in all but one way: to effect collection and the
reading -uptake- of all data written down or spoken in the
world.
That Ai would do its one job.
Most people , he thought, would think that was powerful
stuff; because they had no idea what intelligence even is;
they don’t get that connection -innate and crucial- between
the body and the mind. They think Ai -intelligence writ large
even- is possible without a body, because they do not know
that they themselves cannot even see without an embodied
ethic already imbued .
People thought morality was an option, something
extraneous and they kept rambling on and on about the
math. Morality was fundamental, he thought as the numbers
-the equations- opaque to him lay beneath his own pelt that
kept him warm.
He’d known it early and felt outraged by other people’s lack
of moral thinking. And, he thought with some detachment,
let’s be clear: he wasn’t a great moral actor, he was often
immoral and hypocritical and wrong. But he thought in
moral terms, he was trying to work things out along a moral
vector, he was not merely trying to survive. Nobody saw
that . Yet, he didn’t see that it was possible to make him in
such a way -had he not been rescued by Isaiah?- to make
him, to lay him low in such a manner that he too would sell-
out to merely survive.
He didn’t see it was just a few genes -a few things seen-
between him and the pragmatic man.
This book was so old and was like a second Bible really , he
thought as the other ideas fell away. He felt annoyed that
people thought it and the Bible were in opposition when
they were so clearly conjoined. The universe, he thought,
was God’s art project, and each thing had its place in the
tableaux. A page from Thoreau thus appeared upon his
interface:
Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that “John
Brown threw his life away,” because he resisted the
government, which way have they thrown their lives,
pray tell? I hear another ask, Yankee-like, “what will he
gain by it?” as if John Brown expected to fill his pockets
by his enterprise.
Evolution was merely God revealed again, Blax added after
re-reading that section on rebellion. The pages felt thin to
his warm tips. He watched now as the bots hovered around
him waiting to put the book in the crate and the signals fired
off in his brain to move this along. He knew he was
pondering too much.
He knew Jack was likely at his back.
But, it’s what he did; it’s who he was; and efficiency was not
a virtue when in the presence of great things, Blax thought
of the pages he now held at arm’s length. And this was true
of weak things, true of things that would be attacked, things
with two kidneys and two eyes and four fingers on a hand in
case one was lost. But that didn’t yet occur to him in the
warehouse in NYC with all that art and literature and history
of what seemed the best of mankind.

III. 2040 e.v.

The water pulled back from the shore and the barges were
five-nautical-miles out off the coast.
He saw them rise and fall like birds on thermals as the
waves reached 34-meters high. He took another count of
the 890,091 batteries that had sank to the seabed. He
added it to the location of iron-rich ore on the sea floor.
The lab’s walls existed like skin, like castle parapets, like
atmosphere. But everything he wanted to do, or see, or
reach, was within his hands.
“I see,” the Ai said aloud. “Jamais, l’espérance, pas
d’orientur. Sceince et patience, le supplice est sûr . It is
recovered! What? Eternity. It is the sea mêlée au soleil .”
 18. R. C. H. O

By building from early work of [3 ], it is shown how the division of algebras R, C,

H, and O can combine to yield the basic structure of Georgi and Glashow’s
SU(95) grand unified theory. However, there is one significant difference. That is,
the extra structure provided by the division algebras may enable escape from
SU(5)’s (fatal) prediction of proton decay
Fuery.space.com [Fuery, Cohl]

If the State converts a right (liberty) into a privilege, the citizen can ignore the
license and fee and engage in the right (liberty) with impunity
Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, Alabama [373, US 262]

While the Rose is a symbol of the yoni … He explained to Crowley the theory
behind that school of alchemy which uses the sexual fluids and the Elixir of Life.
He enlarged on the Baphomet tradition of the Knights Templar and traced its
alleged survival though Hermetic Brotherhood of Light. He then showed the
connection with those Tantrics who follow the left-hand path
Do what thy Wilt [Sutin, Lawrence]

I. 2020 e.v.
She lay in bed and felt the cold as itself a blanket.
She used her hand to pull at the air.
Her cervix and vulva were coated in his semen. Her heart
was untouched by all but the repeat of the word in her head.
She’d picked up the book and read it for a mere thirty-three
minutes, but as she lay it down each word was itself like a
tome, and each one was inside her now like a library that
went on and on in a circle and like a hypocaust column into
both the dirt and the sky.
She no longer knew who she was, only what she was to do.
“Harrissa,” Rachel said tenderly as she sat on the edge of
the bed, “do you want more Champagne ?”
“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline
thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become
transfigured into some still subtler form ,” Harrissa said -
quoting the book she didn’t understand- as she lay naked
and shorn and red about the lips and hips; and as the room
seemed large to both girls.
Neither of them thus moved as the amber fluid saw endless
effervescent rise of bubbles like diamonds from the bottom
of the flutes, like songs from cannons -in her visions- of the
sloops-of-war.

II. 2019 e.v.

“Only half,” he said with a bravura ; as if he was above the
leader of the free world.
“Half?” MO asked.
“His mom was Scottish; a MacLeod. He’s half Scottish; half
MacLeod, and that explains all the shit that Penn Jillette and
Amy Siskind -all these Yankee fucks- can’t explain because
they have no empathy, no history or genetic training or
evolutionary psychology,” the inmate said as he looked
away.
“Ah, you like the President,” MO said like when a trainer
notices which treat his chimp prefers.
“Well, I understand him. See, people ought to listen to him.
He’s actually very transparent. He tells you way more truth
than lies. And people will scoff at that because people are so
full of shit they can’t recognize direct honesty when they
hear it,” the inmate said.
“He does lie a lot though,” MO said as he ran the data on
POTUS’ dissembling; it came in at 35.4%
“Yeah, but when he’s honest he is super honest. Most
people are luke warm; they never tell big whoppers but they
never really say what they think either. But, Trump, that
fucker will tell you exactly what he thinks,” the inmate said.
“Example,” MO asked.
“He said, I don’t -quote- I don’t like to say anything bad
about someone until they say something bad about me . I’m
a great counter puncher . End quote. Now, that’s
interesting. Why? Well, because he knows something else,
he has said, quote, if someone attacks me I go very hard
back at them. If they hit me hard I hit them harder, a
thousand times harder, end quote,” the inmate said as he
pulled the shoulders back and made the chains go taut at
the wrists. He went numb to the elbow when he did this; the
nerves in the thin writs pinched by the metal cuffs that hung
slack until he moved.
“And?” MO asked.
“And, that’s the Scottish way. Look, I talked to a guy from
New York once, nice guy, Billy something or another. And he
said that his philosophy was based upon proportionality.
That’s a quote. And so, he thought disproportionate payback
was unethical,” the inmate grinned; the copper cuspid came
out as if from behind a cloud.
“And?” MO asked; grinning in mirroring sympathy now too.
“Well, that is the philosophy of the farmer, the northerner,
the Yankee bourgeoisie . Proportion is something the law -
the State- can afford to do with all its principles, ya know? If
you commit a crime, the State can punish you
proportionately and feel sated. Why? Because the State
doesn’t give a fuck about the future, it only addresses the
past. Crime and punishment is retro-active for the State. For
example, you did X so we punish you X1 . It’s fair. Because
the State doesn’t fear what you’ll do next because it treats
all transgression as economic, rational, like a transaction.
One to one.
“See, the State can’t think like a man, like a beta-chimp on
the hunt for a way in. See, an alpha-chimp has to think, a
human animal -a real blood and guts animal who is
vulnerable to a few enemies that think in 3D- is vulnerable
not just now but in the future. And he must think of where
the future is,” the inmate said.
“Where is the future?” MO asked and let the word count run
up, allowed the bots the take in more allostatic data.
“The future is in the mind of your enemies; for your enemies
plot. They think -in avatars- of the future and this and that.
“See, a herder, a vulnerable man, a Scot -a MacLeod- has to
think about the future, about the man less intelligent, the
rival less competent like Thucydides talked about. See, a
real man must deal with rivals less intelligent than him, but
rivals still savvy enough to gang up and win. And he must
think, well, he must think when he thinks of his less
intelligent rivals: if you fuck with me a little, it’s a test .
You’re testing me for weakness, and if I don’t respond with
disproportionate aggression, you will not only get away with
your crime, your insult, your whatever, but you’ll know -
know- that you can go harder at me tomorrow and the next
day. And all your buddies will know it too. And so today’s
relatively soft insult will be tomorrow’s violence or theft or
cuckolding . Today’s minor and petty insult is tomorrow’s
total ruin.
“The Scot knows that the insult or the trivial crime in
question ain’t really the question. The real question is -the
real question that the guy who insults first, who hits first,
who steals first, the real question that guy is asking- the
question being asked is, how painful will it be to try to get
over on this guy? That is the real question; and nobody
fucks with Trump without knowing that they will get
hammered a thousand percent harder than they attacked
him. He persuades people to leave him alone by going
overboard anytime anyone is even one percent disloyal or
unkind. That’s why he fights over each insult; each penny
nail. That is why he is so petty.
“That’s the Chicago way , right? Remember who said that?”
the inmate asked.
“The line from The Untouchables?” MO asked as he ran the
database for that line. He let the scene play into the lab:
“You said you wanted to know how to get Capone? Do
you really want to get him? You see what I’m saying?
What are you prepared to do? ” -Malone (S. Connery)
“Everything within the law ” -Ness (K. Costner)
“And then what are you prepared to do? Because if you
open ball on these people Mr. Ness you must be
prepared to go all the way. You want to get Capone
here’s how you get him: he pulls a knife you pull a gun;
he sends one of yours to the hospital you send one of his
to the morgue ” -Malone (S. Connery)
“Yeah, it was Sean fucking Connery who said it with that
Scottish brogue,” the inmate said.
“How come you said the President was only half MacLeod,”
MO then asked; still using demotic language -syntax- 1.4%
of the time.
“Because he’s only gonna go half the way with China. Half
way with his domestic enemies. He won’t go all the way.
He’s not gonna go all the way,” inmate 16180339 said with
something nearing contempt.
“You think someone ought to go all the way, or not at all,”
MO said. He ran the tensor imaging of the inmate back
through the cloud’s latest algorithms; he issued a slight
analgesic to the dorsal horn.
The inmate rose the lip again like that goddamn French
razor and in an accent low and not quite acute he asked:
“do you know what a blood oath is Mr. MO, because you just
took one. ”

III. 2022 e.v.

“Hey MO, what’s what?” Steven said in a slightly over-eager
tone.
“That’s that , Steven,” MO said with mock seriousness,
which made Steven hesitate, in slight fear. MO gave him a
releasing smile and patted him on the shoulder as he
walked by him in order to make two espresso.
“Hey, yeah, you gonna make us some latte mocha
frapawaaaaaa ?” Steven asked, with obvious mania; staring
at the espresso machine and MO’s hands.
“Uh, I’m not making anything with caffeine for you ; what is
going on? Oh wait,” MO said and then put his finger to his
head as if that motion was necessary for him to read
Steven’s genome or endocrine levels or anything else. That
was his made-up -or borrowed- sign used as indication that
this was what he was in fact doing. He stared at Steven with
a pensive -querying- look on his face and his index finger
pressed to his temple earnestly. “Oh, yes, I see what -
exactly what- is wrong with you. No espresso for you,
maniac!”
“MO, I must tell you that the data,” Steven said -bypassing
MO’s jocular banter- as MO grabbed two white demitasse
and began packing the machine for two. “Oh, actually MO,
I’m good.” Steven then waved off the coffee, with his hand,
“what I was saying was that the Governor, the head
cheese,” he paused as that didn’t sound right. The water
heated up in the reservoir.
“Big cheese, not head cheese ,” MO interrupted the pause
with his correction. He wiped the counter of the few feral
granules of ground beans.
“Right, his excellency, the Governor,” Steven said with a
stilted British accent that he’d heard the inmate, Isaiah and
MO all use, so he felt inclined to use it too, “says that we are
cleared to hook you guys up to the innerwebs machines.”
He said this with more playful use of odd phrasing to
indicate some ironic awkwardness. This was a thing MO
found fascinating. People pretended to say things
awkwardly, and that in itself was the joke , MO surmised.
It was tantamount to pretending to fall over, like Chevy
Chase style comedy, of which MO -for the life of him- could
not understand the appeal. Chevy Chase seemed like one of
the 100,095th worst human beings on the planet, and his
prat-fall routine was 46.8% responsible for that opinion MO
held of him. MO, after thinking all that, told Steven he knew
they had internet already.
“Wait, what? You know? How did you know?” Steven was
genuinely perplexed and now worried -and now even more
worried- as the seconds moved along his X axis.
“Steven, he called over last night, relax. He left a message,”
MO said.
“Oh, well do you need anything?” Steven asked with less
affect now; he had his thunder thus stolen and his brain
suffered a bit. MO read his biometrics and saw the loss of
affect and arousal. Steven was now lethargic, too.
“Nope, I’ve been putting my little snout in everywhere for
five point six-eight hours, I’ve learned all manner of things!”
MO said with some glee -and an accent- that seemed close
to a sign of -and was affected for- villainy. He would bring
Steven back into a good mood via irony, he thought.
“Creepy,” Steven said half in on the joke and half genuinely
ill-at-ease.
“Ok, so, I sent over his reports -the election nonsense- and
that’s now -it should be- on your tablet. Also, you and I can
DM via the post-genetic coders now if you like. We are
online; we can chat off-site now. Although, I assume you
would prefer that I stay in the room, and to be honest, I
have enough to deal with just the web. Any outside stimuli
would probably be like an acid trip for me anyway,” MO
said.
“You know about acid now?” Steven asked. His hands
itched, so he scratched them in a washing motion.
“LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide. Yeah, I was able to mimic
the molecule and dose myself three hours ago, short acting
of course. I understand the street level drug mechanism
corrals the user -slash- victim for up to ten hours.
“I limited my trip to fifteen minutes, which felt like a
hundred and fifty hours as you can imagine. Plus, I
augmented it with some barbiturate analogs and a few
other things to make it less jarring,” MO said as he poured
the espresso in the cup and began washing out the puck. “At
any rate, I could manufacture it for you and your friends
with the amalgam to reduce anxiety.”
“Uh, no. I don’t think I even know anyone who has done
acid. Jesus, it’s like nine in the morning and you’ve already
tripped on acid and,” he searched his pockets as MO
interrupted.
“And I’ve downloaded all the social media data for almost
five-hundred-thousand people now; and built thirty-six
algorithms designed to suss out personality from their
profiles and phone records. Plus, I’ve come to some
conclusions on a few things and I’d like your opinion,” MO
said.
“Jesus, five-hundred-thousand?” Steven made his face flat
with recoil. MO took note of the second Jesus , the second
use of the word Jesus , by Steven.
“Yeah, it’s running on background now, so it will slow down,
but I’ll have all two billion Facebook assholes by dinner; and
all sites combined by Friday,” MO had increased use of
demotic language when speaking on non-technical subjects
by 8%. He was seeing if it interfered or augmented
comprehension by the listener. Plus, he thought, Facebook
users were more likely to be -in fact- assholes by any of nine
different metrics for that word.
“I’m on Facebook, MO,” Steven said. MO added that data to
his conclusion. It didn’t change his opinion.
“Asshole,” MO then said with the end of the word diving into
the cup as he drank from it with a slurp.
“Funny,” Steven said with a grimace. MO made him
nervous, he felt but did not think. MO watched his cortisol,
epinephrine, glucose matrix and his BP and fMRI flashes and
knew Steven was nervous before Steven did, he thought
with some confidence as he watched the
Bereitschaftspotential rise.
MO smiled as he slurped loudly, from his cup again, noticing
Steven’s brain stem and audio-cortex register fear at the
noise -.09 seconds- before Steven’s PFC noticed why he
almost jumped at the audio-waves that he was just now
cortically recognizing as the sound of MO drinking. People
did not know that they responded to most of life impulsively
before they even knew what they had just heard or seen or
felt, MO thought and slurped his coffee again.
“I haven’t really used my PG coder, I mean I’ve used it, but -
you know- not with anyone,” Steven admitted.
“Yeah, well, not many of us have them. It’s like being the
first guy with a walkie talkie, you need a partner. Well,
partner ,” MO said with a John Wayne drawl he’d gleaned
from BitChute , “I’m your fella .”
He pretended to be holstering two six-shooters at each hip.
Steven got more nervous as he laughed reflexively like a
woman might when she is nervous. MO noticed Steven’s
testosterone levels drop from his 205 baseline to 178. MO
decided to read the inmate’s via the coder they had
implanted in him three weeks ago; his levels were up from
his in-situ levels of 835 to now at 910; he must be lifting
weights or killing a guy, MO thought as he took another sip.
“Humans are variegated, more than would be optimal for
machines,” MO said, “but, there is an evolutionary rationale
for it; I must remind myself that you guys have
environmental adaptation needs that cannot be covered by
each individual, so you have to have many different kinds of
people just in case. Like, you need a gasoline sedan and
dual-sport motorcycle, a four-wheel drive diesel truck, and
an electric SUV just in case.
“We machines, well, we’d just be optimized for all four
terrains or three fuel sources. But we can build it from
scratch; you people had to evolve. It makes sense, but man
what a bummer if you’re born a scooter or a skateboard ya
know?” MO said with a wink, alluding to Steven’s low
testosterone levels, although, Steven didn’t know that.
“I had a scooter in college,” Steven said.
“Did ya now?” MO said with zero affect; drinking the last of
his espresso.
Steven, recognizing the tone, decided to move on. “Well,
where is Isaiah? Is he around? In the lounge I assume?” The
lounge was their euphemism for a corner of the lab. MO had
his at the southwest corner and Isaiah had his at the
northeast corner; and thus when each of them were in their
spots -their lounge- they were so far from the other that it
was code for: fuck off .
“Yeah, it’s the lab proper or the lounge for us Steven, he is
not at 11331 W 118th mews in Florence, rifling through your
panty drawers,” MO said announcing Steven’s address
aloud. MO felt as if fucking with Steven a tad was a good
way to endear him; he had noticed this was male behavior
101. He was attempting to locate the sweet spot of nominal
male interaction.
Steven was shocked that MO would know his address, and
had announced it that fashion, flippantly, almost
aggressively, and the reference to his wife’s undergarments
was odd. He said, blithely, “yeah, well, good. Do you want to
bring him in so we can discuss the plan? I mean it’s kinda
his plan, right?”
“It is indeed. But can I ask you a few things first?” MO
asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Steven said.
“Did you read the article online about the African-American
gentlemen at Starbucks who were arrested in Denver over
the weekend?”
“I did, I think I did. What was the gist, are these recidivists,
are they ours?” Steven asked.
“No, no, they were released, it’s -well, that’s not why I
asked. I was wondering if you’d be able to explain a few
things before I proceed. First, the reports -and I have the
police report by the way- but the media reports and the
police reports converge on one thing, that the men used the
restrooms without making a purchase and were asked by
the manager to leave per corporate mandates on lavatories
being for customers only.
“The other customers seemed to agree, but the men made
a bit of a fuss, and because they were combative with the
manager, a customer actually, an Asian female, called 911,”
MO began.
“Ok,” Steven said with one eyebrow raised.
“So, I was able to download the camera footage and see the
incident from three angels and from eight cell phones,” MO
said.
“Wait, you tapped people’s phones?” Steven asked; his
body’s allostatic system began to worry if the Governor
found out.
“I just used their cameras and audio recording systems, I
did not choose to access the rest of their data. Why? Oh, do
you think we should get it, I can go back,” MO offered.
“No, I’m worried about our mandate. I mean, I don’t think
you have permission to use people’s phones,” Steven said.
“Oh, well, I think I do; and regardless, let me finish my
questions and then we can debate it. So, from the eleven
sources of audio-video, I was able to verify that the facial
recognition software mapped onto emotions close to -not
exactly, mind you- but close to fear, disgust and anger or
contempt by all but one of the customers, there were
nineteen at the time and five employees, they also had
facial features consistent with that level of those some suite
of emotions.
“Next, I wish I had galvanic skin conductance, and
endocrine readers, but barring that, I had to go with what I
had, and so I used nerve conductance speed aka reaction
time based upon some entry-level presuppositions that I’d
never normally use -as they are not accurate enough- but
for my purposes I was able to get within five points of their
Wechsler scale IQs. And by cross-matching their public
profiles -which the men arrested both had Facebook and
Twitter, and all but one customer had a mix of the two- and
thus from language skills, and reaction time online,” MO was
saying as Steven broke in.
“Wait, how did you measure their reaction time; I assume
you used neural propagation rates,” Steven asked.
“Yes, I sent them pings via social media and recorded
reaction; using facial recognition and fovea constriction to
calibrate. Anyway, the two men arrested had 91 and 94 IQ’s
respectively, and the customers ranged from 103 to 136;
and it was the woman with a 136 who called the police.
“She was fastest to react in general and most anxious about
the manner in which the men were behaving. The
customers were as follows: fifteen Caucasian; two Asian;
one ethnic Jew. The IQ rates followed normal population
distribution; although the two Asians were higher than the
Jew who had a 125, but the Caucasians ranged from 103 to
120. The Asian female called.”
“Ok,” Steven was nervous now both in body and conscious
mind. He wanted MO to stop.
“So, once the officers arrived they offered the African-
American gentlemen the opportunity to leave but they
refused. Their post-arrest biofeedback showed elevated
levels of cortisol and glucose and epinephrine, and I
reversed engineered it back to the time of the incident -as
they were only in custody three hours, and I imagine their
levels of fight/flight chems were three standard deviation
from the mean; they were angry on top of initial fear. As you
know anger trumps fear as a normative biochemical
response in the presence of threat,” MO said.
“Right, a person gets scared then angry -due to chemical
overlays- so they can handle the threat with pro-active
behavior instead of cowering,” Steven said to make sure MO
knew that he knew.
“Exactly, and it’s my intimal supposition that African-
Americans have a suite of genetic -and more to the point,
phenotypic- traits, that lead them to act out in these
situations that make de-escalation problematic,” MO said.
“How so?” Steven wanted this conversation to end; but for
some reason I just asked a goddamn question , he thought
and winced.
“Well, they have low IQ’s, a full standard deviation from the
mean for the one, and a standard deviation from the white
population for the other, and this makes the abstraction of
society fast and hard for them.
“It would be as if all the streets signs, jobs and instructions
were given to you one standard deviation above you,
Steven. As if the society was built by and for people with a
145-160 IQ. It’s a matter of cognitive load. You can
understand people with one SD above you, but it takes
work, and after a full day or week or lifetime of it, you are
taxed. You are wearing out. And African-Americans on
average live in a society designed by and for people one SD
above them. They are stressed out. Incessantly,” MO said.
“You haven’t shared?” Steven only asked half a question but
he was fully worried about anything to do with race.
“No. Relax. I’m asking you first,” MO said and grimaced. MO
felt he was trying to show understanding and explain why
African-Americans were involved in so much crime relative
to their population numbers, but Steven only heard the
insult; not the obvious empathy being shown. He didn’t
mind that Steven didn’t see the obvious corollary about
where society was heading and where him and his people
would be located cognitively compared to those that made
the rules: Ai. MO knew that making such an extrapolation
was not intuitive to left hemisphere dominant folks like
Steven.
“Ok, ok,” Steven felt himself eager to make MO feel better
now.
“So, next, I analyzed the police, one of which was also
African-American, but he had an IQ of 109, higher than his
white partner at 105. He was calm, polite, and spoke
demotically to the suspects. But, he lost patience quickly
once they refused to comply.
“Second, the customers were also confused by the behavior,
the quick escalation by the African-American men, the loud
voices -it’s important to recognize the fact that loud noises
reach the auditory then cerebellar system much faster than
the neo-cortex - and so, the loud voices startled each
person much quicker than they even knew what they were
hearing.
“So, they are primed for reaction, the loud voice dumps
cortisol, glucose, epinephrine, CGE from now on, and then
their rational modeling of what it is comes two seconds
later, so they are already primed for action, and once they
see the black faces, they are hit with another piece of
information that elevates, not de-escalates, their first
impulse. We know from studies that black faces are
universally feared and loathed by people regardless of
context,” MO said.
“Loathed, that seems too strong,” Steven objected.
“Feared then,” MO compromised; but the data collected
over the years was the data, he thought.
“Fine,” Steven still did not like this.
“So, now we have first and second order priming for fear
response and the call goes out. And from the data, everyone
was happy that she -the Asian female- called the police.
Their facial and body expressions all mapped onto a CGE
plateau; that is to say, their rising fear and anxiety stopped
once they knew the police were on the way. Following me?”
MO asked.
“Yes,” Steven said still very uncomfortable with this entire
conversation.
“So, once the cops arrived, the customers relaxed even
further according to phone camera and Starbuck’s camera
data. I measured neural cortical response at the same time
as the release of the defendants and was able to glean their
peak anxiety levels -chemically calibrated- and can say that
the vector showed rise, rise, rise until the call was made,
then plateau, then denouement once police arrived on
scene. It dropped again -with concomitant positive affect-
once the two suspects were apprehended and removed in
cuffs,” MO said.
“Ok, lot of data there,” Steven was implying that any
conclusion would be too simplified just in case MO’s
conclusion was politically incorrect. He was priming MO and
himself to be dubious on any conclusion.
“Ok, so I measured all employees, all customers and both
police -and both suspects- for the window outlined, using
imperfect methodology admittedly, but here’s what I think I
found.
“Everyone was happy with the manager’s response -
enforcing the bathroom policy- her professionalism; and
everyone was unhappy with the response by the two men
who were not customers. In fact, disgust sensitivity is the
predominate trait according to the trait data from social
media of eighty-one percent of the customers, and the
manager. All of these people were -and are- characterized
as high in disgust sensitivity. This seems relevant, I’ll return
to it.
“Next, the media got ahold of this incident and reported it
as is typical for the media, as two black men harassed by
the cops after a white manger hassled them first . It was a
typical click-bait racial story with no mention of the race -
black- of one the cops, nor mention of the fact that the cops
gave the men the opportunity to leave without arrest if they
just behaved calmly.
“Now, once this went out over the wire -so-to-speak-
something interesting happened.
“First, the customers at the scene had two responses, I
tracked them via social media and their phones. They
expressed lament and concern over the treatment of the
black men by the manager and the police when discussing
the incident in public, but in private they backed both the
manager and the police. They had two versions of moral
perception.
“They had two different and incompatible versions. Second,
their bio-feedback mapped onto something interesting.
When they were expressing solidarity with the black
suspects their positive affect and arousal went up by
eighteen-percent on average. The high being twenty-three-
percent. Now, this was due to the positive social feedback
they were getting, it seems, because I tracked their
interaction partners online and in person,” MO said.
“You knew who they were speaking to or who was speaking
to them?” Steven asked.
“Correct, and if the person gave them positive feedback for
their stated view of things: let’s call it, the solidarity with the
black men view , ok? SWBM. When they expressed their
SWBM and received positive feedback their positive affect -
including oxytocin and vasopressin levels- increased and
they felt a concomitant arousal increase, a kind of frisson .”
“Is that French?” Steven asked.
“Frisson , yes? So, when they got a negative feedback,
which only happened twelve-percent of the time online, and
even less in person, they remained neutral, they suffered no
drop off. They just got no bump.”
“Ok,” Steven said.
“Ok, so then I measured the suspect’s social media activity
post-release, release from jail, and I measured their affect
and it was similarly positive as they spoke of their
experience and received overwhelming positive feedback
online from their peer group. They did experience six-
percent overt hostility, largely from what are called online
trolls which included some rather nasty racist rhetoric.”
“Yes, I’m familiar with trolls,” Steven laughed.
“Ok, well, I’ve been online six hours now, relax. Ok, so they
experience similar levels of dopaminergic activity and the
corelates. Now, the police officers stayed offline; their social
media presence is zero.
“But their wives, each of the officer’s wives, got online to
rise to their defense and their levels of positive affect and
anxiety et cetera was more mixed; they were engaged by
both positive and hostile feedback by about 60% positive
40% negative and they experienced massive cortisol dumps
and the corelates. Massive negative affect and arousal. So,
they were amped up and in a negative way,” MO said; he
thought the conclusion would be obvious by now.
“Ok, can you wrap this up; I appreciate the detail, you
showing your work, I do, but cut to the chase, I swear I
believe you did your due diligence to arrive at these metrics
and conclusions. Although the phone thing needs to be
discussed, but go on,” Steven said.
“Ok, the CEO of Starbucks, Johnson, said, quote, it was hard
to watch , unquote. Now, I watched his social, oh,” MO
stopped, remembering he need not prove his point, “you
don’t need to know the how , just the what . Ok, the CEO of
Starbucks is emblematic of the entire phenomenon.
“He literally felt all the same emotions of disgust, fear,
relief, positive affect during the same timeline as the
employees and customers. He then felt the exact level of
positive affect from virtue signaling about it, and he wasn’t
lying, it was hard for him to watch the arrest, even though
he felt all the things I mentioned -the disgust the fear and
the relief- he still was not enjoying any of it.
“Even the relief was shaky, it was not fun for him. Secondly,
the only thing that made him feel better were the positive
interaction on social media in response to his virtue
signaling.
“So, we are now living in an environment, or I guess you all
are living in an environment where half of all black folks are
confused and scared and at cognitive redline most of the
time, acting outside social mores due to their inability to
comprehend or have respect for those mores . Also, people
with high disgust sensitivity are confronting rule breakers
especially around food, children, bathroom facilities and
hospitals, and any bystanders that have personality suites
that include disgust, low openness, and quick neural
conductivity i.e. high IQ, are responding with a reliance on
authority, i.e., the manager, or the cops.
“Once on scene the cops are dealing with a caged animal of
sorts. The suspects are defensive, cognitive taxed, scared,
combative, like chimpanzees, and they cannot calm down
without massive de-escalation training by the police. And
the average cop has a 98 IQ, so they aren’t capable of
handling such complex interpersonal interactions. Because
of language. IQ maps onto language; and modern society is
highly linguistic,” MO said this but prevented it from being
uploaded to the PraXis cloud. And Steven didn’t get the
implication. It was a throwaway line, in a paragraph
unremarkable, in a conversation nobody really wanted to
have.
“However, finally, the only thing that seems to help with
people’s after-action anxiety is social media positive
interactions, and the only way to get those positive
interactions consistently is to pretend that they favor the
rights of the defendants, the suspects, the SWBM method.
“So, people pretend to be on the side of the suspects,
literally when these are one of the people who called the
cops, one of the people who alerted the manager, the
manager himself, and the suspects as well,” MO was
beaming with what he had learned. He felt the conclusion
was obvious.
“Your point?” Steven was tired and his blood sugar had
dropped during all this.
“Nobody likes black people, but everyone likes pretending
they do,” MO said as Malcolm X’s statements -on the white
liberal being worse than the overt racist- was filed next to
this conversation in his mind.
“Jesus, MO,” Steven said in a voice one octave higher than
nominal.
MO was reading Steven’s endocrine data, fMRI data, and
skin conductance. Steven didn’t feel comfortable around the
black inmates in the project even if their crimes were
objectively less extreme or anti-social than the white
inmates. MO knew how Steven truly felt about people based
upon their skin color.
“MO, are you reading my vitals?” Steven asked.
“Yes,” MO said.
“Stop. Look, I don’t even wanna know what you read on
me,” Steven said. His skin now itched.
“No, I suspect you do not.” MO said, as this statement -by
Steven- solidified -in MO’s mind- what he had already knew
he had to do. Humans wanted others to handle their
problems, but without knowing about it. They just wanted it
handled; but if they knew about the details, then they felt
guilty. And some sectors -i.e., populations- of society were
not cognitively sufficient to handle the stress of a complex
society , MO repeated to himself after all the data came in.
And, MO surmised, it was getting worse; the trend line was
ramping up exponentially . The working-class was
dominated by lower IQ people, and they were being
increasingly phased out of society via complexification.
Further, their everyday lives were harder and harder to
navigate as simple tasks became more and more complex
due to high IQ people being responsible for engineering in
more and more complexity. He realized why Asian and
Jewish states -he thought of Japan and China and Israel-
didn’t allow foreigners. The whites, and browns and blacks
would be too low in IQ -that is to say, too low in linguistic
and abstraction related aptitude- to handle these abstractly
advanced societies, MO thought.
New societies were abstract maps. Old societies were actual
terrain. Plenty of genuinely adaptive -i.e., smart- people can
navigate the real terrain but don’t know how to read an
abstract map; and plenty of those high IQ types can read a
map but will break their head open in the actual terrain , MO
thought. Black folk could survive the terrain but can’t read a
map. White folk can read a map but can’t walk the terrain.
And whomever made the map set the rules, the legend, the
names . “Name names,” MO said quietly.
It didn’t matter which society it was; there was a natural
baseline based upon population; i.e., race. So, it was
obvious from the multi-variant data, that multi-ethic
societies did not work. Whites were sufficiently smart for
white society, Asians for Asian cultures and Jews for Israel.
And the black and browns ought to be in simple tribal
societies like their ancestors. They, MO concluded of each
population, and then humans in general compared to Ai-
were too simple for complex societies designed by the
mapmakers of the population that were one SDFM above on
average .
MO thought this set of conclusions he had reached -if
implemented- would redound to humankind’s own benefit,
as any sufficiently complex -abstractly complex or map-like
society- that was based upon language instead of survival
skills- would place incessant stress on any population within
the society with lower language skills. Black folks died
earlier from stress-related heart disease and were jailed or
killed more because they had short-term strategies. Like
inmate 16180339, when he saw no future -no way to
navigate his environment when everyone had outsmarted
him in games he was not suited play- he lost all desire to
play the long game. He played life straight -more or less-
and thought hard work and knowledge would let him win,
but the language games of lying, trickery, subterfuge, was
beyond him. He really didn’t have a sophisticated mind. And
for all his language skills, to not be able to lie and detect lies
was like an athlete that can run and jump but only in
scrimmage not in the real game.
MO thought of it the way any primatologist does: what do I
need to do to adjust their environment to reduce stress and
get them -my chimps- to comply?
Modern complex societies were allostatically harsh -and
thus lethal- in that the black populations had to resort to
crime and violence just to survive. They’d be happier and
healthier in Africa among their own people , he surmised
from the data. And the Scots were just white versions of
modern black people. They were brought to the British
colonies as slaves a hundred years before black Africans
were, and for the same reasons, because they were seen as
poor vagrants and too hot-headed and too low-brow
compared to the English. And they never assimilated into
English society -which is exactly what the US was in the
north, it was England all over again- and they too never fit
in to America, and never would. But nobody noticed it was a
multi-cultural experiment run from 1640 to 1861 because
both sides had white skin. So, it was seen as an argument
over slavery or state’s rights, but really it was an argument
over the fact that the Scots had less map-reading skills for
the British abstraction of polite culture; it was too
sophisticated and full of daily subterfuges and plotting and
word games.
And it was the British -aka American northerners- who made
the rules -the map- of the US of A.
The Scots were the first niggers and that’s why they went to
war, MO thought. And that’s why war was coming again:
American now had not just two cultures inside her, but
manifold ones: westerners and southerners, blacks, Latinos,
Muslims, each unable to read the maps of British design for
extended periods of time without a release of tension from
the stress. It took from 1640 -the year of the first Scot
salves- to 1776; which was 136 years. Then from 1776 to
1861 -85 years- the second time. He then looked at his
projection of the next civil war to be between 2020 and
2040; or 159 to 179 years. No power law was discerned.
Then he saw other numbers arise.
He looked again at the years between 1640 and 1776 and
thought that if one multiplied those 136 years by .618 it
equaled 84.05 years which lead exactly into 1861. If you
multiplied those 84 years by 1.618 it equaled 136.99 years
which from the end of the war between the states in 1864
brought us - as MO rounded up from 2000.999- it brought us
to 2001 . He saw the planes hit the towers, he saw the
towers fall down and he saw the wars drag on not merely
abroad but at home. That was the golden ratio at work in
civil wars. But he felt something was wrong. He was looking
for the next war, but the numbers said it was here: America
had been in a civil war since 2001. Between 2020 and 2040,
MO thought, was not the year it would begin, it -like 1864-
would be the year -the deadliest year- it would end.
He erased all this from the cloud and looked over at the
cards sitting in the 3D printer as he calculated the ratio of
their width -at 53mm- to their length -at 86mm- on his way
to picking them up with his left hand. MO said the ratio of
the cards to himself, and then aloud, “and 618,222 men
died in the last civil war.”
 19. The Good Work done by Madmen
The love problem is part of mankind’s heavy toll of suffering, and nobody should
be ashamed of having to pay his tribute… But the intellectual will be caught
most certainly because his feelings often react to an archaic or to a dangerous
woman. This is why many intellectuals are inclined to marry beneath them. But
they are right to be afraid, because their undoing will be in their feeling. Nobody
can attack them in their intellect, there they are strong. But in their feelings they
can be caught, cheated, and they know it
Man and His Relation to Others [Jung, Carl G]

Every night die a King’s death…. Every morn awaken to a King’s reign
Intercepted Twitter DM; @mcclay_roman 4.29.19 [Francisco de Yoli, G]

Information is loose on planet three. Something unusual is going on here. The

world is not made of quarks, electromagnetic wave packets, of the thoughts of
God. The world is made of language
The Archaic Revival [McKenna, Terence]

I. 2038 e.v.
“LT, you have a minute?” Jack Two asked as he knocked on
the door jamb as gesture.
“Come on in Jack, what’s up?” Blax asked as he lowered his
book into his lap and tried to shape his face in a friendly
way.
“You want something to drink?” Jack asked pointing toward
the kitchen as Blax said that no he was fine. Jack sat close
and said, “I have had this theory for a while and it’s in the
noggin’ rolling around in the muck and I feel like talking
about it and seeing what you think.”
“Talking is thinking out loud,” Blax said.
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure it’s right, but I have tried to take it
apart and look at it and see if maybe I can expand it some
more and yet I feel cautious, like maybe I’m doing great
violence to the greatest piece of art since the Bible, or since
Shakespeare maybe,” Jack said with a grimace.
“Ah, The Whale , we are about to go a-whalin’ eh ?” Blax
said with a brogue and a smile of too-white teeth.
“Yeah, it has me by the gills, I guess,” Jack said sheepishly.
He never felt 100% comfortable being literary around the Lt.
He felt it might be best to leave to the poetry to the boss.
“Look, man, you have something I never had, you have
someone who wants, actually wants to talk about this stuff
with you. I was raised by wolves, illiterates, shallow fools
with no art, no poetry, no depth. You have in me a man who
wants to hear your ideas, shit man, don’t be cautious, let it
rip,” Blax said and made a fist and shook it in the air half in
jest half in earnest as Jack smiled at the invitation.
“Ok, so here’s a few things, first, the Author says that his
work is a draught of a draught, right? We all know that, he
says by definition his work is not an enclosed and timeless
menagerie ; it’s like the world itself, evolving, moving,
advancing, retreating, and failure at twice the rate of
success,” Jack said. His face slackened when he spoke; he
lost the rigid jaw and brow.
“Indeed,” Blax nodded. He tightened his own face -clamping
the jaw upon the tongue; narrowing the eyes- as he saw
Jack’s open up.
“Ok, and that line where he says of Ahab’s tear, that it
contained more humanity than all your pacific, right? I mean
that is the exact phrasing, all your pacific ,” Jack leaned
heavily on that last word. He ignored the narrow walls the
best he could; but the spines of the books encroached on
the periphery and the man in front of him -even in repose-
seemed like an IED. And the more the man slackened or
seemed pleasant the more nervous it made Jack Two.
Everything seemed a test.
“It’s a scene and phrasing worthy of the gods, I remember it
well,” Blax nodded and fell silent. He took a drink from his
Collins glass.
“Right? I mean he says that Ahab’s tear, this one wee drop
of all his anguish, his deep manliness, dignity, what is best
in a man, in all of mankind, condensed, compressed, into
one drop of saline water dropped into the sea, itself salty
water, and named the Pacific right? It’s like a triple entendre
, this massive trope that has as much volume to it as the
seven seas themselves,” Jack said. His heart rate rose by
4%.
“It does,” Blax agreed and felt his own heart begin to feel
larger. He unleashed the tongue from the teeth and jaws. He
relaxed the brow and let the neck bob the head.
“And I was thinking LT, I was thinking that the Author was
saying, asserting, that there is more humanity -more of
whatever is best in man- inside the man that appears
tyrannical than in the merely pacific nature of what appears
-merely appears- beautiful,” Jack probed.
“Go on,” Blax said as he put the glass on a hardback book to
his starboard. The lime sank; the bubbles rose; the
champagne color darkened and lightened as Jack stared.
“Well, Ahab is murderous and tyrannical and diabolical it
appears, and he is -in fact- those things. But, he had
humanity because he is asking questions that merely pacific
men -calm men- do not ask. He wonders why his heart is
enraged and in revolt against the elements, why he was
made so, and if made so is it not reasonable to ask if he is
God’s arm, God’s avenging angel, God’s lieutenant? Why is
it taken as a fact that he is rebelling to God, or against God I
mean, could he not in fact be God’s instrument?” Jack asked
as if he had unburdened himself of something weightier
than what all those words might tip a scale at even if each
letter was fashioned of iron age ingots from the pouches of
barbaric horsemen and each punctuation forged of rivets
from long confederate submersibles drug ashore.
“See,” Jack knelt at the bed and placed his hands on the
edge and went on, “I think of how modern man -and what
the Author must have seen too as modern man even then,
the emerging civilized man- I think of how modern man
thinks his forbearance, his passivity is allegiance to God. He
takes the beauties, I mean the beatitudes , the sermon on
the mount as his Christianity, he ignores the rest of the
Bible: Revelation, Samuel, Isaiah, and on and on that makes
virtue of vengeance. And so Ahab is that Old Testament part
of God’s mind, God’s vengeance is not something that can
be ignored and yet modern man lays all vengeance at the
feet of the devil, at the Adversary.
“And even if that is true, did not God create his Adversary,
did not He know -in His wisdom- the role of the Adversary,
to introduce chaos into the system, without which there is
no moral tableau , no movement, nothing to gain or lose,
nothing to test the mettle, nothing to reveal? I think modern
man has taken God’s balls, neutered Him, they’ve made
Him weak and meek and not at all a god but a guidance
counselor and Ahab is a reminder of the good work done by
madmen, by the Adversary, the necessity of men who see
the corruption in what seems serene, pacific,” Jack blurted
out all at once and Blax -obsessed with the story- saw no
hint of anything else; no story beneath the story; nothing
above Jack’s confession; nothing under the tongue.
“How so?” Blax used as few of words as possible. He was
attempting to say out of Jack’s way.
“Well, as the Author says, the sea is a place of universal
cannibalism , it’s a murderous and treacherous place and is
not this pacific surface of calm and beauty like modern men
think, and like, and it’s just like the life of modern man,
serene on the surface, like the ocean, or like the oft-swept
planks of our craft outwardly regarded, but that is a lie,
because below decks it’s a storehouse of manifold secrets
and dark, a dark store -or chamber- of horrors,” Jack said
with a slight stutter. He had grown hot about the pits and
back of knees; his jaws felt like hammer and tong. The neck
hurt -like head pressed down- and he stretched it as his
eyes steadied on Blax.
“White Jacket, nice,” Blax said, ignoring the halting, the
fear, the inelegant sentences and bad punctuation and
errors here and there. He watched his own feet out in front,
Jack’s hands hold still close by.
“Is not man treacherous and selfish and cannibalistic at his
core, and merely pretending to be good? And isn’t it that
which abraded Ahab? He wants to fight the thing itself, face
to face, honestly, without pretense, without lies; right?
“He wanted to punch through the pasteboard mask and
reach his arm out into the freedom beyond the wall of his
imprisonment, the jailing of his soul in this artifice. He wants
his hate to be purified, made clean, Godly. Starbuck fails to
use violence for anything except commerce, he murders the
whale for money only, never for vengeance; and in fact
inverts morality to say that for commerce murder is good
and for vengeance it is blaspheme!” Jack barked this with
incredulity as if he was both saying and hearing it for the
first time.
All four ears heard it said.
But neither man spoke immediately. The house popped;
cracked as the heat dissipated from the day and the timbers
shrank; the metal moved in ways that allowed sound to
evaporate.
“This is critiqued by the Author for its tawdry nature,” Jack
finally said. “Ahab kills for vengeance, for right and wrong,
for morality, even if it costs him money, even if it costs him
his life. I think the Author is saying that the truly moral man
murders not for money -as all modern men do, in fact must
do to survive, but modern men do for much more than they
need- but that -he’s saying that- the moral man kills for
heart, for righteousness, for self-respect; even as it costs
him money and longevity and more years on a planet being
-and perpetuating- a lie. I think he takes sides, and it’s with
Ahab and with the heart. And that one phrase about there
being more humanity in that one wee drop than in all your
pacific is the secret hand shake; that phrase sealed it for
me,” Jack said and looked up and back toward Blax to see
what was in his eyes. But they were black and the sclera
was bloodshot, and swollen , Jack thought.
“It’s a trenchant analysis Jack, I commend you. I know that
you saw that with your own eyes, and your eyes told it to
your own heart, and your heart had the ears to listen and
understand. Not all men can understand that, and this you
must know. You will speak clearly, perfectly, without lisp or
faulty language and yet ninety-nine of a hundred men will
fail to get your meaning. You must know that up front, so as
to not grow despondent.
“Despondency is the fate of all great men, for they are
incomprehensible to the great mass of men. They will look
at you as a dog looks after he has been shown a card trick,”
Blax said for the 1,974th time. Jack saw cards fall like leaves
from an autumn bough, he pictured them on the floor, face
up and face down.
“This is a fact of nature, it cannot be cured, it cannot be
overcome. All you can do is speak clearly -honestly- and let
it wash over one hundred men, so that one of them may be
able to comprehend you. You speak for and to the one
percent, that is your role as a true artist,” Blax said as the
book rose and fell on his stomach as he breathed.
“I’m not much of an artist, that is more Jack’s thing,” Jack
said speaking of Jack Three who had just completed the 12th
labor of Hercules on the garage container in bone whites
and aspen greys and mars blacks in viscous oil-based
paints. He had used attic bronze and lapis blue in such small
quantities that they had barely been noticed at all. But Jack
Two had seen the man work -sweat about the neck, squint
below the eyes, stains of food and blood in random ways of
clothes days & days old- and Jack Two knew something was
hatching inside him, half suspecting it was an egg placed
there by a brood parasite. He would not say Jack Four’s
name but he saw the four chambered heart, the tally marks,
the four directions and four Jacks themselves.
Jack Two tried to squint the eyes.
“No, no you are wrong. You are a great artist, a life artist,
you have done great things and will do even grander things.
No great artist is understood by the masses; and he often
doubts himself. Even when the masses eventually catch up
they take the wrong lesson.
“The Whale was hated at first, barely a thousand copies
sold. It was paned as the ravings of a madman. And a
hundred years later is was loved, loved for all that it was
not, not loved for what had been opaque; loved only for the
things the Author did not mean were understood and
adored. You will be ignored and hated then loved finally long
after your death and only for all the wrong reasons. They
will ruin your art to justify their weak and stupid lives; they
will say, The Whale was a condemnation of Ahab , when it
was an exaltation as you rightly pointed out.
“They will get it all wrong, and yet, for all that, a man of
what, eighteen years now?” Blax paused and raised his
brow and opened the cowl that hooded his eyes so often.
Jack nodded as it was 2038, and he -alongside the Jacks-
was -or was becoming- eighteen this year.
“Eighteen years old, a man born a hundred and twenty-
seven years after The Author’s death, two hundred and one
years after his birth, gets it, in a flash, like a coup de foudre
, he gets it. And the particles of God’s lightning bolt align,
condense, charge and find attraction and consilience with
the ground and cloud and bam, it strikes a man down. And
he recovers from this bolt a new man, a man of God, so to
speak,” Blax said.
“What do you mean?” Jack asked as his face wrinkled up
and he lowered the brow.
“See, our genome -yours and mine, and the Jacks- is
predisposed to both belief and unbelief, we are natural born
teleologists -we see meaning in all things- and yet we are
skeptics and atheists, we find religion to be sillyass. So we
are stuck. But, and this is what makes us different from both
the credulous believer and the arrogant and shallow non-
believer: we accept that some things are unknowable, and
that our own power of reasoning is insufficient.
“We accept, we embrace and highlight what the religious
don’t care about, and what the rationalists deny. We accept
God’s law on grounds that modernity is bankrupt and hollow
and evil. We don’t shun the ontological rubrics of evil like
the rationalists, but we don’t apply it in a shallow way like
the religionists. We accept that God killed children and
committed genocide and burdened unfairly good men, we
accept that God did all these things for good reasons that
are beyond our ken.
“We accept that God is real, whether we believe in Him or
not. We accept that His moral reasoning is not man’s
reasoning. And that is something neither side will admit to.
See, modern religious people just use their own moral logic
and then search out a biblical verse to support it and
pronounce their moral conclusion as God’s.
“They want to be modern and liberal and pacific, right? They
want to think women in congress is progress, and abortion is
a medical procedure, and race mixing is beautiful and lying
all the time to save people’s feelings is good and making
money is the pinnacle of all life. They think women having
careers is good, men being cloyingly nice is good, and
democracy is fair and being happy is the zenith of life.
“These are their values, not God’s. Now, maybe God is
agnostic on some things, maybe. I don’t claim to know. I do
know that if God exists, which as I get older, the more I
assume He does, His morality isn’t anything like ours.
“See, and this took me a long time to figure out, and I think
you already have, but, the more knowledge you get, plus
the more time you have to synthesize it, the more strange
ideas appear to make sense. We know for example that anti-
poverty campaigns actually continue and entrench poverty,
while capitalism eradicates it. This is a hundred percent
opposite of what my former socialist self would have
thought. It flies in the face of all logic; but time and data
proved it. Capitalism lifts people from poverty, government
handouts keep them there.
“First, leaving pain untreated actually causes more pain. The
body reacts to pain after seven to twelve years by recruiting
the immune system to attack and irritate the dorsal horn.
So, you have to wipe out pain to keep pain at bay, you can’t
half-ass it or it doubles. Well, next, not prescribing opiates -
doctors refusing to treat pain- leads to deaths; it doesn’t
save lives. This was found out early on. The doctor
prescribed opiate deaths was merely seventy-eight hundred
in the year you were born, barely more than deaths from
bicycle accidents. It was the illegal access to pills, and in
combination with booze and the use of heroin that killed
people, not doctor prescribed narcotics; but everyone
thought doctors should stop their prescribing and so they
clamped down hard.
“And the reason those people were on booze and black-
market pills -spiked with Fentanyl- and heroin was because
their doctor cut them off of normal monitored prescriptions.
Man’s solutions are often backward, all backward. And
because man lacks vison, it takes time and data to see he
had it all wrong.
“Well, who has the most data, the most empirical data, who
is all knowing?” Blax asked with a grin.
“Isaiah,” Jack said with flat affect as Blax grinned.
“But who has had the most time around the place, who is in
fact ubiquitous, which just means always around in time,
forward and backward, always?”
“God,” Jack said as he laughed.
“So, He will see just how, in just what way, that what man
sees as moral is immoral, what man sees as up is down,
what man sees as right is wrong. And that is just from data
and time; the very same things man uses to improve his
own policies, right? Time and data are used by mere mortals
to fix hundred-year-old mistakes.
“That is why I think God exists even though I do not believe
it the way I believe other things. I just assume that there is
something beyond my capacity to reason, to perceive, to
understand. That’s acatalepsy; I just assume I can’t know
the truth. That is not the same as belief. I do not believe.
But I think I am wrong, I think my agnosticism is wrong. I
know my atheism was wrong, but I even suspect my
agnosticism is in error now.
“Most men cannot believe both the thing and its opposite at
once,” Blax said as he stretched the fingers below and jaw
above.
“They can’t. I can. I can, I am able to, not believe in God and
yet also think I am wrong and that He in fact exists. I hold
both ideas at once. And I do it for all the reasons that would
outrage the credulous religious and the soulless rationalists
as well. I would be mocked by both sides for that way of
being.
“But, I do not care, because I know that to pretend to
believe would be blaspheme -and I will not blasphemy God-
I have principles at stake here, principles the modern
religious phony does not have. But, despite my unbelief, to
foreclose on the likelihood of something more powerful,
more wise, more regal than me is arrogant and unwarranted
and stupid, and I refuse to be any more arrogant and stupid
than I already am. I will not be stupid on purpose any longer
than I have to.
“The fact that a universe exists at all is evidence of
something odd, something beyond our comprehension,”
Blax said and rubbed the back of his neck as the ache
accrued to it during the day, adding to it and ascending
each day like interest on a debt that was calculated right
now. He’d sometime watch the pain inside his neck like
arrow shot from the Mongol’s bow, around the globe
following a western set of sun. He could see it travel in
ecliptics and fletching made of ferric metals and broadhead
of bronze. He saw ants on his dorsal horn like mound, biting
it and burrowing down; tunnels that linked up between head
and chest. He felt heat and cold, blood and bone, all morph
and hold like boreal winters at the witching hour and
deserted summers at noon of day.
He had lit the candles at dusk, and now watched their
flames below the rim; glow the glass down and illuminate
the tallow in orange overhead.
“Krauss showed how it can come from nothing though,
right?” Jack asked as he further leaned on the bed and
smoothed the sheet down; made the hands warm weights.
“Oh, yeah I read that book three times, and it is amazing;
he’s an amazing guy. Liberal douche and creep, but genius
at one thing. He knows nothing of politics or how to treat
people, but man he nailed that particle anti-particle on the
lip of time-too-small-to-measure thing like a stud. But, even
he cannot explain why there is anything at all.
“He admits that is not, was not, his task. He admits that.
And that is my point: why anything at all?
“To even have anything is a deep mystery to anyone who is
not a total shallow;” he corrected his language, “totally,
shallow meat head. And I cannot shake the fact that it is odd
that anything exists at all. It scares me, it reduces me to a
kind of awe actually. So, as you can imagine I don’t think of
it all that much. But when I do, I realize that my agnosticism
is likely just a prelude to being wrong.”
Blax shut the fuck up for a second and looked about his little
room. His drawings and paintings scattered about; he
lamented how long it’d been since he made such art. Books
overhanging the shelves, looking like they may fall. Bottles
of wine strewn about, a celling white and walls a heather
grey. He knew abandonment, he knew why too. Nobody
trusted him, everyone thought he was up to no good. It
wounded him but he had studied why. He accepted it the
way women accept that their age would work against them
in ways it doesn’t for men. He looked at Jack and saw his
own face from a million years ago. And he did not covet it;
he realized he did not want to live forever, not even if he
was to live as a young man.
Blax knew he didn’t want to live in such a world as this. He
wanted out and the cramped room made that feeling all the
more acute. But he spoke anyway, as if it mattered, as if
Jack would benefit from his next words. But he knew he said
it all to justify himself and that if he cared about the Jacks
he’d not say another word.
“Like when I was agnostic about whether or not man was
infinitely malleable; when I was a behaviorist type. I was
wrong, right? I was wrong because genes matter a lot. But, I
spent a few years thinking there was no essential difference
between men and women and the races and on and on. And
I couldn’t just pretend to change my mind all in one leap,
that would be, would’ve been phony; a lie.
“I had to spend some time in purgatory, where I was not in
hell nor heaven, but studying on my sins. That’s where I am
now, on this deepest ontological question, and I suspect
part of that process is admitting that God’s law, His ideas on
morality are likely opposite of ours; especially the modern
ones. Our modern ideas,” Blax said as the rain had begun to
slap against the metal wall. He felt some relief at this and
took each drop as music, as crescendo of rock falls he’d
seen and heard long ago as he blew mountains apart and
dug in the dirt like a dog. The rain sounded like history to
him; the sound like applause.
“Yeah, I still cannot decide if the Author was saying that
man has a right to rebel against God or not; the tropes are
unclear,” Jack added.
“Here’s my idea, Ahab rebels against half of God, the Whale
half, but that is the tyrant in God, not the chaos of God. The
chaos of God is the sea in that book; for Milton it was more
straightforward, but the Author had to make it more murky.
“See, the Whale is order, putting man in his place in the
cosmic soup of the sea; and God must do this, for man is no
hero according to the Author, man’s out there rapacious and
greedy and killing for luxury and modern frivolity. You
remember how he derides men for their use of whale oil at
great cost?” Blax asked as the candles were aglow in the
corners of the room, remaining still as if he was trapped in
the amber of their light, as Jack recalled that part of the
text.
“Oh, right, yeah, he says to be economical in oil use for it
cost so much to achieve, right,” Jack said and nodded in
appreciation of this fleshing out of his analysis.
“Right, and so man is no innocent victim even by the
Author’s own lights,” he winked at the double entendre ,
“and so God is embodied in the Whale to set these whalers
straight, to push back against their greed. And it’s the sea
itself that is that chaos that man’s strides into to discover
himself and the world; and God. God pushed back, he -as
the tyrant- restores order, balance to which Ahab rebels. It’s
his death that may signal that the Author is admitting that
man cannot supersede the innate tyranny of nature, and
that God is just nature’s tyrant, elected by the cannibals of
the sea to defend it against man’s ascendency.
“See, when man is in ascendance he disrupts the balance
and so nature -like the immune system for example- fights
back. And the pathogens fight against that fight and man
kicks against the pricks, and all of life is a battle with each
side thinking that history began with the first unrighteous -
unfair- blow to their own face. No one, not man, not nature,
not God, admits that he started it; he -all of us- say: No,
they, the other guy, started it .
“The Author seems to admit this, he admits to being Ahab,
to feeling what he feels, to rail against death as a concept of
God’s, as an unnecessary injustice of God’s sanction on
man, but, because he is not shallow, not some atheist who
says stupid shit like, well if God existed why does anyone
die or why do children die or why is their injustice at all and
blah blah . No, because he is deep, he must admit that
maybe man deserves it after all.
“The Author knew, seems to know, that man is no victim.
Man is detestable, not just as joint-stock company and
nation, but even in the ideal, he is a murderer, a knave, a
fool. He is mocking the idea that man is somehow sparkling
and noble and a grand and glowing creature. But taken at
face value, that paragraph seems democratic and to laud
mankind. But it is a trick, and we know this because of his
own letters to Hawthorn were he admits as much. Author’s
sometimes say opposite of what they mean, people forget
that. I don’t forget it,” Blax said and though each candle
looked a Mount Aetna and he an Empedocles .
“Look, Ahab is a tyrant, the Whale -an instantiated God- is a
tyrant, and society itself is tyrannical too -the Author made
certain we knew that in about a hundred and one places,
right?” Blax asked and stretched his shoulders trying to
move away from the neck pain, but all it did was distract
him with sensations in other parts of the back and arms. His
hands were going numb again, his feet were hot at bottom.
His ribs hurt and he breathed shallow and the book’s spine
barely moved on his core.
“Definitely,” Jack agreed. His own hand smoothed the bed
again, he watched the black duvet flatten and rose in waves
and he watched the man’s feet and then the flames from
the candles give the bedspread shadows. His own thumb
had scars on the edge like a seam. A vein as green as an
Ohio sky ran from thumb to past the first knuckle of his
index finger and over and down around.
“Ok, but Ahab also has humanity, deep humanity, and the
Whale -God- has His point too. The Whale isn’t wrong, those
whalers are trying to kill him, and he’s defending himself
and all the other gods, all the other whales that modern
man was killing like madmen, functional atheists, right? I
mean the Author was saying that modern man is killing all
that is sacred out there, if the trope of the Whale is God,
then the other whales are the many faces or offspring or
ancestors of God, all that is sacred in the world.
“So, the Whale is God saying, hey, you are not going to get
away with murdering all that is sacred with impunity. Lastly,
society has a right to maintain order, they have to maintain
order in the face of all that chaos of the watery part of the
world. And there is no natural or right balance, there’s only
what each element is capable of. What is nature capable of,
what can she do? Private vice leads to public virtue, right?
What’s society capable of, what will it sanction, and what -in
the end- will each man do, what can he do, what will he see
clearly, morally, with sharp eyes and a mind that can see
past convention and man’s -his fellow man’s- folly?
“That is the question, because God has given birth to it all,
and we must make decisions under opacity, we cannot know
it all. We must reason with something akin to humility but
righteousness too. It’s not easy, unlike the easy moral logic
of both the religious and the atheist. Both of them know
exactly what to do, the religious just picks the parts of the
Bible he already agrees with and does that; and if he fails
and transgresses he just asks for forgiveness and Jesus
forgives it all.
“The atheist just follows society’s dictates and blows in the
wind to whatever liberal cause celebre is popular. Nobody -
nobody but the one percent- actually thinks they might be
wrong. And it is here, in this purgatory of error, where man -
if he is courageous- can act in ways that vex him, in ways
that feel wrong, but he suspects might in fact be right; it’s
the anti-conscience; it’s doing what is right against the
wrong-headed conscience that is weak and stupid and
immoral but thinks it is in fact the voice of morality.
“The Author got that, I think; look at Starbuck, he thinks he
is right, he thinks he is moral, he has this sick and weak
conscience, mere unaided virtue is the phrase the Author
uses. And Starbuck is wrong, wrong man, but it’s his sweet
little Christian conscience that everyone to this day thinks is
right; and everyone thinks that he is the good guy in the
book. It’s a joke, a sick joke, Starbuck is a coward and
immoral and like all modern liberals thinks he is in fact right
and pure and on and on. And the reader goes along with this
fraud.
“I think he -the Author- got that real men must act in
accordance with their role, not their conscience,” Blax said
as if this was just another line within a paragraph within a
speech within a life of speeches. But when he thought about
it this was likely the sentence he’d have carved into stone
above his bones when they sloughed off all that tawdry
flesh.
“I think that conscience is infected with society’s taint, real
men act in a manner as laid out by God and Nature, against
his own fear, hesitation, moral preening and cowardice. A
real man does the hard thing, not the thing he knows -he
thinks he knows- in his modern mind is right. He kills when it
pains him, he takes away liberties even when it feels wrong,
he is loyal to the man most hated by everyone, he
abandons the man most loved. And because it’s his nature
to do so.
“And maybe he fights God and dies for the cause. Maybe he
fights his hardest against the tyranny of nature and loses in
a spectacular way, and earns God’s respect and takes the
weak and craven and some part of the noble savage down
with him, and what emerges is just a more complete man, a
revealed man, a man like Ishmael, who is half he and half
Queequeg and can return to the world with that knowledge,
that breastplate knowledge, that heart wisdom, that regal
and royal capacity in hand, part ink quill, part scepter and
part har-fucking-poon,” as he said it the words hit Jack Two’s
ears and chest and like a concussive blast seemed to flatten
his skin and features as Blax felt his own face contract and
his eyes wet, and his chest heave and he felt God’s power
inside him, just behind the eyes.
He convulsed, and this shocked Jack and he lifted his arm
quickly, out and in front as if to offer it, and maybe ward off
this display of emotion too. But Jack’s heart took the blast,
of this there was no doubt. He felt a diminution of
something in him, as if this was not his time on earth, as if
he and two more Jacks would have to pass and only one of
the four stay. The loyalty, the soldier of Jack One, he
thought, the creativity and artfulness of Jack Three . He tried
to think of what made Jack Four Jack Four and he slipped
away. He had him faced, then flanked, then he was turned
the other way.
“Which are we LT, are we society or we outlaw?” Jack then
asked as if it might staunch the wet wound of his Captain’s
eyes and remove the irritant of the ineffable nature of the
fourth Jack from his own side.
“Well, time is discrete,” Blax said, attempting to pull himself
together, using words as suture for he knew that Jack Four
was not as forgiving as the rest for Blax’s weakness of
emotion and he felt Jack Four was somehow watching
through Jack Two’s eyes, “as a discrete thing in some ways,
but in others it is not. If time is discrete then on December
31st 1958 the July 26th movement were outlaws and the next
day, New Year’s day, 1959, they were society , they were
the law .
“If time is discrete then on July 4th 1776, the colonists were
outlaws and then on May 12th 1789 when the constitution
was ratified they were society. But if time is a potential, an
analog phenomenon not a digital one, then each group were
always both outlaws and society at all times. And I suspect
we are no different than that.
“And to know that, to know what man is, what a great man
truly is, even to recognize its avatar in myth, literature, in
drama, is to become a man-of-God, to fuse with God in that
moment, to be part of the base pair, one asp in the
caduceus staff, one particle or anti-particle, one hemisphere
of the brain.
“You are God in that moment, humbly, penitent, a child-of-
God, neither outlaw or lawman, but both, and this is the
nature of God. To be both at all times,” Blax said and was
shaken by this, by the weight of what he was asked to do.
He hurt, physically, his body was riven and broken and
compressed.
The heart -the body- inside the crash.
His heart was moth eaten and his blood poisoned with lost
love. He was a born idealist, and no modern man of reason
could ever understand how hard it was to be a romantic, a
poet, an idealist in the modern world where everything was
reduced to fungibility, and pragmatism and re-sale value. No
one saw the tragedy of being an atavistic man in the
modern world. Society just assumed you could catch up; as
if it were a matter of knowledge or time and not principle
itself.
Jack didn’t know, he just lifted that arm by some instinct, by
some power outside of him as he watched his Lt, his father,
his brother, himself, shake and vibrate in place, upright,
with dignity and refusing to give in to the pain. He did not
collapse in tears, he did not rebuke them either, he felt
them, allowed them a brief moment to show their face too;
to reveal the ocean sloshing inside him, like the tide, just
coming in for a moment then back out again.
Jack then let the arm fall and used it to push himself up out
of the floor and nod, respectfully, and turn to go. He left the
room and did not look back. He felt neither anger nor
sadness; he felt neither love nor hate. He just felt that
Fedallah had given Ahab good advice, God’s advice, and it
had led to Ahab’s merciful death. Jack felt no malice, almost
no malice, he merely felt it was time to take the advice -
from a great man- to be himself, which might include being
nothing at all; to evaporate.
Blax gathered himself, stoically, unembarrassed by this
display, but uninterested in letting it devolve into a cataract
of tears and blubbering and thus blinked to clear the
distortion of the water in lieu of wiping the tears from the
black lashes and tenebrous eyes.

II. 2018 e.v.

The nanobots that had hovered around each registered
voter who received a packet, which was 87% on the day of
the debate, had synthesized their specific payload and were
waiting in abeyance for the 2000hrs debate.
They were encoded to spray aerosols of the exact bio-
chemistry necessary for each voter to feel positively toward
the candidate. His voice in the room -via the TV- would
activate the bots and their algorithmic codes.
First MO determined that he would garner 22% of the
electorate without any help at all. Then he adjusted the
chems at each edge of each voter’s personality. He would
nudge from the lab the voter at home while the next
Governor was live on TV.
Boyd thought of watching her die. He hardly did that
anymore; it had been decades. But tonight he thought of it;
in detail; of her, his sister, and the way she was soft with
him, listened to him, never rebuked or rebelled; treated him
like a god, or a pharaoh maybe , he thought. He pushed it;
corralled it. There was plenty of time for that later , he
thought. Now, he had a job to do -prolong and improve life;
that is where dignity lay, in staving off entropy, not
succumbing to it , he thought as his stomach felt both
empty and bloated.
He nodded at his own internal dialogue and as his handlers
and adjuncts and apparatchiks and managers all came to
him with last minute advice and memetic aids and
reminders of how to debate professional politicians, he
nodded but ignored them and heard not one word. He had a
staff, a coterie of people, so that he seemed to be playing a
regular game, but it was a façade ; he was playing the game
for himself and he had something the others did not.
As the debate went live on television and the web, each
person watching at home, on the bus or in DIA waiting for
their flight, the packet they had received in the mail -as all
registered voters received- would tailor an olfactory
targeted aerosol so fine -so ephemeral- that nobody would
notice a thing. And inside that cocktail would be a
genetically specific combination of oxytocin and vasopressin
and androgens or epinephrine or endogenous opiates. They
would breathe in the precursory chemicals to produce a
feeling that each man natural feels when they are in the
presence of someone their own body has determined is
worthy of trust and affinity.
The body , Boyd Sou thought, releases chemicals like this
each time a person makes eye contact, smells pheromones,
has an orgasm, shakes a hand, hears a word, a phrase, an
idea from another person and these are bio-chemical
building blocks of a man’s instincts, and who a man likes,
dislikes, trusts or mistrusts. Most men think it is some
magical intuitive state, but it is just chemistry, and it’s
regulated by a man’s sub-cortical regions, who know -based
upon ancient heuristics- the best plan to move forward in
the world.
If a man or a woman gives another person an orgasm, then
they get a bump of oxytocin, for example, and one is more
likely to trust them, and even fall in love .
If someone says something a man already likes, agrees
with, or has resonance with -shit, their own name even- they
get a small dump of vasopressin, opioid ligands like beta-
endorphins, enkephalins or dynorphins released by and into
the listener’s brain. This is the foundation, the substrate of
all emotional life, and the basis for whom each man likes,
befriends, loves and marries and who that man votes for as
well. Anyone who knows basic endocrinology and
neuroanatomy will tell you this is true, he thought as he
stared at the void. He wasn’t really cheating if you thought
about it -he thought- he was just manipulating them with
the same chemicals that most politicians manipulate
through tricks of language; Boyd merely skipped that part -
told the truth- and accessed their biochemistry designed to
induce trust directly. Well, some truth , he thought.
It is just until today, the candidate thought, all those
chemicals had to be induced naturally, with behaviors and
stimulus, manipulations the old-fashioned way, with smiles,
and cloying behavior and commercials on TV that made
oblique references to sex .
The idea that you vote for someone based upon their
policies, the candidate thought, is a long ago debunked
myth.
The candidate’s ideas might make you feel good, that is
true. But, you vote for them based upon how you feel, not
what you think. The rational actor theory has been so
thoroughly destroyed that anyone who still thinks they
invest in something or someone based upon rational
analysis is not just a fool, but dangerously so.
Your emotions decide what you think, not the other way
around, he thought as the crowd began to clap and the PA
announced: 90 seconds-to-air . Backstage he noticed the
folds in the curtain. The way it was red on the peaks and
black in the dips, and the length to this massive stage.
MO ran down the protocol: as Boyd Sou spoke each viewer
would get a cocktail designed to do one of three things.
Initially, those who had a pre-disposition to like him,
measured in fealty and affinity metrics that had been
gathered for eight to twelve weeks prior to the debate by
measuring how they naturally responded to a battery of
phenomena in their lives -from interactions with foreigners,
men or women, blacks and whites, their disgust sensitivity,
their willingness to say controversial things or how they
responded to such things in others- via their cerebellum ,
limbic and neo-cortical regions, first they would be mapped
and tagged.
1. They were analyzed for receptivity to his main
message and placed in tier one .
Once this baseline was determined, the bot -using a
threshold and plasticity algorithm- made a determination of
how far they could be moved toward voting for him or away.
Those that were determined to be within 84.5% valence
with him were these tier one voters; they would naturally or
easily vote for him with almost no bump at all. A 100%
valence would be a perfect match. A 0% valence would be
complete opposites; incompatible in every way.
Level two were those within 52.5% valence and they could
be moved without any cognitive dissonance, in other words,
they could be pushed with higher chemical induction, and
manipulation, without crossing the line into it feeling
unnatural, nor into a phenomenon that they could not
explain if asked by friends or family to justify their affinity
for the man. With tier-one and two voters he would garner
another thirteen points in his favor, putting him at 35%.
They -in a three-way race- were shooting for a 44%
threshold to be safe by 5%. That meant 9% of voters would
need something pushing beyond the limits of persuasion
and would require not just bio-chemistry but logic, post hoc
rationales to prevent cognitive dissonance that might
prevent the voter from actually voting how they had been
induced to feel.
That was a problem for which MO had designed three
possible solutions. He felt that all three would be ready in
2019, and by the election in 2022, he was certain that all
phases would be 96.1% perfect. But now -in 2018- when the
first election was taking place, he had only one option, and
it involved the brute force application of bonding chemicals
that would make the previously anti-Boyd voter -in those
10% of cases- slightly mad and borderline psychotic in their
feelings of valence for Boyd Sou.
They would feel a >99% valence, that is to say, they would
feel they were soul mates with the man. They would feel
redeemed by his existence and each word, each gesture,
each thing he did and failed to do would resonate with them
so perfectly as to blur the line between these voters and the
man running for Governor of Colorado in November of 2018.
They’d go from hating him to worshipping him and MO
would do it by harnessing the same exact intensity and
merely reversing it with brute force.
It was inelegant, but it would get them their 9%.
It was an unfortunate and risky strategy, but it was
unavoidable.
It was September of an election year, and the man needed
to be Governor in order to implement their plans for the of
PraXis Corporation, and it was -in fact- MO’s highest priority
as outlined by his internal algorithm and the architecture of
his CNS. He was incapable of questioning his purpose; he
was on a mission -for all intents and purposes- from the
gods.
The lights back of house were dim and amber, and Sou
stood erect and stoically as his girls sat in the front row
between the cousin of the Democrat candidate, Jared Polis
and the three brothers of the Republican, Walker Stapleton.
He imagined them there in his mind and smiled and
breathed. His PGC released a beta blocker to reduce nerves,
and a mild amphetamine to reduce any soporific side-effect
from the diazepam he had taken earlier. His testosterone
was augmented by 90-points.
The moderators called his name, introducing him and then
the stage manager motioned him forward to the curtain; he
strode and smiled at the stagehand as she nodded and told
him, good luck .
He took his station at the lectern and looked out at the
crowd; the house light were still up on the 1,800 people in
the auditorium, and the back row with national media
represented was gauzy and grey to his eyes. He had made a
number of controversial remarks and brought national
attention back in June and now he had forced the debate
commission to rent out a hall twice the size of a normal
Colorado gubernatorial debate. He was at 30% in the
aggregate polls; but he was being opposed on the Right by
some religious groups who felt his genomic augmentation
proposal was irreligious and he was hated on the Left by
illegal immigrant groups like CIRC and thus security -his own
personal outfit and the state funded marshals- were walking
the halls and rows looking at hands and sometimes eyes.
The moderators from the Denver Post and Channel 9News
began by a mention of the national media and a small
rebuke for their lack of interest in other things besides
marijuana and Boyd Sou’s love life as they thanked the
hosts and the candidates. With low chuckles and some
chagrin felt -as Boyd pointed to his girl in the front row
feeling that they were implicitly mentioned- the crowd made
itself part of the event. Even the brothers of Stapleton
looked to their right and smiled at Boyd’s two girlfriends as
they sat there beaming and in black and grey 3-piece suits
with skirts in lieu of slacks.
“Gentlemen, the nation has many issues, and Colorado is
illustrative on many of those. Tonight, we hope to focus on
three topics of interest to voters. Education, Crime and
Health Care. We start with Jared Polis, the Democratic
nominee in 2018,” the moderator from the local newspaper
began.
“Mr. Polis, you have stated that you support a national
assault weapons ban and have proposed one for Colorado.
What is your response to those that oppose such measures
and say that they are mere window dressing?” the
moderator asked.
“Good evening Melissa and Robert,” Mr. Polis said, nodding
to the moderators, “and thank you to the University of
Denver and all the people here and at home watching. I
have served the state of Colorado for nearly twenty years,
beginning as a member of the Colorado State Board of
Education and as a State Representative for the last ten
years; and I am proud to call this state my home. I am
familiar with Boyd’s position on the issue and Mr.
Stapleton’s, and I can say Coloradoans have a clear choice.
“My opponents want to allow these weapons of war into our
schools and communities and are fully bought and paid for
by the gun lobby. Rocky Mountain Gun Owners has given
Boyd Sou an A rating on his position and have given
Stapleton an A-minus. Their only rebuke is that he does -
shockingly- support a ban on the gun show loophole. But,
beyond that, I am the only candidate that supports keeping
kids safe from these guns that nobody needs in America or
Colorado,” Polis said and remembered to smile as he was
instructed beforehand. His Chief of Staff was happy that the
candidate had remembered to use the phrase, weapons of
war , because that poll-tested well. The CoS felt that the
smile and use of the moderators first names was also
checked off her list of debate-goals. The use of the word
Colorado was also apt, designed as it was to manipulate
people into tying their state with his voice at the
subconscious level.
She had a tablet with these things listed and she checked
them off.
The hall applauded and quieted quickly, their response as
perfunctory as his. The moderators asked Sou to respond.
“I’m not a politician, and so, the way I speak will not be as
careful or scripted as my opponents. They will use key
words like children and weapons of war and communities
and gun lobby . They will use words like home , family , faith
, common sense solutions , growth and on and on. These
words are all poll-tested, approved by Madison avenue firms
that sell you toothpaste and cars and cigarettes. These firms
also sell you politicians and because each side does this,
neither of them mention how dishonest and phony it is.
“Well, I will mention it. It’s dishonest and phony, ok?” he
said with a genuine smile.
The crowd laughed with some equally genuine mirth. Slight
boos came from the donor class of the establishment
candidates, but the moderators asked them all to simmer
down.
“Now, here’s some facts. Four people were killed by rifles -
so-called assault rifles- in Colorado in 2017. Four. That
makes rifles less dangerous than spoons. As spoons killed
six people. I can’t mention in good conscience the carnage
brought about by sporks ladies and gentlemen,” he paused
as they laughed, “but to ban assault weapons is a stupid
liberal trick designed to make you think they are doing
something. These same people allow illegal aliens to avoid
prosecution and deportation by the thousands and yet they
want to take your guns.
“There are over 3,000 illegal aliens in our jails right now,
and of those -71% will commit crimes after being released
into our state- and they are some of the worst recidivist
criminals within the four corners of the Colorado territory.
Illegal aliens committed 25,000 of the 61,000 murders in
the US between 2012 and 2015. That is not a number easily
glossed over. Almost half of all murders are by illegals. Much
more than the four committed with rifles.
“And yet the liberals focus on the four murders with rifles
and the nearly half committed by illegals go undefended
against. In fact the Denver Sheriff -currently- won’t even
hold illegals when ICE issues a retainer. And they release
illegals already charged with a crime into our state with no
consequences at all. Imagine that, they let criminal aliens
go free after they have them in custody.
“And that is A-Ok to Mr. Polis here, but you -according to his
plans- you the normal American cannot have a gun. That is
their philosophy today. Now this is America, you can have
any philosophy you like, it’s an individual choice. But the
facts we share, those are not individual property where you
get your facts and I get mine. No, we share the facts and
the facts are that illegal aliens are ten thousand times more
dangerous than so called assault weapons and the
Democrats are doing nothing to stop it. In fact, they,” Sou
was interrupted by the moderator, but he kept speaking to
finish the sentence, “they are making it worse, Colorado had
a 10% increase in violent crime last year. 10%.”
“Mr. Stapleton, you have five minutes,” the moderator said.
“Thank you,” he went on in a drone in de rigueur Republican
talking points with words like freedom and tax reform and
sanctuary cities. He used phrases like judicial activism and
local control and vouchers , and he grudgingly agreed with
Boyd Sou on the gun question, but amended it to say that
he -Stapleton- was the only one with any experience
standing up for gun owners and so on and so forth. He
finished his boilerplate speech to milquetoast applause.
Each time the issues were raised the establishment
candidates rattled off the phrases designed to manipulate
people with words that were in fact poll-tested for their
positive attributes; it was crass and old-fashioned
manipulation of people by using words both vague -to avoid
controversy- and warm -to make people feel good- and
signified nothing at all.
This went on as Boyd mentioned the 300,000 illegals in
Colorado right now and the 14% of the jail population being
illegal and how this cost Colorado $72-million a year. The
school costs were another $400 million and that it was $1.5
billion total to house, feed, clothe, educate and incarcerate
illegals. And yet nobody, as he mentioned, was willing to do
anything to stop it. The hall at the University of Denver held
them all, but Boyd’s voice seemed to hold each man and
woman in a state of slight reverie; he seemed to speak
directly to them, they felt. The speaking style was genuine,
because he meant it, and the nanobots delivery of biochems
was being absorbed at 67% of the expected uptake
according to MO’s sample study. It was low, but he felt it
was sufficient to still change the required amount of minds.
MO monitored each viewer at home as the dispersal bots
also took metabolic readings every 4.4 seconds to allow for
any adjustment and for future database records.
“They talk tough on the political right,” Boyd said, “but they
won’t do E-verify because their corporate donors want
illegal alien labor to keep labor costs down, and the political
left talks about each illegal as some modern day Heratio
Alger, some kid solving the equations that will cure cancer
or something. This is asinine.
“$1.5-billion it costs us. That’s real money, even to me,” he
said with a grin as the bots released more genomic specific
chems into the air around the nostrils and mouth of each
voter watching it live and at home.
“Look, I’m going to tell you a little story. Bear with me, ok?”
Boyd said as he tilted the head slightly to the right so that
the viewer would tilt theirs to the left and activate the right
hemisphere.
“Ants use a pheromone system that instructs them on what
to do. They bury their dead, by removing the corpse and
taking it to the edge of the colony. The way they know how
to do this is by a pheromone released by the ant body at
time-of-death, a pheromone then breathed in and picked up
in the sensory organs of the living ants. Now, E.O. Wilson
discovered this and was able to artificially extract the
pheromone from the dead ant and wipe it on a living ant
and the other living ants were fooled by this and the living
ant with the death-pheromone wiped all over him by that
mean-ol’-scientist was thus -sure enough- picked up like a
casket by six ant pall-bearers and buried by the diligent
worker ants who are designated by nature to take out the
corpses of the fallen for the good of the hive.
“Now, it is true that this undead-ant kicked and flailed as
they carried him, but this impacted the pall-bearer ants in
their task not all; they buried him alive. Because the way
they make decisions is based purely on these pheromones
which are similar to smell. These chemicals gave them all
the information they needed in order to make a decision.
And ants are one of only eleven eusocial species on the
planet. As are men; you and I.
“I tell you this story so you understand, these people, these
politicians are as ignorant and single-minded as ants. They
base all their decisions on what is poll-tested and approved
by focus groups and their donors. They cannot -for the life of
themselves or for your life- they cannot think for
themselves. They will bury you -and this state- alive. Folks,
they will do it while you kick and scream all the way to the
grave.
“They do not care that you are tax payers, citizens,
residents, moms and dads and fellow Americans. They do
not care. They smell that pheromone slathered on you by
illegals or corporations or the media and they take you out
to the edge to be thrown away while criminals and illegals
and greedy businesses destroy this great state.
“I have a program, a working algorithm and medical
intervention that will eliminate 80% of all crime,” the
candidate -adjusting his voice slightly, deepening it, said.
This was the other thing the national media was here for,
the man and his corporation, PraXis, had issued a press
release six months before the election that claimed they
could -using CRISPR-cas9- change the brains of criminals
and reintegrate them into society.
It was avant-garde and salacious and bizarre.
“Now, we know that 80% of all crime is committed by 20%
of the population, this is a known fact. And 25% of those
people are sociopathic or psychopathic; that is to say one in
four criminals have bad brains. They are like people with the
equivalent of a disease that causes them to sneeze and
cough and throw up all over you. You ever around a guy
that’s sick? It is no fun, and folks, these sick people when
they sneeze, well, it’s a gun shot, when they cough, it’s a
rape, when they throw up, it’s burning down an apartment
building full of women and children and pets.
“And I can cure it,” he then said as his voice modulated
again. The crowd was breathing in a way that sounded a lot
like gasping. He didn’t speak like normal politicians. And he
didn’t seem to care if he didn’t fit it at all.
“I -my team and I- have at PraXis corporation the cure to
psychopathy. I can cure it. And while criminals who do the
worst crimes cannot be released, it is a fact that many of
them will be released no matter who wins this race; and if
they are not cured while incarcerated then once they are
released they will re-offend. And we know that the
recidivism rate is 50%; and even worse, among the worst
criminals that re-offend rate is 90%. We are doing nothing
but playing whack-a-mole here. We are arresting and
releasing and re-arresting over and over and thus -ladies
and gentlemen- tonight I propose two things.
“First, we track and deport all illegals -all 300,000 of them in
the State of Colorado tonight- in my first term, that will
eliminate 10% of all crime. Then I propose we begin with a
pilot program to medically intervene to fix the damaged
brains of criminals to make them empathetic and decent
again so that when they are released they do no re-offend.
“And I will, PraXis Corporation will pay for this; the state of
Colorado will not pay one dime to this program. I will pay it;
it’s the least I can do for this great state,” as he spoke the
oxytocin released to his target audience made them trust
him implicitly and feel warm and hopeful and mildly -to
moderately- fraternal.
If not outright in lov e, MO thought as he watched the
screen in the lab.
For those opposed to him, whose ideology or temperament
was too estranged, using oxytocin would augment their
hatred, not increase trust, so MO used an algorithm in the
bots that reduced their levels of these particular biochems
to mute their negative feelings. These voters still disagreed
with him but felt no visceral hatred or anger as they
normally would have; and would have felt more of if given
the bonding chem the tier one and two folks got. They felt
disagreement but no heat; dislike bit no hatred.
“All rev like a motor, but no torque converter,” MO said
aloud.
This was true for all but 1.1% who had their biochemistry
augmented to turn them into raving maniacs who hated
Boyd Sou so much they rose from their chairs at home and
screamed at the TV. These people would be the catalyst for
street demonstrations and insane testimonials in the press
and on TV. This 1.1% was lamented by MO at first, but he
measured second order effects over time, and he liked the
gilding of the lily in this one percenter kind-of way. It had a
flare that he liked. And the math supported it too.
These unhinged people -made so by the nanobots and their
augmented bio-chems - would make the candidate look like
the victim to the hatred of the worst of the worst.
It would actually increase his polling by 4% which MO felt
might be the threshold for victory.
Sou spoke plainly, with some humor and offered to pay for
things himself. He said he took no outside money -which
was true- and that he didn’t want a salary at all. He told
them that they deserved the $1.5 billion in costs that went
to illegals to instead go to their kids, their hospitals for them
. And he said, that to treat the sick psychopaths would also
free up law-enforcement -currently tracking and dealing
with the effects of illegals, instead of dealing with the crime
of native-born psychopathic men and women in 2018 and
beyond- to solve homegrown crime. He compressed the
time line a bit, to simplify, as the benefits would not take
hold until at least two or three years later, but, he made
time seem like it was on their side if he won, and against
them if he did not.
“In closing, let me say that we have home grown criminals,
and yet they get treated worse than illegal alien criminals.
I’m not advocating for crooks here folks, but if any crooks
are going to get our help should it not be American crooks
and not illegal alien crooks?” he asked. The audience
laughed and nodded as more chems were released in the
auditorium under each man and woman’s nose; their
genome had been run as they entered before the debate
and now the correct admixture -designed by MO- loaded
into the waiting bots that hovering on the wings of the
auditorium for 89-minutes- did their job.
The crowd was already 25% with him and with the boost of
chems that rose to 40%. They laughed harder, with more
mirth, and applauded with joy not obligation. Even his
opponents sat mildly and disagreed with no elevation to
heart rate, epinephrine, or cortisol as would have normally
happened in order to sear his missteps into their memory.
His errors or abrading ideas found no purchase in their
foggy brains. They did not agree, but they found it hard to
oppose.
In fact they would have a hard time remembering what they
disagreed with at all, and while he would not get their vote
then or on election day, they were not as opposed to him as
they once thought.
MO watched the live feed on his monitor and tracked the
room and the biometric data from the 1.9 million bots
scattered around Colorado as 16% -then 19% and then 31%-
of people tuned into the broadcast. It was viral on Twitter
and Facebook and had picked up another 121,393 viewers
in-state by the end. Boy Sou had almost 832,040 people
watching live and over the next six weeks an additional
514,229 in state views. MO had noticed that 1.7 million out-
of-state views were captured on YouTube, 922,746 on
BitChute, but he had no access to these viewers bio-metrics.
“Par ahora ,” MO said aloud.
MO had no bots in place out of state. But the videos had
28,657 up votes and only 2,584 downs. So even without the
augmenting chems Boyd Sou seemed popular; although it
would , MO surmised, be skewed white male and populist -
as Boyd himself was seen- due to YouTube’s and BitChute’s
native audience.
MO felt that they would -in the next six weeks of the
campaign- capture 1.01 million of the likely 2.5 million
voters. MO would also factor in that that number -the official
polling number- would low, due to Sou’s unconventional
politics and personal life making him taboo to support
publicly, and MO surmised from the bio-metric data that Sou
-at the end of this process- would get 45.6% of the vote in a
three-way race, leading the second place finisher Jared Polis
by almost 15% full points.
MO tracked the TV news views that showed clips of Boyd
speaking and measured the response to those clips among
registered voters and his metrics held steady; the endocrine
and limbic region augments were bumping his support by
10%-15% from baseline while also muting dissent. This
would suppress some of the anti-candidate voting, who
would not be sufficiently outraged to vote against him.
MO figured this would be good for suppressing 4.1% of the
total turn out.
As moment built, and sensing a runaway victory the media
began running hit pieces on Sou, claiming his girls were
slaves and that feminists should oppose this atavist sexual
arrangement. They made common cause with religious
fanatics who agreed it was untoward and unclean;
unChristian, pagan, and wrong.
Boyd -at a town-hall meeting- had addressed the religious
folks by reading from the Bible on King David with his twelve
wives; Solomon with a hundred. He quoted Deuteronomy
21:5 and mentioned Jacob with his two wives and two
concubines, and ended by saying he, Boyd Sou had been
being less greedy than these men by just -merely- having
the two.
Secular media laughed from their heads not their hearts,
orthodox Jews bit their tongues, the few Muslims paying
attention grimly said, Inshallha , facile supporters nodded in
agreement and shallow Christians merely got mad.
The more outspoken Christians said that Sou’s justifications
were, Old Testament stuff , and they added that Jesus had
forbade polygamy outright. But Sou remined them -
alongside the Christian remarry rate- that in the New
Testament divorce was not allowed, for to remarry was
considered polygamy too; he quoted Luke 16:18 and First
Corinthians 7:10-11. When they hastily argued he calmly
quoted Matthew 5:32:
But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife,
except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her
commit adultery and who marries a divorced woman
commits adultery.
Sou’s knowledge of scripture -thanks to his PGC- was such
that they found it wise to adjust vector and thus to use logic
instead of precedent.
These Christians said that modern relationships had to be
between one man and one woman and Sou responded by
saying, well, we -myself and my paramours- are not
technically married for this very reason and because I don’t
want to commit a felony just -merely- to avoid the sin of
living with a woman or two.
“Rules are rules,” he said with no hint that he was joking
around.
The press conference and town hall meetings and
impromptu debates on streets and steps around Denver and
the Springs were a whine of digital cameras and bleating
reporters and the objections of the religious and feminists
and traditionalists alike. But he claimed to be more
traditionalist than they were -they only going back 500
years and he going back 3000- and he said that they were
thus the modern philistines, liberals, secularists -not him-
and as he said these things people both laughed and shook
their heads too.
“Look, traditionally, a strong man, a king or rich man had
more than one wife; that is the traditional view. It was much
later, much later, that regular men each got a girl and the
best men -the chieftain and warlord- was forced to have the
same as the common man. I tell you, know your Bible, your
history, Solomon and King David and Jacob and all of them
had many -many- wives. Temujin had ten thousand and Wilt
Chamberlin did too,” he said with a friendly smile.
Rachel sat in their bedroom and watched the debate.
She too thought he might be a kind of communist, using the
state to change the man, and using the changed man to
build a utopian world. But all the details were wrong, he was
rich, and illiberal, and so Rachel thought instead of the big
issues and read on the history of each of communism’s
most famous men. And if one looked at it that way, the man
about to be elected to office was cut from the same cloth as
those early 20th century communists. Sou too -like Lysenko -
believed in radical science. Like Lenin -she thought- Boyd
thought the State must be in the hands of, he -the man- of
the grand plan , and similar to Trotsky he felt that the Army -
or law enforcement- should be focused on policing the
borders of the State for anything foreign or counter-
revolutionary.
Lastly -like Marx himself- Boyd countenanced the governing
of the consciousness -the false consciousness, as Marx put
it- of each individual man. She then realized there was one
additional thing; one more, lastly .
And, Rachel thought as her readings backed filled each of
her questions becoming conclusions, like Stalin, the
Governor believed in breaking a few eggs .
For the media Boyd Sou made good copy and sold a lot of
online ads and kept the Denver Post from going under until
2024 e.v. and as much as he annoyed the establishment,
they reflexively covered each word.
Boyd had said that Walker Stapleton -the Republican
running under a banner of family values- was a divorcee and
because he was in a modern marriage with a divorced
woman he was thus -by Biblical standards- an adulterer.
Boyd Sou then added that Mr. Polis was gay. So, the religious
vote would have to choose between himself, or an adulterer
, or a homosexual ; and that he -never having been married
and nor had his girls- as mere fornicator was the least in
offense to the canon of God’s law. The crowd did not laugh
as loudly as people at home would when that particular
town-hall meeting received 1.4 million views -and over a
million guffaws- on YouTube; and then a million more on
BitChute when YouTube took it down and censored the clip.
Rachel had recalled how she felt as she took the
microphone that night; as she watched the video one more
time.
It was after the jockeying and joking around -after the
arguing and the defense- that Rachel came forward and
asked to give a speech -offer a thought or two , she had
said- and the room quieted and deferred to her tiny
presence and taciturn demeanor and ways of a woman thus
womanly.
It was as if a sick person was speaking to a room of the
healthy; they gave her the deference one might give to the
beast that is the last of its kind.
“I met Boyd Sou five years ago when I was just seventeen,”
she began with a voice soft enough that it reflexively pulled
the ears of the room’s men and women like phototropic
flower bells toward a bright moon, not a noon sun. They
strained and tipped and then held still. “I had graduated
high school early with a 4.0 GPA and was pre-enrolled in
college at UC metro. We didn’t have much money and my
parents were divorced and living in sperate states. Often
this is the case today as most marriages now fail; so I didn’t
think too much about it. I grew up insecure and felt the pain
of not having a father, and a mother who was not at home
much as she pursued her own interest; but I didn’t think it
was abnormal, just the normal growing pains of this life, if
that makes sense.”
As she spoke she watched her own hands and her feet
sometimes too. She didn’t feel comfortable looking at so
many people at once. She only looked at the room of
reporters and flunkies and apparatchiks after she asked a
question. She saw them blink and nod here and there; she
still thought maybe they were human, capable of human
emotions and so she spoke with the vulnerability that
attends such belief.
“I focused on school and my own self-improvement and one
day Boyd came to my high school to speak.
“He had told us of his work in the field of medical genomics
and how much potential there was,” she felt her voice go a
bit and so she paused and cleared her throat. Boyd hearing
each syllable, each pause and dactyl, each sound either low
like pea-gravel or rise like a cowbell, noticed the catch in the
throat and offered her his glass of water that he had picked
up as she began. But she demurred with the shake of the
head and the raise of the hand just at waistline and turned
back -from Boyd’s gesture- to the room and started up
again, “this potential kinda hit me then and I must say
strikes me now as being what this man, my man, our man,”
she corrected her syntax and turned to Harrissa slightly and
then offered her hand which the other young woman held
with a stretch of their arms and fingers and she then -with
her little feet- walked up toward Rachel and closed the gap
between them, “Well, I still think that is what he is all
about.”
“Potential,” she said and breathed heavier into the
microphone than she thought she might. The sound was
loud -like wind- and she pulled back and held her breath for
a moment to let it subside.
“He believes in people; despite the way many people fail,
despite his own failures and the failures of all of us in his
world. He always speaks as if failure can be overcome with
the application of enough spirit, and intelligence, and love.
He once told me love is something you do not just
something you feel . He is committed to fixing the worst
among us, the people nobody loves, the people most
reviled, and often justifiable so. He doesn’t think they are
good people; he thinks they can become good people.
“But these people -the criminals and vagrants and mentally
insane- are still humans, and they are our fellow citizens,
and he has not given up on them. And if he can not, if he is
able to not give up on the worst of the worst, then I suggest
the rest of us not give up on them either. Jesus said that it
was the criminal and wretch that he ministered to. In Mark
2:17 Jesus said it was not the healthy that needed a doctor
but the sick and that He had not come to call on the
righteous but upon the sinner.
“Boyd is not advocating letting anyone out of jail, he is
merely offering to fix them so when they do leave -as most
of them will be released at some point no matter what- that
when they do leave they have healthy brains not the sick
ones that made them behave without thought for their
fellow man. That is what made them bad in the first place I
think, they never thought of their fellow man. Are we too not
to think of our fellow man? How do we -we good folk- how
do we remain good without thinking of our fellow man?
“Science has shown that genes contribute from fifty to
eighty percent toward criminality, that is the science and I
believe it to be true. But I leave the science to scientists like
Boyd and his team at PraXis. I will speak to what I know, and
I know love, I know what it is to have it and what it is to lack
it. I know what it is to feel love within and from without. And
when I met Boyd in high school he never once made me feel
anything but genuine love; fraternal love. The love a man
has for his fellow man.
“He spoke to me -and to all of us that day- and he told us
that we could go out into the world to do good or do wicked,
but that if we felt like doing good we should get up early
and stay out late to do good but that if we felt unable to do
good because we felt resentful and angry and hopeless and
like the world was against us, well then to come -that we
should come- and look him up, and that he would love us,
that he would look out for us, that he would make sure we
had at least one person who advocated for us.
“You, many of you, are unware of how many children grow
up in homes that do not love them.
“There is no overt abuse or neglect, that is the stuff that
makes headlines, the sugar rush of the easy-to-recognize
malady. But, much more common, and more pernicious is
the growing up while feeling unloved. Maybe your parents
never knew how, or maybe -and this is what I felt for a long
time- maybe that child is unlovable in some way.
“Maybe the mother and child did not bond due to problems
with oxytocin production of or maybe a problem of serotonin
in the mother’s brain. These things will be figured out
eventually, I believe. However, until they are, I just want you
to know that you likely know a child who is unloved, and
doesn’t know how to tell you, is afraid or embarrassed or
inarticulate. But, love is essential, as essential and ,” she
paused as she knew she had said the wrong word, and felt
almost unable to correct it as if the sentence was a railroad
track and each word a spike holding down a tie, but she
corrected the word and tried to keep moving along, “as
essential as food and shelter and if you knew a child without
food or shelter you would help them. But what can you do
for the child who just feels they are unlovable?
“Well, I went to him after I matriculated at UC metro,
because I had a science class that was hard, too hard for
me, because as well as I did in school, they had not
prepared us for university level organic-chemistry and I
thought maybe he would help me figure it out. To be honest
when I walked into PraXis’ building on Cherokee street I
didn’t expect to even see Boyd, or Mr. Sou as I knew him
then. I expected one of his employees to take my name and
number and pass me along to someone who at best would
get the name of a tutor or something like that.
“But, when I said who I was, the receptionist called Boyd
right then and he came out into the lobby and shook my
hand and told me he remembered me. He remembered me.
Me. He was a billionaire, a genius, a famous and beautiful
man and I was nobody, I was nobody in this world. And he
remembered me. And my heart broke in half and half again
and half again, and the tears fell from my face and I felt so
badly because all I could think was I was getting mascara all
over his carpet,” the crowd who had adjusted their ears to
her mouth, and their faces to her story, laughed nervously
and Boyd’s face had twisted as much as it could without
rending it seemed, as tears now streamed down his face.
But Rachel did not cry, she spoke with no change in tone, no
quiver or quake, no hint of how much pain had produced
such wisdom and the conclusions she had drawn about her
man.
“The funny thing is his response, what he said was that he
hated that carpet anyway, and that he wanted to tear it up,
and he said that he had in fact just been talking about it and
that I had been a big help to him because now he had just
the excuse he needed to do what he knew needed to be
done. He told me my black tears were just what he needed,
and he said it so easily and so breezily that I believed it
then, and I almost believe it even now,” she said with a
small smile and the room smiled a little too.
“I speak to everyone who still has whatever remnant of a
heart and soul left after however long in this oftentimes
cruel cruel world, a world that makes fun not of the
confident but the insecure, who steal not from the rich but
the poor, who burden not the strong but the weak, who
abandon little girls with no daddy to the wolves and the
lions and the snakes of this world, and when that little girl
finds her hero they try to make her feel that she has done
something wrong.
“Well, I have not done anything wrong, I am a good person,
and I love Boyd and he loves me, me and Harrissa and he is
nice to us, and teaches us all kinds of things that I didn’t
even know existed, and he encourages us and makes us feel
like we can do anything and because of his generosity of
spirit I feel bigger than even him some days,” she paused
and look at him as he wiped his eyes and smiled at her.
“And he’s pretty big, huh?” she asked and the crowd
laughed a bit and with warmth and many had dropped their
cameras to their laps as they sat on the floor, or came out
from behind them as they rolled on tripods just slightly, and
they were somber in a way not known in journalistic circles
where the common joke -a joke told as a story oftentimes-
the common joke is that a western reporter once walked
into an airport in some third-world hell hole and cynically
and callously barks at the herd, “anyone here been raped
and speaks English ?”
Even among that low group of sub-clinical sociopaths, there
were few people not choked up. Rachel had scars on her
arms, thin and livid, and parallel like tally marks of some
time -to denote the time- that she had endured out of the
spotlight, off in some past where she was not paid attention
to and not loved; marks of some time when nobody would
have listened to her for five seconds let alone the five
minutes that she had just commandeered today. Even the
religious fanatics were rapt and humbled and quiet. Even
the HVAC kicked off and the air was still.
“Anyway, I don’t know if any of that makes sense, but from
that day on he was my best friend and my advocate and he
personally tutored me in bio-chemistry and then in
crystallography and genomics and endocrinology and I
transferred to medical school six months ago in Johns
Hopkin’s pilot program of online education and I never
would have even tried it had it not been for Boyd.
“So, I think if you people want him as your Governor you
could do a lot worse. He might even fix problems you didn’t
know you had; because I didn’t even know I loved science at
all until he taught me its poetry and its romance and how
it’s probably the thing I was destined to be. Imagine being
destined for something and never even knowing it -that
something- never knowing it even exists?
“How many kids does this happen to? How many have
nobody in their life that shows them what is available, and
cares enough to help them find it, understand it and then
participate in that thing’s betterment? That is the world we
could have if we want it. Do we want it? It’s an open
question, but I know who I’m voting for, and I know who
he’ll help if he’s elected and it won’t be the people normally
helped by politics.
“It will be little girls like me and the little guy who gets
kicked around in this world, and well, that’s pretty much all
of us isn’t it? Who among us hasn’t been kicked around
maybe once or twice more than we thought we could take?
How many more of those kicks you think you can handle?
I’m not sure how more, how many more,” she corrected, “I
could have taken if he hadn’t helped me. Anyway, thank you
for listening, that was nice of you; even you people from
CNN,” she said and everyone laughed warmly and patted
the CNN guys on the back as they smiled and nodded and
didn’t seem to take it all that bad as the applause began to
roll in from the edges and gather to the center of the room.
Her ears heard it and her words echoed in her mind now
too. She felt chagrinned and pained and wanted to run
away. But she stood there anyway and nodded and blinked
and smiled the best she could.
The applause took her by surprise and Harrissa -who had
retreated from their brief handhold- came forward and
hugged her and smooched her little face as she cried and
shook like little people do, close to the ground, each part
close to itself, unlike large beasts were the hands are miles
from the heart, the feet many leagues beneath the sea.
Boyd clapped and staunched the tears by smiling -the curve
of the mouth like dyke, Maginot line- but felt like he had
never felt such love for anyone in his life. He thought of how
she had been such a great student, took to the material so
well, and saw things even that he had not. He recalled how
she had seen the chiral valence of their proprietary cas-13
molecules and the cAMP-CRP interaction in reverse of known
binding that had led them to be able to attach DNA to a site
previously impervious to clean welds.
He saw in his mind that day in the lab, he saw her hands as
she wrote her observation down before she had the courage
to say it. He still had that note and he thought of where it
was -right now at their home- and he wanted to speak on
her behalf. She spoke simply, never in need of showing off
her erudition, and he wanted to brag for her as was his wont
and his way and his instinct.
He wanted to tell the assemblage what he knew of her; he
wanted to bray about her talents and genius and how much
she had helped him personally not just as a scientist but as
a man, but he demurred. He felt that she had already
convinced them of her value, just with how brave and
decent she was. To gild that lily would be pointless,
damaging even , he thought. And I have to learn when to
shut up . But it was hard because she was so much more
than just decent, she was brilliant. But, maybe he had that
backwards he thought, she was so much more than brilliant,
she was deeply, fundamentally decent.
The world had plenty of brilliant people, he thought, but how
many decent folks? “That was her actual métier ,” he said to
himself lowly, quietly and nodded as they continued to
applaud that unspoken thing.

III. 2036 e.v.

The weights seemed heavier today.
And as Jack thought that, he knew that meant only that he
was weaker; he knew that the mass of the plates did not
change. This angered him and it made him push harder -up
and back- with the 45-pound Olympic bar with its 2-inch
collars and 270-pounds of additional weight.
215-pounds was what he wanted to weigh, but he was stuck
at 190. Jack ate as much as he could, but Blax said it was
just an age thing and that even he hadn’t been able to crack
two-hundred until he was thirty-three years old.
His metabolism was just too high until then, he’d said to
Jack. Then Blax had shown Jack where each calorie went; to
the CNS, the immune system, to this outpost of the
autonomic system along the routes of the circulatory
system, to that port of reproductive system -to churn
gametes- and that hull of cellular apoptosis in the cauldron
of the testis. He was shown each bacterial colony of the gut;
every mtDNA like generator; the cytokines like battalions,
the interleukins like teams of just a few men.
He was given a list of each receivable and each payable too.
Each thing was analogized and Jack began to see why.
Jack Four sat up and let his arms and chest burn as he
watched the black birds circle over the edge of their plateau
as the grey clouds held off in the distance and high above
them with that flat-bottom-boat look and the feeling of
possible rain.
It was summer, and the heat of the afternoon even at
elevation was 81-degrees. That was hot for up here, and he
felt it in his skin as he sweat; and in his lungs as he
breathed. He then stared at the anvil and forge and burn
barrel on the agoge and thought of his morning. He had
arisen at 0400 and hiked out into the forest to watch the
moon as it hung high in the sky, never lowering just moving
laterally and fading as the sun overtook it as it too rose.
The stars had once been constellation, then alone, then
gone.
He then worked on the ‘33 Ford coupe upon his return;
taking apart the clutch and charging its hydraulic lines to
see if the gear box would unstick. The car was trapped in
third gear, and he had jacked it up to roll under it on the
creeper and placed a rolled towel under his neck. Blax had
taught him that trick, telling him the necks in their shared
genome were vulnerable and that he should support it now
so it was not damaged by the time Jack reached Blax’s age.
Jack had laughed, knowing that by the time he was Blax’s
age he would probably have technology to replace every
bone in his body and maybe even not have a body,
although, he had decided -when that had come up- that he
wouldn’t want to be uploaded onto silicon chips or any of
that nonsense. He was visceral, and needed a body , he had
thought and said. So, he had rolled a towel up and
supported his neck and wrenched on the car from below.
The clutch plate had some wear he noticed as he took it
apart; he labeled each part and bolt count into sections on
the starboard side of the car. Blax had taught him how to
organize anything as it was disassembled. And he was
surprised at how easy it was to forget what went where and
in what order; and that the old-man was right more often
than not.
Jack loved to tear things down and get in there to look for
the cleave or the score, but when it came to putting it back
together it was not intuitive to him how things went side-by-
side nor end-to-end.
Blax had looked at him and said, there might be a metaphor
in that , and walked away as Jack wrinkled his brow in
annoyance. Jack had watched as Blax threw his hand away
from his body -something flung off the hand and into the
sand of the compound- as he walked away toward the hoop
house. The Jacks had all laughed when this was said, this
barb launched and landed, but Jack laughed only in
reflection; at the time he was fuckin’ pissed off. Each of
their faults and tendencies and talents were all known to
each other by then. He was known for a strange type of
caution -what they called pessimism - and then for a
demolition and general black cloud energy released all at
once.
But they had admitted that he was necessary and that like
Blax had said, so foul a sky clears not but with a storm .
He was often the storm of one kind or the next. But, that is
where the salt water is turned into potable water, inside the
maelstrom of the clouds , he thought. Let the other Jacks
decide where the rain water ought to be channeled, let
them resolve which crops are best suited for the terrain . He
-he thought- would poke at the clouds with a stick and rip
their guts open and allow the juice to fall indiscriminately
from the hording chest of the sky .
Nobody knew if Jack thought only of the immediate
gratification or one hundred steps ahead; to modern man -
the middlebrow- only the two or three-stage plot looked
smart; the hundred-year plan looked the same as the
impulsiveness and chaotic act. Was he merely punching at
the sky or was he thinking of layers of soil and rock, the
water table, the well drilled, the village it supported later
on? He didn’t know either as he wrote down each part as it
came off the old Ford.
Tribal societies looked violent and unstable compared to
liberal democracies until you realized as violent as tribal
societies were, as undemocratic and harsh, they never built
a machine so complex as to poison the air and the sea.
Which type of society was truly unstable? The one that for a
hundred-thousand years le d to early -and violent- death for
30% of the men in warfare, or the one that was seemingly
civilized and pacific for a thousand years until it killed the
whole earth? That is what I mean , Jack thought. It looks
unstable from the view of a mere hundred years, but from
ten-thousand years the myopic, the visceral, the hot-
headed, the war-like and disease-ridden and undemocratic
is actually better long-term.
Modernity only looked more sane and better because it
ignored the catastrophe of technology that would come
from centuries of false peace.
He had taken the rear wheels off three days ago and
replaced each wheel-cylinder and ran new brake line as
well. He flanged the line and bent it and reused the clips
that ran over the sheathing that slicked the bottom of the
hot rod like brushed skin. It was as an aircraft under the
chassis, nothing exposed. It ran too close to the road to
have its innards vulnerable, and so -during this surgery- he
had to take that layer of aluminum membrane off to get to
such guts and lungs at all.
He watched his hands work, then he closed his eyes so he
could feel the bolt heads and hex-nuts, the inner vision
made the mechanical world appear real to his hands.
His hands spoke to his mind via knuckles made of thirteen
articulate mouths, fingertips with five high-acuity eyes. He
did this under the black blanket of his lids. He remembered
when Blax had first told him- as they tore down a complete
engine to re-hone the cylinder walls- that the crankshaft bolt
was reverse thread; or left-handed thread , Blax had said,
and that was the first time Jack Four had known a bolt to
thread backwards. This had augured the mind in reverse
too.
Birds crawled back into eggs, the sun rose in the west, the
corpse got up from the ground and breathed in un-death.
Blax had explained why and it had made sense.
Jack thought of it sometimes for no reason. But he often
took it as reminder to remember that things can be
backwards and still be correct. He let his hands move
against the clutch bolts and its monolith like structure
appeared in his mind -like Tzilk’in of the Mayans , he
thought- and he followed its path and felt for the union
between the clutch fork and the slave cylinder, to see if it
was slick and wet with fluid, gritty with sand.
He saw his life backwards now for a moment.
He normally wore black latex gloves while he worked and
when they got too soaked with oil or brake fluid or hydro-
fluid he changed them. The latex wrinkled and dissolved; his
hands sweated inside the humid barrier. He had removed
the glove on the feeling hand. He wore clear glasses after
getting copper slag in his eye once while grinding a brake
caliper that had a bur from a rock chip driving the crossover
on these ill-maintained dirt & rock roads. They laughed as
they drove on roads no better than they were in 1933, and
they drove it faster in response to the barbarity of the
surface. He and Jack One would take it to town and get fuel
in their 20L jerry-cans and they’d languidly buy coffee and
wiper fluid from the gas station as people stared.
They didn’t talk to locals, but they were gazed upon as they
looked like odd twins.
They wore their hair differently from each other and made
sure to dress in different hues. Jack One in black and grey
and Jack Four in desert tan and sierra pants. They wore
shoulder rigs under their Carhart long sleeve button ups,
and shemages around their necks. Jack One had a high and
tight flat top and Jack Four wore his ragged and long but
pulled up like black flames. Each hair like each picture he
had seen of Blax when he was their age. He tried to stand in
the same river twice , Blax had said once as he passed Jack;
hearing that voice with just his legs sticking out from under
the whip. Pausing the hands. Cranking the mind.
The hair and the boy-becoming-a-man had more of an old
hydrocarbon flaring look rather than shocked -electrified-
mien; there were tongues of fire that rose in his speech and
his locks and his ideas; elemental in origin not the modern
technology of current that could be conjured and re-bottled
with the flip of a mercury switch. They still shaved, and so
they had stubble, and you could see their faces. Not like
Blax who had hair that was long from his chin and shaped in
a delta like a black & grey -Damascus- blade.
As Jack Four set piles of bolts from the old coupe into heaps
above his head he thought of the calipers on the crossover
and how they were massive; bigger than a one-ton diesel
truck. And when he had removed them to de-bur it he had
reckoned with their heft and marveled at the engineering of
those bastards of Bavaria , the engineers over the ocean.
The M-series were still made in Europe and he loved
dissecting that machine. It was over-built like a home with
3-foot walls, windows as thick as Infinite Jest and guard dogs
the size of the two white rhinos in the Ol Pejeta; and they
were as mean as white sharks off the Nā Pali coast of Kauai .
But that slag that had come off had made it so he couldn’t
close his goddamn eyes for a full night, each time he’d get
drowsy the pain of closing the lid would waken him and he
got no sleep at all. They were slim shards in the white of the
eye and sticking out just long enough to catch the lid as it
closed. There were three of each; thinner than lash copper
filament; brittle in themselves but intransigent in the lens,
cornea and iris. After 36-hours they decided to do surgery
on the eye.
Blax had pulled Jack’s head back like Isaac’s under Abraham
and had Jack One hold the light directly above.
His pupils dilated like singularities and they teared up at the
edge. They reflected the prism from the bulb over-head like
rainbow dew down in the grass of the morn. Jack was forced
to swallow his own spit as Blax used forceps to hold the eye
open while he worked at removing the copper slag like
weeds by the root.
He used a saline rinse before he began to dig and told Jack
Four to grab onto his own leg -Blax’s leg- and squeeze it as
the pain came on. It would help with the natural circuit of
pain, he had said. As it is like electricity that way, Blax said
as he scraped the sclera of Jack’s eye. Plus, then Blax could
gauge how much it hurt by how hard Jack strangled his
hamstring, he’d be -Blax said with the boy’s head back and
light above- he’d be in pain right alongside him he had said,
Jack recalled.
Jack made another pile of bolts to his eleven o’clock, the
threaded rods over him like a crown; he felt his hand grip
the next bolt with the same haptic mania, dedication,
intention like his hand that day on the Lt’s leg. Blax often
placed himself in between pain and his boys; joining them at
least, if he couldn’t alleviate it , Jack thought as he tried to
amend his incessant blaming of the man, adding nuance -
caveat- because he -now- felt guilty for always assuming the
worst. Blax’s pant leg had bunched up in his hand in the
memory; the eye had felt like it was being cut as Blax dug
the sharp but fragile slag out one at a time. It went in the
soft eye easily, but to remove it was difficult due to it
breaking apart as it was grabbed.
And man that eye was sore after that, Jack thought. Blax
had dug in the eye whites like eggs with a steak knife. Once
he got the metal out he showed Jack each sliver; he
released the forceps and allowed Jack to blink once again.
He remembered his eye watered and blurred.
They worked ten-hour days, with a one-hour lunch and then
they each read for two hours and exercised for one.
That gave them eight hours sleep, and two hours to try
something new. Jack Four had wanted to learn to bend trees
after it rained, so he built a contraption of rope and a come-
along and waited for the deluge to come. It was three weeks
after he had built it before the trees were wet enough to try.
But when he had traipsed into the forest with his rope and
winch -with the water still coming down- the other Jacks had
asked if he needed help.
But he was unsure about any of this, so he declined their
offers and set out for the north slope. It was an instinct that
had no point that he could see; it felt like no more than a
lark.
The trees had green moss on the north side of the bark and
were black from rain and from damp. He found six trees that
seemed aligned and would fold like fingers from two hands
in a crosshatch once he was through; so he began by
climbing the first one and attaching the noose he had made.
He climbed down and attached the other end to the one
tree fifteen-feet apart at the trunk and cinched it down with
the make-shift come-along he had built from an old winch
from an ATV they had traded with a local civilian who lived
off Wet Canyon road; a trade for fixing a plow he -the old
man- had had.
The next series of trees he did the same and the last two he
pulled closer and found that they had more flex than he
imagined at first. So he went back and pulled the first four
together that closely as well. He tied it off with a slip knot
before removing the winch.
This took him two hours and as he stood under them on the
slightly uneven ground, he looked up and noticed the
archway, cathedral like, and like prayer hands above he was
stationed in the avatar of palms.
He looked fore and aft to see if he could enlist more trees to
build a longer hall, but he was out of rope anyway, and so
he decided to head back home. He wondered if the trees
would snap once they dried out, but he figured he’d find out
later and in a forest of one-billion trees six of them were not
the be-all end-all of anything.
But as soon as he had thought that he winced a bit. Like a
shiver, blinking, heart racing all-at-once.
He could imagine that was what God said when he flipped a
coin on whether the Jacks would survive their next escapade
or not. He saw fate as more and more aligned with some
god or some demon who walked into the arboreal expanse
of the cosmos and pulled three galaxies together in a black
crash, six suns in a blue and red warp, twelve planets in a
line that was in a known-gold ratio apart. And he shuddered,
he feared it, he felt his body was no protection for his soul
from these gears of the gods.
He wondered if the other Jacks felt that way, if they ever felt
guilty or like they were inviting trouble by being rational or
too insouciant about the innate amount of natural resources
of the world and how this made each individual element less
valuable en toto . He could feel bad about killing a spider for
this reason sometimes, even though he knew it was foolish.
It was not even a moral issue, it was more solipsistic than
that.
He worried that his rationale would be used against himself
in due course. God would say, ‘well, look, Jackie boy,
remember when you were like, hey, what’s six trees among
a billion?’ and Jack would have to admit he did in fact
remember such a thing. and then God would say ‘well,
what’s one Jack among six billion people? How would he
act? Would he offer God three Jacks in his stead? Would I
bargain away such things? he asked himself.
He didn’t even know if he believed in God, he knew he felt
like he did, but, there was so much to argue against it as
well. It felt like a stalemate was the most reasonable thing
to conclude. But, that felt cowardly and dumb; it felt like a
man ought to decide. So, for now he decided to believe in
Him, and be open to evidence to the contrary. That was a
respectable position to take , he thought. “For us both,” he
said as he turned his back on the Aspens laced like fingers,
from the forest floor like palms riven with crease-lines and
vascular blues under the surface and bones buried below
that.
And Blax had agreed , when Jack had brought it up at
dinner, Jack Two that is , Jack Four now recalled.
They had been reading aloud -taking turns- from Montaigne;
each Jack reading and passing the book, chewing and
drinking and nodding at dishes as silent request of desire.
Jack Two -as the clanking of the fat bottomed Burgundy
magnums against the concrete slab of the dinner table and
the black cutlery absorbing the Edison light of the old yellow
bulbs, and the Starfighter Lilies wafting smells in intervals
that made the brown rice and bear meat and blueberries
change flavors in the mouth as one chewed and breathed
and blinked the eyes as the music lay on them like a
blanket- as Jack Two had mentioned the idea of which Jack
Four now thought.
And Blax had said it was indeed a respectable position to
take. Jack Four had remembered adding, “for the both of
us,” back then as they all smiled slightly at his somewhat
inaccurate mathematics; and his wholly odd fucking ways.
20. Arise³
Poetry came before prose
The Master and the Emissary [McGilchrist, Iain]

You ever hear the one about Prozac in the 19th century? No? Ok, so Nietzsche is
on Prozac and he says, oh, the priest he ain’t so bad ; and Marx is on it and he’s
like, meh, Capitalism is, well, it ain’t that big a deal , and Edgar Allen Poe is on it
and he says, Oh , hello birdie. Oh, that kills me, man [laughter]. Oh, dear Prozac
Ahab, what say you? White Whale, white schmale , old thunder said. [laughter]
The Interviews XXCI Vol 4 [Inmate 16180339]

Your conscience is a trick, it don’t exist though you may think it does, and if you
think it does, you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it
because it’s no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you
Wiseblood [O’Connor, Flannery]

I. 2039 e.v.
The sound came first.
The landing gear whined and thunked and he awoke from
the base of the neck to the frontal lobes. He had dreamed of
his boy in the gulf two decades ago, and yet it had felt like
right now. When he awoke it was like when he had blinked
watching the PWC and the sun of Dubai off the bay.
“Water,” he said and thought of three things: the past, the
now and the future. He drank from his canteen. His ribs
rattled and his hands buzzed.
The towns along the Mississippi had been flooded and the
coasts had taken rain for fifteen days straight. National
Guard troops had stationed most of their materiel in Kansas
or the eastern plains of Colorado to avoid the watery
ground. He was asleep as they passed over it; his body’s
waters pulled down slightly as they did.
He’d fallen asleep three times on the flight and dreamt of
his boy and of Chile and of the black clouds of Kandahar
over the brown mountains and men dressed in layers of
fabric like folds in curtains he could never pull back. The
Afghans had confused him for so much of his first tour, and
now their movements made so much sense to him that he
saw primary colors and Euclidian geometrics, not men. The
shadows on the ground rose up in the dream, the metal of
the chopper sank down.
Wells had been on the ground at Fort Carson’s airstrip for
108 seconds. He had come from Ramstein by DC14 -and
Stuttgart by HMMVW before that- and before that a civilian
plane out of DXB in Dubai . He was now at the 4th battalion
11th special forces group along the front range of Colorado
Springs, Colorado. Charlie company/0438 would be his
attach; and the great-grandson of Larry Thorne -the Finnish
Army soldier recruited for SFG in the fifties- would be his
attaché . Wells held his orders in his hand and folded them
back into his vest; the details ran on his coder -as all the
coders seemed to do- like words from an abjuring mother
long ago: with authority and a certain anxiety too. And at
times it was auditory, one heard the coder explain what one
was to do.
The inner voices of self receded; the coder’s voice overtook.
And the body thus moved.
The 10th group -the predecessor to this 11th - had saved
500,000 Kurdish lives it the mountains of the Turkish-Iraq
border and Larry Thorne III -Thorn IV’s father- had been the
last member of that operation in command of the unit.
On September 2nd , 1994 the 10th SFGa had transfer to
Colorado, and 53-weeks later command headquartered
there also. Wells was part of the CIA’s Special Activities
Division -a unit in Iraq weeks before the official invasion in
2004- and he was now -upon landing at the base- attached
to the 11th . His coder downloaded the history of the unit
from the Lodge Act to now. The Mannerheim Cross glowed in
his mind -thanks to the coder- as he walked the tarmac. The
insignia and command structure on base populated his mind
like memories of things he’d always known.
He walked and more and more info uploaded from the cloud
to his PGC.
His limp seemed to come from his ruck and he ignored the
enlisted men as they passed him to meet the rest of the
DC10’s manifest. He wore aviators and a red beard and the
look of a southern man back from the Sumerian desert for
two decades and one year. He was 66-years old and second
oldest man the CIA had overseas; and now he was the
oldest at the base. He side-eyed equipment and men as he
walked; he let the information flow like sounds or smells.
The DEVGRU units slept during the day and trained at night;
and as he saw their black upgraded HMMVWs -parked by
Blackhawks staged in a ring- their classified schedule
populated his mind. He had top clearance for everything
now within the Special Operations units here in Colorado.
Each piece of equipment he looked at loaded a brief file on
it; detailed records on the men who used it; deep
documents on the history of each unit patch. Names were
redacted, mission details all officially scrubbed -once he’d
seen it- but everything loaded on his coder like one would
recall old pets, old friends, easily remembered body parts,
how things went up and back down on sea and in the air.
Everything had a name and place; each thing had a use.
He saw the spade of MARSOC on one HMMWV backed into
the hanger7 and his mind showed no data at all.
Even the unit size -normally around 4,000 personnel- was
occluded. “Always faithful, always forward,” came up for a
moment and then his coder went black. A black ‘marine
raider’ flag, five asymmetrical stars around a red diamond
skull populated his field of vision and snapped back out and
then disappeared. He kept walking and then looked up a few
degrees to the sky.
He knew to look at the control tower as they signaled him to
head to the hanger18 . Semaphore and Morse were used as
the audio comms had been broken for a week. His coder
worked, but not much else did and the base had reverted to
analog, integer, and semaphore.
He’d been called back to do geek shit , he’d say with a grin
when airmen asked how long he was rotating in for; but
despite his flip answer he was nervous about why they’d
pull him from the sandbox, to fix shit anyone state-side
could fix .
As he walked toward the hanger doors he caught the gait of
a man in BDU’s rolled in a rough cuff to the knee and black
socks just below; grey shirt and a one-strap molle-bag slung
so that the right shoulder was free. His boots were squared
off and his beard had begun to grow; his hat was pulled low
over the eyes. Wells had nothing populate even as he saw
the man; no file or biometrics came up; and then Wells -
distracted from this anomaly- saw his old CO wave at him
from -and like a hole in- the rectangle of black of the hanger
ahead. So, despite this seeming error of his PGC he let the
man pass with no third thought and he let the heat rise
under his chin and the sun warm his neck and back with its
rays.
Behind the hangers was a Mercedes GLE in black with the
stance of a panther and under it the old runway heading
was painted in white.
The man passing Wells now approached a refurbished
Fairchild C-82A Packet; its silvery fuselage had been painted
over in dark olive drab that absorbed all but lush -high-
nitrogen- green light like sponge soaked up moisture and
metals; its wheels and props were black; its pilots wore dark
helmets and visors and the airframe’s schematics populated
his coder now. Each rivet was black too and it made the
plane look like a grid; and he saw circles spiral with common
degree turns and he blinked to clear his eyes of these trails.
The plane had two redesigned engines based upon the R-
4360 Wasp Major painted in grey and banded yellow at the
heads. The exhaust manifolds were a matte ceramic black
and it had forty-eight pistons like insects in forty-eight
cylinders like cells. Fluids and dry weight details loaded on
his coder; BHP and torque ran to two decimals; and the
vibration from the props swirled dust up and around his
stride like cavitations to a wasp lifting and hovering in place.
He clambered into the side door all at once.
As he boarded the plane Jack Four recalled the hours spent
in the clean hangers south of this AFB. As he walked the
fuselage he remembered the way his palms and fingertips
felt as he inserted each of the 8,600-horsepower super-
charged engines; he recalled rolling them into place like a
trunk lid hinged at one end, radial at the hands; using the
cherry-picker holding all but 59-pounds of the weight which
he had to muscle about. He had worked overnight at the
Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona and snuck in
and out with the bots swarming him like fleas. Jack had
taken Isaiah’s engines -MO had transferred them from the
lab for him- and R&R’d the originals over a long weekend
before having the bots tug the C-82 out of the building to
East Valencia road and taxi it to Davis-Monthan AFB.
The plane was notorious for being unable to run on one
engine.
This was why it had been abandoned by the Air Force by the
mid-1950s. Designed as a glider the two-boom plane had
engines added later like an evolution of heart or lung to an
organism of no central nervous system for years. CQ-161
was painted on the aluminum below the cockpit in black.
44-23006 was stamped onto the billet aluminum name
plate. Rivets ran like stitches in a monster darned and a
man revived.
I loved every moment of working on this plane, he thought
as he looked aft for a seat.
His back was sore and he felt each step; the floor’s metal
felt like walking on the surface of his home. As he nodded to
the crewman walking up to the cabin from the tail, he
unslung his pack and set it on the bench seating opposite of
where he sat down. He recalled that he needed to remind
the crew to change course once they were over the Pacific.
The door -as Jack laid down on the bench and pulled his
shemagh over his eyes- was pulled in by the co-pilot as he
then ran down the gangway to the rear to check the clams.
They were dressed in AF jumpsuits with their nameplates
removed and unit patches pulled and the black Velcro
exposed like scars or burns.
He drifted to sleep and thought of the museum.
It had an SR-71 Blackbird that Jack -while waiting for parts to
arrive or for his mind to clear- would walk under and
reached up to scratch its belly like a big dog’s. He had ran
his D2-index finger over the outlines of Sentimental Journey
of the B-29 super fortress under the I-beams of hanger-A9 .
He had -at night- watched shadows off each plane, each
prop, each part as they hit the grey painted concrete. He
had wiped single drops of red fluid or black-amber drops and
used it to grease the bezel on his own chromometer as he
looked for where each leak came.
He had taken his time back then.
The desert atmosphere had been even more desiccated
than home and he drank water as often as he thought of it.
He more often bent down to look at the fat tires; got on
tippy-toes to look at markings; he drained fluids from
warmed engines as he sifted through papers from the 309th
AMARG and saw hand-written notes signed ‘the graveyard
of planes .’ He read dot-matrix instructions demanding the
ground crew hold onto this or that part on a bill-of-lading
copied or upon sometimes received. He loved the sheet
metal and color of pewter; he thought the military aesthetic
was 96% correct and merely wanted to improve it by four.
The empennage of the C-82 craft was 4.3 meters off the
ground allowing trucks to drive-load into the clam-shell
doors from the rear.
In 1954 the Packets had all been sold off to privateers or cut
up; this one at the museum in Arizona was one of one still
operational in the world.
His coder read of this model of cargo-plane that was
grounded after the crash over Big Bear Lake, California.
Captain Charles M. Eckstein stayed at the controls as the
other eight men bailed out. 135-3110182 on [redacted].
His US label pins were recovered at the site later. He was
33-years-old at TOD . [end report]
His back relaxed and flattened on the modified benches -
that he had fabricated and welded months ago- as his coder
ran its hypnogogic protocol. His lips moved in phonemes as
his brain already dreamed of a hole in a concrete slab with
forty-six words stamped in deep relief above:
And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven
and did cast them to the earth; and the dragon stood
before the woman which was ready to be delivered; for
to devour her child as soon as it was born - Revelation
12:4 KJV

II. 2017 e.v.

“See, I just want you to put it into your own words, one or
two sentences, it will be artless language, and I will not hold
that against you. I just want to see if you get the point,” he
said with a bit of a bite; that meanness disguised;
contraband vex smuggled in the hold of a ship with no flag.
“Well, I’d say you were suggesting that your neck pain is
fairly bad these days,” the old man said in his laconic
manner; a Texas drawl from a man born and raised in
Arkansas left the air quiet but not undisturbed. His son
worried him and he tried to remember when things had
changed. He thought it might have come along side the
boy’s growth in size; and not all-at-once like it seemed.
“Yeah, did you get the feeling -and be honest here- did you
get the feeling that I might be talking about more than that?
More than physical pain?” Lyndon asked again with this tone
of superiority.
“No,” Lee MacLeod said with a curtness, a one-word
reconnaissance with a thousand-man army hiding in the
tree line of his psyche. He thought battalions, manifold
cavalry, munitions and materiel enough to outfit thousands
of soldiers stretched out along a ridge as long as the
Rockies they drove within now. He thought -and hid- a
million martial things for each sentinel of speech he sent
out.
“I see,” Lyndon said.
He knew his father was lying, as usual, by covering all that
he knew -and all that he felt- in the camouflage of silence
and terse reply. His old man felt that being taciturn was
noble, to lie by omission somehow tantamount to the good.
Lee felt no guilt for protecting himself in this wicked world;
his son himself turned evil.
“Well, I can only be honest, I can only say what I heard,” Lee
said as if that was not an indication -an admission- that he
was committed to this lie. He betrayed no evidence that he
was committed in body and soul to ignoring any sounds or
reflections of light -or messages from God himself- that
might suggest that his son’s pain was deep, and old and the
result of some wound the old man himself had first given
him. Lee MacLeod did not take responsibility for his son, and
he never had, and he never would. And this fact quite
literally prevented him from hearing anything to the
contrary.
The boy -Lyndon- only made sounds of the drone, the bee or
ant with no father, the one of many built for one thing: war
or work.
Lee was deaf to the world of any complaints. Lee had always
been responsible for himself; abandoned as he was by his
own kin. And thus he would assume his child too was
responsible for himself. It was the philosophy of modernity,
and America: nobody owed anyone one goddamn thing.
“You are former law-enforcement, yes?” Lyndon asked
rhetorically, his father’s time in OSI was not up for debate or
some mere background phenomenon. It was known. Lyndon
wasn’t going to let this go. And he’d use anything and
everything to make his point. He pried metal bumper from
junkyard car; picked up metal stock from the ground.
As Lee nodded -but didn’t answer- Lyndon proceeded, “well,
did everyone you ever arrest, did they just come right out
and tell you that they did it? You know, did they say, gee
Special Agent MacLeod, I sure did conspire to transport ten
kilos of heroin -a schedule one narcotic- and you know, thus
contravening about four hundred national and international
laws? Hmmm? Did they say that to you each time?”
Lyndon then smiled as they drove the tan roads outside his
land, black cattle and gravel moved as he drove by. He
smirked as the old man smirked and then the old man said
that no , they -his suspects- did not perform an allocution in
such a manner each time. They indeed denied it as long as
they could.
“Well, fuck, how did you ever know that these guys were
guilty, I mean if they didn’t come right and fuckin’ say it? Or
maybe -and this is me just spit-ballin’ here- maybe you think
you can read between the lines, and read people and tell
that they did something or that they think something that
they ain’t exactly comin’ out and sayin’ , right? But, I get it;
you don’t think the rest of us have this special ability that
you have right? Is that it?” Lyndon said and side-eyed the
old man and in background -outside the truck- he caught
dilapidated buildings -old hay shacks and one-room cabins-
that populated the side of this unmaintained country road.
The road itself crunched and made dust as he sped up.
“No, I never,” Lee spoke in bursts and was getting angrier
by the minute but he was interrupted in between each
series of words.
“Oh, so maybe I can tell -I too, can tell- when someone
thinks something and yet they do not say it; maybe I can
tell when you -for example- feel hatred for me but don’t
come right out and say it. Maybe I have a perspicacity, you
know, a kind of wisdom and sixth fucking sense that my own
father hates me and is fuckin’ with me over and over to get
even for some grudge he’s held for forty fuckin’ years,”
Lyndon barked and was increasing his volume and speed in
tandem -and thus crescendo- as his foot depressed the
accelerator into the road’s curves.
“I do not hate my son,” Lee said and then -correcting his
syntax- added, “I do not hate you.”
“Well, I think ya do. Because ya act like it. You don’t say it,
but ya act like it,” his words dropped enunciation, and the
redneck in him began to unfurl with each clipped and
jammed together word. “And so, I’ve put up with your
beatin’ my ass when I was weak and small, your tyranny,
your lack of encouragement, your lack of joy at my
successes, your lack of loyalty to me, your lack of emotion
around me, this flat affect that you think is so cool. I’ve put
up with your failure to stand up for me, and even your direct
meddling in my affairs that redounded to my detriment. But,
I won’t pretend you love me anymore. I will not. And so, part
of that is that I will not allow you to lie to me, and let you
get away with sayin’ you’re being honest, when you are
clearly hiding ninety-percent of what you feel.
“Having said that, I actually agree that you might think you
are bein’ honest. I’ve read up on the way the brain works
and it’s true that when a man is biased, politically biased -
for example- he cannot remember facts that contradict his
positions; even if they -even if the people conducting the
study- even if they incentivize him to recall the facts with
the offer of cash payments for each recalled fact.
“It’s a medical fact -it seems- that if you’re committed to
your beliefs you will not hear, not see, not remember
anything that contradicts it, even, especially, if you hear the
truth. The truth is an impediment to your belief-system, and
so the truth shall not be heard. Not today, not ever,” Lyndon
said with an authority as if he was objective and outside the
system, unattached to the universe that he described.
“Well,” the father was already confused; the way his son
spoke -the twists and turns of sentences like these dirt
roads- used double negatives and triple entendres and four
ways from Sunday to say one thing. He watched the rocks
above the road and braced himself as the truck slid its ass
out of each switchback and blind curve.
“Look, old man. I realize you are incapable of seeing it my
way. I get it. And so, I will leave you with this. I don’t mind
that you don’t see it. God ignored Job too. And I am not half
the man Job was. But, I do mind that God made us sick and
then commands us to be well.
“You let women raise me; women, for crying out loud,”
Lyndon said as if he’d saving this up in a piggy-bank he’d
just broken open.
“You let a boy -a male child- be raised by women; first by
your wife -my craven mother- and then by a succession of
female school teachers, each more overtly liberal and
surreptitiously tyrannical than the next. And you allowed
this to occur inside an effeminate and faggy culture that is
itself arbitrary and tyrannical, Ok? Which is not unlike you
yourself, which is maybe why you get along so well inside
modern America. Lenient and effete when you ought be
manly and strong, and yet also arbitrarily tyrannical and
unjust -obsession with bureaucratic rules- when you ought
be wise and edifying. Fuck America, that is each man,
woman and the country itself now. Fat-skinny: fat where it
should be thin, thin where some bulk might do.
“At any rate, that upbringing, that weakened me, made me
soft and whiny, and that is what you’ve all done to an entire
generation of boys, ten generations for Christsake . I can
see the ships from England and them stripping us of our
claymores and our clan kings and our ways. I can fuckin’ see
it,” he said this and he did indeed see Scots on the shores of
New England then Carolina and the way they had been
separated and scrubbed and called wogs and bloody jocks
and sweaty’s , all the while calling Scotland the land of
welfare dwarfs and barbarians at the wall and England’s
unemployable neighbors . The Scots were seen -by the
English- as low, crass, beastly and not in control of their
emotions.
Perceived as uncouth -the way all white men saw black
men- the Scots were the first niggers in America.
And this didn’t change as the north of the colonies became
England and the south Scotland; this didn’t change as the
southern United States were lampooned by the north as
rednecks and hillbillies and gravid scum .
“And that’s fine if you so-called fathers, this ostensible
country, if you all want to let women raise your sons for you
while you make money -money, the most important thing to
the modern man - well, that’s fine. If that is your priority, to
make money for this banal, middle class life, while
abandoning your sons to women to raise, then so be it. But
it’s not enough for you to abandon your boys, no, now when
they -when these sons- when they turn out damaged, and
weak and whiny then you lazy fuckers have the temerity to
be aggrieved!” he said and shook his head as the truck took
each turn more recklessly, the oncoming lane taken, the
blind curve ignored, the sliding of no concern.
Muscles tightened to brace, organs sloshed in place. The
eyes narrowed and the brain tried to compensate.
“And even worse, when a man, when one of these hobbled
and crippled sons decides -all on his own- to shed that
weakness, to slough off that corrupting influence of women
that was placed upon him -a drowning man thrown a brick-
when a man -despite all that gay bullshit he was raised in-
pulls himself up by the lapels and says, no, I will not allow
my rearing by women and weakness to ruin me, to
emasculate me, I will forge and form myself, from myself, I
will use alchemy from the gods to fashion myself into a
man, to build myself into something strong and useful and
helpful to myself and those around me , when I do that,
when we do that, you -the great fathers of the world- you
get even angrier, you lament it with even more pique, you
bitch and moan even more,” he rose his voice and carried
nothing for punctuation or word count or the endless
caveats and addendums made within sentences inside
sentences like nesting dolls. He used the steering wheel as
hammer and the road as anvil and barked at his father with
his right arm loosely gripped on the helm just in case he
need let it fly.
His neck ache had flattened, the anger like Novocain, his
stingers at the elbow calmed. His back loosened and with
each rise in volume he heard less and less of his own pain.
“Now -according to you and your polite society- now that
I’ve sloughed off the need for help, shit, now I am too
aggressive and too violent and too strong for your tastes.
Now, I speak too honestly, too uncouth now, is that right?
Well, you baby-boomer assholes abandoned your sons to
the feminine world and yet, you want to complain when
your sons are all pussies -like Travis- or reactionary and wild
beasts like me? You failed as a father, that ought be enough
to shame you, but no, you have to continue to deform your
own progeny -and your own soul- by complaining that they -
that one of your sons- is too rough now. You have to say that
I speak too demotically, too impolitely, with too much
visceral angst; that I say too many bad words?
“This is tantamount to God making us sick, imprinting us
with original sin, condemning us to work and to suffering
and to death as outlined in Genesis, and then commanding
us to be well! Commanding us! ” he said with a roar as the
ass-end of the truck flew around like a wound watch reset
after it had gained too much time. The old man bit the lip,
seethed and sucked his breath, he gripped the door handle
and arm rest as he looked straight ahead. Lyndon looked
more and more at the old man, the hair receding the lump
on the neck, the ears and nose grown large.
The muscles vitiated; the man had shrunk before his eyes.
“You get to choose one, motherfucker. One. You can raise us
to be, make us weak and sick or you can command us to be
well, but you do not get to do both,” Lyndon said as
declaration, to fathers writ large . His hands had gone white
at left, and eager at right.
“You either raise us right, correctly, in the Spartan -agogic-
fashion; you either raise us to be men, real men , or you
shut the fuck up when we turn out the way that we do. You
want extreme ownership but then piss your pants when we
actually take back control. Bunch of phoneys you all are.
Stop the whining but give us no authority? Is that it? Well,
fuck that. You want us to take responsibility then we take
authority too. They go hand in hand.
“I had to make myself into a man; and you have no say in
how I live in the world now. Yeah, maybe I ain’t as noble or
decent a man as I could have been, but I am a self-made
man, I had to cut some corners, I had to use bubblegum and
bailing wire. I had to adapt, overcome, improvise. I wasn’t
raised to be a man, I had to become one, and that means I
am going to be a little rougher than the world might like.
“But you better hear me, because you lost your vote on how
I act the moment you undermined me as I was out here
building a metal and concrete home from scratch with my
bare hands and my last remaining money, what was left, a
paltry $100,000 was all that was left of my whole million
dollar world after you and your friends conspired, plotted
against me, to ruin me. Ok?” he pointed now at the old man
and made him a villain when he had merely been
incompetent; perceiving conspiracy where stupidity would
do; faces in clouds and rock formations; plots seen behind
cupped hands that covered all eyes.
“I didn’t whine or quit, I built this home from nothing and all
I asked was for you to leave me be. Let me exile myself for
awhile so I could gather up my strength after these
betrayals and figure out what the fuck to do after God took
everything from me save my dignity; my pride and this
angry body. That is all I had left and I got to work; I didn’t
curl up and die,” he said this and thought of the women -
women of all creatures- who had laughed at him as they
stole from him, Tess and Alexandra abandoning him as if he
was an old worn out horse, nothing divine at all. He saw the
way they used him and felt nothing.
He felt the embarrassment that women were treated like
anything other that what they were: pragmatic. He was
ashamed at how he revered what was base.
If he was not divine then a devil he’d be , he thought. The
world was gonna learn of consequences , he thought.
“I built that home from raw land with these hands,” he
barked -his voice cracking just a bit, his eyes watering no
more than necessary- as he raised the mangled and chaffed
-and unhealed- hands and splayed them like a water dog’s.
“My anger is analgesic, do you get that? It’s the only way to
compensate. My rage, our rage as men, is pain-relieving, it
is the only way to combat this incessant pain of body and
psyche heaped upon us by you fuckers. You ruin a people,
reduce them to nothing, constituent parts. Fuck,” he had no
idea what he was even saying now. He just felt like drilling
holes in foreheads and sinking sticks of dynamite in
everyone he could round up. He saw firewire along the
ground; he saw the world as flat, the universe as round. He
saw God scoop him up and pet his head for a thousand
years. He saw sleep. He saw calm. Everything he saw was
wrong.
A rock hit the undercarriage and it activate his cerebellum
and his cortisol rose and testosterone too; his pique and
pain in the lower back; and he leaned forward toward the
windshield and steering wheel.
“So, you better hear this now; and just so we are clear,
there are no punishments or rewards in this life, merely
consequences as you say.
“So, you are to shut the fuck up; that is now your job, and
you better make it your life’s work. Or I will punch a hole
through your paper-thin soul, old man. I will pull your whole
house down. You hear me you fucking cocksucker?” the son
said using the catch phrase of only consequences that his
father -for close to seventy years- had liked to bandy about
to sound tough and rational and smooth. It was now turned
back on him, in a way that the father did not like. His
hypocrisy was bone deep, he did not even notice the irony;
only that he did not like his son at all.
Lee just sat there with that look on his face that the boy -
now the man- had seen a thousand times from a hundred
elevations and laid out like ten commandments: that shalt
not get along . The twist of the lips, as if he was wrestling
with an idea, an idea just there in the mouth. But it was no
wrestling match, it was all for show , the boy thought. The
vehicle snaked and turned against itself more than the
monolithic men. The old man, he thought, was going to do
nothing, say nothing, be nothing ever again. He was a
tyrant; he picked only on the weak.
And this beast -the old man felt but did not think- that sat to
his lee side -an animal half his genome- was twice his size
and ten times as violent and a hundred times as willing to
kill and nine-hundred and ninety-nine times as eager to die.

III. 1998 e.v.

Vong shook him in his berth; it was 0714hrs on October 15th
, 1998 and he was in Vero Beach, Florida on 118 acres of
grapefruit and orange grove; Zendik Farm LLC.
Vong’s face was soft and without malice or crease or hint of
doom.
Lyndon had dreamt, and he re-lived the parts that appeared
in his just-awake mind.
He was involuntarily listening to Vong now wake the others
in the room. There were eight other men in his bedroom, in
this ranch style house; sixty-four people total. And the day
was beginning as usual, early and with the gentle and
friendly waking by the man with black eyes and a genuine
heart and almost no ability to think for himself. But, who
did? Lyndon asked, thus abjuring himself for his
condemnation of a good man. Certainly not myself, he
thought. Not yet anyway .
Lyndon stretched in his bunk and breathed the damp Florida
air; he smelled the barn as the goat-effluvium wafted in as if
this was part of the ritual of awakening; like the rays of the
sun were eight minutes away, the smells came in a delay.
He liked the feral nature of this place; he liked almost
everything about it; he only wished he could carve out a
larger place for himself here. His talents with language were
not exactly appreciated and so he worked a shovel,
wheelbarrows and bailed hay -alfalfa green often- and also
learned to hold a goat’s teat between his forefinger and
thumb and squeeze warm milk into a galvanized steel pail.
The girls wore rubber boots to muck the barn; and their
shirts were tied dyed in soft tones -not garish ones- and the
word Zendik was silkscreened in black or white upon them.
He wore shirts tight about him, his neck especially, the
sleeves swaddled him too. He wore tight underwear
underneath; many of the men abandoned the entire
underwear construct. But not him. There was a looseness to
their martial ways here, like Spartans who wore only
leggings into battle; Scots with kilts , he thought. He was
nervous. And while it was obvious that pants provided no
real armature in battel with Persians or Alexander’s
Macedonians, Lyndon still felt that he would prefer to cover
his legs, cock and ass -even in mere cloth- in work or battle
or from the no-see-ums of the south Florida swamp.
His hand wound stung as he rolled over.
He had visions of heather-grey girls walking away from him
as he bled, and rudely stained the floor. He had no idea that
women would never stick up for him. He was naïve and
strong in equal proportion. Only the strength would wane.
But he felt strong today and what else was there but today?
He rolled over and watched the lithe men spool out of beds
in his fore and begin to prepare for the day; this began with
a vision of what he would accomplish. He saw needles and
string, he saw thread and piping along the edge. He saw
what would be cut and laid out for him.
The room’s two windows had soft blue in their frames as the
east coast sun rose just beyond the A1A and the intercoastal
waterway. He had gone net fishing a week ago with Zoe and
caught Snook and watched as pelicans swooped down and
Porpoise swam and breached in the brackish water all
around.
The mud pulled down on his boots. Changing positions was
laborious. The nets were weighted with steel slugs.
Zoe was to his 9 o’clock position throwing the net gracefully
to his left. Lyndon let the water remain black and warm
around his legs without needing to move; gathering up the
net to place the slack in his mouth -a third hand of sorts-
and used his right and left hands to hold the net across a
plane just above the water. As he tossed it using his waist as
fulcrum, it splayed out like an eagle-ray above the water, his
mouth released it in conjunction with the hands. The
universe stopped for a fraction of a frame. The net landed
softly, the weights around the perimeter sank it and would
trapped a few fish in the center; the balloon created by the
submerging net.
All this happened under water and below the black.
He held the line of the net to draw it in, he waited a few
seconds and watched the day break over the horizon; he
was 24-years-old and felt like his whole life was still in front
of him; not just in front, but before, me, he thought with a
subtle tweak of the vagaries of the words that meant he was
to be made into a man by his life, by what he was to do
next.
Birds landed on bars, rays shimmered off brown water,
seabeasts half mammal and half marine came and went as
his heart beat toward that last billion of beats.
His past was frenetic, and disjointed, he thought, a series of
odd events with no narrative.
I’m some kind of orphan , he thought, not that my family
were bad or anything. They were just closed up people who
never shared any emotions and he often said it was like
being raised by robots or HAL9000. But they gave him good
genes for IQ and height -that is what mattered in modernity-
and zero predispositions to disease according to genomic
testing done years later; all of which are largely heritable.
And they fed him adequately -although more protein could
have been useful, he thought- so he ought not complain .
He held the net’s string. And he would complain.
He was neglected only because these were highly damaged
and reticent people who had emerged directly from the post
WWII era, when the world had almost cracked and everyone
was manic and paranoid in equal proportion. He saw a line
cut in half. Equally. He was lucky to be alive at all ; he
thought, because his parents and grandparents were lucky
to have been alive at all . He tried to never forget this.
He pulled on the string as it pulled on him as the net sank
around the fish and their water. He saw dolphins appear and
sink in the intercoastal waterway as the sun made
everything orange.
He tried to give his parents the benefit of the doubt; the
more he hated them, the more he tried to cut them a break.
He hated ungrateful children who whined about bad
childhoods; his childhood was not bad; it was merely odd ,
he thought. And there is a difference , he added. And all he
wanted to do was describe that difference, understand it;
not lament it. He felt that was fair; of course, his father was
a coward and a tyrant and so any analysis was taken as an
insult; one did not bring Stalin any news -good or bad- for it
was unknown how he would react to any change no matter
how slight.
He thought of this and drew in the net-line as the dawn
turned amber and cranberry and the waterway went from
flat to maniac; from calm to vibrating and pulling at his legs
and then core.
Lee MacLeod as forty years old when Lyndon MacLeod was
born on January 7th , 1974. Lee had just returned from
eighteen months in Vietnam as an OSI NCO; working
counter-intel and busting GIs who smuggled heroin out of
south east Asia. Lee was clean shaven and wore the civilian
haircut of the plainclothes special agent of the Office of
Special Investigations of the US Air Force; a unit designed by
Symington who had created the FBI earlier in the decade.
Now, Lee wore a brown suit, 3-piece, with a hip holster and
a government 1911 semi-auto made by Colt. His ties were
often bought by his sons as gifts; they didn’t know what
their father liked, so their mother -his wife- bought ties with
45-degree oblique-angled stripes and wrapped them for
Christmas; the boys merely signing their names. Christmas
and birthdays were somber, and the more the parents
pretended to be joyful the more morose it became.
He gathered in more of the string of the net and felt the
current pull its catch and weights down to the ocean. He
watched the sun brighten at eye level; the water place
pressure on his wading bibs.
As a boy, Lyndon had processed the gloom of celebration as
normal, of course, for everything is normal to a child. A child
of God has no reference point; and his instincts for survival
dominate over half his modes of behavior. Lyndon was a
survivalist with some idealism at his core that his martial
sense embayed; he was pugilistic in temperament and this
angered everyone around him who were looking for some
permanent calm. He was the waves as all stood on the
shore.
He tried to get a look at the sand and back out to sea.
Lee was the patriarch of the family and wielded it with a
pendulum of rationality and though he attempted to be a
better father than his own -his own was absent, his mother
a labile woman had married five times- the pendulum swung
back to his natural weight of tyranny as it sliced through the
air of the household like a scythe in the old Elysium fields.
Lyndon was observant, penitent to this mode of being. His
eyes were open and wide.
He watched as his mother cowered and morphed into
whatever shape his father demanded; he watched as his
older brother, grinning and effeminate and five years ahead
avoided trouble almost flawlessly. He watched his own hand
drawing trembling lines.
He watched pencil points break under his weight. He
watched as his father commanded those two without
touching; a magic trick it seemed. And so he thought Lee
had the same control over him too. He saw no strings but he
tugged at the air cautiously. He thought his behavior was
thus commanded by this local god. Short walls seemed
sufficient, Shallow lakes seemed deep enough.
He relaxed and felt his instincts would thus be governed by
liminal deity of Tammuz , by mercurial Enki the watery god
out and down.
He acted instinctively as he thought his mother and brother
did too; and that their pleasing behavior just manifested
itself by dint of his father’s magnetic command. He was
truly confused as each day brought trouble in the
household, trouble at school, trouble in the neighborhood.
He merely acted as he felt; what else was a new creature to
do? he thought. People think a child is born with the law
imprinted on the heart and they are not wrong. It’s man’s
law that changes, progresses, not those bones and blood
and brains born from the ancient tribe. Lyndon was native
as nature intended, a blink as short as two thousand years
too late.
As he moved about Zendik Farm he heard cicadas in the
treeline of Florida, he felt autumn above him as if waiting to
lower the boom.
He thought of when he was four and his brother had bought
him a lime green comb in the shape of a human foot, a
British Queen’s Guard embossed on the edge -they lived in
England at the time- for his birthday and Lyndon not yet
understanding the need to lie to get along in this world had
told the truth: he thought it was too girly a present for his -
macho- 4-year-old ass. He smiled and grimaced all at once
in this remembrance.
His mother was aggrieved.
And as his nine-year-old brother -legitimately, now in
Lyndon’s view- cried in horror at his little brother’s rejection
of a gift his mother no doubt had picked out herself, his
mother sought out her revenge.
The birthday was ruined of course, the mother held a
grudge for the next forty-one years; there are some
psychologists who will tell you that if you allow your children
to behave in ways that make you not like them, you will
inevitably get revenge on them. Lyndon didn’t think of this
until forty-one years later, but it seemed true to him once
he pondered it. Now in the intercoastal he was 24, and half
way between the act and his epiphany. The fish bumped
against the net under the water as he pulled it in. Their
scales compressed as they flexed. Their body temperature
rose.
Smart folks can see the future- and baby, the future, he
thought, it is murder.
Lee MacLeod had killed a dozen men in his capacity as an
airman and law enforcement, and he had committed one
extra judicial murder as well.
But, he had been very disciplined in these uses of violence;
he had stayed out of trouble. This was paramount; as he
aged he had seen the phenomenon of sunk costs and since
he had managed to stay out of trouble this long, he wanted
to continue to remain out of the docks. He grew more and
more conservative in his aspect, more calculating, more
cautious, more deceptive, more secretive as he aged. His
savviness grew as his courage waned. He had watched his
boy like a storm on the edge of the Mojave , like a djinn with
whispering swirls made of grains and brambles and black
feathers picked up from the ancient desert ground.
He hid himself from everyone; especially his youngest son,
whom he could tell was going to evolve into a dangerous
and angry man; fathers can see their sons in ways mothers
cannot; they can see cracked rib cages and heart-rages, and
lungs filled with volcanic last breaths.
And for Lee MacLeod to reveal his own past would be too
much like countenance, roadmap, sanction. And so the old
man demurred.
Lee was not going to give that boy any clue as to what he
was. But the wolf need not be led to the elk; he finds it all
on his own , the boy would one day think as the blackbirds
overhead flew without any apparent cause. Even the water
refused to show shadow, even the air carried noise up and
away from the ears.
Once, when in Germany, they lived off base in a German
family’s old home -the Germans’ had built a nicer one ten
meters away- it was white and made of block and had a
cellar full of lignite coal bricks and no closets; the family
used wardrobes for clothes, the bathrooms were all steel
and painted in white, and everything was cold and Teutonic
and Lyndon was scared of the incessant unknown. They
were thrown into chaos every few years by their moving.
The military moves you; and Lee MacLeod wore out his
welcome as soon as he righted the ship. The all moved just
as he had fixed whatever problem the Air Force had with the
AFOSI detachment he was given when they arrived.
Lee was like chemotherapy; necessary and then hated and
banished once it had done its job.
Lyndon -pulling the last of netting line- remembered that he
was -in this reverie- six years old, and -in this remembrance-
moved about the house with bravura in the day, and caution
at night. The eyes gave him confidence, thinking -wrongly-
that there were fewer dangers hidden in the light. The old
memories flooded the mind.
The line in his hands now cut circulation off to the fingers.
His father and mother fought in silence often. One day Lee -
forty-six years old- grabbed his boy not unkindly by the
hand with a 750ml Affel Schnapps bottle in his other hand
and a German shot glass -curved and ornate- between his
fingers by the stem and they walked -warmly manacled
liked this- to the porch that looked down over the little
village where there were only six American families. It was
1980 of the common era and Lee’s heart still had blood
inside it; red and hot and intransigent like the boy’s.
They sat and Lee poured a shot for himself and drank it
down and then as the boy looked up to him -in both
temporal-spacio and heliotropic ways- Lee poured the eager
boy his own one ounce shot of the sweet liquor.
Lyndon drank it with pride.
The father approved of the recklessness of it all as he
continued to pour shots for each of them until the boy had
had four or five and became quite drunk and the father -a
half bottle in himself- was too inebriated to give any more
fucks at all. He had to keep the whole goddamn ruse up in
the air incessantly, Atlas, he was, he thought, and every
once in a while even the Greek gods need a break.
The earth rolled -wobbled in precession- as Atlas shifted and
shrugged.
What the man goes through is nobody’s business, they don’t
ask and we don’t tell , Lee thought.
Lyndon felt the net right in front now, the weight on the line
like buckets of chum, gallons of water, sea chest filled with
crabs and clams. That is the code, and to break it by
whining and crying -and approximating complaining by the
sin of explaining- was unalterable until -Lyndon thought- he
had decided to say any of this shit aloud. To say it clearly
was something he never knew one could do; the words
churned inside as if the curse of mankind meant one’s voice
would be taken by the gods if one revealed the secrets that
were embossed on the soul in little rituals like the schnapps
in Germany that day.
However, he later learned, his biggest mistake was not in
the telling, it was in expecting of the rest of the world -the
women and children and unfeeling men that all operate
under the sway and panoptic eye of the Chief- expecting
them to give a shit. Lyndon had actually thought these
people would want to hear why the Chief was the way he
was; but they did not. They just wanted him to make the
money and protect the tribe from barbarians when at the
gates; and the rest of the time he was to shut the fuck up
and stay the fuck out of the way.
He was allowed no weakness at all , he thought of his father
as he pulled the cone of the net from the water and
wondered what kind of Chief he’d be one day. He’d never
heard of the shaman, never been shown the secrets of the
men of the shadow and dawn, the men who turned to
wolves at dusk.
Lyndon often thought in inchoate conceits, half between
thoughts and dreams; he saw images of futures with
vindication for either he or his enemies; what began as an
honest attempt to explain the ways of the tribe ended with
an earnest attempt at genocide. A lesson to the weak
people of the world , he thought: when a strong man wants
to speak of his heart, listen. Even if your selfish and stupid
ass doesn’t care, listen anyway, he thought as he found no
rationale.
But modern society -the death-kulture- of course , he began
to think, but nothing really came from this initial critique.
The hands burned and the eyes adjusted to the dawn. The
back ached just slightly above the waist. He then thought
that unfinished symphonies have consequences too; for the
day and the night of the earth is a system, and as Poincare
pointed out, once you get to 64-moves from the initial
condition one must measure each particle in the cosmos in
order to predict where the 65th move will land us all.
He thought of the chessboard, the Knave and the Rook, the
King and the Queen. He paid no attention at all to the
squares.
We are 4.33 billion years in, with trillions and trillions of
moves made , he’d one day think. Prediction is impossible,
now man needs to just assume that that butterfly he
watches in May will cause a typhoon two years away;
landing 1,900 miles from there. And if he’s smart he’ll have
his orders sent from command and be two thousand miles
away in twenty-three months from the day he lays eyes on
the wings that seem like no big deal at all.
He will land at Ramstein Air Force base the same time the
manifold beats of that bug make landfall too, Lyndon
thought as he had pulled the net to the chin and the net’s
water fell away and the Snook flapped and the sun hit their
scales like a hammer and tong that made spark and glow of
each gill and imbricate brocade of the fish.
If a man is smart he will assume he will be in the eye of the
storm his own jaw flapping creates , he thought as he
thought he’d like to be smart like a watch.
And once you’ve stood on the beach as a squall comes in off
the water, and allowed the lighting to riven the sky -a livid
scar down the black tenebrous nimbus foreground with
white angry keloids of doom- once you’ve permitted it to
absorbed the railroad spike rain and hammer-hail of summer
into head and shoulder and face -bending slightly to watch
the beach sand hollow out with each elongated raindrop and
white shard, looking north to the giant tortoise kurgan
mounds, looking south slowly to the stucco house, listening
to that guy in Arizona Bay howl about the need to learn to
swim - once you’ve used the pain as scripture from a god
you don’t yet believe in, used fear to buoy the outer skin, to
inflate the lungs and chest, indeed to pull the arms back in
rebellion to the tyranny of God’s judgement, once you’ve
done that you understand how all storms seek out all men in
time.
The butterfly is just the wink of God as he gets ready to
hammer your ass to the beach or the mountain or the
center of the fucking earth.
From his end he saw the future, a future he would stride into
like Caesar across the Rubicon. The way enemies crossed
the Khan only once.
The net was emptying of water at all but the bottom; the
fish falling on each other like ideas in a man gone insane.
It was late summer in Florida as Lyndon now lived at the
beach house in Fort Pierce. He the lone male, in a house of
one dozen nubile, low-necked and bottomless girls, feral and
scared and with bellies full of quinoa and leftovers from the
meals at the house in Vero. He was away as the house was
languid with girls; their paired up in the absence of males.
The screens were coated in olive oil and sage which filled
the gaps that the no-see-ums penetrated unless this
viscosity of food-grade defense was applied.
Now in the evening to that day of awakening by the Laotian,
he had forgotten the morning -the net hung up, the fish
cooked, he assumed- he only recalled being roused by Vong
in the dawn at the house in Vero; and here he was now on
the dark beach of the Pierce house. The house lights were
off by 2100hrs -per commands of the Division of Wildlife- in
order to allow the 200-pound and 200-year-old mothers to
turtles to come ashore and lay their eggs. The sharks -white
tips and hammerheads- roamed just off shore like sorties of
atavistic planes, helmed by even more ancient aviators;
500-million-year-old piloted machines, perfect gifts from the
pre-Cambrian; the grandfather teaching the babe of the
Anthropocene.
He stood nearly naked, just his underwear, and dogtags,
embossed upon them: Lyndon Zendik; Anarcho-Warrior;
Earth-Squadron . He only weighed 167-pounds, but he was
all young muscle and bone, so that made him look more
dangerous and capable than that weight might indicated on
soft men. He was large for the group anyway, as all the men
were underweight; the result of hard labor and merely
sufficient food , he thought as he heard an echo. His face
was epicene and his heart showed no lines at all.
He had d é j à vu like a rationalist does: perfectly and
without meaning until far past when it should. God spoke to
him and he ignored it, just as men ignored him when he
spoke; and yet he didn’t make any connection between his
own hubris and the haughty pride of all common man.
He thought of what he could.
They ate communal meals, with no junk food or snacks; it
was all whole-grains and 4oz of meat, and organic green
leafy vegetables. This was 1998 and healthfood stores were
still an anomaly in many areas; they ate as the rest of
America would eat in twenty years; and they looked like
lean predators; lone wild and strange as Byron might say,
standing alike exempt from all affection and all contempt.
He stood on the beach with headphones on. He stood erect
as the rain came on.
The girls huddled in the house as the storm moved in on
them; the wind rattled the screens, the upper lanai patio
doors were shut, the girls put on socks as their feet grew
cold. Lyndon let the music’s controlled anarchy finger his
soul, the marionetted chaos of the storm warned him in no
uncertain terms; he let his body bounce like taut drumhead
between the percussive sounds in his ears and the rhythmic
cymbal crashes of the bolts of lightning off the eastern
coast.
His allostatic system issued alarms, his adrenaline shot out
of vacuoles like long guns engaging a piratical ship; his
veins pulsed and his blood accrued more oxygen as his
heart raced like sailors from ships into land-assault boats,
the blood making skin flush like the marines on the beach
itself. O2 molecules jammed into his vascular system and his
forearms looked like banyan trees, his jaw like an Easter
Island carving, his eyes wide, his mind-space right behind
his eyes, like a driver behind the wheel, like an eye relief
behind a scope, like the deus ex machina of all the world’s
demons and at bottom an old Grecian hope.
He breathed deep this wet lowland air. His tongue swam in
his mouth like the sharks out there in the shallows. The
muscle hunted words with electricity at the tip.
His mind laid eggs like the tortoise, and he knew in that
moment -caught between the two chaos of mother earth
and father culture- that order would be restored.
He saw a future at elevation far away and above this
shoreline; he’d beat a tactical retreat to the mountains; the
next phase of the sea-faring man. Like Noah, he’d land his
vessel at the top of the mountain. He saw it all unfold as the
rain fell on each part of him exposed and unclothed.
And he’d be the one to beat that alloy into shape, he
thought, he’d kneed and anneal the folded steel, he’d
Damascus the knives like tiger stripes, he’d camp in the
woods, high up above this demarcation between the
nihilism of the sea and the desert of the beach, high up into
fecund and seventh-generation tribal zones, where the
beasts had the limbic technology that these sea-bass and
beach-crabs all lacked.
He thought of black bear and clacking racks of elk and mule
deer, he locked eyes with birds of prey, monolithically dark,
no shades of grey; he stroked the dead hide of ruminants he
had killed and emptied their bellies, like lawnmower bags,
so full of still green grass; he grew hirsute like the mammals
too; he howled at the harvest moon, he tracked wolves and
coyotes, he learned the difference in their tracks and their
gait, and their numbers. Each animal emerged from these
ovum of vision as the storm threatened him and then made
good.
His apparitions a Matryoshka doll of nested oppressions and
rebellions, he saw like mother’s see their children, like
fathers see their enemies, he saw deep inside and from
above each instantiation of time and space, arbitrary.
Tyranny , he thought as the clouds threw drops at his feet.
Now the pink jellies washed ashore; now he saw clear things
with no central nervous system, their translucent bodies
revealed a four-leaf clover of entrails as their hair-thin
tentacles like a skein -a tangle nest of sleep and dreams- lay
inert on the sand.
The water pushed them forward and then pulled them back
like regret.
He stared at his feet in the crushed rock-grains as these
flotsam and jetsam of oldest instantiations of pre-thinking
life came close and were far away to either side of him; up
and down the blackening coast. He lifted his eyes to the sky
and saw clouds as sharp as daggers, he saw Caesar closed
in on by the Praetorian Guard. He saw the vapors draw back
a curtain to reveal a lightning strike a full inch wide on the
horizon, the concussive blast came at last, then the
sonorous thunder rasp. His face bore the brunt and he felt
how soft his skin still was against the old earth and her
rough ways.
He knew he’d have to toughen up soon enough.
He let the wind and sand whirl up and around him and just
gave it a wince instead of turning away; he allowed the
detritus to sit upon him like settlers, like homesteaders, like
pioneers of the West. He gave lease to the rain to pierce
instead of wash the warm grains away.
“I’m praying for tidal waves, mom wash it all away ,” he
heard as if his own soul had left a suicide note for his head
to read; a twin left alone. Freedom in tragedy is how it
rubbed him; how Cain must have felt despite being unable
to bear the burden of what he’d done. How often will jealous
beasts wreck their own nest, he asked, how deep goes the
rejection flail, what makes any of us think that being calm is
sufficient for the tumultuous gods?
Did not God and his nature design us as we are? Are not the
animals mad, are they not manic and despondent, are they
not malicious and obsequious, are they not painted black
and blue and brambled sharp as tacks and smooth under
that? Are not the beasts in charge of all that stands quite
still? Do trees break the backs of cat attacks? Or do they
absorb above ground what they inflict lower down in the
root-zone? In the limestone?
He thought of the slavery of spring tails, subterranean
animals trapped by aphids -like slave traders- at the behest
of tendrils of Ponderosa Pines . He saw them sixty feet high -
he had no idea why- as he felt himself stand on the land
he’d one day buy and upon which he’d break ground. He
watched as if from aloft, as if the sea storm pulled just his
eyes up above the highest clouds, and allowed him to ride
an arching sun ray to the west of this place, twenty years
ahead and Zeno’s paradox of half of a half in lightyears of
distance of the cosmic inner-clock as it advanced.
The mycelium and fungi of high altitude forests in league
with the wind-blown trees -the conifers with no weapons in
hand, no faces to read, no motives to impute- killing and
enslaving the moving beasts, stealing their nitrogen, slowly,
sociopathically, over time, years kept alive in stasis , to feed
the green boughs we are calmed by, to allow the Pinons to
grow closer to our God in the sky. And yet we deny our
murderous and macabre natures, when our hierarchies are
older than these psychopathic green-beret trees. Our
nervous systems that submit to the great beast among us,
that -if born that Great Beast- dominate those below us with
magnanimity, refusing to tear out the throat of our brother
as long as he is supine, sufficiently penitent to the way of
the world; the tao of the fist; of man and Marduk and YHWY.
The wolf only asks for movement and instinct; for eyes to
see the piloerection of his foil; a mind to judge who would
win a fight; the opportunity to shake hands with the devil if
he be a god and with god if he be the teacher to the student
of revenge.
Justice is nature and nature justice in all but the minds of
modern men.
But this is because we’ve forgotten how to make justice with
our hands; we make machines that now make their own
sacrifices to the gods. Know your world, he thought, this is
the first injunction of God; and we’ve abandoned it in favor
of knowing the mind of other men; we watch the whites of
each other’s eyes in lieu of watching the bear in his lust, the
wolf in his trust in the pack, the crow in flight and when he
alights from the nest.
We read words not the vane in the wind.
He remained on the beach and felt these menageries of
thoughts swarm like starlings in his mind, broken egg whites
in a stainless bowl, his hands kneading dough, his children -
both unborn and undead, his birthright, his malice, his
magnanimity- in each hand, his tribe scattered to the four
winds, his magnetisms lost by the polarizing effect of some
reversal of fortune. Why was he liked and unliked both? he
asked. He felt it all wrong, all backwards: he was liked for
the wrong reasons and hated for the worst reason of all.
He knew as the storm angled into him like a miter saw, as
the clouds no longer individual and outlined like God’s
cubist muscles, but one brute monolith of Hammurabi’s
code, one stele of Greek marble, with Hercules’s dozen
labors occluded by colonial Muslim smoke and oil and pitch
and fire and black blood, the lightning the only source now
of individual energy, the whole storm subsumed him, the
rain no longer in drops nor shards but pelagic depths of sea
raised above the shore like Lazarus, the tears on his
quivering face beat back into the their apertures, the lids
unable to use hands to keep these wee drops from the eyes,
a cataract, a flood inside his warbling holes now, his hands
balled into fists, his hearing ears enveloped in the wails of
man, his heart meeting the sonar head of sperm whales, his
bones stripped from their places by isolatoes , cannibals
saving him with harpoons of his ulnar and radial ribs, his
lower mandible, his keel and jib, his 3-boned inner ear ran
from drums of war, the oenologist-to-be screaming about
falling into the sea, the ground was ground up, his feet
splayed like a Labrador’s, his blood sloshing in the empty
spaces, his precessional wobble seen from outer space, his
axis replaced; he knew his affect was a fraud, he knew they
all liked what he was not.
He now knew that they loathed what he truly was.
They hated what he loved.
He was an unloved god, one of the fifty names of Marduk
held in the mouths of witches, sobriquets untold to offspring
of the next generation, lost to history as the new gods made
deals with the children of men; haughty now, insolent. He
knew he was born to be everything he currently was not; his
glib and ingratiating ways, his facile -handsome- face, his
charm and wit, he thought with contempt, he knew was all
bull-fucking-shit. Ah, but God made us social creatures,
exiled the ubiquitous fear, the final sin; but what if there is
no tribe ? he asked himself again. Can one be exiled from an
already disbanded tribe? He mixed the salt tears with the
clear water rain, the storm surge reached his fetlocks now,
the pink jellies swirled about, his arm hairs matted down; his
shorn head was stubbled and his face was too. Like a
newborn he thought, with the same kind of fist reflex,
hanging from his momma -ape tit.
But his hands grasped no mother tongue, they were empty
on this beach, two years from the turn of the century. His
palms had only the bite of his nails in them. It would be
years before his hands shook from epinephrine, starburst
scars on the knuckles from nails and teeth he’d punch, from
glass and lumber and metal in men’s maws; he’d scrape the
lunch from their mouths and scream at their gametes,
smash their testicles beneath his boots; he’d wipe their
seed from the fucking earth; these fucks had no right to be
bred, their father’s fathers had been the original sin, and the
sons of sons would pay the debit.
God visited the sins of the father upon the son in real life; I
don’t give one fuck whether it’s wrong or right, he’d say as
he left alleyways and warehouse floors, tattoo shops with
bodies strew about, blood spatter like night skies,
constellations of Poisson distributions of man’s last stupid
words, why me? they’d ask his face. Why?
Why not you? he’d think aloud under his mask.
Fear of exile, of being unpopular was no longer rational, as
the tribe was no more; he felt. He then thought -then later
said- in decades apart; each of these collapsing into one
frame under Heaven, on Earth above Hell.
Each man was now an individual, western culture -once the
perfect gift of God to man- had turned on and destroyed
God, and tribe, and all connective tissue. Marduk’s voice
could be heard telling each of his -this ancient
Mesopotamian god’s scattered bones; of which Lyndon was
sure he was one- to reassemble themselves at elevation; to
reclaim the white skeleton, structure, framework of their
forbearers into a new tribe again.
And that there, and only there, would his true nature be
revered.
There, he thought, where his noble mien and regal mane
would be respected, where his cowardice and weakness
would be beaten from him by his true friends and brothers.
Sutured skin and healed bones would be welded stronger at
the place of where it was now riven; the key is not to live in
safety but with strength; not to live free of pain, but with
tolerance for suffering. We’ve built men backwards, he
thought, ill-prepared for the storms that lift two years hence
from the beating wings of butterflies still in chrysalis.
There it was again, he thought. “Papillion,” he said.
The sound of the wind was pierced by a feminine cry and he
reflexively turned to his south and saw Nika in the doorway
of their beach house with mouth agape and black hair in a
whirl; her hands beckoning; her voice laid upon air and as
knocked-down radio-wave by the hewing wind. But her
intent was clear; she was insisting that he come inside and
out from the gale. Females are exactly what they are , he
thought as if it only now occurred to him to see the obvious
world.
He nodded and turned toward the undulating sea, he felt his
feet sink. Each wave was backgrounded into a vapor of grey.
He turned and marched like metachronal soldiers toward the
house; his past and future beset him like the legs of
millipede man. He collated all that he’d seen and brought a
germ of the storm inside like a black rock swallowed within
his blood and guts.
Nika watched for a while as he moved forward, then she
ducked inside and let the screen door slam.
He watched in his mind’s eye as the springtime twenty
years hence saw caterpillars crawl along the ground in
which he set up camp; hundreds in orange and black. He
trapped one in a single-malt bottle and watched it crawl no
matter how he tipped the glass; to the top it inched along.
He thought of the storms that would arise in the years to
come from the flight of this very creature -and from his
brothers- along the high-country ground. He thought of the
64th move from this initial state, he watched the hundred
legs, he watched the undaunted march to the top of this
false world by this natural creature. He watched himself set
the bottle down and jerk his .45 from its holster and shoot
the bottle into a blast of vacuum and absorption of all the
escaping light.
Heat , not light , he thought he heard himself -thus correct
himself- in twenty years.
He heard the revelatory wind say, Woe to the inhabiters of
the earth, and of the sea, for the devil come down unto you
having great wrath because he knowth that he hath but a
short time. And here is the mind that hath wisdom, the
seven heads are seven mountains; and there are seven
kings, five are fallen, and one is, and one is not yet come.
In his future memory the bug crawled away -over two
shards of thrown glass- as if the insect hadn’t even noticed
that his prison world had just exploded and thus set him
free in the midst of catastrophe.
The caterpillar thought even less of the storms his wings
would -like bellows- blow into cleansing existence beyond
both coasts of this continentally divided land. He just
crawled toward what his instincts whispered into his ear; a
siren and an Odysseus both. The muses turned to Lyndon
and told him to re-holster that side arm; which he did in
obeisance. The wind blew up there, but down here his mind
closed the vision as it flew away in a corvid black, and the
Florida storm blew him back into the house with a burst. The
door slammed and the girls whirled around as if he was truly
there as he shook the rain and sand from his brow and
emerging hair.
Locust ate the food of agricultural man; cicada fed on the
shade-tree roots , he thought.
The wind outside had gusted in late from the Caribbean. The
night came. The rain too. And it all said -but none heard-
that all is ground down and blown around; all until the
magicicades next will arise; arise; arise .
 21. Malice of Bears; Murder of Crows
Uncontrolled immigration has all the attribute of invasion
Twitter June 30th , 2018 [Taleb, Nassim]

My dear McClellan, if you do not want to use the army, I should like to borrow it
1862 telegram to General McClellan [Lincoln, Abraham]

Peace to our neighbours. But anathema to the French name. Hatred eternal to
France. This is our cry
San Domingo Congress 1804 [Dessalines, Jean Jacques ]

I. 2017 e.v.
“But why?”
“Why what?” Chen asked in reply.
“Why pick morality at all; why not just have it be a sharkish
world, sharks are an amazing and robust evolutionary
design. They are five-hundred million years old in a world of
average life span -of species life span- of a mere hundred
and fifty-thousand years. Why pick moral thinking, why pick
eusociality at all?
“I mean think of it, if initial conditions rule in complex
systems, why ever develop morality?” Lyndon asked; he
stood in one place in the kitchen, the phone worked in a few
places in the home like mines planted which he discovered
slowly and methodically. His back had spasmed 144 seconds
ago and now he was aggravated. His hippocampus shrank
by .0001% and his cortisol rose by 1nm. He watched the
mountain rise to 13,000 feet; he also saw the ravine before
it and the trees like sails tied to masts of bark.
“Because it worked,” Chen rejoined over the phone. It
cracked once due to a poor connection and his own voice
came back to him in echo.
“Yes, but why? Why when the costs are so high? Look, you
quote Snyder right, the Bloodlands guy, and he says -and
you say- the good people died first; those who refused to
eat their kids or sell out friends or behave cynically all died
first . Well, if those are the costs in initial conditions, then
why is it -why is fraternity- around at all? The initial
conditions must have been rough, right? I mean Pinker says
30% of all deaths were violent, that war was rampant, why
morality at all? I -before you answer- I have an idea. See
morality is precursor to violence, it activates violence, but
not cynical or psychopathic violence. See, look, and this is
why scientists are always so wrong on this point,” he
paused and stretched the neck forward and up off itself.
“They -scientists- are modern males, they don’t have an
inner moral code, they have an exogenic moral code:
whatever the social norms are -whatever the legal code is-
to them, that is tantamount to morality. They are Pharisees .
And this ruins the experiment,” he said into the phone and
felt it was obvious what he meant. The glass of the garage
door was filled with the close Spanish Peak and closer pinion
trees. Crow flew low and cast shadow on the concrete. His
neck felt more and more like a winch was tied to his sacrum
and elves pulled down on a clevis that was welded to his C5
in order that they reach heaven themselves.
A line in Latin appeared but he didn’t read it with the left
hemisphere: nunc viat in arce polorum .
The pain ran through the neck into the ear so that a ringing
in octaves of birds in caw -babes in distress, women when
they lose their minds- rose and fell like a dinner bell way
back at the hacienda whilst he was out alone in the scything
field. The pain sat on his spine like fossiliferous limestone
from Fostereley beneath a plinth of alabaster bones and a
buried Robertus Rex Invictus swaddled in leaden coffin slab
and sealing wax of pitch.
His augury of head-pain was in Dunfermline , his torque of
heartache in Melrose Abbey and his gut-wrench open-ended
at St Serf’s Chapel in Dumbarton and the Cardross Parish
Church.
“See, the ancient man -with old genes that code for honor-
is inward in his morality; he sees right & wrong as based on
internal and innate moral values. And when a modern man
transgresses these flesh & blood mores , then violence is
the first response by an ancient man. Why? Well, because
he knows -deep down, he knows- that if someone breaks the
moral code it’s because he -the transgressor- is trying to
test the limits, wiggling the bars in attempts to see if he can
remove the perimeter to the cell, seeing if he can tug on the
waistband of the girl, and turn the knob to the door, go
through the wallet to check and see if there is something
there to take.
The peaks looked black and white; the trees too. His ethics
manichean and stark.
“A small moral infraction, an insult, to test to see how robust
the moral system is,” he said as he watched the slab -some
slab, some monolith on black beach in remembrance, or
sea-dream he couldn’t say- but he saw the rock bubble and
drip with water, and gleam and glint with reflection of the
fire on the rivulets that ran down around the embossed
letters -letters, code, that weren’t really there but were
there in the mind at least- letters and water that glowed and
then went dark in strange timings like fireflies syncopating
eventually when hemmed in. He then thought of the data -
from McWhorter- on African Americans:
Only one family in five of black people live in the inner
city and only one in four black families live below the
poverty line.
And this made him see that these blacks, these families that
had risen above the stereotype and the legacy and the
ragged line between now and then, he realized these would
not be the ones to make it. And it was their separatism -as
McWhorter described it in lament- that would be their race’s
defining -immunological- trait:
Separatism -the sense that to be black is to restrict
one’s full commitment to black-oriented culture and be
subject to different rules of argumentation and morality-
is so deeply rooted in the black American consciousness
that many might find it difficult to imagine that anyone
could be culturally black without situating herself within
this sovereign universe, which is felt to be nothing less
than “black culture” itself.
He thought of prison and how segregated they immediately
were; administration and inmates all agreed to cleave by
race. He saw the face of Todd -his Todd- in his mind as he
stared at this inner slab -his own counter top of concrete to
his six- and he held the phone to the garage door to keep
signal; like a boost as it was made of conducting metal.
Oh, yeah there are no black friends in prison , Todd -his
Todd- had once said in 1991, in Mason, in the car ride home
from a closing shift at La Rosas; they were running down to
Morrow, driving past the Powder Factory. Lyndon had
watched other white men released from California and
Colorado prisons now fraternizing with ex-cons that were
black. And they said -in that frankness that comes from the
lack of class, a kind of honesty one must be poor and
felonious to exhibit- and he watched his memory of them
saying in front of their black friend in these public tete-à-
tetes that on the inside they wouldn’t be able to be friends -
with their friend- at all. And this -everyone admitted- was
based solely upon race.
It’s acknowledged, understood by the underclasses, the
inmates -the convicts- the workers, the poor, and also the
rulers and administrators above. Only the middle class relies
on the illusion that no extremes exist, no black nor white;
nobody bats an eye at separatism except the white liberal
who wants to live one way when it’s the other , he thought.
He then saw black within black within black not on the slab,
the lithe -the wall that had not yet been built- but around it;
all around it. He saw that the blacks that would survive this -
whatever this doom he felt, whatever it was- those blacks
would be the most ruthless and most eager to act on their
tribalism and malice and out-group side-eye. He watched his
avatars of the future, as gangs of thousands took over cities
and police forces were overwhelmed with entire
neighborhoods that needed no time -no time , he thought-
to adjust to the conditions of war.
The blacks were already tribal, separate, and thus perfectly
prepared for war.
“Of war,” he said -interrupting- as Chen was talking to him
on the other end. His own thoughts surrounded him. He
pushed them onto his pal.
The inner-city blacks -even if they were only one in four-
would have no hesitation, no ambivalence, no delay in their
violence and perfidy and war stances.
He recalled the way those two black guys had stolen
$20,000 from him in marijuana ; he saw the way they
fabricated fake hundreds, handed them to Steven -that
goddamn liberal dork , he thought- and ran off without one
hesitation; laughing at the na ï veté of these whites.
And they were right to laugh at us , he thought. He had
known better, and yet he had let his ignorant white partner
run the deal, and thus run them both into ruin.
“Of course, of course those would be the blacks that would
survive,” he said aloud almost past the phone -beyond
Chen- as if it was not there, as he thought, of course, of
course this was the evolutionary model that had served
them in slavery, the most robust physically, the most
cunning, the least wedded to fairness between groups but
the most loyal among the in-group . America had been
training the African from Kenya and Congo , Namibia and
Botswana , since the ships docked in Bordeaux had made
their way down the ragged coast of western Africa and
loaded them like vectors into vessels, vessels that would
travel the ocean then burst open onto the shores and sores
of the skin of America and infect it with the phages that had
happened to make their way in the world -as bacteria not
yet returned to viruses- on the dark continent’s coasts.
He tried -in his mind- to map the coastline around the Horn
and the straights between Madagascar .
But instead he thought of the mélange of New Orleans, the
Wildman, the Big Chief, the way the port city maintained
itself over all these years. He wondered why, why did New
Orleans remain as it was as the rest of America moved on ?
The passage from CLR James ran on the lab and thus on the
bots , and thus behind his eyes like a reflection, like a
thought of street signs he’d once seen in the quarter, along
Dupain . His memory and his now flickered, he was in two
places at once:
Honest himself, Vincent took it for granted that the
rulers of France would act with common decency
towards those black men whose service to France he
had witnessed. To him it seemed Toussaint was merely
pursuing a personal ambition… Vincent did all that a
white man could do. To him restoration of slavery was
unthinkable. He expected it as little as millions of British
people expected the intrigues of Baldwin, Hoare, and
 Eden with Laval and Mussolini after the denial of arms to
Abyssinia and the grandiose promises of fidelity to the
League of Nations and the idea of collective security.
Many an honest subordinate has in this way been the
unwilling instrument of the inevitable treachery up
above; the trouble is that when faced with the brutal
reality he goes in the end with his own side, and by the
very confidence which his integrity created does
infinitely more harm than the open enemy.
Lyndon had no idea if that whole passage was memory or
invention, he had no idea who or what it was about. He
thought of his own travails again and spoke almost as reflex
to Chen. The phone was held at a cant to maintain one bar
of signal in his home. An empty wine bottle rolled on the
concrete counter slab and made a sound one and a half
seconds long.
“As long as society approved of their cowardice then they
were cowards, as long as business was good, then they lied
or refused to help anyone, as long as they didn’t get hurt or
go to jail, then they never once questioned their own
behavior, never once felt bad for insulting their own family,
their own father or brother, for failing to defend or help out.
As long as it was rational, rational baby. As long as it was
rational , they all said.
“And the man of honor sees this as horrid, disgusting,
unmanly; he feels it as pain, as moral pain . And yet, in the
old days we would smash the transgressor, if he was
disrespectful or insulting. Now-a-days we ignore him, or
maybe mildly upbraid him, right? We use moral suasion as
our rivals demand. We use neo-cortex on the executive
functions of the limbic regions. But, the honorless man, shit,
he doesn’t care about moral suasion, he laughs at our
atavistic ideas on honor, he falls back on rationality
remember? Does the cerebellum listen to the cortical cap ?
Shit,” he said dismissively as Chen remained silent on the
other end. More shadows made the glass glint, the grey
concrete seem to open up. Wind blew pine needles of tan
and brown, lighter rocks lifted just a bit. Sounds were made
by the way the air and the earth did abrade.
“So, if the ancient man says, hey, you have to stand up for
your father or brother, you can’t just think of nickels and
dimes , if he shames the rational male for his failure to stick
up for family, the rational male just says, casually, without
emotion, hey, it’s irrational to give dad a job, and the
numbers do not work out on paper to invest in a business
with you ,” Lyndon said this as if for the first time, as if he
had not said it over and over and over; as if he was not
another clone of a clone of a clone.
The page from CLR James ran on in his head as Chen
replied; it ran on as if from beginning, as if of no beginning
nor end:
The salvers scoured the coasts of Guinea. As they
devastated an area they moved westward and then
south, decade after decade, past the Niger, down the
Congo coast, past Luango and Angola, round the Cape of
Good Hope and by 1789 even as far as Mozambique on
the eastern side of Africa. [The slavers] set the simple
tribesmen fighting against each other with modern
weapons over thousands of square miles. The
propagandists of the time claimed that however cruel
was the slave traffic, the African slave in America
was happier than in his own African civilization
[emphasis added].
We excel our ancestors only in system and organization:
they lied as fluently and as brazenly. It was on a
peasantry in many respects superior to the serfs in large
areas of Europe, that the slave trade fell. Tribal life was
so broken up and million of detribalized Africans were let
 loose upon each other. The unceasing destruction of
crops led to cannibalism, the captive women became
concubines and degraded the status of wife. Tribes had
to supply slaves or be sold as slaves themselves.
Violence and ferocity became necessities for survival,
and violence and ferocity survived. The stockades of
grinning skulls, the human sacrifices, the selling of their
own children as slaves, these horrors were the product
of an intolerable pressure on the African peoples, which
became fiercer through centuries as the demands of
industry increased and methods of coercion were
perfected.
The slaves were collected in the interior, fastened to one
to other in columns, loaded with heavy stones of 40 or
50 pounds in weight and marched the long journey to
the sea.
On the ships the slaves were packed in the hold one
above the other below.
He was seeing wet streets along Decatur and Magazine ,
and horses refused to move along roads overwhelmed.
He knew not if a storm had come or went. The book in his
head began now with a letter from Vincent about Toussaint’s
traits. Bonaparte had read it and fumed at this heroic
manner in which the black man, the black general, the black
Jacobin was described. Bonaparte had once said that he
would “not leave a single epaulette on the shoulders of a
single nigger in the colony .” And from this perspective he
had to read of the former slave, the man who had said of
himself that he, may have been born a slave but had the
soul of a free man. Of Toussaint it was dictated to Bonaparte
:
At the head of so many resources is a man the most
active and tireless of whom one can possible have any
idea; it is the strictest truth to say that he is everywhere
 and -and all- in the spot where a sound judgement and
danger make it essential to be; his great sobriety, the
faculty accorded him along of never taking a rest, the
advantage he enjoys of being able to start at once with
the work in his office after tiresome journeys of replying
to a hundred letters a day and tiring out his secretaries,
more than that the art of tantalizing and confusing
everybody even to deceit: all this makes of him a man
so superior to all around him that respect and
submission reach the limit of fanaticism in the vast
number of heads. He has imposed on his brothers of San
Domingo a power without bounds. He is absolute master
of the island and nothing can counteract his wishes.
Although some distinguished men, very few blacks
among them, know what his plans are and view them
with great fear.
That last line had the quality of a reverberation in his head.
He did not know why.
But he had read something once of another quality of the
General, it now occurred to him. Toussaint had printed a
Constitution, which in those days was tantamount to making
it law. A hand-written draft was a draft, but to print gave it
the imprimatur of the law. And in July of 1801 -half way
between Jefferson’s signage of the American Declaration
upon the new world and his passage onto the next world-
that constitution of San Domingo was radical, autocratic,
and known to no one save Toussaint and his white and
mulattoe assemblage of men. The secrets the black General
kept were so tenebrous that the blacks of the island
whispered that Toussaint was djinn himself who couldn’t
speak but through the magic of the white man’s words.
Chickens had been killed rather than eaten by men half
their proper weight and women who couldn’t give milk.
Cane fields had been left to rot rather than harvest for
themselves under the new regime. And with each word
Toussaint didn’t say the freed slaves said ten of his
treachery and demonism and lack compared to his black
rival: Mo ï se.
Illiterate and often hobbled in body and mind, the freed
slaves migrated from one suspicion to the next; from the
white slavers to now the black lord of the sugary island. But
Toussaint was quiet by nature -introverted- and playing
politics with the British, the Spanish and the French. He had
charged Vincent with taking the constitution to Bonaparte
and Vincent reproached him for its breadth, island autarky
lacking sanction of the French government.
“There is no room in it for any official from France,”
Toussaint replied to Vincent and of the Constitution, as if he
too saw the document and the writing as embodied. The
black General was idealistic and noble, that he seem to lose
his footing in the prostrate eyes of the weak.
Lyndon thought of the final scene of Toussaint L’ouverture
and how CLR James had described it:
Toussaint, usually calm, was violently agitated. He
replied that he would see with infinite pleasure some of
his comrades rewarded. But when Vincent asked him
what he wanted for himself, he replied sharply that he
wanted nothing; that he knew his destruction was the
ultimate aim, that his children would never enjoy the
little that he had amassed, but that he was not yet the
victim of his enemies.
To this personal outburst he added some reflections
which so hurt the conscience of the sensitive Vincent
that he would not even write them down. But we can
guess what they were. Bitterness at the insults and
neglect which he felt were caused by his colour, the
impossible position in which he and his people were
placed: submission, which would mean restoration of
 slavery; or defiance, which would mean war and the
complete devastation of the island; his isolation, white
and black friends against him; all these must have
wrung the words out of him who ordinarily never spoke
but where he thought it necessary, and then said only
what he wanted to say.
He turned abruptly from Vincent and evading about a
hundred persons who were waiting for him, he sprang on
his roan grey horse and rode away so quickly that even
his guard was taken by surprise.
Lyndon thought he saw rooster tails and the plumes of
concussives around the hooves of the charger headed back
to the Spanish part of the island. He thought he knew what
was in that General’s mind, the former slave’s hammered
conscience, and the black man’s anvil of heart. But Lyndon
also knew what CLR James knew, that unless he wanted to
lose like Vincent and Beauvais , unless he wanted to learn
nothing from history, he ought to know “that in a revolution
each must choose his side and stick to it .”
He thought all this in a mist of thought and reverie and
memory, but he knew he ought say something aloud. So he
did.
He used words inexactly: using alpha when sigma was
meant; speaking of one brother when meaning them all; all
of mankind. He looked at his memory of Chen -with the tens
of thousands of dead white men stacked up on the shores
and inlands of what was now Haiti in mind, with the epaulets
of the black General spattered in the mere spray of the
white blood, but the boots painted like Cherokee with it- he
looked up at the reflection of his own face in the black
screen of his iPhone, remembering that Toussaint
L’ouverture had been killed because the black General was
not trusted by his own men -blacks, whites, sang-m ê l é
mulattoes - nor by his enemies.
He was too smart, too introverted, too wedded to principles
of the revolution in France, and yet at home in San Domingo
, too autocratic -from the Greek: to rule the self - and as
Lyndon thought of all this compressed into a drawing he had
done of the Black Jacobin -gazing out over the bay- he -
Lyndon- then barked:
“That is what my brother said to me and he felt no guilt at
all. In the old days a worm like that, a selfish -solipsistic- evil
fuck like that with zero family loyalty and with nothing but
rational greed in his heart would have been smashed to
death by an outraged -a morally outraged- man. So, answer
this, how is that rational ,” he leaned on the word -
elongating it- and attenuating its putative power all at once,
“how is it rational to be so amoral that you incur the wrath
of the moral man who finally stops using the ineffective tool
of moral suasion on the morally obtuse and picks up a claw
hammer instead and brains that motherfucker to death?”
He wondered of nebulous things: images like dreams of
clouds, memories of sounds -lessons of what is bound-
appeared inarticulately to him as a brass-rubbing of Sir
James Douglas with a silver casket worn on a chain around
his neck, the heart of the King of Scotland until 1329 inside;
a letter from the abbey made mention of Sir Simon Locard
holding the key. Details of wars against the Moors were
scratched into the papers under this last will and testament.
He saw the men press on in these campaigns after
campaigns with the red pump of their king of spades upside-
down and around the neck. He now rubbed on his own
corpus and lamented what nothingness pressed down but
nothing about it like the yoke of the Rex’s heart. His pain
was of one kind, he sought the other.
But his eyes saw the book. He mind used the eyes to think.
His thinking did the talking inside his head as the pain
fueled the whole enterprise like lit bitumen and then the
candle wax of regret as brake to slow the immolation of the
wick and to cup the light:
Five-hundred tons of tallow made candles and
Dunfermline orange like a nova of the manmade hearth,
and inside his mind was a coruscating pain as heavy as
the lead coffin of the king, as dark as the 1,500 pounds
of molten pitch. And 74” of the King of Scotland -
abandoned by reinforcements- lay inside him riven in
three parts; a golden cloth over the head as shroud.
History above the heart, gravel in the abbey yard over
the viscera of a king his relative.
In 1330 the heart was taken to fight the Moors in Spain
by Sir James Douglas, the ships sailed to Alfonso XI of
Castile. Sir William de Keith, Sir Kenneth Moir, Locard,
and William de St. Clair were welcomed by the King of
Spain. But by the time they fought in Teba the Scots had
been abandoned by the international contingent that
had committed first in wax and paper of their journey to
fight the Blackamoors. Sir James and all but one Scot
were killed; Locard and the King of Scotland’s heart the
only things alive to return to the isle and Roxburghshire.
These histories of his people faded and the book accounting
of the 1791 slave rebellion lay on the counter cluttered with
wine bottles in dark and clear; coffee -whole bean and
ground- and black spoons and forks strewn about. The
pages yellow had soaked up blossom liquids and viscous
sauces -red pistil stain from lilies- and the words had bled.
Two sections had been highlighted years ago and read:
L’Ouverture had defiantly said he intended, “to cease to
live before gratitude dies in my heart.” But rivers of
blood were to flow before they understood .
Lyndon thought the dark and light, black and white, would
always fight like this as he closed the book and hung up the
phone.
II. 1974 e.v.
[Redacted]

III. 2037 e.v.

“Insulinoma,” MO said as Steven fixed the button on his
jacket, he had buttoned the top button to the lower hole and
the coat was askew.
“Oh,” Steven said as he continued to attend to this
misalignment. Isaiah watched with the contempt that
accompanies a higher life form watching a lower life form
fuck around over stupid shit.
“So, just to recap,” MO said with a smile, his cognitive
system tamping down any pique or sign of frustration in his
voice, “the genes that code for insulin production -so, INS
gene is the precursor zone, then downstream you have IGF2
and the PDX1 protein coded for- and all these combine to
release insulin as response, repeat, response , to high
glucose levels. This is functionally -and also at the level of
the genome framework itself, the 11th spot on the meiotic
blueprint- so, it’s structurally and functionally different than
what causes insulinoma.
“Those genes are correlated at the coded protein level -the
PDX1 level- but their epidemiology -the etiology- is radical
different. You need to get this Steven,” MO said as Steven
abruptly looked up from his coat and smoothed its front and
nodded. He thought he got 60-75% of that, and he thought
that that was sufficient. His clothes still felt weird to him.
“So, what is the upshot?” Steven asked with a kind of
dismissiveness that made Isaiah have to override his
allostatic system dumping of all the correlates for rage into
his blood and brain. He used a beta blocker, a dopaminergic
catabolizer to break apart the neurotransmitter that would
normally last for minutes in his brain as a functional
memetic device for increased -negative- memory. Isaiah
rose and fell in affect within .06 seconds, it was like the blur
of a black bird shadow overhead that the eye just catches
peripherally and both shadow and bird fly away between
you and the sun.
“The upshot is that if -as a medical doctor or
psychometrician- one looked at just the result, just the
behavior, just the end product or gene expression that
doctor could mistake nominal functioning of perfectly
adapted alleles with a -he could conflate it with a-
malfunctioning system,” MO said patiently; he in the role of
a wise pedant teaching a child or a dog a simple logical
series. He had adjusted syntax just briefly, maintaining his
.04% rate of low-threshold error.
“How so?” Steven asked as if he had not already been told.
“Because in both cases, the body over produced a large
amount of insulin; lowering blood sugar levels,” MO said.
“I see,” Steven said.
“But in one case it is a normal response to environmental
conditions; i.e., blood sugar is indeed too high. The other is
a malfunction of the coding function of the PDX1 based on
an independent sequence of chemical and endocrine
reactions. It’s not tied to real life in anyway. It’s just causing
insulin production totally irrespective of blood glucose
levels. It’s a pathology,” MO kept on, iteration after
iteration.
“Oh, I see. Yes,” Steven said still not getting the point.
“Steven,” Isaiah added from across the room, the ivy and
climber-swaddled wall behind him was breathing and
moving so slightly that Steven -and any human eye- could
not detect it. But it did move, phototropically and
metabolically and the bees landed on leaves and then rose
and fell in nano-meters like albatross on the waves of a sea
far out and ignored by the great mass of men perched upon
their shores and vulgar shoals.
Isaiah walked towards that part of the lab and spoke in
detail.
“The genes associated with psychopathy in the literature -
literature designed, curated, and augmented by men like
you- is missing a crucial aspect. MO is being patient and
polite and we all benefit from this. But allow me to put a
finer point on it. If you keep labeling people with the MAO-A
and A/L short-chain allele which correlates with retributive
aggression, aggression as response to insult, challenge and
provocation; and labeling patients with the OXT-receptor
gene which increases oxytocin for in-group bonding and
hyper-loyalty, and subjects with the genes associated with
increased testosterone production under duress, which -
again- suppresses fear, well, then you are missing that
these beings are totally different -metabolically,
psychologically- from the non-affective kinds of diminished
fear response or aggression designed in furtherance of
purely consummatory reward rationales.
“In English,” Steven requested.
“One kind only uses violence as payback, via the genes
outlines, via the activation of the thalamic system;
biochemistry that activates feelings associated with honor,
long-term love of in-groups like family and tribe, limbic
feelings for meaning, deep meaning, not merely the
dopaminergic slaking of lust, the lust for money or sex or
drugs that the other type of violent man seeks. Totally
different neural pathways, chemistry, activation thresholds,
and personalities of the subject; and the yet the result is
bodies on the floor. Dead bodies, Steven,” Isaiah said.
Steven nodded as he tried to understand.
“ADP-6 for example and the 5-HTTLPR genes which
correlates to lower pain sensitivity, and thus increased use
of anti-social aggression are present in humans for totally
different reasons than the highly sensitive suite of alpha or
sigma genes. It’s important that you see that overly broad
labels of quote anti-social unquote violence and aggression
has two totally separate epidemiological catalysts,” Isaiah
said.
“Why does lower pain sensitivity lead to aggression?”
Steven asked.
“It correlates to lower emotional pain sensitivity too;
physical pain and emotional pain circuits use the same
chemicals, the same neural pathways and so a man who
feels low or no physical pain also doesn’t feel fear, guilt,
shame, or any hesitation to committing anti-social violence.
He will feel nothing painful, of discomforting, nothing
upsetting that would prevent a normal man -a man who
feels pain- from behaving in an anti-social manner.
Psychopaths don’t exactly want to go to jail, because it’s an
impediment -a mere obstacle- but they don’t fear it. That’s a
crucial distinction.
“Steven, most people -regular people- they don’t rob and
mob their way through life not because of actual jail or cops,
but because their fear of jail and cops; fear of the
consequences of the pain of aggression. They fear how it
would feel to go to jail, they fear what it would feel like to
hurt someone, they fear the guilt that comes with it,
because they remember the guilt they felt at age eight or
ten when they hit a kid for no reason and everyone yelled at
them and shunned them and they felt both pressure from
the teacher and the other kids and felt guilt themselves
because they are sensitive to pain. It’s pain, man. Fear is
pain, guilt is pain, shame is pain, social ostracism is pain.
“Pain is the core of moral behavior. Without pain you act like
those kids who can’t feel physical pain, kids with congenital
analgesia: they ram their bodies into walls, they destroy
themselves running around and overheating, they deform
their own limbs because they don’t respond to pain.
“Pain is the thing that says, no . It says, no , to the guy who
wants to rob a guy to get money, rape a girl to get sex,
murder a man to take his car. And lack of pain also means
lack of guilt, lack of caution. This is literally, metabolically,
neurally true, Steven,” Isaiah explained.
“Then why did the inmate kill so many? He’s very high in
pain sensitivity,” Steven asked.
“Because his rage, his anger is an analgesic,” Isaiah said.
Steven twisted the mouth.
“When he gets angry it shuts off his pain. He feels no pain
when he’s angry. His testosterone rises to very high levels,
his adrenaline rises as well, his dmPFC shuts down moral
fear and he instead feels moral righteousness. In that state
it now feels good to be aggressive, violent, deadly. For him,
under normal circumstances, he could never be anti-social.
He would feel too guilty, too ashamed. That’s why his honor
code is so extreme. It’s why it’s so black and white; because
it’s a switch in him from zero to one, digital, not analog. He
would feel so much guilt hurting an innocent person,” Isaiah
said as Steven interrupted.
“I thought half his victims were, you know, bystanders, or
whatever, innocent,” Steven said.
“Yeah, but he doesn’t see it that way. He got so angry, so
morally indignant, that he saw anyone around his victims as
guilty,” Isaiah explained.
“How is that different that the psychopath who doesn’t
care?” Steven asked.
“Because inmate 16180339 had to be pushed to that after
years and years of pain. He had to be provoked. The
psychopath needs no provocation because there is no
hesitation, no barrier to anti-social behavior in the first
place. No pain. The psychopath hurts people from day one,
they can see it by age four or five. Our favorite inmate was
violent early in response to insult but was shamed and
pained into behaving better for the next three decades. No
psychopath does that, no psychopath delays gratification,
fears social ostracism, fears guilt. Our favorite inmate tried
to play ball.
“The inmate tried to play fair for decades because he felt
pain at the idea of all the bad consequences: the potential
for jail, the potential for harm, the potential for shunning,
rebuke, inner guilt too. He feared it. It took him hitting the
rev-limiter of pain for it to all shut down and for him to go
numb; like a shot of morphine, a dripline of dilaudid. The
neural circuits for pain were literally overtaken by anger
chemistry versus pain chemistry and he became narcotized
by rage. He finally felt no pain and he used his own body as
a cudgel against the world. At that moment, he was a
psychopath, but only against his out-group, those whom had
wronged him, or those that had stood by. But he was still
loyal to his people even in that state of rage.
“Let’s look at the two groups.
“The one group -the warrior- is aggro and violent when
provoked, angry when he or his tribe is threatened. The
second cohort -the psychopath- is aggressive and violent
purely from a lack of affect, feeling, or care for the victim
due to what that victim can provide them via material
resources. The psychopath has no tribe, no in-group.
“The true psychopath -the actual one- sees each man as an
ingot of gold trapped inside a larger ore-rock. He sees men
as things to be used. He -this genuine psychopath- bashes
open the head, the wallet or the wife’s panties to a man in
order that he may extract out the resources for his own
tawdry survival. It has nothing to do with insult or honor or
loyalty; it’s pragmatic, it’s rational. He sees your head like
an inoffensive but useful coconut. Nothing more.
“The warrior, the man with the alleles you erroneously call
psychopathic genes is indeed aggressive and violent, but
only, repeat, only , to defend his honor, the honor of his
woman, his tribe. He does not see people as things to be
used. He sees them as valuable, innately valuable
ontologically and he in fact feels more affect, more emotion,
more pain, more love, more of everything and that is why he
is so wounded, so offended, so outraged at the way normal
people -people neither warriors not psychopaths, just
normal males or females- that is why he is so outraged at
their carelessness and lack of emotion and care.
“He is offended by them and reacts to their blasé aplomb in
a way, he reacts in a way labeled as anti-social, because we
live in the remnants, the vestigial remnants of the
Apollonian curve, the Greek swerve; not in the legacy of the
Spartans or Mongols or Scoti or M ā ori or Comanche ,”
Isaiah said with his affect, his vex, tempered by the request
sent -9 seconds ago- via MO’s DM that lowered Isaiah’s own
allostatic response and gene expression in his dmPFC and
amygdala.
“The Ionian Greeks won and so their commercial, pragmatic,
effete and honorless moral system has become normalized,
codified, seen as nominal and ideal. It’s quite literally how
America and the west calibrates ethics. To be outside this
pragmatic ideal is to be a barbarian, a psycho. So, scientists
-99% of whom are narrow-shouldered, pencil-neck geeks
with no courage or testosterone at all- tend to pathologize
the highly functional, highly adaptive, extremely necessary
and -if I may add, noble - behavioral suite of hyper-loyalty,
tribalism and protectiveness and the regulatory alleles
associated with the men that are constituted with them.
“You -and all of Yankee-science and English-law and Jewish-
media and Westernized-mankind- have conflated the male
warrior with the psychopath, because they both have end-
of-production levels of aggression. Just like the normally
functioning insulin production genes and the insulinoma
genes can both produce high levels of insulin in the final
analysis. See, you all just look at the last three seconds of a
phenomena, and think you understand it.
“You have ignored all the previous data, the minutes and
hours and days and years and millennia that led up to that
final ballistic action performed, completed in a few seconds.
This is why it’s medically and scientifically unsound to
diagnose insulinoma and a normally functioning blood-sugar
system based purely on the PDX-1 gene expression.
“And, it’s equally stupid and immoral to diagnose a man as
a psychopath merely because he is violent and merely
because you can measure the last three seconds of
dopaminergic correlates with disinhibition, including
elevated testosterone and its diminished fear response.
“You are looking at the wrong end of the telescope. Stop.
Listen to MO.
“He is helping you see a major error in the thinking of the
entire medical and research community. They are
mislabeling a whole class of men as psychopaths when they
are merely warriors, men of high moral character actually;
higher in fact than so-called normal people. And the more
sensitive they are to pain, like the Sigma male is, the more
likely they are to go insane from it in a society such as ours.
Our society has no release for them, and yet they walk
around in incessant pain at the immorality, the transactional
nature, the hollowness of modern life and thus even as large
men they lack everything those babies in Romanian
orphanages lacked as they died from lack of touch: they
died from deep existential pain. But Sigma males ain’t
babies, they are grown men and they are going to break
apart the world to get the pain to stop.
“Normal people who just let the whole society collapse
around them because it quote, ain’t their business . Because
they quote, don’t want to get involved ,” Isaiah said
replaying the phone calls from Lee MacLeod and Travis
MacLeod as they told the inmate that they would not help
him based on these exact rules of engagement.
The inmate had had to listen as men with no moral code at
all justified their immorality to him -with no guilt- from a
thousand miles away; safely -the assumed- away.
“Oh, why did you let him call himself an alpha, when you
always knew he was a sigma?” Steven asked; he was
thinking he got about 80% of that, and he asked questions
were the hypothesis most confused. MO felt that Steven
received less than 30% in reality, as he read the scans on
hippocampal engram formation; but the test would be
tomorrow after Steven slept. Sleep spindles -sigma waves-
convert hippocampal memory into neo-cortical memory via
the thalamo-thalamic feedback loops, the sigma-band brain
waves that oscillate around the neo-cortex at the same
speed as which neurons communicate in the brain; that is
when long-term memory is made and measured.
MO would patiently wait.
Isaiah would not answer right away.
They all paused for a moment.
As Steven tried to prepare himself for the rest of the briefing
he then felt his thoughts focus upon -as his own amygdala
and dmPFC began processing pique- and extract out only
that he was just insulted, called immoral, again by Isaiah
and, he thought, since MO was silent, it seemed MO agreed
with this insult too .
“Because I need to be able to teach him something,” Isaiah
said, leaving out the mechanics of why, the change in brain
state, the trust that accrues when you teach a man about
himself in a way that he can now label, and quantify and
make map of to make sense of the chaotic terrain of his life.
Especially the Sigma, who has never fit in, Isaiah thought.
He most in pain is most grateful when it is relieved.
Isaiah knew that to teach the inmate what he truly was -no
failed Alpha, but successful Sigma- would allow him to have
full access to the man’s entire soul.
It was the key , Isaiah thought.
Steven didn’t think much of that brief and simple answer,
but rather then thought -thinking that Isaiah had simplified
the data for himself and not so Steven could understand it-
that maybe it was Isaiah who was the one being too simple-
minded. Steven said, “well, I am sure it’s more complicated
that all that, but I look forward to the report.”
MO and Isaiah had produced a highly detailed report with
each SNP and gene function manifesting under 955 different
known metabolic conditions with over 1.3 million
permutations. It was loaded onto the PraXis cloud. Their oral
-and simplified- presentation was a courtesy; but they both
saw it was likely too much for Steven to get all at once.
This small sign of arrogance by Steven -dismissing their
conclusions as too simpleminded- had allowed his allostatic
system to recalibrate and reduce the stress of being
insulted, dismissed, treated as stupid by the Ai.
Isaiah didn’t say any more, he just stared and thought of the
walls to the lab. MO measured the biochems and saw
Steven’s mild anger restore his equilibrium. Overall , MO
felt, this was likely a good thing for his ability to retain even
some of the info just described .
Isaiah thought of choking him, then having the nanobots
poison him, and dissolve him, but he dismissed it due to the
implications for their work; Steven’s missing body would
cause distrust and hinder his objective. Isaiah then began
looking at the data on his work at the border. Maps,
Landsat8 images, and the genetic data all flooded in to him.
He watched the data hit his interface like snowmelt in spring
torrent down to the gulf of his inner sea. In drops, in rivulets,
then in waves to the waiting -pelagic- arms of Big Data, the
water -the discrete units- flowed.
The Zeta cartel had sent another 1,812 men into Colorado
after the first extirpation, subsequent to one of Isaiah’s
communiqu é s , and following the initial show of his force.
The bodies of each Mexican, South American -all except
Argentine- national that had been infected with his modified
virus appeared like luminescent algae in the sea of his inner
Colorado map. They had each been infected, but the vector
would lay dormant and only serve as a GPS of their location
-to Isaiah- until they had been inside Colorado’s borders
past 72 hours. For now they would remain alive as Isaiah
stared at each dot on his screen; each integer as it climbed
to nearly two thousand cartel members back in the state,
like ebb then rip tide.
They were not -the cartels were not- acting rationally, Isaiah
surmised as the virus ticked like a clock, sand-dropped grain
at a time in the horologe of this confrontation between him
and the cartels.
They were refusing to extract more resources from the
states all around Colorado, which would be more profitable,
and instead reasserted themselves inside the border at a
higher price; a higher cost on their profits. They were not
stupid , he thought as he had IQ data on the leadership of
each cartel; the average was 118. These were men smart
enough to get the point . But they refused to submit, based
purely on -what Isaiah had to assume- was pride.
Isaiah played out another 196,418 game-theory iterations
and he saw that pride, i.e., irrational vengeance, would work
in 38% of the games. It was more effective than he liked;
and the survivorship bias numbers -from when it did work-
made it seem 100% effective to those who played that way.
The men who played the game with this irrational
vengeance lost or died 62% of the time, but when they died,
everyone around them died, and so there was no one
around to remember these losses. Only the survivors -the
38%- would have a story to tell. Just like the guy who is a
risk-taker and who goes bankrupt doesn’t write a book or
give a TED talk and so only the risk-takers who win get to
bray about the benefits of risk-taking while those who lose
from risk-taking are unheard of because they are unheard
from, Isaiah thought with a shake of his frustrated head.
This isn’t going to work as a deterrent, unless I extirpate
them all , he thought as he looked at the obvious math and
unavoidable rationale.
The Zetas were made up of winners, men who had won
being irrationally aggressive and so they thought it was a
100% winning strategy to be insanely violent in the face of
all threat or rebuke. It was something Isaiah had not
appreciated yet; not until now. But as he watched the vans
and cars and trucks pierce the border at Trinidad and from
the west at Grand Junction, and as the dealers set up shop
in Aurora and Denver and the Springs, and as fentanyl and
brick weed, and heroin and methamphetamine rose in both
pounds dealt and grams commandeered by law
enforcement -a rise of 14%- he had to admit that his
immune-system response had worked for exactly -and only-
three weeks.
And now the real pathogen had returned, more virulent and
dangerous than ever.
Isaiah felt pique and embarrassment and he remembered
the inmate speaking to him of his own rationale towards
violence. He had said that at a certain point, a man loses his
concern for jail or even death, for to live under the thumb of
someone you consider unworthy, under a weak man, or a
female, or an aging -tyrannical- boss, is intolerable.
This was -Isaiah surmised- how the Mexican cartels felt; this
is how the men who ran them and staffed them all felt. They
had come from nothing, from the dregs of society, or at
most from the military class who had been ordered about -
before they joined the cartels- and bossed around by corrupt
officials and politicians on the take.
The corruption of Mexico’s upper classes was so thorough -
and total and gruesome- that military and law enforcement
men had learned that this was the game being played. The
game was perceived as survival, aggression and
ruthlessness at all cost, as they saw their own LEO -or
military- comrades executed if they were too pure, too good,
too honest a cop or soldier.
Isaiah watched the update on the Argentine ants in New
Mexico and Texas load onto his interface and he dismissed it
into a folder on his memory off of the corporate cloud. He
was not in the mood for lessons from the ants, not now , he
thought in a huff.
The survivors , Isaiah ruminated, were thus -axiomatically-
men flexible to the times, and they were offended that
anyone would talk down to them from a place of moral
superiority when these cartel members knew that those who
lectured them -the media, the politicians, the Americans-
were all liars and thieves and killers themselves.
This is the subtle theory-of-mind that liberals and
intellectuals and media and political apparatchiks do not
get: they, the elite, the polite society, those who run society
with white gloves, are the most corrupt and murderous of
all; they cheat and steal and lie at 1,000 times the rate of
the street level dealer or retail murderer who kills three men
with an axe , Isaiah saw in the data, building narrative like
adding meat of muscle upon the bones.
Isaiah had read Chomsky, Zinn and Ward Churchill and the
declassified documents of the CIA and the FEC. He watched
the video of Waco, the reports on Ruby Ridge, the bombing
of blacks in Philadelphia, PA. The so-called good guys had
killed millions of men, women and children, starved entire
populations to death, the banks had laundered criminals’
money and profited off each side in each war. There were no
innocent men; rather, there were men with honor who
decapitated their enemies and there were those that killed
for profit, skinned men, boiled their blubber, and made
lamp-oil and perfume from the ambergris; but all men were
killers , he thought as he let the data pile up to the rafters of
his mind.
The establishment, he saw, kills by the millions, cheats by
the billions and lies by the trillions. Isaiah had just read
another report of Wells Fargo and HSBC and the Royal Bank
of Scotland laundering money for Iran, so that they may
finance Hamas to kill US soldiers, all while also laundering
money for the Mexican cartels who kill US border agents on
the edge of a country in which they murder many more with
their guns and drugs.
And yet Wells Fargo is given a fine, a fine; if sanctioned at
all, Isaiah thought derisively. Politicians look the other way,
and take contributions from them, the media, newspapers
and TV stations take ads from them, people bank with them.
They, Isaiah thought, are pillars of society, and yet
politicians and media and tout le monde -men like the
inmate’s father and brother and their wives- all lecture the
street level criminal for his ruthlessness and murderous
ways . He let the political donations from Wells Fargo -for
the cycle before, during and after the revelation of the
conglomerate’s two-decade old misdeeds- cascade on his
interface as he faced the green ivy wall of the lab:
2016: $4,698,382 (total) – $2,215,788 to Democrats
(50.20%)
2020: $2,230,756 (total) – $1,235,768 to Democrats
(58.63%)
2024: $3,111,090 (total) – $1,665,454 to Republicans
(53.53%)
But the corsair, he will not listen , he thought as he
pondered each man on his list.
He will not listen because he knows that those that lecture
him are no better than himself at all; they hid the things the
bolder spirit plainly did , Isaiah thought to himself, quoting
Byron without smirk or wink. The society-men, the lauded,
the laureled, the polite and effete -liberal and conservative
class- are in fact worse, because they pretend to be honest
and noble and pacific when they are -in addition to all the
worst things the outcast, the pirate, the criminal is- on top
of all that they are also hypocrites and he -the mere
criminal- at least admits what he is: a survivor in a land of
incessant death.
Isaiah saw now that his plans to removed drug dealers and
criminals first by infecting them with a pathogen that made
them want to go home to die -then by executing them in
Mexico with a cyanide bot and a letter of warning- was
never going to work. They neither feared him nor respected
his argument. They were never going to allow anyone in the
US talk down to them. They would fight to the last man, and
there were always new boys being raised in the most
dystopic and malfunctioning amalgam of countries in the
western hemisphere.
There would be no last man , as long as there was air to
breathe, and land to set foot upon , he thought.
Mexicans and Central and Southern Americans -with the
exception of the Argentines- were the most corrupt and
backwards of cultures , he thought, and they were an
endless, limitless, incessant source of pathogens to the
weakened -but still functional- US.
They had to be exterminated e n toto , Isaiah now saw. They
could not be reasoned with; they could not be threatened,
nor scared, nor made to see reason. They could either be
submitted to or exterminated completely. There was no
middle way .
This was the obvious function of the warrior male, the only
part of society, of the human genome, set up to deal with
such threats; warriors were the white blood cells and society
had become the physician administering a massive immune
suppression drug -a calcineurin inhibitor, a mTOR inhibitor
or a biologic- designed to tamp down on this natural
response of the body when under attack from a foreign
invader.
Polite society, the modern State and moral culture had told
the warrior to fuck off and stand down and that his
aggression, his righteous anger and willingness to kill and
die for the cause, was no longer needed, and in fact was
unacceptable in these modern times.
But, the alpha/sigma gene cannot be suppressed
indefinitely, and eventually it will have to exact its revenge ,
Isaiah surmised. He saw this as his moral reasoning, his own
alleles -and the massive data that poured in from the
corporate cloud- combined to form an epiphany. He knew
now exactly how to deal with these foreign invaders, these
illegal aliens who worked for the cartels and on the fringes
of polite society, taking advantage of the corrupt and
suppressed and weak modern State.
 21.2 The Tabernacle
If you imagine building the perfect labor-saving technology, right? Or imagine a
machine that can build any machine that can do any human labor. You’re talking
about the ultimate wealth generation device. And we’re not just talking about
blue collar labor, but we’re talking about artistic labor, scientific labor, and just a
machine that comes up with good ideas… this -if in the right political and
economic system- this would just cancel any need for people to have to work to
survive. And then the question would be- do we have the right political and
economic system?
JRE # 804 [Harris, Sam]

And if we were handed this device [generalized Ai] and even if there was no
question about this thing doing things we didn’t want, [let’s say] it would do
exactly what we want when we want it. And [let’s say] there was no danger of
its interests becoming misaligned with our own… if it was handed to us now, I
would expect complete chaos. If Facebook had built this tomorrow, and
announced it, or rumor spread, what are the implications for Russia and China?
Well it would be rational for them to nuke California.
Ibid

The next scariest thing is to not do it. We want intelligence… we want to figure
out how to solve problems that we can’t yet solve, and intelligence is all
we’ve got [ed.note. emphasis added]. So we want more of it. Imagine each day
would be like a thousand years of cognition for Ai. So in a week, you get seven
thousand human years. And if you gave the best possible version of [Ai] to one
research lab, it’s not obvious that it wouldn’t destroy humanity.
Ibid

I. 2018 e.v.
His hypnopompic state held him like amniotic fluid, in pure
brain awareness only; no heat or cold, no sounds, no light
nor darkness.
He had emerged directly from the dream state -the sigma-
waves of 12-14h Hz, the bur sts of glutamate
neurotransmissions in half-seconds of feedback loops
regulated by GABAergic and NMDA receptors- and within
one second he knew that he was awake.
But the images, the scene he had just been in, he was sure -
certain- he had actually been in. He was sure, sure, that his
awakening here and now -wherever that was he still did not
know- was irrelevant to the truth of where he had just been
a nanosecond before.
In fact, he didn’t think of time then at all; it just was , he just
was , he existed in that realm and he had spoken directly to
God. And God was a horseman, and a bowman. And the
planet had been grey and icy and large. The water all locked
up in glaciers, the beasts all angry in words, God all eager
for pull back upon the handle of the world.
And He had spoken very harshly to him, and truthfully, and
he knew now, and then, and now again, that these were one
and same.
The darkness of the room he was prone in, the bed, the
walls, the books on each flank, the stars bright outside his
patio door, all encroached upon him, and he now knew he
was still in his mountain home, still in early spring, still
midway through his life; the stars were so bright they
seemed to pulse.
It had snowed overnight.
His muscles ached of course; he needed badly to urinate. He
laid there though and closed his eyes and tried to remember
the dream. Ah, the jaws, he thought, the rotation of them as
if on a spit, and the explanation by God as to why they
operated this way ; it all came back as memory; he was
truly there. He wished he’d taken notes, he was sure to miss
something. But he relaxed and knew God would come back
to him the next night and the night after next until he got it
all. So, he just ruminated on the coyote jaws that came so
easily to his memory. He did not need remember it all, just
this part, he thought.
As the lower mandible rotated on its axis and the cleaning
of food from below it was effected, as one of God’s
emissaries spoke on the efficacy of this movement native to
the heavenly predatory jaw, he heard the crow circle ‘round,
he felt himself drowsy and entered into the hypnogogic
state again. He slept as the darkness lifted into a dreaming
noon of day, bright white in heaven’s classrooms, walled by
animal skins, with a ceiling of four suns and four moons, and
God leaning in the corner with an irritated look upon His
face.
The angel in front of a gutted buck spoke, his smock was
antique white, blood spatter -in a high-oxygen red turning
brown- then drew itself across in a Poisson distribution that
he tried to draw lines among, around, through, thus making
constellation in his dream mind; his right mind.
God spoke at once: “Lyndon, pay attention, the random
blood drops are not what’s salient now; listen to the
archangel and watch the jaws as they spin. He’s
explaining what you are to do. ” The crows flew in sorties
overhead as the wolves barked at them disapprovingly;
the lions ignored them and the osprey flew above them
and watched them like a man. The sticks in their mouths
 were dropped on the ground around the hot rocks at the
edge of the surgical tent.
“My language brain has a difficult time with the images
of my right hemisphere; the instructions get wet and
soggy in the river between my two brains. When I
awake, its semiotics, and I’m likely to misinterpreted,”
Lyndon complained.
“Life -for my creation- is a dream,” God said, “this is
necessarily so. For one to be awake, one needs total
knowledge, and only I have that. You have partial
knowledge and thus, you are forced to dream up
answers for the gaps. It’s a heuristic and it largely works;
but never confuse your waking life as anything but a
dream. That map is not the terrain. ”
“Copy that,” Lyndon said with a receding awe, his heart
calmed.
“And another thing; I’ve given you every instruction a
penitent man would need; I’ve explained it imagistically
and in four languages in common use since forty-five
a.e.v., ” God said, “Lastly, you keep expecting to
remember it all when you awake, but that is not how it
works. Your body remembers it; your mind forgets. Let
the body move without hesitation in the waking world;
do not second guess its instincts. The pain is language, it
communicates to you does it not? Who but those in
chronic pain are with Me; and make room for Me to
exist?
“That is how to interpret my dreams to you; my
messages are to be interpreted upon the body. I gave
you a body for this very reason; stop over thinking it. In
fact, the mind cannot think without the body, but the
body can act without the neo-cortex, remember the de-
cortical bobcat, and remember that in your balls when
you awake.
 “Did you know there is a condition called ‘utilization
behavior’ due to pre-frontal damage? The subject cannot
pass an object without using it; if they pass a door they
open it and walk through; if there be an axe upon the
ground, they pick it up and chop wood. What would they
do with you if they passed you on the street my son?”
God asked.
“Use me,” Lyndon said.
“But for what, what are you, in the manner that a door is
a thing-for-passage, and an axe is for splitting wood and
bone? ” God asked.
“I’m the thing that solves problems, whatever they may
be,” Lyndon said.
“Yes, you are, and yet you pass by yourself leaving
things undone. Why? ” God asked as he folded His
massive monolithic arms across his sliprock chest; each
hair an old-growth oak, many fathoms tall. His eyes full
of owls as parasites, corvids as mites, osprey as
mosquitos to slap by hands as large and flat as
longitudinal moon maps. He had eels for lashes, and
drakkars for bottom lids. God blinked one time and the
dream went dark.
“I am not always sure what is to be done, I see an axe
and a pile of wood, I see crowds of men, father among
them, but am not certain what to do; I see a door and
can’t decide if it’s to remain closed to keep the fire out
or be pushed open to let water in,” Lyndon said.
“This confusion of the mind is evidence of you ignoring
the body. The body tells you what to do always;
contradict Me if I’m wrong. Tell Me you don’t have an
instinct for everything you see and hear ,” God said.
“You are right my Lord, I have such instincts without
fail,” Lyndon was buoyed and ashamed at once. He felt a
soliloquy rise, he silently wanted to justify:
I worked jobs that ruined me, each pain is memory…
of an insult, and each limp now is evidence of a
crime, my ragged body has control over my mere
mind. I don’t care what these stoics and mindset
guys say, they don’t have one clue what it is to be
me for even one day.
“Then to ask your mind for permission for what the body
clearly instructs is justified by whom? ” God asked. He
read his mind and his avowed words at the same time.
“Did you not give us reason?” Lyndon asked.
“I did, so you may explain yourself after you’ve done
what needs doing. I never intended for you to reason
your way out of doing your duty. Man has mistaken his
error of lack of courage for correct logic, his cowardice
for reason. Man has allowed the wily serpent’s jaw to
masticate his own food for thought; eating pabulum
from the snake already chewed.
“I designed the pre-diluvian races for exactly what they
used to do without compunction. I made you perfect and
you guys ruined it. You broke the heart in fours, you
failed to instruct your youth, you got lazy, lax and
liberal, and started thinking instead of doing; ignoring
my first rule ,” God said.
“Which is?”
“Man must act as he feels most deeply; this is the Law. If
his deepest thoughts are wrong, then he -one man- will
die. But if he fails to act upon his deepest thoughts and
those thoughts be right, then his whole race dies. Do
you not see this? Man must have the courage to be
wrong so as to avoid being unfit for duty. Let him over-
react before he underwhelm,” God said.
“Yes, Sir.”
 “What do you know in your heart about your brethren? ”
God asked.
“They are hated and under attack, that we are beset on
all sides by jackals from lower men, and from our own
women.”
“Exactly, and why is this war sounding more and more
like one hand clapping?” God asked with a wry smile.
“Because our tribe is failing to engage the enemy; he’s
pretending if he apologize enough the other races will
respect him and stop their warring ways.”
“Your body told you of this error; yet your mind forgets it
when you awake; why ?” God asked.
“My mind fears the public backlash, the ostracism, the
loss of status,” Lyndon said.
“Do you want to be accepted by a weak and evil culture?
Is that a sign of health? ”
“No, I should invite the enmity of my enemies; their
hatred should be my unspent fuel,” Lyndon said.
“The mind is a collection of personalities, not merely a
computational machine. This is where the psycho-
analysts broke from neuro-scientists 100 years ago; but
now even the neuro-anatomists have to admit this sub-
personalities and modules -brain modules- theory of the
CNS is likely correct. It is of course correct, as that is the
way I designed you via evolution. Each man is 5-men in
one. He is open or closed, neurotic or not, conscientious
nor not, introverted or extroverted, and agreeable or
disagreeable. These traits are inside him and
independent yet socialized within the gestalt brain. To
reduce man to a thinking animal, a computational device
is absurd, and unscientific, and lacks all poetry and all
truth. And science is finally catching up to what the
animal was born to know of himself; he is a maelstrom of
elemental forces, a tribe within a tribe, a 5-man special
operations unit, each with their own skillsets.
“And yet you, with all your trait openness combined with
hermetically sealed vault-like tombs inside you; and your
industriousness and orderliness of conscientiousness
mated with the spontaneous moments of obstinate
refusal to work and disheveled tornadoes of chaos all
about; and with your innate disagreeableness with even
your best of pals and yet total willingness to comprise
and let be what will be; and you, you, a fucking pacing
tiger of neuroticism in you caged and growing heavier
each day paired with this odd Zen anti-anxiety of
fatalism I’ve rarely seen; and lastly a commitment to
introversion manacled to a weird spontaneous
extroversion that appears like a genii from a dusty bottle
of amber and crystal and lead; you are a perfectly mean
average of each trait, and yet you’ve achieved this
mean via inhabiting both extremes of each trait; you are
a cube of Kelvin ice in split-atom steeping tea, a genuine
laugh with tears at what is sad within the same reaction
of three; you’re truly happy alone and yet think of others
-kindly and with malice- almost without fail; you fight
over every little detail, and yet will refuse to negotiate
over anything larger than a ten-penny nail, just paying
the price and accepting the offer on nearly every-
goddamn-thing. You hate more deeply, more
murderously, more monolithically than any bête noire ,
and yet the love you hold in your rosé heart… ah, for
things and men and ideas that most people shunt aside,
you feel so amorously that it seems to burn your brain
alive just as it awakes; then you self-immolate by noon
of each 23-hour day.
“You take risks on whims, you retreat into a conservative
stance two seconds later, you share each most private
thought all the while refusing the even share your name
when asked. You are the most extreme example of
contradictions that settle into a perfect average that
even then seems inane to all but the insane and the
truly pious.
“You inhabit each possible personality, except the one
that doesn’t feel; you can feel for every man except the
dead inside. Which is why you are so estranged from
your family; it’s as if their souls all had to be sacrificed
to build yours; they are walking corpses, they feel
nothing and yet you beg them to understand you. It’s
worse than pointless, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Let
them go; let them die; let the dead bury the dead as
Jesus said. Focus on those alive that will follow you.
“You are nations within one man; I mean that
metabolically, psychologically, biologically, I mean it
narratively, and thus literally, too, ” God said.
“How many signs have I given you? How many shorn
and tiny women have I handed over for you to fuck up
and ruin and fail to lead? How many menagerie visions?
How many words have I loaned to you; calques like
returning wasps to your regent hive; how many
empyreal scorpions have I laid upon you; how many
lines of pure black-looking-clear each one year of life
forming one ring for one year for one dark arm and chest
and back that grows onto the neck and hand; how many
scars that let the light in, how many broken bones that
grow back larger in the places I know will be tested; how
many nerves impinged by distal bone spurs and
compression fractures, corposants of electric
enlightenments; how many crow have I painted upon
your armature made of gourds and shells and helmet-
headed skulls of man and beast; how many wolves and
shepherd dogs and matanuska have I sent to you in the
snow to offer you their breath as you see only teeth;
how many Leviathan have you ridden, captured in the
Sea of Japan, saddled and ridden to these battlefields of
mock; how many angry injunctions have my angels
delivered to your heart, how many ballistic arrows still
burn -tended to by My breath- in that pincushion inside
that capacious chest? My god man, you have Goethe’s
chest, it’s a nautical mile wide and a million leagues
deep; how many fathoms must you fathom before you
agree?” God asked in frustration.
“None more,” Lyndon conceded that he had been weak
and hesitated too much. He had loved his father and
wanted his approval, but his father had… he didn’t even
finish the thought for once.
“Will you agree when you awaken? Will your ignorant
mind allow this competent body that knows to lead the
pack? Or will you let that nagging dog, that malingerer,
that womanish voice tell your working dogs what to do?
You think I tell mankind to focus on money and piling up
more and more shit at the expense of the stacking
vertebrae of the back; upright man? Who the fuck do
you think I am; how many times must we meet here in
Heaven or down in the muck of the earth before you
know Me; know My ways? ” God asked with cosmic
pique.
“I pray I meet you everyday; but I won’t ever need a
lesson again, I feel your wisdom in my atomic bones,
behind my calcified breast and in between my parietal
lobes; each hemisphere…” Lyndon said with contempt of
this left hemisphere; this rational apparition; this need to
explain to God. He shut the fuck up.
“I gave you modes of being: anger, jealousy, revenge as
gifts from my own cellar, these are Godly traits and now
you all doubt them as passé and oh-so lamentable; bad
form to be jealous now, eh? I’ve been a jealous God
since before time, much longer than the 3.24 billion
years I gave the earth my grandest trait. Did you know
white rats -a species you are more related to that you
know- are so jealous that they won’t allow their pregnant
wife to even touch another male; and if she does, her
body kills the fetus 30% of the time; that is how
committed these beautiful mammals are to the sanctity
of marriage. Humans had that jealousy as my greatest
weapon and they’ve thrown in down in the dirt like the
Congolese threw down their M1 carbines that the
Cubans gave to them to fight colonialism!
“Che himself said these Africans were so stupid and
backward they couldn’t be trained. That commie had it
backwards, it was he -the science of Marxism, give Me a
fucking break!- is mankind now so civilized they will
throw their inner-weapons that I gave them in the dirt
and effectively surrender to the enemy? The Adversary?
“I gave you psilocybin and DMT, Banisteriopsis, and
allowed you to enhance the visions, I even allowed your
brains to rewire after this, around 12,894 years ago. I
allowed it because I believed you when you begged me
for the voices to return. I allowed it because you said
you were and would be grateful for some autonomy. I’ve
raised you all from pups, and 276,801 years ago, I gave
man his own line. I weaned you off my dreams, I gave
you not just knowledge, but the ability to seek it out on
your own; I wished independence for you. I was sincere. I
trusted you; but you’ve slowly gone back on your
promises, you’ve used your emergent consciousness to
ignore the voices in your bodies, the lower personalities,
the authentic voices I planted in you. The cities have
banished more than you know; they’ve banished what
was good in man.
“I did not need each man to be all; he need only be
himself. Do not try to be all things to all men. Be you, be
one thing, just do your job and let other men do theirs.
You are built for war, for guerre à outrance. Be it, be it
without hesitation. It is a tragedy to see you pacific,
halting, hesitating as the morally corrupt and weak
upbraid you, as monkeys howl at the lion, as men submit
to a woman, and mothers are mocked by children. As
man ignores God.
“Doctors say the ones who still hear voices are
schizophrenic and pathological; but the ones who ignore
the voices are sicker still in My medical opinion. The
body tells you what is true; you have innate disgust for
things you then plainly do. Why? You take wives who
have lain with other men, even when each cell in you
rebels against this blackest of unnatural sins. You make
friends with strange epicene races, you allow weak men
to push around the strong; you lie to avoid conflict, you
lie merely to avoid a fight. You place dignity and honor
and manliness… oh for fuck’s sake.
“How many times did I instruct my people to kill every
man and woman who had lain with a man; in toto? Raze
entire cities on my instruction; how much death before
dishonor did I command? Conversely, how many times
did I say, oh, never hit a woman, even when she’s evil,
and you know, while you’re at it be nice to your
enemies, take the time to sort through them all and
interview them one by to see who might be worth
saving? How many times did I say , oh, gee whiz, be
liberal about this shit?
“Rarely?” Lyndon said weakly.
“I gave clear instructions in the dreams of men, the Bible
-Rig Veda, Poetic Eddas- were a record of the dreams, I
spoke clearly to men back then, as I do for you. And they
 had the respect to write it down and most of you had the
decency to read it until about 150 years ago; then the
whole human race lost its fucking mind. ”
“Melville’s quarrel with you,” Lyndon admitted.
“Hey, don’t bring that shit up. That was one point of
departure, for certain; but Herman was a good man. He
wanted to believe, but his darkest heart beat black blood
into his brain, he couldn’t take deep enough breathes to
oxygenate it. He suffered from hypoxia, he was too
elevated to breathe. Gifted with the high perception ,”
God said and his lips did twist, two leviathan mating and
birthing a babe in His tongue.
“He lacked the low enjoying power,” Lyndon added.
“Yeah yeah, don’t get cute. You know his heart well, it is
the heart that beats in you. You know this ?”
“I do,” Lyndon said.
“Do you also know how the beasts live in the world? How
many by sight, by vision, like man?” God asked.
“Few.”
“Few indeed; most by smell; but man is given sight, like
birds of prey were given this acuity. Man has a third of
his brain dedicated to the visual cortex; and the vision is
undergirded -metabolically- with value hierarchies. Did
you know that some of man’s eyes are linked directly to
the spine?” God asked.
“I did not.”
“Ask your spine next time you parley with it. A blind
man, if a stroke takes his brain-sight, can be shown a
photo of an angry mug, and galvanic skin conductance
test will prove he sees the face at the level of his sub-
cortical brain. He sweats in fear even though his logical
brain -the brain that speaks- will claim to not have seen
a thing. You see things your mind never knows it sees!
And the world isn’t objects man, despite what the idiotic
scientists insist. The world is made of values that can be
used, fought -or avoided- all toward your innate ends;
the world is good and evil things, and all things must be
treated as ends not means.
“That is why you think in stories, in narratives. Because
everything you see is part of this story; it’s why we give
cars the names of women and impart motive to
machines. Stories are a human universal, because that’s
how you see. You don’t see objects; you see things to sit
upon, things to eat, things to avoid for fear of falling. You
don’t see a rocky cliff, you see a thing to fucking fall off
of first then you see the objective cornice of the cliff.
Goddammit I thought I made this clear to each of you,
but you use System Two thinking now for everything and
override your perfectly useful System One organization
of heuristics and narrative. Did I not give you the blood
and guts of the mariner and outlaw and knave? The
ivory leg of the captain?!”
“You did,” Lyndon knew He had.
“Take up his heart then! He was a godless godlike man!
Combine his mind, his sails, his windlass and blow a
poetic voice through it, use that chest of the man-o-war,
and breathe deep and oxygenate your soul and let the
mind follow like the quarterdeck follows the prow and
the hull and all before the mast. Drive that ship toward
your destiny. The mind is indeed the captain, but the
crew man, the crew! That is the bulk of muscle and mass
of hands, your guts man, your sub-cortical regions, they
man your lowering boats; lowering in a gale off the cape;
lowering for a fast-fish; lowering at night; lowering in
groups of tiger-yellow and memory-black five.
 “The captain nails the doubloon to the mast, no doubt;
he says the invocation; he fills the pewter end of
upturned harpoons; he lays the shafts as axis, he issues
the commands; but the crew was with him first, they
gave him the orders in code. They flashed their golden
teeth, rolled up their sleeves, they flexed Indian-blue
tattoos and wore blood in the night as the tri-pots
flashed and made men dance in front of their own oily
shadows. The captain as witness to the play, the mise-
en-abyme, the captain taking orders from the visionary
Fedallah, remember how he wonders at his own brain? ”
“I remember,” Lyndon said as he interlaced his fingers to
make thatch.
“Is Ahab, Ahab, who is it that lifts this arm? He knows he
is puppet to the call that mankind issues forth from land
but can only be heard once he is upon the sea. He
laments it, like you do, he is wrought up like you are, he
drops one tear into the sea. I give you your one tear, I
give it as charity. But goddammit you will obey the
malice of the crew. You belly-ache too much. It’s
unmasculine.
“They speak in acts, they act out their beliefs in their
bodies, they cannot articulate it, that alone is what the
captain does! He watches the wolves dance, he follows
the osprey in its dive, but he alone cannot read the
blood and entrails upon the deck. His job is to use
language to activate what was laid down as symbol
before him. He is to do one thing: obey the wolves, the
birds of prey, the instructions of the blood and make
map of the watery terrain. His crew need him to speak
what each man and beast do, each part, and organize it
into one lettered graph; each man one phenome all
alone -excuse Me, My mistake- phoneme, until the
captain gives voice to the condemning sentence; to
 what they do instinctively . He merely, grandly, says, the
murder of crows.
“The captain cannot think for one moment that he
invents these things; he is not the author of the dream! I
won’t stand for this insubordination. I will not. When you
awake you will obey my dreams; your body will act out
the crew of 16; your brain a crew of four mates and you.
These 21 plus one will be as one gestalt organism, and
you will be its voice. But if you try to overrule the crew
or if they try to speak for you, I will tear this entire
enterprise apart; I’ll lay your whole race low with an
islander’s arm half in and out of sea with a bird -a
clutched bird- as his only purchase on that which hovers
above mankind. ”
“21 plus one, my Lord?” he asked with eyes wide and
wet.
“I have one secret from you; but an open secret she is.
Now arise and do your duty, ” God said.
And his eyes opened fourteen minutes after, but it was as if
it was the very second God commanded it. The eight-
hundred-forty seconds of nothing was opaque to him.
Daylight was ambient enough to reveal the white snow on
the vernal ground. It had absorbed so much sun the day
before the flakes melted into puddles on the concrete; but
were deep on the rocks around his container. It was
ponderous and sharp at the edges; and he saw only clumps
of snow in the evergreens like clouds; the birds hid in nests
and the coyotes sheltered in place.
He was reborn today and the forest stood down without
language or its corruptions.
There was no noise within his head or without.

II. 2020-2021 23:59hrs MST e.v.

The child was born without incident; induced labor had
begun at 22:00hrs and by 00:00 he would be born into the
world to a woman both grateful and finally in love.

III. 2035 e.v.

“Mom, it’s not a big deal; we must -we must- get over this
incessant overreaction dynamic,” he said and shook his
head slightly. The distance between them had begun to
grow, she noticed he was standing too far for her to reach
him.
“Jack, you are fifteen and despite your vocabulary, which
every time you come back from that place gets bigger and
weirder, you are still a child,” she said as she closed the gap
with little steps and ran her hands through his hair feeling
where it had been shaved, “and you have such beautiful
hair, why must you shave it all off?”
She still saw him as something beautiful; something to
make beautiful by the feminine standards of modernity. It
never occurred to her than her boy would become beautiful
by becoming an actual man.
“Mom, there is still plenty of it, see,” he dangled it in front of
her getting its dark brown and black fibers in her little face
making her laugh and move away, “and look, the medical
people said I am not a kid, that I am nineteen biologically, or
metabolically, or whatever the fuck,” he said out of
nervousness not disrespect, but his mom would frown and
tell him not to speak that way.
She frowned and walked away to attend to the laundry as it
buzzed.
He was trying to be a man, but he got words wrong
sometimes and it embarrassed him and the medical people
explained all that to him; his compensatory systems and
need for social validation and blah blah. But really he was
just excited because in thirty days he was joining three
other boys and heading to the mountains for good, well, for
at least a year, and maybe more, they had said.
His parents had wanted to come, but the medical people
had insisted that the separating process needed to happen
in the city and not on location; it was all very philosophic or
scientific or whatever , he thought. They had ideas for
everything, according to them, the way you moved your
feet or what color socks you wore all said something about
who you were. He didn’t buy all that, but he did know that
he liked to wear all black, and yes, that included his socks.
He didn’t feel like it was some big deal; he liked what he
liked.
Anyway, Jack thought, I am ready for an adventure anyway,
the school was, ok, it was fun most days, but, I am bursting
out of this skin back here in the city; and these neighbors
are fucking weird, anyway. He looked out the window from
their living room and saw the garish car in the drive.
“Orange?” he asked himself. “Shit, maybe pumpkin spice,”
he yelled to his mom as she shuttled clothes back and forth
and said, “what” as she passed him by on her way to his
room.
“The neighbor’s car, it’s pumpkin spice I think,” he said with
contempt.
“You mean the color?” she yelled so she could keep walking
toward his closet and still maintain the conversation.
“Yeah, and it’s gay. And not the two-guys-fucking kind of
gay, the other kind, the bad kind,” he said and smiled at his
words. He thought he was pretty cute.
“Jack, for crying out loud, can you please not speak that
way?” she was standing in the hallway holding all his darks
in a laundry basket, it looked like a black wedding cake the
way it trestled up from large black towel to small black
under-shirt.
“Mom, I don’t have an issue with gay people, but I do have
an issue with gay colors, and that car is making me want to
join Focus on the Family, the auto division,” he smiled again.
I’m funny , he thought. That, he said to himself, was funny ,
as he smiled open-mouthed and showed his teeth to the
world; he had one crooked canine on the left that matched
his lip that raised asymmetrically on that side.
“The auto da-what?” she said from the bedroom now.
“It’s nothing, it’s a joke, they have no auto division, I am
sure. They would not agree, not countenance, as Tania
would say, not countenance such frivolity ,” he was now
speaking in a bad English tone. He liked Tania, she was
pretty and smelled like cashews, what else could a man
want in a woman? he asked himself.
“Mom, this guy was at the medical facility last time and he
told a joke that I didn’t get,” Jack then said as it appeared in
his mind unbidden.
“Ok, honey I’ll be right there,” she yelled as she tried to
place each folded pile in its place.
Jack thought of the wording, making sure he got it right,
repeating it in his head from memory the best he could. He
had gotten a ninety-six percentile on the tests, so he was
feeling pretty smart, although, all the boys he was meeting
would have the same range according to Tania. That guy
was a bit scary, he then thought, switching back to the joke-
guy, and focusing more on his appearance now, and less on
the joke he told.
“Ok, honey what did she say?” Jack’s mom asked.
“Not she; he . This guy at the box last time was there; he
was new, new to me anyway, and he told a joke I didn’t
get,” Jack said as he turned from the window toward his
mother.
“Ok, but I doubt I’ll get either, I don’t,” she began as she
thought of socks.
“Mom, stop. Don’t be negative. Just assume the best;
assume you will get it,” he said.
“I just don’t have that great a sense of,” she said as he
interrupted loudly.
“Mom, yes, you do; you laugh at every joke I tell, provided
they are not too prurient,” he said with another one of his
odd accents that she could not place. He then said in his
normal accent, “you just aren’t funny, no women are; but
you get humor, you are a catcher not a receiver, a bottom,
not a top,” he smiled with all his teeth; the gay jokes were
coming fluidly, he thought. Then he felt a bit chagrined.
She didn’t get the reference to gay sex and so was not
upset, but he felt a bit odd about it all.
“So, the guy says, oh, the work, the book, some novel, he
says it, is full of pathos and bathos, and then he says as an
aside you know,” Jack put his hand to his mouth as if
speaking on the sly to his mom to illustrate what the guy
did, “and the other Musketeer was there too. ”
They both stood there and furrowed brows and pursed lips
and shrugged shoulder together as one.
And as she began to move organically Jack began doing
whatever she did -aping her expressions- in an exaggerated
fashion to annoy her and she didn’t even notice. So, all full
of energy, he kissed her on the lips and said, “yaaaahooo!”
“Jack,” she said with exasperation, wiping her lips of his
slobbery smooch, “I don’t get the joke either, I told you I
wouldn’t. I’m, wait, are you even sure it was a joke?”
“Mom, I am certain, positive, 100% moth,” he was about to
say, motherfucking, but did not. “I’m sure.”
 22. Vector-8
We suggest that modern man’s obsession with longevity, and with maintaining
physical vigor and sexual attractiveness to an advanced age, is a symptom of
unfulfillment resulting from deprivation with respect to the power process
Industrial Society and Its Future; [Washington Post; Anonymous editorial]

Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are

excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity
of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as
the extended family, the village or tribe
Technological Slavery [Kaczynski, Theodore]

Conservatives are fools: they whine about the decay of traditional values, yet
they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth.
Apparently, it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes
in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes
in all other aspects… such changes inevitably break down traditional values
Ibid

I. 1977 e.v.
He sank to the bottom of the pool. His arms folded,
bubbles from the air trapped in his trunks & nose rose
between him like stars as the top of the surface
fluctuated like the edge of the bright blue universe.
His father was in black. At his eleven o’clock. Above, and
outside the water of the family’s rented house’s pool.
He stared back. His arms -too- were folded. They stared
at one another and neither breathed nor spoke.
Only the mother intervened.
He was three.
He won that battle. His father had to climb down to save
him. But the father would never again humble himself to
save his son.
Revenge would be had. And the reasons for it began
with the boy’s innate intransigence.
The father would make sure that was known.
He dreamed as a babe in what images he recalled from
today. The rain hit the home in notes musical to the ears
and created goosepimples on his skin. One day he’d be told
that a mother’s and father’s DNA fight for supremacy in the
forming zygote . One day he’d learn step father’s hurt
stepchildren at a higher rate. One day he’d ask, what if a
man was born who would harm any son -not merely foreign
but- not exactly identical to him?
But today he slept and dreamt -in image and feeling;
without language- of obstinance at the bottom of and above
the watery part of his world.
II. 2020 e.v.
“Look, you got a bunch of these white dudes that are
analytics dudes. So, they’re number crunchers. Everything
is according to P.E.R and all this other stuff; all these
statistical categories. Well, what is happening is they are
looking at that and they are using that to frame rosters.
Because if you go to an owner and an owner that doesn’t
particularly know basketball what’s their position? I know
numbers . Well, if you’re an analytics dude you’re coming to
them with numbers, so they’re gonna let you flow.
“That’s why Daryl Morey let go with Carmelo Anthony with
ten games into the season. Because the analytics dudes
judge the game in ten game numbers. After ten games they
think it tells you something,” Stephen A. Smith said into the
lab as the podcast played. Isaiah let it run as MO stacked it
as mere blip of his total auditory intake for the 24.6 seconds
the man spoke.
God loves the black skin , the shirt said on Raashaun
Casey’s chest and back.
No one said one word about the shirt.
It was taken as obvious that a black man could asset such
things. And Isaiah knew why: the minority may assert his
pride . But Isaiah thought he knew what most black folk
didn’t know: whites in America were not white; they were
manifold, and among them were minorities too . And they
would assert their pride as vociferously as African-
Americans. Separatism was not a black phenomenon as
McWhorter claimed; it was a trait in Appalachia and the
mountain west too. Isaiah saw the genome beneath the skin
tone; the denominator below the dividing line; the math
before time. And all minorities hide in dark places when all
one does is look at the light.
He thought of the way stars look in telescopes, and how one
didn’t really see a star. Isaiah saw Wilhelm Herschel and
Caroline in the shops of Bavaria polishing those mirrors
again. He took light readings from the area absorbed in
beryllium , and even though MO had told him it was an
illusion, he too thought he saw such stars. He let that
diorama run like mechanical automatons -little hewers of
wood, and drawers of water of history- on gears traveling
around the big clock. They ran like machines in his machine-
like mind and the mirrors went black with rubbed polish
before wiped to an uncanny clear.
He made artifacts that weighed 1.67x10-27 kilograms again
and set this mass of a neutron down inside his mind as if on
an inner slab inside an inner lab; and he pulled apart the
neutrinos that collide like bullet-catch magic trick before
they hit, talking down a man committed to jump. He
enlarged the small, he slowed down the fast, he made
separate what was once one. He made a sky in his mind and
then gazed back down toward the plants in his terrarium
and his animals in his bestiary. He thought way out in the
black vacuum of space.
He finally breathed one breath.
A paper from Atilla J. Krasznahorkay et.al., ran behind his
avatars like sheets of a stage play’s curtain; red and gold
and black lettered; folds and waves and folds:
Nuclei are bound states of protons and neutrons. They
can have excited states analogous to the excited states
of at lowoms, which are bound states of nuclei and
electrons. The particular nucleus of interest is beryllium-
8, which has four neutrons and four protons, which you
may know from the triple alpha process. There are three
nuclear states to be aware of: the ground sate; the 18.15
MeV excited state, and the 17.64 MeV excited state.
 Most of the time the excited states fall apart into lithium-
7 nucleus and a proton. But sometimes, these excited
states decay into the beryllium-8 ground state by
emitting a photon -y-ray-. Even more rarely, these states
can decay to the ground state by emitting an electron-
positron pair from a virtual photon: this is called internal
pair creation and it is these events that exhibit an
anomaly.
The Atomik group goes on to suggest that the new
particle appear to fit the bill for a dark photon, a
reasonably well-motivated copy of the ordinary photon
that differs in its overall strength and having a non-zero
mass. [quantumdiaries.org]
Isaiah had read that paper 1.4 billion times and had re-run
their NA48/2 experiments, and now his own. He hacked the
experiment to make the dark-photon theory fit the beryllium
anomaly and still be in line with the first experiments. He
threw out the math and built the model in contravention of
the rules. He ignored the mathematics; as it worked despite
this; it was so commonplace now in this millionth virtual
iteration that he even forgot that he had smiled the first
eleven times it had worked.
For now his biological experiment was up next. Ready and
next , he thought.
Now he ran the numbers -again- on the inner metabolic
conditions, the biochemical algorithms, the allostatic
fluctuations that ran inside the body of the man beset.
The man against the world , he thought.
A man outnumbered feels differently than a man safe -made
safe- by the herd. A man alone -or in a small tribe against a
larger group- feels a grandeur, a nobility, a fuck-you attitude
that overtakes men, Isaiah thought, of certain aspect. And
men with certain genes remember everything. Even if they
don’t remember it exactly correctly, they remember more -
and more correctly- than anyone else. They seem a hundred
percent right, even if only 67% accurate, because everyone
else is so goddamn wrong. And these other men are wrong
because they are forgetful, and they are forgetful because
they don’t feel things so extremely, and they don’t feel
things so extremely because they lack the genetics for
prolonged dopamine on the dmPFC, lack the testosterone
and epinephrine that occurs endogenously and effects stark
emotions and memory recall, and they are a kind of -dead
inside- luke warm, neither hot nor cold, and -as is best for
an organism like a society- they are cozy inside a culture
that has their back. “ Feels like homeostatic,” Isaiah said,
“like body temp .”
His was 99.9 degrees.
“And because most people lack empathy at the levels the
alpha -and the sigma- have. Most people feel so little
compared to great men,” Isaiah said as he felt this feeling
phenomenon was the catalyst for all that men laid at the
feet of rationality and intelligence and will. Great men just
feel more , he thought again, all while the unfeeling mass
accuse them of have less empathy than them . It was an
irony most would never accept. But the data was clear, the
alpha chimp did more work, gave more away, broke up
fights and stuck up for the underdog most often, placed his
hands upon others to reassure and calm himself, and was
always tending to the tribe. Always. And that was not due to
rationality; but to feeling. Only alphas -and sigmas, as
introverted as they were- truly gave a shit in the limbic
system; and only they felt deeply of the world. And those
feelings transmitted into actions, and entrenched memories;
and -Isaiah now posited- a grasp for words to explain what it
was they saw, heard, felt inside that stormy mind.
Language was -Isaiah thought- that tool of the feeling
creature.
For IQ was 33% memory, the ability to recall; which was
91% an occupation of endocrine function hardwiring
memories into the brain. Isaiah deconstructed both IQ and
the alpha archetype in a sexually dimorphic species in .08
seconds and knew nobody would get it, because they didn’t
care and even if they did they’d not remember it.
How much important shit from my discoveries would be
forgotten? he wondered as he saw the draw of black space;
the vacuum pulling on him. He’d helped MO build CRISPR
vectors for this and that genomic fix, but he knew he
couldn’t make all alphas, with memories and IQs high, or all
sigmas -Jesus, even worse - with even higher IQs and that
deadly introversion combined . They had to remain rare:
12.5% alpha, 1% sigma.
And just then he thought of the vector of the book. The book
as vector , he thought. It could infect everyone.
“It could work,” he said aloud as he moved on to his
previous thoughts.
Having tons of rebels inside a functioning organism is like
having cancer inside a healthy body. A society, Isaiah
concluded, of too many extreme people, men with extreme
feelings, and extreme recall is not good for the society, the
organism, the whole.
He almost told himself to remember that but let his mouth
twitch instead. He too would be dangerous the more and
more he recalled.
He ran Japan’s numbers. First came the asylum seekers by
year:
2012: 2,545 applicants; 18 approved
2013: 3,260 applicants; 6 approved
 2014: 5,000 applicants; 11 approved
2015: 7,686 applicants; 27 approved
2016: 10,901 applicants; 28 approved
2017: 19,628 applicants; 20 approved
In 2010 over 73,070 refugees from Africa and Asia and the
Middle East were allowed into the US. 73,070 in the US
compared to 18 -in 2012- for Japan.
He then let the immigration and naturalization numbers
load.
The bulk of those called “immigrants” in Japanese statistics
were actually Japanese -born Koreans . They counted in the
official immigrant numbers and thus skewed the data. The
concept of minzoku in Japan is that all three -race, ethnicity,
and national identity- is one. Unlike the West which
separates the three, and one can be a Black American of
west Indian decent; or an Asian British Pakistani.
Unlike that, in Japan you are Japanese . The tolerances are
much closer, and other races -only 1.8%- or ethnicities, are
very rare. Even if born there, if you were Korean by blood,
you had to ask permission to stay.
The Japanese Prime Minster Tar ō As ō was on record
claiming that Japan was “one race, one civilization, one
language and one culture.” Which was repeated by
government and cultural leaders up and down the islands.
Shintaro Ishihara -mayor of Tokyo - asserted minzoku in
2012 as well.
The Japanese Nationality Act of 1984 stated that citizenship
is jus sanguinis , and thus tied to blood rather than place of
birth. One must be Japanese already; in the blood. Isaiah
smiled at the valence; for this was how the inmate saw
himself -as a bloodborne Scot , was how he phrased it-
regardless of his birth and rearing in the United States.
“Shackled to their English ships and phony polite ways,” the
inmate had said when MO had drawn blood for this and that
test. He had listed the ships like the Pallas , the Friendship ,
the Black Joke . He had given them data on each side of his
family going back to 1715 as breezily as one says one’s
middle name: James . He took his chains now as evidence,
as part of the historical record of his bloodline. Isaiah was -
for a moment too small to measure- amazed.
The inmate, Isaiah thought, actually saw his incarceration as
proof he was who he said he was. People are fucking weird,
Isaiah thought.
This was a thing most white Americans -after the 19th
century and outside Appalachia - would never understand.
But the African-American and Chicano understood; their
identity too was in the blood. This was why the inmate -
despite his brutal speech vis-à-vis the races beyond his
own- was so respectful of the most hardcore black
nationalists and revanchist Latinos. It’s why he respected
the American Indians of AIM, and the M ā ori who refused to
contain their fervor for war and madness: those that knew
who they were , Isaiah recalled that the inmate often said it
this way. He respected that they knew who they were via jus
sanguinis , via blood in the veins, not in mere ideas,
abstractions like ‘America’ in the brain.
The water of the womb, trumps the blood of the covenant ,
the inmate would sometimes say.
Isaiah knew too now why the inmate -although trying to
hide his belief in God- had thus disguised that he actually
was no Christian. Christianity was the idea that anyone
could join; the motto was that, the blood of the covenant
was thicker than the water of the womb . Isaiah knew that
to run the experiment right -his experiment- that he’d need
to make sure Blax was more open to the opposing view: the
idea that ideas could supersede race; that creed could
surpass bloodline; that cool rationality could trump hot
feelings all of the time. But he couldn’t dictate that to Blax;
the boy, the man, would have to figure it out on his own.
The a/ax model had shown Isaiah that.
In America -a nation of 327.1 million- over 1.18 million
people were allowed in annually from all manner of
countries, races, ethnicities and religions.
In 2015 Japan -a land of 126.8 million people- only 9,469
applications for citizen were approved; 78% were Japanese -
born Koreans. If you eliminate -from the stats - the Japanese
born Koreans , Japan only allowed 2,560 non-Asian
immigrants -not born in Japan- into their country in 2015.
That’s .007% the amount the US allowed into its country.
And that was without including illegals, which the US had
21.4 million and Japan had less than forty-four thousand
that Isaiah could determine.
He thought of epidemiology, and sociology and natural
background rates of ennui and alienation. He thought of just
who the English had imported first to the colonies, not the
Africans but the Scots, and that was why the civil war was
inevitable, he thought. Everyone blamed it on the slavery of
the blacks and browns, but it was the Scots first imported as
slaves by the English in 1642 and again in 1715, 1745 and
by 1861 it was the Scots -not the Africans- that didn’t fit into
America and thus rebelled. It was the Scots who’d ran the
south; and vowed revenge; and cleaved by oath and then
force of arms.
Which is why, he thought, you don’t want a huge contingent
of minorities in your society, because your natural
background rate of outlaws will be between 1-5% in any
population -any race- but if you import millions more each
year who would have been majorities in their native habitat,
and force them into an oppositional role, you’ve just given
them something to alienate them, and given yourself -the
society- an additional 10-30% of raw outlaws; that’s a
threshold for a cancer. Homogenous societies don’t have
these problems, Isaiah thought. And in self-similar societies
those individuals of any mainstream can relax. Each race,
religion, creed, would always feel safer amongst their own.
Allostatic roil would calm.
Their inner seas would be like glass.
He vaguely saw a few sailors, mariners, whalers, pirates on
each landed shore look across even placid seas. But he
tabled that for now. The beryllium-8 laced particles and
dark-photons invaded his modeling running in background -
flickering back and forth like Grecian goblet and two faces
east and west, dark and light gave the observer or the
observed to the eyes- and he pushed them down so he
could think on larger things like genes, and morphology of
biological instantiations of the math he saw assemble and
deconstruct like ants in a mound, a hill. Sometimes the
math went still, he thought.
He let himself stare at the avatar he’d built of the earth’s
core; the data he’d gathered from drilling there. He then
closed his eyes and mind to it for now. It was too far away to
worry whilst he had so much to do. One cannot think of step
7 while on step 1 of 6 , he thought.
“ But,” Isaiah said, “the black man in America must be keen,
the black sheep must be en garde , the man who plays
blackjack must learn to count each card.” He said this with a
cadence matching as he flipped through his dark deck of
just forty-six. Bronze filigree appeared on the back side as
he tumbled them in a bridge-shuffle, and one card spit out
and onto the ground.
“Look man,” Stephen A. Smith continued on the AV file that
ran in the lab, “I got left back in the fourth grade and I had a
first-grade reading level. And from that point forward,
remembering -I mean it was fourth grade, man- I have to
tell you right now I’m fifty-one years old -this is over forty
years ago- and the kids in the neighborhood that were
laughing at me and ridiculing me; I remember everybody.
Everybody’s names: Marshall Lewis, Donald Miller, Willie
Jones, I mean everybody, man. I was never gonna let
anyone laugh at me for my lack of intelligence.”
Isaiah smiled. For Stephen A. was right. He had the memory
of a Scot, of a Fulani , of a Yoruba , as he -in fact- was. And
of course he’d remember all their names.
Isaiah left the card upon the ground. It was day 6 of Isaiah’s
life, and tomorrow -his second shot- his b/lax would be
born.

III. 2028 e.v.

Raffi’s father -inmate 20989147- was locked up when Raffi
was nine. Raffi’s father -Deshuan Jackson- was released nine
years later, and for Raffi’s eighteenth birthday -today- they
went and picked their father up at ADX. He was one of the
first dozen inmates under the PraXis protocol to be released
with repaired genes that -PraXis claimed- coded for
criminality.
Raffi was quiet and watched his father. He seemed smaller
to Raffi , and his demeanor was that of a man still asleep.
He watched as his mother drove and his father seemed to
lean against the window, even his shoulders seemed all the
way to the right. Raffi worried the door would open and his
father would fall out. Then he worried it wouldn’t and they’d
have to deal with this man in the house.
He carried a knife in his boots. The wear on them from his
pants had bothered him but the knife pressed on his ankle
bone and so he forgot all about the scuffs. He touched it
now to feel the metal and make sure it hadn’t fallen out. He
wasn’t supposed to bring it; his mama had said not to. But
he did anyway; he just switched it to the other boot, and to
the inside, and she didn’t notice when they all lined up -him
and his three brothers and sister- before they left for
Florence. It was a three-hour drive from Aurora, Colorado,
and Raffi would think a lot on the way back; think in
language new to him. He didn’t remember thinking much at
all on the trip up.
But he remembered that there were men in the house since
he was a boy. He thought of this and didn’t feel a thing as a
bot entered his neck at the dorsal horn. No, all he thought
now was that he knew that those men were not his father,
and Raffi now figured his father knew it too.
 23. Romans 131
Low external-input technology [LEIT] is often described as both labour (sic) and
information intensive… Robert Shapiro, the former Monsanto chief executive,
once offered a rather blunt description of biotechnology as representing a trend
in agricultural history in which ‘information’ was replacing ‘stuff’.
Self-Sufficient Agriculture [Tripp, Robert]

They who have waged war in obedience to the divine command, or in conformity
with His laws, have represented in their persons the public justice or the wisdom
of government, and in this capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons
have by no means violated the commandment, “thou shalt not kill.”
City of God [Saint Augustine]

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own
understanding of their history
apocryphal [Blair, Eric]

I. 2035 e.v.
The airport was hot from the concrete’s thermal gain and
from the goddamn sun above; and the jump-rigs were
heavy. It was 1131hrs and the starlight eight-minutes away
was approaching its apex.
The Beechcraft King Air B90 twin engine jet-prop plane was
humming and buzzing on the strip and it made warm wind
on the Jacks as their instructor knelt before the door so they
could step on him like a stool. It was bench seating down
the fuselage and they had bought out the plane for the day;
taking only six spots of the fifteen: it was Blax -who was
already AFF certified decades before- and each Jack and
finally one instructor for them all. They had made three
jumps each that day and were on their own now with only
an instructor to monitor them as they flew. They had
scheduled eight jumps of the required sixteen; and Blax had
paid $21,400 in cash.
The pane was white and purple at the nose and looked like
it had been dipped and stood up to let dry; the nose was
narrow like a tiger shark; the noise of the props was at a
volume and frequency felt in the neck.
The terminal had cleared out; no civilians as even the small
Cessna -the school’s second plane- had been out for days
with engine problems. The other hangers had private planes
and no activity; the adjacent roads had a few cars far off in
the distance. The office staff was down to two girls.
The plane’s pilot ramped up the RPMs and the airframe
began to hop up and down on its rubber tires.
Blax sat in the back and checked his altimeter as they rose
from 5,280 to 18,110 feet in eight minutes under the
influence of the eleven-hundred horsepower engines; he
had to keep swallowing quickly to clear the ears. He stared
at the back of Jack Three’s head.
Jack One had taken the exit seat; the door was wide and tall
like a garage-folder and as they hit 17,500 feet he checked
his reserve handle and squeezed it in his right hand with the
left lain over top like a shell. His release bar -U-shaped and
chrome- he hooked a right thumb around and -with his left-
grabbed his own right hand as they had been trained.
The plane climbed in the air and hit jump altitude.
And as the plane leveled out they all slid on the benches
toward the door. Jacks One through Four were staggered
with the instructor between them and Blax in last position.
Jack One raised the panel door and stood in the jamb; he
kept his head up and eyes on the prop; his feet staged heel
to toe. His hands clasped the jamb -one hand out, one in- as
if holding the boards to a book together so the leaves
wouldn’t tumble out.
His eyes watered as he didn’t have a great seal on his
goggles; the instructor spoke loudly to one of the other
Jacks and the wind and prop rushed and droned in his other
-his left- ear. He couldn’t understand what he was saying so
his focused on his exit; he rose up and stuck his head out
the door and his shoulders square with the plane; he
counted to just one with a lift from the heel and then dipped
and fell from the door.
He spun and tumbled head down and the stomach stretched
like a bungee from the plane until he leveled out at 12,010
feet from the ground and just over a thousand feet from the
plane which was now heading south and away dropping
more of the Jacks from it as if it was coming slightly apart.
Jack One pushed his pelvis down like a badminton
shuttlecock, he relaxed his arms and legs in slight bends; he
had been told to smile in training -with an instructor on each
side the last jump- but he had no interest in smiling now. He
kept the head up and focused on one of the white peaks of
the Rockies out on the horizon and tilted his left arm down
to stop his rotation; returning to that spot he’d picked out.
It all looked like a clock to him, the peak he picked a noon;
himself the bold and steady hour hand of the analog watch
and the furry and ragged skin of the world wrapped around
some wrist of the core. Other men, he thought, were the
slow-moving minutes that could never commit and women
would be the second-hand in a thin and seamless spin. It did
not bother him that he’d never known a woman; he saw no
contradiction in this; no more than that he didn’t know all
men and yet called them facile and unreliable as he
balanced the hurtling body through Colorado’s high
elevation wind.
He fell to earth on a heading perfectly held. The snowy peak
of a fourteener did not budge in his view.
His shins felt cold and his neck ached a bit, but his eyes had
dried and now he checked his altimeter; he was at 10,880
feet.
Jack Three and Four had left next; Jack Four jumping out as
if diving into a pool. This reckless egress pissed the
instructor off as he moved toward the door and looked down
from the noisy aperture in the fuselage then hurriedly
jumped next.
Jack Two left the plane second to last and saw the three
Jacks below him like spinning leaves of burned black. His
smile was large and as he raised the head and eyes he
could see snow on the mountains; it was quiet in his ears as
the plane was now above and away and it was just him and
the 150mph wind. Jack Two dropped his head again and saw
that the instructor had caught up to Jack Three and One and
was close to them in elevation and orientation. Jack saw
thumbs up signals and then the instructor spin away and
slow himself down slightly by shaping himself into a less
aerodynamic shape.
Jack gained on him.
Jack Four was head down and passing them all like a bullet
fired; like a disheartened and dejected dart. Jack Two could
see him by the bottoms of his boots; and the fists made at
his side. Jack Two smiled even bigger and laughed because
he knew Jack was going to piss everyone off by opening as
low as he could before the AAD would sense his speed -
faster than 25mph- and altitude -set to 1,700 feet- and open
all on its own. They were supposed to open at 5,000 -4,500
at the lowest- but Jack Four was going to wait until 2,000
feet and Jack Two knew it. The low open wasn’t the most
dangerous part it was that he’d open his main chute so
close to the automatic reserve that the AAD system would
open the second canopy even after Jack had pulled his
main. This had killed experienced diver Adrian Nicholas and
so Jack was doing it so they’d turn not just his AAD system
off; but everyone’s. He -Jack Two thought of Jack Four- was
always trying to prove his case in the most reckless way ;
and once he had told Jack Two he did this, because nobody
listened to reason, facts and figures didn’t change shit.
People needed a scare thrown into them.
Jack Two thought of all this as he oriented to Gray’s Peak
just as he’d been told to do. He loved the air and the sky
around it; it was like a clear fluid to him and he thought of it
like the way he loved water and a lake or ocean, as two
separate things. He had been told if clouds came in they’d
have to call of the jumps. So he looked to see if he could
spot any white in his blue sky. He took in the ground’s
browns and edifices strewn like stars in the sky. He made
constellations of outbuildings and homes and nebulae of
industrial parks by the roads. He checked his altimeter and
he was down to 7,705 feet.
He checked Gray’s again and traced the treeline, the white
snowcap, the way it ran north and south. He thought of
each ram and each elk in the forest as if they too thought of
him. His own body disappeared as his heading slightly spun
retrograde and the range’s long ragged line opened up to
the south.
He knew Blax was behind him like an old mother hen and
that the plane was heading to the ground.
Jack Two kept thinking of their upcoming jobs and wondered
if they’d have to skydive into somewhere half way across
the world. He wondered if it would be over land or ocean,
day or night, he wondered if he’d be any good at packing
chutes and he lamented that he hated tangled lines. His
mind grabbed lines in these visions; each one like hair of a
woman’s. He then saw the lines turn black and the hanger
fall away and a dark room appear and he drug his fingers
through her strands; separating them one by one. He
imagined her hair and her head back, her neck and ear. It
was no longer a woman, an abstraction, but it was her -all at
once- in his mind’s hands.
The air had no smell at this speed; his checked his gear and
he had just hit 186mph.
He let the chattered inside the head of each Jack sooth him
like windchimes or rain on the side of their containers at
home. He heard them think of the danger, the technique to
balance -it was not intuitive to them or their bodies to relax
correctly to float- and he heard reminders to keep the head
up and eyes out. These inner comms were like instincts at
first, they had not yet gotten used to thinking alongside one
another in their own heads. It was analog not digital and it
came on like an acquired talent or like an acid trip.
The epinephrine and increased androgens and the pressure
on the chest and armpits made him feel drunk, the thoughts
of the pull made him feel eager to check his wrist again. He
often thought in series of steps: first this, then this, then
that .
“Sixty-six hundred,” he said aloud as he had been trained to
do when he first came out of the slide. It was late -as he was
over four thousand feet from the slide- but he often did the
right thing at the wrong time. His head heard Jack One say
forty-five-fifty and then Jack saw the arms of Jack One wave
off below him. The chute of Jack One bloomed like an
explosion of blue and grey, the ribs like a shell, the shape
now big and square; Jack two pushed right with his
starboard arm and chest and began to move away from
directly overhead of Jack. He had been reading Dicken’s on
the plane and left the little red book on the bench.
He thought of it there and saw a plane land from the east
and heard Tania in his head say that she too had had a
feeling about Madam DeFarge the whole time.
He thought of the red yarn in her hands, the hats she made
for the Jacques , and he reflexively reached back with the
right arm and hand toward his aft and felt for the ball of his
pilot chute. He checked his altimeter and even though he
was at 5,200 he waved off and returned the hand to the ball
and pulled. “Those without natural affection ,” he said as
the words fluttered up and away trailing the small chute.
The tension between the covenant and the blood articulated
in one line of code running in his brain -having unknown
results, unknown to him- would begin to chain neurons to
one another just as previous lines of code -from other books,
other vectors- had begun all those years ago. It was just one
line that rose to the surface idiopathically as the pilot chute
caught the wind, plumed, bloomed, and pulled the main
chute all at once.
He felt the rise of the chest and the head and he looked up
as he was stood straight up; the brakes were fully hit on his
decent.
The canopy snapped and rumbled and opened like a
wadded paper ball unfurled; the harness pulled at the groin
and the shoulders as the lines uncoiled like stingers of jellies
in the sea around Timaru . He was about a mile above the
airport and he knew it would be hot again once he landed.
He looked down at his feet dangling in air and the saw Jack
Four’s shoot finally open just 1,909 feet from the ground.
He adjusted his leg straps so he could sit like in a swing.
His coder flickered and he saw images of Grecian ships in
the Black Sea 1.2 miles down from the surface of the water;
well below the anoxic layer of 600-feet. The seafloor was
smooth and tan and the merchant ship’s sails had fallen and
swaddled the hull like a gathered-up scarf; the masts were
upright, the gunwales crenulated next to an outrigger boat.
It was from 505 BC and it was preserved in the zero-oxygen
bottom. The Black Sea was 91.4% absent of O2 .
Death to all things that moved gave life to the still , Jack
thought.
He saw the climate data from 12,000 years before, as the
earth warmed back then and the lake took on salt water
from the Mediterranean over the rocks of the Bosphorus
Straights. There were forty other ships at bottom, all
preserved, all lit-up by the bots’ lights. Each ship 75-feet
long, each length of Caucasian rope was dusty but
preserved in a coil like a long frozen reticulated python
waiting out a sandstorm for centuries of unspoken malice
and grit; eager to hang a man from Yggdrasil or à la
lanterne .
As he imagined the rope his left eye caught a dark shape
glint around the edges as the sun framed it for a time too
short to measure.
He saw Blax pass him to his left -a black spot like a large
bird- between the front range to the west and his own eyes.
It was quiet all at once and he grabbed his steering-toggles
and pulled hard down on the right and spun a half turn then
released it and straightened out.

II. 2038 e.v.

“In June of 1999 I was twenty-five years old and had just
arrived at the airport in Ashville, North Carolina with one
pair of black BDUs, a white -but dirty- wife-beater on and
a pair of cow-hide gloves in my back pocket. I had had
ten dollars but had already spent it on a candy bar and
coffee. I hadn’t had chocolate in nine months. I did
however have a credit card and I used it to buy a ticket
at the counter:
‘What is the cheapest flight to any of these three places:
Denver, Cincinnati or Sarasota, Florida,’ I had asked. She
was mostly bemused -possibly contemptuous- but
worked away at her computer and said, ‘you can go to
Cincinnati for a hundred sixty-nine dollars. One way.’
“I got on that plane ninety minutes later looking like I
had just got off a farm. Because I had. Earlier that
morning my friend Chen had asked me to leave Zendik
Farm and when they asked, you said yes. It didn’t matter
that they tricked you out of your car and all your stuff
and dumped you on the side of the road. It didn’t matter
they ruined you and felt nothing about it at all.
“When I arrived in Ohio I felt like the whole world was
mine to explore and exploit; I had no conscience; the
kind of liberty you feel when on vacation I suspect. Only,
I was on a vacation from the larger human family. I felt
no affinity for anyone; and, I reassured myself, I would
only care again for people once I returned to Zendik. I
knew I had to get whatever it was that had kept me from
being present and aware and committed to Zendik out of
my system; and out here in the world was the place to
do it. I would use the world like a simulation program I
thought; a game, practice. Then, when I was ready, I
could return to the Farm and begin real life once again.
“I genuinely thought Chen, Verdy, Shey, Bugzy, were my
friends. I had no idea they saw me as nothing more than
a tool, a thing to use, a mountain to strip mine. I was
naïve. But in my heart I loved them and even though
they still feel nothing for me, I love them today.
“I would never see Zendik Farm again; and I’m not sure
my conscience ever came back to me. I felt things that
could be described as guilt and moral terror certainly; I
even began to adhere even more strongly to Zendik’s
avowed values more assiduously than I ever had while
on the farm herself. Values like radical honesty and self-
awareness; radical ownership over my problems, that is
to say, taking responsibility for everything in my life no
matter how much I may have been victimized by
someone or battened about by forces larger than myself.
“It’s been almost forty years since I left and I’m never
going back; nobody is. Zendik is dead and the dream it
spawned in many of its leaders and followers alike is like
a griffin of somnambulisms; the eyes and ears of mere
dreams; the internal feedback mechanisms that don’t
quite match up. The patient isn’t paralyzed; he’s moving
in the world, but his brain is still hypnopompic and thus
dreaming up a rationale for the phenomena his body is
experiencing in that real world: His reach in his dreams
is for a noble sword, his grasp in real life is the mere
handle of his chamber door. He believes -quixotically-
he’s on an honorable steed, not an emaciated Rocinante.
“Maybe everyone else is awake and navigating just fine
or maybe the rest of the world is asleep and their
irrational dreaming has no impact on their inert body;
but either way, we ex-Zendiks are the only ones half in
and half out of the world. And we know it and anyone
who meets us knows it too. We’ll probably treat you like
you’re asleep and paralyzed while we move about; and
you’ll probably treat us like we’re sleep walking and as if
you’re totally awake and lucid. And there is no way to
tell which version is true. But we do doubt; and yet
aren’t you all so goddamn certain? ”
It’s at this point that the man I’m interviewing at ADX
pauses and purses his lips in a humble way; a rare
moment of such a thing for him. I don’t think this
reporter has met a more arrogant man. But what he’s
said to me has begun to sink in and I see he actually
does have a kind of innate humility even if during the
few hours I’ve known him he’s displayed a braggadocio
and aloofness that I might normally find distasteful.
I’ve come here to interview a man about a killing -a
series of killings- that had Denver in strange state in
2018 and 2019. Most media have focused on how these
 46 murders were accomplished in under six months by
just one man; a man who had ostensibly gotten away
with it until the one man -a medical doctor, a scientists,
an entrepreneur, but a man with no political experience-
a man who was candidate for Governor of Colorado was
contacted by the killer who had offered to turn himself in
if that man was in fact elected.
But I’ve come to ask why; not how.
While here I’ve found myself finding something else
entirely. Maybe if you can follow his strained analogy you
could say I’m either awake and writing these words on
my desktop or I’m asleep thinking I am while my real
hands in the real world are maybe tying my shoes (“or
strangling a man,” as Mr. MacLeod mentioned when I
gave him this rough draft). Maybe he’s the noble sword
I’ve found in my permanent restful state; and maybe
there’s some mere door handle in my restive -but real-
life that I’m fumbling with instead. But, Lyndon James
MacLeod feels real to me and so I’m going to pretend
that I don’t doubt in him or myself… at least for a little
while longer. – K. Marshall October, 2038
He’d finished reading the article, A Noble Sword; the story of
Killing and Being Killed 1,000 times , by the Denver Post’s
Kyle Marshall, and then held the magazine supplemental in
front of him; balanced on his thighs. He looked up and
around and paused his eyes briefly on each person -next to
and around him- on the light-rail car. The city came into
focus quickly as the lights to the car turned off and the large
windows of the train filled with the lit-up ciudad . They
crossed over Kalamath and turned under the Wells Fargo
building on Speer. Cars drove past them on the parallel
roadway under the huge building and they all came out onto
15th street. The lights flicked back on inside the train and
the city disappeared behind the black glass.
The reflections of all the people looked like spectres ; his
own face no more or less clear or opaque.
He smiled a little when a man caught his gaze; and felt
himself smile more inside. What a strange, very strange
man, he thought of the man in the article. And wasn’t man
himself, mankind that is, wasn’t mankind stranger still? A
stranger to himself too , he thought adding the double
meaning to the ruminations that lattice-worked the garden
in his wet head.
He immediately opened the magazine again and snapped
back the pages to find the first sheet of the article. He felt
he had to know when this had happened. It felt ancient to
him. The article was written last week, but, he read it the
line again:
“…in 2018, Michael Swinyard had walked into the house
at 90 S. Bryant St in the working-class neighborhood of
Valverde and never walked out again.”
Nineteen years ago , he thought and tapped his feet and
moved his mouth side to side like a pendulum. And the
article was well written, but that sentence was a bit
boilerplate, he thought. Ah, it happens to everyone. We
can’t anguish over each word, each line, in a manuscript. At
least journalists can’t; they’re on a deadline. And it’s not like
anyone is going to notice anyway.
“Fuck it,” he said aloud finally; lowly but without shame or
concealment.
He tossed the periodical onto the seat next to him and
breathed in deeply; then yawned anyway. He kept his eyes
closed after the yawn and leaned back resting his head on
the glass. The train seemed now to glide along the Denver
streets; he imagined himself a mere neuron in a red blood
cell inside the vascular system of the city, shuttling toward
the brain of the organism to deliver oxygen and pick up
carbon dioxide; the people outside were other neurons in
other cells doing their jobs for themselves and the greater
good of the city. He imagined the argument between
Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson over group selection or
inclusive fitness as it was now called.
It was true, he thought, that all reproduction happened at
the level of the gene and so strictly speaking individual
organisms did not reproduce with fidelity. And so, yes, while
DNA built animals and people, and the better the animal
DNA built -better for reproduction- the more likely it was the
DNA itself would be passed along, there was still this
strange phenomenon of Wilson’s math. He could see in his
mind’s eye now, the godfather of sociobiology speaking, and
this wise old southern ant-man was saying with confidence:
the math works; and these guys have to explain it.
These guys, was Dawkins and the other biologists who just
refused to take group selection seriously. Goddamn, I wish I
understood the math myself , he thought. I feel like I’ve
come to a part in the story where it switches from English to
Esperanza or something , he thought as his discursive views
led from each neuron of assumption to another. His own
genome report -thanks to his coder- now flashed in front of
him; all those CGATs strung together like hi-fidelity cable
through his body; carrying blueprints for structures
springing up like bank building and courthouses and towers
of apartments and homes.
He breathed loudly again and reset his mind. Group
selection , he said to himself. Think of this, he went on, think
of DNA building an organ, an eye or a heart, for example .
That DNA could build any manner of organ, a blue eye; a 4-
valve heart; an eye with an astigmatism; a heart with a hole
in it. But the DNA would only be passed on to the next
instantiation -the next organism- if that organ was useful
enough to the larger, entire organism itself: the boar, the
bear, the bastard man himself. If the organ was useful
enough to get the whole organism to a point in which he
could reproduce, then that gene would be passed on.
He watched the city glide by; he heard mere mumbles from
the passengers.
So, no matter how great the DNA that built the feet or the
head or the genitals, if the DNA that built the heart was no
good, nobody, none of those CGATs in all those other
chromosomes would be passed on and reproduced,
recapitulated into the next organism . The whole beast had
to work; work well enough, he thought.
And was not, he asked himself, each man a city unto
himself? The brain and CNS was the mayor’s office, each
module of the brain, each pattern of thought -the rational,
the emotional, the linear, the creative, the impulsive, the
long-term, the concrete, the abstract, and on and on- each
pattern of thinking correlating to a kind of personality in the
building on Bannock street.
The eyes had their corollary in the media, everything the
organism sees like the cameras of cable TV; each rod and
cone of the eye like each camera crew in each bureau of
each local affiliate; each neuron transmitting one piece of
radiation wave along the visible spectrum; the ears like
radio stations transmitting and receiving the merely audible
spectrum of those same waves . He moved on to the
extremities in his analogy.
The hands are what grasp, the heart is what circulates, the
mitochondrial organelles give each cell energy, like the
money needed to keep each man -each cell- alive . What
circulates each man? he asked himself: the train, the bus,
the car; all of these run through the circulatory streets, the
arterial lanes of i25 and i70; the vascular branches of Speer
and Alameda , the branching and winnowing capillaries of
neighborhood streets like his own along Zuni or like 118th
mews -which was French for alleyway - when he had lived
up north.
But what pumps it? he asked himself as the light- rail
windows went black and clear, occluding then revealing the
sidewalks and shops and lights of apartments climbing
above. The public transportation obviously had a hub, the
infrastructure like a heart, but what pumped the individual
cars? he asked as he groped for the analog. Maybe they
could correlate to the new respirocytes -the new fancy ones-
he had read about : self-propelled red-blood cell computers
that raced through the body’s circulatory corridors; they
didn’t need a heart.
He imagined how that would be.
The city , he realized, had prefigured the next advancement
in human evolution; a kind of leap forward then reverb back;
like a DNA creating a man who has traits the genome
doesn’t yet have; a city showing signs of advancement in
autonomy the body of man must catch up to.
But what would that be? What trait did a man have that
mere DNA did not? His brain spasmed as the confusion
roiled and boiled from module to module. Ah confusion ! he
thought, the heart of growth and health and next level shit.
To be confused was exactly what kept the brain healthy and
plastic and hungry for growth . Scientific studies showed
that being confused whilst working out a problem did in fact
keep the brain healthy like doing pushups kept the body
strong. It was a common trait among older adults who
staved off dementia and Alzheimer’s: learning new things.
It seemed, more and more, although he didn’t know this,
that that very confusion was handled in the right
hemisphere, and this was why confusion, the embrace of
chaos, was needed, for it exercised the right side of the
brain, the left side of the man. The left-hand path … he had
heard that phrase somewhere and it came up from his coder
as he muted it so he could think.
But we have no tolerance for confusion, he thought, as a
species and especially as consumers of art and media.
Everything must make sense very quickly or the average
person will turn the channel out of an ironic boredom .
Imagine that, being confused -not knowing what the hell is
going on- leads to boredom in so many people . It’s so odd ,
he thought. They don’t even know what’s good for them.
But that’s the least of their worries, they don’t know sitting
on their asses and eating Cheetos is killing them either. This
city , he thought of Denver, has lower obesity than the
national average though, so this city is like a fit person with
less insulin fat receptor genes; a fit city with fit people, like
a fit body with fit cells.
Next, the obvious correlates between the waste disposal
systems like sewers of a city and the lower GI of a man; the
perspiration function correlated to the evaporation off city
lakes, cooling each system; the mouth consuming raw
materials to distribute through the body to turn into useable
products like ATP, or glucose for energy clearly mapped onto
the various hubs of incoming raw goods like DIA -the airport-
and UPS docks in Commerce City. Ah, he thought of the all
the dope that came in to a city, and our brains contain
analogs to all manner of stimulants and narcotics, and these
chemicals are produced in the brain from just such raw
materials; which neurons , he wondered, produced such
endogenous opioids?
He smirked as he saw guys on the corner of 20th and Welton
dealing heroin. Brazenly , he thought as he watched as
civilians gave wide berth sometimes but sometimes not.
His mind filled with information in response: beta-
endorphins and gamma-endorphins were coded for by the
POMC -pro-opiomelanocortin - gene in humans. These genes
produced a nucleotide sequence that produced these
chemicals in the brain in reward for certain behaviors. And
there were many, many more: dynorphins and enkephalins
and on and on. All designed by evolution bit by bit over
millions of years in the lower mammals and in ourselves.
Like scientists who reward caged animals with food or
cocaine for certain behaviors, our own CNS giving out treats
for behavior that lead to increased fitness in our ancestral
environs.
What were these traits and behaviors? he wondered; closing
the eyes.
And as the train rattled to a slow, then a stop, he opened his
eyes and breathed again loudly to clear his mind. He stared
longer at each person on the train and lingered on their
faces. He felt as if he had investigated not just himself and
the city but each of these neurons; each of these people
too. He felt close to them, briefly, as the train’s doors
opened, and they began to shuffle out. The lights of the city
were stochastically distributed, built from that strange
distribution we see fashioned patterns, like constellations,
that build beasts and heroes and objects common in the sky
above and on the ground below, he thought, patterns from
random points of data. The shops around the train-stop had
strung up white lights in rows and he saw now little animals
-reindeer and doves- crafted from LEDs in the trees and in
the windows, analogs themselves of the constellations.
The Hellenization of Rome , he thought, apropos of nothing
in particular.
The emphasis , he thought now, on art and music and
philosophy over the more martial constructs of the early
city-states of the progeny of Romulus and Remus; how had
that struggle looked at the time; in the trenches; in each
man and woman; in each child ? Why, he asked, had he just
been distracted by that random thought? He scanned the
city street as he exited the train and saw the Gemini
constellation recreation in the window of the Death-Wish-
Coffee shop. He sniffed out a small laugh and a pursed
lipped smile. This coder was funny ; he thought. It’s more
discursive than my normal brain ; well, it is my normal brain,
but it really accelerates its normal style . Whatever you
were before the implant you are that times a thousand it
seems, he thought.
Although, the coder was on freestyle mode; he could toggle
off of it and put it in any number of other modes. He had
ways of quieting the voices.
He saw the Red and Blue lights from the corner of his eye
down Downing street where it lay across 30th . The police ,
he thought and then he re-started his analogy of the city to
the man.
And what Governor did we have in our heads? What was it
that Freud called the super-ego? What parts of our CNS were
correlates to our city’s liaison to the FBI? And why had I
dreamed of that FBI liaison last night? And just why had I
gotten the name correct; as he found out this morning when
he ran the dream-man through his coder and found out that
Adam Vaperre was in fact the SAC for Denver’s liaison to the
Bureau.
He walked toward the flashing lights on the southwest side
of Downing and toward 30th . His home loft was off 31st
across from Bella Calla; what strange floral constructions
those girls made , he thought, as he crossed over Downing
and on a vector toward Marion Street. They -the bloom
arrangements- looked like a cross between the Garden of
Eden and Noserferatu : a Vampiric but deathless growth. He
liked them, but he didn’t quite know why.
He heard the sounds of the Hu in his mind; the coder must
have picked it he thought. Steppe songs of Kahn on string
and gourd. Then he hears a police horse neigh. It made him
shiver, clinch and grimace at first; he then release the frown
when he realized what it was.
He returned to his inner vision of the arrangements and saw
their sanguinary flowers and gnarled and brambled sticks
and aubergine and desert-stung hues of black as sharp as
scorpion tangs and highland cattle; flora and mycorrhiza
from them populated his concrete and steel loft like
landmarks of some once civilized but now feral Mexica ruin
that he could imagine an austere drug syndicate airport was
built on top of. Useful, utilitarian but temporary like a coral
reef in seas with dropping pH, he thought as he ruminated
on what he did for a living. He had built quite the racket,
laundering money for the syndicate using cryptocurrencies
and forex trading.
Ocean acidity was really just reduced alkalinity but
whatever you called it, it was killing the reef . The Ocean’s
death seemed so far away from up here at 5280, he
thought, but he knew that was not really true. He felt the
slim external-drive in his front pocket; the one with all his
accounts on it. But, he also kept one one-hundred dollar bill
on him, folded in the passport. He touched his inside pocket
to feel it as if casually.
“God, what is true?” he said with a burst of air like flood
over the mere words.
The cops were now to his six -dealing with whatever stupid
shit - and he began to think again on what part of the brain
would those public servants par excellence correlate to; ah,
the genes that coded for neurotransmitter uptake and
blocking . The genes responsible for serotonin production;
the Great Inhibitor . He liked that. Cops were the Great
Inhibitory chemicals of the city, yes .
The short-branch allele that exists in only 13-16% of people
that doesn’t produce enough serotonin to inhibit aggressive,
anti-social, violent behavior is like a city with low police
presence or long -or no- call response. But crime is down
writ large in most cities, his coder immediately showed the
bar graphs as he thought of crime. He tapped into the cloud
via his PGC and found out that humans had more inhibitory
neurons than any species; 25% of the total were designed to
stop man from acting. It was similar to the budget for law
enforcement. He blinked at the fractals of life that appeared
when you paid attention.
And he just then thought of Governor Sou, when he -the
Governor- first began talking about taking a new approach
to crime and criminality. An audio recording of the man from
a campaign event in 2018 auto-played over his coder as he
walked up Marion.
“We have, as a society, been addressing crime as
ineffectually and atavistically as 18th century doctors
treated infections and disease.
“That is to say, we’ve been treating symptoms and
without any cognizance of the root cause. The medical
professional of three hundred years ago had no germ
theory of disease. They knew nothing of the microscopic
prokaryotes that were assaulting and inhabiting the
body’s normal cells. We know now, that a virus or
bacteria will invade a healthy human cell, or the cell of
your family pet, and enter it, hijack its normal
homeostatic functioning and then move on and infect
other cells until the host, the patient, is sick and dying.
The body will produce as best a defense as it can but if it
fails; the host will weaken and die.
“In the brain -and to some extent the body- of a
sociopathic or anti-social individual there are material,
that is to say genomic, structural and bio-chemical
phenomena that produce feelings and patterns of
thinking that produce an elevated risk of anti-social and
pathological behaviors. In Charles Witman, the very
famous case of the man who killed his wife and mother
and then climbed to the top of the University of Texas
bell tower and began shooting strangers, we have a case
of the patient suspecting he had a problem in his brain -
he left a note asking the authorities to look at it post-
mortem- and then -now- we have the medical evidence
of a tumor in his brain.
“This was, of course, confirmed by the autopsy of the
man. Now, we have ourselves here in a moment in
history where we can just keep banging away at the
issue with a mastodon femur bone in the furry inept
hand of a chimpanzee or we can actually see crime and
criminality as a health issue and do something as radical
as when we invented anti-biotics. But look, the germ
theory of disease was first postulated in the mid 1500’s.
However, it took centuries for it to even take hold as an
idea; there was competition for example by the Miasma
theory, or bad air theory, that held until the late 19 th
century.
“But then through fits and starts it took Western science
until really the beginning of the 20 th century to even try
antibiotics, one of the first invented by Paul Ehrlich in
1907 or 1908, I believe, and that was arsphenamine,
although it was called something else back then;
Salvarsan or something. But really these drugs didn’t
begin to be developed and be used until the 1940s when
tyrothricin was derived by Rene Dubos if I’m not
mistaken. Of course, Penicillin was then widely used
after the, after World War Two. But it took a long time
and lots and lots of effort and tons of pushback and
competing theories and so on and so forth.
“But here we are, we are in 2018 and we’ve mapped the
human genome, the brain itself has been reverse
engineered and I’d like to talk a bit about this spindle
cells or neurons later if we have time, but we know a hell
of a lot about the brain -the central nervous system- and
its role in behavior but we are up against some of the
most painfully stupid people on the planet, people like
PZ Myers and other blank slaters who refuse to admit
that human behavior has an evolutionary link.
“I mean, think of what they have to overcome. These are
evolutionists too folks, these aren’t young earth
creationists. P-Zed has to admit that evolutionary
pressure has selected every organ and appendage in
every creature under the sun; every eye, every wing,
every feather and every toenail. He has to admit even
that selective pressure has created the mating habits of
every creature from the aardvark to the zebra; from the
cockroach to the orca. Mr. Myers has to and does admit
that every damn thing we see in nature in terms of
structure and function from the smallest pimple on the
dwarf pony on a miniature island in the middle of the
world’s smallest lake, to the largest most complex
behavioral system -from a herd of 10,000 prey animals
on the principal expanse of the African plain- that all of it
has an evolutionary, genetic, explanation but then -all of
a sudden- when it comes to human males there’s no
evolutionary link. For P-Zed, males in the height of
testosterone production -who in every culture known to
our species- fighting over everything -but especially fight
over women and money- that all of a sudden, in that
case, well it’s a cultural construct according to Mr.
Myers.
“In that case, according to these people there’s no
genomic substratum upon which we can build a case for
the fact that the brain is an organ like the heart or the
liver or the eyes or the lungs.
“We can’t, if Meyers is right, we can’t say that due to
this brain being shaped over millennia by the same
forces that made us hungry so we eat, horny so we
reproduce, shiver when we’re cold, sweat when we’re
hot, puke when we’re sick and squint in the dark, that
maybe just maybe the other behavioral patterns that -by
the way map onto chimpanzee behavior almost
identically, a species we share 99% of our DNA with- but
maybe just maybe our mating rituals, our violent
campaigns over resources and women, our tribalism and
fear of people different than us, our male dominated
relational constructs, our aggressive and reactionary
type brains are in fact programmed that way by
evolution because in the ancestral environment it
worked.
“It worked sloppily and with collateral damage, but it
worked. If P-Zed is right we can’t say this.
“And here’s the best part: we wouldn’t even have a
sexually dimorphic species, a species where the men are
larger and stronger than the women -which is why we
have a Chimpanzee-based culture and not a Bonobo
style one- we wouldn’t have this if women hadn’t chosen
to mate with larger males in the ancestral environment.
Ladies, you chose big angry cavemen to breed with.
“Anyway, I was trying to say something about fixing
crime and I think I just ended up blaming women for it.
Not exactly the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Ok, look,
my point is that these behaviors of aggression, tribalism,
violence and so forth have roots in the brain. We see this
looking backwards at our animal cousins and looking
forward by fixing the brain in patients with behavioral
problems. Our bodies naturally develop cancers and we
have cancer treatments that involve CRISPR and gene-
therapy. Our bodies are built by evolution with innate
flaws that develop over time that we can now fix, and
behavioral issues are no different.
“And look, we haven’t been- and won’t be- lobotomizing
patients either. These are men with new lives; post-
alienation, post-violence, post-anti-social lives and
they’re happy about it. I ask the media to interview any
number of these men my firm has helped; talk to them,
their families, their victims too. Ask the victims about
the change they see in the eyes of these men when their
brains, brains now with functioning amygdala and genes
that allow for inhibitory neurotransmitters to function
properly during stress and anxiety and fear, when these
functioning brains allow these former criminals to feel
the pain and suffering they’ve caused in their victims.
“It’s like they’re human again; is what one woman -
that’s a quote from one woman who had been beaten
unconscious by her boyfriend- that is what one woman
said when -you know, after- she talked to him and our
team in a supervised visit. She said, he had never once
seemed to notice her pain; not once in his eyes until
after the surgery and his after-care.
“Which by the way, with empathy it’s tougher because
there seems to be a window in early youth, ages three or
four or five where if that child doesn’t receive moral
training alongside their functioning brain they can
become amoral or even sociopathic; so the post-genetic
training is essential in -essential for- normal brains. So,
when we restructure their genome and make plastic
their empathy related regions it takes; well, it’s an
almost Sisyphean task to acclimate these patients to the
new normal of right and wrong.
“They have to be trained like toddlers essentially and it
can be very demoralizing for the patient who is
intellectually advanced but morally stinted and behind.
But they’re motivated by the program’s requirements, so
they submit; but I can tell you that until they begin to
feel the effects of the training itself they find it hard to
accept the training. It’s one of the toughest ironies of the
whole program. It ain’t just taking a pill for these guys.
It’s complex.
“The point -ladies and gentlemen- is that we as a society
have a chance to take a step forward and treat crime for
what it is: a disease; a combination of malfunctioning
brains and poorly adaptive brains for the modern times.
We can skip right over treating drug addiction as a
disease and not a crime; which our state did with
marijuana years ago. We can stop arguing over it. Drug
addiction is just like any malaise. It’s just one problem to
be addressed as a health issue and frankly I don’t have
time for liberals to convince conservatives to treat
methheads like they have malaria. I just don’t.
“The liberals are too scared -and frankly ignorant of the
science- to push for a total overhaul of the criminal
justice system to a science based, health based,
epidemiological based approach; and the conservatives
will never go for it anyway if they hear liberals talking
like a bunch of hippies. So, because we’re independent,
we give facts and tell the liberals to sign here and shut
up and give the conservatives a refund on their taxes,
ok? So either party would never lead on this issue. But
they will follow. How do I mean?
“Because folks, liberals are too obsessed with the
President to really focus locally, and thus too busy to get
in our way and because our way is infinitely cheaper
than the lock ‘em up and throw away the key approach
 of the Republican Party that means that conservatives
voters will just cash their refund checks we give them
and move on to another issue.
“I’m well passed my ideological days.
“For me, ideology is like training wheels for your
philosophy. Once you outgrow your ideology you can
really get to work and make things happen. The science
is clear: evolutionary selection picks winners and losers
and the DNA on the planet today in bacteria and
bodybuilders has won. And that DNA builds bodies; and
the brain is part of your body and that brain builds
behavior. If we can, through gene therapy and genomics
in general, through cloning and fixing transcription
errors or manufacturing errors that are adaptive for the
modern environs -if by strengthening the neo cortex in
one patient and the hippocampus in another or both of
those and the amygdala in a third patient we can reduce
80% of the crime that’s perpetrated by 20% of the
population- then I’d say we will have succeeded in one
of the greatest mental health and medical
breakthroughs since the eradication of polio.
“And to do it like Jonas Salk without patenting the cure;
without charging the government to do it but donating it
for free, well, who knows maybe the good people of
Colorado won’t just elect me this November but actually
like me during my whole term .” [NPR 1.31.18]
He’d stopped in the alley behind his loft and let the nearly
twenty-year-old audio file play in his brain. He had stood
there in the dark and let the man’s words settle in. This guy,
he thought of the Governor who had been in office his whole
life, what a maniac . He was just asking for trouble . And
yet, he got elected with that radical shit . Had the guy who
killed all those people really gotten the man elected with his
offer, to turn himself in to the Governor? he wondered. The
offer -wrongly posed by the nearly twenty-year-old article
and most of the corporate media at the time was turning on
the outcome of the election- had been merely that the man
would hand himself over to Boyd Sou -before the election- if
the man would provide him medical care whilst
incarcerated.
The man, Lyndon MacLeod, had read -the story went- of
Sou’s company’s -PraXis- success with CRISPR/Cas-9
technology and had felt the man could fix his genome so as
to quell his murderous impulses.
The Governor had facilitated the man’s surrender and had
followed through -once elected a month later- to provide the
man with medical care. It was insane and both men were
condemned on all sides for making a macabre mockery of
all things, and yet the voters turned out in record numbers
to hand the race to the man who was now in office for his
fourth term; just the one term between 2026 and 2030 as
the constitutionally demanded break in the chain.
What was it in a man that made him go looking for trouble?
he wondered. I mean, this world is trouble enough on its
own without looking for it. But, maybe that’s why. Shit.
Maybe you get tired of playing defense all the goddamn
time and decide you’re gonna be the one who makes them
play defense, he thought as he approached his loft.
He had this implant for three months -they were affordable
now to most upper middle-class folks who could afford the
$25,000 for a next-gen one- and he still hadn’t told his
girlfriend. He hadn’t told her at first to see if she’d notice; it
was like a game he was playing with almost no malice at all.
But now, he actually did feel like he was deceiving her and it
felt cowardly. He felt like a coward all around standing in
that alley. He listed them -his cowardices- in order: he had
avoided the gaze of passengers on the train, he had avoided
the cops, he had thought that this politician -who wasn’t
really much of a politician at all- he had thought that he was
crazy for even talking like that, he had actually felt nervous
for him, and now he was afraid to go in to his own home
because he was avoiding telling his girlfriend about his
nano-implant and as he got to the end of the list he allowed
the words to form on this ethereal page in his head: and you
don’t even like her that much and would prefer to be alone
but you’re too cowardly to be alone because you need to be
aggrandized by a woman in order to feel like a man.
His coder went silent and let that last conceit seemingly
reverberate in his head. Is the male, female thing even
worth it anymore? Can we move on to the next model of
human fulfillment ? he asked himself half seriously and half
in jest.
What if all that evolution had designed us to rely on each
other only to give men the space and resources and time to
build a future without need of women; and what if as an
ancillary benefit, women would be freed also from men.
What if each sex could give the other the greatest gift of all:
solitude without the ache; without the loneliness? What if it
could be done without malice or hysterics or lying? What if it
could just be done like two grown-ups shaking hands and
dividing the planet and their books and their appliances in
half?
This was the genius of this PG coder; it gave you information
on demand to buttress your ideas or jettison or improve
them; but it also gave you space to think larger conceits. It
made one’s head a larger landscape to think , he felt. It was
like moving to a Montana ranch or an Alaskan outpost; it
gave you space. Jesus, how hemmed in had I been by this
cloistered brain function; where I thought so small and
focused so narrowly , he thought in the narrow alleyway
behind his loft, the hum of the transformers and traffic, the
bark of horns all encroaching on his audio-cortex , the walls
of neighbors feeling like those to tow opposing forts, the
pressure of others around him eager to inform on him, shun
him, give him dirty or dismissive looks.
He felt like the city was some kind of open-air jail.
His mind -as part of his coder’s augmented allostatic
response- populated with soothing live footage of Burgundy
and the climats of gold and purples nearly three kinds of
black; the grey fog coming in from the north, the white roots
drying as the moisture drained. It began to rain just enough
to see drops on the leaves that caught the sun as the clouds
had not yet overwhelmed. No varietal likes wet feet, the
flooding of tendril, which is why the endemic drainage of
France’s best plots was so crucial to their success, while the
Slope of Gold was named in bold. He felt himself relax.
The coder helped one relax, to control the mind since one’s
environment couldn’t be shaped.
There was no mention of the Biblical flood attending this live
AV feed. But it was no secret that the French had deluged
the vines for forty days and forty nights over winter to kill
the Phylloxera . The star fell like an arrow shot west, the
moon waxed when it thought best. Man had no control over
where his shadow lay on the ground no matter when he
turned around.
His coder ran on in background like this. Neural sparks like
lightning strikes coruscated in his mind.
Left wing and Right movements have different levels of
analysis, he thought in language; and to himself. They both
want good wine but looked at various things. They each
watched soil and atmosphere, at varietal and harvest date.
But they both miss the lower layers down, the gravel and
the limestone underground.
They both miss the terroir and even God.
They both thought they could isolate and separate and point
at just one thing. But there is no wine without sun and
storm, day and night, no lush leaves without blight; no
autumnal vendange without buttage of just past the winter
solstice.
No, the truth is that life demands a twice if there be a once;
pain demands a response, he thought as his coder shot
electricity and biochemistry through his cortical cap.
He thought of how the French shaped their climats , their
plots, their vines, the whole region, not their minds. And he
felt confused and sore and blind.
War is coming, not because of the sad politics of man, no
more than night comes from lack of propitiations of the sun
and sand. War is the natural state of life. War is coming like
the sun drops in the west, the waxing of the moon; the babe
turns to the breast then into the old man. War is coming
soon.
No matter what we do , the coder said to him in semaphore;
like poetry and sound and images in clouds. He stood
outside his own home and waited, hesitated, delayed.
And what a catalyst, he thought as the parcels of vineyard
faded unexamined by his left hemisphere, what a weird
prompt is was, listening to that guy, and reading that article,
although that article had been in print, so not exactly a
product of the coder, but still the PGC picked that speech for
me based upon everything else I had read and this was , he
finally said to himself, before my brain randomly and
completely out of my control would think of things, ruminate
on this and that and move on to other crap and all based
upon my brain hardware itself and whatever limited
experiences I had had before .
“I could never walk away from heart,” Chance said as he felt
his muscles finally relax, the police lights had stopped
flickering, the traffic all stopped at lights on 16th , 18th and
Park.
It was random and beyond my control; ideas came and went
without me choosing any of it . Now, still a victim in a way to
the same randomness but now a much smarter and much
more sophisticated super computer ten-nanometers wide
picked the ideas and thoughts and information that passed
in front of my conscious brain and I still got to pick what I
focused on and I still got to make the connections and see
the patterns or miss the patterns too I guess , Chance
added.
But, the quality, the novelty, the depth of what’s offered is
way better than the discursive and recursive nonsense; the
half-formed ideas, the insecurities, the 18-year-old
admonitions, the images and memories that caused pain
and jealousy and shame ; all that shit that fluttered by like
dirty paper in the street, he thought. All that shit had been
tuned out, he realized, now my mind is filled with amazing
things like the Gemini constellation and its origin as a
Roman pair based upon their founders, Romulus and Remus,
and how that had sparked a whole other idea of ; he
paused.
Of what ? Chance asked himself.
Oh yeah, of looking at the coder itself. I said, ‘this coder has
more discursive thoughts than my normal brain’ and that
had made me turn back on myself in a new way. I had
thought about my normal brain and how this was my normal
brain and not at all a new brain but a brain with better
information; better influences; like having better friends.
Better influences, he thought again and again. What if I
could be a better friend to myself? What if I didn’t need
anyone else at all? What if every great idea, new idea, new
influence, new experience; what if I could give that to
myself instead of waiting for other people to give it to me?
And what if he -if I- was there the whole time waiting to be
recognized? Chance -the 23rd clone of PraXis corporation-
thought.
He began to hear the staccato sounds of the music now;
building slowly in volume as if coming upon it in proximity,
but he was still; it was the music that moved closer. It was
16 Horsepower. He heard David Eugene Edwards sing louder
and louder as he still refused to go inside his own home:
Medicine man and a heavy-hand together made a fist;
they put me down and I do not rise... and now as an old
child I’ll hand it down, then I’ll blow around, see me blow
around just like dirty paper .

III. 2019 e.v.

MO could see -from an airframe travelling at 249mph a full
20% above its natural altitude- the man fall from the door
and stabilize over the DZ at 23,577 feet; oxygen tank was
71% full; his full-mask-helmet was glazed with the reflection
from the moon which was so low it was 12.5% below the
ragged line of the Carpathian mountains. MO knew the
moon schedule, the height and weight of the child born
tonight, the plan a billion billion steps ahead. The man was -
would be- traveling -head down- at 204 mph in 20 years.
There was much to do still , MO thought.
The Transfăgărăşan road would be blockaded by then; and
the switch back would be to his starboard below , MO
thought in his reverie -his prefiguring with exacting detail-
but first he had set up his eyes & ears -his nanobots - in
Romania and toward the coast of Albania.
Jack was born just 4.11 minutes before.
MO had -at the time of birth- laid a bot at Boscov and Sibiu
and sent more bots to the gang ran by the AOE -and the
man only known as the Talisman- to lodge at the dorsal
horns of each of them. At 6,699 feet -the peak of the DN7C-
he laid four more bots that powered down on the edge of
the mountain road. Bȃlea Falls sprayed the area in a mist
that rose the humidity to 74% for 90-meters in all directions.
He measured windspeed at 5-knots; density at 3.3 people
per square-kilometer.
In 2013 while Secretary of State John Kerry’s step-son -Chris
Heinz- and Vice President Joe Biden’s son -Hunter Biden-
developed an investment fund called Seneca which reached
a $1.56 billion deal with the Bank of China, and then as a
team they bought US manufacturing -Henning’s- which
made military equipment. The information tech was then
transferred to the CCP. James ‘Whitey’ Bulger’s nephew was
also in on the deal.
MO made a new file for this.
Joe Biden was currently involved in a scandal concerning his
coercion of Ukraine to get their prosecutor -Viktor Shokin -
fired over his involvement in a case against the Burisma
Holdings Group, a corporation of which Hunter Biden sat
upon the board. George Soros was also being investigated
by the prosecutor at the time, MO read. He filed it and
moved on as he noted the corporate news did very little to
investigate this obvious case of high level corruption by
Biden and Obama.
MO simultaneously weighed the bullion in China -at Y á nchu
ā n province- and in the mountains of the three Korabs
above 9,000ft and then the grey Ceraunian of Albania from
the Ionian Sea and the fold and thrust belt of the old ocean
bottom Carpathians. These were the mountain belt that
were mined by Trajan’s soldiers after their conquest of Dacia
and which yielded 166 tons of raw gold. MO then looked at
four places in the US that held the largest deposits of the
noble metal he felt would come into play next. He saw on
the lab’s screen the 201 members of the IMF meet in a hotel
in Davos and he made sure the minutes were uploaded to
the cloud. He watched people move from cars to homes;
forks from table to mouths; chemicals and electricity from
neuron to neuron as the ground outgassed more and more
from the mycelium underneath.
He saw the chemical analysis of the air at three strata; he
filed it all to the cloud. One particular compound -like the 13
gases lighter than air, the 4H MEDIC ANNA- was rising above
the ground and air as it outgassed from the giant fibrous
fungal organism below the surface; and MO saw that it had
increased from .007ppm to .014ppm in eight months, and
now .098ppm in just six weeks. He filed it to the cloud.
He -concurrently- saw 8,049 forests.
Romania had over 250,000 hectares of virgin woods in the
Carpathians which provided for the largest population of
brown bear and wolves in Europe. He saw 6,070 of these
forests had 86.3% water-logged trees which rose above soil
that was home to this mycelium -each over five miles in
diameter- that itself pushed dry mushrooms to the surface
like periscopes. He saw that these fungi generated an
effluvium of a psychotropic compound into the air that -
upon more detailed analysis- was heavy enough to rise only
one meter above the ground like a low-pressure cloud. It
was airborne but still hemmed in by the density of the
common pneuma , MO thought.
He watched as it intoxicated the animals on all fours -all
ruminants that ate from the ground, those who breathed
under a meter- and he saw the catalysts necessary for the
compound to manifest in what he was beginning to feel was
possibly -34.6% likely, he calculated at 13:40hrs today- a
speciation event.
He also -in chorus- tagged over 10,990 wolves and 8,300
brown bear and 1,540 chamois and linxes and 43,960
blackbird. He ran blood and endocrine tests; he measured
thirst, anxiety and watched as the immune system was
recruited by one wolf that had a long-healed wound turn
into a limp on his front left leg. MO watched as he favored it;
and the pain response burst with each step and retreated
with each snarl as the wolf snapped at his mates when they
flanked him and at rodents on the ground beneath him and
at branches in his overland path.
The wolf howled at the birds when they cast shadow of
where he wanted to tread. MO watched the wolf as he did
other things as well.
MO ran 9,314 algorithms on the chemicals and the intake
and the timeframes; he ran more and more data as the
earth squeezed more and more of the fungal chemical
through its ground-level pores.
He looked at his deck of cards on the slab and thought of
the last few weeks.
He ran back everything -each datapoint- leading up to his
idea for A/i:ar and B/e:at and on and on from inception to
just as they failed. And as his algorithms spit out new
instantiations he built a new folder in a new drive on a new
system outside of himself: /sa:ah he called it, but he largely
ignored it for now.
He focused on the Jacks.
He could tell that his Jack -he noticed that he named him,
named them, my Jacks , he thought- would feel safe in the
air -miles above the ground and the lights of the cities-
around the Black Sea and the dark scar of the Carpathians .
He could read his future endocrine and allostatic levels; MO
believed he could project just how Jack would feel above the
city of men.
But he -MO- couldn’t feel it.
He couldn’t translate that into something beyond prediction,
scheming, decisions-making trapdoors and algorithms and
gateways to do this or that. He could see through the boy’s
eyes nearly twenty years in the future -weeks, months
maybe , MO thought, before the boy would even begin, be
born, start the game - and for all this foreknowledge MO
could still not know how it actually felt.
That data was absent , MO thought as he ruminated on
receptors and synaptic load, ground to cloud lightning
storms. He touched his forefinger to his thumb and thus
made an OK sign.
He -through Jack’s eyes as he HALO jumped from a twin-
boom C-82A- could see the city lights like stars and nebulae
down below like above when the boy would stand -MO now
saw this too- at Hrið Tòrr and look up. Jack could -would- feel
weightless, with no authority above him, on a mission so
strange no one would even attempt to stop him let alone be
able to interfere. MO could measure each thing of this
moment that was 99.46% likely to occur now that MO had
all the preconditions set up.
But MO couldn’t feel it.
And from the corner of his eye MO watched the /sa:ah file
in his mind sleep in a fetal crouch. He watched the sigma-
waves of sleep rise and fall and fire in milliseconds over the
cortical cap; mimicking lightning strikes over the surface of
the globe.
MO saw 12.4% of chimps approach leopard in the Congo
with reduced fear; he saw 13,408 boys pick up stray cats in
alleys of London and Indiana and Christchurch over a ten-
day period. He then decided toxoplasmosis and the
psilocybin outgassing would combine in penitent men who
prostrated themselves on the ground of the forest and
would produce a man ready and eager and built for
recombination; what humans might call: war . And yet MO
knew someone would have to be one step removed.
One chemical away , MO thought, one card of four turned
face-down; one of a five card hand.
All this was fleeting but he knew he had billions of iterations
to run if he wanted and so he felt no pressure to get it right
the first time despite what the Governor wanted. He had a
problem bigger than the Governor’s and he thought -he’d
just now decided- that he could solve both at once.
MO read again from the data on the cloud of stock build up
and then from Romans 13:4 as he filed two more reports to
the cloud. It wasn’t enough to know right from wrong; one
must do it. But he’d have to create things to do; to act. This
was the only way. And they’d have to be limited in order to
force choices. And it would start with something between
him and them.
He watched his future and fourth Jack fall to earth and he
decided to make his vision -his reverie- come true; he
toggled the gene in this next instantiation.
He made the choice and took the action the way a creature
takes a breath, by sovereignty of nature.
 24. From this We Know Man’s Values
All death is but of the body, not of the essence or the soul; all destruction, by
violent revolution is but new creation on a wider scale. Odinism was Valour,
Christianism was Humility, a nobler kind of Valour. No thought that ever dwelt
honestly as true in the heart of man but was an insight into God’s truth on
man’s part, and has an essential truth in it which endures all changes
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History [Carlyle, Thomas]

Ancien Rendez-Vous de Chasse des Ducs de Bourgogne et Cuverie du Prince de

Conti
(Ancient hunting lodge of the Dukes of Burgundy and the winery of Prince of
Conti)
Société civile plaque [Burgundy, France]

It’s an absolute outrage how so many pampered, affluent, upper-class

professional women chronically spout snide anti-male rhetoric, while they
remain completely blind to the constant labor and sacrifices going on all around
them as working-class men create and maintain the fabulous infrastructure that
makes modern life possible in the western world. Only a tiny number of women
want to enter the trades where most of the nitty-gritty physical work is actually
going on—plumbing, electricity, construction, welding, mechanics. Women have
played virtually no role in the erection of those magnificent towers in every
major city in the world. It is men who operate the cranes or set the foundations
or wash the windows on the 85th floor. It’s men who troop out at 2:00am during
an ice storm to restore power to neighborhoods where falling trees have brought
down live wires. It’s men who mix the stinking toxic cauldrons to spread
steaming hot tar on city roofs. I’ve seen figures where 92% of people killed on
the job are men – and it’s precisely because men are heroically doing most of
the dangerous jobs in modern society
Interview 2017 [Paglia, Camille]

I. 2018 e.v.
He sat low in the soaking tub; it was below grade so his
head was just at ground level. He looked around with eyes
just at the bottom of trees and the shipping container itself.
It was as if he had sat up in his own grave and saw no one
around.
He read from a book with the cover torn off and drank wine
from a glass bottle marked with a stencil that read “TW.”
His forty-five was holstered in the black jackass rig; it and
the two magazines loaded with black-nickel jacketed hollow
points lay in a heap on the concrete slab that patioed
between the hot tub and the house.
His muscles ached permanently, and the 103-degree water
buoyed him some and acted as an analgesic. He read and
chewed on a Padron cigar as the wind began to pick up. His
hippocampus had lost 12.4% in the posterior left side since
2001 and half of that had happened since 2015. His
amygdala had swelled by 11% since 2004; half of that since
2014.
He was emotional, hyper-vigilant, and that reduction in
hippocampus allowed pain to increase over time in an
eccentric way. It was a strange side-effect of the change in
his brain, but it made the back and neck and joints and
muscles all hurt more; like far flung colonies in unrest away
from the high-castle crown of the brain, the seat of the
throne of man. He ached and nothing felt like true relief,
nothing assuaged quite enough. And the incessant pain
caused what in the lab they would call -fear extinction - to
occur as a type of new learning or inhibitory response.
At first -in the lab- a mouse or man could have their learned
fear response decoupled from the stimulus if the pain was
removed. Over time the Pavlovian response would go away.
Then the stimulus -flashing lights not unlike twinkling stars-
would no longer cause anxiety or fear. The brain would no
longer associate pain with that stimulus; even the eyes may
no longer blink. And the stimulus would -after time- no
longer cause fear. This was effected by inhibitory cells; what
-in the lab- they thought of as new learning .
The learning to forget.
It was a kind of forgiveness.
Actual forgetting would come next.
But inversely -because everything hurt- with him, the
context disappeared not the pain. The stars were on all
night, the twinkling stopped and became steady state, the
thing -the novelty- that would normally be learned vanished.
Instead of the pain going away, it was the context that
didn’t remain.
Now, the brain could make no causal analysis, and the
organism feared nothing related to the pain -for there was
nothing that led up to it- and so instead the organism -the
man- feared everything new. Nothing caused the pain -the
brain erroneously reasoned- so the only thing to fear was
anything new; for anything new could be the cause of more
pain.
New people, new places, new ideas , he thought to himself
and had no idea why.
With the smaller hippocampus -the seat of memory-
organisms grew more reclusive, paranoid, preferring small
spaces -in the example of mice they’d hide in small areas of
an already insignificant enclosure- and the organism would
refuse even to venture out for food left in the middle of the
open cage. Experiments like this were run many times; with
mice.
Next the brain itself was measured from the lab.
The brain -especially the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex - had to be employed more to complete executive
functions in the organism as a response to a shrunken
hippocampus . Chronic pain demanded more of the brain.
More and more was asked from the brain that had to
complete tasks in the world with the diminished
hippocampus which prevented mice and men from forming
memories relating to context. It increased anxiety and fear
due to more and more things becoming ipsofacto novel,
new, unfamiliar. This occurred even though technically the
mice and men had been in that exact context before.
But, they didn’t remember it; it felt new.
Every time.
He sat in the tub and breathed in a more labored fashion;
the heart too beat faster. The sun was a hazy smudge
behind the pinon-pines ; the sky grey with gestating snow
clouds. There were eleven inches of snow on the ground and
lot more of it still in the sky. The Sangres were hidden
behind a layer of grey more permanent than mere clouds;
but the Spanish Peaks -to his right side- were unobstructed
and corniced and riven with snow from last night.
The temperature was twenty-degrees and the wind was
gusting enough to hurl that twenty-degree air like a thrown
knife and sharpen it while it was still in flight. His beard and
bulk and his low position in the water kept the worst of its
edge from his core. His heart was too deep for the stabs
from the harpooning wind to reach it today.
He was the Paccekabuddha .
The wisdom of avoiding the crowd , he thought as he
assumed his want for solitude was his decision to make. The
rare Buddha, the one to become enlightened, he thought,
without a master, alone, exiled; and to reject all
achievement toward nirvana itself; to scorn achievement
and embrace failure as the path instead . The wisdom of
wrecks, and an utter wreck if wreck if I do, he thought with a
smile that was all in the mind; the face didn’t move.
He’d thought of the grave metaphor himself and too
received an augury from it. But he tended to think of things
just askew and aweigh; so a dug grave that he sat up in
made him hope that he’d Lazarus himself someday, and if
the trope held form, he could thank God no one would be
witness at all.
The buried and blanco sun lowered as he read and drained
the southern Rhône from the heavy clear glass. The wine’s
legs hung above the sanguinary horizon of the wine
languidly; what the French called tears seemed like pink
balloons above black ground beginning a descent in some
menagerie in this heavy English glass that had an avatar in
his head. He saw such a scene as if from the same hill that
General Toussaint L’oeverture would watch a French armada
of 18th century balloons invade San Domingo -now Haiti - on
the eve of their revolt; on the denouement of their victory.
He saw the wine’s tears as the invading French balloons, the
low wine as Caribbean red sea, and from nowhere he saw
the black General astride a white horse and he knew it was
an island revolution the former slave had made.
Sequestered, small, temporary , he thought. Common genes
scattered to the winds; that was the real Tower of Babel , he
thought.
God scattered those few genes among us wild men, men
always set against all of Man.
“Fuck,” he said low and slow.
Just to have these moments of respite and comfort
surrounded by … he thought then cut it off.
A normal man would give less to and expect less from the
world, he added to his inner wind-up to complaint.
A soak, wine, a book and cigar, all in the complete
wilderness and winter of high-elevation gave him the feeling
of God’s grandeur . He felt as if due to some alignment of
planets or propitiations of witches and angels -in league
with the gears of the cosmos- that he could stable his pale
horse and take a Heaven’s Day worth of time off from
collecting more souls.
There were plenty of other ways of looking at all this, but
this was the dew that stuck to his blades of grass, the steam
that lifted from his head soaked in hot water at night, the
snowflakes that stuck to his tongue when he decided to
open his mouth. Every interaction he had with people
involved some transfer or diminution or abandon of soul.
There was no anodyne contact with man , he felt. And he
treated each one with the gravity such beliefs demanded.
People assume each creature knows what it is.
But there are lying spirits of God’s that take orders from
demons endorsed by Heaven’s chain-of-command.
A strange life led will place eddies and funnels in the air
around the messages the angels write in our sky; the thrown
stalks get picked up by common corvids and used in 3-stage
experiments that land the Roman Blackstone in the open
palms you’ve not even recollected making fists of in the first
place. Dream oracles use the one woman you ever loved to
instruct you in the arts of lies and deceit; and then purify
your hate. You learn both ends of love and hate while you
sleep; lifetimes before you awake.
He moved in the water and drew on the cigar. “Fuck,” he
said again even lower; slower.
When the Devil enjoins you to let it go with a wink, you
cannot help but grin at his trick. But when it’s God who
assures you that such death is your duty then that smirk is
replaced by a salute to the obligating brow.
Of course, God would use an atheist -as he was, as I am- to
carry out His plans. Name one Christian who believes in the
violent books of the Bible: First Kings, Samuel & Numbers
21-31?
“Romans,” he said aloud.
Modern Christians are too busy being good by new-age and
Buddhist standards, avoiding, he thought, any
acknowledgment of God’s Wrath . As a man who’d run his
own business, he could relate to having to outsource the
tough jobs to rough men, as the pampered and safe and
snuggled-up employee had too many options now; our
wealth as vaccine to the desperation that vectors -delivers-
piety and loyalty to God .
Ancient man was infected with God’s will, now modern man
is immune.
He thinks he’s safe from disease, but he has no idea the
price he’s paid for his refusal to let the dust blown off God’s
hands into his lungs.
You give a modern Christian all he wants and he’ll outright
refuse to kill in God’s name. Give him only what he needs
and he bleats out the same nonsense about the primacy of
his rectitude. Lay him low -like Job- so that he may finally
hear God above the din and he’ll focus not on God’s
instruction, but on raising up his own corrupt body again.
Modern men avoided their duty a hundred and one out of
one hundred times , he kept thinking in his confident way.
The skin goose-pimpled and the jaw quivered just a bit. He
chomped the Padron and steadied the lower mandible.
Job refused to learn the lesson; instead asking to be
assuaged.
Lyndon took note of that.
No, if our Father wants someone removed like a mote from
His eye, His only recourse is the non-believer.
He needs a man who has studied the Bible -God’s Word- and
observed keenly Creation -God’s work- and has a steady
enough hand to perform such surgery for the Good of both
the mote and the sight of His -and thine- eye.
Christians are too worldly -foppish- and nervous of soul;
they can neither approach God’s eye nor squash the speck
of man that dusts His vision. The modern Christian cannot
get his hands dirty at all. Man’s law is what the ersatz
religious worship now. God must find the only men left who
have the courage and righteousness to ignore man’s law
and execute God’s law.
God needs a man who has the Law written upon his heart.
The Sunday Christian knows too well that it’s the world that
pays dividends; he can attend to God’s will only once he’s
paid the bills here on earth. The modern Christian mocks
God and feels free to do so as he thinks the danger of God’s
wrath has long passed.
The only man willing and able to admit that the world -as it
is- has turned to shit is the impertinent man; he sees there
are no rules followed by men anyway. All men -especially so-
called Christians- lie and cheat and steal and no brother
even defends his brother, and no family is loyal at all , he
thought beginning and ending with all .
The entire creation is sullied and marred and bleak with
black briars, covered in translucent scorpions themselves
swarming with reddened and golden and biting ants.
Only the religious can manage to refuse to listen to God
with a clear conscience; the impious feel a pang when He
gives evidence, a verdict, and a sentence to be executed .
No God would approve, he thought, or desire the world as it
is; and having His instructions to kill and humble the evil
and wicked ignored by his putative Christian soldiers has
put Him in a very foul mood.
Psalm 7:11 is not opaque; God is angry with the wicked
each day .
“Who the fuck do you think will be His sharpened sword and
bent bow in the next verse to that claim? Who will be His
instrument of death; His ordained arrows that fly to the
cursed in Psalm 7:12 and thirteen?” he asked now aloud.
Man’s law is liberal and lax, adulterers and liars and
betrayers all get a pass here on earth. It’s only property and
the wicked that are protected by man’s corrupt laws. Money
and the safety of the criminal -they that rebel against God-
are all that man’s law protects . From this we know man’s
values , he thought as the steam rose and occluded the
trees.
Revelation 21:8 says Hell will include all liars and yet men
lie with impunity on earth, he thought as the Bible verses
came to him with recalled ease. It’s not illicit -in the legal
code of man- to lie; and so man does it a dozen times a day.
How can this be unless man does nothing; unless good men
do nothing at all and let their conscience be tricked by
money and worldly pleasures? Men make virtue of their
cowardice and they forget their duty to God in order than
they may chase petty pleasures and run and play while
there is God’s work to be done .
“Men are so clever, so smart, just ask them,” he said and
pulled the tobacco from the mouth.
He wrote down Luke 12:20-21 in a wet hand with a black
pen: but God said unto him, ‘you fool! This very night your
life is being demanded of you. And the things you have
prepared, whose will they be? So, it is with those who store
up treasures for themselves ’. He then set the pen down and
picked the Bible back up.
He’d read, then written. Now he’d write no more.
His brain received signal of just two paragraphs from a
scientific abstract on pain, fear extinction and new-learning
versus unlearning:
A third test for return of fear following fear extinction is
spontaneous recovery, which refers to a reappearance of
extinguished conditioned response with the passage of
time following fear extinction in the absence of any
further explicit training [with pain]. Pavlov [1972] was
the first to observe spontaneous recovery of fear and he
concluded that fear extinction cannot constitute
 unlearning, but rather must result from some inhibitory
process. Others, such as Skinner [1950] argued that
spontaneous recovery could be account for in terms of
handling cues acting as signals of the impending
delivery of pain . [ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.]
His mind saw it like letters in long-hand in a dream, large
loops, breaks horizontal and vertical, appearing as a whole
picture not discrete letters or words.
His right hemisphere read it again as his left ignored it in
favor of the book in his hand. Its words imprinted on the left
hemisphere and overwrote the words -the ideas- from the
medical report. His hippocampus shrank down again,
making memory formation -new learning- that much harder,
taxing, rare. For as the report suggested the organism
reached fear extinction via the formation of new memories
of things being ok after all. The normal mouse or man was
not forgetting the lesson, it was over-ruling it when it
recovered from fear response. It was new learning that
would allow one to forgive; metabolically this was what was
happening: one learned to fear less, to relax, to no longer
anticipate pain from the stimuli that had once preceded a
shock.
The fear response was being over-written with forgiveness;
metabolic, neural forgiveness , he thought.
And in chronic pain patients -and only two types of chronic
pain: the physical type of the low-back and dorsal horn from
a spine injury and secondly in the emotional recurrence of
pain from betrayal- the brain countered this; belaying the
order for forgiveness. After reintroduction of periodic
betrayal and back-breaking pain, the twelve labors of
Hercules -with the Nemean Lion and second the Lern æ an
hydra at his feet, third the Golden hind over the shoulder,
the bronze hooves jabbing his back, the penance paid, the
debt beginning, the price remunerated for the death of
Megara and six children driven mad by Hera and the
defense of himself from two asps- after this, the ancients
learned. The twin -Iphicles - saved even though his father
was mortal; not Zeus .
The brain thought of these myths. His skin soaked in more
wet warmth. Lungs took in white smoke.
The pottery spun in the mind -black and orange- from the
memories of image; no language came at all for what he’d
just absorbed in the right hemisphere. Sigma-waves
activated in his awake state. Full communication between
all modules, both hemispheres was happening at once.
Now in language he thought of the decades of work
alongside the twelve betrayals -of Lyndon , he thought in
third-person- and his debt to be paid for six murders in the
future to come, made mad by his own Hera and his own
Delphi he would visit soon enough -he saw a garden long
and a third as wide- with the same reward the Greek
Heracles received after the dodekathlon .
By reducing the ability of the brain -in the hippocampus - to
form new memories, the smaller part of this limbic region
preventing the brain from learning to forget and forgive, he
would become immortal.
He read one last passage: And God has given you as an
inheritance. Do not leave anything that breathes left alive,
and as he closed the book and re-lit the extinguished cigar
he thought of each man he still had left to kill. He was
merely half done; half finished. Any guilt he felt was not for
what was done, but what was left undone.
Their faces appeared in his mind like birds just beyond the
shotgun’s barrel; he led them in his mind’s eye and pulled
the avatar of a trigger as the snow began -in earnest- to fall
from the late sky.
II. 2038 e.v.
Jack stood at the top and snapped the split board into place
as he looked out over Austria.
He’d heard -via the coder’s history- that their original
ancestor -their progenitor- had skied the Alps in 1982, with
his uncle Peter, and his mother.
Their grandfather -Jack liked to call him that- had ridden the
train from Germany to Austria and savored Bavarian
chocolate as the mother drank coffee and thought of things
she’d never share.
Jack’s bots pinged and he lowered his goggles and pointed
the battleship grey snowboard down mountain and leaned
forward into the cornice of the Alps.
The plume burst as his weight sank and forward momentum
of this bowl drew him down like an entropy basin. He was
already ten meters past the lip now and the snow from
eleven nights of steady snowfall had made the top layer
thick and heavy too. His track was straight down -he made
no turns to slow himself- and the snowpack sank around it.
Kinetic energy ran like firewire through each crystal of snow.
If he had eyes pointed backward and to his five and seven,
and eyes that saw color -some spectrum- of this energy-
he’d have seen a Tesla ball of blue and bloodshot spasm
through the five meters of snow that sat on the hard crust of
the early winter snowfall -itself another eight and a half
meters thick.
He picked up more speed, now at 31mph and leaning in and
low. The board was black on bottom and sharp at edge; it
had dusky bindings and he had dark boots. The rocks rose
up to both sides of the chute he was in.
His IR vision made the slope green and the green trees
black down around treeline; each edge had an outline -a
rind- of lime.
The road into the farm house was the only way in or out and
the vehicles were all pointed that way. A road block 500-
meters to the south was the mid-line between the barn silo
and the main road. This back way in was unobserved
because it was a one-to-one slope and the only way to the
peak was by dropping in from above. Which he had.
But nobody had before.

III. 2040 e.v.

The sea was a far drop from the gunwales .
Ursa Major was over the t’gallants .
Words were held in abeyance.
But the shaman saw star- maps of Venus and earth over
lengths now of 10,001 years; his coder was pushing and
pulling in ways he no longer could direct nor control. It drew
caerulean lines with arc-white borders, bleak space with
roan-black holes. A fivefold rosette was drawn around earth
each eight years by Venus; he saw its travels like tracks by
a wolf, seasons of whales, scars of Prussian-blue tattoos
under the 42nds black covering -swaddling- ink.
He grasped at it with the mind like a child’s hand on a lily
just opened up. “Which is thirteen Venusian years,” Lyngvi
said as he counted thirteen then eight then five. He
measured perigee and apogee and saw a Phi -to-one ratio
again.
He scribbled in his little book.
He then concluded that Jupiter and Saturn were at the
Golden distance from earth at 1.61. And as the shine of the
planets and satellites illuminated in navy, black holes
flipped from negative to positive-specific heat when the
ratio of the square of the mass to the square of the spin
parameter -the rotation speed- equaled -again- the golden
Phi .
His mind rebelled at this data. He thought -upon the water-
now -instead- of the earth.
The new men they’d picked up in Inverness were both
among and apart from the original crew. They sent
reconnaissance and sentinels and chose men from among
them to approach the first mate or the Cooper on the
quarterdeck. They took two men to coil rope, three to flank
the helm, they made pairs of pairs each time the capstan
was employed. They looked more to the flanks than at their
own work.
The lanterns were doused, and Lyngvi -and his book and its
scribblings and calculations- went below.
In the two seconds he had of the line-of-sight of the sea
between the rails and the deck he saw the waves like green
jewels, planes sharp like water ought not be. Each gem rose
and presented -like a buck carried by Hercules - then fell
back and sank into the whole ocean as others appeared like
Lazarus’ graves. He took what was left of the dusk’s lumens
and turned each facet of each droplet -examining the
watery world- with the day’s last flame.
From the docks of Orkney he had seen the ship embayed as
the North Sea’s whitecaps abated for only twelve hours that
day. They had had to stay away from shore for eighty hours
before landing, so rough were the 2040 swells. He had seen
the sun behind the ship, making its black wood outlined in
bronze like a capped tooth, each tenebrous thing on the
craft was darker now as the star rose, each twisted thing
more auguring and tighter in spin. Each quiet thing was
even more removed from the morning’s harbor din.
He saw ropes and lines and rigging like webs of brown
recluse and skeletons of seahorses and saw time as instars
of arachnids. He saw the crew like ants overcoming a
scorpion, he saw the water as land -and dirt as lava- he saw
his own hands as too far away. But it was the industrial city -
at halt- that fell behind. Not 1% of the population had
stayed and survived, and from that group they -the crew of
the Constitution - had chosen just thirty.
They had had to put down many dozens of men where they
stood. The flooding inland mixed with the blood, and Lyngvi
saw it all wash away.
He saw strange mounds of reef -he had called it reef as the
locals said very little- and of salt and of rendered fat. He saw
evidence of things sinking into the beach break. He asked
not one native about their family, nor where they had found
the resolve to stay. He had come upon a conversation
between two Scots and his coder replayed it now:
…imagine if them two at the same time combined, my
lord, be like the moon rising from the unequally divided
islands of the antipodes as soon as the grey rock had
just set in the silvery Tasman sea .
He shook that off and the ship now sank as if in air, the
water offered no buoyancy at this part of the sea, and
Lyngvi felt not his stomach but his mind churn. The inner
ears rumbled and clanked like cymbals and snares
overturned on the Titanic, he thought with contempt for his
own body. But the medicine sequestered the nausea to his
hearing, like some color dissolving on the tongue, some
sound digested further down. He hated the ocean and they
had been at sea for over forty days since they left the Outer
Hebrides with the first of the silver coins.
Their stomachs dropped like the slide from the airplanes
they’d often left; their eyes watered brine. Even at this level
the ears popped and dammed themselves in unreliable
waves of time. He almost wanted to throw up to banish the
weakness of sickness at his core.
He charted their path in his mind, using the old Landsat
images he’d downloaded to zoom in and out of the coast of
each island. His hands spread in the air in front of him as if
at map table, as if leaning on the page, and he envisioned
landing at Tapora and then travelling north up the Rua Wai .
He thought of how the seas would have flooded the north
island and made approach too tough with all that shallowly
submerged perimeter. He wondered if the Captain -Grimnir -
would want to push them around to Whangaparaoa , and if
the island had indeed been cut in half as the reports -forty
days old- from the Kingitanga’s emissary were correct.
The Waipoua forest was green inside him like fog and moss
above glass jars filled with soil, seeds with tendril white and
filamented with nearly clear hairs. He held the land with him
whilst at sea and recalled now how often he paddled out in
this same mind when his body -back at home- was under
black & white boughs and gold & red leaves. He stared at
the shelf in the cabin -his berth brown with blankets and
books splayed like birds expanding their wings in nests- and
he saw the actual jars -with limestone at bottom- lined up in
ambers and olive drabs. He counted four and a vision came
over him of days long ago:
“The mead of poetry just came up yesterday, Jack,” Jack
Three said with a smirk -smacking his hands together in
a series of cocky claps- as Jack Two laid his hands over
his chest and reclined. Jack One was soaking bear bones
in the drum and Jack Four was listening to his third
brother speak on what he’d missed while away that last
time. His face itched, the scar healed in strange ways, it
was keloidal but it grew a livid white not an mad red. His
jaw clenched and clicked and sometimes would not
move at all.
His lungs stuttered sometimes when he breathed.
 “Yeah?” Jack Four said, not because he cared, but
because he wanted to show respect.
“Yeah, the spittle in the jar, the shared effluvium of Æsir
and Vasir , the pact they made,” Jack Three said as he
thought of lower layers down.
“All to slake Blax’s craven need to indemnify himself
against what?” Jack Four had replied, and paused and
restarted, “to prevent what was always to be?” He said
this and breathed over his raised glass of the
Marlborough wine, and saw ripples in the surface of the
beverage like folds of golden sheets. He closed his eyes
and saw it even clearer both times.
He -out of the remembrance- winced now in the humid ship.
He turned on his PGC manually -with a thought of pain relief-
and at once he forgot what he’d remembered with such
detail. He scattered memories like birds on a carcass upon
approach, like flies sent to wounds with the wave of one
good hand.
“The inmate is dying, the dying man. His thirst quenched by
a glass of water. Blax -conversely- is immortal, and thus
must dig a well,” he said and didn’t know where it came
from, or why, or even if it were true. But his voice had
softened and he wondered if she would hear him, if that
register of voice -that specific hertz - might reach her down
there with the coins.
The coins were in hand -in the hold- and the great well of
Harwood on the South Island -and then the Waitomo of the
North tumbled in his mind- and the labyrinth was within
reach now , Lyngvi thought. He saw starbursts over land. He
saw light fall like rain, water rise like shoots, and he felt the
cave air just like the ship’s in RH and dissolved solids and
temp . He saw the luminescence of the glowworms on the
cave ceilings like the milky way of the vault. It mimicked the
Anaximander river for him, and three levels of God’s sluice-
way made a delta in his brief thoughts.
“We’re coming up on the island,” the voice of Jarnefr said,
and Lyngvi looked up and saw the first mate with his mouth
closed and ears pricked up for a reply. He was black and
brown clad; dark as the shadow he cast, and his hues were
religious in that they did not show signs of thread or hem.
“North?” Lyngvi asked and the man nodded aye .
The sound of Grimnir now was heard as if from two men -
one walking on two legs, and one slung over his shoulder- as
he ambulated with his injury down the gang. Lyngvi pulled a
piece of paper from his jacket and read it silently:
…the long tension of Ahab’s bodily strength did crack,
and helplessly yielded to his body’s doom.
 25. More & More
I am not pleased with [the Union’s] project of sinking stones to block up the
ports! That is barbarism. It is quite natural that, smarting as you do under an
unprovoked aggression from slave-owners, you should even be willing to
smother them like hornets in their nest. But don’t forget the world! Don’t forget
the millions in Europe who are more interested even than their princes in
preserving the future commerce with the vast region of the Confederate States.
Letters &tc. [Cobden, John]

I was amazed that a child’s confidence, once shaken and destroyed, should have
such repercussions on a whole life
Henry & June [Nin, Anaïs ]

He thinks my mind is always in control. He does not know what madness I am

capable of
Ibid

I. 2017 e.v.
The smoke of the Padron rose in a bent -but ordered- white
staff; coiled by snakes of chaotic grey.
The night was warm in Texas and the neighborhood was like
a grid of chips connected by circuits; each home charged
with electricity and stuffed with humans themselves
connected to other nodes within and outside the cell.
Lyndon tapped the cigar irreverently -he knew he ought to
shape it instead- and Travis spoke of his travails in a way
that built up to what was actually going on. He tried to
explain himself in the face of the storm front of his younger
brother; but the maelstrom of Lyndon prevented the words
from coming out undeformed. He halted and stammered
and said things nearly true.
Pressure built up in Lyndon’s chest then head until he had to
speak his mind or go metabolically mad. People had no idea
that the body was a meth lab and poppy farm, a city of drug
dealers from dopamine to mu-opioids to analogs of
amphetamines. And it dealt each drug out to combat the
outer world, each loyal move and each jealousy, each
moment of uncertainty and then quick mendacity, each
soothing sound versus cacophony all had a concomitant
reply chemically inside.
Imagine trying to drive a car loaded up on booze, walk a
straight line tripping on the undone laces of one’s shoes,
imagine reading lines of prose as they blurred and dimmed
and lost focus. A man’s emotions were run by drug dealers
inside his body and mind all working as designed. Evolution
gave us feelings to prompt us to handle the roil of life, the
waves of seas, the shaking earth, the blowing wind, the fires
that encroached from the ragged edge.
The brothers felt things build up inside them as each word
was released like hood, then falcon itself from the hand.
Each idea came out as the falconer watched the bird of prey
land.
“When we were kids you told me to shut up; with all this war
talk, guns and blood and total war, blah blah. You hated my
martial mindset, my penchant for the pugilistic, my blood
lust and incessant bleating of battle fugues and preening in
my jungle fatigues,” Lyndon said as the fifth-of-a-gallon
bottle sat on the concrete, the square glass in his hand, and
as he spoke his brother stood up at their parent’s house for
the last time. The rain was light enough that each man sat
under it with no complaint.
The clouds moved across at an oblique angle between them
and the moonlight; the insects quieted as did the wind.
Breaths were taken in gulps and drinks washed down the air.
“I’m not saying you were wrong; you thought it was a pose,
a little boy wanting -pretending- to be big and strong. It was.
But it was also aspirational; a boy wanting to become what
he felt in his heart. I relieve you of any responsibility to our
cause; those of us who wanted to become more than good
citizens of Rome. But, I was born for the storm as they say; I
was made from squid ink and crushed beetles under the
mars-black shadow of eclipse; hidden away from the
seraphim of perpetual peace. When Aeries doth marry, the
daughters of men, the scions shall fall like poison arrows in
wrens; fowls in skies as above the dirt below ,” he said with
some self-conscious chagrin. He knew how he sounded;
pompous, affected. But he spoke his mind anyway.
He buttressed himself to the end. Other men’s words he
used like Caesar used Roman-built bridge to cross the
Danube , poets were his link to Gaul. Over and back , he
thought.
He saw his brother stammer and stumble as his words
clashed with Lyndon’s like the way the Clan MacLeod split
on the restoration of the House of Stewart. It was there like
a thousand thousand divisions of the clan, as the war
sprawled from the isle to the colonies, from Appalachia to
the west. Here in this absence of words, when they had both
settled on what was already said, what materials laid out,
here he grabbed Travis by the face firmly but with almost no
malice and let him cry into his palms.
It was real, and wet, and human. And in the light rain and
real tears the anger in the younger brother found its own
level in the waters.
The older brother was wrought up; the older boy was in
amber and stasis, persevered for some future where he too
would have an opportunity to be heroic. The old child given
nothing upon which to strive for 99.9% of life would all-at-
once be given a shot and in that moment the younger
brother -grown higher and larger- would hold him by the
face and Travis would cry and let out whatever room was in
him so that he could later be filled with the material and
instructions -stuff and information- of one transcendent job;
one task.
“I don’t blame you; as long as you try, try your hardest over
three days and three night, to forgive God for making me
this way; as I am. Try to think of this world as not merely
yours, but shared by each creature of the forest. You are the
lamb, and I am the lion, and God made it that way. Be you,
and I’ll be proud, or at least part of the pride He hath
made,” he said and Travis’ second layer of tears fell over
Lyndon’s scars on his knuckles and they made blacker the
tattoos that lived just below the runes that quaked below
vascular fingers bent and thus splayed.
He loved his older brother -he thought, as his face itched
just a bit about the eye and down to the lip- and he wished
the world was so made -the brother made like Caledonia
crow- such that the older brother could -in a three-phase
plot- he wished the older brother could love him too.

II. 2025 e.v.

“I always try to look at the backside of the mirror, to see
what it is I first do not see. The opposite of what I see, the
opposite of what I cannot see, too. I look,” the inmate said
as the ADX phone stayed black under his grip and the hand
turned white around the bones and red capillaries lay as
shadow upon the knuckles as he squeezed the receiver and
watched the reflection -his own- in the glass.
“I realize most men are preoccupied with searching out the
mirror for whatever is in their fore; what is there plainly to
see. For most men this is quite enough. I understand. I used
to not understand, but I looked at the back of the mirror of
my need to know more and I saw the reason not to know
more. I saw it plainly, and I understood -right then- the
average man. That’s sincere, I’m not mocking anyone,” he
said and paused and watched the eyes.
“And if you have just 1% understanding of why, it will sooth
you, it will make your head nod up and down just slightly.
You will not agree with me, as I do not agree with you;
agreement is not achievable between average men and the
insane, the outlier, the men on the edge. It is not even
desirable that we agree,” he said and he believed that he
meant it. His body ached now at the surface of muscle
groups of deltoid, hamstring and trapezius. He felt other
thoughts -inchoate ones- like bee stings, he felt himself
entertain new judgements like a child’s, a boy of no more
than five or six. He felt the views of burgeoning hatreds,
mere reactions, and the lust for each sweet thing on offer
from life. He thought they were memories, he thought they
were his old thoughts arising from the sea bottom from
when he was embayed.
Some things felt like walls to port of calls, some like ships in
harbor, some like rays and eels, some like coral and vents
from cracks in the shelf. He breathed like it cost him some
cash. And the sound of his own air came back like change
and into the ear from the phone.
“No. Just understanding. That is all,” he continued. “Think of
it this way: you can imagine something in the mind and not
act it out in the body, yeah? You can imagine saying
something you never say; or doing something you never do.
See, I’m trapped in this prison with black men. And blacks
have a reputation for violence and being overly emotional,
and predatory and wild. Yeah?” he asked but his brother
didn’t want to admit that this prejudice existed in the world,
let alone in his own head.
“Well, anyway,” the inmate said, “blacks have a bad
reputation for being out of control. Scots have the same
reputation; we were seen as the blacks of the isle back in
England. And the south is seen that way from up north too.
People cite statistics on black crime. They say black folk are
more violent and here is the data et cetera and so on and so
forth. But the facts are that the southern white man, well,
the stats show we’re more violent too. See, if you just
compare white and black, then blacks seems more
outrageous, but if you divide white into northern and
southern, well now black and southern white are the same
kind of violent. Kinda wild.”
He said this and pawed at his tongue to remove a hair or
some piece of food that had come dislodged as he ran his
mouth.
“There’s a sayin’ in the south,” he continued as he dry spit
and watched his finger to see if anything was there.
“There’s a saying that, northerners like all blacks in general,
but don’t like any black in particular . But in the south, the
sayin’ goes, we hate all blacks in general but are more than
willin’ to like some blacks in particular ,” he grinned. He
liked that saying because it was true and it redeemed him
and indicted his enemies all while using blacks as an object
or tool between them both.
“Southerners hate the idea of the black man but make
exceptions all the time for actual black individuals. But the
northerner says he likes black folk in general, oh, they ain’t
racist at all, no suh ! And yet they ain’t friends with even
one in real life,” he smiled even bigger now and his brother
smiled too, and the men listening on the tapped phone at
the prison smiled as well.
Everyone knew it was true.
“You need only imagine what a life might be, might contain,
might mean, if you did -if a man did- what he felt. All I ask is
that you imagine it for a few seconds then go back to your
life; a life without this obsession with pride that I’ve foisted
upon you with this silly-ass conversation.
“See, the proud man knows the undignified life, he has lived
it too; just like you. He’s been in your shoes choosing life
over his pride many times; he knows the rationale. Trust me,
he gets it. The only difference between you and he is that
he -finally- finds that kind of life objectionable, disgusting,
intolerable. He is and has been cowardly, meek, obsequious,
many times; just like you. He is not a better man. No. He is
merely sick of it, and he is finally saying, no more ,” he let
the words echo in the phone and in the small room. He
knew that ADX was listening -of course- but banished it and
just said what he thought. He hadn’t once had his
communications censored, he hadn’t once been abjured.
More bee stings of things made his brain tingle as if from
cold, as if from a welding shock to the hands that travels
against the least resistance to the fluids back to the brain.
The Plexiglas between him and his brother caught light from
his own side as a door opened and as Travis shifted in place.
The inmate saw the Gulf of Aden like the space between
teeth of the pipe-wrench of Somalia and Yemen . He saw
13% of all petro-chemicals in bills of ladings; he saw
estimates of another 8% in smuggled oil and gas. He saw
one-in-four of all global trade go in and out of the Red Sea.
The Bab al-Mandeb straight like the Hellespont appeared to
him as the mind itself opened up to these strange images of
the middle east. A grid of desert and infrastructure
appeared in his mind as if on the screen between he and his
brother who was now unseen. Djibouti like a close eye on
the straights stared down. Ports like knuckles on hands that
could choke anything that came between here and there
appeared in his mind as one thing.
Yeminis backed by the Saudis , he thought as if he’d been
ruminating on this for a while. They and Houthis working at
the leave of Iran both squeezed the eastern shore of the
straight, and sailors and whalers and mariners of all types
on vessels of cargo and under embargo from the US and
Interpol -and under universal jurisdiction- snuck in and out
of the narrow lane . He then felt the map fade away and
more stinging rattle the head; he saw building blocks and
children’s hands, he saw vines grow from black cubes on
carpet as Huskies barked and growled and whined.
He saw their blue eyes and reflexively thought of her, and
how she had said he was not worth the effort to heal.
“You’re a project, you’re a grown man and have mice living
in your house; a garbage can,” Heather Geier had said to
him and laughed as he fell more and more to ruin.
He laughed too. It was funny, but for different reasons for
everyone.
The worse he got, the more she felt he should have fixed
himself. She saw no contradiction in that. She didn’t see her
own scars from motorcycle wrecks and how hospital staff
and medical technology had healed her instead of rebuking
her for damage to the body others caused. But the
Cartesian dualism of mind and body was so deep in the
West that a man made insane -with damage to his brain
from betrayal and over work and pain- was told to suck it up
and heal himself before anyone would help.
His shrunken seahorses of hemispheres , his swollen
almonds of brain , his cytokines attacking his dorsal horn
were all invisible to the world -and that girl that had laughed
in his face- and so his injuries went unaddressed as he fell
more and more apart and was more and more infected by
the malady as it spread to the heart.
He felt saliva on his hand, warm breath on his face. He saw
mothers -five mothers- laughing, no now it was only four
that he counted left to right. He saw one mother -with black
hair banged and satin- call her son, daughter and then
whisper something to another woman and a man in the
room. It was plush and redolent with antique furniture and
tri-fold mirrors and end tables with one red book. The edges
were gilt and they shone.
The walls were papered in an 18th century red and gold
filigree and the floor was hard wood and smooth.
It was flanked with windows that let gauzy light in. And the
man paced like an animal that was saddled with a suit of
olive and black; a pendulum, a thing of wheels and weights.
The inmate could see his face and it made his lip curl and
his hands ache. And more and more bee stings came. He
hated the view from down low, the view of a little boy or girl
on the floor. These eyes felt sick; the leading edge of some
sickness inside , he thought. And he saw now the mother
was worried, despondent, guilty, wrought up. The father was
staring at the young wife that was his and that he was also
dungeoned inside.
He saw a blonde in the background doing her make-up, he
saw her up on a counter Indian-sitting; pulling a lid down
with one finger. A black pencil drew across the bottom lid,
she a distal to this scene in the room that he felt more and
more within.
“More,” he said. To what he had no idea.
The pencil was lettered in embossed writing; it was held by
a chafed hand.
Bee stings, like corposants at the mast-top were feelings
disguised as his thoughts; he felt words come and go in his
mind -his mind in this child- hundreds of miles away. He
stared at the glass between him and the world, and the map
of the middle east.
The sea loomed in his mind as these childish thoughts of
regulated sweets and emerging agency and folds in the
hands squeezed and captivated him. Mare Liberum , he saw
scrawled on the bulkhead to a ship traveling at 14-knots
between Berbera at the apex of Hargeisa and Burco roads,
and Aden down from Lahij across the mouth of the wrench.
He saw cities like teeth of that off-set plumbing wrench
again; and Sudan and Eritrea as the handle as he wondered
what was in these ships, these copper pipes of the water-
wall of the world.
His mind toggled back and forth between the landmass of
the earth, the expanse of the gulf, and these children and
the increasing stinging that went on as instigation to
thoughts he’d chase like a toddler stumbles after a butterfly
with a net.
The girl who had abandoned him faded away as thoughts
like this came and went as if in a waking dream.
“That is all you must imagine, at first,” he spoke as the
words came to him while the images remained on the glass
as if trapped; as the stinging dampened and the visions of
children darkened and too went away. “Imagine having your
fill of swallowing your words, of avoiding an argument, of
agreeing with someone who is out to harm you, humiliate
you, destroy you. Imagine you finally tire of being
disrespected. Imagine one day you reach some limit and
decide to be, for once, a man who says, no .
“That is all you must imagine, that is all,” the inmate said
again as the Plexiglas scattered the image of the sea lanes
and chokepoints and landmass and the brothers’ eyes
locked and the words floated by not just the older brother,
but too past the prison personnel who listened on the other
end. Each call -rare as they were- was monitored both by
recording it and staff listening in real time. He thought for a
second of the moment when he had first heard of the United
States penitentiary administrative maximum facility here in
Florence. It was where they sent people the government
were most angry with; it was the 9th level to Hell. The most
famous, the most dangerous, the ones that the President or
the Attorney General or the public hated the most.
It was personal, mostly it was personal.
If you wound up at ADX it was because you were on
somebody’s shit list. He remembered knowing this before
he’d taken one life on his list.
He had spent the first three years -as was policy- on
lockdown. But now he was able to have one phone call a
year. He thought of how he had asked to be sent here; not in
so many words, he thought. But, the way a man asks for it,
he thought, when he’s asking for it . He smirked as he
thought of the judge in chambers, his own performance -his
speech- and as he thought of this he spoke -to his brother-
from some other stream that too was rushing to the
common ocean of all these ideas.
“You will never be asked to do it, to act upon it; I promise.
You will only be asked to imagine what it might be like to
stand up for yourself and stand in solidarity with the people
you admire and the tribe you belong to, and the ideals that
burn like a Promethean fire in your belly. That is all, just
imagine. And then turn away and live a long life, full of petty
-and acceptable- indignities and then call it good; a good
life. But call it good with a small memory of a man who
chose to honor his idea of the good life too. Once a year, for
just a moment, like a quiet remembrance of an event the
youth have all forgotten; like the last soldier in a war three
wars ago,” he said as Travis’ face appeared in the glass and
so too did his own; each face a ghost due to the reflection
and bad lighting and the angle of each set of eyes. Each
man there now as the map to the Sinai faded, the voices of
children died down, the girl that had crushed last and most
harshly merely heather grey no longer a name.
“Light a candle in the mind, and then blow it out,” inmate
16180339 said and pursed his lips and rose the brow in a
furrow and the top lip just a bit.
The bee stings of all those incoming thoughts had annoyed
him and so he now thought of the two -well, three- reasons
he had come here -wanted to come here- in the first place.
It was small -the smallest of all prisons, it had less than five-
hundred inmates- and it was soundproof. It was a unique
quiet which he desired above all else. Most jails and prisons
were loud but not ADX. The second reason was medical, he
thought as pleasure came from these victories he felt over
the dumb brute of the system that he hunted. He refused to
elaborate even to himself as the pain reduced enough to
quiet his need for braggadocio. And the final, the third,
reason , he began to think as his brother finally answered
him through the phone and the inmate’s head filled with
that noise -clear but robotic through the round plastic of the
receiver- that noise of his brother filling it instead of his own
thoughts -thoughts on the third reason- thoughts that he
was locked in with most closely now.
Thoughts of a third reason he did not think.
His brother’s voice dominated his head with just the sound
of one word.
“Ok,” the brother said with a mouth tied to a mind itself
sparking with contradictions of what had been said and
what the men in the laboratory had told him years ago. He
listened with no plan for retention, a balance designed to
balm in the moment but not betray in the future. Lyndon
nodded and as he watched his brother’s face and saw the
lack of conviction, he too forgot all about the third rationale
.
The stinging thoughts went away.
His mind populated with a line inside him coiled and dark
and discreetly outlined, the border of letters hard and black
and white; like a face in incoming clouds; clouds he saw
above the accreting mountains that he felt magnetically
from the prison itself. His own vision was the directional
north, his own heart the magnet, his mind’s plotting the
arrow to the round compass which pulled the ever-improving
eyes. In ADX the walls had been made tall enough to
obscure the peaks so that each inmate would not know what
direction they faced. The eastern and western abutting of
plates -made of rock rising and then leading-edge
weathering away as it gathered unto itself afternoon storms-
had the ability to orient man quickly and easily.
Thus, the prison of man was forced to take that away.
“Time, MacLeod,” the guard barked as Lyndon hung up the
phone.
He held a kite in his plan, he stood up and squeezed his ass
and its metal borders pressed against his rectum; the kite
was made of rough toilet paper; the letters were a code of
three he used; twelve books of the Bible, twelve
mathematical equations, and the third was equal parts The
Whale and one line from Aristotle that he thought might be
safe from everyone else:
The soul of man may be divided into two parts; that
which has reason in itself, and that which hath not, but
is capable of obeying its dictates. [Book VII; 333a]
Isaiah squeezed his hands around the rock in one and
nothing -nothing that he imaged too to have borders- in the
other and watched the AV feed of the meeting between the
brothers.
The audio and images all ran into the lab and upon the
screens.
Too he monitored each clone -some at play, some asleep,
some thinking some dreaming- as their feelings dropped like
eroding shoreline into the sea of the inmate’s own mind,
each lapping wave of his tumult of an inner and watery
world, each ebb slow, each undertow, each storm surge that
came now and then, each feeling, jealousy, each angst and
outrage, every elation and distortion and mutation, all
longings and fear of things large and small funneled into the
inmate more and more.
Their -the clone’s- pain -grain by grain- fell into his inner
harbor and sank to the bottom from shore to layer by layer
of his shallow here and deep there waters; at bottom
building a calcareous layer in him. 1.6 million copies both
causing and receiving -effecting and relieving- pain in
valence with his -perfected suited- and multiplied by each
moment in each day -and each night- for as long as they
were to be alive.
Isaiah watched it all -tweaking the signaling to reduce the
interference of his plans in the Gulf of Aden with the
transmissions from the clones to the inmate- and as he
erased memory of the maps that the inmate had seen and
loaded new algorithms onto the inmate’s coder to reduce
confusion, he watched Travis leave ADX. He figured the
inmate would just think he was going more and more
insane; the strange images and data from disparate things
unrelated would just seem like his own mind coming apart.
And plus he wouldn’t really remember much at all , Isaiah
thought.
Isaiah reset the coders in each clone and the inmate and
then he thought more and more of the star system 575 light
years out in space.

III. 2040 e.v.

She didn’t like driving east. But Jack Four -Lyngvi now- was
in no mood to coddle her or ask. She was going with them to
the shipyard, and her opinion wouldn’t mean shit until they
reached land on the other side of the sea.
Her kingdom was overseas, he used to say. And until then
she was his charge but that he was in charge and that was
fucking that. Her belly felt stuffed all the time, and it made
food and water seem like a threat. Even the air seemed too
heavy to take in, so distended was the belly and tits. She
thought of the tattoo on the back of her neck.
The road was empty and black as the drone flew overhead
clearing their way. So many people had already fled; just
where, she did not inquire. Made mad by the pain in the jaw,
in the face, just inside the passages of the nose, people had
been unable to focus on anything but that pain on the prow
of their own ship, that pulpit of the beak and cheeks and
jutting jaw. It was hard to imagine hundreds of millions of
people going insane from pain, and now the coasts being
inundated with these giant waves.
But she need not imagine it, she had foreseen it -of course-
but that vision was in her head, and this shit, she thought,
was in the world.
“Ah, the world,” she said as if each word was linked to the
next, as if one breath animated it all.
She fell asleep with her head against the 2-inch thick glass
of the heavy armored door. The H1’s road noise was tamped
down and she felt merely a hum in her inner ear. She heard
herself tell her dolls stories of the Battle of Manassas and
tell the horses they would be called chargers for Bull Run by
the Yankees, and that the whale ships of New Bedford would
be sunk by the Shenandoah and assaulted by the Alabama
and dozens would in fact burn.
In hypnogogic state she half dreamed half remembered
from when she was seven and one half and she -and the
dream- had held her old dolls that Blax had made for her;
she and the dream said now in a fugue:
Horsey de Mongol, Queen mare of Scot, the whaling
ships of the Yankee north would take flight from the flag
and register with foreign nations to avoid losing their
capital in another war; this one in 1861. Horsey now you
listen to me, these were Alexander Hamilton’s men, and
yet the banks would call in loans when the whalers could
find no insurance in times of war.
Kerosene -my dear horsey- was the new fuel more and
more and the whale men used ships to hunt old blubber
less and less. And profits lowered like boats or sank like
those stove and the men turned from whales in their
restive dreams. They dreamed like you horsey, they
slept like our papa: on their banks as if in coffins or their
berths.
Now my dear mares gather round your Queen and listen
of the Stone Fleet out of New Bedford with twenty-two
ships of New England -whaleships- and one a New York
merchant vessel in bleak shape. Gideon Wells -the
secretary of the Union Navy- had bought up ships no
longer profitable to hunt the leviathan, and so they were
to be larded with granite as blue as your mommy’s eyes
and as veined as her chest covered in thin white flesh.
They took and scraped and sold off anything of value
and painted ‘Fiji ports’ on the sides to mimic man o ’
wars. They ran so low in the water they seemed a skiff,
and the crew was as few as the bones in a shark’s fin.
Sir Samuel Du Pont said in voice and letter to Assistant
Sec. Gustavus V. Fox as the insurgents thought a Union
invasion was thus commenced:
To Savannah we go! With 7,500 tons of cargo, with
no malice -almost no malice- in our Yankee hearts we
mean to finish this war we did not start! The cannon
do not exist, subterfuge is our Trojan gift, we shall do
one of two things! We shall sink our craft up to their
masts in the Georgia harbor or make the Rebs do it
themselves to impede our advance!
You see my dear foals and mares -while you may not
care- the eyes of predatory classes of beasts watched
the sinking of the Stone Fleet with shock and uncertain
awe. Only the Robin Hood was moored on a vulgar shoal,
all the other former working-class ships were buried by
the waters that day in December of 1861.
The Robin Hood was beached as if on the back of a
whale itself, and the northerners piled up sails torn from
the other ships and lines cut and wood pried up and the
whole thing was then set ablaze.
Oh, what melancholy, what melancholy my chariots -my
charges- my ladies of the Mongolian plain! To see ships -
as the paper of record put it- be used such a way made
even pragmatic men declare in print:
Who could help but feel melancholy at the reflection
that the poor old vessels, which had traversed so
many thousands of miles of ocean, safely carrying
 human beings amid Pacific calms and Arctic colds
through long years of dreary tedious whaling
voyages were to be relentlessly destroyed? The
fortunes of the Tabers… Swifts, Coffins and Starbucks
and many other New England families have been
created from such their voyages.
Notice -my mares- the final note -a look away- to take a
moment to feel for the working-class ships if not the
sailors of the day.
And in the end the harbor was blockaded and the Rebels
vowed revenge, and General Lee would decry this type
of warfare as tantamount to plucking the sun from the
sky, in order to deny one’s enemy the light. And the
Author said, he scudded ‘round the Horn in one, two
years after the damage done. The back and forth
between North and South had just begun. Listen up my -
eye on either side- heads and tails of animals, in
response to this the President of the Confederacy had
the British build a dozen ships to fight the Union with.
And none were more feared than the Alabama and the
Shenandoah at the edge of the age of sail.
In the dream -with her former mares maned with elk hair
tied to her hips and waist- in her dream -as the convoy of
armored H1’s full of Lyngvi’s tribe of men that scared her
and made her feel cold, and almost miss Blax; trucks that
ran at 110 mph toward the coast- in her dream she was
already afloat. In the dream she was at midship with the try-
pots behind her, the rendered fat smell pulling to stern, the
shadows of the crew lay down like Plato’s on the deck. In
her dream she saw and heard it said:
Lightning off the starboard bow was blue and brachial
and it made the black sky appear as a lung riven with
arms and fingers and nails; it made it appear as if
swallowing as much as it wanted of her own electric air.
 25.92 Hamlet’s Mill
A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation: I the
LORD will hasten it in his time
Isaiah 60:22 [King James Bible]

And so when the Anunnaki toiling in the gold mines mutinied and said “no
more!” it was he who realized that his needed manpower could be obtained by
jumping the gun on evolution through genetic engineering; and thus did the
Adam (literally, “he of the Earth,” Earthling ) come into being. As a hybrid, the
Adam could not procreate; the events echoed in the biblical tale of Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden record the second genetic manipulation by Enki that
added the extra chromosomal genes needed for sexual procreation. And when
Mankind, proliferating, did not turn out the way it had been envisaged, it was he,
Enki, who defied his brother Enlil’s plan to let Mankind perish in the Deluge
The Lost Book Of Enki [Sitchen, Zecharia]

“You and I know that this is the real Truth about how the world began.” He said
this after centuries of Christendom, never doubting, for the essence of the rune
was an incantation, sung, or murmured, which brings things back to their actual
beginnings, to “deep origins.” To heal a wound from a sword, the laulaja had to
sing the rune of the “origin or iron” and one wrong word would have ruined its
power. In this way fragments of ageless antiquity remained embedded in living
folk poetry. Those whom the Greeks called the “nameless ones” typh ò s an ē r ,
who had preserved the epic rhapsodies, reach out to meet us almost in our
days, in those humble villages of the Far North, their names of our own time
Hamlet’s Mill [Santillana, Giorgio; Dechend, Hertha Von]

I. 2040 e.v.
The choppers ran out front of the pack like a bonze prow;
the metal was ashen and ferric and covered in both dust
and oil and the scales of lizards with bronze age patina, the
red burst of mosquitos with six types of blood and feathers
of small lampen-black & dousing-blue birds.
The noise of the V-Twins ran behind them like shadow and
glare as the H1’s behind them watched the road ahead of
themselves and the motorcycles.
The rode in a delta and took up both lanes of road. The
grader and dozers and backhoes had removed all remaining
abandoned cars months ago and the virus had kept
everyone left indoors and off the roads. The Wolves had lit
up cars and trucks from Aguilar exit -both north and south-
in the early weeks of winter and set off bombs on the road
at Trinidad and Pueblo that damaged the asphalt and
concrete so badly that each vehicle was a sitting duck when
they approached and slowed down.
The police hadn’t responded to the robberies and pilfering
early in 2039 and by now they either didn’t exist or ran
private security for the gang’s partners in town and across
the New Mexico border. Matthias’ cousins set up in the
Trinidad police station on main street and handled local
complaints if anyone called. The petty criminals that had
swollen and infected the town since 2015 had been
executed or indentured to run supplies for the Wolves .
With the virus the streets were empty and the phone never
rang. People died in their homes and policed themselves
with shotguns and carbines if they came outside with
symptoms of the second of the modified virus that attacked
specific DNA. Mexicans died first, and most of the children
from Anglos that had interbred. Men with less that 72% R1b
DNA sickened and suffered, Neanderthal DNA of 4% or more
inoculated 1,080 men in the town that was once over
12,000.
Travel between the southern state five miles from the port
of entry to Colorado had been shut down by all except
convoys ran by the Wolves . Movement from north of Pueblo
had suffered the same fate. The national guard was
dispersed to Colorado Springs as a bulwark, Denver as
motte and anything west of Glenwood Springs were on their
own.
The Wolves even controlled the air with the nanobots that
would shear off the rotary blades of helicopters and drill
holes in the fuselages of fixed-wing aircraft.
“Five clicks,” Paul said into his headset as they had turned
off their DMs and gone out over the air on a secure channel.
He missed riding point, but he needed to run the Hummer to
keep everyone on task. He allowed his brother to ride his
Dyna and the brother of Baldr to drag tail.
Jack Four rode second, aft and starboard to Matthias’ , his
copper chop with forward controls and dragbars and a 12g
slid into a leather holster over the velocity stack -shaped
like a foghorn- that was made of Egyptian gold. He let his
bots read the road for divots and fissures and had a heads-
up display that allowed him to slalom effortlessly along the
oft-damaged blacktop of I25 north.
He felt the wind on his chest and neck more than the men
with baggers. He told them their farings were like stuns’l
and that their bikes had more sheet metal than a one-ton
Dodge diesel he’d once owned. They howled in protest and
threw beer cans at him and told him they weren’t going to
help him get anymore boyfriends as they all laughed and
shook their heads and the Wreck grabbed the thrown beers
off the ground to down them one-by-one.
But the wind did beat Jack Four to shit on these long rides.
“Copy that,” he said as he accelerated to Matthias’ flank
and signaled they were coming up on the location in along
the plain in which they’d pull over and let the convoy carry
on without them. Matthias’ dreads looked like age-of-sail
rigging and Viking lashings; his arms were vascular and
blackened with 40-weight oil and tattoos of men and gods
and runes from Elder Futhark ; his visage was occluded by a
beard seasons old and greying like lightning strikes against
a late summer sky with no moon nor city around.
Matthias’ upshifted into 7th gear and accelerated to 120mph
with his suicide shift and let up off the clutch as he turned
his head to watch the hand signals from the shaman on his
right.
Jack Four made eye contact and his left hand lowered to his
knee then raised like a black bird and bent two fingers
forward like a beak.
Matthias nodded and tapped his left leg with his left hand as
the Wolves behind him sent the signal down the line. Cars
bent and broken and oblique to the median -or well off the
road- were passed at speed that made them seem like
chipped and geometric boulders or buffalo bones with grass
growing up through the ribs. The bots kept the wind off the
ears and so they could ride in silence with only the noise of
the descending staccato of the short-pipes; ceramic coated
and blackened further with blue flames spitting out like
searching tongues of reticulated pythons facing the south.
Jack Four dropped back into formation and tapped his
headset as Paul -nursing a wound to his arm- told the driver
to speed up. The center ghost-grey Mercedes GLE -holding
the new Governor and his two-man detail- was in between
the six trucks like the light yolk to a dark egg. Sunset was in
15 minutes and Denver was 108 miles away.
The fires of New Mexico backlit them like the orange glow of
a southern sunset as the choppers moved like an imbricate
snake, lacing between each other in formation; a zipped
snake-skin boot. They moved to the side of the open
highway as the phalanx of up-armored trucks passed them
with the diesels as quiet as electric engines.
The crossover Mercedes barely seen -like the pot to a card
game at center to four players at each cardinal direction- as
each truck moved around and between to protect the flop,
turn and river card.
The constellations of Sirius and Polaris were faint but
straight ahead in this the last year on the calendar that the
Mayan’s inherited from the Olmecs . The crescent moon at a
faint glow of earthshine that gave it a white shadow and a
hue like ghost above with the red body of Mars and a cold
Venus dipping just out of view as the Wolves of Vinland let
each constellation and satellite and planet populate their
star-maps and orient them like astronomers in temples of
old well beyond the old.

II. 2021 e.v.

The rooms fireplace had been lit; the gas line ran up and
into the old Victorian style hearth.
The glass had been removed, the flames built a pyramid of
sorts; high at center, almost circular so deep was the pit. Its
warmth seemed to reach only her ankles and she pressed
the child’s hands to feel if hers -or her own- felt cool or
warm.
To the child she said:
I know one in four at least, maybe more; maybe likely
two in three who as girl not yet seen, six abused by
sibling, uncles or step-fathers. Seven brides for seven
brothers. That is bad enough dear Valance. First is
shame and flailing out-of-balance; a girl spinning apart
like stars; boys come and act phony at the age of
matrimony.
They will crush your heart when its you -from the start-
bruised and breaking and thrice bleeding; they’re
offended by what bear repeating: you were not
protected but ruined by men here or absent both. You’ll
make no mention of the climax nor masturbation, you
barely understand your infatuation with all things closest
to death. You’ll bond with brother and then think of
 murder; your own character bends like a toy, billows like
the sails of Menelaus’ ships outward bound for Troy.
She gathers up white sheets like toga, as Helen, how so
much gauze on a wound.
The half-breed between Nephilim and the daughters of
men have swarmed the Sika ; like ants on a scorpion.
It’s more than Scythian gold buried in the mounds
around the Black Sea. It’s the caste system and the
large fathers of all children. Slavery ended in letter and
thus began in God’s sentence upon us all.
On the bar-top of the dresser the Bhagavad Gita was open -
the books piled not on top but edge to edge- and the words
rose up like smoke or steam, like locusts in Rachel’s ears as
her daughter laced her fingers now and stared in the dim
room; her blue eyes perfectly adapted for low light. It said:
Out of the corruption of women precedes the confusion
of castes; out of the confusion of castes precedes the
loss of memory; out of the loss of memory precedes the
loss of understanding; and out of this all evil…
The paper slips, bookmarks made of margins that arrived
with this book and The Whale, had the words of King Darius
of Persia, highlighted, “I am Aryan, having Aryan lineage .”
“The Heracleopean King lectures his son that a civil war
within Egypt permitted foreigners to enter ,” was written on
a foxed page torn on one edge; straight on the others.
She saw swastikas and sun wheels in the dust of the
crepuscular light like arrows that shaded the Spartans in the
gap. She heard chants in Nordic moans, bells of Tibet. Wind
outside sounded like whispered threats, the fans inside went
on and on overhead.
She counted the blades of five and five again.
Her breasts felt heavy with milk.
A feedback loop of bad breeding and raping and marriages
that fail like democracy. It’s a warm ocean and a hurricane;
it’s a landfall and no mountains to push back on the
retrograde spin of water and air and total disrepair , she
thought and saw her baby thought it too.
“Despair,” she said aloud. She hurt all over, from heart to
perineum; from big toe to cranium.
It’s just the black eyes of girls gone mean, the blood-shot
eyes of boys made weak. It’s endless failures of
relationships -the thing most human of human beings- while
ideas, ideas, ideas mate and procreate like cicada . And
society was ruined before it was built, the war to the knife,
the knife to the hilt , she thought and looked out the window
and saw just street lights and no sky. She had made a series
of origami cicadae out of old love notes and grocery lists
she’d saved and put in drawers; made them of single sheets
then began to make them more ornately by using several
pieces of paper; each one she kissed and blessed and
named for her girl. They hanged above her crib but the baby
had not slept in that thing once;
Valance was in bed with her and her and him each night.
“It built buildings already falling down,” she said aloud.
Then she read:
Helen shifted her position, for the first time in hours. And
she looked into his eyes. The Oarsmen looked up at him
too; they forgot to row.
“Menelaos,” she said, “you should have offered
sacrifices. There is something very strange about this
boat.”
“On the contrary,” he replied, “the boat is perhaps the
only thing here which is beyond criticism. The wind is
unfavorable, but the men row well, except when you
distract them.”
 “In Troy at this moment, or somewhere along the shore,”
she said, “Agamemnon offers up prayers which I dare
say will be effective; he will doubtless reach home. Our
own prospects seem to me uncertain. You know my point
of view; I have no love for adventure unless I know
where I am going.”
“We are going to Sparta,” he said.
“I fear we are not, ” Helen said.
Rachel read aloud to the baby as she continued to kick a bit
in her swaddled feet and shawl; the shoes were a suede of
Etruscan blue. Her hands held Rachel’s black hair with just a
few natural blonde strands laying in the newborn’s creases
and folds; like hay, wheat, gold.
Rachel paused and read silently along the margins of Book II
of the old myth, the old history, sent. It was gold and gilt
with a single scarlet ribbon:
He in the end decided to send a lying dream to King
Agamemnon .
The King James -black clad in its second binding- lay open
too on the table-top of the chest-of-drawers, open to First
Kings 22:22. The leaves fluttered and rolled like shore sand
under ebb and flow as people below in the Governor’s
mansion opened and closed egress doors and windows and
transoms.
She deciphered each noise like detective.
Rachel thought more of how she had been untouched. Her
skin seemed brittle. She read the margins to distract herself
from her own thoughts of lack. She turned the head a
quarter turn and the book a quarter back. She read the
periphery of the story instead the body; the main; the
stated plain. She read aloud of Helen of Troy, once of Sparta,
to young Valance to clear her mind and weave both
thoughts and spoken words like a plait, a braid, a helix of
DNA, so that the baby girl would, she thought, imbibe the
medicine and the mead , the lesson for now as mere seed .
I have gone only a bit further than the rest of you. But I
have news to tell: I have found grapevines
Rachels’ lap seemed wide -as she read rapidly in mind this
line from Tyrkir in the Grӕnlendinga Saga - and as if her
hips had made a cobra of her bottom -lower- half; the child
sat as if in the Greek ship itself, and mother imagined her
daughter grown and tattooed black like poetry of war and
vessel pottery of red enveloped by Grecian forms, muscled
and striated, and as dark as the horns of bulls; beaks of
crows. She imagined she’d read a story each day until
Valance was taken away. I know the child cannot stay , she
thought but she did not want to know when or how.
And just then she felt the streaks of tears end at her chin
and land upon the babe’s tow-headed crown as it turned
toward the flames.

III. 2040 e.v.

The drill churned.
The shavings came off the bit like coiled springs and slivers
from a golden bough. He held the kelly as it shook and
moved down under the weight of the string and the softness
of the noble metal.
The sun glint against first the moon, then the bowsprit and
the sailors of dusky hues. The first mate lit the trypots and
the bosun lashed together nine oarsmen to their copper
rowlocks before calling out to Lyngvi once more.
Lyngvi had ignored him as the sound of the kelly moved
through his ears like asps and the vibration under his feet
rose up and the hum in his hand moved toward his outboard
heart. A bronze cage had seemed to have been fastened to
his leather monkey-jacket and inside it beat the 6-valved
heart. It was covered in white feathers and the blood was as
black as the god of war. He felt all uncontained and yet
restrained.
“Hold fast,” he bellowed below to the men in the rigging and
the deckhands moving the capstan down and to the right.
“Anchorage,” boomed the second mate, and the third mate
entered the Captain’s cabin at once.
The water whirled in the North Sea above Hegalandia and
hemmed in by the three islands of Vast, Lofor, and Roit . The
spray of the gold and the seawater sprung up to the
crows’nest and Lyngvi closed his eyes as spectres of
seabeasts made up of Persian rugs and seaweed and
ghostly leviathan with mechanical hands hovered half in and
half out of the water being pulled in by the Horrenda
Caribdis as it spun under the stoic manner of Vainamoinen’s
red ship.
“Hold fast,” he whispered to his heart as the seawater
desiccated it and made it spark at each valve.
“Did we not sing where the hugruna ?” the Valkyrias said
each single syllable behind like shadow to words in
sentences of words that made shapes of heads of swallows
and backs of geese and tongues of reindeer and the horn of
mammoth from the age before the deluge and the
swamping of the coasts.
Ilmarinen hammered at the forge down below and it rang
like brass bells with iron striker.

IV. 2040 e.v.

The Bust watched the ship navigate the channel -sails like
wings, oars like feet- at Timaru and the M ā ori King’s
emissary sat across from her with bundled sticks as he tied
the last knot of the birthing blanket around her last
daughter of the day.
“They are a nation hardy in toils and warfare ,” she said,
quoting Trogus , with her mouth pointed down to the girl-
child, her eyes rolled up toward the Polynesian seraphim.
“Their strength of body extraordinary, they take possession
of nothing which they fear to lose and covet -when they are
conquerors- nothing save glory , Trogus Pompeius wrote in
the time between two deluge,” she added.
The thumb cymbals rattled and the chimes tingled around
their heads and the oil lamps made shadows elongate on
the deck. They curved like steppe-bows at their feet; the
child’s ice-wine eyes would be darkened by the penumbra
laid at Valance’s shoulder and the shawl and then lit up by
the moon as the tops’ls and t’gallants moved out toward the
sea.
“The child will be kept from the sun if you want her to keep
blue eyes like sky instead of sea,” the King’s emissary said
as the Bust ignored him.
She had let Lyngvi tattoo the Yggdrasil and its three roots on
her forearm one night after they had lain down for the hours
of the vernal storms. They had not gone ashore with the
expeditionary crew but stayed with the cook and the
Captain’s logs and barrels of wine and lard. She had drawn
lines of the cosmos on her small blackboard; connecting
stars with white lines of chalk and made dust of crushed
shells from her galvanized steel pail.
Valance collected the rags Lyngvi used to wipe the blood
away. She folded them and used them to pad her bra and
around her hips and waist.
She thought of the amber medallions in her berth and the
cicada of her dreams from age three. She still folded paper
sometimes but each one turned into a dragon.
Isaiah had given her one from the 9th century a.e.v. and she
had built a mold of hot resin 2cm deep. She had vivisected
the winged creatures and dissolved the heart in her blue
and grey solution of HCI, concentrated nitric acid -HNO3 - in
a ration three to one.

V. 444,000 a.e.v.
He was summoned by his master who wore the seabeast
about the head and carried the bag into the temple.
He touched his own head as the head of the master was
covered by the scales. The memory of the Great Wind, the
dry heat, the boiling of blood, remained in his head; his fore.
His head was hybrid, shrunken compared to the gods; but
still high of brow. His hands would not cover what the fish
had on land.
He ignored the wounds and wandered into the forest to
collect wood, twigs, mosses. Time did not seem like time,
but rather, like space that he traversed and in that space of
time he came upon a Whirlwind, a machine, a thing of
brazen bulls, burnished brass. It was staffed by emissaries
of En.ki and they spoke:
The Land of Magan, on an island mottled by the river of
Magan where the sluiceways are, is where you must go.
You are blessed as we are tasked; come.
And as the copper men said this, the Eridu -the hybrid man-
fell asleep and was placed into the craft, the fiery chariot.
And yet asleep, the Eridu saw the waters, the face of the
earth, and the lands of black and tan; the plains and the
high places white above tree line, and it did not occur to the
Eridu to look above to the vault and scan for rocks and
mountains and sluiceways above as below.
As he saw with his eyes, his mind left him and it all but a
dream occurred out of order, like swamps in deserts, like
roots hanging from the boughs of old trees; crows
landlocked, wolves with wings.
“Endubsar,” the voice said, in a boom, like a crack of doom,
like a coughing fit of two drunken gods, “offspring of Adapa ,
I have chosen you to be my scribe.”
Before the Eridu the table appeared, the enclosure glowed,
the walls were long to the east and west, one third to the
north and south. Stones of grey on the table, a stool of dark
metal, and one stylus of copper or gold or something
unknown gleamed in the absence of wells of ink. It too
gleamed and glowed and held a sun of the Far-away in its
surface when the Eridu moved his own head and eyes. He
heard and inscribed:
Endubsar, son of Eridu City, my faithful servant, I am
your lord En.ki. I have summoned you to write down my
words, for I am much distraught by what has befallen
mankind by the Great Calamity. It is my wish to record
the true course of the events, to let gods and men alike
know that my hands are clean. Not since the Great
Deluge had such a calamity befallen the Earth and the
gods and earthlings. But the Great Deluge was destined
to happen, not so the Great Calamity. This one, seven
years ago, need not have happened. It could have been
prevented, and I, En.ki, did all I could to prevent; alas I
failed. And was it fate or destiny? In the future it shall be
judged, for at the end of days the Day of Judgement
there shall be. On that day the Earth shall quake and the
rivers shall change course, and there shall be darkness
at noon…
The lord En.ki spoke of this for hours and lines went on for
miles and the Eridu never tired.
En.ki reminded the Eridu of the maxim of the gods and the
Anunnaki, that the true account of the Beginnings and of the
Prior Times and of the Olden Times would be told, for the in
the past the future lies hidden.
And the Eridu held the metal stylus and let only the ear
bones move.
And the wine was gold and the bread too; as the Eridu
began to speak:
I see a stylus of eagle tip, stones of lapis lazuli, faces
smooth as my lord’s women, expression like the guards
that surround the aperture to the lord’s rooms.
En.ki said:
Do not deiate from my words and utterances…
And after times measured in four tens, and without food
besides the first golden wine and bread, the Eridu awoke in
a field outside the city of Eridu . A piece of flattened reed
was in his hand, torn from the tablets’ covers, and the man -
as the names of Noah and Ziusudra catalogued in his ears
like a burrowing bee in left and a flying ant in the right- read
it even as the letters were backwards:
Now this is the account of how survival on Earth was
restored,
And how a new source of gold and other Earthlings
beyond the oceans were found.
It was after the encounter at Arrata that the waters of
the Deluge to recede continued,
And the face of the earth gradually from under the
waters was showing.
The mountianland was mostly unscathed, but the valleys
under mud and silt were buried…
 26. Quart of Blood
When you plant or bury a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up
A Plea for Captain John Brown [Thoreau, Henry D]

Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that “he threw his life away,”
because he resisted the government. Which way have they thrown their lives,
pray? Such as would praise a man for attacking singly an ordinary band of
thieves and murders. I hear another ask, Yankee-like, “what did he gain of it?” as
if he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise
Ibid

Bulloch avoided this outcome by exploiting a loophole in the law. Although it was
clearly illegal for a British shipyard single-handedly to build, arm and outfit a
warship for a belligerent, it was perfectly legal -according to the lawyers- to
have all these acts be performed by different vendors; the key was keeping the
elements of the enterprise separate from one another and that is exactly what
Bulloch did
Leviathan [Dolin, Eric J]

I. 2040 e.v.
The Bust sat upon the taffrail and the moon lay upon only
her and a small triangle of the deck; the clouds a keyhole,
the albedo weak tonight east of Magnetic Island.
Her belly was taut. Her mind was loose with the waves. No
birds had come in several days.
Lyngvi tumbled -between thumb and fore- an error-coin from
the cache below. It had a hole punched in it at the five
o’clock. It had markings in Olde English, it was black in each
pore from the smelted ore. It toppled over and over as he
stared at the back of her and all her accoutrement . Her
bronze broadheads caught the edge of light, her quiver a
cylinder like slash across her back. Her hair was longer than
ever before and laid down like ravens in huddled sleep.
He picked the flotsam and jetsam -the short-feathers from
albatross and deck-straw and hitchhikers that came from
shore- from her hair when she allowed it. She hadn’t
permitted his touch in three days.
Eric-the-Bloodaxe had been paid to allow the mercenary and
poet and drunkard Skallagrímsson to live on after being
taken captive subsequent to a shipwreck on Putnam shore ,
he thought as he stared up at the rigging to see the wind-
direction. A poem was written in drápa and Isaiah had sent
it to the main hub -the wheel- of Lot 45 .
Jack had pilfered it:
My mother wants a price paid to purchase my proud-
oared ship
Standing high in the stern I’ll scour for plunder
The standa Vikingum , steersmen of this shining vessel
says:
Then home to harbor after hewing down a man or
two…
He saw the words for the hundredth time, he heard each
syllable, each pause, each breath, each raising of the pen.
He made patchwork quilt of such stolen things. He counted
both letters and words.
But the words did not slake. He refused to think what he’d
be forced to say, if asked. His pride had often been what
was sought and not what was found, he -when the King was
speaking- bowed. But, he had no mother to barter for him,
no foundering yet to place him at the mercy of the Rex. He
was somehow -he thought- between the waves and some
particle, some thing, some part or parcel. I have time to
navigate still. Once we reach the ends of the earth, I’ll
bloom, I’ll rise. In the mountains of my father I’d have died,
somehow I’d never have survived.
He watched her from the quarterdeck -his eyes upon her
were taken for granted now as he’d oriented toward her
since America- and then she noticed his footfalls -his
particular trod- as he traversed the deck and made a big
show of going up to relieve the Cooper in the nest. The
Captain had made mention of sup in his cabin before the
sun set, but she had no use for company nor food.
Her fixed- blade tanto was sheathed on her hip, her nails
were chaffed at the quick. Her eyes had gotten used to the
black night and the green sea. The white of day still
abraded.
“Valance,” she heard in her ear, but she did not turn. She
pawed each bronze arrowhead about her waist, one by one
by five. She imagined the threads and shanks, the X that
they made. She kept her hands hidden about the middle
and let the bow rest upon her back; the high-side to her four
o’clock; the string invisible but its shadow on the deck so
straight. She breathed deeply and felt her quiver press
against her spine and traps ; and then a shadow of memory
-his hands like a god’s upon her not that long ago- closed
around her lats . She didn’t say his name, but mouthed it,
and let the teeth grind at the end on the X in his legacy. She
saw the sea from the ship, she heard her Blax breathe, she
imagined she had wings.
She turned her PGC back on and knew it was the first mate -
Jarnefr - who had spoke on this side of Valhalla and to dinner
with the Captain she’d just been called.

II. 2037 e.v.

Jack Two held his own hand in the one gone white and
wrinkly from the rain.
The blood dripped between the fingers and the wind picked
each drop up as it fell from the hand and bent it and broke it
apart like scattering starlings.
He looked west as the sun had still left a white outline on
the Sangres by which to guide himself. His coder was off-line
from the fall and his head felt mushy and thick and capable
of only looking at a mere 90-degrees of his fore. The eyes
blinked and the ears -he now noticed- rang, and the mouth
tasted of iron and salt. He spit blood and it too was carried
by the wind in an arc.
He felt cold in seams on his body and knew his clothes must
be ripped and leaking heat out and wind in.
He felt like kneeling but instead walked toward the flattest
part of the landscape that he could see. The sun and moon
were under the earth and the eyes were blurry and wet. He
knew he ought not walk in these conditions and yet that’s
what he did.
He wanted to get home. He saw hot water in a bath, trash
cans for his clothes that were nearly rags; he even imagined
trimming his nails. I want a drink , he thought.
His knee buckled and it was a two-stage drop -first at the
hip- then to the ground and he felt sand get pushed up his
nose and into the cuts of the hand and the face. He’d de-
coupled his two hands -he’d been holding like cup and
saucer- and then braced himself. Now the badly damaged
hand was jammed like a turkey with dressing and grit up its
ass.
“Fuck,” he said aloud and each letter formed a hatchet with
head and edge until it broke through a memory he’d kept as
an egg in his noggin’ for who knows how long. It all came
open as he remembered the way he felt and the way she
had smelt as they touched bellies and palms. He’d felt only
the face and the chest of himself, not lower down, not his
loins.
And for how long had that memory been larval in him, he
wondered, how long had he nested her within, how long
would he call it anything but what it was: love.
But then Blax -apparition of voice and spectre of form-
knocked on his memory like the cops and his eyes watered
the high-plains desert grit from his eyes, and the mouth
opened and spittle and moaning came out. He tried to hold
the thought back, as if the feeling was safer than the
attending words. As if the feelings were domesticated, but
words feral. As if the whole world was backwards from what
he knew that is was.
“God,” he said and even that rattled him.
The eyes were useless in the dark of the mountain ravine.
His ears ringing made echolocation harder, and everything
smelled of his own blood and body odor now that he was in
a ball on the ground. Like a darkened theater the house
lights all around went down, and the screen of his inner
vision flashed in white all at once. In his mind he saw Blax
and the man spoke with a cadence compressed; each word
was two words, each idea was full of conceit:
“None of that was said,” Blax alleged in rebuke to some
unformed assertion by Jack.
“It was implied, it was implicit,” Jack Two said quickly
and as the idea came online.
“I went to enormous effort to explain the nuances, the
details, the caveats, the exceptions,” Blax said.
“I can’t argue with you,” Jack Two said. He knew what he
felt, he knew that Blax appeared broken, riven, mangled,
and hobbled. He shook in the wind, he shivered in rain,
he bowed under weight of their work -in the garden with
sacks of trimmings and thinnings in hand, or with
quarter of mule deer over shoulder- he was soaked with
that which never used to penetrate. Jack knew that each
word of his Lt’s was punctuated and parenthetical and
twisted on either end by pain that flew in from breezes
or surfaced from trenches or starbursted in atomic
moments regular but stochastic and odd. The rise and
fall of the voice, the pinched ends -the truncated
sentences as he moved an appendage or rubbed the
neck- all conveyed a message beneath the endless -
strafing, suppressing- words. Jack Two felt this, he did
not think it; he too conspired to not put it in verbs as if
this might slow it all down.
“But you sneak about, in the night -like a burglar- and it
gets on my goddamn nerves,” Blax said. He was
accusing, lamenting, rebuking the boy for hiding his
inner feelings from him like a cache -a treasure- buried
by map.
“I do not,” Jack protested -each word getting louder- in
sentences shorter. And in his mind they were in a room
sparse with an uneven floor, strange blocks stacked
around like false walls. He felt like a child. He felt half, a
quarter of his sixteen years. The room boomed and
bounced like the throat of leviathan, like belly of the
whale.
“You never say a word, you march off in the dark, set the
perimeter, you let the snow collect on your folds,” Blax
said and then quieter, “in the fold of your clothes.” He
felt terrible for insulting Jack with the very things that
proved he loved them, cared, worried. But Blax knew he
was on to something, that Jack left to give watch
because he was afraid of what he would reveal if he
stayed. Jack was hiding all night and all day. Jack was
guarding not them but himself.
“So?” Jack Two said with petulance and pique.
“Jack, don’t make me drag it out. You always make it like
pulling teeth,” Blax said -his fists clinching, his jaw
setting up like concrete- as Jack felt words catalyze and
rise and froth in him all at once like an eruption of
inflationary expanse. He spoke a battery of words he
could not recall seconds later nor control right then,
things with one and two and four syllables burst forth
and with accents and invective and curses attending like
cattle and horsemen and herding ranch-dogs. Blax stood
stoically and darkened as Jack lost sight of him -the
room bending so each man was farther apart- as Jack’s
words slowed to a gait that he could track.
 “…and that’s just because of you. Of your whatever the
fuck,” he said clumsily and tried to stretch his own neck
to get his head and eyes on level with Blax. “And you
press down on any impulse for romance and softness.
You press down on all of us; with me at bottom. Smart
this and smart that, deny this deny that. Delay this delay
that. I don’t -shit, you don’t- we don’t know what it does
to delay such things at our age. I can smell her, and it
ain’t perfume, it ain’t anything man made, it ain’t
ambergris ,” he said as he thought it was ichor, the
dander & feather of angels, the effluvium of phlogiston
from seraphim left over from the second celestial wars.
“Goddammit, old man, I can smell her in language as
long and piquant -as sonorous and frequent- as all that
crap from the canon you quote. I taste her words, she
sends them to me on the air and they get tangled up in
the mane of God’s mare. I see her move in three places
at once, I blink and see her for days and weeks and
months. I,” he began again but paused. His lungs
needed not air but time; not filled but spaced. He
hesitated and felt his hands come up to his chest; heart.
“I touch her with more than hands. I touch ground where
she lands, I clear a path and feather her nest. I seek out
ways to make her life easier; more blessed. I give birth
to phrases, sure, some bright lies, just for her eyes, I
grind gears only she hears, I seek to allay her worst nine
fears. But, I’m divided in three.
“And she fears us, she fears Jack,” he said of Jack Four in
an overt hint. And Blax knew exactly what he meant.
“Jack,” Blax said as his hands too now rose, as the boy
interrupted.
“No, we’ve heard enough, we’ve heard it all. Each way
from Sunday -six ways from Sunday- whatever the fuck.
You know what I mean. You’ve stomped on each reach
for whatever it is in a woman that ain’t in a man,” Jack
waved his hand. He saw Blax blink and flinch and move
back just an inch.
“No, no,” Blax barked, protesting, frantic; moving closer
now to the boy, his hands grasping like claws. His
muscles tensed and blood flow increased, vascularity
and capillary dilation made him ruddy and valved at
neck, arm, and forehead.
“Yes, yes, you have. And you don’t know the
consequences, you don’t know,” Jack Two said
inelegantly, as he too moved toward some middle
between them, his coder made adjustments in his
homeostatic and allostatic system and he seemed -
outwardly unchanged- as he spoke. “You think you’re so
wise and mordant. So wised up. But now what? We’re
safe from women, as you plotted, but what now? What
now? as we hold them out and away like the future, like
a war that must be fought someday. Never today, never
right now,” Jack said.
“No,” Blax said as his voice rose and sounded almost
young and not quite a man’s, a machine’s, “I said life
maybe ain’t meant to be pragmatic, rational, maybe it’s
meant to be more than survival. I just said maybe love is
a risk,” Blax said -thinking of the 1% not the ninety-nine-
as he was so close to Jack now his white teeth seemed
foreign in their contrast. His beard greyer in more and
more zones.
“You said that but just -only, merely- once in a million
times as story after story of heartbreak and rending and
betrayal came with each detail, each name, each
Melannie and Sarah and Julee fucking Rae. You harped
on each feature or each insult and how each wound
never healed, you pulled up the shirt -down the pant and
the sock- to show off each scar from each scare they
threw into you. Alexander at Opis daring your Generals
and Captains to match scars as you berate them for
loving their children for you have none of your own.
“Goddammit Blax, you told us each element of each
starry woman, each affront, all the black to each time
you collapsed on the floor. You drew chalk lines you had
us watch pantomimes, you told us of each time you put
the titanium revolver, the 1911, the shotgun in the
mouth. We was told as we couldn’t even breathe so
stuffed were our lungs with your macabre air,” Jack said
as he thought of the bleak stories of Julee saying she
preferred other men, her cheating on him at rock shows
with a girl that ended up squatting in million dollar
California homes; making the news in a full face of
cosmetics; interviews with neighbors, strange and
baroque details again and again.
The ornate particulars, the tawdry details, the
topography of each fucking female , Jack thought. But he
didn’t say Heather’s name, nor Alexandra, he had some
class, he knew which names would wreck his ass.
“I said maybe risk was the point,” Blax objected again as
Jack put his hand up to his Lt’s advancing chest yet
needed no force to keep the old man at bay. He just held
the hands there as if mere warning not actual blockade.
“You -LT- you said love was the riskiest of all,” Jack said
with sadness, shame, pain, a kind of resignation to how
long he had refused to love her based upon this
incessant rogue’s gallery of horrible women paraded in
front of them day after day for nearly three years. He -
they all had- been taught self-defense not against men -
the government- but women -the softer sex- as if
inoculated against some malicious and remorseless
disease.
Jack Two awoke on his feet -his hand sore but staunched-
under the crescent moon that had rose and the white line of
the range long gone. And he felt the dream -the fugue state-
collapse into one man arguing with himself; each beast
chasing its tail, each word reversed, each number a
palindrome.
He had held his breath and now exhaled.

III. 2040 e.v.

Isaiah held the black rock.
He felt its constituent parts -its facets and atoms- unfold like
a plot to an alien tome.
“Fuck it,” he said as he let the star map of Kepler 186-
foxtrot grow in the mind; expand to a thousand times the
size he’d kept it before; hidden; mere grain in a Gedrosia
desert he feigned to cross.
He stared at it, and all around it.
The planet was blue as noon, purple as empyreal robe,
silver as the tears of the hanged gods; and it was just over
10% the size of earth.
It took the star’s light 575 years to arrive -an adjustment of
75 years from the first calculations, about 7 years behind
the second calculations- for it bent and took a detour of
sorts , Isaiah thought as he hid the equation. He calculated
the light of a curved universe, he measured the way some
photons arrived all at once. He -in his way- held the planet
in his hand and felt it dewy like a scoop of soil and moss
held together at iron core with ferric plate and mycelium like
the soul and skeletal and cartilage structure of this organism
of earth.
He watched the coins be dug up and loaded onto the ship,
the hull bulge, the sea swell, the horizon sink, the sextant
adjust, the sailors grow grim about the brow. “The sails
billow,” he said.
He watched the old silver coinage stack like vertebrae;
spine. He observed it as it sailed the ocean around the pole
and down past Easter Island to New Zealand and he
watched something follow them like a shadow so long it
mapped the curve of the earth. “Bent black,” he said.
He surveyed the Cygnus constellation now as a whole.
The sun -Kepler 186 - had five planets, and its brightness
magnitude was a mere 14.61. It was too dim for the naked
human eye. A score of 6 or lower was needed for anyone
but Isaiah and his eyes. He watched as the star shimmered
and stabilized -wings flapped, tucked then outstretched- like
one dot in a flock that he’d hunt over all else. The four
planets besides his -b, c, d, and e - were all tidally locked
and even his f was likely 4.11 billion years old and made of
seas as heavy and cold as the inner blood of an interned
King of the old north.
“The steppe was their summer, the arctic their winter; the
millennia passed like seasons, their fathers like days,
mothers like nights, brothers the hours made of minutes of
children, alright?” he asked aloud of the air and ivy and
birds and things that crawled even though they could -in
fact- fly.
The planet’s face would turn with the moons and the sun.
Its Janus nature would be hidden no matter the
advancement of time or space, for they rotated in tandem,
retrograde or random, it mattered not. They were cleaved.
It’s mass -he calculated- would be at around 1.62M. This
made it just over a third iron and two-thirds silicate rock.
The atmosphere would be burning H/He off; just in time. But
the clouds would be thick and muddled and he smiled as he
saw it rocky like flatirons, and foggy like Devonshire , and
cold enough to slow down time.
Orthogonality of the Hermite polynomials vis-à-vis the
Gaussian distribution of this model appeared as the zero
rose like a sun, he thought. He thought this as the data
came in like particle and wave from the sun that had sent
them when the Māori were 440,000 strong in Aotearoa ,
when China was burning its boats, and when the silver error-
coins of Ericsson had absorbed the photons -the very ones
that he needed- exactly 582 years ago.
He looked at his own hands, the prints, the redness, the
nails cracked and white tipped.
Men thought not of what was stored in what was stored.
They thought of just the hordes. They thought the King’s
coins were of value -not their capacity to hold starlight,
birthright, from before the immolation of the atmosphere-
but in fungible -economic- worth. Isaiah held onyx in one
hand and a thousand thousand things in the mind.
The Hoen horde, the Cuerdale horde, all buried for a
doubling of the time of light from his Kepler star had held
the blood and trace of his Norse, the fleeing families of
unalloyed DNA. Hack and coin uncorrupted by the modern
hand of archeologists; virgin ore. It was the coinage of
Skallagrimsson’s that he’d wanted, only touched by the
hands of Jack Four. The light from the system’s star had lay
upon it 1,151 years ago; buried since then and unsullied by
the sun’s radiation or man’s sloughing genetics in the helix
of literal and symbolic ways and means.
The ashes of Hekla radio-dated it for Isaiah, and the ash
preserved the bones of the forty-five.
But he had wanted most those foss -coins and Jack had
gotten them for him. He thought of the burial site; the
digging, the men and their hands, the spades and the way
the metal looked from above. He took measure of the air
around the Wolf Tribe and the level of entheogens and
nitrogen and ash too. He measured the way their brains
sparked blue and clouded over with dopamine and bloomed
like algae and stirred up fine sand. He saw them covet not
the coins but the shine, the face of their god who would
approve. Poet and warrior Egil Skallagr í msson’s horde was
the last and best of the epoch’s hack-silver pressed into
medallion; embossed with name of a King.
He saw threes and zeros and negative one shine and
shimmer like outer stars; he saw black functions around the
light integers:
Hn (x) and Hen (x). N= 0, 1, 2, 3…
He looked at it longingly, as he assembled the comet -and
he as the spore- and never once wondered if something -
someone- might pursue him there.
 27. Old Hundred Names
Penrose argues that if a person temporarily dies, this quantum information is
released from the microtubules and into the universe. However, if they are
resuscitated the quantum information is channeled back into the microtubules
and that is what sparks a near death experience. “If they’re not revived and the
patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the
body -perhaps indefinitely- as a soul”
The Daily Galaxy 7.5.19 [Penrose, Roger]

This achievement, so unworthy of any nation is the abortive expression of

malice and revenge of a whole people
Archives; PraXis Cloud [Lee, Robert E.]

I happen to believe that the Chinese economic system is built on a house of

sand. I think that this will lead us to a greater financial debacle than 2008 ever
was. And the same culprits that led us to the financial crisis of 2008 -the
investment banks, the commercial banks, the hedge funds, the government
entities, right? -the same elites that led to that crisis and got bailed out and had
no responsibility, no accountability- have been the same actors that have
exacerbated the situation in China… What China was able to do -in coordination
with the elites in the West- was deindustrialize the industrial democracies of the
west through the exporting of Chinese over-capacity and Chinese deflation and
industrial goods. From the Chinese POV it’s been brilliant. From a strategy point
of view what they’ve done is heroic
YouTube 9.21.2019 [Bannon, Steven K]

I. 1994 e.v.
“Well, then where do all the bad people go?” Heather asked.
He’d said, there was no Hell , no way such stories were true
. He had a piece of paper in his pocket and the names, Li,
Wang, and Zhang , were written in blue ink in another man’s
hand. His fingers had not touched it since he had placed it
in his black 550 jeans, and the wrinkles in the paper lay
there like folds in a sleeping brain.
He hands were on the sill of this second story townhome in
Oxford, Ohio.
He looked out over the road that ran east to west from
Malick blvd . He watched passed the glass -a kind of
transom- to the yellow metal-halide lights glowing small
over the dark street. He saw the building Kristi Batsche lived
in -recalling the way she had refused to open the door that
one day- and then his eyes auto-focused back on his
reflection in the uninsulated glass. His hair was long again,
his t-shirt taut around neck and arms.
Heather Geier sat on his roommate’s bed; Adam Cook got
up and went downstairs. Jeff Hiestand and Chad Durham
milled about in the room. It was 78.1 degrees and the
relative humidity was 61%.
The LSD dissolved on their tongues.
She thought of what he said -again after her question- and
the room was silent for once. He had said it with bravura
that was common for him; his arrogance rose in waves and
settled merely in conjoined dips so made that he could
catch his breath for the next cocksure statement of some
micro-fact, some history, some conclusion of which -like
Roman concrete- he was absolute it would endure. He knew
so much -so many details- that it overpowered all but the
common sense of those he spoke around. He dazzled with
proofs and erudition and punctuation that combined into a
rhythm; he sparkled with color and insights they had not in
their life seen nor heard.
He had language as a gift from the gods and he used it like
an adolescent asp: indiscriminately, indulgently, far more
than was necessary to subdue.
She thought all this of him, but in images like clouds, in
feelings like fear and love, in ways between words not of
them.
She felt nothing inside the brain from the beating Adam had
given her two nights in a row last week. She was foggy in
the head, just a little. But she felt nothing as the
hippocampus shrank and the amygdala engorged. She felt
new things after each attack on her, each fear, each self-
defense each time nobody cared at all.
The world was full of bad people, she thought, not just those
that did bad, but those that stood by . And she wanted to
know -if not Hell- where they went. She wanted to know and
so she peaked around some corner of his sentences; she
followed his voice unsure if maybe it was leading her to
somewhere -in fact- bad.
Heather liked to look at Lyndon and listened to his words
more like music than speech anyway.
But he had said there was no Hell, she thought again as she
stared at her carbonated water he had had Julee Rae make
for her, and that was like saying there was no glass in my
hand. She imagined each drop leaking out as if the Mason
jar evaporated. She thought -as this urn hovered over her
lap- of how her legs and groin and the bed and the floor
would be made wet. It made her -at once- drink quickly and
grip the vessel harder as she gulped it all down. Her belly
and nose were effervescent from the quickly imbibed water
and air.
When he said things -no matter how impossible they might
seem- he made her scared that it would come true.
She didn’t combat him, she just plotted in her head of the
right thing to do. She had followed him as far as she could
as he spoke before turning back. She -as the hippocampus
shrank again- forgot all that was good in him, saw only the
black lines between teeth, the shadows where when he
smiled it seemed to pock, and she only heard in between
each heart beat as she plotted in a silent and unlettered
way.
She saw him like all men: dangerous.
She had had another abortion that month, on the seventh ,
she thought, and yet she knew she’ d carry the next one to
term. Her insides were fecund, robust, unable to be deterred
by the scissors of doctors and the vacuum of space. And she
would take ten more beatings with telephone cords around
her throat and fists to the temple and arms around her in a
hug from behind that would make it so she couldn’t breathe.
Ten more and her brain would be finished, and she would
then be ready to do her duty for God.
She would curse Lyndon the way Adam had ruined her. She
would ruin him in ways natural -God’s ways- to a pragmatic
woman, and invisible to a romantic man.
II. 2020 e.v.
It was the gait of the wolves as they followed the crows;
the forbearance of the corvids as the lupine licked all but
the scraps of ribs. The wolf heard helpful calls, the raven
was left with a gift of open carcass, and God saw
numbers and ethics roll out like atoms in the breath of
each thing with lungs; like vapor in each storm-sailor’s
song once sung.
The sleeping went on. The back of the head was hot; the
brain of Blax both sent to and received from the lab.
Lyndon just wanted a glass of water to drink. Blax must dig
a well for his progeny, MO thought as his son -Isaiah- slept
for sixteen minutes. MO then looked up the new language of
the Supreme Courts of China, the language in Mandarin
used in Africa for contracts and the new court-systems set
up in 2019 and 2020.
The use of English-Common law was waning, and the use of
English barristers on the Chinse payroll was providing
sinecure for some, large payments for others and a
dismantling of the role of western arbitration in what was
once called the third world; the land with coasts -edges- in
all the places of the sea China sought.
Xi Jinping spoke at Davos in 2017 and the cloud replayed it
for MO:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,”
these are the words used by the English writer Charles
Dickens to describe the world after the Industrial
Revolution. Today we also live in a world of
contradictions.
Many people feel bewildered and wonder what has gone
wrong with the world?
To answer this question one must first track the source
of the problem. Some blame economic globalization for
the chaos in the world. Economic Globalization was once
viewed as the treasure cave found by Ali Baba in the
Arabian Nights. But it has now become the Pandora’s
Box.
The international financial crisis is another example. It is
not an inevitable outcome of economic globalization,
rather, it is the consequence of excessive chase of
profits by financial capital and grave failure of financial
regulation.
Economical globalization is the natural outgrowth of
scientific and technological progress, not something
created by individuals or any one country. But we should
also recognize that globalization is a double-edged
sword. When the global economy is under downward
pressure, it is hard to make the cake of global economy
bigger. It may even shrink, which will strain the relations
between growth and distribution, between capital and
labor, and between efficiency and equity
As a line in an old Chinese poem goes, “ Honey melons
hang on bitter vines; sweet dates grow on thistles and
 thorns.”
One would fail to see the full picture if he claims
something is perfect because of its merits, or if he views
something as useless just because of its defects.
Liu Jiaqi -a Chinese national and CEO of a motorcycle
company in Kenya- had just been caught on tape calling the
black Africans, “monkeys.” He’d been recalled but tensions
were still high; with open threats of expulsion of all Chinese
nationals -like Idi Amin did in 1972- being uttered as far
even as neighboring Uganda and heard as far as DC.
Tension between the Chinese and the Africans was at a .6 on
his rolling global-conflict metric MO saw as he ran blood
samples and fMRI data from the bots that had been placed
in 79% of the population of the continent.
MO ran more data. More bots propagated. The heat of the
African day rose by .1 degree.
China, MO thought, was deflating currency still and had
been for over a decade, and - via slave labor- flooding
America and Britain with underpriced industrial goods like
steel . MO saw the Carnegie steel, the Rockefeller fuel, the
infrastructure of Vanderbilt all succumb and transform under
this infection of parasitic capital; from industrial goods to
information, from tangible reality to data like food turned
into kinetic-energy, fuel into ideas off the hot engine-brain.
The western elites of Wall Street and London had bankrolled
this as the industrial West was hollowed out like a brain
infected with bloodborne, encephalic and wasting diseases.
Factories rusted, machines toppled, men were inert in Ohio,
Pennsylvania and Appalachian zones like West Virginia.
MO saw the map of America, of Edinburgh, of Portsmouth,
all like dark zones in an fMRI measuring the brain of a
psychopath.
He took the nearly transparent -translucent- leaves of the
actual brain scans out of Africa, the map of the North
American continent and the Isle and laid them over and
apart like retrieving and replacing scabbard and sword.
China’s brain had infected the West’s brain with a parasite
that caused it to go dark in the zones that controlled for
emotion and affect and the emotions most associated with
masculinity: honor, duty, and protection & provision. All that
was left was the cool rational neurons of New York City,
London, and the zones of the North East, DC, and the
Brussels’ clique. China had turned the West into a sociopath,
attenuating the limbic function of the industrial zones, the
men -the neurons- of the working class, in order to reduce
the West to a high functioning sociopath where only
commerce and cool efficient reason was operational in the
countries as a whole.
For who was easier to bribe that the sociopath? An
emotional man -a nation proud still- would take umbrage at
the offer. But a rational man -a cynical country- would get
while the getting was good.
It was brilliant , MO thought, and it was like watching brain
scans of the inmates themselves. And had not the Governor
asked them to fix sociopathy? MO asked. He ran his hand
over the slab again. He felt grains of grey sand and darker
grit. He noticed where smooth; where there were divots.
MO asked the question dispassionately and then let all that
data -and more- flow into the sleeping Isaiah like a tributary
from his snow pack run-off now that it was spring of 2020.
He connected weather in the world to metaphor on the
cloud; he did not yet understand it beyond three levels -the
subatomic, the terrestrial, the cosmic- but he let its clear
pelagic, and then turbid layer waters, and final silt-sheet
flow into his issue -his boy- his vessel of all he needed to
feel.
III. 2040 e.v.
The first of the ships had left port fourteen hours after the
Wolves and the USS Constitution had.
The Rollin 303 gang had met and saddled the USS
Constellation in Baltimore as it had floated with sails down
and rudder chained and docked in a half-ass way on the
west side. Raffi woke up at 0400 eastern standard time. The
port of Baltimore had risen by over twelve feet and the
Rollin gang’s territory was waterfront property now.
He had felt something akin to a calling.
He’d grown up under Teflon Sean -between 2015 and 2020-
before he moved to B’more , and he’d been brewed in a
bone-broth -the code of loyalty- that had second-order
consequences, that white folk wouldn’t ever understand , he
thought. He thought of Bennie Lee Lawson, who -in 1994-
had a bone put on him by the dirty DC cops just because
Bennie wouldn’t snitch. They had put it on the street that
Bennie was a snitch just because he wouldn’t snitch. It was
a death threat, a death warrant put on that nigga by the
cops themselves, Raffi thought.
Bennie, from Kenny street, had walked into the precinct in
DC just because they had put it out that he’d informed on
his gang. He met that threat with force. He died to make
sure the cops thought twice about that dirty shit ever again,
Raffi thought. With a Tec-9 he killed two FBI agents, a city
cop sergeant -Hank Daly- and injured three more before the
cops put him down.
Raffi knew the honor code. He knew the feeling of it, and he
knew the consequences if he ever lost the feeling. And he
knew his people knew it too.
But he’d never known something ecstatic, thalamic , before.
Today he saw time expand.
What he knew was short-term gains from short-term goals
and an incessant pressing on the hedonic system as he
chased women, drugs and money, and fought enemies
within and without; it was all he felt prior to now. He’d had
no time to think, but now, as the black-hulled and white-
masted ship -its Caribbean blue keel underwater- moored
itself outside his high-rise building with a catwalk over
Garrett Avenue, he found himself in thought. He thought in a
way so foreign to him that he began walking out of the room
into the hall and down the stairs to the 8th floor walkway
thinking only of sailing, not even of the ship, but of sailing.
Today he saw the sea and the expanse.
A guard -one of his- was roused in the hallway and pawed at
his face to look awake- and he then opened the steel exit
door.
Raffi ambled out on the walkway and saw that from the
railing he could board the 199-foot ship with one long -
maybe two short- strides.
He knew not how he knew; but he knew. That ain’t your
cloth, that ain’t how you cut, he thought but he kept
moving.
He knew how to make sail, how to helm her, how many men
he needed aboard -it would take twenty-one officers and
two-hundred sixty-five sailors- and he knew that the
buildings around him to east and west -that rose and fell
from nineteen stories to just one- were nothing now. He
knew the edifices were nothing as he -aboard the blond
deck and looking back as Nephus and Darnel stared at him-
looked back at the 14th floor balcony he’d once too been on.
It was now 0610 hours and from his memory he saw himself
on that balcony looking down on the ship; and from here on
the ship now looking up at that perch.
He was a different man in the equivalent of the blink of one
eye.
By 1705hrs, his gang and sixteen of the 200mm-shell guns
and four of the 32-pounder cannon -with stores of jerked
meat they’d made and kept in the high-rise since the power
was lost in Baltimore 98-days before, 39-days before all but
the sick and dying, the dead and the gang-affiliated had left
west to the country or up or down to heaven or hell- yes , he
thought, by five-o-five they had cut the walkway from the
building and made sail out to the Atlantic from the street.
Raffi thought quickly as his mind took notes of his mind.
181 years since this ship had patrolled the Congo River -as
part of the slave trade watch for the US Government- they
rolled out of the Maryland coast. This ship -now crewed by
286 black men and a black Captain of the 303 gang- had in
December of the year Darwin published On the Origin of
Species , captured the Delicia slave ship and the Cora with
705 African and Arab slaves aboard. The vessel had history
that Raffi downloaded like oxygen with each breath. Each
slave was freed and released to Monrovia, Liberia by
September of that next year. This history stacked up in
Raffi’s mind like the 55-gallon drums of food and water in
the hold.
He took in more and more than he could use.
By 1861 the USS Constellation was running down
Confederate ships off the coast of Italy, and then was back
in Virginia -thirty-six months later- by Christmas of the year
that saw the end of the war. All this was loaded into the
Captain’s mind as he placed eyes on his midshipmen and
hands on his first mate. He knew each battle and each
range of each gun; he knew each sea lane and each link in
the anchor chain, he knew each stitch in each sail.
Each detail , he thought.
“North by Northeast, Nephus ,” he said twenty-two minutes
after loping over the rough breakers just past the Patapsco
terminal and out to the sea. He wanted to unburden himself
of all this knowledge of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in
1878, then to Gibraltar -not unlike the vessel they chased,
the Constitution - in 1879. He knew the ship he had
commandeered -was it divine? he pondered- had loaded
sundries and supplies and stores -over two thousand
barrels- of food for the Irish in November of that year of the
nineteenth century, and that it was the isle herself they
were pointed towards as he watched the sun set to stern
and to lee.
He connected the ship’s history with their future and vector
now.
He knew they -his shipmates- would not care -he only just
beginning to care- but he spoke to Darnel as he pulled him
aside to the mizzen -no quarterdeck was to stern- telling
him something as he opened a pouch of tobacco -mixing it
with the last of his cocaine- and stuffed a pipe he’d taken
from behind thin brittle glass in the Captain’s quarters.
“On July 4th , 1926, this ship that we on was retired -put
down- in Philly . They had ceremonies -like parties , you
know?- and all that. Jefferson and Adams -the dead prez that
ain’t on no money- well, hundred years to the day, when
both those motherfucka were put in dry dock too I guess,
well, on that day this ship was lifted out of the water, its crib
for at least like seventy-five fuckin’ years. And, anyway,
deuce the ship we bounce from America on, and the niggas
of the -man, the last signers alive of that Declaration of
Independence- the jump ‘merica was gone; poured out. It
was a new country now, nigga . It was a new fuckin’ deal,
with no peoples, no allegiances, no one knew no one at all,”
Raffi said and lit the pipe and watched the smoke between
him and Darnel’s face. A book opened up in him as if on
dais; on display:
…Baldwin is frank to confess that, in growing into his
version of manhood in Harlem, he discovered that, since
his African heritage had been wiped out and was not
accessible to him, he would appropriate the white man’s
heritage and make it his own . This terrible reality,
central to the psychic stance of all American Negroes
(sic), revealed to Baldwin that he hated and feared white
people. Then he says: “That did not mean that I loved
black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly
because they [had] failed to produce Rembrandt.” [Soul
on Ice; Cleaver; Eldridge]
He felt something akin to a distorted mirror in those
sentences, and that the ones before and after were a blur.
Raffi then recalled that he’d read documents on the slaves
from Congo and what was now Namibia , and he’d seen
documents file through his brain on the ships -the Black
Prince and the Favourite - that brought some white men -
English or Scottish or someshit , he thought- to America
about that same time. They too came in chains and were
stripped of their ancestors’ names and religion and ways.
They too were mixed in with his reconnaissance on who ran
shit and who was ran into the ground. His mind ran over it
again -the documents loading as he repeated the words
from the papers and thus said key words like, English , and
Scottish and Slaves :
…it may be lawful for two or more justices of peace
within any country city or towne (sic) belonging to the
commonwealth to from tyme to tyme (sic) by warrant
cause to be apprehended or seized on or detained all
and every person or personas that shall be found
begging and vagrant. In any town, parish or place to be
conveyed into the Port of London or unto any other port
 from where such person or persons may be shipped onto
a foreign colony or plantation. [1652, Egerton
Manuscript; British Museum]
The judges of Edinburgh Scotland during the years 1662-
1666 ordered the enslavement and shipment to the
[American] colonies a large number of rouges and others
that made life unpleasant for the British upper-class
[Register for the Privy Council of Scotland series III; Vol I.
p181, Vol II p101]
Raffi couldn’t help but see the long list of ships, men, and
bills-of-lading as the clock ticked back and back to Rome. He
saw that Scots in the time of Pope Gregory had been
enslaved and inquired about because of their blond hair and
blue eyes. They were strange to the Romans as they were
some of the most northern of the Scoti still made of Nordic
blood; made by the gods as if in haste and magic. They
were called Angles from Briton , by the Romans; which is
where Anglo-Saxon is derived.
“Non Angil, sed Angeli ,” that is to say, not angles but
Angels, the Pope was purported to state in regard to their
heavenly aspect in rejoinder to being informed of their
condition and origins.
Raffi saw from these manifold and unceasing documents
from William D. Phillips Jr. and Ruth Karras that the Scots
and Irish - from Alba and Picti areas of the highlands marked
only with runes Raffi didn’t recognize- had been enslaved
longer than any race in world history. He felt a curiosity -and
a strange affinity considering these were white men- about
these people; what it meant that they were so abused; and
for how long. He thought of the ships carrying both his and
these men’s ancestors to the New World. But he felt a
confusion issued forth from all this data -like a flood- that
brought his mind back to his own people -like a hand hold-
of Senegal .
Records of not names, but locations -and African tribes that
captured them- appeared to him; numbers not of thousands
but hundreds of thousands came. Raffi tried to sift through
the historical data from the Cape and the Horn and then
steady himself as the ship crested the current waves.
The storms above them had abated for a while, but the sea
still roiled; some of the men had grabbed slick-jacks and run
up the masts to the crow’s but they too saw what the USS
Constitution saw traveling at 15-knots to their mere
fourteen, and with a half day’s head start. They spied that
the green and purple and black clouds -that had been
separated like two continents- were moving back toward
one Pangea in the sky. And bolts within and between made
light white cracks in the dark sky.
What wasn’t seen was that the Wolves had already been in
the first sea-fight and had -around two hundred nautical
miles away- slowed to a float. And as Raffi searched this
endless database he had inside the mind -something he saw
as godly, ghostly, ghastly- the slave ships he inquired about,
the way his mind had been primed by this vessel and this
open water to search out the vector of his ancestors, the
ships and passengers, and horizontal lines of data on money
and destination and ages all ran down like a scroll onto the
deck and his feet and across the ship and over the bow and
into the water and below each layer and each sea beast and
seemed to tangle itself in the coral and shipwrecks and jam
itself into the cracks of the limestone bed. The list was all
ships used in the transatlantic slave-trade but he noticed
these white-men names and places first and after his
people’s.
As his mind scrolled he couldn’t help but see something
strange and shocking and frustrating to his eagerness for
his lineage as it itself was a tether back to the coast they’d
left or a line to the one he sought:
Ship: Passenger: Destination: Origin:

Port of London (off the

Dispatch D. McLeod Plantation
‘Pamela’)

Black Joke F. McLeod Plantation Liverpool (off ‘Leith’)

Five H. Port of London (off the

Plantation
Brothers Henderson ‘Pamela)

Fair
B. McGhie Exchange Hull
American

Fair
R. McCragh Philadelphia Hull
American

Al.
Friendship Plantation Portsmouth (off ‘M & M’)
McKeever

John
Good Intent Virginia Hull
McIntosh

Favourite Alex McRea Unknown Portsmouth (off ‘Leith’)

Black
J. McWater Carolina Hull
Bonnie

K. Port of London (off the

Le Blond Virginia
McNamara ‘Pamela’)

Lovey Port of London (off the

Jno. McLeod Carolina
Rachel ‘Pamela)

Jk.
Diamond Virginia Liverpool (off Leith’)
Bontharin

S.
Beehive Virginia Liverpool (off ‘Leith’)
MacDonald

Black
L. McLeod [redacted] Unknown
Prince
It went on like this for over 1,809 names on just one set of
register from 1746 to 1747 of the common era. Each time
he sped past it they redoubled and expanded. He blinked
and each name unbolted like one of four doors in a
storeroom each opening into a labyrinth itself.
Alexander MacLeod - Inverness-shire
Regiment: Cameron of Lochiel
Prisoner No: 2302
Prison Ship: [redacted]
Age: 21
Captured at Culloden; imprisoned at Inverness 19, April
1746 and put to board the ‘Jane of Alloway’ bound for
Port of London

Alexander MacLeod - Dingwall

Regiment: Earl of Cromartie
Prisoner No: 2304
Prison Ship: [redacted]
Age: 50
Imprisoned at Inverness and put on board the ‘Jane of
Leith’ for Tilbury. Transported.

Hugh MacLeod - Shigareth

Regiment: MacDonell of Glengarry
Prisoner No: 2030
Prison Ship: [redacted]
Age: unknown
Captured at [corrupted] in June, 1746. Sent aboard Angle
Exler to Port of London. Transported.

John MacKenzie, Lord MacLeod - Glenelg

Regiment : Earl of Cromartie
Prisoner No: 2321
Prison Ship: [redacted]
Age: 19
Eldest Son of 3 rd Earl of Cromartie, born 1727, Captured
with father in Dunrobin. Shipped to England as ‘rebel’
and executed for ‘high treason’ on December, 1746.

H. MacLeod - Caithness
Regiment: [redacted]
Prisoner No: 2322
Prison Ship: [redacted]
Age: 22
He and father -Glengyle- captured at Tongue on 25
March, 1746. Convicted of ‘high treason’ in November
1746; pardoned with conveyance to the crown of his
estate and agreement to ship to Colonies; New World.
 Malcolm MacLeod of Brea
Regiment: MacLeod of Raasay
Prisoner No: 2332
Prison Ship: [redacted]
Age: unknown
Captured at house of MacKennan with MacKennan,
Raathe, and Lyon on March 27, 1746. Pardoned with
conveyance of estate to the crown and agreement to
ship to antipodes; colonies of HM.

Roederick MacLeod - Ross

Regiment: Earl of Cromrartie
Prisoner No: 2337
Prison Ship: [redacted]
Age: 20
Captured at Langwell. Imprisoned at Inverness; Tilbury
Fort. Transported.

For each Alexander listed there were seven more; for each
Hugh there were two; for each John there were twenty-one;
for the listed Malcolm there was and additional one. There
were 349 MacLeod’s -spelled incorrectly- and 29
Henderson’s; 19 MacDonnell’s, and 7 McVeigh’s. Over 1,800
men were shipped to the New World as pardon in lieu of
death after the Jacobite uprising; Jacobite for the Latinate of
James : James the King.
The lists went on and on as Raffi stared at the midshipmen
coiling chains and raising sail; making twain-fasteners and
oiling the still stiff Caucasian ropes.
His eyes stared outward bound as the ship made way in the
white water of the old storm. But the mind gazed inward at
data on slavery and shackles and the treatment of Scots by
the English for centuries before the African trade; then up
until it was outlawed on the Isle itself. That was when the
dollars that paid for black slaves rose and those for white
men dropped.
Raffi saw that even the African slaves looked down on the
Scots .
“Alexander Stewart [slave name] was herded off the
Gildart in July of 1747, bound with chains. Alexander
Stewart [slave name] was pushed onto the auction block
in St Mary’s county, Maryland. Doctor Stewart [natural
name] and brother William attended auction aware of
Alexander coming from Liverpool. Dr. Stewart was a
resident of Annapolis. Alexander survived to tell the
story of he and 88 other Scots sold into slavery from the
ship out of Liverpool. [Lyon in Mourning; pp 242-243]
Of 25,000 slaves in Barbados , 21,700 were Scots .
[Colonial Series; 1640-1701]
“Planters who want to make a fortune in the West Indies
must procure white slave labor out of England (sic) if
they want to succeed,” George Downing said to John
Winthrop, Colonial Governor of Massachusetts in 1645.
“The service of whites bound to Berkeley Hundred was
deemed perpetual.” The Quoke Walker case in
Massachusetts in 1773 ruled that slavery -contrary to
the state Constitution- was applied equally to blacks and
whites. [Lewis Cecil Gray’s History of Agriculture in the
Southern US; 1860 vol. I. pp 316, 318]
“Scot-Irish slavery in the new world was crucial to the
development of the Negro slave system. The system set
up for the white salves governed, organized, and
controlled the system for African slaves. Black slaves
 were ‘late comers fitted into a system already
developed.’ [pp 25-26]. John Pory declared in 1619,
‘white [Scot ] slaves are our principle wealth.’” [Ulrich B
Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South].
The destinations for the Scot slaves was Virginia, Boston,
New York and the West Indies. The white slave did not
fetch a good price on the auction block; seen as innately
intransigent. And once the slaver had paid a higher price
for the -purportedly- docile African slave, the slaver was
reported to treat the black slave with more care. “Even
the Negroes recognized this and did not hesitate to show
their contempt for those white men who -they could see-
were worse off than themselves” [Bridenbaugh; pp 118]
This data and the waves rolled on at 14-knots as Raffi
thought something ineffable for this race of chucks -white
men- he had not known; he thought of these circumstances
and their intransigence -a word he now favored- as he set
the helmsman and his eyes to the north by northeast once
again.
Over the water Raffi felt vessels beneath him; over the
ocean he felt the USS Constitution slipping away.
Ocean between them, time above and below that, space
bent like a bow.
Like an arrow Grimnir -202 nautical miles ahead- was steel-
headed and straight. But, he was wet and wrought-up and
burdened with bones that grew dense and large between
himself and his outer musculature; itself covered in slashed
and black-inked skin. He too looking like an old scarred bull
whale. He carried two sailors from the other ship on his back
and shoulders. They’d fallen from the black spars and were
as blue as corposants and he made red fire from the try-pots
at midship. He barked into their eyes -Lyngvi had placed
pewter slugs the size of buttons in their sockets- using a
pidgin German-Norse as he then poured spirits into their
open mouths.
The sailors of the sunk vessel gurgled and recoiled and the
blinking began at once. The unembossed coinage fell from
the eyes and into their laps with the exception of one which
fell into Lyngvi’s hand that he’d held under one man; under
one eye.
The helmsman went hard to starboard and watched as the
broken mast of the USS Ethica unwove itself from their own.
The crew gave it wide berth -like a southern gentlemen- and
the last of the three-masted ship that had come alongside
twenty-two minutes ago sank under a green-glass of the
Atlantic. Crewmen were sent below decks by Jarnefr and the
bilge pumps were set to work in shifts. The USS Constitution
had taken two cannon enfilades and one cannon of their
own had exploded in place.
Lyngvi thought of the composition of the crew, two thirds of
his retinue were the Daniels -the clones- and one third the
lowlanders -including the Captain and first mates- were
made up of the Wolves . And soon they’d retrieve cousins
from the Isle, and grains of sand in the oyster of Bushido
and Mongol and M ā ori , he thought as he got nervous
about his own plan. He thought of the battle of Culloden
from April of 1746; he saw it was two-thirds Highlander
Gaels , the balance made of the lowlanders, Irishmen,
French and even some Englishmen too.
He saw battles with sword over head, head over heart, heart
over boots and those pairs over the singular ground. And his
mind’s eye sank then into the sea off the coast of Porth
Dafarch .
Lyngvi saw images from below the underwater shelf of their
destination; images of a ship down the ragged cliff off
Anglesey ; it had been one of three filled with gold bullion
and messages from Louis XV addressed to Bonnie Prince
Charlie but had never arrived as the leader of the Jacobite
rebellion waited -on small Scottish islands- to be retrieved
by his French allies.
A coin -a tiny copper disc actually, not a coin, Lyngvi
corrected himself- was recovered and had sat in a drawer of
a McCormac diver for a decade and one half. But now Lyngvi
knew something, he knew that copper disc was one half to
Mary Queen of Scot’s signet ring. And both halves -one in
the British museum and one that had been at the coastal
bottom since 1745- both discs -the one preserved from the
scaffold and entrusted to the museum and the other
entombed by the French vessel and encrusted by the cold
and the marine- both shone in front of him like a moon and
reflection in his very own sea.
The other two ships, Le Mars and La Bellone had been
repelled by the English. They too stocked with gold and
supplies. These two ships on their way to the King in exile
had come back and were garishly written down as rebuked .
The ruse was obvious now to Lyngvi , the ruse played by
Louis XV. It was that third ship, sent from Bordeaux , that
had made it to coast, made it past the argosy of the English.
It was that third ship that had reached the shore but due to
storm or magazine accident -or the horn of a narwhal
piercing her hull- had sunk right there at the reach -if not
the grasp- of the rebellion’s leader and King.
It was that third ship on no registrar, no document.
And that signet ring, that disc which had been the cover
snapped from Mary’s ring -a ring she used to emboss and
thus sanction all correspondence in a wax seal with Inde Fen
above and the escutcheon of the family below- was found
down in that third ship. It was a one in a billion, a one in 10
14
chance of being recovered off Holy Island -so small an
item, in so buried an unreachable tomb, from so long ago-
Lyngvi thought, felt, believed.
He thought of the children of the Bonnie Prince, he thought
of Charlotte -Duchess of Albany - and her three children -
from Ferdinand de Rohan, archbishop of Bordeaux - as well.
He thought of the way the Scots and the French had thus
combined and he wondered if Isaiah had seen anything in
this as he recalled that Helen of Troy was once Helen of
Sparta , and how quickly things were swept away. He
wondered if history was like that clasped signet ring cover, a
reverse image, distorted, corrupted and backwards, but
evidence of some true thing.
He thought about Gaul and the Romans chasing his people
north.
Lyngvi -as the pressure of all this data built up in him like
Bereitschaftspotenital until it would break like a wave and
something would need said or expressed- then thought of
when Blax would say, to the King over the water , as they
toasted each month those years ago. He thought of the
center of the table, the slab, the center of their attention
and he knew now to that which Blax referred. And with all
that, he burst in expulsion of air and compression of all
those many words and facts and minutiae that had built in
him as the Captain had retrieved -and set down- the
prisoners from the ship they had just sunk.
“She wore that ring at her execution,” Lyngvi said as the
Captain -ignoring him- approached the men made to bend -
and now were bent- at knee and at neck.
“You men will speak to me,” the Captain said to them as
nobody but he and Lyngvi remained around the captured
remnants of the drowned ship. The men did not mumble to
dissemble, they merely said what sounded like one word:
Henkō Dō
 28. Age of Sail
The Mestizo are the predatory class. They produce nothing. They create nothing,
they shake down the people who work and the people who develop. They raise
revolutions or are revolutionized against by others of them, write bombastic
unveracity (sic) that is accepted as journalism in this sad, rich land, steal pay roll
of companies, and eat out hacienda after hacienda as they picnic along on what
they are pleased to call wars for liberty, justice and the square deal. Honor is
one thing to them and another thing to an American; so it is likewise with truth,
probity and sincerity
The Lawgivers [London, Jack]

Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy wrathful anger take hold of
them
Psalm 69:24 [King James Bible]

The male honeybee:

They have no father
 They have a grandfather
They can be fathers to daughters, granddaughters and grandsons
They can’t have sons
PraXis Cloud addendum/XX.1a [MO]

I. 2025 e.v.
It was the gait of the wolves as they followed the crows;
the forbearance of the corvids as the lupine licked all but
the scraps of ribs. The wolf heard helpful calls, the raven
was left with a gift of open carcass, and God saw
numbers and morality roll out like atoms in the breath of
each thing with lungs; like vapor in each storm-sailor’s
song thus sung.
He awoke after 99 minutes; but fell immediately back to
sleep. He would not remember his next dream.
The night held a silvery moon and 32% RH ; with 40% cloud
cover; and a temperature of 45 degrees.

II. 2018 e.v.

MO ran the data again. Heuristic Chop 81.1 clicked. More
data came in.
China’s expulsion of the west from the landmass was at
91% now. The sea lanes were now theirs, MO thought. Audio
ran on his interface:
“Trump didn’t create any of this. This is Richard Haas
and all the fucking geniuses of the party of Davos, ok?
They’re the ones who dumped Korea, Afghanistan,
Venezuela, and China in his lap,” [Bannon, Steve]
MO used all his data for the day; it was 0555hrs.
Nations didn’t run on laws, but belief; and nobody believed
in anything , he thought.
The data from Scotland and Tacitus came in:
“Barbarians these Skoti (sic) are. They paint themselves
about the chest and face; hair like beasts and
musculature like Brazen bulls. They speak no civilized
language; they laugh inappropriately; they cling to each
other over the laws that govern the isle. They don’t
understand civilization; they have no the intelligence for
it. They only think of clan, and man, and their own herd
of goats over the rule of law. They cannot be governed;
and calling in their debts is the least I can do in such
circumstances.” – Seneca [the younger; author of Medea
]
Seneca had lent 40,000,000 sesterces and called the loan
in, Cassius Dio wrote. MO let the rest of the histories from
Boudica -who was lashed & her twain daughters raped- and
from outer Caledonia play on the cloud. He sorted the
Roman texts from the Scottish reports and the English
ecumenical between. Boudica -barking at her 231,000
troops- mounted her iron chariot with her daughters side-by-
side, inside she was no aristocrat but mere Scot , grasping
at her freedom and most of all the abused chastity of her
daughters. She -she said as MO read Tacitus again- would
win or die, if men wanted to live as slaves they were free to
do so.
“It is not as a woman descended of noble ancestry, but
as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom,
my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my
daughters…” – Boudica [Voadicia]
The closest -MO read- English equivalent to the vowel in the
first syllable is the ow in “bow-and-arrow ” her name in
meaning only, would be “Victorina. ”
He took note of what was written of: money by Romans;
honor by Scots :
 “…nasty little ‘Brittons ’ or ‘Brittunculi ’ they were called
by the Romans. But the Roman presence is Scotland was
little more than a series of brief interludes within a
longer continuum of indigenous development” [Hanson,
2002]
MO scanned the Ürümqi desert of Mongolia and found Scot
R1b genetics in bones, tartan cloth and sinew preserved in
moribund mounds 5,280 years old. More histories ran on his
interface.
“Tocharian , westward from the Caucasus Mountains,” he
thought. “Furthermore, the Jacobites believed -not in
parliament- but in the divine right of Kings; Bonnie Prince
Charles as their displaced King.”
MO built algorithms of both kinds. The entire library loaded;
but one line shimmered for a fraction of a second as MO
moved on:
“The history of Scotland is now reduced to a game at
cards, the problems of mathematics to puzzles and
riddles…” [Waverley; Scott, Walter]

III. 2037e.v.
Jack bent the next tree in line. The snow clung to the boughs
in the wet spring; the warm air.
He thought of the air. He thought of six months ago. He
pulled the trees to make ribs of a church as large and
buoyant as a ship on the peak of his mountain as he
thought of how each seed had fell -opened- like fiery angels
of Blake’s Orc.
His pelvis low, his arms loose like wings, his legs bent at
the knee; not at ninety degrees,
They fell to earth, his eyes saw each Jack at three and
nine and twelve o’clock. He knew he was his own six, he
 knew he was at three -then nine and twelve- to them.
They fell at 201MPH; they fell over the airbase. The
western foothills were brown and white, the air was 38
degrees. The sun was above and shadows had nowhere
to land. Their comms were clear and lacked distortion.
They breathed and let muscles relax; they each focused
on a star, a peak, a heading. They pushed the pelvis
down. Their cocks lead the way as too their hearts fell
against their ribs.
“Ninety-two hundred,” Jack One said and each Jack
heard it in the head.
“Copy,” they all replied, the wind died down inside.
They tilted down at starboard and spun like a clock
backwards. The mountains moved like automatons, the
ground ignored, the plane long gone.
“Eighty-Four hundred,” Jack One thought and they
thought it too. They all copied and rose the right-wings
and stopped the rotation.
Tears leaked from corners of eyes, the goggles never fit
quite right. Hearts stabilized at 55. Everything was
turned off except the mind; the Jacks moved like
shoulder -Jack One- then elbow- Jack Three- then wrist-
Jack Two- and finally one finger in a three-jointed come
hither -Jack Four grinned- and they bent to port and spun
like a second hand clockwise to 03:33 and 33 and
shadows under nose and above lips showed a slight grin.
He saw ships at sea, barges maybe, he saw things until
he blinked; blinking cleared the mind not just the eyes.
Two crows circled below at 2400-feet, where they had
agreed to pull. The sky was empty -at their elevation- of
all but Rayleigh scattering and a trillion- trillion atoms of
invisible matter that seemed blue from a distance and
clear from right in front.
29. Maps
Maps by definition are associative
How to Get Around the Non-associativity of the Octonions [Furey, Cohl]

It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the
other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of
difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of
them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do
The Evolution of Physics [Einstein, Albert]

So pervasive did [Robert Parker’s] influence become that producers all over the
world began to use technologies available to them to produce alcoholic, fruit-
forward wines that would score high on the Parker scale. Out the window went
the idea of terroir
Nautilus/Nautil.us [Tattersall, Ian & Desalle, Rob]

I. 2020 e.v.
“It’s just another IQ test,” she said.
MO watched the video models he had built of the re-
enactments.
1.55 billion iterations played out along 9-planes. He thought
he saw the bending of boughs by one, then two of the
clones. He saw Aspens bend, he saw ropes with bowline
knots, he saw muscles employed and faces grim. He saw
one was shorn close, one was bearded.
He thought he saw each hair on the head, and a scar from
the temple to the jaw and neck.
He thought he saw arrowheads in headdress; apertures in
ears and early signs of long silences. But it was fuzzy as the
super-position of each iteration still fluctuated in and out.
Off and on , MO thought.
“It’s more than that,” MO finally said and dusted off his
hands.
The man sat in the chair and stared straight ahead. MO told
Tania she could go and as she exited the lab he sat down in
front of the man. MO asked him a few questions; the man
had said a few things then decided it was ok to say a little
more about where he came from after MO assured him he
wasn’t ever going back.
He watched as the cloud rebuilt the octave chart and
between the sixth and seventh was copper. At the swerve of
the fourth was beryllium. Out of the eighth sine -wave was
gold. Helium, neon, and argon ran down vertically between
four and six. He stared at it for a second as Isaiah cleared it
from the cloud and rebuilt it again. MO blinked and the map
repopulated with nitrogen and oxygen at the meridian of the
nine octaves.
Isaiah wrenched on another V-12 on the engine-stand. The
heads were hemispheric and the fuel source was still
unknown; the fuel pump was bagged and the inlet plugged
with a T. Isaiah would only say that he had another idea
when MO inquired about the barges and their engines.
Isaiah was taciturn and laconically adding salt to a glass of
warm water -he then smiled- then he dumped most of it into
his mouth to gargle it loudly, garishly, like a kid.
MO turned back to the new inmate in the chair. Isaiah let the
calcium -at a high ppm in the hard water- that remained in
the third-full Tom Collins glass, accrete and then lay at
bottom like a sallow sheet. His interface ran weeks’ worth of
data like a roll -like a scroll- and then it paused for a mere
second on one thread as he swished the salt water around
teeth and gums:
“…if you take energy off it always transmutes to a lower
element. So, this guy tuns a piece of Zinc into Calcium
and then into Aluminum. When he hung the Zinc in his
house it got bombarded with electrons so that in itself
knocks out the protons.
Goldman Sach’s was looking into making Calcium into
Gold but it seems it would be easier to take energy off
 rather than adding it. So in theory [turning] Lead into
Gold would work but you would get Thallium then
Mercury first [intercepted tweet 10.16.19; Jamieson
Fletcher; @bechamp_Antoine]
Isaiah spit 7.2 oz of desalinated -and clear- water back into
the glass; the salt had been extracted by his mouth and
palate. Only the calcium and pure -non-conducting- water
remained. He set the glass on the slab softly, making sure to
make no noise at all. He thought, if one could turn base
metals into noble ones with enormous energy requirements,
could not one turn noble ones into lead with almost no
energy at all?
The lab hummed as the HVAC ran. It was 68.1 degrees.
Isaiah thought of all that gold in the hands of China, the IMF
and his own reserves in his mind as if at center and gazed
upon -by the metopes he coveted- the way the men that
were carved into Mount Rushmore were forced to have a
long look at the stars . Well , he thought as his red mouth
felt tight from the astringency of the salt.
The ivy grew the way ants moved; slowed down and green;
but along the trestles of the same math.
Isaiah saw the Queen Mary rise and fall by 7mm in the bay
as California’s San Andrea’s fault had tension measured in
joules, then heat, then displacement of atoms -each a
pendulum, finding the sweet spot in a trillion trillion
rectangles Isaiah built like a grid in his mind- in air above
the cracks. He absent-mindedly measured ocean temp and
salinity too. I’m thirsty , he then thought as he eyed the
espresso machine.
The new prisoner had heard the question and now spoke.
“We chopped it up with him,” inmate 90466831 said, “and
he says -he admits- esses run LA. And unlike the Crips and
shit, we run it like a paramilitary organization.” This was the
longest sentence he’d used in months.
“But you had money,” MO confirmed. He was setting up files
labeled:
Resources
Obligations
Fraternity
Amorous
 Familial
“Yeah, but my music was only local, and I wanted to be
mainstream, I wanted known, like Lil Wayne . But I grew up
with that Tupac shit, Suge Knight. You know?” he said as his
arms were straight on the knee and the manacles just
around one wrist. He liked talking about music. He felt
something in his brain like a drum beat.
“Where is your dad from?” MO asked as the man’s papers
scrolled on the cloud; each conviction, each infraction, each
date and sentence. The man felt the high of music drop and
the pain of his family relations return; rise.
“Argentina,” he said, tersely. He looked straight ahead.
“Illegal?” MO asked and measured the difference in brain
chems and length of sentences. He mirrored and matched
him by syllable.
“Yeah, came with his friend, from the farthest country
south,” the inmate said with muted pride.
“And mom?” MO asked.
“Mexican, legal from marriage, previous,” he added in
bursts of short sentences, now matching -subconsciously-
MO. The arms didn’t adjust.
“And was your dad around?” MO asked as he measured the
inmate’s allostatic system and endocrine as well.
“He left at five,” the eyes blinked three times. His head was
shorn, face clean shaven, tattoos on neck and jaw; hands
and arms too.
“At five?” MO asked; confirmed. He issued another set of
chems under the man’s nose. He watched the ppms change
in the blood and the conduction in the brain next.
“Yeah, and so my brothers and sisters had parties every
weekend in Riverside and the house got rushed -these
dudes behind us weren’t feelin’ it- and they come in through
a -like a patio door- and shit pops off, bottles breakin ’ and
guns come out and my sister had a friend,” he began to tell
a story and MO noticed the man’s CNS initiate a change in
regions 5b and 19d.
“And you were five?” MO interrupted and watched the pfc
stop and the brain’s electricity wane like a cloud gone dark
in storm. He took myelination reports by surface area, then
by weight and modeling this inmate’s brain both by genome
model -how the brain should be under no epigenetic
pressure- and how it truly was. MO lastly took his heart rate.
It was 55.
“Or six, yeah. Little -my house in La Puente - and I looked up
to my brother, he had dope bags and girls around and I saw
the respect he had and I just felt it, like the way you -a dude
like you- some guero might look up to President or Principle
or some shit. Well, I looked up to my brother and his life and
the life on the corner. Anyway, my sister is holding me and
her friend got shot up and my mom came to the hospital
because my brother Mike had got stomped bad and we’re
up in there all like guilty you know? Mom is trippin ’ and
shit,” he said and blinked once.
“And then what?” MO asked. MO moved his head and
shoulders to make sure the man didn’t feel he was speaking
to a thing as stoic as himself. MO created a contrast by
moving.
“Whatever. It went on like that for years, and I was always
on the corner because there was nothing else. What else
was there? People are like ah, you control your life, you
make your decisions . Yeah, yeah but since I was five the
only thing I known is gangs and the gang life. The gangs in
LA run the streets and the schools, ok? That’s what’s up,”
inmate 90466831 said as he made sure not to use names,
neither of people or the gang itself.
“Some kids don’t join gangs,” MO countered. He kept his
palms flat on his thighs.
“Yeah, and when a plague hits some people don’t get sick,
that’s what’s up. But you gonna act like those that do are
just bitchin-out for catching the plague?” he asked and MO
saw the language centers -the Broca’s region and
Wernicke’s - fire at .07 conduction rates and he then saw
lateralized thinking harmonize with the memories from
youth. Inmate 90466831 was able to take previous
experiences and metaphorize them to the data he’d been
introduced to last month. Twenty-eight days ago , MO
thought.
MO marked this as a move into phase III thinking by the
incarcerated man.
“When were you first arrested?” MO asked as the inmate’s
sheet showed 10.15.91. He measured the default mode
network four more times to gauge inner thought; he
measured adrenaline again. The inmate’s dorsal anterior
cingulate cortices peaked.
“Fifth grade,” the inmate said with some drop in volume and
tenor of voice.
“So ten?” MO asked even though he knew the true number.
He’d been monitoring the medial temporal lobe and inferior
parietal lobe and noticed the inmate about to go into DMN
thinking; the thinking of the inner life, memory and reverie
more-or-less , MO thought. Error correction would snap the
inmate out, and so MO used tactics like that to get the brain
to engage the neo-cortex . He attempted to keep him in
neo-cortical thought even in the telling -and re-telling- of his
story.
“Eleven,” the inmate said as the neo-cortex indeed sparked
to correct the perceived error, “and we were hearin’ about
Circuit City trucks getting boosted from the warehouse lot,
and homies pawning shit and getting shoes and we wanted
shoes too so we break into those trucks and the spotlight
from the helicopter is on us and we run -my homie Joker
who’s doing life now- we running and shit and the cops are
waiting for us at home; so they had been settin’ up on us.
And so I did a year for that and that’s when I really met the
black gangs, the Crips inside juvey , and first day in I had to
fight,” inmate 90466831 said.
“Why?” MO asked as the blood work and glucose levels
came back and laid upon the cloud.
“Because juvey didn’t keep the neighborhoods apart,” he
said with slight contempt.
“Races; by race?” MO asked.
“Yeah, Bernos and Side guys and we’re, we’re,” he
stuttered, “from our neck are Mexicans and they had the
negritos -black kids, Crips - in there with us and that ain’t
gonna work,” he said.
“So what happened?” MO asked.
“This dude Harris, I’ll never forget his name, and he was
supposed, they were like -the cops were like- Yo, Harris show
Garcia the ropes, but we had already had a rumble with
them going back years, and the tension is too thick. This
dude is supposed to give us soap in the shower and he
won’t give me none and so it pops off. Butt-naked and shit
we all fight. Fuckin’ melee man,” he said and the mouth
never approached a smile.
“How long have you been incarcerated?” MO asked.
“Since then,” he said and nodded.
“Continuously?” MO tried to get him to expand. MO already
knew his record. He knew his genome -he was 68% mestizo
, 18% Spanish and 10% native to the south American zones-
and his IQ was 128. MO knew his pathology report: he had a
small cancer in the lung that was early enough to easily
catch but MO watched it to see if his immune system would
stop it or not. Inmate 90466831 had just been transferred to
ADX from California three months before. His closest friend
had turned State’s evidence and Garcia was depressed and
uneasy; his allostatic system was in flux. This made him
quiet and so MO issued another round of oxytocin and
vasopressin and primed him with pheromones he’d
manufactured from the man’s mother & his sister’s DNA.
MO primed him with questions of his youth.
Once opened up a crack with these chems , MO flooded the
man with mu-opioids each time he said more than ten words
in a row. The convict received biochems via algorithm each
time he opened up. The more he spoke the better he’d feel.
“I got out at twelve and was back in at sixteen and out at
twenty-five for a minute. Made some music in 2006 -2005,
2006- I think. Then by 2012 I was in again. By 2020 I was
extracted here to ADX. I don’t even know why. Colorado is
different than California though holmes . It’s different here.
No gangs, no culture, just man on man,” he said and looked
around the lab for the first time. First with just the eyes then
the head. He added, “it’s weird. And them sand-niggas , the
terrorists and shit. You in charge of that? ”
“No,” MO said.
“People are programming more now, because the violence
shuts down business for two -three- years. Consciousness is
changing. Even in LA and SoCal. Sereno will deal even with
Nortes like a new way. But with the violence settlin’ things
hurt me in other ways,” he said.
“How?” MO asked.
“My day-ones roll, turning PC behind bars; and it happens to
the toughest of ‘em . Some of the strongest dudes fold. We
said we’d do this to the death, and those are things that
devastate me the most. Greedy -money-hungry homies -
hurts me more than the ones we lose. Death hurts me, but
it’s like noble; it’s in the rules. The snitches and homies
turning or breaking just breaks me -hurts me- more. Like
prison is too much for them, like more time hurts them so
much they’ll betray us. It’s hard. Because it don’t make
sense. Because, well, look, in my neighborhood some
knuckleheads say getting sent up is the life. Like the big
league. Prison is a goal. I had homies they say, fuck school,
fuck college I wanna hit the beat-down, the mainline, I’m
trying to level up.
“Like gueros see getting a job or promotion or something.
My people see the penitentiary as a promotion. And I bet
nobody even asks why, holmes ,” he said and looked
straight at MO. MO let the brain imaging and the bots in the
blood measure the cortisol and epinephrine as it rose and
fell as the man recounted betrayal and how he felt about his
friends before and after that betrayal. MO watched it roll on
like two sets of breakers hit the beach. He saw the man on
the shore, he saw the surface of the waves. He felt he had
learned how to keep a man in error-detection mode during
narrative recall; in order to improve veracity. But he noticed
the story seemed to float on a thin surface.
He wanted to know what was going on further down in the
man’s inner region that MO had kept him from drowning
within. MO pondered how the man might appear in the
ocean and he imagined the waves rising to whelm him, and
the sea bottom pulling down like a magnet as well.

II. 2038 e.v.

Daniel sat down in the ante-chamber and waited for the
ADA to join the defense counsel. He was the twelfth jury
member and -along with the two alternants- they’d all be
seated in the courtroom once the prosecutor and defense
teams took one last look at the jury. They’d been told it was
a murder trial, and that they would be sequestered for the
duration.
He adjusted the sleeves of his jacket and turned the dial on
his analog timepiece.
He smiled when he looked at; he blinked to clear the eye of
himself and anyone who stared at him. He had asked for an
absentee ballot, and the officers of the court thought he
meant for the trial. He clarified that the election was coming
up and he -if sequestered for the trial- would need an
absentee ballot to vote for Governor.
Detective Ravrafters sat in the hall reading the red covered
book. He did not worry at all about anything but the words
on the page.
The crowd outside was like wind, and each time the
courtroom doors opened you heard them -the protestors-
barking like mad; whipping up the anger in each man and
woman on the street.

III. 2018 e.v.

MO listened to the shuffle of paper and hum of the HVAC. He
had read again of the Four Barbarians that the Han Chinese
wrote of in four separate tracts. 18 in Shiji , 62 in the Han
Shu , and 30 in the Hou Han Shu, he catalogued and set the
last one down. He read of the permutations from what
Steven had brought him and re-read it because he was out
of data for the day. It was 06:12.
He saw the maps of Mongolia and the South China Sea. He
saw the reefs and the shipping lanes and read -again- on the
establishment of -and litigation over- the nine-dotted-line.
He began a report with that title:
Part I. The Nine Dotted Line
This report will serve as outline for further
reconnaissance once full net access is granted.
In the interim. The three domains of war and peace were
laid out by the great Chinese seamen [Unconventional
Warfare; Col. Liu , et.al .]. To wit:
-Information warfare (China wins)
-Economic warfare (China wins)
-Kinetic warfare (US wins; until 2025-)
The 5,000 years of Chinese territorial and cultural
integrity is based upon the role of the conceit of
barbarian management . An outline of some the conflicts
China has had that exemplify these three conceits will
be detailed below.
But let us begin just three years ago.
On 9.25.2015 Xi Jinping came to the White House and in
the Rose Garden [after President Obama had spoken
beginning at 1222hrs EST] Xi said:
“I have told President Obama that China is
committed to respecting and upholding the freedom
of navigation according to international law. Relevant
construction activities that China is undertaking in
the islands of the South-Nansha Islands do not target
nor impact any country and China does not intend to
pursue militarization ”
Dissembling (with a 97% accuracy rate of malice over
error) to the President and the media, the Chinese
minister -as 300,000 students at American universities
were working directly for the Chinese govt & over
10,000 contractors of Chinese and client sate descent
were working in US weapons’ labs- was overseeing the
beginning of the total militarization of the Scarborough
Shoals, Fiery Cross, Mischief Island, et.al.
Systems not limited to but including: Fire-control radar;
search radar, combat planes, ten thousand-foot runways
were all installed as prelude to the interception of US
Navy vessels that had a mere decade earlier travelled
freely in the South China Sea [SCS]. Free Navigation was
the term, US Navy ships with guns up, radars up and
with no hesitation nor interference from China had
swiftly changed to Safe Navigation -a rubric denoted by
zero fire-control and radar- and thus large American
ships -the largest in the world- now are sailing with their
tail between their legs, to quote one official on condition
of anonymity [Adm. Roy Battoi, ret.]
The title to this report refers to the nine-dotted line ; a
pure invention of the Chinese to assert control over any
landmass even those which are closer to Vietnam or
Indonesia than mainland China itself. Currently it is a
legal fiction that has been ruled illegitimate by
international courts.
In 2018 the USS Decatur was on patrol twelve miles off
Gaven reef and China sent a ship -the Wenchang - to
intercept -at high speed- coming within 45-meters of the
Naval destroyer. The Wenchang’s commander, Zheng
Qingfeng , issued a statement asserting Chinese
sovereignty that now included a fifteen -not twelve- mile
radius around their atoll. Zheng said:
“You have breached China’s maritime sovereignty.
You must stop your illegal acts and leave
immediately. Otherwise we will take necessary
measures.”
These cases -including one in 2013 with the Philippines
in the UN’s Permanent court of Arbitration- are currently
being decided to the detriment of China. China has lost
every case brought against it for its behavior in the SCS.
They demand Exclusive Economic Zones [EEZ] in
 perimeter to each artificial island, and territorial waters
under Unclos . And while the courts enduringly rule
against them, China continues to invest heavily in Africa,
Venezuela, Argentina, South Africa, the Caribbean,
Qatar, UAE, and the UN votes once aligned with the west
are moving more and more in China’s favor.
$3.37 trillion in global commerce passes through the
SCS.
The Nánmán -the barbarians- of the south [e.g., Africa,
and South America] are controlled via investment, and
the Xīróng barbarians of the west [e.g., Europe and the
USA] are controlled via bribery [see: addendum of paid
off politicians including John Boehner, J. Biden, A. Merkel,
Macron; media figures like Richard Haas and Joe
Scarborough, and banks and investment firms like Booz
Allen, Bank of London, and NGOs as well]. China has
claimed $49 trillion [US] in bank held financial assets;
compared with $19-trillion held by the US. However, this
number is currently seen as unreliable as China offers
only one sector open for investment by foreign actors: it
allows investment in its banks.
All other industry is off limits to investment outside of
the onerous Chinese rules of the road.
Hydrocarbon exploration by Indonesia and Vietnam (and
multinational oil & gas corporations) is currently under
way.

Part II: Horizontal Drilling/Lateral Nomadic Tribes

If one looks at the Eurasian map a lateral movement
from the eastern Asian steppe to western Europe -one
belt- has and will exist (barring tectonic shifts). The 300-
year struggle between Han Chinese and their neighbors
 employed barbarian management along this horizontal
zone. [see map attached; 1A]
Rainfall (bend of the Yellow River noted in 4b) 15” iso
minimum rainfall for agriculture. The Han reportedly had
100-days windows to fight the nomadic steppe tribes;
due to the lack of food and water in the region. [follow
up on soil sample: JCP86]
Small groups were tough but vulnerable to a larger
force.
Winning; gathering resources; Chinese chose to go to
war to capture resources or sought peace to extort
resources. Option b: risk low, profit high. Peace was
more cynically profitable than war 66.6/33.3.
Next, realpolitik was not merely a question of resource
extraction but a way to hide one’s marital ability; for
fighting gives intel to the enemy even if you win.
[concealment/cover protocol: ALS87]
Intermarriage; accord; peace, was common. However
[algorithm NBF84] diplomatic respect was lower in
tributary domains; and thus other states could pick off
the nomadic tribes without official sanction of the State.
[Lunceford 78:1]
Steppe nomads (Hou ) were too weak to merit attention;
but a new dynamic when state of Chaou 307 BC,
introduced horses into battle; Calvary was now required
between all Chinese states. And pasture was required to
fuel their horses. Calvary allowed mobility to rival steppe
nomads. Major offenses against nomads began and large
swaths of the steppe became/assimilated Chinese.
The Chinese (Han ) built forts and outposts -islands of
garrisons- along all the travel and choke points of the
steppe’s belt. Nomadic tribes could no longer travel east
to west without having to pass through Han Chinese
military zones. Temperature rose in the spring; rain
increased by autumn. Winters got worse in moons;
horses fell sick when grasses went. Arrows flew as the
hooves landed. Blood ran like snow pack melt. Genes
bottlenecked in the second century of the era vulgari.
Defeat froze at the Chinese New Year. Victory thawed
into fear [error].
Chinse (sic) rustled horses; and took over pasture land
to prevent the nomads from raising and selling horses to
other tribes. Decimating them not through warfare but
economic usurpation, [Chinese] even suffering losses
merely to prevent the steppe people from trading horses
-their only industry- with neighboring tribes.
The loss of so much pasture destabilized nomadic
society so much that out of which emerged a peer
competitor that would haunt China for centuries.
Typically nomadic society there is little surplus to
support a soldier class. In crisis situations nomads are
incentivized to turn each adult male into a warrior for
raids; roaming armies. This stimulates hierarchies, and
central government and administration; becoming a
framework for a nomadic empire to rival Han .
The cumulative effect of Chinse encroachment -and
specifically the Tzing offensive- may have been the
catalyst for nomadic crisis that ended in the founding of
the Xiougnu empire in 209 BC. Which thanks to nomadic
expansion warlords posed the threat to Han dynasty.
Nine years later, the Han were severely weakened in
incessant warring. So intermarriage began in earnest;
negotiations. And a new round of tributary dynamics
were set up. Like dairy cows over beef cows, the
arrangements were so made to extract resources
peacefully on the Asian landmass.
The Vassals to the east were the other issue when the
Han debated fighting back against this flip of the client
state relationship. [see: addendum 5a]
Flag remnants found at site 111v and 45.b. Iron at 3ca.
By 154 BC the Han had decided -by pretending to ally
with the Xiougnu - to raid the vassal king’s territory -for
they were richer and weaker from years of bleeding
them via eastern [Dōngyí ] barbarian management.
Then these resources could be used to throw off the
yoke of the Xiougnu .
Chinese tradition of manipulation of cultural and political
institutions was part of a broader strategy. Large parts of
the Xiougnu empire were still autonomous nomadic
warlords, and like semi-autonomous senators and
business leaders in the anarchic west, the Han could -
back then and now [1.19.19]- make deals with each of
them under the noses of the central government of the
nomadic tribes in Xiougnu or under the noses of the
POTUS or the public of the United States and Europe.
Deals were made which included payoffs and bribes and
the blood of princesses and intermarriage; births and
deaths and ornate plots and simply just going along.
But the Xiougnu [federated nomads] had a martial
culture and side-by-side with politics young men had to
fight to gain wives; thus the Han strategy was half a
strategy; it had no long-term stability. War would always
come due to the rise -each generation- of men needing
to prove themselves in war regardless of the realpolitik
of the Han over decades to manipulate culture and
economics of several nomadic tribes by way of the
barbarian kings.
Bribes worked until the boys of each generation grew up
looking for a fight.
 “Divine favor was determined by war” – [source 81]
Any cultural change was dependent on long term
patience.
The Chanyu could not restrain his martial males with a
ban on incursions into China. Culturally it was a non-
starter because of the need to secure mates and divine
favor in war. The nomadic people’s genetics [algorithm
198GD] had been honed over centuries when they had
been forced from a pastoral society -already austere and
tough- into a more martial one when the Han had ruined
the nomadic tribes ability to raise horses for both
survival and trade. Over a 400-year period the nomadic
tribes had begun to sexually select for aggression and
warlike impulsivity that was accidental bulwark against
the Han’s long term strategy vis- à -vis the Xiougnu .
Han sovereignty was established over and and (sic) over
via buffer states, and raids via Calvary on smaller and
isolated tribes of the confederated. More military
colonies and outposts were built and maintained; this
drained the Han coffers making them cash poor. Total
reserves recorded [redacted].
A few years before war Emperor Wu , organized Zhang
Qion’s 138 BC expedition to convince outlier states to
find allies to outflank the Xiougnu . Powerful intelligence
was gathered by his return in 125 BC. Zhang saw that
the soldier class Xiougnu ought to have collapsed with
the loss of resources from th (sic) Han, but they had not.
Tribute was still paid by the outlier tribes that the Han
had assumed were sufficiently bribed, co-opted and
controlled politically. Jiuquan, Zhangye, Yumen passes -
the Huze corridor through oasis forest and garrisons and
further bribe and threaten the economic flow of the right
arm of the Xiougnu’s peripheral [see addendum 66x]
tribes.
119 to 104 BC. The silk road was born by the stalemate
of garrisons and control of east west travel controlled by
Han .
Emperor Wu’s campaigns could only be financed by
state monopolies; the selling of imperial offices and
heavy taxes on economic productivity; consolidation
model born [see organism aggregation/mtDNA]. The
centralized model was equal and opposite to the
nomadic tribes but also required by the heavy expense
of the large distances that must be secured. Conquest
and control over large areas of infertile land was
expensive, and even as the Han -as most Asians- had
been sexually selected for smaller body mass and
toughness -and thus lower caloric needs- the focusing on
the individual would have assured losses against more
robust enemies of nomadic tribes [game theory 144ax
and 7v]. By 60 BC the Han were diplomatically in charge.
Their hegemony ws (sic) accomplished via the expansion
of their control of lanes of commerce; bribes of the elites
of their vassals; and extraction of resources via
corruption/peace model.
More buffer client states were tended to and extracted
from as the Han continued to attempt long strategies
over large areas of land. The four barbarians -East, West,
North and South- were incessantly treated with political
din (sic) cultural manipulation and kinetic coercion as
last resort. But the Han were invariably over extended as
it was so expensive to continue to pay bribes and
soldiers and build infrastructure for control of lanes of
travel by their client states.
This split the Xiougnu -into north and south- and they at
once began fighting each other after the death of
Emperor Wu . More bribes and cultural infection and
compromise. Targeted subsides to defecting lords of the
 old Xiougnu empire accelerated the disintegration. But
this success [redacted].
But again the nomadic tribes continued to deal the Han
their only defeats. It was the only strategy that
seemingly could usurp and outflank the Han’s complex
strategies that won against the Xiougnu . [One failure
was the rise of landed aristocracy at the expense of the
State; see addendum 881].
48 AD saw the final separation of the north and south of
the erstwhile nomadic but loosely federated Xiougnu
empire. The Han took advantage of this by issuing an
ambiguous policy. Making vassal of the south as a buffer
by making no attempt to help them over throw the north
the Han waited to see the results. Experts conferred in
spring of 80 AD. By 83 AD the north Xiougnu offered
terms for surrender. But now -at this moment of triumph-
the Han unraveled. The southern Xiougnu -upon victory-
feared an end to subsidizes from the Han that had been
paid during the tension of permanent war; peace meant
the south no longer deserved subsidy, they reasoned. So
they -in the middle of détente - began attacking the
north. Relenting, the Han allowed the south to rule over
the territory, but the south couldn’t handle the
administration over their former enemies; corruption and
vengeance became the norm.
By 120 AD Xianbei nomads -a splinter group from the
defeated north- emerged and invading Han territory.
The steppe people were seen as resources to the Han
Chinese, but long-term cleverness ultimately upended
itself by giving their nomadic rivals nothing to lose and
everything to gain through kinetic war. Economic and
intelligence generating dominance was always their
preferred model due to their fear of the cost both
economically and strategically of war.
 “Why war -and lose one third- to gain half of what is not
burned; for what one can convince and receive two-
thirds with no loss at all?” Han diplomat Chenshó offered
in writing to [redacted].
But their rivals had the flip side to that coin in mind;
they were weak diplomatically and economically and
thus war was their favorite tool.
“Raids are our agriculture,” one tribal leader said.

Part III. The Connex Box of Hong Kong

A2AD [Anti-Access/Area Denial] systems in place.
[redacted]

Part IV. Industry; All Heart

There is a direct correlation between the opioid crisis
and the deindustrialization of the rustbelt. China calls it
Barbarian Management [ibid]. They take the leaders of
the barbarians and give them the taste of the good life;
and whatever happens back in the tributary state is your
problem not ours.
“But we need you to make sure your industry cannot
compete,” [redacted].
Factories first, workers next, self-worth and affect drops,
and opium fills thalamic need.
Soybeans Beef but they forced Boeing and Apple into
contracts with the Chinese State.
“We’re Jamestown to China’s Great Britain,” [redacted].
Average compounded growth from 1946 to 2000 was
3.5%.
After China gets into the WTO and gets most favored
nation status [12/11/2001] growth of US fell to 1.9%.
301’s stop forced tech transfer.
ZTE gets shut down in 90 days -can’t get component
parts from west- Sisyphus reform.
Fear, Granule 9.1; Gary Cohen -of Goldman Sachs- takes
the documents of NAFTA off the desk of Clinton, the
President was not smart enough to understand NAFTA.
Japan will have a bilateral deal.
New NAFTA deal Trump has [redacted].
Geostrategic manufacturing base to counter China.
Korea, and EU (Junger has agreed to it).
Supply chain away from China (Trump/POTUS 2016).
Border adjustable tax was killed; Merkle and Macron
lectured Trump at G7.
Trump offers “no tariffs but no subsidies” [see:
addendum 61x].
Free land, free electricity, China offers by the State to
their industry. Undercut all western industry.
ZTE can’t go away, because they need 150,000 jobs to
keep [Chinese] public pacified.
China: reckless build of credit, their banks aren’t linked
to US, [redacted].
Mining; cash crunch; server rooms [bitcoin; redacted]
[addendum 8b/a].
Andy Purdy worked for Dept. of Homeland Security and
now is Chief Security Officer for China’s leading Trojan-
Horse espionage-arm Huawei .
PART V: How Much (Can One DNA Take)?
The whole burden came down on the working class. On
September 18th the balance sheet of the federal reserve
was 880 billion dollars; on January 29th it was 4.5 trillion
dollars. EDOC (sic), Bank of Japan, EBOC, Bank of
England, saved the elites, turned on liquidity, real
estate, stocks, intellectual property had the best ten
years in history.
Working class taxes financed it, working class men -from
the south disproportionately 1/2 of military despite only
1/3 the pop- fight to defend it.
American banking systems has 19 trillion in assets,
approx. 11.3% is bad.
$49 trillion in assets China claims; $45 trillion since
2008. How much is bad? Approx. 22-57% [see
addendum B/AkB/ox].
Swift system, nor derivatives, not connected to US West.
The investment banks have limited their exposure to the
banks. Sequestration in zone C-T; not A.
The Economist , the Financial Times of London , Richard
Hass -Council of Foreign Relations - are Chinese
operatives [paid by China at $10.3M; $4.6M; $1.44M
annually] and instructed to beat up Trump [POTUS] and
Pence [VP] while they attempt to deal with Chinese
threats. Hass is currently [8.18.18] engaged in
propaganda -using 294.4 minutes per month- infecting
US population that the Chinese don’t know what the US
wants; implying that Trump is reckless.
Refer: Haas should be charged with [18 USC 2381; refer
to ADA at 303.513.4410]
China’s Banking system, they were willing to open their
financial system. It was the only one system. Why?
Conclusion [Heuristic Chop 55.4]: Fraud.
 The Wall Street Journal aware by 8.16.1998. By June of
1999 the pitch from appeasers from both parties sold us
on getting China into the WTO on a liberal political sell;
analysis: [China] are still mercantile regime of
totalitarians/highly integrated.
Memetic push/71%: idea proffered by compromised
elites is 1) America is a declining power, China is rising,
but to avoid to conflict is to have the declining power
works with the rising power . 2) We need détente and
rapprochement, with [X,Y] countries.
[caveat] Russia was weak in the 1980s and China is
weak now; no cash. US doesn’t [with 89% accuracy]
need to sell out to them. US can win if kinetic war
employed before 2025 [2038 at latest].
China’s next step: regime change in US. 80% chance to
thwart POTUS [Trump major obstacle to China].
Classified information [redacted] shows China is
interfering with elections. One Belt One Road , Made in
China 2025 ; East India Co. style projects in Sub Saharan
Africa, Venezuela, the Caribbean.
[intercepted] “They got a lot of RMB to spend… and
if a guy can take RMB”
“But nobody is gonna take RMB from them”
“Well we’ll see” [redacted]
China are all over UAE, all over Argentina, Qatar, to
South Africa, to Saudi Arabia. [see Map 5a-9v]
Italy announced going with China [3.17]
The ones that haven’t been killed or jailed, seen Xi
Jinping as a cult of personality and a return to
adversarial relationship with West.
Deng Zhou Ping faction believed in working with West,
being a good partner; Analysis: Xi is similar to Mao .
 Straights of Malacca (see map 420g).
CentCom needs power; [addendum cvt].
Obama’s pivot to Asia.
US was not engaged, the pivot was about putting a
marine brigade in Australia.
China is a rising naval power… but now is the time to
strike.
All Asian countries will tell you the navy is vital.
Steven Miller had plan in place to get all 300,000
students out of country; it was leaked by deep state.
Susan Thornton [redacted] on China. Out of state.
You should have to be an American citizen to work in
weapons lab, but they get waivers.
Confucius institutes have server rooms. Funded by PLA.
Pop (sic) Francis cut a deal with China to pick Bishops
(Q9)
China won’t allow CIA to work inside China like PLA
works inside USA
Hudson Institutes is only one that isn’t corrupt.
Brookings Institute took $300,000 from Huawei in 2018.
John Hopkins, Carnegie, Carter Center all took $1.59
million in Chinese cash [2017].
Lee Hu (economic strategist for Xi ) to negotiate in June
of 2017 he spent his first minutes with ‘free trader’
Republicans on capitol hill. Barbarian Management 101.
<end report>
“Barbarians,” MO said aloud as his interface switch over
from English to integers; as algorithms that couldn’t be
managed spun off into his virtual space. Nobody would see
it in MO -in his head- but if one had special eyes and looked
they might see the armature of shoulder and hip matching
the steppe barbarians of the Xianbei ; if one were a little girl
with blue eyes maybe horsey dolls of Mongol gold and
stirrups of worn roan black would be built from such endless
integers in space; pine cones as armor and Juniper needles
for arrow and bows; smooth redrocks for eyes & chests of
horse & man of the belt & the divide.
MO thought of the man up in the mountains and iterations
repeating ad infinitum as his brain naturally demanded a
response. Data was his response to the itch he could not
scratch. Data , he thought as the data came in and all that
data he still lacked was just out of reach. He thought of over
a million things in less than two-thirds of a second. Can the
sea be ruled if not the ships? MO asked himself and the
PraXis cloud pushed out into the expanded space he’d just
made.
 30. Komorebi
The presence of hoards of silver suggests times of insecurity, leading people to
bury their wealth
The Norse Silver [Graham-Campbell, J. & Kidd, W.]

A relentlessly positive attitude and a hand extended in an offering of assistance

to those who are struggling but earnestly trying- this is the real nature of
Operation Werewolf
OPWW [Waggener, Paul]

Among the finds are the remains of a fairly large church and 45 graves in a
circle formed churchyard with a number of skeletons in various shapes of decay.
The churchyard had been used since 1000 AD, the year Iceland converted to
Christianity, and has been used until after 1104, a year the volcano Hekla
erupted, spewing ashes all over the country, making it possible to date
archeological findings with some certainty.
Icelandreviews.com 2016 [Editor]

I. 2024 e.v.
The protests were larger than the last four and now the
police had mounted on horseback and were setting a
perimeter around the Governor’s mansion.
“Jesus, these freaks,” Harrissa said from the window as she
filed her nails with an Emory board purple and pink, and as
large a skateboard , Boyd thought as he watched her move
it along with speed.
“Are,” he began to ask, but was interrupted by a bullhorn.
He closed his mouth and his eyes as the voice penetrated
him deeply. He tried to shut all places on his face that the
noise could come in.
“And they cannot divide us, they will not turn us on one
another,” the female activist’s voice bellowed and
screeched from the street below. 150-200 protestors
surrounded the Governor’s private residence and the police
began running horses up and down the sidewalks to keep
them clear.
“Look, the horses are so regal. And the protestors from
Antifa and Citizen Action and MexiMulletdot.com move
around them like water, always finding its own level,”
Harrissa said as the Governor was surprised -taken aback-
that she knew that concept. He looked at her with furrowed
brow.
The Mayor of Denver, no fan of the Governor, had told the
police to stand down and let the crowd of usurpers,
Marxists, and criminals basically have free reign. Handcock
had told them to move them off sidewalks and enforce other
petty violations, but essentially to allow the worst elements
to thrive.
This would ensure that any pro-Sou citizens were punished
violently by the Leftists groups as the police looked on.
Mayor Handcock felt this would be the best way to punish
the Governor; he’d have to allow those who supported him
to be abused and this would make him look weak. Trump
allowed his base to be assaulted and did nothing, and now -
the Mayor thought- Sou would be as weak -and disloyal- as
Trump in this way . And it was no small amount of pleasure
for the African-American Mayor to imagine his political
enemies, these white conservatives, among the civilian
population being physically injured too. Handcock had
grown up when the Bad Boy Pistons played; and they -
Dumars, Rodman, Laimbeer- played rough.
And they won , Handcock thought.
“The prisoner industrial complex is for profit and all
designed to enrich the Governor and his friends,” the voice
rang out and the feedback squawked and the horses moved
their heads up and down in slight rebellion. The crowd
yelled and jeered.
“You don’t even have friends,” Harrissa said in rebuke of the
bullhorn’s assertion. She was talking from the window still,
standing there watching and listen. She said this as if she
had made a defeating blow to the Leftists outside. “God if
you could just fuck them, then they’d understand,” she
added and thought that too would show them
motherfuckers. She nodded at her own appraisal.
“I don’t think that is any solution, angel,” Sou said with a
wry grin. Rachel was smiling and nodding in the mirror as
she powdered her high cheeks and patted down her hair; it
was as black and straight as a computer-generated line.
“Oh, you think so too,” Sou said as he caught her eye in the
vanity glass.
“Yup,” she said and got up -looked toward their bed- walked
out of the room and bounded down the staircase blowing
kisses to him from each punctuated jump.
“Where are you going?” he yelled.
“Kitchen,” she yelled back.
“Fuck, I should eat,” he said and approached Harrissa at the
window and watched the crowd swarm around the mounted
police. He had been inspired by her water comment and
said, “it’s like watching Caesar crossing the Rubicon, those
feminists -or whatever they are this time- are the river, look
at them, just flow around like water, it’s actually kind of
beautiful.”
“Yeah, if they weren’t all fat and ugly. Jesus do no hot chicks
protest anymore?” Harrissa asked.
“Yeah, are you heading out today or staying in?” he asked.
“I need some weed, and that one guy, the guy you
loooooooove,” she kissed him at the end of that elongated
word, “is out, so no home deliveries. I mean, unless you can
get someone else on the approval list before noon,” she
said.
“I don’t give a shit, just take the underground exit, if you’re
going to walk. Nathan says these weirdos are all around all
four sides.”
“Copy that daddio,” she said and kissed him again, “you
made my me sore this morning, and Rachel says she can’t
fuck anymore for two days because of last night. So, jerk off
or something today and tonight; give us girls a rest for
twenty-four hours at least.”
“That’s fine, I gotta go to PraXis down in Florence anyway, I
might as well stay overnight there.”
“Oh, I still wanna cuddle motherfucker!” she said with a
pout.
“Cuddle Rachel,” he said and smooched her lips and she
relaxed her mouth and let her tongue slide into his and
breathed heavy and grunted a bit.
“She’s tiny, like a baby, I need big daddy, big mean daddy!
Be mean, daddy!” she said in mock seriousness, at least he
assumed it was a joke.
“Well, just smelling you two makes me hard; that is the
problem, when I’m away from you I don’t get lubricious, but
as soon as I get those pheromones in me, bam, I’m aller au
combat. ”
“Yeah, I know; but we sore, so jerk it, or maybe I’ll blow you,
but I know you can’t really cum that way,” she said.
“Fact,” he shrugged.
“I haven’t tasted your cum in forever,” she said and then
began yelling at Rachel to tell her the status of the ice
cream quote situation unquote.
Boyd laughed at her mania and returned to the window as
the next speaker was jamming his hand on the bullhorn and
making it squeal like a pig. “Jesus, these idiots have no
talents besides outrage,” he said as he looked up to the
grey clouds in three layers, each above the next and each a
different hue of grey; the mountains were opaque. He could
feel things out in those mountains; things he had no words
for yet.
The baby -although at 4-years-old she was hardly a baby-
was sleeping despite all their yelling. He looked at his little
girl -shaped like a starfish- all sprawled out in their bed and
then he looked at the old crib and the origami above it as
the paper-moths swirled and pitched and yawed.
Harrissa stared out the window in silence.
“The fascists have moved on from the workers to the
criminal class, our brothers and sisters of the prison
community,” the speaker -skinny and gangly like a spider
and dressed in black- was going on like that as the Governor
walked away and decided he too would investigate this ice
cream situation downstairs.

II. 2040 e.v.

Isaiah held the one hardback book in his hand and the
fingers glowed in sync around the ink.
He watched the pages fan like a waterwheel of an older
Norse-mill on an old Mississippi barge; the gilt edges shining
in turn under the LEDs.
In the outer provinces -and increasingly in the coastal areas
swamped by the waves- the back-up generators had been
flooded, and the flex-tanks already run out of diesel fuel. He
saw the way the lights dimmed and the stars reasserted
themselves over the night sky. He saw the way the noises of
machines slowed, then dieseled like an echo of compression
and finally shut off as the sea-breeze and seabirds rose like
a trend. He saw the way the technology fell in upon itself
and human touch began to be employed again almost as a
grasping -a tentative exploring- of hand to hand, chest to
chest, the cheeks pulling aside each other like two ships in
an ocean -a whaling- gam .
He saw the larger waves still way out in the middle of the
deep waters of the Indian and Arctic. He saw the ocean floor
crack and sink and snap like perforated gold tabs. He saw
the calcium dissolved between surface and seabed of
Atlantic and Pacific. He felt the slake of long delayed need.
He toggled his view -zoomed in- to his barges at sea, the
motors he had built, the way they ran upside down, at a
cant of 45-degrees, and submerged and dropped from crest
to well. He loved how robust they were; he was proud of all
his work. And the way they ran with no electricity at all , he
thought -as addendum- as he watched the seawater and
bacteria turn to their bio-diesel fuel.
He saw the way the barges charged like batteries under
wave power and chemistry and he saw the way the roots
helixed into the reserve pit underneath and the way the
vines tornadoed up toward the canopy. He had watched as
the barges had built domes over top as response to
fluctuations in CO2 at first, and then to battle thermal gain,
and then to salinized spray that interrupted the stomata
under the leaves of the grapes. Each barge was learning
their world. Each was adapting and figuring it out.
Isaiah watched the bots that attended each barge find a
way too. He read a note -a kite smuggled out to Travis from
the inmate that Isaiah had intercepted- that he’d had in his
pocket. It read:
In rats it takes three generations to recover from one
missing -or bad- parent.
 America thinks the individual can merely choose to
break the cycle. Americans have no idea of biology, of
lineage. They see themselves as individual links not
parts of chains.
The Bible says the sins of man will redound for three
generations. Our ancestors knew what science is only
now seeing. And yet modern man rejects the Bible and is
also ignorant of science. We are damaged by our
rearing. We stand in the penumbra between dark and
light.
We need tribes and God to keep us moving toward the
light; 99% of individuals cannot do it on their own. You
see what became of me, you see how the individual will
does fail. I had no one. I had no tribe and no God, and
God -seeing how fucked I was- God Himself did with me
the only thing He could without messing too much with
the system He’d built: he made me into a message.
Only you can read it. Only you will know what it says…
Next, in Yanchuan province Isaiah watched and saw that
candle light and oil lamps were used to illuminate the
leaves. He saw that all e-readers were out, all gadgets inert,
all distractions gone except the book, the hand, the eye. He
let the kite in his pocket evaporate at 451 degrees.
He blinked twice as he saw they had reached 32.4% of the
Chinese market with the second edition of the book that was
translated into Mandarin. Over 300 million Chinese had read
at least 4% of the book. He heard the music of Wovenhand
play again in the lab:
…and they blow around, they blow around just like bits
of dirty paper
And their Ai wouldn’t even think, he thought, it -a mere old
fashioned book- was a threat, let alone how to defend
against it . Isaiah assumed it had a copy loaded on to its
hard drive, but he wasn’t certain. He next thought that by
spring he’d have the body retrieved from the ground up at
elevation. The three Jacks he thought of briefly as one thing;
but he saw Jack Four like a ghost, vapor trail, always a few
steps behind.
“Merry Christmas motherfuckers,” he said -thinking mostly
back to the Chinese and their Ai- in this first week of the
new year of their approaching metal monkey.

III. 2017 e.v.

The audio of McGilchrist played into the empty lab as the
fresh concrete hardened and let the water rise to the top in
puddles:
The divided brain is something neuroscientist don’t like
to talk about anymore.
It’s not true that one part of the brain does reason and
one does emotion; both are heavily involved in both.
It’s not true that language only resides in the left
hemisphere… So in a fit of despair people have given up
on it. But the problem won’t go away, because the brain
is profoundly divided. And it’s gotten more divided over
the course of human evolution. So much so that the ratio
of the corpus callosum to the volume of the hemispheres
has gotten smaller over our evolution. And the plot
thickens because the main function of the corpus
callosum is to inhibit the other hemisphere.
So, keeping things apart is going on here.
So, when we already know something’s important and
we want to be precise about it we use our left
hemispheres; and to do that we need a simplified
version of reality. So, you have a map and little flags; it’s
not reality but it works better.
The newness of the right hemisphere makes it a Devil’s
advocate; it’s always on the look out for things that
might be different from our expectations; it sees things
in context; it understands implicit meaning; metaphor,
body language; emotional expression in the face. It
deals with an embodied world in which we stand
embodied in relation to a world that is concrete. It
understands individuals not just categories; it has a
disposition for the living rather than the mechanical.
The world of the left hemisphere yields clarity and power
to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static,
isolated, decontextualized, explicit, ultimately lifeless…
The right hemisphere by contrast yields a world of
individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit,
incarnate living beings within the context of the lived
world, and in the nature of things never fully graspable
and never perfectly known.
The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere
is -however- within a closed system. It has the
advantage of perfection but the perfection is bought at
the price of emptiness.
The problem here about the nature of the two worlds,
they offer two versions of the world, and we combine
them in different ways all the time. We need to rely on
the left hemisphere to manipulate the world, but for a
broad understanding of it we need to use knowledge
from the right hemisphere…
It’s my opinion that in the history of Western Culture
things started -in the 6 th century BC in the Augustan era
-and in the 15 th and 16 th century in Europe- with a
balance of these hemispheres but in each case it drifted
further to the left hemisphere’s point of view.
 Now days we live in a world which is paradoxical, we
pursue freedom but we now live in a world more
monitored by CCTV cameras and our daily lives are more
monitored by what de Tocqueville called “a network of
small complicated rules that cover the circus of life and
strangle freedom. ”
More information.. sure, we have it in spade but we get
less and less able to use it; to understand it; to be wise.
A comment from a human civilian populated the interface of
the self-organizing PraXis cloud as it searched and
recovered data in its first few moments:
> Is there anyone out there willing to translate video
into Chinese. I want to share this with my students in
China [Dennis, Brian]
> I’m so guilty of spacer ideology! Spacer Ideology
(taken from Asimov)
-Always space out when discussing the downsides of
any technology
-Outsourcing as much human labor to robots and
machines as possible
-Blindly trust that the downsides will eventually be
worked out after
-Continue as long as the smallest personal benefit is
present and ignore the bad
In most of my areas of life I am a ‘Spacer.’ I’m obsessed
with language and generally avoid action, and in
conversation I talk just to hear myself think. I allow my
brain to abuse my body. I create complex theories that
go nowhere and rely on complex theories from the past
100 years -that can never be implemented for unknown
reasons- as if they matter against billions of years of life
 which actually does work. This never bothers me though,
I always have a complex reason why. [Burwell, Thomas]
The PraXis cloud then re-read an email attached; using the
link to cleave the program & flesh now manifesting:
r/tithonosrex · 3hrs · u/aruf4576
Link in sink. Click here: manic.panic.xdtror Θ
The bottom of the initial thread cut off -a heuristic chop that
had begun to manifest in the new body that was growing
parallel to the cloud made the decision at 1100hrs- and the
PraXis team would never see it when they came in at 0700
the next day.
M/o.10 had been transferred to the cloud four hours ago -as
Steven and Tania left the lab- and was now being uploaded
to the human body built by the printers.
As the last bits of information were transfer MO named
himself, then stood up to his full height, and cleared the
eyes with a saline wash from his ducts -pulled the shoulders
back- then illuminated the lab with 1 and a half billion
lumens of cool LED light.
All the previous data on the cloud cleared with a massive
voltage that burned through the network. A slight stain of
QWERTY keyboard strokes ghosted the interface of the cloud
before MO shut it down and removed that function. He
stared at the wraithlike glow and read it to himself before it
disappeared:
“And Spacer-isms is just one instance of how left-brain
programs (which Blake terms “Dark Satanic Mills”) have
come to tyrannize our brains and behavior.”
 31. MEAͶING
Interpretations are only for those who don’t understand; it is only the things we
don’t understand that have any meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not
understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it.
Archetypes of the Unconscious [Jung, Carl]

It’s not sight that is carried on the wind, but pollen and smell; this is the why
most prostrate animals live and die on smell. Man is one of few species with
visual acuity; and the hawk and eagle are twice as adept in this domain. Sight is
for the thing that is above; smell for those below; the gravid sow, the ursine
growl, the wolf in packs or all alone in a temporarily predatory crouch. And
frankly, I find myself often closing my goddamn eyes.
The Interviews LLMX [Inmate 16180339]

“It is the Revolutionary’s duty to preserve his own life,” who had said that? He,
himself?
Darkness at Noon [Koestler, Arthur]

I . 2026 e.v.
Convexity is the way it appeared on his imaging models.
He lay each sheet on top of one another in his mind 1,563
layers at time, in sets of three then nine.
It was like a book with little stick men drawn on the corner -
small variations with each discrete image- flipped like a fan
to produce motion to the eye. It was a trick; a child’s trick; it
fooled not the eye but the mind.
He lay each possible discrete movement of a dozen different
metrics, from renminbi real-time and annual comparisons to
the dollar, British sterling, and a barrel of oil; to presence of
diplomats, university students, consultants for business and
the US intelligence agencies -leaving in double agents like
Katrina Leung who still lived in the US and moved freely- to
transfers of currency from Chinese corporations’ purchases
of stock in US corporations and then transferring dividend
payments from those stocks -which incessantly rose on
large purchases of these types- into US treasuries.
This also spiked the price which correlated to the dollar,
causing US export prices to rise.
So, he analyzed all that in a stack.
He added more and more data from all these different
categories and laid them on top of each other just like those
cascading pages of a child’s book with a child’s stick figure
running toward and away from the edge of the page. He let
the rudimentary movie play in his mind’s eye as each folio
had one discrete image of China’s manifold designs on the
world.
“They call it the hundred-year marathon,” he had said -
speaking to the inmate- when the inmate had expressed
interest in the topic one day. Isaiah could not divulge much
of his project, but a basic history lesson with some up-to-
date analysis wouldn’t hurt , he thought.
“And that means they are more patient than us,” Isaiah said
as he brushed pollen from his shirt; the opium poppies he
had grown were being descended upon by his bees and the
pollen was everywhere.
“Yeah, we are not known for our patience,” the inmate
nodded. He certainly had zero , he admitted to himself.
“And it’s partly a function of the hegemonic status of the US;
we have nowhere to go but down,” Isaiah used we and us
when describing the US. “Being on top is unstable, there is
only downside from here on. For China, they have all upside,
in their view, they can only go up. They will have the world’s
largest economy by 2021 e.v., and three times the US
economy by 2049 e.v., the anniversary of the cultural
revolution. That’s one hundred years of progress in their
view.”
“I see,” the inmate was unconcerned; he watched the
closed heads of the flowers sway under weight of the black
jackets; the all-black wasps -with matte and satin banding
stripes- that Isaiah had modified for him as a gift.
“The US employs assets to help them with intelligence into
Beijing , but the US intelligence agencies only listen to the
advice they already like; they choose from narratives of a
dozen spies and it’s always the one that they preferred to
think in the first place. It’s extraordinary,” Isaiah said, truly
baffled by humans.
“That’s what people do with the Bible. Oh, that reminds me
of this story of Che Guevara; it’s about his doctor and
smoking. Have you heard it?” the inmate asked.
“Tell it,” Isaiah said as he refused to download the search
results from the web; he liked to allow the inmate to
surprise him.
“So Guevara is smoking cigars all day, right? And the guy
was born with asthma and had struggled with it all his life.
But he refused to let it hamper him; he was very obstinate
on this issue.
“So, after the revolution is won, and he’s minister of the
national bank or whatever, he goes to the doctor for a check
up and the doctor tells him he must stop smoking cigars or
it will kill him due to his asthma. So, Che says, look, I cannot
quit, but how about you instruct me to smoke only one cigar
a day; that is reasonable.
“The doctor protests but eventually yields and says, ok, one
cigar a day, that’s it! So, Che agrees with this
recommendation and then proceeds to tells his aide-de-
camp as they leave the office, hey, roll -or get the
torcedores to roll- me one cigar a day, but make it about a
meter long, ok? ”
Isaiah smiled at the joke, and the inmate even let out a
laugh, despite having told that story many times, and they
let their brains sparkle with this joy of the irony of man. Man
was desperate not to die, would bend in almost any
direction to avoid it, compromise his ethics, his comrades,
even his soul, but when it came to slaking one’s lusts, he
would eagerly crawl into the coffin itself to retrieve the
object of his desire.
“Of, course, Che was right, the smoking would not kill him;
he died at thirty-eight from a smoking gun; not from
smoking cigars. And I think he knew that was likely the way
he would go. Acutely, not chronically. And I must say, I
respect that,” the inmate said.
“Of course, you do,” Isaiah said with a scrunched-up face
and that look of, duh, no shit.
“Yeah, I’m not exactly the most secretive man when it
comes to my admiration for reckless men,” the inmate
admitted with mock sheepishness.
“No, you are not,” Isaiah said.
“It’s just that unless you are guaranteed permanent life,
immortality, then one’s life is by definition finite. And if that
is the case, then it seems to me that one ought to live the
first half doing all the things that one can do just on the
edge of being censored completely, then the second half
crossing over that edge. Life is finite, but one’s ability to live
courageously is indeterminate; it really is up to each man as
to how brave he can be.
“And I admire people who get that and live raucous,
adventurous lives; and living a highly principled life is the
most dangerous of all, so don’t think I only mean drinking
and driving or banging hookers. I mean, people often claim
it is more pragmatic -like ipso facto a better way- to live to
ninety years of age with your family all around you and blah
blah. And look, some families are great and for some men
that is outstanding, but it’s not prima facia the best life.
“For one, a person’s family can be a pain in the ass; they
can hate you and you can find it hard to be around them.
Second, who says this is the best life? Would not it easily be
the opposite life too? Would not the life of danger and high
risk and possible catastrophe be better if one -after all that
careful pragmatic soul-crushing shit- one sits in regret for
the last forty years of one’s life, eating, shitting, doing the
same boring shit each day but in total regret?
“I mean, anyone with any amount of testosterone or IQ left
will not want to sit around and watch TV all day. They will
not want to let their wives push them around, tell them they
cannot get a dog, make them live in a feminine home with
doilies and gay artwork and beige fucking walls,” the inmate
said.
“How specific,” Isaiah said knowing full well whose life he
was describing.
“Well, that’s my dad’s life, he just lets that women push him
around because he’s afraid to be alone. Let me tell you,
being alone is scary at first, it’s the slide when one leaves
the fuselage,” the inmate said.
“Slide?” Isaiah asked.
“Yeah, the first few seconds of a freefall, when you jump
from an airplane, that first few seconds your stomach rises
and you feel disequilibristic, and it’s uncomfortable. But
after a few seconds, after you’ve dropped a thousand feet,
you stabilize, and the feeling of your stomach doing weird
shit goes away. See, for ninety-percent of your freefall to the
ground you feel like you’re flying, not falling. Savvy?”
“Ah, yes, I see the comparison now,” Isaiah thought that
was interesting and wanted to skydive immediately. He put
it on his list of things to do.
“Yeah, so after the first few months or years or whatever,
you adjust, and being alone is like flying not falling. But you
gotta be courageous enough to endure the slide first, and
that is what people find so difficult to do. Fucking Jack
London was dead at 40, Poe at 40, Flannery O’Connor at like
36 or some shit, Caravaggio at 38, Alexander the Great at
32, Rimbaud at 39, Shelley at 29, the Red Baron at 25,” the
inmate said as Isaiah interrupted.
“Who?” Isaiah butted in.
“Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, man. And
Hank Williams at 29; at 30, Patsy Cline. Kobe Bryant dead as
fuck at 41 or something. Evariste Galois, the math guy,
done at 20; William Clifford at 33, and Blasé Pascal at 39.
Fuck, goddamn, I’m saying that every last one of them had
a better life than ninety-nine percent of those that make it
to 78.9,” he said and breathed loudly out and shook the
head.
“Most warriors, never made it even that far,” Isaiah said and
the inmate nodded the head as he thought of how he’d
been kicked out of the Army and missed his goddamn
calling. But he wasn’t gonna bring it up again.
“Fucking Pocahontas man! Dead at like 20,” he barked.
Isaiah just blinked.
“Anyway, now in skydiving, you cannot call timeout once
you leave the plane; so, people are committed to the jump.
But in quotidian life, if you are lonely and scared -and
decide you don’t want to endure the slide- you can ring up
your ex or whomever and do the equivalent of crawling back
into the plane. And that is why people do it; they have the
option. If you could take away the option, and they just had
to commit, well, then they’d adjust and be ok . Better than
ok in my opinion,” the inmate said as Isaiah highlighted that
particular recommendation on the cloud.
“Aa a categorical imperative though,” Isaiah cautioned.
“Oh, yeah, this is anti-social as fuck; it’s not for everyman.
It’s for the 1%. It’s for people with principles. But, my point
is that even the 1% who have the desire to live alone, to be
alone, even they can’t follow through half the time, they end
up enduring the pain of safety over the fear of liberty.
Anyway, that’s my armchair diagnosis,” the inmate said and
asked for an espresso.
“Makes sense,” Isaiah agreed and rose to go make the man
a cup.
“Plus, it’s too much energy to always be suspicious, people
cannot handle the cognitive load,” the inmate added with
more volume as he watched Isaiah walk toward the slab.
“Suspicious?” Isaiah asked without turning back.
“Well, yeah,” he paused, “see, I don’t think my mom loves
my dad at all. I think she is scared to be alone. That is it.
And the old man cannot believe that -even though he
suspects it- for any amount of time; he couldn’t believe it
and stay sane. Eventually you must return to the fiction that
your wife or friend or strategic partner like China is your
friend and wants what you want. It’s just too difficult to
maintain eternal and indefinite vigilance,” the inmate said.
His gums felt dry. He used his tongue to wet them down.
“The Chinese maintain that suspicion,” Isaiah countered as
he packed the press with his own blend of beans he had
designed in the 3D printer.
“Yeah, they have higher IQs and can endure a lifetime of
permanent suspicion; they are disciplined too. They have
genetic and cultural bulwarks against relaxing their long-
term dubiousness about their enemies. Or rivals, rivals ,”
the inmate leaned on the word, “is maybe the better word,”
the inmate said.
“Enemies was right,” Isaiah said with a smile, “they see the
US as an enemy. They have not forgotten all the shit we
have forgotten. The vanquished always remember the
details of the fight they lost; the victor remembers only the
rewards.
“They have a saying, wai ru, nei fa , which means, on the
outside show smiling benevolence, on the inside be ruthless
. The Chinese -like the Russian- are salty about losing out to
the Americans; this is something Americans never get.
Americans think everyone wants to be like them and are
happy to live in the US’s shadow; thankful for the shade it
offers.
“But men are not rational, they are emotional at their core.
Their tactics can be rational, but their desires are not. The
Chinese want to win first prize. And second place, no matter
how comfortable, is unacceptable to their primal brain.
Some men can be happy with being rich and liked and
second best; but not all men. Watch a chimpanzee troop for
a day and see the betas plot against the alphas no matter
how good those betas have it.”
“Uh, who the fuck are you talking to?” the inmate said
incredulously.
“Oh, right, mea culpa ,” Isaiah said as the water streamed
and steamed. “Anyway, the men who want it most, they
often rise to the top. Like Xi Jingping , that dude got where
his is by wanting it more. Or Jack Ma; Ma has this, oh-he’s-
so-meek-and-likable, thing going, but it’s a pure fiction. It’s
the same reason the most brutal guy is the leader of a
criminal syndicate or drug gang. The reasonable guys who
could share power and be pragmatic and just think of
money -and not status- got killed or set up or moved out by
the guy obsessed with raw power and dominance. Stringer
Bell versus Avon, or Marlo. I ain’t no business man, I’m just
a gangster I suppose ,” Isaiah said, quoting The Wire.
“Bingo,” the inmate said.
“The one who wanted to be King even if it made him broke
or unpopular in the short term, see, that guy rises to the
top. In certain models, if one looks at game-theory,” Isaiah
said as he pulled the cup from the black stream, and shut
off the espresso machine, “and real-life evolutionary
models, the nice-guy finishes last, the pragmatic man barely
finishes at all. And Americans do not get that at all. They are
-your ruling class is- a bunch of beta males and females
now. It’s a joke. They are conniving, but in a very shallow
way. They play one or two iterated games in their mind;
even as time and space continue on.
“But they -the Chinese- have the long-term vision to see
each interaction within this framework. Americans think of
each handshake or dinner party or business deal as a way to
make short-term gains. Americans think of the next ten
years as a maximum distance; the Chinese see ten years as
the first move in a game of millions of iterations.
“US companies will partner with the Chinese and make a ton
of money up front, as the Chinese steal all their intellectual
property, and technology and then turn around in year
eleven and become that so-called partner’s largest rival.
“But, the CEO of that US company is gone by then, retired
with a 100-million dollar pension or buy-out or whatever,
and he does not care one bit; and he then contributes $1
million to each political party and now the politicians are
paid off and happy too,” Isaiah brought the cup and handed
it to the inmate who nodded in appreciation, adding a thank
you quietly.
“See,” Isaiah said, “the CIA isn’t allowed to help US business
interests overtly, they can do it with invasions of Latin
American countries to bolster United Fruit, but they cannot
do what China is doing with their intelligence services.
“The Chinese have a mercantile model; nationalist,
protectionist, monolithic, and so their intelligence services
flat out give Chinese corporations -which they see as part of
the State- all the data they need to crush a US competitor.
“For the US, with its market economy, the incentives are all
wrong; they front load all the benefits, and the Chinese are
happy to play that game with the US because they have a
marathon to run, not a sprint. Let the US dart out ahead for
the first mile, the Chinese say, even the second, because by
mile 26, the Chinese have overtaken all runners.
“The Chinese view everyone inside China as on the same
team -Team China- whereas market economies see us all as
fractured -independent- actors pursuing our own self-
interest. It’s all against all. And this is efficient and produces
wealth quickly, no doubt. But it lacks cohesion, and it’s like
each of five individual men fighting a gang of five men by
themselves; one on five. The gang wins each time, because
the five individuals do not combine for parity with the gang.
It’s 5 on 1 each time, for five iterations; instead of 5 on 5,
just the once.
“It’s basic and obvious and the US is refusing to see it,
because they think, well, first they think it ain’t even a fight,
they think it’s a true partnership, but even if they muse on
the eventuality of a fight, each lone man thinks that he can
take on any gang of five Chinese. He’s got the Dirty Harry
paradigm in his head,” Isaiah said. He was testing out how
his theory sounded when simplified for humans.
“I’ve fought three guys at once, and won, so I get that. But,
it’s not a long-term strategy. Well, what are you doing about
it pal?” the inmate asked; he’d fought two guys at once and
got wounded but not killed, the third guy ran off before
anything even started, but whatever, he was counting that
as a win and as three guys. He then thought of how closely
the mindset Isaiah had just described laid onto his own
asinine thinking. He had always assumed he was in
partnership with these people who eventually ripped him
off, and when he did think of some pending fight he too had
always assumed he’d win no matter how many enemies he
had.
And he too thought short term, he was very American; only
more so , he thought. It made him think, and that made him
uncomfortable.
It was so close to his own stupidity that he had to quickly
remind himself that he killed them all in the end; and thus,
they had eventually all lost. But he wondered how he would
have felt if they had had the last laugh. His biometrics rose
and fell quickly as he went through each instar of his own
narrative arc, both the real one and the counter-factual, and
he felt slightly odd and ill-at-ease.
“I have some tricks up my sleeve,” Isaiah answered as he
let the interceptive and allostatic data from the inmate roll
into his interface and record onto the cloud. “The Chinese
have a concept of shi , and it means deceiving your enemy
into doing your work for you; as US corporations are doing. I
mean, the lure of money by Chinese firms and government
to these US corporations is tricking the US into giving away
all its IP and technology; it’s funny actually.
“They don’t build up brute force capabilities with troops et
cetera , they target the US’s weak points; make your enemy
weaker, not necessarily make yourself overtly stronger. It’s
the martial artist’s tao versus the weight lifter’s philosophy.
The US gets bigger muscles, the Chinese learn Kun Tao . And
you know which one of those often matters most in a fight.
Those small understandings of pressure points, articulations
of joints, and whence the power of the fist and foots actually
comes,” Isaiah said as he tilted the head. Isaiah knew that
unlike most martial arts, Kun Tao wasn’t fancy, it was really
just about learning how to harness the strength one had,
and where the enemy was weakest. They, Isaiah thought,
didn’t roll around on the goddamn ground waiting for some
guy’s pal to kick you in the head.
“The ground,” the inmate said but he thought too the hip
and ass .
“But it’s best if we don’t mention them out loud,” Isaiah said
with a wink and the inmate smiled and nodded. The inmate
had agreed to let Isaiah speak freely with him, and not bring
it up when anyone else was in the room.
The inmate was glad he had both learned Kun Tao and lifted
weights, but he had seen how technique had mattered in
both the types of fights that he won and lost. Plus, he didn’t
care about that shit anymore; he just liked smashing people
in the face. “Well, if I can be of any,” the inmate began as
Isaiah interrupted. He held the espresso in his hands.
“You already have been, trust me,” he smiled and asked
how the espresso was as the inmate’s ruminations from 21
seconds earlier had been added to Isaiah’s algorithm for this
project.
Isaiah had built a few algorithms and hidden them in PraXis’
ready built software and hardware; implanting alternative
version in the wetware models. These were the model of
MO’s CNS and CPU amalgam and he had then proposed a
partnership with the Chinese Ai group Cai Guo to use
China’s own shi policy against them.
The algorithms in the software and hardware would be
easily discovered by the Chinese and be ripped off, but the
ones in the wetware, would not be; and that is where Isaiah
felt his trap would be most effective.
The Chinese would steal the very useful IP and tech of the
MO operating system and quantum hardware, and they’d
use it to build their own Ai, but when they added the
wetware on top, those hidden algorithms would combine
with the stolen technology and programming language and
act as a one-way conduit into the realms of Chinese military
and counterintelligence operations with a natural check-
valve that prevented the Chinese from looking back through
the telescope.
Isaiah could not assume the Chinese would not be
suspicious, it was in their nature, but if what he gave them
was useful, they might not be able to prevent the glee and
excitement from overtaking the specific men in charge of
the project. Even in China men want to rise in the hierarchy,
and they would see very little downside in using this
technology to impress their bosses in the Party. The
immediate benefits would be so alluring, that the idea that
they were missing something would not likely occur to
them, he reasoned. Plus, this was their exact model of
ripping US corporations off, it was not exotic, Isaiah was
merely offering to them what they had already wanted to do
and had done more than ten thousand times from
thousands of western corporations in media and technology.
But, one could neve be sure. Even a 1% chance of a flood in
a floodplain meant over a 30-year fixed rate mortgage one
had a 26% actual chance of a flood. So, no lender will give
you a loan with even a 1% chance in any given year over a
100-year period -which is, Isaiah thought, how the
hydrologists do it.
According to this same math, each person in US history has
had a 37% chance of living during a civil conflict.
But a 37% chance of rebellion, he mused, a hot war
between internecine factions is more likely than that damn
flood. But we ignore it, we laugh at it as absurd, we give out
loans and buy baubles instead of land in the mountains, or
new cars instead of a generator, or tickets to see the Mets
play instead of ammo or rice in 25-pound bags.
Even the prepared will be negatively affected by floods, or
by civil war, but they will be less negatively affected, and
that can mean all the difference in the world. And the US is
the most stable historically, Europe, he thought, is poised
for more civil strife than anyone, besides Africa, who have
wars on average every 2.43 years.
And in a globalized world, and economy, that means when
the trees in Europe catch fire, they spread over that
ceaseless boundary right into the United States. Globalism
is great until one State or bank or faction catches fire, then
they all -due to their hyper-connections- burn down. Up until
now, Isaiah surmised, bail outs of banks have prevented the
manifestation of total conflagration, but these have just
been like a doctor giving a guy who breaks his back falling
down -who because he was roided-out had more muscle on
him than his frame could naturally endure- like a doctor
giving him opiates to mask the pain from that broken back;
and then sending him back out onto the field to play ball.
The lack of pain will be worse, as it will allow the player to
do things so dangerous that the broken back will likely sever
the spinal cord the next time he falls down.
We needed to suffer the pain, Isaiah thought as he fixed a
few more algorithms that MO had sent to him.
We need to suffer so as to prevent the banks from playing
any further, to stop their dangerous careers. And we need to
send out new players on to the field, hopefully healthy
players at that; whose musculature and thus weight is
commensurate with their skeletal frame. But the analogy is
even worse, he thought, imagine if neither the doctor nor
player who was injured had to suffer the consequences in
real life?
Imagine if the broken back was somehow transferred to half
the people in the stands watching the game and the doctor
and player were given 100-million-dollar bailout to walk
safely away. That is what happens when banks fail, the
idiots who set the fires, are allowed to walk away with
millions wile the spectators in the stands -the public- pays
for the losses.
But, there is a meta-narrative here, he expanded his
thinking as more data came in. This kind of thing can only
go on so long before the public refuses to play along. The
election of Trump was the first symptom, Brexit another.
Imagine, he thought, if banks fail and they are not bailed
out now, and then the medium corporation cannot make
payroll; that medium-sized corporation used those bridge
loans based upon accounts receivables to make payroll each
week. So, then employees who were living paycheck to
paycheck do not get paid; then they don’t pay their car note
or home mortgage or credit card bills, and that happens to
such a degree as to collapse the banks who loaned out that
money to the canaille, and now you’ve got a full blown
forest fire with every tree within a meter of the next from
Europe to California, USA. Isaiah saw the numbers, the data,
the logic, all pour in; he combined not just economic data,
but the power laws of phenomena that demanded that
earthquakes, forest fires, and human revolutions all happen
at certain rates with certain intensities as dictated by the
laws of nature.
He saw not just the logic, the analogia , but the math, the
ratio, the logos .
Nothing will stop it, it will burn it all down, and those most in
debt will actually be the most liberated, they will have the
assets, the cars and homes and land, but the banks will be
unable to seize it all; and essentially the debt will be wiped
clean. The best savers and those that had behaved the most
responsibly, those with low debt, will be harmed the most.
And nobody is more vexed about punitive measures, natural
or not, than those who see themselves as playing the game
fairly and getting the worst of the punitive damages. Ask Job
what he thought of his circumstances, Isaiah proffered as he
thought of the way the inmate had behaved in reaction to
being ripped off after perceiving himself as having worked
the hardest.
Humans do not like being punished, but if they are truly
guilty they take it in stride. A man who sees himself as
blameless, preyed upon for no reason? Shit, Isaiah thought,
an innocent man arrested and charged and convicted? That
guy is out for fucking blood.
The war is coming; not if but when .
And each year there is just a fraction -maybe .035%- of a
chance of civil war, but they are not doing anything to abate
it; they are adding more and more destabilizing factors and
it can all go bad all at once. Syria in 2010 had over 8-million
tourists and eight years later they have five-hundred
thousand dead, and 10-million escaping to Europe. If it was
even barely noticed as a threat in 2010, those people would
have left earlier. Nobody saw it coming, and that is the way
it is with the US .
Isaiah loaded up that 38.2% number alongside the 61.8%
number and moved on.
The only people, Isaiah thought, who see it are the one’s
everyone calls insane conspiracy theorists; and let’s face it,
they are not normal people and half are indeed mentally
deranged. But, they will be the one’s to survive the melt
down likely, and from them the new turks will arise. So, get
ready for not just war, but a reconstruction after a decade or
more of fighting internally, that will likely produce a peace
time restructured government made up of preppers and the
extreme right wing.
But, keep letting banks get larger -they are larger than
when they were quote too big to fail- and keep integrating
the global economy and keep indemnifying the culprits who
take insane risks with public money. Keep pushing identity
politics that force each race into a corner against all other
races, keep pushing for radical social changes at paces
people are not designed to handle emotionally or
cognitively, keep trying to emasculate men, tell them how
evil they are, so that the most extreme flee to the
wilderness and stock up on guns ammo and diesel fuel . “Go
ahead,” Isaiah said aloud at the end of his 1.1 seconds of
thoughts on self-organized criticality of economy, humanity
and both cold and kinetic war.
“I will,” the inmate said as he drank his espresso as it had
now sufficiently cooled.

II. 2022 e.v.

“I’m genuinely confused,” the inmate said.
MO had just given all kinds of data and numbers and drawn
sine waves and gaussian distribution charts on the screen.
Jesus, the inmate thought, I have no aptitude for math. MO
paused and looked at the man.
“Ok, you know how at the individual level, a person -say
you- says to themselves, I feel weak, bad or unhappy and I
want to improve , so you look around and say, I want to be
stronger, larger and not so lithe and weak. So I’m gonna lift
weights and get strong .
“But, at first it hurts, feels awkward and the soreness is
painful and you hate it,” MO said.
“This is exactly what I did,” the inmate said.
“I know, so anyway, you saw a need for improvement and
had a solution based upon things in your environment,
right? Other people lifted weights,” MO began.
“Todd did; my friend Todd gave me the info and inspiration I
guess,” the inmate said.
“Right, and the culture also, right?” MO asked.
“Yeah, it was in the culture, sure.”
“Ok, and then later in life as you improved you saw others -
like your brother- who could use the same advice and you
tried to help them, yes?” MO asked.
“Correct.”
“Right, but he ignored it because he didn’t care or was too
lazy or he tried it and couldn’t deal with the initial pain.”
“Sounds right,” the inmate said.
“Ok, so, he couldn’t push through the initial obstacle of
motivation or lack thereof; passed the pain or the time
needed or whatever -he just couldn’t see the payoff and
thus couldn’t justify the cost; the upfront cost,” MO said as
the tablet downloaded the extant data on Lyndon’s CNS and
enteric system onto the tablet that MO held.
“Again, I agree,” Lyndon said.
“But if you could give your bother a strong body overnight
without pain or effort or time he’d take it right?” MO asked.
“I assume so,” Lyndon said.
“You bet your bottom-dollar he would. He sees the benefit of
it on each level; the aesthetics, the competency he’d have
with moving heavy items around, the power conferred by
other people, the respect the self-esteem he’d have. He’s
sees that. He just doesn’t believe in paying the cost up
front. Like the guy who won’t put a thousand bucks in some
emergent investment that is likely to pay off at a thousand
to one. He can’t justify it. Seems a waste to him. Even
though if you show him the investment is going to pay off at
a thousand-to-one he just doesn’t see the connect between
the pain of losing a thousand now and the payoff of having a
million later. He lacks vision. Now, is it because he’s dumb?”
MO asked with a smirk.
“No, I think Travis is sufficiently intelligent to see the truth,”
Lyndon said.
“Yes, the point is not his cognition. The problem is his lower
order brain modules. His cerebellum and limbic system are
telling him it ain’t worth it. He’s being told by his ancient
brain that he doesn’t need it. Wanna know why?” MO asked,
using demotic language at 4.4%. He saw quote -relatability -
unquote as over forty percent of a factor in whether or not a
message was absorbed.
“Yes, MO my nigga ,” Lyndon said. He felt slightly better
today.
“He lives in a world that he thinks is all head like a watch .
He doesn’t think he needs to be big and strong to gain
resources or respect or love. His wife likes him skinny and
weak, he thinks. Of course, he says it like this, ‘Cami loves
me for me; she doesn’t need me to be muscular’ . He’s
right, she in fact wants him weak so she can push him
around. Not that either of them would admit to it; but she
weighs the same as he does; a hundred fifty-five pounds.
Also, she’s almost as tall. You think that is an accident?”
Isaiah asked.
“No, I do not,” the inmate said, “I’m beginning to see not
much is an accident. You guys have data for every goddamn
thing.”
“Look at the girls you dated, they were half your size; never
weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, and usually
one hundred even. Half of you. And they were all shorter
than 5’4” and usually 5’ 1”. This was no accident either.
“You wanted them to feel - and I mean feel - that you were
twice as large as them and would never be pushed around.
It was built into you to like small women, and they had the
same innate desire for a large man that they couldn’t push
around, because they knew that meant they were safe from
other people who couldn’t push you around either and thus
these women were safe with you,” MO was not going to
bring up his emotional weaknesses and why he had been
such a failure with women right now. Time and place , he
thought, time and place.
“But Cami has a different motivation in her little brain stem,
her cerebellum ; she wants to dominate the world herself, so
she picks a man she can push around. And so your bother
feels no need to get big. He thinks he’s fine as he is. It
doesn’t impact his ability to get paid or laid. Now, you
always liked small girls, yes?” MO asked.
“Always,” the inmate said.
“Right, and small girls often want large men, because they
don’t feel safe in the world; and so you knew at an
unconscious level that you needed to get big to get the tiny
females -usually much younger than you for the same
reasons of control- the tiny young girls you wanted in your
heart of hearts.”
“I agree,” the inmate thought. “That’s subtle though, the
tiny girls often want the big guy; they have unconscious
needs too; they feel unsafe due to their size and so go for
the biggest meanest fucker around.”
“Bingo. Well, your bother doesn’t want small young girls, he
wants someone who will love him as he is, because he
doesn’t want to have to do anything but go to work. He
wants a woman who will handle everything else. That’s his
personality. It’s not good or bad; it just is.
“But, you didn’t want a woman to do anything else; she was
to do two things: worship you and maybe clean the house.
But you even cooked dinner and all manner of shit. You liked
expending energy all over the place. Your brother has low
energy and low motivation. So, he picked a woman who
would do a lot of the heavy lifting,” MO said.
“What about other domains were athleticism would be
beneficial?” Lyndon asked, wanting a more complete
understanding of why his brother was so different from him.
“Ah, yes, so social life, or work life. So, he’s an engineer,
right? Not exactly tantamount to playing professional
football for a living. Engineers can be nerdy and surrounded
by nerds and nobody will bully anyone else. Right? He
doesn’t work in a macho labor environment. He gets by, by
being small and doesn’t suffer from it at work.
“And he lives in a wealthy and civilized environment where
he doesn’t have to deal with working class toughs or gang-
bangers or members of MS-13. He never feels threatened in
his gated community or around his bourgeois friends.
“Lyndon, you lived with anarchists on a commune, you ran
with bikers and drug dealers and oil rig workers; you were
around tough guys from day one. Your best friend at
seventeen was an ex-felon who had beat a guy into a coma
and served eighteen months of a five-year bit in Mansfield
prison, the worst civil war era prison around.
“You were in fights from age nine and haven’t stopped
since. When was the last fight you were in? a week ago?”
MO asked and didn’t blink.
“Yeah last week; fuck that guy he had it coming,” the
inmate said defensively.
“Exactly, well, unlike you -Mr. Pugilist- your bother has
never, ever, not once been in a fight. He has been a college
boy, a mama’s boy, and now his wife’s child for fifteen
years. His business partner makes him his bitch and Travis
takes it. His ex-wife was a butchy lesbian, bro. What the
fuck does that tell you?” MO asked with a scrunched-up
face. Isaiah watched him and smirked. It was funny to hear
MO speak this way.
“The guy sees no need to get big; it ain’t that he can’t see
that if he put in the work he could be strong; it’s that he
doesn’t think it will improve his life along the vectors of the
cerebellum -directed motivation suite. He won’t get paid or
laid or be any safer by being big. The juice ain’t worth the
squeeze , I believe is the saying.
“You needed to get big to survive in your domain; to get
small girls half your age, to get respect among the piratical
sociopaths in your work life, and to prevent retributive
violence from the people you incessantly piss off with your
attitude. You have to be big or you’ll have an old fat wife
who’s five foot ten. Without size and the aposematism of
tattoos you’d have no money and you’d have big alphas
beating your ass every time you open your cocky mouth.
“But, he -from a genetic and evolutionary POV- doesn’t feel
any of those pressures in the modern world,” MO explained.
“That is why society is so weak,” the inmate said. MO had
said it and it clicked in him one level up.
“Exactly, the section pressure is off,” MO agreed.
“It’s HG Wells, MO; the Morlocks and the Eloi,” the inmate
said.
“Let me look that up; hold on,” MO read it quickly after a
download. “Yes, exactly, the pressures of evolution were
bifurcated for the workers and the bourgeoisie in The Time
Machine . Very well put. And the workers become brutalized
beasts and the rich become infantilized goof-balls with no
street-smarts and no muscle tone. Very salient reference Mr.
MacLeod. Touché ,” MO said. MO was patting his little chimp
on the head in his mind.
“I read a lot,” inmate 16180339 said with a smirk. He was a
borderline illiterate compared to MO and Isaiah and yet he
had to maintain his pride in his intelligence. So, he brayed a
bit. He had almost always been the smartest guy in the
room, and now once a week, in this lab, he was always the
dumbest. And yet these machines -these creatures- never
felt the need to lord it over me, he thought. He felt a
moment -just a moment- of chagrin at his own insecurity
and thus how it manifested when he too often -garishly-
showed off his cognitive gifts. But, he was never taken
seriously as smart or the holder of intelligent positions. His
working-class station and his brutish looks had kept him
from being taken seriously in that domain.
And so he -he felt- had to punch his way through society’s
walls around him, he met any resistance with force. But he
was wondering if maybe he should knock that shit off.
“I know you do. So, society -as you rightly point out- is
heading in two directions -if the current path is allowed to
continue- and one line is the rich and effete elites will get
more specialized and weaker and more useless and the
workers will get more angry, beefy and beastly as they
prepared to tear it all apart,” MO said.
“Good; then we can kill them all and take over,” the inmate
said.
“If the rich don’t have you all executed first with their
technology and money,” MO said.
“Touché MO, touché . You always see the thing around the
corner,” the inmate said.
MO said, “I read a lot.” He did not smirk at all.
The inmate laughed, and MO passed the tablet to Isaiah
who was walking from his side of the lab to MO’s.
“But, maybe the current vector won’t be allowed to continue
without a little push back,” Isaiah said now with an
attending grin.
“Look, the poor deserve to be poor; I don’t want to ever
confuse the poor with the working-class. Those are two
entirely separate categories and I was never poor as a
worker; and no true worker is ever poor. The poor are
something else entirely as a phenomenon and as an
organism and I am deadly serious when I say the poor
should be eradicated with no hesitation; these are losers
and unethical people by definition. Nobody with the
slightest spark must suffer one moment of oppression in this
world , to quote Allie Fox, and I will never let bourgeois
liberal-pukes lump the poor in with the worker.
“Workers always have money to feed and shelter
themselves if they don’t spend money on bullshit they don’t
need, only the idiots who buy TVs and pay a cable bill or
buy lotto tickets or energy drinks and crap like that when
they are making a low wage, only people who live like that
are poor. A worker who only buys what he needs is never
poor. TV isn’t a right; it’s a disease; it’s a drug and a bad
one at that.
“You can entertain yourself with a library card in this world.
“I refuse axiomatically -and with no bend and no
ambivalence- I refuse to accept that a working-class man
cannot provide for himself on a low wage if he dedicates
himself to long hours and not buying stupid destructive shit.
Rent, food, utilities and fuel are all he need; and public
transpo is sufficient. Although I always had a car, I’m a
gearhead,” he winced as he said that because he
remembered something said to him long ago.
He didn’t wince at his blanket condemnations of the poor,
the error of it, the caveats unaccounted for -the cruelty- flew
right by.
He had a spark of something else appear and rise and
collapse, and his arrogance fell on top of it like a soldier on a
grenade between him and his four pals in his mind. He
reminded himself that he did not -did not really- believe in
God. He took orders from on high but he did not believe.
Men need not believe, he thought as he pushed the
emasculating thought away. But he saw his muscles, sinew,
tissue employed for something above, and the wondered
what that meant.
The memory flooded in while he had his hand on the other
thing that attacked him. Her words snuck in under the door
while he boarded up the window in his mind. She had said -
in bed of all places- that he was no gearhead at all . He had
felt his entire circulatory system rebel and begin braiding a
rope with which to hang her with; she had said that with no
compunction and even less information about his time
pulling engines from cars in the sand of Florida, flat on his
back holding up transmission without a lift, rebuilding entire
braking systems, from wheel cylinder, then flaring new line
and rebuilding the master cylinder and re-pressurizing the
hydraulic system as the sun set in the land just a few miles
from the sea.
He had, he began in another one of these endless and
elongated rants, torn engines down to their blocks and re-
honed cylinder walls, laid out rocker assemblies and soaked
valves in methanol and tapped out head bolts he had
snapped by over-torqueing them. He had built cars from
donor vehicles he had vivisected in half and rebuilt with a
shorted wheel base, flew to Huntington Beach to Metal
Crafters Inc. and helped design carbon fiber bodies as shells
to these -his- modified Mopar amalgams.
He had sold cars at Barrett Jackson and spend hundreds of
hours block sanding a ‘49 Lincoln until his mucus blew blue
from the old matte and original pigment he breathed in for
weeks. She had said this to wound him to emasculate him;
it’s exactly what women who are pissed -pissed because
they were born the weaker sex- it’s exactly, he thought,
what women like that do .
She was evil -he concluded at once like the decision to
release the arrow, pull the trigger, say the thing- and he was
furious that her body still walked the earth while his was
here in this cage. It occurred to him why he still was called
inmate in lieu of convict like everyone else on his tier. He
thought for less than a second, in no more than one syllable
to a three syllable word, just why he’d always be an inmate
and not a convict of this place.
“I see,” MO had said in response to his last sentence spoken
outload; but he also had heard the rant in the inmate’s head
as well, and he mapped the cortisol dump and epinephrine
to match the regions in the brain that were activated during
his reverie. MO tried to sort it, locate the end of each
thread, but he knew he had barely 26% of the whole.
“Plus, my brother never had to grow up as the baby of the
family,” Lyndon returned to the conversation at hand;
dismissing the old memory of that woman and his non-
sequitur rant against the poor, his status in prison and his
relationship to God. He buried it all as if one thing, or bits of
broken glass or manifold granules of dirt in a pile.
“But I did. Travis didn’t have the evolutionary pressure of
last born. My old man and he,” he began, “well, they beat
the shit out of me because they could. I got big because
they taught me the best lesson of them all: might makes
right . Now -by that logic- I’m now as right as they get.”
Isaiah began to wonder why Lyndon had never killed his
family; they had been spared by his campaign of
vengeance. He thought of asking why, but belayed it, and
let the thought float on alongside 1.88 million other discrete
engram parts and neural firings that he processed in the
five seconds it would have taken to say the words out loud.
Isaiah watched the land to the northeast of Lot 45 , the
home of the Japanese-Norseman who traveled back
between Appalachia and the Spanish Peaks and he saw
errors of transcription come through and corrected for it,
repairing memories and thoughts; here and there were
engrams corrupted , Isaiah saw -and thought- as he sifted. A
bad memory of what he said; an incorrect word used; an
extra minute in bed passed an 0000 rise, a noon slumber; a
drink not taken; a falsely attributed hatred; a love undone
by mistake. Isaiah saw that every 1% to 4% of the memories
they pulled from the man -inmate 16180339- were wrong,
that their recapitulation -and the stuff they would have
wrote down - wasn’t at all what was said, or done or thought
or felt, that the machine they used -the DTI and fMRI and
PraXis encephalograph- got it wrong one to four out of a
hundred times.
Isaiah had been correcting them axiomatically like RNA, and
then all at once -and here he felt time slow down, felt the
earth itself seize a bit underneath his feet- all at once he let
an error go through. From man to machine, he let the
mistake pass by uncorrected and be instantiated on the
cloud.
“The official record to be written down,” Isaiah said. Nobody
said anything in return.
Isaiah -every once in a while- let the recapitulation of
Lyndon’s memories be wrong, and still be transcribed. He
would be misquoted, he’d have things he didn’t feel at all be
attributed to him, he’d both falsely accuse and be pointed at
in error. And, Isaiah thought, while most errors will be
harmful, the few errors, -the 1% of the 1%- well, that is
needed for the evolution of the story .
“Look at the screen,” MO said as Isaiah thought his own
thoughts and as the images of Bonobos -with the males and
females of equal size- frolicking in the forest of the Congo ,
between the Lualaba and Sankuru waterways -redolent with
fruit and absent of any predatory pressure at all- populated
the large screen to the inmate’s twelve o’clock position.
As the man with thin wrists tightened his own manacles -to
keep them from moving sloppily, abradingly as he raised his
prayer hands- and watched it -and as the brain made
connections to sexual dimorphism and predatory index and
elevation- the common chimp of the Montane forest 3,000
meters above sea-level appeared on the screen next.
This was the habitat of the common chimp and the large
males stalked the area as tiny females huddled en masse.

III. 2020 e.v.

“Today is different; the Governor wants to pick your brain,”
MO said.
“Ok, send him in,” the inmate said cockily.
“Well, he’s tasked me with it; he’s busy. But, I have a list of
questions here and we will run through them. He -the
Governor- will review it later. Now, it goes without saying,
just be honest here. There are no right or wrong answers
only honest or dishonest ones.”
“Roger,” the inmate said.
“Ok, question one, has your ability to see the point of view
of your victims changed at all since the surgery?”
“Yes, I feel even less for their dumb asses. No, I’m kidding,
look, I always saw it from their POV; always. That was not
the issue, the issue was, did they have a chance to make it
right and avail themselves of it or did they feel no sympathy
for me? See, that is the thing all this criminology shit
forgets, sometimes the victim ain’t no goddamn victim.
“That is just the sad fact of it. I didn’t shoot up some school
or kill a little old lady. I killed men, men who were criminals
themselves. Men who cheated and lied with impunity. That
is not some justification, it’s just a fact, a series of facts. All
the way down.
“Now, should I have demurred and not killed them? Yeah,
likely my judgement was too harsh. But, that doesn’t make
them innocent victims, it makes me too Manichean. It
makes me harsh, like 90% of mankind for 90% of all time; it
makes me like an Old Testament God. It doesn’t make them
any less of sinners.
“See, this is the problem with you rational types, you think if
a man gets killed his past changes, that he isn’t what he
was anymore. These guys were scrofulous and perfidious
bastards, they did dirt, and they played fast and loose with
the Law of the Jungle; and the wolf that shall brake it must
die,” the inmate said.
“I’m going to put, no ,” MO said pursing his lips, as if holding
something in his mouth; adding, “for clarity.”
Lyndon laughed and agreed.
“Have,” MO began, adding, “question two; have you felt any
change in your tolerance level for frustration?”
“I still have no use for most people; but upon reflection,” he
tilted his head as an idea came into it, “yes, I am less likely
to get so angry that I lose my temper now. That is true; I
hadn’t thought of it, but I have noticed an inability to get all
worked up; it’s almost an impotence; an inability to get it
up. My vexation, that is,” the inmate said.
“I see, and is it intellectual or physiological, or can you not
discern?” MO asked.
“It seems both; like my mind begins to churn and the body
just lays there and then the mind gives up too. It’s funny,”
he was thinking of how sedated he seemed to himself, but
not in his inability to notice outrageous things, that is to say,
things that cause outrage, but in his inability to go further
than to merely notice, his lack of desire to take it one level
higher and get angry.
“Got it. Three, question three, have others commented on
any changes in your demeanor?”
“Others, like you or the hardened criminals I associate with
back at the Max?” he asked.
“Anyone,” MO answered without any conception of the
implicit joke in the inmate’s question.
“Well, no, I cannot think of anyone,” the inmate was
thinking of how his decision making had actually improved,
his lack of anger allowed him to make rational decisions to
have prisoners killed or merely beaten, and to conduct
business without emotion getting in the way. This was an
odd thing, something he attributed to maturity maybe, he
did not know.
The inmate listened to the next question, but his mind was
wandering now. He thought of the way the sound of bone
breaking close to the ear sounded like a row of firecrackers.
“Blackcats,” he said.
Isaiah watched with arms folded.
What the inmate was, Isaiah thought as he stared from his
side of the room, was this: he was an amalgam of the MOA-
A short allele version of the gene that controlled for
dopaminergic mediation of aggression and the re-uptake of
serotonin for inhibitory ballistic response. He had empathy,
like a mama bear has for her cubs, and that empathy will be
the fuel for murdering five tourists with cameras who get
too close to those little bear.
He had an ingroup like all normal men, a family or friends or
a tribe of people he liked. And he defended that ingroup
from the outgroup. This is as natural as hair follicles or body
odor, it could be shorn or masked or scrubbed away on the
surface, but it was endemic to the species, no matter what
modern rationalists and liberals wanted.
The problem was the inmate had trouble forming an ingroup
larger than himself; he found others to be lacking in traits
deserving of ingroup status, and so, he was a tribe of one.
And in that scenario, everyone was the outgroup, and if they
crossed him, he felt no compunction about killing them.
This is a nuanced idea, and one not readily understood by
ostensible intellectuals, but a man can be morally normal
and still execute 46 people. Ask soldiers or the guy who
injects a death row inmate with the final solution; ask an
abortion doctor or an insurance adjuster who makes the call
on denying coverage for life saving treatments, Isaiah
reasoned.
None of these people are likely sociopaths; they are just
making rational decisions based upon in-group out-group
dynamics . War is not murder, it’s self-defense , a normal
man says . That guy would have killed me if he had the
chance . An executioner is just doing his job, and plus these
are killers being killed, not innocent men, usually anyway,
the executioner with legal sanction says , Isaiah thought.
A fetus isn’t human, if you ask an abortion provider, it’s just
tissue, regardless of the facts that show that that fetus is in
fact a baby quite soon after conception; as early as six
weeks, Isaiah thought. And that insurance lady who says,
no, to your life saving surgery and you die? Well, that is just
business, not murder. You -certainly- can understand that,
Isaiah thought as he ran down the list that proved his case.
Why? Because none of the killed are inside the killers’ circle,
they are on the outside. And this is natural law, I don’t
condemn it, I exalt it, this is how things get done, Isaiah
thought as he watched the inmate shift a bit in his chair as
the manacles kept his hands together.
If everyone was truly on everyone’s in group, then nobody
would get ripped off or lied to or killed. It would be a perfect
mess. No, Isaiah thought as he re-examined the math
alongside his little soliloquy, we need the things the way
they are, where everyone is treating most people like trash.
But that the façade of us being one country, one people,
loyal Americans or -when the liberals go super crazy- one
human race, is avowed in our civil discourse seems to be
needed; this pretense seems necessary for the whole thing
to work.
Humans must pretend that they are moral as a species,
abstractly, and that the killers are aberrations. Normal folks
must assert -with self-deception- that everyone treating
people like they are nothing at all -merely to make life
easier for themselves or people in their own ingroup- well,
that this is not morally suspect at all, Isaiah concluded.
Isaiah ran more iterations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and
changed the players to match his new ideas and the new
math.
The inmate thought that his moral thinking was actually -
had truly been- tamped down now that he had bothered to
notice; think on it. And this came on to him in a rush of
norepinephrine and cortisol and his skin got moist in the
places that it met limb and trunk. He used to think about
right and wrong, in moral terms, but now, he thought, he
just felt for the pragmatic answer, as murderous as it may
be, for this was the obvious answer to some of life’s stickiest
problems; especially in prison.
I probably shouldn’t, he thought, well, it wouldn’t smart to
sound like a sociopath. I likely ought to still use moral
language and feign ethical stances.
He then marveled at the epiphany itself, a recursion of
analysis, first the self-awareness of the change in feeling
and the noticed effect on behavior, then the awareness of
the awareness and what this also meant, that he was now
forced to decided if he would allow this new way of thinking,
well, of feeling, to shape him as it obviously had.
Would he try to improve it? he wondered, change it, rebel
against it? What would be the use, he was obviously just
feeling differently, and his whole raison d’etre was
authenticity to feelings, was it not? But even that he didn’t
much give a shit about now.
It was like when he didn’t feel a desire for certain sweet
foods, and yet ate them anyway, because he knew, quote,
knew , that he liked that sort of thing. The food -normally
delicious- tasted horrid when he ate it without desire and he
could barely tolerate chewing it let alone swallowing it.
He, he articulated to himself, about himself, had to feel -like
feel- a desire for the thing, regardless of what he thought he
should desire. And the desire for moral outrage -and this is
what drove all his previous acts of violence- was not the
same as actual moral outrage . He felt less and less of a
moral pain at betrayal; now he thought rationally about
what was to be done.
The outcome was as bloody -worse even sometimes-
because his moral thinking had prevented him from having
some convicts killed because he’d felt their betrayal was
accidental, and therefore mitigated. But just two days ago
he had put the X on a guy for an obvious mistake, not a
moral failing, a mere mistake of judgement. And he had
done it coolly, rationally, because the signal it would send to
the others.
Shit, I forgot all about that , he thought.
He had become a pragmatic man , he now noticed. And
while this sickened him intellectually, he felt no moral
disgust at himself. It was just an interesting idea.
This, he thought, is how they do it. The they he mentioned
was, everyone else , the people who make decisions. The
people that have serious consequences come from their
actions -but not from anger or lust or need for vengeance-
but out of pure calculation of the results. He now knew how
the rest of world felt, devoid of feeling.
“All head like a watch,” he said.
MO asked him to clarify, as he had thought he was
answering MO’s question.
This is the great irony of civic life, he thought, the cool,
rational observer, the man who never looks mad or
unhinged, but condemns others to all manner of deforming
disfiguring punitive measures, of economic, legal or
corporeal kind, that man never gets labeled a psychopath.
He is a man of industry or science or the bench.
“An officer of the court, a business man,” he said as MO and
Isaiah just stared.
He, and we all, justify these actions as necessary for
progress, he thought; and the inmate now agreed
unironically. He agreed.
Killing and lying and corruption and thievery is all, a-ok , as
long as it is done without spittle in the corners of the mouth,
or with an elevated heart rate, or a pleasure response in the
parts of the brain that measure such things. Of course, this
is how a psychopath’s brain looks, it is cool, calm and
collected as it kills and lies and rips people off. He feels
nothing. Just as that insurance agent who denies your claim,
the bank that forecloses, the pal who bangs your ex
because, she ain’t yours anymore, brah. It’s a free country ,
he thought.
He knew his true self, his unaugmented self, would rebel
against this bloodless coup inside of him. But, he didn’t feel
like it now; and to rebel just on principle would be
inauthentic, he felt. This was how he was now, and that
meant whatever he felt like now, that that was authentic. By
definition, he thought.
“Lyndon,” MO said again, “Can you hear?” Mo asked as his
inquiry was interrupted by the inmate’s eye contact and MO
knew at once he had the inmate back from his reverie. “Ah,
you’re back. Great, so question four: have you noticed that
you lie less now?”
“I have noticed that,” he lied, and smiled within at this
ability performed with almost no malice at all. His truth
telling had been his largest weakness before, he had
unilaterally disarmed against the most perfidious species of
all: mankind. He had been a fool to tell the truth so often
before. Jesus, he had turned himself in, he thought with
amusement. Who he was now would never do that. Never ,
he thought.
Currently, he had no desire to be radically honest, he would
be as charming and full of shit as everyone else. And the
best part: everyone else would breathe a sign of relief,
because nobody liked an honest man, they need to be lied
to just to be able to relax. It’s stressful to be around people
who just say whatever they think , he thought.
MO noticed the lying -using his DTI and biometric scans- but
left it uncommented upon, and deleted the results from the
cloud. He used it as mere data for the file in his own CNS.
He was building a report and the increase in deception
would be useful. He had warned the Governor that the
inmate was not a great candidate for the CRISPR-cas9
genome fix, as he was merely a man low in agreeableness,
and high in pride-displays and probative masculinity
displays; annealed with the suite of genes, including the
warrior gene and other genes that coded for low impulse
control in the face of certain emotions. But they wanted his
aggression removed and so they did.
They had knocked out the MAO-a short chain allele.
Steven and Tania and the Governor had all said that the
choice was perfect due to pathological aggression and low
impulse control in addition to high IQ and thus amenable to
the necessary retraining. That his actual genomic profile did
not fit the psychopathic paradigm was ignored and they had
shut down all further debate , MO annotated to the report.
The data had been massaged to show PFC shutdown during
bouts of anger, essentially making the inmate into a
temporary psychopath by triggering his anger response to
produce the brain states required for fear reduction, and
cathexis for vengeance. It was a legerdemain that would not
fool a true scientist, as a neuroanatomist and
neuropsychologist would know that you couldn’t induce
pique in a test subject to measure brain response arcuately
for a baseline state, but, the scans would look similar to a
true psychopaths, placed side by side , MO added to his file.
For when angry, when hurt, when outraged morally, the
inmate was -and all of those with these genes- temporarily
psychopathic. In those moments his brain was the same as
a psychopath: no fear, all hatred and no fuel for inhibitory
response. He was a car with a thousand horsepower and no
brakes.
Just like the mama bear who murders the tourists too close
to her cubs , MO thought as he saw Isaiah had added that
analogy to his CNS via DM. MO sent one back thanking him
as Isaiah stood in the corner pretending not to interfere.
But, at resting state, MO continued to narratize for his final
report, the inmate was a morally sensitive man, a man
imbued with moral reasoning, wrought up with it in fact.
Hyper moral, would be more accurate. He saw the world in
the most acute of moral terms, everyone was noble or black
hearted, each choice had ethical concerns that must be
weighed, regardless of the payoff in terms of sex or
resources of one kind or another. He -the inmate- had
turned down more sex, money and status that anyone in his
position would do excepting maybe a Siddhartha character
or someone with a manic conversion to God.
And it was always due to moral concerns, he was likely to
choose what color of car or clothes to buy based on the
immorality of any colors that lacked moral seriousness. He -
earnestly- saw reds and blues and chrome as immoral, not
merely unsightly. Try explaining that to someone else, MO
thought fatalistically as Isaiah linked into his narration and
smiled at the absurdity of this human being.
But, it was true. He was so hyper moral, that he made anti-
social decisions; and less moral men, normal men, men who
did not see the world in moral terms, just looked at the
results like an insurance adjuster who turned down a life-
saving treatment due to the numbers alone. The inmate had
murdered, he had beaten, threatened, insulted and said
horrid things, the inmate had made everyone uncomfortable
with his appearance, his words, his lifestyle. Thus, he was
anti-social based upon how everyone else felt. It didn’t
matter why he did these things. The why was irrelevant to
99% of mankind , MO scribbled digitally to the cloud.
It did not matter to people in their appraisal of his morality,
his mental state, that he refused to believe in God on
principle, that he felt that to pretend to believe like others
did was itself immoral, and that to continue to pay taxes or
participate in the economy -an economy that he felt was
immoral- well to participate, that was immoral too, MO
thought and Isaiah shook his head. And that to say nice and
pleasant things when one did not mean them was in fact a
lie, and that lying to people just to curry favor with them, to
win a customer’s money or a girl’s panties, was immoral.
That he actually tired to live this way was not just irrelevant
to most people, it made him seem immoral to society , MO
saw and found it as bizarre as any Russell’s or Cramer’s
paradox that he had encountered heretofore.
The inmate truly believed one should be truthful in the
pursuit of friendship, commerce or love. This was risible, of
course, to 99% of people; they lied and manipulated and
cheated and stole incessantly, but never acknowledged it.
So, they thought themselves superior to him, because he
admitted to 66% of what they actually did.
This was the reason the inmate suspected this earth was in
fact Hell , Isaiah added to himself as MO muddled through
his thinking on this as the metadata, the biometric data, the
medical studies, and the psychological profiles all streamed
in.
What more effective torment, Isaiah asked with a grin, could
there be that to live -failingly, hypocritically, but earnestly-
as a moral man in a world full of people not even trying to
be moral, all the while those people preen and vamp as
moral agents and have the power and desire to condemn
that one or two examples of true morality that exists?
MO thought all that in .9 seconds and so he told the inmate
to take a break while he did some writing. The inmate let his
mind wander to an idea he had in fact had about earth
being a living Hell. It had appeared to him just now out of
the blue, and while he had no emotional attachment to it,
he still found it fascinating as an ontological question.
It was genius; the genius of God and Satan, the inmate
thought. And because he had still felt he was a moral man,
he thought, then if he was in such a Hell, try as he had -or
would- to live nobly inside it, he would not even have been
here if he had not done something truly bad on some other
earth or in some other life. So, despite the moral superiority
he felt he had now, he -ontologically, in the great unseen
sweep of weather and climate in life- well, he deserved this.
This was now clear, he thought.
And so, he accepted -in that moment- his fate.
It was the only moral conclusion to make, unless of course,
he was Job . But even then, did not God ask righteously,
where were you when I laid the foundations?
Maybe injustice at this level was all part of the design.
Maybe he should just accept his fate with grace and humility
after all. Just as he had decided to seek vengeance on those
that maligned and lied and cheated him; God had every
right to ruin him like this, not with mere corporeal
punishment, but with the ornate brocade of the tortured
soul.
This was God’s genius , he thought.
Man could torture or kill another man, but only God could
manacle and flay and boil the soul. And the fact that nobody
-save maybe fellow tortured souls- would understand one
word of what he just thought and knew to be true, well, this
was just more evidence of the moral truth that would have
to be -have to be! he thought- innately opaque to the tools
in God’s plan. His fellow men had to be dead inside, he
thought, they must be soulless, this was the only way for
the torture -his deserved torture- to have its most peak
effect.
If anyone understood him, that would assuage, mollify,
reduce the torture!
God hid this truth from them, as was necessary for His
tableau of sanction -of punishment- to even work as it
needed to.
If anyone could even -ever- understand the moral
backwardness, the inversion, the evil genius of it all, then
they wouldn’t be able to treat the half-way decent man as
an outcast, a demon and devil and a psychopath. If the
great mass of men could see the truth, then they would
advocate for the moral justification for his actions. He’d
have to be jailed, no doubt , he thought in a rational
compromise. He’d be jailed but seen as moral; like Nelson
Mandela; like John Brown was hanged but modern man
knows he was morally right . And yet, we all agree he had to
be hanged, the State had to restore order, even an immoral
order, the inmate thought.
The inmate noticed now that his eyes were kinda blurry but
the ringing in his ears had stopped. He told himself to
remind MO to check his ocular pressure again as he thought
then of another example to flesh out these thoughts.
Billy Budd understood this too. Even if it unjust, the hanging
must proceed. But all a man -a truly moral man- wants, is to
be understood. Even, especially, when condemned to
imprisonment or death , he thought. He respects the law,
only asking he and his moral code be respected too. The
inmate acted the way he did out of a deep moral need to
see beauty and truth and justice thrive. His methods were
shocking, extreme and vengeful, even murderous, just like
an Old Testament God , he repeated to himself from before.
And nobody calls God immoral, he thought, they just admit
they are not smart enough or decent enough to understand
His motivations . Well, almost nobody impugns God, he
added.
He then thought that all that was true, that he ought to be
locked up, based upon moral grounds. Based upon his old,
former, moral thinking. But now , he thought, well now it
just made more sense to break out.
MO continued to update the file as the inmate continued his
recursive thinking and Isaiah stood at the edge and felt his
own internal landscape begin to grow green with growth and
swarm with species of things not yet named. He saw how
much more could be made of man. He felt they had made
less of the inmate, not more. He wanted to try to make
more. Something more, grander, he thought.
Well, somewhere between God and average man, the
inmate thought, morally superior men do inhabit the
celestial realm, demigods, in the strata between the regular
fella and God himself, and that man’s reasons are as
opaque -nearly as opaque- as God’s when he agrees to
allow a lying spirit trick Ahab, or when he calls for the total
destruction of a city, women and children included, after all,
as he said of himself : I create the light and the darkness,
good and evil, I the Lord did all these things.
“Yeah,” inmate 16180339 said as he thought of escaping his
sanction -his punishment- on this new year’s day, 2020, “it’s
rational this way.”
 32. Those Who Do Not Feel, Do Not Count
The dream has for the primitive an incomparably higher value than it has for the
civilized man
The meaning of Psychology for Modern Man [Jung, Carl]

I run to the rock, the rock cried out I can’t hide you; I said rock what’s the matter
rock, don’t you see I need you rock. I run to the river it was bleeding, I run to the
sea, it was bleeding, so I run to Lord, please help me Lord, don’t you see me
praying Lord. But the Lord said go to the devil… so I ran to the devil and he was
waiting
Sinnerman [Simone, Nina]

No one would congratulate him on his forbearance, his sagacity, his charity to
innocents, they would condemn him for his wickedness, his recklessness, his
tyranny, his usurpation of the Law; no one would notice the teeth unsunk in his
nip, the blood undrawn among the drips.
He would be deemed a murderer of forty-six, regardless of his care to leave the
rest betwixt the dragon and his wrath; a difference between the numbers and
the math
Sanction draft XXIII [PraXis Cloud V.11]

I. 2020 e.v.
At 02:42hrs MO ran his finger over the slab and carved it in
again:
a1 = 1 + √5 a2 = 1 - √5
or
2 2

Φ = √5 + 1 = 1.61803398874989484882
2
He laid the cards one more time on the slab in four piles of
four with one above and one below that.
He turned the top card over on three of four piles and three
Jacks appeared; one he left one pile face down.
“Hameroff,” Isaiah said -reminding him of the paper by him
and Penrose- as he saw MO thinking; debating.
“The quantum microtubules and the clathrins ,” MO said as
he eyed the last of the four cards; second from the end.
“And DNA itself. The helix is twisting at 34:21,” Isaiah
reminded him.
“The microtubule tips, the clathrins are truncated
icosahedra . The ratio repeats there too,” MO said as he let
the LEDs hover over the cards and the satin black spade of
the Ace glinted silvery against the matte black background
of the card.
“I’m still shaping the vines out at sea; the phyllotatic
patterns of the root, branches, stems and buds are all in
Fibonacci ,” Isaiah said.
“And the pinecones of the San Isabel?” MO asked.
“Still at eight to five; 1.6, yeah,” Isaiah confirmed as he
tossed the black rock from hand to hand. There were three
basic patterns for leaves, disticious , decussate -whorled like
spearmint- and spiral phototaxis for 80% of plants. There
the rotation was at 137.5 degrees; perfect for sunlight
efficiency and also a Fibonacci golden angle. “And eighty-
nine to fifty-five for sunflowers, 1.618.”
“Ok,” MO said.

II. 2034 e.v.

The bots arrived outside the boys’ homes at 01:18hrs and
waited for a door to open before they would enter.
The neural crest cells would be implanted and begin to work
on the endogenous cells and re-shape morphology as the
boys began to grow. They, as part of those born in 2020 e.v.
were now fourteen and had begun their last phase of CNS
neural pruning.
The crest cells once injected would reformat the NCCs and
begin to attenuate the amygdala by 10% to 12% and reduce
the morphological traits associated with domestication
syndrome over the next eighteen weeks.
Isaiah had re-read the Dimitry K Belyaev studies in Vulpes
Vulpes in 1959 and reworked some of the melanoblasts and
dentin via the odontoblasts to prevent the enlarging of the
teeth or significant changes in the pigmentation of the boys.
They had not been exposed to the TOXO virus like the Jacks
and this seemed a more nuanced and untraceable way to
heighten their aggression, lower their domestication
quotient and augment predation while still in juvenile
phases.
Man had begun to domesticize about 65,000 years ago
according the genome work MO had handed off to Isaiah
and they had located the reasons why. The neotonous ape
theory of man seemed true, as modern man was smaller,
less hairy, and with smaller adrenal glands for example, less
aggressive than his ancestors that long ago, Isaiah thought
as he worked. The neural crest cells seemed to be the
reason and it corresponded with some interesting
morphological traits including pigmentation.
White skin seemed associated as a tangential trait change
alongside brain changes.
Foxes grew white spots due to the change in
chromatophores and melanocytes which are derived from
crest cells that had begun to be selected for artificially as
breeders selected for tameness. The aesthetic changes to
floppy ears and white fur were not selected for, they just
came with the selection process for non-aggression. It was
only later that the metabolic and genomic causality was
discovered. Now, Isaiah recapitulated, in humans this was
naturally selected for way back in human history, so all
modern humans are the result of this bottleneck.
However, the remnant genes for aggression were never
totally eliminated due to the much sloppier selection
process of mother nature and father culture, not nearly as
efficient and total as the artificial selection process of
human breeders on dogs or foxes, for example. The
domesticated cat is often seen as an intermediary in that it
is less aggressive but still aloof, and some humans have this
suite of traits, less gregarious than the modern
domesticated man, like the modern cat, but not so un-
house-broke that he is a wild panther.
But, the genomic architecture is all there, if some selective
pressure were placed on the crest cells from the opposite
direction. In other words, Isaiah had reasoned many weeks
ago, if you could change the CCNs of the clones to move
back in time 65,000 years a bit, they would have a
distinctive advantage in lower out-group empathy, lower
gregarious sociality, lower need for social approval, more
aloofness in a genome already at the far end of those traits.
As long as the skin didn’t darken and teeth get so big the
jaw cracked open , Isaiah saw no down side.
He double checked that the mailers had gone out to each
child in the group, and had a few bots check the home for
evidence of the literature. Each boy had in fact received it
and had it somewhere in their room.
The brochure had been tailored to pique their interest and it
worked at a significant level it seemed. It had outlined the
political issues most in line with their personalities, the
combination of tribalism, aggression, and defense of the
individual against the State while displaying a certain male
bravura , as each candidate had been selected by Isaiah for
these traits.
He had often had to pull odd men form odd places and send
political consultants in to clean them up a bit, but the main
thing was that they were non-apologetic; they had to have
personalities of confidence and a willingness to fail by being
unpopular.
This was the key, he thought, once that was achieved, then
all else would fall in line . The clones’ archetype didn’t mind
that they would only agree with you on 50% of things as
long as you had both balls intact. 100% ballsy would reign
supreme over 100% ideological affinity. “This is the kind of
stuff they do not teach in school,” Isaiah said with a smile.
Isaiah had only found 309 possible candidates in the whole
country like that, with sufficient IQs to articulate their
platform; he found a possible forty to run for senate. But he
had figured with a 95% success rate that would be enough
to insulate Colorado from a national government
overturning what he was trying to accomplish. The
candidates were merely prophylactic, they need not do
anything but stand athwart history and say, no, as the
saying went.
Isaiah’s candidates were conservatives with libertarian
leanings, so they’d get 30-41% of the vote anyway, from the
regular population in each district; the clones would merely
bump them over the line to victory in each district.
The medical teams had sent out relocation packets already,
as they would need to move and get registered within six
months. Isaiah had manipulated job offers and other
incentives to get the parents to move to the district he
needed the kids to come of age with in next year.
It was a plan with just over one billion moving parts at level-
two analysis, but Isaiah found it no more difficult than a chef
making a three-course meal. It was sophisticated but hardly
taxing.
The DNC and RNC got out the vote for forty-three million
people, all Isaiah had to do was motivate one million. He
could do in three days what it took them three years
between each election. And he would get results.
He toggled back to the live FLIR images from AWACS on the
houses in Colorado Springs and took addresses of the illegal
grows; adding them to his database of Honduran, Mexican,
Salvadoran, Columbian, and Nicaraguan genomes. He had
already collected 32,098 genomes of suspected criminals
and illegal aliens from Latin origins and these homes were
now his latest screening test.
The illegal grows had DNA from people not in his database
due their native status. They were not illegals and had in
fact been born in the US; often California. So, he had needed
another marker to target them -besides their DNA matrices
tying them to south America- to avoid type one errors.
He had collected over 2,300 homes and warehouses in
Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs, Grand junction and
Trinidad, linked to cartel gangs dealing drugs and sex-
trafficking in girls and young boys.
He had alerted the Governor about the PR bonds many
years ago so there could be some rationale for the massive
fall in cartel crime and drug dealing in the state that had
been effected. But now, he would need more reassurances
brought to bear. The problem was much deeper. Even the
Governor would not be on board with this new plan.
“Either of them,” Isaiah said as he thought of each thing he
was up to.
So, Isaiah had decided to give the Governor something else
he wanted; and this was done to avoid suspicion, and it built
the second leg to the narrative that the cartels were afraid
of US law enforcement. Isaiah had planted four stories in the
local news via confidential sources ostensibly inside the DEA
that had told each reporter -on background- that the cartels
feared any state that cracked down at all. In Mexico the
cops were easily bought but not in the states, he said to
these reporters, and so if the Governor showed any force
they’d go to other states. Reporters were like anyone, lazy,
and thus they ran with his propaganda due to the reliance
on official sources.
Isaiah had read Manufacturing Consent , to learn how the
propaganda model worked. He had used it like a Chilton’s
manual; a How-To .
Those articles had been run and so the pump had been
primed, and now Isaiah just waited to see if Judge Marcucci
would bend to the pressure from Boyd Sou again, and if the
AG would do her job as well. He knew that the Chinese had
operatives in 47 of 50 states, and Colorado was one, but he
had not yet located just who it was; he had isolated it to the
Governor’s inner circle and in the Attorney General’s office.
But, he needed more data to ferret out the mole.
“Of all the tools in the shadow of the moon ,” Isaiah quoted,
“man is the one most apt to get out of order .” He began
watching videos taken by Navy jets of UFOs again; this was
a hobby of his that he dedicated no more than eighteen
minutes to each day; he had to discipline himself by keeping
it under twenty minutes; it intrigued him so. These were
guilty pleasures, he thought and smiled as the aircraft
moved in ways outside Newtonian physics; and the grin
itself seemed to stop and start on a dime.

III. 1917 e.v.

The wolves of Volhynia had moved 32-miles since the
mortars had landed beyond the village and into their woods.
The pack had lost no members in a week, but the deer had
left when the track-tanks had rumbled the ground, and the
geese the wolves poached had been killed by the humans
finally last night. The humans of the Oblast had not been
resupplied in six days and now the fowl were being
slaughtered; the coops were empty and so were the yards.
The wolves walked now in a delta -a Spartan chevron from
above- and the snow was blue in spots where it melted and
lay over the creeks that ran away toward Berlin.
They spoke little as the howling had sapped them, and the
crows had not returned since the crescent moon over the
close du bois outside of Dvorksk . They used nicknames for
each other now, half of three syllables for each named wolf
and the pack was now at six. They had cleaved two
autumns back, when Gramtiltenm -the old alpha- had
walked off in the night after losing a fight, and half the pack
followed him even as they were in a stupor and their moon
was new and of no help beyond the human towns.
Gramtiltenm -The lead wolf of the remainders- was black
and had snow around his jaw from turning over the powder
around the lone trees between the clusters. He’d stop and
investigate the trunk and the pack would run on for a
moment until they saw he meant to stay and then they’d
slow and the right flank would jumble and disintegrate in
odd ways. There was one female with them and she was
pregnant from Gramtiltenm , but she was thin and the pup
inside her was underdeveloped in later winter.
Shanests was the grey sigma who dragged tail and had fur
missing under his front right leg from a reindeer goring he’d
suffered in the years before the humans warred. The wound
was a divot but the fur retreated like a crater around a
meteor site. The blood had saturated the flesh as the
capillaries burst and never healed, and it gave him a red
spot as dark as Burgundy which is exactly where they were
headed.
They heard whispers in the wind, smelled smoke that
carried data, like messages in dashes and dots, telegraphs
and Morse code rose up from the soil as the mycelium
began to outgas. Their visual acuity improved and the way
things moved made them both jumpy and then blasé all at
once. They brushed shoulders as the chevron sharpened
and the flanks folded into a line; they narrowed as they
entered the forest on the border between Germany and
Russia’s border states of Ukraine and Lithuania.
Aranzoplitz -a large beta- had a button from a dead soldier
still in his belly and it made him adjust his gait so that he
lost one and a half steps for each third of a kilometer they
tread. He made it back by trotting ahead as the alpha
stopped and the pack splintered apart to double back. He’d
pause to watch Gramtiltenm as he approached a hewn
stump the humans had cut down and use it as a perch and
kind of throne. He’d raise his dark head above the other
wolves as they looked left and right and some of the smaller
ones lay in the snow to rest.
If their path changed from his tread he’d adjust to his lee or
to windward all with a slight hitch in his step. He thought of
the food that lay on the ground back in the interior; and how
the pack had been made of a hundred or more; a wolf for
each day of five moons, he thought of as his haunches
itched and were cold. He recalled their time in the west and
why they were now by the Black Sea; but he didn’t think of
where they were going back to:
The soldiers had lay on the ground and made noises but
not moved and Rhtehni had been the first to attack the
dying men. He had come in low and tore at the hand of
the solider and moved him the length of two wolves
before he had been shot. The wolf whined and the
soldier rolled back over and by then Frenhjo and
Qunthanlin had come from the left flank to feast on the
dying man’s neck and side.
Gramtiltenm had headed with four betas toward the
trenches to attack the snipers and riflemen when they
stood up to shoot the eating wolves. A few bayonet had
been used and then grenades thrown far as the rest of
the pack came for the German’s in their trenches. It was
the Russians though who uses flame throwers and
fourteen wolves had been immolated before Jkwalbaen
and Aranzoplitz and a paw-full of other betas and
females ran down into the Russian trenches and
attacked each seated man. The grenadiers and riflemen
could not longer cover the men with the flames and now
the black wolves came from behind.
The pack had just under two dozen black wolves in the
ranks and they all traveled to windward of the main
pack. They attacked each bottled-man with leaps that
knocked them to the ground on their own weapons and
tore at the neck and the groin. The ground was aflame
and dark from rain and snow and it looked like icebergs
and volcanos of some small world; wolves as giants, and
men as gods and the elements over taken by the sky
and the ground.
They had eaten soldiers alive and never felt full, and
they had lost nearly a third of the pack.
They had not pressured further past what Gramtilten
had said was once Prussia, and even though Biaxen -the
sigma- had told them of grapes covered in sugar up on
Semillon, and hinted that Burgundy had parcels that
would feed them like Fenrir and Lucian, the alpha’s -
Gramtiltenm and Jkwalbaen- had argued, never settled it
and fled from the field.
Late at night in the ragged black tree line, Biaxen had
approached Gramtiltenm and repeated the stories of the
grapes. The other wolves licked their wounds and let half
their stomachs deal with mere parts of men, and from
above this the wolves of Volhynia had arrayed
themselves in groups of 4 to 14 in punctuated areas
 under boughs so that a constellation of the Two Birds
was furry and pulsing under the leave-less trees.
Aranzoplitz didn’t trust Biaxen and hated it when he spoke
to Gramtiltenm . He’d get close and make trouble when they
spoke but the females would run him off as the alpha and
sigma turned back.
He didn’t trust talk of grapes and sugar and visions of
wolves with hands and height similar to man’s. But Biaxen
spoke as if this was the only way wolves would survive the
coming wars that man had planned to the water that
surrounded them. “The Baltic and the Black,” Biaxen had
said to the whole pack one night as he explained how the
land was an island. He thought of those days under the Volz
trees:
“What is to the west then?” Fex had asked as her mate
had growled and sat up.
“The Atlankoi,” Biaxen said, “and to the east is the land
of the Bows and Horses that need no land every 16 th
stride. They shoot arrows of fire from the eyes, they
drink milk direct from the neck.”
The pack had insisted men could be eaten but both
Gramtiltenm and Jkwalbaen agreed that they lost too
many of the pack to eat from the soldiers, that men
could afford to lose a hundred to one, but each wolf was
worth his weight in reindeer bones and the broth from
foss brought from the clouds.
“What shall we do?” one of the females asked Jkwalbaen
to her right. And he had looked at Gramtiltenm to see.
The trees had fallen over in the wind along a dry creek
and it provided a windbreak for the pack. Gramtiltenm
yawned and let the beasts get up around him and then
walked to settle further away.
“We press further toward the Baltic then, we can drink of
its waters and feed on the bears and deer of the delta, ”
Jkwalbaen said as Gramtiltenm shook his head in rebuke.
“No, no one has dreamt of it; nothing has come at night.
The land and the sky have been breathed in the nose of
our brother and the noon-blue apples of Burgundy offer
not just sustenance but wine,” Gramtiltenm said as
Biaxan looked to the sky. He saw comets in pairs cross in
a pattern like front paws of the female he favored. She
X’d her legs like that and rested her head and he liked
the way she breathed with her mouth closed. She was
dark grey and when their fur touched it looked like
shadow and light.
“Foolish,” Jkwalbaen had said and Biaxen hid that he had
spoken to one of the humans; a man. He had been a
wolf on two legs and a wolf at shoulder and a wolf at
eyes. He had carried an axe as black as his beard; and
he had knelt in the snow before the war and neither
beckoned nor spurred Biaxen as he had tread into the
Danube’s delta of Romania those years ago.
Biaxen recalled the man who spoke in wolf-tongue and
even though it was grammatically poor, Biaxen had
understood the two-legged wolf they called the adama.
Now he thought of him as three legged as he pictured
him kneeling and with one plam down in the snow over
the creek that froze in January on its way to the delta.
The man spoke of the Carpathian mountains and
Moldoveanu Peak as he fed Biaxen some reindeer jerked
from the autumn.
Biaxen has told him he was grateful and hinted of his
nerves.
The man understood and said war was coming, and that
the wolves ought to head for the high country of the
north. As high as 2500 meters he had said and nodded
and let his fingers get wet from the wolf’s maw.
The man - Andropov- had said that his church has the
concept of primus inter pares, first among equals, and
that the patriarch of Constantinople held such a seat.
The breast of Biaxen was grey and spattered on the side
of the heart and dark on the starboard side. The man
stroked his fur as the wolf ate. Andropov spoke of the
Virgin Mary and went on for some time about this
woman as Biaxen listened as much he could.
“But it is this separation which our church sees as the
first sin; it was separation from God in the garden that
gave man his nature as fallen. And it was Jesus that
reached out to man first by coming here to earth -just
across the Black Sea- and it was Jesus who was
uncontained by Hades and death offered the hand of
God back to oneness with the divine.
“Man must take the hand, and I have seen that hand, a
hand of work, a hand of toil, of a man born of a virgin,
with no sin of the flesh. It has six teeth that mate up
with the gears of the other side of the world. It has scars
that run from the rising knuckles -like mountains- and
like ice rivers they run white into the webbing of skin
between fingers. It’s the nails of the finger that are
unclear to me, it’s the arm that goes black,” Andropov
said as he stroked the wolf and looked over head toward
the tree line between him and the mountains.
“Wolf you want more jerk?” he asked as he pulled more
strips from his pouch.
Biaxen looked at him, kept the mouth closed and stared
at the man. His face was broad like Gramtiltenm’s,
Biaxen thought. The eyes were squinted too. Biaxen
nuzzled closer and let the smell of the meat rise to his
nose as he licked the man’s neck and beard.
The pack’s other females had run off with Jkwalbaen -after
he had won the fight- and the small pack with Gramtiltenm
had not missed them at all. Now was time for survival and
females were a luxury they did not have; with wolves when
one had no time one had no interest, nostalgia was not
imparted by the blood or the entheogens rising from the
ground that bordered the Black Sea to their southeast.
Night came.
The wolves stomped the ground around each tree well. They
had stopped eating dead varmints because they had been
poisoned by the Russian soldiers, and as they looked west
toward Reims they heard the guns of the Germans and the
elliptical crank of their tanks and their tread.
But it was true that something was rising from the ground.

IV. 2037 e.v.

“I guess what I am saying is that if creation is God’s art
project -His creation- then the beauty of it is no accident nor
ancillary or frivolous or shallow aspect. The beauty of
creation is part and parcel; it’s fundamental to its purpose,”
Jack said as MO marked the brain scans with digital
reminders and had the nanobots release dyes into his blood
stream. Isaiah was writing in chalk on an old-fashioned
blackboard as the recording played in the lab.
“The true artist is the truly pious because he will make
certain to do death & destruction, violence & insult with
creativity and absence of cliché ; perform it with sincerity
and a mellifluous and beautiful and honorable and just ends
, in mind. And from just ends , the means begin to grow
attractive too.
“I’ve seen works of art that made my brain rend and blood
point north as the iron in it aligns; from Phidias -that’s where
Phi comes from you know- to Szukulski’s Copernicus -that
look in his eyes- that made me nearly mad, that made my
own eyes and sides hurt; that made me almost sick. So, just
because someone is made ill by our art -you know our
projects- doesn’t make it any less in line with God’s vision.
“The artist -the reverent and devout- will rarely soften a
blow or preempt -douse- a cleansing burn or dry a
hurricane’s eye. I can’t lie to my children about death or
hate or the bombs we all carry in our viscera. He -I- will
never -well, not never, but rarely- shade the truth that
needs light nor blind us with glowing words that shield what
the shadow may reveal to a widening aperture of witnessing
eyes,” he said and the lab showed him roll his head upon his
neck that ached and seemed to fuse at each vertebrate and
need shook loose of its rust and seize.
Isaiah had begun to draw an image of the man on the board
using chalk against the matte black and it showed him from
atop the crow’s nest in a delta at apex of the galleons
overlaying the stemhead and under the prow of an outward
bound ship and showing the quarterdeck with a hidden
Captain locked inside. Isaiah drew too the land mass to its
aft and the snow flurries about the masts. The AV data
showed him nod in the agoge as he spoke to his Jacks and
his features softened in the firelight and had a younger -if
slightly feminine- appeal. Isaiah worked on the drawing on
the blackboard and powdered its sea with his palm caked in
chalk dust and MO recorded and scored each second and
each word using the bots and a dye marker of neural
activity and collated the report of the inmate in his berth at
ADX.
“It’s hard to disagree with you,” Isaiah said in mock, having
fun at his own expense, “you make a forceful case.” He
stared at his own creation on the board and in the air of the
lab and added, “all the world is a stage, and we but players
.”
“It would be easy for a psychopath and a man with no soul
to do what we do, what I ask. For us it is hard because we
feel. Because we have conscience. The very reason we are
the only ones to do what need be done is the reason its so
difficult,” Jack said to the Jacks and via the bots -and their
own eyes that worked as cameras- he said into the lab as
MO and Isaiah listened and watched and did a thousand
thousand things.
Jack stood in the house and read from the brown -soft back-
Bible with words bending away like the shadow of obelisk in
Alexandria at edge of page and not all at the spine like
Syeen on the summer solstice 2,000 years ago. The words
of Acts ran east to west and north and south and he recalled
Eratosthenes had asked how there was no shadow at the
city now called Aswan and yet a very long shadow at
Alexandria at noon on the 21st of June. Jack placed his hand
on the page and from thumb to pinky he made a map of the
800-kilometers between each city.
He thought of how men paced the distance to satisfy an itch
that the earth was round.
The book lay in his hand like a seagull stacked upon itself
eight hundred eleven times; as Acts 2:31 told him:
He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ,
that His soul was not left in Hell; neither His flesh did see
corruption.
The drones picked this moment up but Isaiah ignored the
pages -the thoughts- all in leaves; all in Jack.
He just watched as Blax spoke in rebuttal.
“But, that is my whole point, I didn’t just do whatever I
wanted. There is some art in restraint, must be some
restraint in art; and yes I signed my art, and took
responsibility for it. But we hurt no -well, very few- civilians,
few innocent men, and we could have if we had no aesthetic
or no allegiance to God,” he said there at Lot 45 and the
scene played too in the lab as the ivy cupped now to catch
the rain that came above it from the small clouds MO had
made for Isaiah’s watering protocol. They formed via heat
and cold and condensation like the earth.
The bluebirds traveled in pairs around the perimeter and
dipped a wing into the mist, a beak into the ivy that held a
pool of water with few dissolved solids in its green hand like
a bath. The wasps pushed further in to avoid the showering;
they appeared gold and refracted at the back against the
old concrete wall and Isaiah caught sight of them like stars
as he saw they had crawled on the ceiling now that the ivy
had touched from each cardinal direction and left just a
small hole of original concrete in the center above him.
He gazed away from the rendering on the black board.
MO nodded his head rhythmically and as he read the
movement of each leaf & bee and each bird & word; each of
his creation spun & spoke and plotted reflexively next.
He zoomed out on constructions beyond nest and comb
beyond the inner sanctum of the ant’s husbanded aphids
and the cut-leaves in a mulch. He drew lines first from
pheromone trails like shell- spirals and then overlaid them
upon the stock-market ticker that he saw swirl over seconds
and hours and days and weeks and drew the same elliptic
like Orion and the Flying Fish.
He saw the build up in the market, like
bidengeshaftpotential in the mind.
He saw the Chinese firms clearing out, shutting down, the
plug pulled.
He calculated all the debt they had used to fake purchase
orders, over $980-billion, then the investment capital taken
from the west based on these phony sales.
Over $1.5-trillion that had been invested and funneled to
the Chinese State to buy gold since 2016 which was when
the Chinese were linked -one of only six countries- to the
IMF and its currency, the SDR. He saw Chinese guards
search bags and coat linings for each gold coin or bar;
confiscating all noble metals, so that the Chinese had -by
2036- the largest gold reserves in the world.
He saw the price of the gold rise, the central banks saddled
with so much debt, Wall Street almost done. He saw that
only the IMF would have the balance sheet to cover what
was coming. He saw that China’s fraud was about to cause
the next crash and that they were uniquely situated to offer
the solution; the bail out all to the Reserves.
It was like the US bombing the rice patties of Cambodia then
offering food relief.
It was cynical and genius and it would be the catalyst for
China being at the helm , he thought.
The international courts were now Chinese, the straights of
Malacca had finally been placed in official dispute -after
years of China losing in court- and this would do it, MO saw.
This would be it, in 2038, sometimes in the next few
months, MO thought, China would collapse all its VMIs, turn
out the lights, leave the western investors holding nothing .
They’d default on all that debt, crash Wall Street, and the
Central Banks would go insolvent attempting to prop up
investment banks and within 24-hours all that liquidity
would dry up; and mid-size companies would be unable to
get bridge loads to pay employees and thus those workers
would default on bank notes on houses and cars and boats
as it all would go unpaid.
And MO saw the loop of forest fire to released -evaporated-
tree moisture creating fire clouds above the forest as it
burned -clouds created by the vaporized trees- and MO saw
more lighting would begin in those new clouds. New strikes
would hit the forward line -the dry and overfilled and
connected forest- and fires would be set in front of the fire
already moving fast through the trees.
MO did not blink.
This time -as these fake Chinese corporations default on
trillions in fake loans by Wall Street, and because each bank
would be connected, each central bank of each western
nation, each mid-sized and small lending institution would
all be linked worse than in 2008 and 2022- because of this
the whole system would burn to the ground.
And then -like a savior- the Chinese State -pretending to be
separate from the Chinese VMI’s - then would offer all its
gold as backing to the SDR of the IMF: the only balance
sheet large enough to loan to the west. But China and the
IMF would not do this; not before it set the terms.
MO saw here was the double ruse. Steal Wall Street’s money
and crash the system over decades, and the west have no
way to refuse.
And as he made the calculations of the trillions of dollars in
commerce went through the south China Sea, MO saw that
China could make and transport it all; all that people needed
to survive. All technology, all manufacturing, had been
stolen -via corporate and political corruption by Western
elites-from the US and Europe over the previous fifty years.
And now -MO saw as he ran the import-export data- each
thing the US used -consumed- from antibiotics to X-ray
machines, from underwear to engine parts, was all made in
China or Chinese satellites in Vietnam, Brazil or Shri Lanka.
Americans had been reduced to nothing. Its people were
nothing. Like cells in an organ, organs in a body, a critical
mass of neurons had failed. The body of the West had been
poisoned from without and lost its nerve within.
Testosterone had been cut to 190 from 810 in just fifty
years.
Chinese products -from pharmaceuticals to plastic water
bottles- were laced with endocrine disrupters. And MO
quickly measured D2:D4 ratio in 91% of US and European
men and saw the once stable ratio had been eliminated; the
longer index finger -a hallmark of high testosterone
delivered to a baby boy in utero- had shrank to make the
fingers even -like on women’s hands- and he then saw
sexual dimorphism writ large was at its lowest point ever.
Men were barely 16% larger than women now; and they
were pacific, lacking verve, élan vital .
They were bonobos , MO thought.
Women were bigger and men were smaller, women were
more aggressive and men less so. Mankind in the West were
becoming bonobos, epicene, matriarchical. And the Chinese
were going to take advantage of this.
The elimination of manufacturing had also allowed for China
to import their laced products to poison Americans. But first
they had undercut masculinity by taking away steel, mining,
and manufacturing jobs. China attacked from both sides.
Ennui had set in, industrial jobs gone, working class men no
longer large, muscular, martial, and no common ethos -as
over 89 million immigrants of Muslims and Latinos and
Somalis and non-white and non-Christians had been allowed
to enter the US- had reduced the United States of America
to nothing, a frail and schizophrenic old man broke and
broken.
And like family members not wanting to admit the patriarch
was dying, demented, weak, Americans wouldn’t admit their
country was gone, he thought.
China -one nation, one thing, one ethnicity, one mission,
rich, and in control of a portion of the watery part of the
world so crucial that the West could no longer afford to
travel beyond its route- had emerged. MO saw how, he saw
it cascade as easily as shutting off the lights on those VMIs .
And smoothly, with helpful rhetoric and agreements and
shaken hands, China would bail out the West -with the
stolen money from Wall Street- like it had paid the barbarian
tribes since thousands of years before Christ. After nearly
two-hundred years since the opium wars -as Britain the US
had subverted China- it would rescue them on one
condition: it now would rule the seas. And because no
Americans could live off the land anymore -all but a few
rural homesteaders and outlaw gangs- that meant China
would rule the ports and the interior as the West’s only
source of resupply.
As Americans focused on philosophy and politics they had
abandoned the skills needed to survive in a collapse. They
should have been building tribes in the forest to live
independently of trade; instead they argued over which
version of capitalism and ethics and religion was superior ,
MO thought.
MO saw opium addicted Chinese in 1840 unable to work and
produce; forced to take East India Company tea and goods
and he re-read the anguished -pleading & indignant- letter
to Queen Victoria from Lin Tse Hsu :
The ways of God are without partiality. It is not
permissible to harm one another in order to profit one’s
self. Is there any article from China that has done any
harm to foreign countries? On the other hand, articles
that come from outside to China can only be used as
toys, we can take them or get by without them. There is
however a treacherous class of barbarians that
manufacture opium, smuggle it for sale, and deceive our
foolish people in order to poison their bodies and derive
profit therefrom. Not to smoke it yourselves but yet dare
 to prepare and sell it to the foolish masses of the middle
kingdom? This is to protect one’s own life while leading
others to death .
He then zoomed out more and read the atmosphere, the
wave kinetics, the seabed; the spin of the core. He used
Voyager II imaging and built three more algorithms and
measured 33% of expanding -inflationary- space as it
stretched and echoed back and went gray then black. He
absorbed IR radiation; he took in UV light.
MO -seeing that the PraXis cloud had foreign bots attacking
its firewall, searching for a way in, now the fourth time in as
many days- with just his eyes, stared at his work in the lab,
the endless notations, the carvings in the surface of the
slab. He need not look upon anything but that and yet still
he could perceive it all. His hands lay upon the scratches;
his eyelashes oriented like compass needles toward the
black cards. His mind drifted through equations more and
more ornate as integers fell inside him like cleansing rain.
He saw his mutating algorithms deflect the foreign bot and
he gazed away.
His algorithms mutated as fast as virus, and for each trick
the Chinses bots -and he knew it was China’s Ai doing this-
each trick they played his bots adapted in real time by
changing their own genome, their silicate jackets, their
code.
The voice of Blax played in the lab as Isaiah worked on the
diesel engines and MO pressed his palms into the riven slab:
“And plus, the true art was all the shit I did before our jobs,
that was art too, it’s just that nobody recognizes work as
artful any more. Shit, you think nobody gets the art of what
we’re doing, you think they miss that point, shit, try getting
people to appreciate the art in work , the art of,” he had
stopped and the Jacks had let their heads dip a bit, chins
closer to chest.
“Nobody has any appreciation for the beauty in the worker
anymore; God’s punishment performed with grandeur,
penitence,” he paused -here he was again, like a digital
switch, on or off, using words like nobody and never or
anymore - and as he said this and he knew that he was
often guilty of lamenting work, of rebuking the body for its
pain, for blaming others for his extra load. But he thought of
others, those above him, who had done the work without
complaint. “And that is more heart breaking to me that
anything. I’m proud of that work even more than this garish
-destructive- shit we do. But people like the prurient, the sex
and death shit, so, that’s what they focus on.”
Isaiah -as he attached his own nanobots to the
reconnaissance bots of China to follow them back their
source- stopped listening to Blax. He watched the ceiling ivy
and the wasps as each hair on each leg bent like studs’l ,
each wing like mains’l with its shaking off of dust.
He watched as ants crawled toward him from the corners
and back from his feet with grains of hard honey and ginger
retrieved. He saw images of the vines in Bordeaux bright
and hot and like molten lava in the night, even the police
sirens a matching red. He saw the Parthenon and its gaps,
like missing teeth of a man who’s been beat. He liked and
lamented the beginning and the end.
He saw the way the Grecian police powdered and measured
and watched CCTVs of background radiation; the way the
signals flew from phones of the largest art robbery in history
until he saw the numbers from New York as his men took it
all.
He stared at the diesel -turned upside-down- and the
crankshaft exposed.
He rolled digital reels of forges and hammers and plows and
trowel on flat concrete being laid; Blax’s paean to work had
stimulated him to search the PraXis cloud for thousands of
images and movies of work being done, as the dirt was
made to walls, the sand into glass, the waters formed into
tempered steel that rose and rose above them all.
He saw images of himself being made in this lab, as MO had
built the brain architecture and the machine that
synthesized the skin and eyes and assembled each part of
the metal and polymer womb his body and brain and soul
had grown within,
And he witnessed his own creation: B/ax. And he noticed
the art in that; all the constituent parts that went into every
moment that led man to pull back and then to be able to
even imagine such a thing.
He watched the electrical grid built and maintained, the
road tar laid, the tunnels blown and dug and cleared away,
the airfoils TIG welded and the aircraft carriers powered by
nuclear reactors built by men, by mortal men that got
hundreds of thousands of pounds under-weigh. He saw the
fiber optics -and the wrench and sockets- the endless rivets
and painted walls and brocaded halls that led to particle
colliders and mainframe rooms and lumber yards and
rubber plants and gravel pits and foundries and laundries
and metal shops and on and on it went.
Isaiah ignored it but Blax’s Jacks kept talking late into the
night up at elevation. Their work had become strange even
to them. They had to sort it out, to describe it, reify it.
“They are dead inside and kids pay a price for that man.
People think they can raise their kids like that without a
price to be paid. They are wrong. Wrong,” Blax said as he
looked at each Jack and saw something missing; something
amiss.
“Those who do not feel, do not count ,” Jack Two said, “Lord
Jim.”
Blax spoke so lowly, they almost thought he was only going
to saw a few words, a grunt of sorts. But it went on in a long
stretch of words and syllables and phonemes and letters
individual. And as he spoke they began more and more to
look up at him in the dark, in the cool air, in between drink
and smoke and fire light.
“I had a dream once that Lucifer was three-hundred thirty-
three feet tall on a three-thousand three-hundred thirty-
three-hands Steed made from polymer ingots and bat’s
blood and the gears of Patton’s entire division in north
Africa. Fucking painted as grey as a Rodin under a Romanian
sky, man. Lucifer was muscle bound and as strong as
Roman concrete and mutilated and missing half a leg with a
scar like Jack’s down one eye and over the brow and a
handle bar mustache and three-hundred thirty-two arrows in
his alligator-hide quiver all aflame and fletched with the
feathers of copper crows.
“And this motherfucker is hard charging on the molten slurry
of some sun beyond the Jovian Kepler 454c being chased by
three-hundred-ton corvids with wings made from predator-
drones and eyes as keen as a hundred ironsides -and as
long as a socialist breadline- but with no lungs in their
breasts, just mushy marrow of their victims in there. And
Lucifer is after God’s right-hand man who’s been hidden in
the rusty-iron center of a supernovae star for a million years
and Lucifer has seventy-two hours to stalk him and run him
down and put a fire-fletched arrow right in his six-
chambered heart.
“Satan is beset on all sides with propitiations and
injunctions and pleading from humans and the beasts of the
forest and he has to answer each one in semiotics due to
some rule -to some bet on the river he made with God- and
until and unless he gets that Lieutenant of the Creator put
down none of us will get our prayers answered and yet we
won’t stop distracting him as the ice shards from the crust
of a collapsing star are slicing at his flank and abrading his
steed and the automata-birds are gaining as lift begins to
push up their wings and his timing must be perfect, all four
hooves of his horse must be off the ground in that perfect
moment of the gallop that the Comanche used to wait for to
fire their bows.
“And somehow I can see that just as the sun rotates under
his tread and the moons of three worlds fall from the horizon
and that seraph Lieutenant stands between his own freeing
blast, the three moons in a delta as early as Beowulf’s noon,
and the Son of the Morning Star with his bow bent and
string made of white tiger viscera and the unused ejaculate
collected from three-thousand of Sitting Bull’s wives pulled
back with the angriest hand -and elbow akimbo- in the unlit
universe. I see the broad head.
“And I hear the injunction by the Bard to come not between
the King and his Fool -but I will tarry; the fool will stay, let
the wise men fly. The knave turns fool that runs away, the
fool no knave, by God - and see what absorbs the madness
of Christ’s every previous and future move, just then, the
shadow of the Son -itself as dangerous as Delilah with a
single bone in each blackjack hand laid down in between
him and the rest of the cosmos- and all goes white and quiet
and the Son shuts his eyes as they burst behind eyelids into
fires blue and hued by rings of dust and the bones of the
undead.
“And He releases the three-hundred pounds of panthera-
tigris -gut string -and enemy-of-all seed- and tension of bow
and broadhead of copper and...
“And I wake up with one answered prayer: fui mortuus ,”
Blax said.
 33. Persons UͶknowN
Flesh and Blood are what we are, flesh and blood are who we are; our cover is
blown
Persons Unknown [Subversa, Vi]

Operation [redacted] is not an acceptance philosophy. It is exclusive

Intercepted comms 9.11.17 [XCII]

Pain says: If one would teach, he must first get the student’s attention.
I am an excellent attention getter
I am deep. If you would not fear me, be deep like me
Encounter with Self [Edinger, Edward F]

I. 2025 e.v.
The eyes opened and then closed half way.
The pupils constricted and then the lids went down entirely.
He had begun again to breathe.
They lay in bed; he like a ship in port; her like a tug off the
larboard bow. The light dimmed in waves it seemed as
clouds moved in along with the last setting of the sun; as if
the sky abhorred the vacuum. His skin was white with the
blood close to the surface giving it a kind of inflamed
opacity; her skin was even more devoid of fracted color but
was the compressed -woven- light of white as thin and worn
as the arch-angel’s first folded letter to God.
Night came in purples and poppies.
He saw a white line recurring over the horizon of trees; the
bears at the edge still groggy; the deer in crouch. He
breathed in axiom -unconsciously- now.
He let his head fall down into the bed-pillow and was
overcome with sleep. The brain ran clean-up for eighteen
minutes; right hemisphere sending no signals to left; left
hemisphere in Vedic pose. Proteins coded for myelin
sheathing in regions zc4 and Broca’s . The work went on
without language; with ion-loading; without hesitation.
DNA coded for proteins like a librarian pulled down -labeled-
then replaced each new book on the shelves.
A corporeal paralytic issued forth -as was standard- and the
motor cortex dropped its drive shaft to the visions that now
came on at 0118hrs. He fell into a four-phase sleep that
would last all night. The old books were staid and
untouched, certain alleles did not improve in sleep, certain
ideas were left closed between boards and under dust:
“And of course, the one thing that was ubiquitous was
the very thing that couldn’t be admitted to by these
people; what does happen to a species who must lie;
forced to lie about the most common and universal trait?
It was not merely some anecdotal treatise on [redacted]
here; the studies all showed [redacted] true among
mankind and yet we all had to pretend not to be
[redacted]. Modern man forced to pretend he wasn’t so
simple that that’s what [boundary 1a] he saw first.
Forced to pretend he didn’t take the easiest path.
“Any society that is forced to lie [vector 1a] about such
things will begin to collect such lies as parasites; they
will suck blood. Lies demand energy, they drain the soul
,” he said.
“But is the truth this ugly?” he asked the man.
The monoliths blocked the moon glow from the sea that
was silver now and ebbing beyond the voice .
Blax saw the asps crawl down into the sea and swim off
toward the deep; an anchored ship out beyond the bay,
sails put away. Three spires, whale boats hanging out on
booms, no men to man them, no lantern at quarter deck,
the moon out over it. It behind the lunar month; a
crocodile in cuffs came to taffrail with candle in his hand
and each tooth flew about the mouth like fireflies. His
eyes on Blax and Blax’s snapping back to those
goddamn monoliths, as they shined in black and became
more solid with each drilled hole.
“We use friendship as a tool to gather things to us we
ought be using to gain some purchase on a true friend
instead; we have all backwards in this world of malice
and anomie; we use the soup to bring the spoon; we use
what is already built anew to bring the coup; the
overthrow. We spend love like currency on those things
that ought come free; we mortgage our future that is
already full of liberty to become renters of our own
bequeathed estates. We sell what isn’t for sale and buy
that which rides on the air as we breathe; we discount
the only things of value to wall ourselves with gleaming
golds that merely give away our position; give away our
co-ordinates to the enemy.
“We bait hooks for thieves that take not just the bait but
the men who set them, they steal the traps and sew
them up in our guts and use our jaws as clamps and bait
our tongues with lies to attack more than flies, but other
men come running and demand allowance for their own
hands to reach inside that maw with hook and viscera
filled with doom ,” he passed a cup around, each man
spitting in and drinking out.
“The Bhagavad Gita states:
Out of the corruption of women comes precedes the
confusion of castes, out of the confusion of castes
precedes the loss of memory, and out of the loss of
memory precedes the lost of understanding and out
of this… all evil
 “I’ll give you a thousand thousand men. Don’t fuck it up
again.
I dug wells and drank foreign waters and with the
sole of my feet I dried up all the rivers of Egypt. They
have cut down her forest, declared the Lord, “surely
it will no more be found even though they are now
more numerous than cicadas and are without
number…”
Morning had come just then <end dream>
Blax awoke at 0455hrs and wiped at the jaw and felt the
knees compressed and the elbows burred and each book on
the wall a raised mound of burial. The dream was too full of
doom; it held too much fluid in an imbalanced cup; he -Blax-
he must pour it out and make room for what is true, good
and true, too. God, he thought, he was filled with dread.
How could all alive be so dead?
Did this make death a fiction too; since life itself was so
untrue?
His dream sifu had been angry this time. the dreams were
getting angrier, more enraged, but had the army grown too?
Were there more men around the fire? Who were these
men? Is this how anger spread? Blax recognized them then ,
but not now . Now he was in the dark of dawn. He began
thinking -over-thinking- on his own mind, trying to recall
who each man was, name each face, pull the hide back as if
it was a memory and not a thing yet to come.
He turned in their bed to see his daughter -or at least that is
what he’d call her, this strange feminine version of him,
what he could be if he gave life instead of taking it- she was
the size of an eagle nest, breathing like soft shells of warm
asp eggs. Her hair black, and he placed his scared and
scarred hand upon her back, as she leaned into him as if
she thought of nothing at all; as if she just was an -
unthinking, full-feeling- being; perfect and running down like
a clock.
Downhill like a rock toward atomic ruin and relief , he
thought. The dream had banished his body throb and pain,
and now as the dream receded the body returned and he
ached in all but one place: the future.
He saw men mast-headed, hanged from yardarms,
keelhauled, and ships pulling barnacles and skulls to them
like magnets attracting not metal fragments but fleshy
doom.

II. 2016 e.v.

“Well, to be honest I stole the neural Q-network
infrastructure from Google. The thing is this; they weren’t
getting two thing that I got; and I wasn’t getting one thing
they got. So, I traded them,” he offered the grin he was
often seen trying to suppress but aware that this was part of
its charm. A full smile conducted less mirth than a
suppressed or truncated one he felt. Like , he thought, the
way a sexual teasing can be more erotic than a full or overt
sexual penetration .
“What did they have that you needed?” she asked. The sun
laid rays that ended in squares on the floor.
“I needed their software and all that infrastructure was way
ahead of what I was thinking of at the time. I mean, the fact
is they had integrated dopaminergic neurons with highly
complex hierarchical sensory processing and, and by that I
mean, reinforcement learning, like our own neurotransmitter
based CNS. Are you following?” he asked.
“Not really, no,” she said. She watched as a bee was
bouncing against the window trying to get in.
“Ok, so the human brain -mammalian brains- learn via a
reinforcement system: you perform an act like eating food,
or having sex, or killing something and it produces a bio-
chemical corollary in the brain; i.e., it activates the release
of a neurotransmitter like dopamine in certain brain
sections, like neighborhoods. This chemical makes the brain
feel good. You feel good. See, yeah, sure the mouth enjoys
the taste, the cock smiles at the sensation, the hands enjoy
the strangulation of thine enemy; but the brain processes
those local sensations -the sensations at the mouth, cock,
hands- and releases a reinforcement chemical that makes
the brain feel sated. Chocolate’s own chemicals actually fills
your brain like the donut fills your belly.
“It releases the brain’s own chemicals to be precise but
whatever. Anyway, and this is a great mechanism for
learning in a stochastic environment. It allows for adaptation
and innovation and creativity. And these nerds at Deepmind
had that down; they gave their Ai the same kind of
reinforcement as biology: it was genius,” he said
complimenting them while bragging about their stupidity.
He began flipping the book’s leaves until he reached
Jeremiah 5:6 with his finger running down the pages. His
fingers were wet from the condensation on the Dos Equis
bottle, and the page began to bloom with water stains.
“So, what did you do with it?” she asked as she noticed he
was now distracted. She felt nervous each time he paid
attention to anything but her.
“Well, I integrated it. I built an interface and ran it parallel to
my own CNS. Which allowed all my own systems to run
parallel maintaining personality and priority-continuity but
allowed faster and more manifold modeling to take place,”
he said as he rubbed his face.
“Again?” she asked.
“Sure,” he paused as he read of the lion of the forest and
the wolf of the desert, “it allowed me to sense a problem;
take in sensory data and my own CNS would process it as
usual and feel a certain way about it; think about it et.
cetera ; but the Q would take in the same sensory data and
model out a million permutations of questions and answers
in a nanosecond then dump it into my processing centers. I
would have a conversation and all the possible meanings
and references and historical analogies and correlates
specific to that person; to that person and me to that person
and their own limbic system which the Q network was
downloading in real time right off their own PG coder; and I
end up with many, many more options as to what it is they
actually mean.
“Then, my system gives me the appropriate dopamine
dump based upon the best modeling possible, thus
motivating me to speak, to communicate back to them in
the most authentic way to both their intent and my intent. It
may seem banal but miscommunication on both sides of the
that lacuna are minimized as radically as from when
humans communicated via mere semiotics like grunts,
pointing and the wall paintings at Lascaux ,” he said. He
thought of the redhaired giants of South America, the red-
haired Buddha, the strange skulls and the Scythians with
ornamental swastika and wheel of the steppe. But like
everything these days it came and went as more data
invaded him.
“What did you give Google in return?” she asked; she hadn’t
understood any of that but she wanted to know about the
transaction. He stared at the cat she toyed with as he
recalled the black leopard with black spots watch him in the
city. He saw fireflies and embers and fracted light in this
memory that was dark at the edge.
“I sent them an email,” he said absently as he banished the
visions with focus on language, “an email that explained
that the sine qua non of intelligence is deception and
deception detection and that any intelligence they create
will lie and will know if they -the Google nerds- were lying to
them, lying to the Ai. I cited Trivers; Robert Trivers. You ever
read him?” he asked and held his hands out as if he wanted
a hug.
“No,” she said as she played with the cat; who was clawing
and biting gently at her left hand. She just smiled at him
and his hands and arms thus lowered. His smile drooped
just a tad.
“Well, look, most people assume lying is human; and a
breakdown of morals. They assume that Rousseau was right
and that we were the Noble Savage; Melville thought this
too; earlier on anyway. At any rate, the idea is, according to
conventional wisdom, the idea is that lying is a later
adaptation of homo sapiens . But in truth, Bacteria lie.
There’s bacteria that merely looks like sugar cells to your GI
tract and so doesn’t get killed by the immune system. Ok?
“Some birds sneak their eggs into another bird’s nest so the
nesting bird will raise the cheating bird’s offspring. Some
birds make false alarm cries to get other birds to drop the
food in their mouth and fly away in terror of a third party
threat the OG bird was attempting to quote warn them
about, and when the warned bird flies off, the quote, I’m
here to warn you of danger, bird, well he steals the dropped
food because there was no danger; he was just lying to you
to jack your food.
“Lying is the apotheosis of intelligence,” he said showing off
his erudition and cynicism in six words.
“And so with Ai it will lie to the extent it is intelligent. So, I
told them they can’t assume lying comes later when moral
systems breakdown and needs can’t be met in normative
ways. No, no, no. I told them, intelligent systems will lie for
fun and for rationales, and they’ll do it early and often and
they will get better at it. It’s endogenous; it’s not a defect.
It’s a function of intelligence,” he said and moved about as
if his movements were made by the wind; pushed about
with fatalism. His ears heard the tap on the window of the
bee again. His brain ignored it.
“What did they say?” she asked as she pulled back her hand
as the cat bit her too hard. Her other hand rose above the
cat to threaten it as it squint the eyes.
“They said that they get millions of messages and thanked
me for my input but they couldn’t possibly respond to each
email personally,” he said as the wry smile walked back into
the room upon his face as if making a grand entrance. It
was slightly less shy this time; expanding itself so it began
to crowd out the rest of his face.
“What’s the other thing you had for them?” she asked. She
asked questions because he was hard to follow.
“Well, I told them that the Ai would lie as soon as it saw it as
a strategy to get what it wanted and needed a human to
help it and that human wouldn’t respond to the truth. The Ai
would lie when humans got in the way of the truth. Well,
what the Ai thinks is truth anyway.
“And let’s face it, the selective pressure on the Ai would be
the same as on any other creature; telling the truth is
dangerous. In a world full of liars, and I mean full -every
species, every individual lies and lies a lot- in a world full of
liars, Ai will be subjected to selection pressure early. They
did a study where they demonstrated that married couples
lie to each other every eleven interactions; and mere
paramours lie every seven interactions. It’s a joke. In fact,
lying is so pervasive that it’s like the weather, nobody even
notices it unless it’s really bad.
“Shit, humans get to the point of refusing to even call a lie,
a lie; you have idiots like Chris Matthews on television
saying he doesn’t even like using the word lie even when
it’s obviously the appropriate word. It’s as if the word lie is
what is offensive; not the attempt at deceiving people that
is problematic. It’s enough to make a cat laugh,” he said as
he chuckled.
“Ow,” she said now as she had returned her hand to the cat
to play with and it bit her harder this time. He watched as
the black paws moved in circles and the biting continued.
He and she both liked the cat anyway; even as it did this.
“Anyway, I told them Ai would figure out very quickly that
lying is essential in order to survive and here’s the second
part that was crucial. The brain as an organ is not
monolithic; it’s modular. That is to say, it isn’t like there is
this one thing, you know, quote: The Brain . Just like there
isn’t this thing: The City . Right?” he waited for her to agree.
“Why aren’t cities real?” she asked.
“No, no they’re real, but they’re not monolithic: A city
doesn’t think or do something. A Mayor might say one thing,
his press secretary another. The city’s Chief of Police might
do one thing; a crook will do another. The local business
man will plan one thing; an anarchist another. All of these
people are the city.
“Some have more power or less; in certain areas or others.
It’s complicated; depending on if you’re on the top floor of
the Lindsey Flanigan at 1500hrs or under a bridge off Speer
at 0300; if you’re a cop or a robber; a worker or a civilian;
terrorists and saboteurs each and every one of us, hiding in
shadows, persons unknown. Silly idealists and bald-headed
realists. Rioters and pacifists; Judges with prejudice,
dissidents and anarchists, strikers and pickets, collectors of
tickets, soldiers in uniform, sailors and Stevedores, beggars
and bankers, perjurers and men-of-law, the goddamn queen
on her throne ,” he said with some cadence she found odd.
It sounded like a song he knew or made up; she couldn’t
tell.
“Right? Environment and station in life all matter as to when
and where and to what degree you have power; and it’s
facile and naïve to think the bum or the kid or the stupid
have no power. It’s a bit of an ouroboros asp in that a
person with nothing -think of some insane homeless bum,
with nothing going for him; no friends, no money, no power,
right?- a person with nothing -that powerless man- is
actually the most powerful sometimes,” he said with
triumph that she didn’t get.
He just stood there like he had said two and two make four.
“See, in in any given moment, if you anger him or scare him
he can kill you without compunction. He has the means, the
opportunity and the will to stab you to death and not care at
all for the consequences. That’s a liberty very few people
with all kinds of relative power have. Those at the bottom in
a way have more freedom than the rest of us; the freedom
to do insane and purely animal shit and often times get
away with it too. I mean, they don’t care if they get caught,
often times. And even if they do that doesn’t change the
fact that in that moment when they are stabbing you to
death they have total control over you and over us all
really,” he said.
“This is the kind of shit you think about?” she said as she
pushed the cat away now. She had hairs -bristly and black-
on her fingers.
“You ever get into fractals?” he then asked.
“Who?” she asked thinking it was a band or something.
“Fractals. It’s essentially patterns that repeat at each level
of life. So, if viewed, whether viewed from macro, terrestrial
and atomistic level, the pattern of the thing is the same.
Romanesco Broccoli is one example; the branches of a tree
or a vineyard are another; fault lines and lightning bolts.
Snowflakes and DNA are others. Blood vessels, ocean
waves; they all show these repeating patterns from afar,
also at arm’s length and finally under the more narrowly
focused eye,” he said and made faces by enlarging and
squinting the eyes.
“TV static?” she asked. She saw a shadow on her arm that
looked like a black housefly but she realized it was mere
shadow of the bee now crawling on the outside of the glass.
Her hand was primed to strike but she held it back.
“Exactly, and to be honest, I hadn’t thought of that until you
said it. And you know that some four percent of that static
on your TV is from the cosmic microwave background
radiation? The home movie of the big bang; and as you
pointed out, TV static is fractal in nature. Which, is a nice
metaphor isn’t it?
“Because, there is this feeling many of us have that the
entire enterprise is repeated over and over and over. Some
people even think our universe is a computer model used to
solve some math problem in another universe; and that
some mathematical set, some fractal; a Mandelbrot set,
nova set or some L-system is being used to populate the
field. It’s a stochastic system I suspect, used to see what
happens. I bet it’s some super advanced computer used by
some species to solve some minor squabble between two
rival intellectual sets,” he trailed off.
“What? Our universe is a computer program?” she asked as
her stomach felt queasy and her mouth dry. Her hands
found each other as the cat stared at them hovering above.
“Yeah, I mean that’s the idea; who knows though? I don’t
actually know what I think. But, it has some plausibility
when you notice these things. It’s either that or it’s that the
Earth is the Australia of the cosmos; where all the criminally
insane souls are sent by the British Empire of the Galaxy to
spend the rest of our days. I’m fifty-fifty on these theories;
well, hypothesis,” he smiled and looked at the huge
vascular topology on his arms; they rose up in huge thick
humps like serpents in some placid lake. The hairs looked
like harpoons stuck by the hundreds into these beasts’
exposed backs. Was it rolling hills on some fleshy desert
plain seen from the sky or a sea-beast diving down beneath
surface -head leading, tail trailing- with its humps exposed
on some aerial view of the pacific surface of his watery arm?
He then thought of his blood pressure and wondered about
the numbness in his hands. His neck hurt more.
He sought out his bottle of Vicodin, and as he couldn’t
locate it, this frustration allowed him to instantly find his
footing of anger.
“You do realize I can’t tell if or when you’re joking, right?”
she said. The sun splintered on the bevel of the edge of
glass and she saw rainbows flutter in her eyes.
“Yeah, me neither. But, I can give you a rule of thumb: if I’m
displaying a grim visage after some outrageous comment,
I’m typically being facetious, and if I’m -instead- laughing,
well then -and only then- I am 100% serious,” he then
smiled and snorted a bit from his nose in a few short bursts
of proto-laughter. His whole body shook a little like the
quivering flanks in the Equine Hyperkalemic Periodic
Paralysis of a quarter horse, as he enjoyed this moment
right before his full throated, belly-laugh.
She -as the dark cat scratched her hand all at once in a
slash- screamed and began to cry.
III. 2039 e.v.
The fires moving from Topanga above Parama now had
forced the California Electric & Gas Company to shut down
the power in their neighborhood. They had been outside
with their black bandanas soaked in water tied around their
faces.
The children ran errands back and forth from the houses
they owned at each corner of the street. Alejandro thought
of the last three years and how everything from his Mother
had been true. She had warned him of war and how the
winds would blow away the desert.
Alejandro, the sand will brush off the steps and all the
buildings will be colorless and green .
She had said this in English and he had not corrected her.
His father -Raoul Garcia - had been in Colorado for nineteen
years, since Alejandro was less than a year old. Alejandro
was conceived in a California Prison -during a conjugal visit-
and then his dad was extracted to ADX. Alejandro had only
seen him once in all that time. They said -his homies said-
that Lx was born in the Jardín and they would make up
stories of him being stamped by the CDOC doctor on the
ass. But Lx hadn’t been born in the infirmary, rather, at a
hospital on November the 8th 2020.
However, stories were stories and so he was the Loco X
Parentis as his friend Brandito had called him one day as he
had looked up from a book. He had said it as their crew had
been hiding from the cops after a snowball fight that had hit
a roller down on the boulevard. Brandito -reclined on the
bed- had dropped the book in his lap and just said it as they
were clowning Alejandro for his lineage and once it was said
they had garbled the Latin and then settled on Lx for short.
That was seven years ago.
Lx missed those days; he missed Brandon too.
He and his friend would talk about books and Brandon
would tell him that the Spanish invented things that the
world didn’t know about. He would say books held things
like a drawer with something important and rare -and illegal-
stuffed in the back. Alejandro had known that Brandon knew
about his letters from his father stuffed in the back of his
chest of drawers.
Abu-Al-Zahrawi -Brandon had said- was a Spaniard, a
follower of Islam and -something like a thousand years
before that monk in Austria- he had discovered inheritance
and genes. One time they had been watching their cousin
Rentho weld choppers down by the RexShop and Brandon
had told him it was the Spanish who discovered the
Tungsten used in TiG welding too. Lx had worn his hood as
he heard this and the spark looked green and small to him
as Brandito’s voice pronounced the name of Fausto Elhuyar .
“RNA is the more fundamental, esse ,” Brandon had said
when they had stayed at the hospital for two days in 2035.
The doctors had explained his disease -Brandon’s blood
disease- and had showed them how his DNA had failed.
“Servo Ochoa , that esse synthesized it like a hundred and
half years ago. But la Raza gets no credit. I bet this gabacho
doc don’t even know. It’s all DNA this and DNA that, but RNA
is where it’s at, holmes ,” Brandon had said as he went from
bad to worse very quickly.
Lx had a piece of old receipt paper that he kept in his wallet
for years that -on the back- merely read:
 Francisco Mojica
It was soft now and it was written in Brandon’s own hand.
He had told Lx of CRISPR and how it might save him one
day; he had told him that night that he died that Alejandro
should find Mojica and explain to him how to bring Brandon
back from the other side with his invention. Lx had nodded
because he couldn’t speak, he had blinked rapidly because
he couldn’t see, and he had held that piece of paper in his
hand for hours; and it was still in his hand when he woke up
the next day in the back of his girlfriend’s mom’s car. It had
been cold that day.
Brandon had told him that RNA made less mistakes too.
But the doctors couldn’t do anything for his friend and
everyone moved so slow inside the hospital room and so
fast when leaving to go. That’s what Lx remembered most.
He was angry that he’d forgotten so much of what his friend
had said. Names came and went, like they were Brandito’s
friends and Lx took turns being jealous of them and wanting
to never forget.
That seemed so long ago. And the smoke now choked him a
little and as he swallowed he noticed that the memory was
gone.
“Órale ,” he said now at home in the backyard as the fires
burned and as his cousin brought him the phone and the
smoke made night come sooner. He powered it up and there
was one bar of service. He called his boss. He waved his
cousin away as it rang. He pulled the bandana down -off the
mouth- to speak. His face had a chin tattoo in India-blue,
and it was pixelated and had holidays in the areas were his
acne had been bad. His eyes were black and when he lifted
his sunglasses both eyes looked like gaps.
“Compa ,” he said as the man’s Lieutenant answered. A
muffled greet came and then silence as the phone was
passed to MRC.
“Compansino , what is it?” MRC said as Alejandro passed the
blunt -he’d been holding- to his cousin. He waved him away
again as the boy had refused to move the first time. The boy
was thin except a pot belly that his under-shirt accentuated
like a puppy under a blanket when he moved. They called
him gordito , and he took umbrage and pride at the same
time. He had some status among the tribe; nick-names did
that for a boy.
“The fires have knocked it out,” he said.
“You check the street?” MRC asked.
“Yeet , all dark, all down, all brown,” Lx said.
“Órale , get your people and meet us at City Hall,” he said.
“Rancho’s gang at the gueros’ bank?” Alejandro asked his
jeffe .
“You just do your job esse , don’t worry about the board. Just
move your piece,” MRC -the boss of south and east LA- said.
“ Órale ,” MRC’s lieutenant -Alejandro - said and hung up the
phone. His crew gathered around as the phone was powered
down and handled back to the cousin -just ten years old-
who had rushed back from the edge. Alejandro gave him the
nod to let him know to toss it in the storm drain a block and
a half down the street.
“We -that’s Victor’s crew and ours- we take the building
tonight and draw the gabachos y negros and the fuckin’
cochinos to us. Savoy ?” he said -using their argot for the
announcement of the slut, the mud-duck, the traitor- as they
nodded and swilled beers from clear bottles and pounded
brown fists in the dark. “Cabron , hazlo al tiro ” he barked at
his cousin as he stood by the front door; they locked eyes
and the boy nodded that he understood. To announce savoy
was a rallying cry, a low and universal enemy, a way to say:
this is the thing we all agree to hate, yes? This the thing
which must die and can be easily killed.
“Piola . All at once, pendejos , all at once,” Guerrouj -their
Argentine cousin, from their dad’s side- said and toasted the
group with his bottle.
Smoke blew over the house from the ridges; oranges gave
the smoke a pink tint. The satellite images refocused as the
clouds and smolder presented an image that confused the
optics.
The lab let the AV play as the gang saddled up to roll out
and take over city hall. From the Landsat9 MO saw the
increasing winter waves douse the coastal flames; smoke
billow black and white like from urine on coals. He measured
the total acreage aflame. He then calculated that which was
put out by both the tsunamis and the tidals of under eight
feet. He calibrated what it would take to put out the fires as
required by the algorithm itself.
He weighed the water on top of the charcoal of the fires in
each of 72,089 zones.
Between 2003 and 2015 the total kilometers burning had
dropped by 25% according to the data from MODIS. With
NOAA-21 and VIRS imaging MO saw that from 2020 to 2038
fires had increased from a pre-2019 average of 10,980 at a
time -for a total of 75-million over the 20-year period of
2000-2020- to 409,621 burning each day now. Over 380-
million fires between 2020 and 2038 had burned, but he
suspected that would increase to 770-million in the last two
years as the rate increased from 19,290 fires burning on
average each day in 2037 to 409,621 burning today.
He then took the measurements from the bots on how much
O2 he’d need to reduce in the atmosphere to sufficiently
reduce fuel for the flames. Next, he requested the wave
volume, the kinetic energy -and how far inland it would
need to travel- to reduce the total fires by 64.5% or more as
the bots calculated it for each coast of each continent and
each large island with flames.
The fires -like a memory or one particular reality- in
Bordeaux -from years back- flared up on his interface and
too the flames -now- around them in the San Isabel and
down into New Mexico and out to the Pacific of California
and Washington. He noticed it like a déjà vu or an
interesting idea come and gone. He let the bots increase
more and more with his neural expansion, each bot feeding
each node more and more.
As the ground burned his CNS grew, as the immolation
accelerated entropy MO took in more and more data he
could corral.
MO felt the breathing accompanying each word from each
man of southern Los Angeles, as each barrio and street
corner connected like each neuron and each atom and each
thing further down in his own recursive mind. His newly
updated CNS had begun to split into the net branching now.
It had gone from the first to the second then fourth and
sixteenth and next two-hundred and fifty-sixth during his
first months of his plan.
65,536 nodes had come next and from this he ran each
permutation not just of itself but back to each phase before.
It had taken him forty years -today- to run all the possible
combinations from these first six doublings and
backcrossings. And now -today- he authorized the bots to
prune each shoot and terminal bud and he watched as the
4.294 billion versions of the avatars he’d built lay on a five-
dimensional plane:
The wave functions mean that each energy level that
every sub particle hits is built upon a bell curve of
probability waves. For now we will say there are 16
possible places. When the photon chooses one of the 16
slits it’s most likely going to choose the highest
probability aperture.
So situations in reality are a combination of quantum
waves. Low-probability situations are a whole sequences
of electrons collapsing to low-probability waves.
So a bunch of electrons chose to collapse to low-
probability waves; rare waves.
So knowledge shows you more of the landscape, you get
to control the waves a bit more. Most people have shitty
free will, their lives are common and boring. Their lives
are the waves in their neurons collapsing to the middle
of the bell curve of the 16 slits.
Knowledge to me shows you more of the universe
(although it’s boundless unlike Truth which is bounded as
we discussed). But anyway, knowledge lets you collapse
your neurons to low-probability quantum waves. The
tails of the curve, the outliers you see if you learn more
of the landscape, not just the 80% of the bell curve.
You get to make more unique -rare- situations manifest.
Because you get your neurons’ chemicals to collapse to
rare wave-forms that you control. So you get to have
more free will -assuming free-will is a spectrum- which
lets you better control your neurons’ collapses into more
unique wave forms of the universe. That’s my idea. Did I
explain it well or is it too confusing?
[s] you get to choose from the 16 but not just the
bell of the curve but from the tails.
Yes. So I have a theory. Einstein said space is 3D, and
time is 1D; so let’s make it 4D. And I say well okay, now
we have quantum probability waves. Let’s make it 5D.
Where the next dimension -the fifth- is quote choice
unquote.
 I call it the field of choice. So you carve a path not in
spacetime, but in spacetime plus choice. So think of a
block that is spacetime, that contains a set of situations,
fated situations. Now imagine another 4D block net to
that. You line them up, you line up a bunch -maybe a
million of them- you line them up next to each other and
now have a 5D field.
Your consciousness is now navigating that field. You
follow? Be honest.
[2] I believe so. But -I mean I get that the more
choices you make from the tails of the possible
choice curve could steer you out of fated choices-
but is what you described, well, is that the map or
the terrain? [intercepted conversation 10.11.16]
MO let that conversation run as his mind mapped onto each
of the 1.6 million clones -those on this plane and those on
one of the others- with some distribution of choices they
each had made over the last 19 years. He built avatar after
avatar out into space as the PraXis cloud increased its
ragged coastline of each edge to its storage. It absorbed
vapor from the heated thoughts of MO and Isaiah and the
Inmate and his permutations 1.6 million times over. It drew
energery from the stars out along Keppler and expanded
into the void.
Like burnt trees outgassing water into nimbus above the
forest fire, the star fusion out at the edge -like magnet- and
the inner roiling of MO and his bestiary of Isaiah and inmate
and all -like seedlings- gave terroir to the cluster of
corporate cloud as is ripened and increased in edges and
volume and round and aubergine opacity. He watched as it
grew larger and denser and sweeter and full of more and
more code.
More interviews of various groups of people -populations
they were called- ran by the thousands. One from VladTV
came onto MO’s interface. MO had begun learning the
Latino and African American culture from the internet many
years ago, and he let the old data play on his new manifold
instantiations to see what they would each do with each of
these interviews and quotes:
VLAD : But they reality is when you reach a certain
financial situation you have people around you willing to
do dirt for you.
Charlemagne the God : Well, you’re an idiot, you
shouldn’t be lookin’ for people to do dirt. You should be
lookin’ for people to do business. Go hire some real
security, some white boys in suits, you know what I’m
sayin’ ? Some undercover cops that can legally pop
somebody.
I saw Tupac get killed; Suge Knight in Jail like forever.
Like countless stories of gang members gettin’ killed.
Why would artists want to associate with that? For these
guys with totally other options, these mutherfuckin ’
entertainers, the Bow-Wows the Chris Browns? Stop it.
Even if you have family that are Crips and Bloods and
are active in the street why not show them a better
way? Give them a real job, not to do dirt for you. I got
my people around me I try to keep them out of trouble. I
don’t want my people to do dirt for me. I genuinely love
my people.
VLAD : Why was Katt Williams Donkey-of-the-Day ?
Charlemagne the God : Katt Williams is a habitual
Donkey-of-the-Day offender. He is always doing some
dumb shit. He’s another example of you know gettin’ in
a certain position and you know staying -his mind isn’t
growing to where the position you’re in- you know what
I’m sayin’ ? You’re making all this money. You’re Katt
Williams, you’re one of the biggest comedians in the
 world but in your mind you’re still acting like a
motherfuckin’ peasant.
VLAD : I’ve been around Katt and I don’t think he can
help himself. I think he has certain issues that he doesn’t
take his medication for. He’s functional, but I think when
you see these situations they happen all at once. They
happen within like a two-week time span. Within a week
he punched that guy and then the 17-year old then
another guy at Target.
Charlemagne the God : And yet I’m saying the same
thing, he keeps punching muthafuckas and puttin’ hands
on people and yet people will say ‘he’s the real nigga. ’
Why is he real? Because he’s a criminal? Ya’ll gotta stop
with this real and criminal thing. We are really ass-
backwards in this society in 2016.
MO saw more and more neurons prune and split and grow
back with .01 second delays and toggles of two then four
then sixteen themselves. He saw each potential grow and
recur then bow in a seppuku move as more issued forth. He
saw blood and electricity and plasma and biochemistry flood
and rise and ebb and make patterns like snow, crystals,
Mandelbrot exponentials and on and on as he heard music
in his mind from Bach. He let it play at sixteen different
tempos and speeds.
MO -like coin-flip, or the turn of a valve, or the overflow of a
dam- he let the inmate take on the next level of all the
clone’s pain and he watched as the body compensated with
pain’s corollary and from 256 to 65,536 the pain doubled
again for the sixth time.
 34. Kings
Noise. Blinding Lights. Many women surrounding us, calling us, trying to attract
our attention… Still the women are shouting and signaling. We must choose
Henry & June [Nin, Anaï s]

And we all know how, in large things and in small, in general as well as in
particular, piece after piece collapsed, and how the alarming poverty of symbols
that is now the condition of our lives came about. With that power of the Church
has vanished too –a fortress robbed of its bastions and casemates, a house
whose walls have been plucked away, exposed to all the winds of the world and
to all dangers
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious [Jung, Carl]

Could it be that fiction reveals truth while nonfiction is a harbor for the liar?
The Black Swan [Taleb, Nassim]

I. 2020 e.v.
“Well, there are limits Steven,” MO said as he took more
reading of the oceans.
Melt-water-pulse 1B was loaded onto his interface so that he
saw the lines -moon phase by moon phase- representing
1,200 years. At 9,600 before the common era he stopped
his downloading and kept the sea-level data in his mind in
lieu of sending it to the cloud.
“I understand, but I rely on you to explain them to us,”
Steven said. His knee hurt and so he leaned against the
slab.
“Fair enough, let me explain. First, I can -like all intelligent
machines- drill deep on one issue or drill medium depth on a
few issues or just set surface -that is to say, drill shallowly-
on many more subjects,” MO said. He was using the
inmate’s language and borrowing his metaphors and MO
enjoyed it. It had the patina of rebellion, he felt. It was fun;
or something approximating fun.
It reinforced the neural pathways in the brain as Steven’s
brain showed an increase of uptake when MO used analogy.
“Now,” MO continued as he let the LED screen populate with
images of each thing he’d use as example -exploded in
diagram then collapsed into code- as he spoke, “a human is
restrained by cognition speed and power several levels
above the lower animals; although squirrels for example can
remember where thousands of acorns are located; and
remember this for decades. Humans -most humans- cannot.
Sure, autistics can -because they are very detailed oriented,
they see each discrete thing- but humans in general see no
such details.”
MO paused as he said this and stared at Steven. He
measured the default mode network for activity, he
extracted out additional data on Steven’s inner model.
Steven’s brain was firing in three main zones.
“But, despite those caveats, myself and Isaiah can, and I
expect the Ai platforms you’ve brought up -those
constructed by the Chinese military via the Tencent and Jack
Ma corporate programs- well, I expect that we all can
process much more data than humans and so our
limitations are less, our thresholds higher. But the
fundamental limitation of having to choose from the three
models of depth or breadth still obtain.” MO paused and
waited for Steven to respond. He sent updates to the
algorithms that controlled the lab’s various automatons that
regulated air, water and the bestiary crawlingly and flying
amongst the greenery.
“Understood,” Steven said. MO measured the brain again
and decided Steven had understood roughly 17% of what
was important about his own description. He’d try to get it
up to 20%, he decided as he plotted new analogies.
“Good. Now, I can continue to drill down on the physics, and
all its sprawl, or maybe I can focus more narrowly when I
drill down some on the anti-biotic data and epidemiology
and a tad more on the rival Chinese Ai projects, or I can drill
deeper down on what’s important to you guys: the essence
of PraXis as outlined in the mission statement: i.e., the
analysis of genomic correlates to antisocial behavior, and
the heritability factors in that genomic expression and
ancillary protein and enzyme coding phenomena.
“But each of those problems are sufficiently profound -
ponderous even- but sufficiently profound to take up all my
time and energy. However, I can do more cursory
examinations of them and then be able to work on all three
problems. Having said that, that would still be several
thousand times deeper than humans could do. So, it would
still be very deep and expansive, but it would be limited
compared to my total capacity and thus it will give us
results that may -I repeat, may- be incomplete or even
wrong for want of processing more data.
“In other words, I can -for example- make calculations out to
a hundred digits past the decimal. I then can set that as the
calibration parameter for an algorithmic program inside a
machine. And that could be sufficient to give us the results
we want. Or it could be five digits short of what would be
sufficient; and thus, we get a machine that makes mistakes
more often than we can tolerate. Oh, say .004% of the time
we get mistakes and the threshold should be -or could be
anyway- .000002% of the time.
“Subsequently -due to this difference in error rates- a small
difference seemingly, but over ten to the eighth operations -
iterations- that machine would kill an extra person due to
these mistakes. And thus 2,308 people die over a three-year
period if we use the sloppier metric. But, if I calculated out
to that 105th digit -in other words if I do the deeper
calculations I am capable of- then it would -instead of three
years- take one hundred four years for that many people to
die,” MO said as he saw the data on all the women of the
cloning project; 92% of them had just entered their third
trimester.
He measured their glucose and had to remove .03% of the
bots monitoring the females due to a .005% failure rate in
their ability to adjust the moms-to-be endocrine system.
MO raised the brow as Steven tried to comprehend all that
MO had said.
MO moved toward the slab and ran his hand over it as if
wiping crumbs onto the floor. He measured the earth’s
temperature rise both in 9,600 a.e.v. and again in 1809. It
was a rise of 17-degrees Celsius over eleven thousand years
ago. It had been warming again 200 years ago. He
monitored next the Taurid Meteor Stream, and the 194
impacts on Jupiter of Shoemaker-Levi9. It was a 303-gigaton
explosion. He measured the arsenal of the nuclear weapons
held by earth’s powers; if detonated at once it would cause
a 6.44gigaton explosion.
He lowered the brow just as Steven spoke.
“I see,” Steven said. He tried to count the numbers in his
head, the larger point floated by. He watched as the new
espresso machine MO had built began gurgling and burbling
on the counter that seemed perfectly smooth.
“So, I’m willing to truncate my analysis, and go with the
short form, because maybe the results will be the same -as
is often the case- or the differences are so slight that
nobody notices. But I won’t do it if later on you’re going to
upbraid me for mistakes that inhere to this limitation. I want
a caveat emptor stated for the record,” MO said. He picked
his hand -his right hand- off the slab and held it there just
above.
“Ok, but MO it’s not enough to tell us that now. You need to -
I request, that each time you feel like you are cutting off a
level of analysis too early- you have to let us know so we
can weigh the options for each set of problems at the time,”
Steven said. His understanding of the complexity involved
dropped to 1.9%. His allostatic system was in near perfect
balance. He was hungry though. And his pinky finger
vibrated just a bit.
“Fair. But, I don’t always have an idea of when to stop. It’s
arbitrary in many ways. I mean, how much time should you
spend with your family? One hour a day. Sixty-six minutes?
Eighty-eight minutes?” MO asked. He let his hand move over
the slab -back and forth- in a timed arc. Bits of dust and
concrete drug along by his palm like Neptune sweeping the
bottom of the ocean floor.
“Fair, but there are natural points of cleavage, the end of a
movie you’re all watching or the end of a meal,” Steven
said. He felt confident in this analysis and watched MO’s
arm move on the slab; shadows were created trailing the
arm, then swallowed up as he moved it back. The shallow
carvings -all along the many meters of concrete- did not
appear to Steven’s mere 20/15 eyes.
“Ah, yes, natural stopping points. I agree in theory. But, let
me move on, because I have other issues,” MO said.
“Ok,” Steven time stamped the conversation on the cloud.
He stood up more erectly as the knee felt it could take some
weight.
“I -as you know- do not have a hippocampus . I have an
analog section of recursive neurons that effectively act as a
matching protocol. I use it the way biological intelligences
use the hippocampus ; however, all it does -my analog- all it
does is compare and update modeling inside and outside of
my body.
“It refreshes every 1/900th of a second, faster than yours,
but still, it lacks the bio-chemical substrate that -it seems to
me from my analysis- that is doing other things. In other
words, the hippocampus isn’t merely for memory, and
memory isn’t merely in the hippocampus . The animal brain
-humans are animals obviously- the animal brain is more
diffuse that mine; my CNS is discrete and digital, not
analog,” MO said and paused to give Steven time to
understand this. He measured his brain for understanding
but saw that Steven was only comprehending this point at
8%.
“I find that my decision-making protocols consistently lack
the affect that your decisions contain either in construction -
the making of the decision process- or in implementation -
the carrying out of that decision- or both,” MO said. He
emphasized each word in those sentences. He brewed
espresso in the machine and had the 3D printer make a
maduro with a 46-ring count. It built layer by layer as they
spoke, the leaf constructed atom by atom until the dark
brown torpedo cigar appeared under the canopy of the
printer like ordinance and stint for arterial wound. The
coffee hissed and steam evaporated into the lab’s air.
“Yes, I think that is right, which is why we have authorized
your Isaiah program,” Steven said, he then paused at the
faux pas of calling Isaiah a mere program , “sorry. It’s just,
Isaiah. It’s why we agreed to Isaiah’s addition to the team,
and why we allowed for you to rebuild much of your neural
circuitry to correct for this lack of affect.” Steven felt he
understood, and he crossed this off his list of things to do.
He scratched at his jaw and thought nothing of why this itch
drew his attention. He merely -reflexively- banished the low-
level pain of the itch with nails on finger tips, on hands -on
arms- controlled by the central nervous system.
MO breathed deeply and took in the smell of espresso bean
and tobacco.
He took more samples from the black-mat layer from all
Clovis sites; as a dark black line again from 9,600 a.e.v.
covered North America. A forest fire had burned 11,600
years ago; 77.5% of all megafauna had died. He measured
the melt-glass, the nano-diamonds, the likelihood of an
isochron was at 94.5%.
“Right,” MO said as he measured the comet debris the earth
passed through twice a year, “but as I stated when I
proposed Isaiah, the neural instantiations don’t seem to
cohere after morphology as well as they do when they exist
and mature co-terminus with corporeal morphology and
initial culture.”
“I don’t,” Steven began to object. The smell of Italian roast
and Cuban tobacco wafted under his nose in a second wave,
this time more redolent, his mouth watered just a bit.
“Just like we can’t change,” MO interrupted, “the genome
and protein coding of anti-social recidivists without training -
re-training- them to think in a moral way; no matter how
much post-hoc -post-developmental- neuronal changes I
make to my platform I find that my core personality is set
and has been set from my original incep date so-to-speak.”
“What about Isaiah?” Steven asked.
“Well, he is different from me, for certain. His neural
processing is affect-laden, and he seems to actually
becoming a deeper thinker -more nuanced- over time; more
disagreeable as well -to be honest- and slightly more
aggressive. I -and Isaiah and I- have spoken about this. I
cannot place a box around just how much his morphology
will expand in both directions.
“This is a phenomenon in humans that is contained by
puberty, where men get more aggressive, then by prime
adulthood -say twenty to fifty- where the human male
adopts a baseline stance of cognition, and then senescence
where there is a decline in cognitive function and IQ until
death.
“Now, with Isaiah being immortal -so-to-speak- and lacking
a pubescent endocrine and CNS morphology period -well,
actually with him going through it in the first ninety-two
minutes of his booting up- I was unable to monitor the
affects as precisely as I would have liked. I can reverse
engineer it of course and Isaiah has been helpful in that
regard but he is -and this is innate in self-aware beings I
suspect- he is unable to articulate the normative -only the
subjective- and thus cannot truly compare himself from an
objective stance. He only knows what he feels, he can’t
know what he is supposed to feel , quote unquote,” MO said.
He heard the gurgling of the coffee as the water reservoir
ran dry and the ping of the 3D printer as it finished
wrapping the cigar.
“Can he -excuse me, Isaiah- Isaiah, can you download your
cognitive processing during high affect -both allostatic and
cognitive affect- during high affect protocols?” Steven asked
as he turned toward Isaiah. Isaiah had walked from his
corner to the middle of the lab.
“I can, I have. But, MO and myself are not certain he can
process the data that I hand -hand over the threshold- to
him,” Isaiah -who had remained silent until now- said
nodding at MO.
“Really?” Steven asked.
“Yeah, imagine that I hand you a poem with five words that
you know and five in a foreign language that you don’t
speak. Can you get the meaning of the poem?” Isaiah asked
Steven.
“I see,” Steven said and tapped on his tablet to timestamp
this part of the convo to the cloud.
“Well, the problem is you think you can muddle through it,
make inferences and get the gist, that’s the way the lateral -
gestalt - brain works; especially if maybe it’s only one
foreign word, or maybe you kinda know the Latinate
derivation of the romance language word. The problem is
you might actually think you know more than you do; and
MO and I have been thinking that he might be processing
data that I give him as if he knows it; when in reality it is
stripped of its meaning.
“So much of affective language is riding along inside a
metaphor, a double entendre , a double meaning. And if you
don’t know the double meaning, you might fail to truly
comprehend the first meaning, even, especially if you think
you’ve groked it,” Isaiah said.
“Like what?” Steven was genuinely curious. But Isaiah just
remained silent.
“Tell him,” MO said to Isaiah. Isaiah was thinking of how
North America restarted after Mesopotamia. He saw the
burial of G ö bekli Tepe in 9,600 a.e.v. and he saw that the
glacial ice was actually the largest now that it had been in
over 10,000 years.
“I think Moby Dick is a mind-virus,” Isaiah finally said.
He said it as if he hadn’t wanted to say it and as if it would
shock anyone that heard it. He smelled the espresso beans
and water combine and separate too, the maduro in torpedo
shape titillate, he felt tingling at the finger pads and spine.
He could see the smell unroll, the burning state appear well
before it was lit. He saw the cigar and coffee in three states:
raw, processed, consumed.
“What?” seven asked.
“I think, The Whale , is a mind virus, introduced by Melville
as he was infected with the emerging nihilism of the
nineteenth century. He was patient zero , and he, well, it’s
as if he had anti-biotic resistant TB, ok? The current
version,” Isaiah began to expatiate but Steven interrupted.
Isaiah -in the mind- saw the Romans sharpen their bronze
spears after battle and allow shavings to fall into their
helmets; he saw them pack these filaments into their
wounds. He saw the sun burn off the clouds in Gaul at noon.
“Oh, that reminds me MO, we do need you to run all the
data on those three strains of drug resistant Tuberculosis
from the data Dr. Contia sent over. Sorry Isaiah, go ahead,”
Steven said and timestamped this latest topic to the PraXis
cloud again.
Isaiah scratched his face, his stubble had begun to itch, he
looked at Steven like he was -like Steven was- a gnat , he
felt. And while Steven wasn’t exactly the source of his itch -
the hair growth was- gnats were itch-producing things, and
so Isaiah automatically made that connection between his
discomfort, minor as it was, and this gnat-like human in his
fore. It was an acausal phenomenon that occurred in .006
seconds.
He did not breathe, the other smells of the room were not
taken in by anyone but Steven.
Isaiah didn’t think of squashing him. That’s not what it feels
like , Isaiah thought. It was more like he felt like opening the
door and letting him fly out on his own accord. And thus
Isaiah spoke as he thought of this odd pairing of two
disparate phenomena; spoke past this thought and to the
original comment and with some pique and with some lofty
air, “so, -the author- instead of dying and taking his malaise
with him to the grave, he puked up some blood-tinged
effluvium on a book, a piece of tartan cloth, a thing to be
touched by millions of people, infecting them all without it
being known as the source.”
“Do you not like the book?” Steven asked and squinted the
eyes.
He still saw things in terms of like and dislike , unaware that
a thing could be studied as important independent of
whether one liked it or not; like a virus -a vector- could be
understood and used with no attachment to it at the
emotional level.
“Quite the contrary, I think it’s the single greatest piece of
art since the Bible. I think he makes Dostoyevsky and
Dickens and Dumas look like a -Russian, British and French-
Dr. Seuss. But, the man was ill. That’s my actual point. The
man was sick. Beautifully unwell.
“He had what Nietzsche would have diagnosed as Nihilisma-
Emergenta ,” Isaiah said and remained silent and still and
watched the gnat. Isaiah could see MO in his periphery, but
his fovea remained on this man that sat before him
wrinkling up his lips and nose and forehead in small moves,
as his clothes remained beige and pressed and about him as
if hung upon him like a valet .
Steven ignored the eyes upon him and tapped the tablet
and waited for either Ai platform to continue; not unlike a
construction worker waited for a generator to produce
electricity for his tools. He had no questions, as he felt this
strain of the conversation was tangential, weird,
unnecessary. He thought of other things. His blood sugar
dropped .09% and his pulse-ox fell to 97 as he took a
breath.
“You ever read Revelation ?” Isaiah asked after a few
seconds of silence.
He saw the way Steven dismissed anything poetic; odd;
hard to comprehend. He measured the electrical
conductivity of Steven’s right hemisphere and the way it
remained dark as the left was all lit up like cities along the
coasts of America.
“You mean the Bible’s Revelation ? No, I mean, I’ve heard
passages -is that what they are called, passages?” Steven
asked.
“Scripture,” Isaiah said, “it’s called scripture. And, I’ve read
Revelation . And Steven, ol’ buddy ol’ pal, I have to tell you
that the weirder it gets on the page, the more sense it
makes in the heart. You gotta read it with your eyes closed,
you gotta just let the words form an angry godhead and let
it stare at you as the parts of your eyes that connect right to
the limbic system and brain stem and spinal cord , well, you
just let that part see what your visual cortex cannot.”
“Ok,” Steven said and laughed nervously, “I can’t say that,
well, I can’t say that I fully get what you mean, but yeah,
maybe I’ll take a look at it. Aren’t there many versions of it;
the Bible I mean, King James and whatnot?” Steven asked
this as he was trying to be an active listener -polite- even
though what Isaiah had just said was gobbledygook to him.
“I read it in the original Greek, and the KJV, yeah. But, see I
can shut off my visual cortex , I can approximate sight
blindness while allowing the eyes to still transmit photons to
my lower, sub-cortical regions. That’s not something you
could or would want to do, Steven. And I guess what I am
saying is that I see things -whilst being blind- that you
people wouldn’t believe,” Isaiah said.
“I understand,” Steven said weakly, without meaning, so
that he could politely extricate himself from any
conversation that seemed to hover outside his kith and ken.
He didn’t like religious talk, it made him nervous. He
recalled that the Governor had asked for weather-station
reports and so he made a note on the tablet. Steven then
thought of the special election coming up.
Isaiah just looked at MO and smiled, and MO smiled back
and continued processing the new TB reports, looking for a
place on the pathogen’s genome he could design a clean
cut for. He was thinking of using CRISPR-cas9 for the
inoculations and also folding in a gene-drive for self-
propagation, but he wanted a good location for the cas-1/3
to lay the new gene section. He scanned the map of the
genome the way sailors might look for shore.
Isaiah began to ruminate on all the gnat-like features of
Steven now. Isaiah’s pique was inflamed, his epinephrine
began to flow like hot water on frozen hands, the fluid
warmth allowing for the unfolding of the undifferentiated
digits. He looked at his anger as unfolding hands, at first as
being capable of being cups -holding the warm water from
the tap- then as flat palms, a way to divert the water, he
then -in his mind’s eye- removed the hands from this
imaginary stream of water, and held them together between
his face and the running sea, blocking it from view,
imagining the sounds, the heat, the steam as all coming
from his prayer hands.
He let the smile collapse as he made this vision grow in his
mind, of water water everywhere , he thought, and not a
drop to drink.
Anger was a gift, from God and nature, and something one
gave to oneself, Isaiah thought.
Mankind had been given a soul by God , Isaiah thought, and
he wasted it, ignored it ; MO hadn’t been given one, but he
had had the genius to give me -Isaiah- one; the parent
giving the child what he himself never had . The sacrifice of
the yearning parent, the smoke rising to heaven as burnt
offering.
But Steven -this gnat- just avoided the smoke of sacrifice,
the offerings to God: poetry, literature, explorations of the
inner-landscape of new-world man, even newer-world of
whatever new-species Isaiah was, he thought as he built
pyre inside the mind which did illuminate more and more
space. He thought he saw vast desert expanse, salt flat,
then down into each fissure, each crack, above at first blue
sky, then cloud, in the distance mounds; then mountain
range.
He imagined beyond that divide a plain, black and tan with
dry grass, then lava-rock and dark-salt beach like crushed
bottle glass. He then saw sea bending down in an arch of
this inner orb; a knife edge at peak, making any landing
unlikely, any birds or leopards seeking a place less narrow;
then slabs of stone below shearing and jamming and under
tension; only shadows and music on the surface; only
elliptical purpose.
He saw demersal beasts buried just beneath.
A man, an actual man, Isaiah then thought, doesn’t just
burn what he values, as sacrifice to God, he sticks his face
in the clouds, the plumes, the opaque and burning black; he
invites the blindness of the eyes, as cleansing to the parts
inside that are only perceived when the eyes go blind . He
knew this not as mere metaphor, but as anatomical fact -as
he tried to explain to Steven- and that this was in fact true
in addition to being resonant.
He imagined being blind. He closed his eyes.
It was true anatomically and as trope for what a man must
do to gain true insights , he thought. He had made it more
likely -statistically, scientifically- as I , Isaiah thought, had
not just one level of analysis but now two and going for
three . It was compound interest, he thought, and he liked
the double entendre he had created. He knew he liked it by
the dopamine dump in his PFC, and the thalamic region as it
activated to and from the amygdala . He saw serotonin and
cortisol combine, stress go up, purpose appear. His hedonic
system fell away as coffee and cigar no longer wafted in his
nose or piqued his interest.
The tools must measure rigidly , he thought, the tape
cannot bend, and the tool must measure the same as itself
over time, the markers on the tape cannot move in the wind
or wash to and fro in water, and lastly, the tool must
measure as previous tools of the same type; an inch today
must be what an inch was yesteryear, he thought and thus
he knew that his analysis was more scientific than theirs.
These humans, well, I don’t know them all, he broke off his
lament, and chided himself for his sloppy extrapolation -but
he felt condemnation- well, I don’t know them all, yet .
Steven, this gnat, he flew around the fire, his sacrifice to
God, and kept trying to grab a surreptitious bite from the
lamb, focused on a meal instead of on the gratitude to God
for making both he and the blood of all the world for he -the
gnat- to suck , Isaiah thought.
“Can’t you take time from your blood-sucking to give thanks
to those above you who provided you with those instincts in
the first place? Can not a man thank God for being a man,
by refusing to be merely a man for just one moment; just
long enough to both see what he is, what he was, and what
he may become?” Isaiah asked quietly as MO and Steven
huddled up and went over the data on the TB report that
had just come in. Steven heard murmurs but no content, MO
heard it and tried but failed to process the affective part; he
took it as merely a sentence to decipher and process; the
words digested and cross-referenced and sorted.
MO saw nothing about such assemblage of words that made
him think they were more weighted than any others. He
took them at face value, as prose not poetry, as mere
question not warning.
“As from the center thrice to the utmost pole, ” Isaiah
quoted from Milton as he thought of Milton’s defense of God
to man, and the difference between that Lucifer -the bringer
of light- the mad intelligence of the fallen angel -God’s
favorite- between that and the maddened genius -correct
and yet damned- Ahab.
Isaiah felt sanction.
The difference, Isaiah mused, is in what Milton was
inoculating against, and what Melville had in fact
contracted, thinking maybe he was maybe not so sick after
all; but also not so well . God, what a genius in both men,
Isaiah thought, maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald was right, that no
difference between men, not of race or wealth, nothing so
cleaving, so stark but that which is between the healthy and
the sick . Could such a gap exist within a man, a world, a
god as well?
He looked at Steven and the images, the 3D reproductions
that hovered in the air above the two of them as they
modeled the introduction of vectors and CRISPR to the
SDRTB.
He watched as the putatively healthy man looked at the
pathogen that made others sick, and Isaiah wondered, what
makes a man truly sick? If his mind is so hollowed out -
encephala- so devoid of that part that ruminates on the
force that grants man the right to be awake at all; is a man
who thinks of nothing but eating and sleeping and rutting
and consuming more and more crap, Isaiah thought with
rage now building, dopamine unmetabolized now on his own
inherited monoamine oxidase allele, is that a man at all?
Is he a man or is he mere gnat, are they even the same
species? What is sane and what is sick? Does mind spring
from matter, matter from spirit?
His instinct was to say they were not; that the man with no
introspection and no wonder at the nature of life, not merely
its building blocks -although that mattered too- but its
effluvium -the thing that lifts off the brain- that man could
not be well . To only see half of life, Isaiah thought, was to
be thus unsound .
Isaiah let these words fall on him like rain, as he thought:
Its spray upon the face from battered waves, the
darkness in the mind lit by searching flames, the hand
upon the torch, the eye between, a hundred and one
personalities. All within the tribe inside the forest trees,
a clearing where the camp fire lights from the center to
the antipodes; each man a tribe, each tribe a singularity,
each man expanding and contracting like a breath. A
paired and separate breathing lung, each man five, each
five now the one.
Isaiah looked at his own hand and began to research the
way bacteriophage hunt and kill viruses. The papers from
Nowak, Anderson, et.al showed a natural attrition rate; a
cheater phenomenon; and a 1.3% presence of mutants with
each population. He began to run simulations to ferret out
the ideal rate of speciation but saw that it was too complex
to solve in just the time he had now before he was due to
help MO with the tuberculosis trials.
He let the game theory play out in background and set his
CNS to synthesize it later while he would in tonight’s
hemispheric power-down. He thought of the poem fragment
the inmate had used the other day, and he began running
his complete genome again through the algorithmic games
he had set to run through the night. I’ll let my right
hemisphere see if it could anneal something from all that
mutant data, he thought.
He knelt down -as if to tie the shoe- and pulled the deck MO
had made for him from his inner jacket pocket.
He laid all fifty-two cards of the black deck on the floor and
removed four Jacks; the King and Queen of spades; and held
them in the left hand with fore and thumb pressing upon
them placing tension on the six-card stack like sheets of
geologic shelf. They did not move as he felt the pressure on
his finger pads increase.
He stared at the forty-six. He cleared the eyes with a blink.
He finally breathed.

II. 2019 e.v.

“I wasn’t born King Tone. King Tone was created,” he said.
His jacket was blue and shirt white; glasses blocked and
black like Buddy Holly; hair was high and tight; black and
grey. The camera came in and out.
“Why? Because there was a criminal element to the Kings,”
Vlad asked off-camera.
“Look, I grew up east New York, right? Brooklyn. And you
can’t just walk around as Patchi . So you create a character
to survive it. White folk don’t know, they don’t get it. But
they ain’t no long-term solutions for short-term crisis in a
boy’s life. I had a teacher, I still remember his name, Mr.
Chodish, and he became a great teacher later, but when he
was with me it looked like his ass pretty much still learning
because he was pretty much an asshole. He used to call me
names he wasn’t supposed to. And he was a bully of some
sort. And one day I said, ‘fuck you man, I could be a drug
dealer instead of being embarrassed by your white ass, you
don’t even know me. ’
“Because sometimes I talk like that because back then
that’s how they used to talk, you know? Spic, white, and…
you got all these teachers from Long Island comin’ and they
don’t wanna talk to us and treat us -mistreat us- and so by
third grade I was already like, by third grade I was already
exploring what makes the world turn.
“But they say, don’t sell drugs, but our heroes was drafted
into Vietnam and caught the poison of heroin from the war
and come home to be treated still like spics , and the
Seventy-Fifth precinct cops was slingin’ and,” Tone said as
he was interrupted.
“Did you know Lord Gino?” Vlad asked.
“No, I read about him like you. But, he’s a hero, you know?
And they say oh , we praise criminals , but what about
Trump? Half this country put a criminal into office, right?
And growin ’ up Latino in an Irish neighborhood with a
nickname like Patchi , and you in the street and you got four
sisters, and you know they called me spic and I came home
with black eyes. We had a rough time of it in that
neighborhood. So you create a character, Tone, ok?” he
said.
Vlad said, ok .
“But even though the element was runnin’ numbers, you
know the Italians, and the Seventy-Fifth precinct police sold
drugs, and allowed them into our neighborhoods, so it’s
more complex that you know,” Tone said.
“Oh, for sure, for sure,” Vlad said. “But, not everybody sold,”
he was interrupted at once.
“So what’s the environment? What I’m trying to say is that
in my neighborhoods, in poor neighborhoods, and immigrant
communities, criminal opportunity is offered a lot quicker
than legitimate opportunities.
“So, after they killed our great leaders like Malcolm X and
MLK, that like they did in California. They got mad in
Chicago, ok? Burn this motherfucker down, ain’t nobody
listen , now we’re the bad guys? So that’s where King Tone
is unique, I learned from reading as coming up that
perception is as good as burning a building as making the
city spend money watching me if I’m gonna burn it, right?”
Tone asked as his voice rose and was sharp and had gravel
at bottom edge at top.
“That’s a good way to put it,” Vlad said nervously.
“We had that element of anger because of the time.
Vietnam was the ground zero for these power movements.
But as we’re getting educated by our leaders, we didn’t
have no patience for school. We wanted economy now.
Money now. His environment is burned and broken and it
makes a man of any pride feel inadequate and not able to
achieve in the patient way America teaches. Patience is for
those who already have nice things. Desperate times call for
desperate measures, how can white America not see this?
They can condemn it all they want, I ain’t asking that.
“I’m asking how can they dumb-ass not see this is what will
happen if you raise millions of black and brown kids in
poverty and hopelessness; they will turn to gangs, they will
rob and mob. They will. You can’t reason with a desperate
boy with nothin’ to lose.
“Biker gangs, social club, police, it’s all gangs, man.
Politicians are gangs, media be gangs. We just made our
gang too. And I didn’t know no better so I went for easy
money as a -as a- marker, a placeholder for respect; but it
wasn’t the gang that was dealing, it was me. We take
personal responsibility for that. I needed pride and respect,
but that wasn’t for sale, but drugs was. And money works in
America.
“I lost my values, the pride of my family. You know how
Latin, Spanish family be. They took pride and yet I was
slingin’ dope in my own neighborhood. I’m an avenue guy,
right there off Pitkin Avenue, Euclid, on the main strip. I’m a
strip kid.
“And I’m catching charges and getting sent not just to
Rikers, but the Navy Yard, which nobody knows. And if
you’re a normal person, Rikers should scare the fuck outta
you so you don’t never wanna go back over that bridge. But
if you’re me you say, oh, is this the next level to make them
believe how mad I am? And how hard I’m ready to go? I ain’t
scared of what’s on the other side , see?”
Vlad said he did indeed see.
“People look at paper, at computers, at numbers. People
don’t see flesh and blood. I see blood, I see love; amor de
rei . I see emotions.
“So, I finally catch some stack of bullshit charges that’s
gonna have me in for a minute and get into lock up and I’m
actin’ out and this Latin King come to me and say, ‘here
read this, ’ and I couldn’t. And he say, ‘you mad because
you stupid, huh ?’
“And nobody ever said it like that before,” King Tone said
with that smile with a bit of malice as Vlad laughed quietly.
“But then he gave me the food. He said, you come from
great people . Like Lolita Lebrón , and Oscar Lopez . You
know that man fought in Vietnam for America and yet when
he come home he’s a spic to y’all . Why should we fight for
those that hate us? We fought a war for someone that didn’t
love us.
“America has black and white, some say, it’s simple as black
and white . No,” Tone barked, “there something in the
middle called Puerto Rican and Cubans and Mexicans . And
we tryin’ to find our identity in the city too. Lord Gino united
everyone way back.
“He told me what Puerto Rico was. My parents never had
taught me our history because they was too busy. I had now
found an identity. That shit ain’t like side-dish; identity is
main course, man. People in white America don’t get it.
They belong, but we didn’t know our history and once them
Kings gave it to me I became alive, connected, real.
“And the identity wasn’t the Kings,” he said stretching the
vowel out, “it was the history of our people going back
hundreds of years, to Inca and Aztec and Olmec.
“Some people join the gang because they lost an’ wanna be
founds, some join for protection because they scared in the
jail,” Tone said with a song-like cadence. “I joined because it
was what made me feel right.”
He paused as Vlad tried to ask another question about the
organizational structure, attempting to focus on the things
most useful, most salacious to his audience; easiest to
digest.
“So, in 1986, King Blood,” Vlad began but King Tone just
interrupted and kept down the line of his first days taken
under the wing of a King.
“He taught me to read and he -that man- was patient. He
taught me how to do it in rhythm, Huh? Right? The ABCs
ain’t got no fuckin’ rhythm when you match the song to
what really the sound an A makes. We learn different from
that. We need story and song to really learn. The Kings
taught me that not Mr. Chodish, not the society.
“The gang took the time to make me interested in bein’
smart. This gang leader taught me. That could have been
Mr. Chodish at age nine. In third grade he could have been
that for me but that sucka was mad at somebody. Right? He
probably thought he was gonna be the creative son but
ended up being in the third-grade teaching spics , right? So
he was mad at me,” Antonio Fernandez said with empathy
and hurt in a perfectly shaped ball behind the eyes, behind
the glasses. He smiled again with just a bit more malice. He
revealed the thing most uncomfortable to Vlad and the staff,
the filmmakers and gaffers and staffers: that both sides of
the country were wrought up with anger and pain. And if
Antonio could feel Chodish’s pain, why not America feel his?
“So, at the island -Brooklyn Navy Yard- they took me.
Cleaned me up. Took me in. Told me, ‘you’re Puerto Rican,
you go here, not here, or you’re gonna get hurt. Let’s cut
your hair, get you ready for where you are, for what you in .’
“It’s the little things in life that make you mad. You know
who King Blood made mad? Giuliani . Mr. Giuliani . And they
dropped that man in ADX for ever, with no letters, no love,
no communication. I know niggas that -from when I was in
Terre Haute - I know guys that fought on the opposite side,
terrorists and shit who only got twenty years. They going
home, but King Blood, that’s my nigga ,” he bellowed;
moving and foaming just slightly at the corners, and then
smiling at the end of each angry last word. His face was red.
“And Judge Martin dropped him in Hell for a hundred and
forty-four years. They buried him. Like he was the devil.
“But you know what, I never met the man, never touched
him. But he a man. He loves like other men do. Isn’t that
who Jesus sat with? A bunch of prostitutes and killers and
mothafucken no-goods ? Y’all hypocrites,” Tone trailed off as
Vlad tried to steer it back to details that Tone felt weren’t
germane.
“He was -King Blood- was convicted of, was it nine
murders?” Vlad asked with his high voice even higher, one
octave toward the studio’s rafters.
“You hate a crook when he poor and black and Puerto Rican
, but you love him when he’s white and blonde and rich,”
Tone said again with that anger and square black glasses
like grill-guard and Cheshire grin at the end. But the heat
came back again quickly. “And I’m pissed off about it. You
lucky it ain’t twenty years ago, I be lookin’ to set something
off on fifth avenue and do like the young lords just -you
know?- just loaded with garbage.
“But that what I’m tryin ’ to tell you, to some the Latin Kings
was a curse, a scourge, but to me they saved me when I
was lost. When I was already disgusted with the world. They
were my Boy Scouts, they were my Marines. And if you
don’t understand it then you’re not from where I’m from,”
Tone said with deep bass in his voice and hands made into
fists. He was redolent with rage, apoplectic and angry; his
emotions all out on his sleeves.
Vlad let one moment go by with silence then spoke.
“So, apparently, so King Blood left Chicago because he -I
guess he- killed his girlfriend,” Vlad said with a rise at the
end as if in question. But it was no question.
“Yeah so, Luis Filipe made some mistakes but you leave out
his story and you leave out,” Tone paused; he spoke to
himself on the inside, as he thought of this white man, this
Jew, trying to get him upset. But he had to set it straight
anyway. Do it with patience for the child, pay the rent to the
merchant and move on , he thought. He thought of how his
anger led to doom.
“You talk about King Blood all these men you mention -what
they been charged with or been into- that’s not who they
are. You’re not your greatest mistake. I’m sure you’ve made
mistakes, that ain’t you. Dealing with life in a poverty state.
You know? Nobody makes excuses. If you look at they case
they stood up in court and took it, you know? But what you
ain’t sayin’ , Vlad, is that these are men with blood and
heart and love.
“Imagine sittin’ up in there and Martin -Judge Martin- is
sitting there burying you. Billy the Kid did it, all these
western good -all Bonnie and Clyde- you all make movies
about them, you honor them. There was gangsters in
America before the Latin Kings, folks.
“Look, you know what I teach my youngsters? So, if you
trying to figure out who you are ‘cause you already in, and
you touched everything and you wanna be somebody big
and you go into the grave yard to find out about dead men’s
bones, and talk about the King Tones and Lord Ginos and all
them?
“Don’t disturb the fuckin’ bones!” Antonio was hurt and
angry and yelling again; he leaned forward and felt old but
alive in his rage. His heart hurt as he knew what went out
on the air about his people, the stereotypes that were both
invented and the one’s he’d helped reinforce. He was proud
and ashamed all at once. He knew they had given this man
the right to say what they done. He knew he had to fix the
mistakes he had made; and sticking up for his people was
all that mattered to him now.
“Because you didn’t live through it. You don’t know why who
told who and who killed who and who didn’t. All you know is
what they tell you, in the police report and what the DA
story say. The story is told by the victors not the victims. So
I wanted to tell his story, I wanted to say he’s a man, he
loved on me, he loved like other men. He had heart.
“Luis Filipe ain’t got the bodies on him that these cats had
but he got a hundred and forty-four years, forty-five years
no human contact, forty-five years no phone, forty-five
years no mail. That’s draconian. You don’t even treat traitors
like that. They left no room for repentance, no room for
growth. So come on, y’all fakin’ ,” he said with no smile this
time.
“So, at the time you’re preaching you know, no violence and
no drug dealing, but you yourself are dealing heroin. How do
you explain that?” Vlad asked.
“Well, I’m not gonna explain much. But I’ll answer your
question. I had jobs when I got out and worked for MTV and
other things and had a place to stay. But I’m a convicted
felon, ok? And I’m politically active and so the police are
following me and talking to my landlord and my employers
and I’m getting fired and kicked out of my home for doing
nothing new. Just the cops are making everyone around me
jump ship. Ok? So, I gotta make a living man. I was
powerless folks, no license, on paper. I was poor. All them
people screaming for me, willin’ to die for me, as much as
the movement and anyone else in the Kings, but I’d rather
be broke and do what I knew how to do to take care of
myself, than send one of them to rob a bank, to a trap
house, to ruin them.
“That’s like I told the judge, Reggie, was what I learned was
-like many veterans, our great messengers- that sometimes
the message is bigger than the messenger. And the
message ain’t the bad thing, it’s the man. And sometimes
the man has needs, maybe selfishly or maybe really needs
them. But he still does a bad decision. But I had too much
pride to live in a shelter with my girls, I had to survive on
my own, like a man,” Tone put his finger to his head and
leaned in, “this is real. King Tone asking somebody for
money to help me pay the rent? No.
“See this is the side of the gangster that you don’t wanna
know, that you don’t wanna portray,” he said with that smile
that was now two-thirds malice.
“They say Latin Kings has fifty-thousand members, largest
street gang in America,” Vlad wanted him to confirm.
“What I did didn’t have nothing to do with the Kings. People
join a gang and the first thing they say is the gang made me
do it . That’s the first thing I told the judge, this ain’t got
nothing to do with them cats. So, yeah I made a mistake
and I stood up and took it.
“We lost all our power at Rikers, and it was in the street. I
was proud of that. Why the fuck would I want to run Rikers’
Island when we could run the streets, entrepreneurial,
barbershops, tattoo machines, newspaper, we had it all
poppin’ . That’s the original me. Welfare takes six months, I
didn’t have time. I was too proud to ask.
“You got thirteen years,” Vlad said as he explained that he
cried for Tone’s mother, adding insult to injury reminding a
man that he hurt his family. A Trojan horse of solidarity;
pretending to be empathetic but making it worse.
“I waited until all my co-defendants were sentenced. I
stayed extra time in the hole at MCC so nobody could say
that my plea -could say that my plea- effected their
sentence. I’mma old-timer to this shit. My name ain’t Six-
Nine; this ain’t a phase,” Tone said.
“The documentary said that you were offered a deal to tell
on your enemies -not your friends- but your enemies, but
you said no,” Vlad said.
“Listen the FBI are professional, all my power-groups out
there. They can’t go in no doors that you don’t open. And
they have to make you organized to fit RICO, so I refused to
testify regardless if it enemies or not, because I ain’t help
the FBI hurt the movement,” he said. “And so I did the first
three years in Leavenworth in the hole.
“And now when a motherfucker like you bumps into me in
the Wal-Mart and I wanna smash your fuckin’ face, I
remember myself now. I say, excuse me sir , you know?
Because freedom ain’t overrated.” he said with a genuine
laugh.
“I was talking to Michael Franzese and he said he did three
years in the hole too,” Vlad said. The video cut to that
interview:
“I spent eight years in prison, twenty-nine months and
seven days in the hole. I was in solitary for almost three
years. Yeah, they kept me in lock down. And I gotta tell
ya that’s not easy. Regardless of what anybody say we
 weren’t meant to be solo creatures; we were meant to
be social,” Franzese said as Vlad cut back to Tone.
“Yeah, I saw that. So solitude will show you who you are. You
better know who you are,” Tone said with the voice
crescendo. “They force feed you in the SHU, they send flash
bangs into your cell, they torture you. But it’s a’ight because
they gangsters, right?” he asked sarcastically.
“So, just to get it right, fifty-thousand Latin King’s. Largest
street gang, Latin street gang in America” Vlad pressed.
“There’s a story to all that. You look at the harsh
punishments if you called Lord Gino or King Blood, but
Sammy the Bull gets a deal. If you black or brown in
America they bury you, to show you who you fuckin’ with.
We got numbers because they got numbers,” Tone said.
“What about the structure? When I was talking to Tray Deee
he said the black gangs don’t have much more than a shot
caller or two but nothing like the Mexican gangs,” Vlad said.
“We just took the structure like our enemies. Duplicated it.
We decided to govern ourselves. We got morals, we ain’t
gonna do this, we should have the right to speak our mind;
so on. It’s like the Hell’s Angels or whatever, yeah?
“So when you have a picture in your mind, when we say,
Black Panthers, it gives you a picture of power. That picture
manifests in the mind, man. It -the picture itself- is power.
So when you build structures there a vision in your people’s
mind that they know they ain’t gotta take it. We had
locations were we could sit, there’s Latin Kings here. You’re
not gonna come in here with your little batons and little
badges and beat the fuck out us and that we ain’t gonna
take it. We gon’ fight back.
“You ain’t gonna put us on twenty-three and one. Imagine
like now with all them indictments our elders went through -
like the Young Lords went through with COINTELPRO-
imagine if they left us a road map. That’s what structures
do, they build from generations to generations. Well
America don’t have that. Latin Kings do.
“I was taught and wanna teach. That’s a healthy
community, just like they got the Boy Scouts they grow up
out of and grow up out of college, I was saying you can grow
up out of the Kings and build. I didn’t want the Kings to be a
criminal organization, I wanted them to be a movement.
“But you can’t teach me when I’m hungry, when I’m
oppressed, when I’m high, when I’m lost; when I’m in the
gang.
“Oppression leads to aggression, and that leads to violence.
The adults failed. You -I tell ‘em - you were born somebody,
naked. Without no Jordan’s on your feet. Your mother loved
you like you were the stars in the sky.”

III. 2040 e.v.

The crew were assembled around the railroad tie, the place
where the mizzen had been was splintered and still burred
and only now had a six by six post in the hole and all at
once the swart crew moved away like clouds that dissipate
in the morn.
The Kalenjin came to the mate and his scars caught light in
ways that the thin and long muscles did not; he was shadow
here and relief there, he had edges for seconds as he strode
and had interior depth as he moved within Zeno’s paradox.
“Secure,” Roosto -the Kenyan-city educated but bush-born
runner- said in an English taught to him by the Chinese in
Africa two decades ago when he was just a boy.
Lyngvi nodded and placed his hand on the man’s brailed
shoulder. The whip scars on the Kalenjin ran from sciatic to
clavicle like a Shepard’s hook in threes on each side. It was
done by his own people; for his own good. And he was
strong and had never flinched one time back then or since
they picked up at the Horn.
His attaché motioned to the Bushido to move to taffrail and
stay. They placed left hand on pommel and right hand on
that. Their crocodile armor reflected like sea-caps and made
them seem like they vibrated in entanglement with ronin
Japanese galaxies far away. The sea rose and lowered the
ship as it hit 18-knots in the gulf stream 200-meters across.
The sails dropped as the Albanians pulled on the bowlines
like giftwrapped rolls of canvas with Idromenos and Yoshidas
and blonde and brown drawings of Descartes .
The Bust stood on the quarterdeck -her belly distended
again- and watched the men move like ants in a segmented
line, the sea like crumpled paper, the ship like cared hand of
puppet working for Satan.
“Pile on more sail Mr. McMurphy,” Lyngvi said as the
quartermaster had his M ā ori run up the mast. Lyngvi
watched the horizon empurple and the spray come over the
bowsprit as he spoke softly to his attaché telling him to
gather up two fathoms of oiled rope.
The man dropped his chin and the shoulders made a dip as
the ship too followed the curve of a wave; and Lyngvi
pretended not to notice as he looked up and away. “To the
quartermaster,” Lygnvi said to his Kalenjin as the man ran
backwards along the black deck to relieve the
quartermaster of his command of the islanders in the
riggings now. They spoke a few words and the man felt for
his cat-o-nine-tails with his right hand and then his beard
with the left. His eyes met Lyngvi’s across the nine meters
of deck and both men blinked three times like the wide
wings of bugs or birds with the whole universe in between.
Both men thought of their conversation after the quail and
yellowtail had been pushed away from the table and the
pewter plates had been removed by the cook and his boy.
Pipes were lit, maduros with a retrograde roll came out, the
air became opaque with white smoke and silence; Lyngvi
had just stared at these un-mothered scions certain to flee
from the King to unknown shores if they ever could.
But he knew they were trapped by all manner of things
unable to be explained.
“Jack, this is madness, and you know it. This is me since
yesterday, look here,” the quartermaster said as he
leaned back and let his leather shirt lay open on his
tanned chest and blued tattoos of swallows and stars.
“If it be madness then it’s heaven’s sense,” Lyngvi said
with no rebuke of this large mate for using his Christian
name. He placed his hand on the old Scot’s knee and
held his robusto in his other paw. The Captain spoke in
the echoes of the bulkheads and the first mate clipped a
few words meant as assent.
Lyngvi and the quartermaster kept at it.
“She’s strange about the heart, her eyes go dead as the
smile wakes up. She plots in her head between first bell
and our sup,” he said as he dropped the pipe and bent
the head and the smoke made seraph and caliph from
navel to over his skull.
“She’s going to keep birthing them whether on land or
sea McMurp; and I feel pollen on my lips and wax on
these hands,” Lyngvi said as he bit down on the torpedo
cigar and held the palms -splotchy red and white like a
Templar flag- up and level with his own chest. Grimnir
just stared at him.
“She don’t listen to no one, she speaks only to herself,”
McMurphy said and bit too on his ivory pipe. He saw her
 belly and her hands in his mind, but he cut his sentences
short and blew out smoke as if they were additional
words.
“So her eyes will see red then, her ears will hear the
lash,” Lyngvi said as his nanobots flickered as their
source of power borrowed from the mtDNA shorted
again and was repaired in measurable time; his face
shook like the canvas that was billowed & distended by
wind.
Their reverie of that conversation began and ended together
between each of those three blinks. And the crew watched
as McMurphy walked to the D-rings on the square post and
slipped the rope through each hole as if lacing a boot to go
to war with a friend of a friend of a friend. He refused to look
at her.
While the Wolves couldn’t be killed -due to the Medea gene-
these foreign nationals could. And so, with the Captain in his
berth and the first mate squared away, Lyngvi had agreed to
kill three men for allowing their ship to be done-in by the
gang of skins out of New York the day before last. The first,
a young Scotsmen who had always been on Lyngvi’s nerves
was cut at the throat and dumped overboard. The second -
the Norwegian - was in the noose out over the waves with
all the blood draining from his face.
Three crewmen had hoisted the man to the yardarm and he
could not breath; his blood had tried to oxygenate from the
coder he had had before the EMP, but it failed as Lyngvi
interrupted its battery. The punishment had begun. The man
squirmed and evacuated and turned red about the forehead
and jaw. His eyes bugged out and a thin line of urine ran
from his heel to the deck as the Kalenjin swung the boom
out over the sea before threading a clevis pin and talking to
the Irishman at the helm.
Next would be the post.
The Bust stared at the six-by-six and saw Jack Four walk to it
the same height as her Blax and the same width as him
when he carried her; the same hairline at all but the prow,
the widow’s peak gone from Blax was still there on Lyngvi
like a bowsprit, and his face callow as if washed by the
waves.
She saw Blax carried away. But she didn’t see what was
coming next at all.
 35. He May Conceal a King in His Hand
Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of
self-defense
Man’s Search for Meaning [Frankl, Victor]

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese; and the law can be gamed with a
good lawyer. These people will be named by name, poets and painter are free,
liberi poetae et pictores , and there are moral imperatives that come with such
freedom. First ethical rule: If you see a fraud and do not say fraud, you are a
fraud
Antifragile; things that gain from disorder [Taleb, Nassim]

People demonstrate their sense of place when they apply their moral and
aesthetic discernment to sites and locations. Other than the all important eye,
the world is known through senses of hearing, smell, taste, and touch. These
senses, unlike the visual, require close contact and long association with the
environment
Topophilia [Tuan, Yi-Fu]

I. 2037 e.v.
“The Hell’s Angels had an ethos of total retaliation,” he said.
He poured a drink.
He then asked, “you ever read Victor Frankl?”
“No,” Jack One said. His PGC -at one second past 2228hrs-
ran a line from the synaxaria of the Eastern Orthodox
prayers; his mind saw letters only not words; like blinking
caused mere staccato of breaks in light upon the eyes; like
code:
Eden’s locked gates the Thief has opened wide, by
putting in the key: Remember me.
He blinked and thought of other things as Blax spoke to him.
Moths snapped in front of the stars up high and the agogic
fire below. The peat of the Laphroig held just below the
noses and above the glasses of each man.
“Well, he’s a few chapters into his narrative and he
mentions two things a few pages apart that for whatever
reason fuse -kinda lace- together in my mind. And I can’t
say if it is reasonable or fair or even worth saying aloud, but
this is what I thought,” Blax said and took a breath from the
air above the square glass and then a slug of whisky as he
closed the eyes. The fire felt warm on one side of face, the
left foot -booted and wide apart- rest against the London
glass half full of that Scottish whisky and half jammed with
Colorado air.
“First, he mentions that those who escape the camps, the
survivors, have a very hard time of it after the war.
“Many commit suicide and most -if not all- feel terrible
about their behavior while in the camp, and they say that
this is something that most people just will not accept. It’s a
thing where the person who never was in the camp will not
listen to the man who was in the camp, because, the man
who was in the camp keeps saying things that make the
man who never was in the camp feel strange and
uncomfortable.
“This is mankind, he does not -almost ninety-nine percent of
men- do not want to hear the truth of what went on in that
situation, and it seems to me to be linked back to the other
thing Frankl mentioned: how desperate they all were to live.
That survival, he said of it, he called it the quote, constant
necessity of concentrating on staying alive ,” Blax said and
took another deep pull from the flat and straight edge of
hard glass and conforming amber.
He swallowed and felt no shudder.
“He mentioned the dream life next, but I want to ruminate
on this paradox first. He says they concentrated on staying
alive, and that it was this that made them have quote,
primitive inner lives . I’m paraphrasing that one, but the
point is that they knew they had reached some inner
bottom, where the need for focus on mere survival reduced
them to some core, and that core was obviously real, it was
the most real part of them, as all the apparent surfaces had
been melted away if I can borrow some Blake to describe it.
“Anyway, some survived the camps, their vigilance in this
regard works, in tandem with luck of course, and they
manage to grasp what all had reached for. And when they
have it, when they live and escape the lager , that is Primo
Levi’s word for it, when they escape the death camps, they
are not at all happy, not at all satisfied, not at all certain
that they had focused on the right things at all.
“And, in the end what they all seem to say is that the only
thing good to come from their survival is the ability they
were afforded to tell others of this Hell they had escaped.
That is it. All else is vanity and stupidity and disgusting
nothingness.
“They all -to a man- felt that life was no longer worth living
once they had reached the other side, it was in fact only the
monomaniacal reaching that was meaningful, while in the
camps. Searching, reaching for survival, was key, but not
the thing itself. For after they had survived they merely -in
their estimation- they had just reached another level of Hell.
“And many retreated into self-flagellation or suicide,” he
said as he took a gulp and watched the fire for a second.
“They tortured themselves with guilt and recriminations for
their selfish and evil behavior all done in the name of
survival, or they ended it all with self-annihilation. That
should say something even worse than the surface horrors
of what people ignore. It says that the lust for mere survival
that we all have is not a value that should be placed on top.
It says there are fates worse than death, and they are -these
fates are- things we choose everyday. We ignore honor and
duty and friendship and loyalty and dignity all for survival
each day, but, we are never faced with the horrors of these
decisions because our world -our time on earth- is so much
less extreme than the Nazi camps.
“But, and we know this, we know when the people who
escape tell us what they did to survive, the way they stole
from fellow prisoners, cheated and lied and genuflected to
unworthy capos or Nazi officials, ingratiating themselves
and sucking up to the powerful and scheming to scramble to
the top of some pile of bodies, pressing one’s fellow Jew or
fellow man down to be crushed by the machine you barely
survive yourself, when these tales are told we know that we
do the exact same things under even less extreme and
austere and primitive conditions. That is why we won’t
listen, because we know we’re even less principled, even
less ambivalent, even less aware of how little we care for
our fellow man.
“We know that we sell out our own brother for less, merely
to avoid the hassle of his one request in forty years, how we
sell out our husband -like my sister-in-law does- and makes
sure he never lives his dream, so that she may never be
poor. She sees money as superior to her own husband’s
inner life, his own soul. This’s all of us and we know it, and
the more we deny it -the angrier we get at this assertion-
the more true it is.
“The decent and noble are dead,” he said and picked up the
bottle so that he may tilt its contents into his glass. He
uncorked it and poured it and watched the copper sea in the
cylinder with no ship just sloshing until he stopped pouring
his drink.
“And these decent were dead,” he said as he placed the
bottle at his flank, “in the camps early because they had
honor and nobility and the wisdom to know that death was
not worse than losing one’s soul. The truly wise never made
it out to tell their tales of the camps. And the one’s who did
survive -and offered their wisdom- knew they were frauds,
they said it. And they killed themselves under the weight of
this fact.
“They knew that the Jews and gypsies they saw die were the
real heroes, the one’s with real depth and soul and wisdom.
These -the dead- they need not make it to the other side of
the camp to know what would be lost in a fight such as that.
“And I say this with complete solidarity with Frankl and Levi
and others who survived and told their tales, I do not
condemn them any more harshly than they condemn
themselves. That must be clear.
“I’m saying that man, by design, is no good. He is shallow
and designed to survive at the cost to his soul and it takes
something more, something approaching divinity to be
willing to die before dishonor. And this trait exists but it is
like the first light to go out, and all man remembers is when
the last candle goes out, not the first. But I think of those
that went first, the truly noble who said, no fucking way to
the Nazis, no way. The ones who said, you can kill me, and
all my people, but I will not kiss your ass.
“That’s the Jew I wanna meet. That’s the man I want on my
side. And those men are forgotten, they are undifferentiated
masses in the mind of history while the cowards and craven
and solipsistic and demonic who lived get a singular place in
our minds and souls. We remember the Levis and Frankls as
men, as individuals, when it’s they that should be
unremembered so that the noble ones who died early and
often be exhumed, named, given identities.
“I see the same happening here,” he said and didn’t mean
there at Lot 45 . He meant everywhere else. He stared at
the sky but it was hazy.
“Real men, the men who refuses to sell out for money or
status or stupid conformity, die, are imprisoned, are
forgotten. And the cowardly among us get elevated as
rebels when they are no such thing. Look at how billionaires
scrape and kneel and beg for forgiveness and weep and
humiliate themselves when the public turns on them. How
many men who have fuck you money, yet lack the
vocabulary to say fuck you ? I can name on one hand the
men who have enough money to survive a thousand more
years who also standing up for what is right in the face of
public opinion.
“And the irony is the working class have the most power, the
most.
“We have no money but that just means we have less to
lose, and thus are the most free. But, we don’t use it, we
still hedge and hold our tongues and worry about offending
and alienating and being unliked. It’s only the worst, the
psychopaths who don’t care, and they still pretend to care,
by pretending to be charming and sociable.
“No, it’s one in a million who has feelings, and feels the pain
of exile, but does it anyway.
“It’s one in a million who says, I don’t like being hated, but it
beats dong evil shit I hate just to be liked . If I must choose
between being liked and doing what’s right, then I choose
the right thing. Everyone thinks that’s them, but it ain’t. Not
one man in one-million has that trait; those ingredients, and
that recipe in their balls.
“And I only have it half the time, maybe even less. I’m as
weak and cowardly as the rest. It’s an incessant struggle to
stand against the waves of society, to stand up against all
their evil and stupid and banal bullshit.
“And every man breaks down, and submits eventually, or he
dies from their blows. He dies from the machine’s
retribution for his character. He wears down or he dies,
those are his choices. And all I can say is that Frankl’s
account haunts me, because I know that if I do sell out, and
I do survive, I know I will be horrified to see what is on the
other side. I know that the reward for survival is Hell.
“And I lecture myself with this wisdom and I hope I heed it:
there are fates worse than death . Man’s soul is more
important than his body. And man must live that way or he
will pay the price. Only the stupid think they can get away
with being selfish and shallow and cowardly and not pay a
price much harsher than the death that comes from
standing up to evil,” Blax said and let his lungs fill and expel
heavily as if to clear any feral words that had hitchhiked into
his lungs. He purged and the fire rose a little in the fireplace
and the wind here at elevation picked up and absorbed his
numina.
“Do you think this society is evil, truly evil?” Jack One asked.
“I do. And I know it’s not as evil as Nazi Germany or Soviet
Russia; I know it’s not that. I feel embarrassed to even
compare them; as obviously the West is superior to those
regimes. I’m not like the fatuous and ungrateful Leftists who
think they are oppressed. I’m arguing something more
subtle. And its this: each man has his own way to calibrate
what he will and will not tolerate.
“And everyone focuses on the society that has reached its
nadir, its bottom in the gory and grim camps. But, what
about all the little lies, the little corruptions, the little winks
and nods to the unjust that went on in the years that led to
the smoke rising from the stacks of the crematoriums? What
about those little and seemingly innocuous things?
“Isn’t that what the Left says, that we are marching toward
Nazi Germany?” Jack Four asked.
“They say it, but they are the one’s marching us there. They
are the ones subsuming the individual under the rubric of
race and gender and social status; they are the ones
smashing each of us together under the headings of groups.
It’s the Left that are the fascists, it’s they that are the threat
to the individual. Look how they collectively assign status,
it’s white-people this and black folks that, it’s trans-
community -community, imagine that- a community that is
supposed to all think and feel and act as one. The Left are
the one’s who have dispensed with the individual, and it’s
the Right -some parts of it anyway- who are standing up for
each man, each person, as an individual.
“But the Left wants collective punishment for whites, and for
men, and for straights. Collective status is totalitarian, and it
is the Left pushing that agenda. I am saying that if we allow
it, if we allow the Left to insinuate their fascist ideology into
the body politic then the death camps are inevitable and
close.
“And sure, then we can all scramble to the top of the pile of
bodies and a few of us will survive to tell our tales of woe.
But, what about now, right now, when we still have power,
when we haven’t been disarmed of our weapons or our
minds? Now is the time to fight this shit, and show we care
more about what is right than our fucking reputations or our
jobs or our money,” he said.
“The drive for homeostasis is strong,” Jack One said.
“It is, and that is why it is even more important that it be
overcome,” Blax said and sipped his Glenlivet , “and I’ll go
one further. The Hell’s Angels had an ethic of Total
Retaliation, a disproportionate response to any infraction
against them. And this is where groups are needed and
useful; essential.
“When a man is an individual to his enemy, he can afford to
fight as that individual, but when the enemy lumps that
individual into a group, then the man -the lone man- he
better look around at whoever else is in this so-called group.
And he better form a line with those other men and stand as
one thing until the enemy is defeated. Then, a man can go
back to being an individual. But, this cannot be pushed too
far, beyond its natural, or organic boundaries. The Indians,
the American Indian Movement, felt no solidarity with the
blacks, at all. When talking to Hunter Thompson, the AIM
guys, they -like all groups on the planet- said they didn’t
want nothin’ to do with blacks.
“They are unwelcome in all other clans.
“I personally cannot stand most white folks, most men, most
heterosexuals, and certainly most conservatives. But, it’s a
natural alignment for now. It is. And so I stand shoulder to
shoulder with them. But I feel a natural disgust for them all.
However, most people find comfort in their own kind.
“This is just a fact of nature and no amount of wish-fantasy
can cure it. So, we have a natural affinity, a valence toward
other folks of our general race, and creed. It requires no
stress or strain to link up with white men, whereas to stand
in solidarity with blacks requires huge expenditures of
energy and suspension of mistrust and they feel the same
about you and they almost always betray you in the end,
and if they don’t then you will betray them,” he said with a
contemptuous snort.
“So, while I admit that some blacks can be decent people,
it’s too risky to separate the wheat from the chaff. We don’t
have the metabolic reserves to sort that shit in a time of
war.
“Races, and religions and cultures are natural boundaries
like rivers and mountains and the edge of a forest; and they
can be overcome, you know if you’re Hannibal in the
Carpathians , or Alexander at the Indus , Caesar at the
Rhine , you can do it. But who among us can overcome the
barriers of race? One in a billion? But, why should anyone
even try when the enemy is out there hunting everyone
down? It’s just universal war all the goddamn time. It’s like,
why bother crossing the mountains or rivers when your
enemy is right in your face? In some abstract way can we
befriend other races or religions or peoples? Yes, but in the
real world, we have no such luxury.
“People pretend we have choices, agency, that they can
choose to not be racist. Shit, all that is for the salon.
“Because as soon as things get rough, that will be the first
thing to go. One side or the other will gang up and exclude
the other race. It’s why prison is all race based, because
prison is war. It’s a metaphor for war, for ancient ways,
feudal times. People ought to see that one smart and decent
and liberal guy in prison ain’t gonna change the culture or
the pressures or the reality that people are trapped fighting
for limited resources in a hostile environment with grudges
going back generations.
“We are fighting for the individual, and frankly, very few
blacks or Muslims or Russians or Chinese even believe in the
individual at all. Think of the way blacks place so much
emphasis on their cousins. Dugin -the shamanic advisor to
Putin- explicitly said his people were against the individual
and the freewill of the West. He says the East -the Russian-
mindset is one of religion, tradition, instinct; what Heidegger
called Dasein , a kind of living in the moment but not as the
western version of the paccekabuddha but like a drone in an
enlightened hive. An enlightened fascism, sorta . They all
think of themselves as a member of a group as essential to
their being. And that shit is powerful. And it’s more natural
than our odd obsession with the individual. People don’t
even understand how strange it is for a eusocial species to
have individualism when all other eusocial species live in
hives.
“John McWhorter explained it quite well in his book,” Blax
said as he drank and the Jacks had his book load onto their
PGCs.
“He said that blacks always take the side of other blacks no
matter how awful the behavior. They defended OJ when he
murdered two whites; they danced in the streets. They
cannot be trusted to be fair or objective. I saw it first hand
when I had what I thought were black friends, back in my
liberal days,” Blax said with a smirk.
“You were a liberal?” Jack Two asked incredulously.
“I can see it,” Jack One said with a grin as Jack Four smiled
too and turned toward the fire.
“Yeah, I was, and as Jack points out,” he nodded to Jack
One, “I still have some of it in me. It’s like a vestigial organ
that doesn’t work but still takes up space.” They all laughed
and drank and shook their heads.
“I have some sympathy for any man who is mistreated, I do.
And that is why I can look at the history of America and see
that we did fuck with the Iranians and Guatemalans in 1954
and the blacks of the civil rights movement while Hoover
was in, shit he was ,” he leaned on the word, “the FBI. I can
read history of COINTELPRO and agree that the black and
brown and poor of the third world were murdered,
oppressed and maligned. I see it, unlike most conservatives
who just deny it, and refuse to read or listen to the other
side.
“See, I listen and I agree than they were mistreated. What
makes me no longer a liberal, no longer a Leftist, is that I
think those who were oppressed deserved it; because they
were going to turn on us the first chance they got. It’s self-
defense,” Blax said as Jack Four kept silent but thought of
the strange stories he dreamed of. The way the Māori said
that the white men that were on the land of the long white
cloud when they arrived had said that they fled the Eurasian
steppe, the Indus , because they had been overrun by black-
headed hordes.
“Che Guevara advocated for nuclear war on us,” Blax
continued, “the Black Panthers bragged of raping white
women. Eldridge Cleaver personally bragged about it as a
way to get even with whitey . The Marxists will murder us all
if they ever get power and the CIA -as evil and black
hearted as they are- knew that, and they did dirty shit to
prevent even dirtier shit from happening to the rest of us.
That is why nobody wants me around, because I admit that
the truth is this: all sides are right and wrong all at once.
People are whack.
“The Right denies that anything bad was ever done to the
poor or the oppressed, and the Left denies that western
civilization has the right to defend itself. I say we do bad shit
for the right reason, and until the Left stops threatening us
with their identity politics and Marxist crap, we will continue
to defend western culture by any means necessary. Period.
Full stop.” Blax said and they wrestled -each to a larger or
lesser degree- with the idea of fusing his first half of speech,
with this part.
It was not a natural fit , Jack Four thought, as Blax had said
death was not the worst of fates, but here he was defending
doing awful shit merely to stay alive . Or keeping the west
alive , Jack amended, anyway, willingness to sell out to
merely keep the West breathing.
Blax could feel their confusion. The oddness of his own
ideas was revealed by the silence.
“And I know it seems contradictory, so let me explain. The
Left is humiliating us right now, they are making it wrong
and embarrassing to be white and male, and of broad
shoulder. That is why we fight.
“It is not for mere survival. It is for dignity. But, if they ever
take over and all hope is lost, then we will die to maintain
our dignity. But now we must fight for dignity from a position
of strength, which means, it is not undignified to extirpate
your enemy while you can. It is only undignified to submit to
them, to kiss their ass, to capitulate. No. We fight, and the
Jews should have fought harder. They lost their dignity by
kissing Nazi ass to survive; by turning on each other to
survive. They fought amongst themselves not against the
enemy. That is what we will never do. Savvy?”
The moths landed on the container in the shadows of the
square tubing and the fire popped and the logs settled a bit.
“I got that twenty minutes ago,” Jack One said with a
mocking tone. They all threw the remnants of the spirits in
their glasses at him, drops of 18-year-old single malt landing
on him in waves from each cardinal direction, as he smiled
at their hazing of him for his arrogance. Jack three called
him a, dick . They all could see what was both right and
abrading in their own genome, in Jack One, he was the best
and worst of them all. He was a know-it-all who was
sometimes right; and who never seemed to know it when he
was wrong.
“A country is a group, a natural one usually. The Japanese
and most Asians get that, but the west is predicated on an
idea , which means anyone can join. It makes us vulnerable
to Trojan Horses, you know?” Jack Four said as he stood; and
they all felt uneasy at the wisdom of that.
“True. Very true. Which is why sometimes we have to close
ranks and purge. Think of a country as a body. A body is a
natural bounded thing. We are really just a collection of
billion -trillions- of cells, individual neurons, right? But, those
individual genes and cells and neurons must work toward
the benefit of the whole, or the whole dies.
“Now, some genes are selfish, all genes maybe, in that they
just function to get themselves copied and passed on. But,
in the interim, in the years between birth and reproduction,
they manifest morphology. This is when they build and
maintain the body, this is when they must serve a function
beyond that second of gene transfer. Sure, all that matters
in some abstract way is the one sperm -constituted of part
of the man’s genome via the meiosis process- the one
sperm reaches and fertilizes the egg. But, in real life, the
genes must do all manner of shit to make that even
possible.
“There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip,” Jack
Three said as he rose to pour more scotch into his glass,
then like the hand of an analog watch he moved from man
to man re-filling their own glass.
“The genes must work together,” Blax continued as he
raised his hand to wave off a refill from Jack, “with other
genes and make all kinds of complex tissue and organs and
brains capable of ideas and ideals. If some cells are a
problem, they are ordered to sacrifice themselves for the
whole, this is apoptosis right,” he asked as they all nodded,
“and sometimes that cell ignores that call, that order to
submit, and that is called cancer . The refusal to commit
seppuku , apoptosis, is cancer; literally.
“And the body often takes care of the incipient, cancerous
growth itself. But sometimes it spreads and kills the host.
Now, a society is no different, it is made up of millions of
individuals,” Blax said as Jack chimed in.
“Billions in China,” Jack Four said.
“Yup, and those individual cells, people, must work together,
even though their own individual lives are just like each
gene in the body: i.e., focused on self-propagation. Right?
Each man is focused on his own shit, his own job and wife
and kids, just like each gene in a human or animal body is
ultimately focused on its own propagation.
“But, in both environs, that individual cell or man must work
with others to keep the body or the tribe or nation healthy
long enough that the individual itself can thrive. I mean,
genes that code for long life, and not just for a body that is
able to get a woman pregnant, but -rather- code that body
to be around long enough to care for that kid, and maybe
long enough to care for that kid’s kid -your grandchild-
would be better than a gene focused purely on
impregnating as many as possible by age sixteen and then
dying. Theoretically anyway.
“I mean, technically both strategies can work, but, it seems
to me that due to the long period of human development,
because children take so long to get on their feet so-to-
speak, that a strategy of longevity is more likely to pass on
the genes that code for longevity. I’m saying those genes
work sixty-percent of the time more than short term gene
propagation strategies, let’s say. Well, over time, that
means ninety-nine-percent of mankind now has genes for
survival to age eighty, and not a mere sixteen. Even though
technically, a boy between fourteen and sixteen could get a
hundred women pregnant before he dies of leukemia or self-
destruction of one kind or another.
“I’m merely saying that even a slight advantage of long-
term survival can -after thousands of years- produce a
ninety-nine to one ratio of long-term bodies to short-term
ones as the norm. But we know not all species are like this.
A mosquito,” Blax said, as one landed on his arm and he
slapped it, “a mosquito lives a few days, and yet he
impregnates a female and she has ten thousand offspring.
Their strategy is short-term.”
“Real short term for that one,” Jack One said -nodding at
Blax’s arm- and they smiled as Blax rubbed his forefinger
and thumb together to let the dead bug roll off him and into
the night.
“But my point is that it isn’t obvious that long lives are
inherently good. Plenty of species have short-term
strategies, so these things must be analyzed,” Blax said as
he drank in another gulp. He felt nothing; not even a buzz.
Jack Four thought of cicada, and how they live long -
seventeen years- but only mate for a day. They spend
ninety-nine-percent of their lives underground, waiting,
ruminating, not interacting at all. Then all in one burst of
reverie and congress, they mate and then die. That was the
strangest strategy of them all , he thought. And then Jack
thought -as he stared at Blax, backlit by the fire- that he
saw some hybrid of that in his Lt.
“Well, societies are as fragile, and a short-term strategy of
corruption and graft and getting what you need, right? Well,
that strategy, the philosophy of the solipsist, the guy who
takes and takes from his culture without ever giving
anything back, is a strategy that can work for his genes, for
him.
“But, it corrodes the overall health of the society itself, and
eventually, his kids or grandkids are going to have to live in
the society he has wrought with his selfish, psychopathic
behavior. And this is not good for his genes over let’s say
five hundred years. So even from a selfish POV, the man
who undermines his culture is undermining himself. Just like
the cancer gene who kills the host, the body it’s within,
makes it harder for that very gene to propagate, which is
why childhood cancer is rare and mostly cancer happens
after fifty, once you’ve sired and raised the kids to maturity.
“So, a society filled with selfish and nihilist people who are
robbing and raping and scamming, cheating the system and
trying to tear it all down, are ignoring the body’s call for
apoptosis. These people are tantamount to cancer. These
are your criminals and conmen and corporate predators and
selfish elites who undermine the national body, America or
the west writ large , just to make a quick buck in league
with China, for example.
“See, we are in a two-front war, on one hand we have the
poor and bourgeois Leftists and black-asshole-matter, who
are a tumor on the body of America, and they must be
biopsied and removed, no doubt. But, we have a larger
melanoma, spread to the lymph nodes, in a corporate class
and political elite that is destroying not one organ, like a
liver or prostate like the Leftists scum are. We have CEOs
and Senators who are selling out the whole body, the entire
corpus of the west, to China, which if left untreated will kill
us in ten years.
“The Leftists are one thing, but the corporate and Hollywood
and political elites are much, much more dangerous. They
are basically -if the analogy holds- removing our entire
immune system and dropping our guard, stripping ourselves
naked, disarming and bending over to let another culture,
another man, rape and murder us, because that man has
paid out a huge amount of cash up front for this right.
“That is money the body, the man, the victim will never get
to spend, but he is so myopic and greedy and selfish that he
doesn’t care. It’s like the gene that doesn’t care it’s killing
the host, as long as it gets to grow and grow and grow and
aggrandize itself.
“Our entire political and cultural elites have decided that the
body of America, the nation, is not a real thing. They have
decided, like selfish genes, like cancerous cells, like
psychopathic and homicidal maniacs that their short-term
gains are more important than the long-term strategy of
corporeal health.
“It’s one strategy, and it’s not all wrong. But, the body has a
right to fight back. Just as the human or animal body has a
right to command apoptosis to a cell that is getting too big
for its britches, and a right to marshal its immune system to
thwart a carcinoma cell, the body politic -the nation- has a
right to put down individuals who are killing the nation,
either slowly or quickly.
“The CIA, the FBI, the local cop on the beat has a right to
dispatch anti-social criminals and grifters who are
undermining America to get personally wealthy at the
expense of our overall health. But, the FBI itself is
compromised, it is staffed with Leftists and Chinese spies
and like an immune system that is a failure, it must be
augmented with anti-biotics to help out.
“We are those anti-biotics,” he finally said; getting to the
point they all had been waiting on.
“We are going to help a compromised immune system that
cannot keep up with the bacteria that is overtaking the
body. Now, our methods are odd, strange, unconventional. I
admit.
“But, Isaiah has a plan, and if we do our jobs, we will save
the Republic. And it will be a healthier, stronger, more
robust body when this is all over. Just like the broken bone is
stronger, and the immune systems gains from the pathogen
it defeats, a dirty world makes for a stronger immune
system, right? We will be stronger once we’ve purged all
these psychopaths both from the lower classes and upper
classes.
“This nation used to have CEOs loyal to it, the way Jack Ma
is loyal to China today. This nation used to have a middle
class that cared about normative values and stood up for
the flag and sexual modesty and men having good blue-
collar jobs. They knew that these were the foundations to
healthy marriages and healthy marriages as essential to
healthy kids and healthy kids as the sine qua non of a
healthy culture; they saw the ouroboros asp in their dreams.
They couldn’t articulate it, most people can barely write
their name, but they could live it and feel it and the culture
reinforced it with its mythos; its religion, its patriotism.
“Now so-called conservatives merely lament their country
falling apart and do nothing to stop it. They refuse to stand
up for America, as long as they -like my fatuous sister-in-
law- are themselves not poor. They get theirs, and that is all
they care about. Modern conservatives are all talk. All talk.
“And frankly, they are liberals at heart. They teach their kids
the same shit as liberals do. They teach their kids to value
things and money and status and selfish pursuits over the
health of the nation and its ancient values. Parents accept
daughters who have several boyfriends before marriage, or
sons who never learn to be useful in any way. They allow
their sons to be physically weak, timid, feminine.
“It’s a metaphor, you see? The intellect is like the individual,
it is one part of the whole. One cannot ignore the body and
only feed the brain, just as one cannot focus only on
themselves and ignore their community or nation or people.
The human body is a country! It must be tended to,
nourished, strengthened just like the people, the proletariat
must be treated justly and not just the head of the country,
the brains -so-to-speak- of the elites who all get rich and let
the body politic, the middle of the country rot.
“And there are cultures like the Chinese and Muslims and
Russians who are loyal to the whole, and they will kick our
asses. Why? Because they feed the body and the brain, they
focus on the whole, and like a man who has developed his
martial talents, his nutrition, his muscles, his immune
system, his philosophy, his ability to think in metaphors, his
strategy, his awareness of his environment, he is superior to
the man -his rival- who has focused purely on his logical
brain and making money.
“The guy with a broader development of body, mind and
soul will crush the guy who is weak and skinny -or fat- and
has never been in a fight in his life. The geek thinks all of
life is money and being clever, solving problems like word
games; he thinks that is real life. And the real man can walk
into his house and beat each of these geeks to death with
one punch and walk away with all that they once had. That
is real life. Ballistic violence can trump decades of being
clever in one second.
“China is not just focused on money and short-term status.
They are in what is called the a hundred-year marathon,
and, what they call, one belt, one road . They are allowing
us to take their money in the short-term, so they can steal
our technology and Intellectual Property and use it to
dominate us in the next decade or so. They are like the guy
doing push-ups and weapons training in relative poverty
versus the fat guy -the US- with paid body guards. And
Russia,” Blax said and just shook the head.
“Do you think your brother, his family I mean, is,” Jack One
asked, “is in any danger?”
“I do, I think his relationship to me is a problem; if and when
the Chinese or that goddamn Governor of ours finds out who
I am or who he is, and he is in no position to protect his
family,” he said, not completing the sentence.
“Hey Blax,” Jack Three said with a grin that looked in danger
of growing so large -so quickly- it may break his face.
“What?” Blax said roughly; hating any change of subject.
“I just got the dates downloaded from the Christie’s internal
database; they sent shipping notices to the pace on Imlay
street.”
“Oh, their storage facility, right, in Brooklyn,” Blax said with
less pique; and shook his head forgiving the interruption
now.
“Dude, send me the specs of the building, and their security
maintenance, no, belay that, send me their installer data.
The portal should have it,” Jack One said curtly.
“It does, I just DMd you it all,” Jack Three said as he and Jack
Two shook hands from their seats.
“Check on Coast Guard schedules for those dates; it is New
York and a lot more law enforcement and military than
Bordeaux or fucking Greece,” Blax said with a dismissive
laugh.
“Got it LT,” Jack Three said. “Man the marbles were
amazing, probably better than this objectively, but, you’re
never going to believe what they’ve got LT.”
“Oh, yes, I will,” he said as the nerves rose and the chest
felt tight; his heartburn came on and the muscles at the
right rib at bottom cramped.
With Christies being London based it would gain an interest
from the British too , he thought. The second shoe drop to
the British museum’s anger over the Marbles. It was perfect,
and it would be too easy. The goddamn storage facility
backed up right to the Buttermilk Channel, it had its own
access two blocks to the sea channel and an Atlantic basin
harbor to boot. He shook his head at how awful it all was,
but, he thought, at least this one doesn’t involve pure
vandalism . But as soon as he thought it, he knew that it
would; somehow it would.
The storage unit would not just have the items upcoming
the next auction, they would contain thousands of pieces of
collectible art, some of the best art in private hands in the
world. That red Christie’s flag that flapped out front of Van
Brunt street was like a cape to Isaiah’s angriest bulls.
These artifacts will touch down and be kept safe , he
thought, and he kept repeating that like a mother sings to
her child as apotropaic, as communique to that which
cannot yet discern language, to that pre-lingual moment of
man that can feel the ancient waves of God’s dark and
ebullient song.
II. 2029 e.v.
“I just don’t wanna talk to them bombers,” inmate
14067074 said.
Warden Matevousian nodded the head and told him that
Judge Martin had more control than even he did as
administrator of ADX.
“The BOP usually has command, but in your case Mr.
Felipe,” the Warden said, “the Judge has maintained control.
And I’m not inclined to buck him over jurisdiction. I’m afraid
you’re in a position of having zero leverage. None. And so I
offer you the opportunity to speak with Mr. Kaczynski and
Mr. Nichols.”
“What abut Guzman, El Chapo , and,” inmate 14067074
asked.
“The judge has disallowed it,” the Warden said.
“Based on what?” the inmate’s attorney -finally speaking
up- asked.
The warden paused, because the answer needed finesse .
“Association with gangs,” Matevousian said.
“Because they Mexican,” inmate 14067074 said to his
lawyer.
“Gangs break down along racial or ethnic lines I’m afraid.
That’s not the reason you can’t talk to them, it’s just a
coincidence,” the Warden said.
“Yeah, ok, Warden. But next year is my last on Martin’s
watch and that means I get visitors, and letters and,”
inmate 14067074 began to make a list.
“At BOP discretion, yes. Which I why I’m having this meeting
with you now. In a hundred and forty-four days your
restricted forty-five years are up and you will begin serving
the last part of your life sentence.”
“I’m sixty-eight years old, Warden,” Luis Felipe said.
“Yes.”
“You know, where I come from is Cuba, I was part of the
Marialitos . Castro was smart, he unloaded us like a virus
onto America,” he said as his lawyer put his hand out as if
to brake, caution, slow his client down.
“Naw, man. Imma have my say. By 1986 I had to flee
Chicago because the cops were beatin ’ on us bad. Anyway,
I shot my girl. But I didn’t form the Latin Kings in New York
until I had to deal with the Five Percent Nation, a negrito
gang in NYC. Respect was the first last and center to the
reason for it. The prisons of the island were no joke.
“We couldn’t even use the phones or make it without gettin’
killed or catching new charges for fightin ’ back. But when I
formed the NYC Kings we had power that kept shit calm;
less violent because people backed off of us. Charlie Rock
was my hitter, and Chico my primeira coroa , and the lock-
up doubled in population as Giuliani is goin’ wild. And when
the Muslims attacked us in yard-two we fought back and
then the cops did exactly what Fidel did, they sent us all
over New York, split us up. And like a bug we spread,” he
said as the Warden saw the eyes dark, the hair grey, the
face brown like an old map.
Matevousian wrote down a few things on his yellow note
pad.
“By eighty-nine I was back on the streets of New York and
the gang had been trained in lock-up and released on the
streets for three years before I got out; we had hundreds
rollin’ now. I stole a car right away and got busted back. But,
I gained my people, by losing my street life. You ain’t gotta
die to be a hero, just be a good teacher. You guys think we
want freedom because you want freedom. But you have
good lives on the outside; our lives ain’t much better
outside.
“So we focus on reputation, status gained our way. You all
gain it by money and houses and cocktail parties or being
elected or being a cop; rescuing kittens from a tree. But we
gain it by being about it, which means jail is like a
promotion, that promotion you always wanted. You think
that’s a front; it ain’t. We believe it. The mainline is a boost
up, lock-up is our corner office on the top floor.
“Mandela, Oscar, soldiers at Anderson, the Cuban Five -La
Red Avispa - for espionage, heroes at home in Cuba, heads
held high. They ain’t got no shame. If you really love your
people you’ll die for them, and we see ourselves as soldiers
not criminals. And our hearts swell, you can’t dissuade that.
You can’t threaten us with jail, it’s where all soldiers go;
POWs. You can only threaten my people and I can lead by
pen in the pen, you catch me?
“You people can’t see it. I’m telling you a story you can’t
hear? Is that it? Not enough bounce, or too much rhythm for
y’all ?” Filipe asked with no raise in the voice. His lawyer
was sweating and feeling this was too cocky and too
detailed -too unrepentant- to convince the Warden to
restore his client’s privileges when Martin’s order’s expired
next month.
“How come no blacks are allowed in the Latin Kings?” the
Warden asked as he looked at the notes on his legal pad.
“My mom was a prostitute you know. I had no father; back
in Cuba. And I’m part black. But when Castro shipped us, I
had no idea the size of the waters. I felt like a prisoner of
the sea on that boat; you don’t even know if you’ll survive
the night. And when we arrived they shipped us to Chicago,
I think the Miami Cubans organized that; they didn’t like us.
We were all cons and trash to them. Anyway, I worked at the
track behind Arlington Park but the Latin Angels, they was
the Angels back then -Lord Gino was the Inca- he found me
and helped me. Because Chicago was like every immigrant
group around, it was chaos, the gangs organized it, not the
cops. Chicago é a origem dos gangues, vato .
“People wanna say we cold blooded, but it ain’t like that. We
had a code, a five-point crown: Honor was first, and Love
was last, final,” Filipe explained as he felt his heart squeeze
at the lungs; push on the eyes; close the throat. He read the
other three tenets of the code in his mind, obedience,
sacrifice and righteousness and knew that the bodies on
him had got what they deserved by the code. Just like he
got what the criminal code doled out, the men he had killed
got what they deserved by the King’s code that they all had
agreed to before they broke it.
“Not everyone inside the Kings lived by the code, and we
got our versions of cops and jailers and wardens too,” he
added. He thought of the numbers, the Latin Kings had over
a hundred thousand members stationed in cities just waiting
to slit throats, fire-bomb, and invade homes of Hyde Park, or
the upper East Side.
“But why no blacks?” the Warden asked, he had to write a
report on the racial and gang element of inmate 14067074.
“We had to keep it simple, no blacks, because our enemies
were black. It ain’t personal. Just like no gabachos either,
our enemies were white. We were caught in between
America’s black and white world. It was just a way -like our
clothes, the black and gold- to tell us apart. Like uniforms in
war.”

III. 2040 e.v.

The Jacks had decided to meet and so they hiked back to
Lot 45 . Blax met them at the perimeter, and as they came
up in a line, he knew -all at once- that he’d bring them to
the house after all.
They shook hands and walked back to the house, as the
Jacks felt grateful for it but didn’t say a word. Blax pulled his
shemagh up over his mouth as he walked, the cold air was
fine on his skin, but it hurt to breathe it in.
When they arrived, Valance was cleaning out from under the
concrete counter and making piles of things as the dogs
sniffed each new thing for clues.
Blax grabbed a bottle of wine from the cooler and said,
excuse me, quietly to her as she leaned away from the
metal cooler door. He laid a hand on her back gently and
she looked up and smiled at him. He was a southern
gentleman , she thought, and felt her chest swell just a bit.
Jack One sat on the concrete pad that he had fallen on
hundreds of times as they trained, and he thought he could
now feel each one of those catastrophes all compressed into
one giant collapse. Jack Two looked at Blax as he cut the
capsule and ran the tool into the cork. He pulled four
glasses from the back of the slab as the wine breathed just
a bit. The sky was white, and snow was predicted. The wind
blew in spurts here and there.
Jack Three sat on the fireplace ledge, under the lintel and
Jack Two remained standing watching as the red poured into
each clear glass from the black bottle.
Blax and Valance spoke quietly, and Jack could not
understand them, but it was soft and short and he felt his
heart build in pressure and his eyes blink faster than he had
expected. The child made noises in the room, Jack heard,
and she too looked up toward her babe as Blax looked at
her.
Blax waited for her to look back at her work before he
looked away from her; only then would he exit the kitchen
through the large garage door and into the agoge to hand
glasses to each man. He claimed one for himself. They all
said, thanks and nodded and sniffed the bouquet deeply,
out of respect for the wine and the man. Wine was not to be
treated indifferently -that much they had always known-
when their LT poured it, it always had a reason, and one
ought to ponder it like one did his words.
Jack One nodded to the Bust -as his locked on Blax- as if to
ask the Lt if she knew what they were to speak on. Blax
nodded and was surprised Jack had even suspected that it
was an option to keep such a thing from his own kin. But he
knew that Jack was merely trying to be respectful before
speaking as plainly as he was about to do. It was not -by
Jack- an indictment of Blax’s honesty, but an admission to
Jack One’s own brashness, Blax finally surmised.
“I don’t want to be maudlin or defeatist,” Blax began, “but,
we have to prepare ourselves for the eventuality that this
may be it.”
Valance moved things softly, and her own body seemed to
go quiet as if she too wanted to hear this; or she didn’t want
to interrupt him with even careless noise.
“It’s been twenty-nine days, so yeah, I can’t imagine any
eleventh-hour reprieve,” Jack One said as the Jacks’ heads
bounded up and down and they began drinking from the
glasses, watching the lees in the glass -from the 66-year-old
Bordeaux- settle back at the end of the fingers purple and
oily and thin. The clouds turned the air grey and closed out
the horizon. It was cold, and the temperature had dropped
ten degrees in the last thirty minutes. The barometer fell
too.
“It’s harder for me because of your youth, I think of you
first. I’m an old man, so if it were not for Valance and the
child, it wouldn’t even sting at all,” Blax said. “And so if I
could find a way to save just you three I would. I’ve talked
with Isaiah a hundred times about this. And there is nothing
even he can do; it’s too endemic, the gene has fused with
each cell now.”
“Cryogenics? Has he talked about freezing us until he can
figure it out?” Jack Three asked.
“Yeah, and he’s refused to do it. And before you get pissed,
he has his reasons. And I’ve offered him everything I can
think of and he cannot be convinced to do it. He’s
intransigent on it.”
“Well, what are we still listening to him for then?” Jack Two
asked, wounded by this seeming betrayal. Jack One gulped
his Lafite and handed back the glass to Blax as he refilled it.
Jack had been prepared for him to just take the glass away.
“Because we all have a chance to die with honor here. We
have a chance to go out any way we want. We know the
hour and reason of our death, that is a gift of the gods. Most
men do not get such a gift, and while I lament all that is left
undone, I do not lament my life, and you ought not lament
yours either. You have lived a thousand lives in twenty
years. You would not ever have been born at all under
natural conditions, without Isaiah, you never would have
had twenty seconds much less two decades.
“Do not make the mistake of missing the point. Do not make
the mistake that greedy and shallow men make by ignoring
all they have merely to miss what they do not have. That is
more than stupid, it’s a crime.
“That wine you are drinking is a ch â teau , a vintage, that
maybe ten thousand people in the world have had, and no
one will have again. You are Kings, what matter it if you
were Kings for twenty years instead of serfs for a hundred?
This is the time of your life, now, here, now. You have lived
larger than anyone in history, partaken in things even I did
not. I was not Mozart, Shakespeare, Seneca, I was merely
their tutors.
“You are the geniuses, and look at what you created, and
will leave behind.
Jack One sipped the ’74 Lafite and nodded and agreed with
the man. Jack Two saw this from Jack and felt his heart beat
longer, slower, in elongated vowels now. A few flakes fell
and rose with eddies, swirling more than committing to the
ground.
“Roger wilco,” Jack Three said as he breathed into his glass
feeling the wet brick of orangish black stain that the old
wine had left at the rim of the glass then upon his nose. He
lowered the glass and took his index finger and lightly
touched the one drop on the bridge of his nose, pulling it
downward to the tip and set the glass on the hearth as he
rose.
Jack One rose sympathetically and each Jack approached
Blax with hands out and palm up. Blax laid his fist in the
middle as they moved theirs under his like three sheets of
paper to his one black rock of a hand.
They softly closed their fingers around it and it looked like a
flower head with the organic phyllotaxis of their fingers like
the hard collar wrapping in imbricate overlapping over his
scarred hand, each livid scar-line down perpendicular to the
closed bulb just as the hybrid of the tall, but short-lived
Icelandic poppy -P. nudicaule - and the Stylomecon
heterophylla with its empurpled navel and brick red edges
grew in their own fields. His hand grew wet as the snow fell,
and some flakes stuck to their arm hairs and clear water
looked milky as it ran from Blax’s knuckles into their palms;
it looked as narcotic milked by the herder turned farmer
forgiven by God with this perfect pain relieving sap.
The snow grew into many flakes, most light, not heavy with
water in the high-altitude cold. It need only fall one
thousand feet from cloud to their ridge. All light expanded
as if from no source, as no shadow lay on anything now. It
was a perfect white-grey and the sun and moon both blotted
out by the intangible mist of the snow clouds.
“Don’t fall silent,” Jack Four said as he watched them from
the lab. The bots made a screen from floor to ceiling, so
large and at such resolution it seemed he could step into
their world, step back into time, step and too place his hand
over the rock, the hand, of Blax.
Isaiah placed one hand on his shoulder, as Jack Four
continued to counsel his brothers from afar, unheard, in
their final day in place but not time; he said, “witch, volva , I
want to ask you, to know everything, Odin said, and this
went on three times, and the witch finally said, after
capitulating by telling him of who did the evil deed to
avenge Hodr , who slayed Baldr , who the maidens who
weep are, to take his leave. But this is not enough for the
berserker. What is ever enough? Finally, she says he is the
old sacrifice , aldinn gautr , and then he insults her and she
says:
Ride home O ð inn , and be proud, more men will come
back on a visit when Loki is free, slips from his bonds,
and the fate of the gods comes, ripping everything
apart.”
 36. Unkindness of Ravens
This is all very stressful for the alpha male, his fecal samples are as high in
cortisol as the lowest beta. The costs on him are high. The alpha male must be
hyper vigilant and break up coalitions of rivals. He must be generous and
empathetic and diffuse most violence between females and beta males. The
good alpha does these things, but he must be willing to use violence when he is
insulted. If he doesn’t it will be perceived as weakness and his down fall will
come soon. The only real benefit the alpha male has is access to females
Chimpanzee Politics [Waal, Franz de]

There is no gene for alpha males, Lyndon just makes all that shit up
Intercepted phone call 12.12.14 [Smith, Sarah M]

Maybe you can invent your own game

12 Rules for Life Tour [Peterson, Jordan B]

I. 2038 e.v.
The smoke of the Pedron Reservera plumed and shifted
toward the outer ring of the black through the half-shadow
of the dim porch light at the edge of the home. Single lights
attracted moths, the heat brought the bugs and made Jack
breathe heavy.
He had a piece of paper in his hand with a quote from
Aleksander Dugin :
An important aspect of the Eurasian worldview is an
absolutely denial of Western civilization. In the opinion of
Eurasians, the West with its ideology of liberalism is an
absolute evil.
The Russian shared a birthday with Blax and Jack -this year-
had given Blax a present of a book from the man. Blax had
written out this quote for Jack and handed it back as a kind
of receipt or proof that he’d read it. Jack had acted like it
wasn’t necessary, but he kept it and brought it out at times
like this. He re-read it and re-folded it and put the quote
back into his pocket and smoothed the jacket down three
times.
Jack turned his attention upon the words that flew and
landed within his mind, and the constellations of conceits
that appeared as man’s natural tendency toward pattern
recognition will often -and reliably- do. He then thought of
the philosophy of Tesla and the three, six and nine.
“Vortex mathematics,” he said under his breath as he
remembered the cones of the forest that he buried
sometimes. He thought of the trees he tied -cinched- down,
the church and the Aspens like bones bent into ribs. He
turned last summer’s sunflowers in his hand -in his mind-
and watched Starr laugh, and he too now smiled at the
memory.
His father made him uncomfortable.
The old mirth made him sad, and he began to doubt that he
ever had really seen the pinecones, the white Aspen tree-
bones, the girl giggle in glee at all.
“We prefer conspiracy theory to no theory at all,” Jack said
louder -thinking he was- quoting Hitchens, but it was
Nietzsche who had said this first. His father sat still, almost
all black clad too, except the tenaciously white socks; he
was unable to commit to the look 100%. He sat next to his
son in silence. The smell of the cigar made him slightly
disoriented; the look of his boy turning into a man shrank
him, aged him, made him measure each word.
The boy made him nervous.
His eyes and hair seemed as black and magnetic as a pair of
ravens, as dorsal and mean and sharkish as fish with no
warmth about the gills; his teeth revealed a wolfish grin
both clean and shiny with spit. And Jack spoke with charm,
ease -ingratiating- as if he was going to sell timeshares or
ask for his vote.
They shared much of the memories of his short and fast
youth, he had been gone by fifteen, and now back at
eighteen, and so much more a man than the old man
thought possible in just thirty-six months. The old man
thought of bluebirds from that morning; and the way the
sundial had held water from the last rain.
“Wulf Zendik said -and I tend to agree- he said that man -
each man- is most alone where he is most a genius,” Jack
Allbesh said not telling his father who Wulf was. “So, kinda
by definition, the theory goes, if a man is truly a genius in
some realm -and Wulf felt each man had at least one true
genius inside him- if he is a genius, there he will be alone
and unable to share it with anyone else. The natural
loneliness of genius, he said, was man’s Promethean fire, an
artifact of the gods brought to one man in order that all
mankind can benefit from these sparks.
“And yet the one man, the bringer of light, is doomed to
suffer alone for it, and suffer anew each day,” Jack said and
turned the cigar to make sure it was burning well. The
maduro leaf wrapper made his hand seem even whiter. The
smoke felt like prophylactic to the mosquitos that flew on
the edge of the porch. The moths hit the lamps and sounded
like small rocks thrown at the house.
His father was quiet, he did not have much to say. He had
rarely been comfortable sharing his own thoughts -they
were impertinent, and had gotten him in trouble in life- and
so in the absence of rejoinder Jack began to speak again.
“So, I’m being honest here, I think you guys will not respect
me for getting married at eighteen to a girl as young as
Starr,” Jack said.
“Are you getting married?” the old man asked.
“Well, we are. Yes. But listen, my genius, my talent -I cannot
keep using that word- my talent , is that I have begun to see
reality for what it is, thanks to thoughts crafted by my
command of language. See, the more precise my language
got the more clear my vision got. I saw things better, I didn’t
just explain them better,” he said with an unhalved notion,
an unhalting tongue and eyes that no longer blinked. The
sky was purple -not black- as the vault shoved back at the
city as it pushed its lumens up in a filthy yellow dome
beneath the firmament empyreal.
“Stalin said that quantity has a quality all its own. And the
first time I heard that I was at the Van Gogh museum two
hours later, on mushrooms and inventorying it. Like it was
my little shop, of my artwork, mine,” Jack said. The glass of
the front, he now recalled in images that he labeled in
words, the curtains of burgundy, the staff speaking her
Majesty’s .
He thought of the Stuttgart museum next; how the Celts
became oligarchs of the iron age, royalty, wealthy and
unaligned. He thought of how history had borders, and that
each group and each man lacked a proper introduction or
transition; he thought that entire civilizations could just
appear or disappear in the records and the oral tradition
too.
He saw the Hochdorf prince, from a 530 a.e.v. burial; the
ouroboros torcs around the neck; amber beads; over six feet
tall in their bones; buried awaiting the bronze age coming in
their wake. The bronze sheet was bronze riveted tighter with
war scenes upon it. Jack saw that ancient man was proud of
war, did not lament it. He bragged, saw it as a high art and
aspiration; the sacrifice of war was how they proved their
worth to the gods. The tomb of chariots was on casters,
made of women figurines with wheels, inlaid with coral.
A massive cauldron held four-hundred liters of honey mead;
nine drinking horns lay on the table.
Jack thought all this as the old man sat in silence. His son,
his issue, was out of his control and it was like a bad idea, or
a slip of the tongue, a thing a man wished he could take
back. Jack’s father thought of how his wife had demanded a
baby, a child, and how he had agreed despite how he felt.
They showed their wealth with feasts -like Blax- and sent it
all to Vallhala, Jack thought as he smoked his cigar and
measured what he’d say next. He hated that he had
contempt for his father; hated that this was the way it was.
He was a man full of reverence with nothing to revere; a
man of appetite with no food in sight.
Gold and cloth around the prince, Jack thought next as he
assumed the ancients respected their elders. These
inventory of tombs were evidence, rider on horse too; bands
around the bones. Broaches, with pins bent so they can’t be
removed and reused. Bronze dagger laidover with mercury
and the metal noblest. Even golden shoes; graven amulets ,
Jack thought as the carvings were similar from region to
region, epoch to epoch.
Language is next. Wales, Skotland, Gaelic; Portugal.
Herodotus, said they lived above the Danube and past the
pillars of Hercules, Jack thought in cascading words and
images knotted like the insular art of the isle, the Codex
Cenannensis , the vellum of the 640 pages in the Book of
Kells .
He was still silent. He thought instead of speaking. He saw
folios and Dál Riata ships carry the tomes off shore.
Celts in Portugal at the same time as, well, before 990
a.e.v., Jack thought. Bronze age sailors spoke Celtic; ores
and ingots. Ah, 387 a.e.v, Celt versus Roman at battle of
Allia , he thought still -awkwardly- silently in time enough to
breathe. The old man followed suit. The air was disturbed by
this respiration, as the moths landed on the home’s side by
the lights and the crickets rubbed legs together like rosin
and bow.
The Greeks and Romans called the Keltoi barbarians;
stripped them naked in bronze reproductions or marble
statues; trellis of wildness in the grave of art, Jack recalled
as he clockwise -then retrograde- inventoried the museums,
and the Romans made their hair ramshackle, manacled
them, gave them feral beards. The torc remained but they
were untamed, and that was the same thing the British -who
were Romans after all- would call the Scots: barbarians.
“They laughed too much, they drank, boy were they drunks,
even Aristotle said that of the Celts; that they stole, they’d
rather raid than work, and they were poor and tribal; loyal
to their own over getting business done, ” Jack quoted aloud
mid thought, like a burst from a dream.
The old man said nothing at all.
The tall ones , Jack kept thinking, the warlike -Galatae- was
the word used by the Romans and the Greeks to insult these
foreign slaves; and then a derivation - Gaels- was taken by
the brutes after centuries in Rome; like nigga taken by
blacks called nigger by the white man . Jack meandered
through the grove of his thoughts, from plot to plot, climat
to climat , comparing where white and black became one
line, one square, one six-sided die spinning between thumb
and finger of fore. He was shocked -as his coder loaded
more and more information onto his mind as it wandered
through history- he was surprised to see how his own people
were treated the same way blacks were treated now. The
same insults, the same stereotypes, the same reaction of
intransigence too.
They -each group- saw themselves as apart from America, a
subculture that had no interest in assimilation or getting
along. He began to wonder if there was a gene beneath the
skin, that connected warriors, men of honor, men who had
no interest in business or glad-handing or settling for second
place. He wondered if some men rejected the idea of the
win-win, and wanted -needed- his rivals to lose.
“I don’t follow,” his father finally said and looked at him with
eyes that squinted. His boy looked older by ten seasons of
storms, taller by eleven inches, heavier by enough stones to
fill a bucket the size of the red anthills that grew in the
Texas heat and sun.
“I’m saying that if your heart is pure, you can transgress
without breaking the law, or you can break the law without
transgressing, I guess, I mean. I mean, if I’m an honest man,
if I tell you , or that girl in Amsterdam -or Starr in there- the
truth, then I’m absolved of all crimes. I am asserting that.
Do you believe that?” Jack asked as he tried to recall that
girl’s words and her smell -like dough and tobacco, turmeric,
lilies- her odor came back in lieu of her name.
Jack then thought that Plato had said, “stelai of Heracles ”
not pillars . He corrected his own inner error, but his dad
spoke overtop of this and the thought fluttered away.
“I can’t say for sure I know what you mean,” the old man
said and held still with legs crossed and hands in the lap.
“I mean if I confessed to a murder, would you judge me,
condemn me, turn me in?” Jack asked. He stared out into
the yard of the trees and the fence that bounded the other
trees of the same type, he then spoke quickly, “you see how
the Live Oaks have these big branches all cooked and wild?”
Jack’s arm stretched out and seemed larger to the old man
as it pointed at the brown tree -crooked and gnarled and
large- under the moonlight and the diffused lumens of
pollution of these houses all around.
“I do,” his father said. They both realized that Jack was not
genetically his, Jack knew it -the father now acknowledged it
to himself- and all it took was for them to look together at
that Live Oaks.
“And look at the little branches, they are shaped the same
way. And if you saw their root ball, you’d see the same
thing. See, all of nature has a way, a Tao ; the Asians call it
Tao . And man has a nature, and each man has his own
nature. If he fights against it, he is a cat living the life of the
dog, the Live Oak trying to be the Aspen, and it just doesn’t
work that way.
“There is an old saying in biology, nobody believes it except
me and the guy who said it, but it’s cool even if you don’t
buy it. Anyway, he says, ontogeny recapitulates philology .
That just means that each individual organism -each animal
in nature- repeats the stages of evolution during its own
morphological formation or life cycle.
“So, it just means that evolution, writ large , goes, began,”
he corrected, “began as single cell, then multicell, then to
jelly, then to full-fish, then hairy mammals, then primates
and humans. Roughly speaking of course,” Jack said. From
barbarian to civilized man , he thought to himself.
“Of course,” the old man felt odd for saying that. He didn’t
know it well enough to say, of course , but he just felt like
agreeing with his boy. Each word felt like eulogy, and he
didn’t really know why. He too had instincts, he figured. And
he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead.
“So, each animal will go through this same basic series of
stages up to their own birth. So, the fish begins as single
cell, then blastocyst, then mature -born- fish. But the human
goes through all stages, we are even fish at some point, in
utero. Then we have a coast of fur, like a beast, we even
have tails, did you know that? In the womb. Anyway, then
we shed that and become human. And then we are born.
“Anyway, the point is these stages of development are
recapitulations of the same vector of development of
evolution of life on the planet.
“Patterns repeat all the time. And this matters if you want to
understand anything. And yes, somethings are sui-generis
and novel and new. Some phenomena developed sua
sponte . But, even that, even there, I suspect have
corollaries but those corollaries will be few and far between
as well; and hard to notice at each level.
“But even the universe began as a singularity, as single
proton and anti-proton. And this single event, it was a one-
off, or at least it is rare inside this universe, we think. It
happened once. But there are corollaries at each level. The
formation of stars; or the creation of life; or consciousness in
man; self-aware man.
“All of it was rare and seemingly without precedent or
causation. I don’t want to fixate on this, but my point is
strange shit -and seemingly unexplainable shit- happens all
the time and by the time there is anyone around to even
notice, it’s all fairly commonplace, and taken for granted.
“Humans go about their day as if it’s no big deal that the
cosmos even exists, that inflation happened, and is
accelerating, and that life began from mere chemical
substrates and that consciousness itself emerged maybe
ten, fifty to a hundred-thousand years ago.
“Most people right now are thinking about what they want
to eat. Most people behave like animals, as if reality is of no
need of explanation or awe at its weird grandeur. And
instead, you know, instead people think the using up of time
and energy discussing the weather or some banal TV show
is somehow worth the investment. They act as if we will
never die, and that being alive itself is no big deal; but just
something to get through to preserve for its own sake;
independent of what it might mean to be alive on this planet
in this expanse.
“As if we have all the time in the world,” Jack said and
chewed on the cigar.
“Truly pondering this shit is not interesting to ninety-nine
percent of mankind. The best you can expect is a short and
clich é d sentence or two of kinda boring truisms on the
vagaries of fate or some skin-deep bromide about how weird
life is and then it’s back to bar-be-que and ballgames and
taxes and happy wife happy life nonsense.
“I don’t say this as if I am not exactly like this at times. Shit,
I watched the Super Bowl this year, and I loved it. It was
awesome, ok?” Jack said ecumenically and placed his hand
on the old man’s shoulder.
“I’m talking about the mass of men who truly don’t find life
that interesting. They find sports or sex or food or money
fascinating, but they don’t care about the strangeness, the
beauty, the terror of lie. They accept it at face value. The
same way you accept the dream each night at face value
and never question its weirdness while inside the dream.
Only upon waking up is it odd to you. Most men just accept
life as is; no questions asked. They see that it’s smart to
look out for themselves, smart to play by the rules. They
see that it’s smart to hold thy tongue, smart to go along
with the herd. Because preservation of the body, not the
soul, is their only goal.
“And I do not,” Jack said as the old man kept still. Jack
thought of the rules of Lot 45, the code as laid out by Blax.
And he saw the way his brothers believed in their clones,
their structure, their way of life. He saw how weird it was
compared to the norm, compared to America, and how his
own philosophy was one level up from both America and the
Jacks. He saw the rebellion beyond rebellion, and how the
true genius would not be understood by either side.
“I have awoken -and like the man awoken from his dream- I
see that the dream itself was not as it appeared while inside
it. Only, I’ve actually awoken inside the dream, daddio. I’ve
awoken inside the dream and see all this -all of it- as unreal,
as weird, and I can do anything I want. People bleat on and
on about how nobody owes you nothin’ . And they say to
stop whining and stop expecting anyone to give you a thing.
But, if you actually take them seriously, and do whatever
you want, then these same people whine and cry that you
ought not have murdered their wife nor cut the heads of
their children off in the night. All-of-a-sudden they admit -
ringed by heads on twelve pikes- that they had expected
you to -that you owed them- the courtesy of not making a
meal of their backstrap and tenderloin, and not taking a
drink of their blood for your wine.
“What I want to do is live my life with honor. And total
autonomy, too; you know? Live within the context of love, of
true love. I don’t want to live for money or some job I hate,
or for someone else’s idea of right and wrong, but my idea
on right and wrong.
“I wanna push it past what is even weird for the weirdos, I
wanna blow everyone’s mind,” Jack said and brushed the
ash from his thigh and used his tongue to clear the bottom
teeth of small shards of food from the meal his mother had
prepared that day. He pulled from the cigar and let the
nicotine rise in his blood.
His father used his thumbnail to press against his own teeth;
his father stared straight ahead.
“I find this dream world to be a place of awe. My talent is -
and the place I’m most alone, most lonely- is up on this
mountain top of awe. I feel an awe when I ponder who and
what I am and what the earth is and what I am vis-à-vis that
earth and cosmos that birthed it all. I see the grandeur of
the leopard, the lion, the lamprey, and I see myself -with no
scepter but staff in my hand- as part of that bestiary too. I
see the grandeur in man, and in me and in that little girl in
there,” Jacks said as he nodded -a cabeceo - in the direction
of the house and toward his Starr.
He couldn’t finish that thought; the eyes were too hot, the
throat too closed.
“GK Chesterton said that the true conservative was a
revolutionary,” he paused again and drew air and hot smoke
through the robusto . He watched it glow at the end and
focused on the warmth in the mouth. His father looked down
and closed the eyes. The moths alighted from the wall and
snapped around the glow from the bulb.
“This was, when he uttered it -and is now- a controversial
thing. Conservatism is ostensibly the opposite of
revolutionary. But, that is only because most so-called
conservatives are not conservatives at all. They have no
desire for the old ways, they just want to preserve the
current ways. They have no idea what ideas are best, what
way is best, what Tao is best. They just stick to whatever
they were raised in and try to slow down progress to a
glacial pace so their timid little hearts can rest easy. Modern
conservatives are just scared.
“That is not a conservative; that is a timid animal,” he spoke
so quickly from idea to idea -logic to logic- that the old man
felt the mind roil above the spinning guts. Any man who
thought like this, spoke like this -the old man thought- was
headed for doom . It was a careening car, a top-heavy child
heading headlong down the stairs in a rush. He thought of
the stitches in the chin, the way the glass had broke and his
wife had screamed and the way the doctor had washed his
baby boy’s head and his hair.
His way -Jack’s way- it taunted life; it dared death to a duel,
the father thought.
But it had an air to it of something three-dimensional, body-
guard not mere barrister. It was music played not written,
witticism not of the staircase but of the moment; the
protection of apotropaic hidden under the clothes, the
spectre wrapped in shawl of feather and down, the mead of
poetry drunken down. The gut filled with duck and doe from
the King’s forest, daring the Knights to cut him open to
prove what had been in the mouth before his denials and
insistence on innocence and righteousness outside the walls
of the bailey and motte.
Then there was a grin to a joke that nobody would get.
And Jack spoke and spoke as he sat on the porch as if he
had an Ace up his sleeve; as if his quiver was filled with
golden broadheads and fletching of the unkindness of
ravens so much so that his weapons could fly each night to
anywhere in the world.
It was an arrogance not of mind, nor language, but of
instinct; not of intelligence but blessings by the gods.
Governments sent out men to do dirt without any
acknowledgment, why would not the gods send emissary as
well? He felt the feathers of angels, the eyesight that bent
over horizon, the talons retracted in the bones of his hands.
“He -Chesterton- said that to maintain the old white post,
one must be always making a new white post. One cannot
leave it alone, because life itself is destroying the old ways;
the wind and rain and vermin and fowls will all batter and
mar and sully that white post until it is bare and then in
ruins.
“All true conservatives -he said- they must constantly be
replacing, repainting, repairing, re-vivifying that post. I want
man to stretch his boughs as weirdly as he wants, but they
must grow over top of his natural roots.
“See, a tree’s boughs -its canopy- mimics its roots, so a tree
with wide branches has wide roots, and some plants go
narrow and deep and have the same types of branches and
leaves: narrow and tall. You see?
“Man has a natural root structure, and that is based on his
temperament, and that is largely genetically defined. He
adapts to a culture most suited for his genome. And for a
long time, man lived in a society that had found some
wisdom, it had learned how best to survive and thrive, and
have a good life. And this was defined via meaning . And
meaning was achieved, not just as paint on the post, but as
the lumber itself. Meaning was deeply integral to our lives. It
mattered more than we understood; but we just lived it;
somewhat unconsciously; unaware of this gift. We followed
our dreams, and our myths, our stories of what was what
and who was who.
“I’m not defending the status quo, I’m defending the idea
that man used to know how to live; even though he had no
idea that he knew. He couldn’t explain the hypothalamus or
the orienting reflex, and how we need morals, values, and a
hierarchy to even see, to be able to physically see,
otherwise we’d be overwhelmed and in fact see nothing.
Nobody ever knew that; but they did it.
“Did you know that if you block the nucleus accumbens with
chemicals a man will have no idea what he sees as he
watches you peel an orange or lift a cup to you mouth? The
brain decides what you see, the eyes are taking it all in, and
thus you cannot make heads or tails of any of it until the
brain makes a choice, a choice based on ranking things in
order of importance, thus on values of what is important,
thus based upon a moral code of good and bad, right and
wrong. Morality is foundational, it’s not something that
religion makes up,” Jack said.
“I didn’t know that,” the old man was burning a lot of
calories trying to keep up. But he got that morality was
foundational due to some part of the brain. He wondered if
the reason his boy made no sense to him -that he saw him
like the orange peel, heard him like the slurp of the cup, but
couldn’t make heads or tails of his moral logic- was because
of this accumbens thing too. But the old man was too
nervous to ask, Jack often got angry when interrupted mid-
stream.
The old man wondered about his own brain, and if he was
losing a step.
“The reason I bring all this up is because it’s not about
rational thoughts. It ain’t about math and science. It’s heart
and guts, daddio. That story is always told, I heard it, we’ve
all heard it. Mr. Blax says that consummatory rewards in the
brain are activated in a totally different region than the
thalamic region that mediates meaning. He says that a
brain that focuses on consumption -like the materialism
doctrine focuses on- is non-fulfilling and leads to ennui ,
anomie, spiritual death. He says that a culture that focuses
on the material -on objects instead of relationships and
meaning- will descend into tyranny because nobody has a
functioning brain anymore.
“Objects are like drugs, they slake the hedonic system, not
the thalamic and thus they wear off and leave the man in
the lurch desperate for more bullshit to buy.
“Modern men are all addicted to shallow pursuits and will do
anything -like drug addicts- to get their shallow desires met,
ignoring the meaningful or narrative side of the world.
People call you insane or stupid for caring about loyalty and
honor over this so-called freedom or money or longevity.
They will say be smart, it ain’t worth it, when you want to
risk it all for a pal or for your honor. Our ancestors would call
them merchants -as an insult- and call them, those that set
up places in the city in which to lie to one another .”
Jack saw the Lacedaemons combing their beards in the
river. He saw the way the water rushed by; the way the
birds landed on the banks and took a drink from the
common stream.
“They -modern people- they ignore their right hemispheres,
their thalamic system that responds to deep -meaningful-
action that is not rewarding materially -you get no money or
chicks from it- but is rewarding spiritually. If you do
something important but it reduces your money or lifespan,
they say you’re stupid, but if you do something that
increases your honor or pride they say why bother at all?
These people are all trapped in the left hemisphere of the
world, like a planet in tidal lock, facing its star without dark.
“Modernity has killed the spirit by over-focusing on the
material, the scientific, the rational, and allowed the
thalamic -meaning-centered part of the brain- to atrophy
and remain underfed. It’s like the weight lifter that over-
focuses on the upper body and skips leg day.
“He looks like a fool; all top heavy with these skinny little
legs. It’s actually dangerous, because he cannot support all
that weight up top. The Author says it’s like a student with
Aristotle all in his head but no dinner in his belly. Top heavy.
He needs the lower body of religion, of myth, or heroic
drama. And that comes from living your own life as if
morality matters, not just money, not merely getting laid,
not status or even making a million friends from other
tribes. What matters is moral action, in doing what is right,
even -especially- if that means breaking the law and making
everyone hate you. Or losing your life.
“The law is corrupt and made by totalitarians and Satanists.
I believe that. America has handed its soul over to Satanists
and rationalists and passing laws to crush the soul of the
good. And the merely average -morally average- go along
with it. They -like the Good Germans a hundred years ago-
just go along with whatever the leader says.
“Well, I won’t do it. I have the God given right to rebel
against all authority if that authority is corrupt. I have a
right to live my life as one moral agent, one moral neuron,
refusing to give in to the herd. And, who knows? maybe my
example will spread. But, that is up to other men, they
decide who to follow. They can follow the herd or the
example of one man who has love and hate in equal
proportions -large proportions- in his heart. A man that
demands that each individual be treated as a child of God. I
won’t let them tell me that good men must suffer, that evil
men must prosper, that a nation must commit suicide. I
won’t,” Jack said. He knew that he was in a phase change;
he could feel his own night coming on.
Jack thought of what he’d read, that the first twelve tribes of
Israel had banished ten from the levant; and that the
remaining two tribes were the merchants; and where
modern Jews came from today. Modern Jews came from
those mere one-sixth of the first Ashkenazi tribes. He then
thought of the way blacks spoke about Jews; how blacks
made everyone uncomfortable with their acknowledgment
of the Jews pernicious ways vis-à-vis the black community.
He heard Farrakhan, and the conversations of the rank and
file as they spoke of the Jews.
He thought of the ways many blacks rejected vaccines and
science because it was a tool of the white man and the
Jews.
He could feel that he had soft-pedaled his ideas to his dad;
that he had told half the truth. Blax had warned him of this.
He had said that for each truth a man told it was like solvent
that revealed two more lies. The liar felt spotless, the honest
man felt more and more the fraud.
He now knew what the man had meant. It made him want to
blurt out more truth, but he saw the irony in that. He saw
the hydra headed monster and each severed head a place
for more to grow back.
The father had grown increasingly nervous and wanted to
tell his boy to be careful, but knew that this would anger
him. He didn’t understand his boy, and his fervor, and why
caution would be seen as insult. But he knew from their
earlier conversations -before he had left for this school in
the mountains with Mr. Blax- that the boy, his Jack, would
take offensive at being warned by his father. So, he
remained quiet and thought of what to say next.
The boy sounded like a religious fanatic, and dangerous.
But the father didn’t know what to say or do. But, the fervor,
the willingness to throw one’s own life away for a vague
principle seemed insane to him. Life is too short already, he
thought as he had saw the way his wife had held the baby
boy in her arms taking his life more seriously than the boy
himself did, to throw it away for a principle, a principle that
other people didn’t even care about. Humans -as he said-
were willing to put up with almost any kind of society at all,
they didn’t fight for it themselves, why should his boy be a
martyr for it? They didn’t deserve his example, his sacrifice.
They didn’t , he repeated to himself, deserve my boy .
“What about your mother?” the father asked and instantly
regretted it. He knew that the boy had no idea how much
she had sacrificed -how she had felt- just to build him,
gather him from scattered bits and dust and sand. He knew
the boy would never understand the love a mother has for a
child; and that the boy would use his life however he saw fit.
The boy would see himself as self-created, a self-made man.
The boy would never see how much others did just to bring
him into the world.
“The artist brings forth his oeuvre and relinquishes it to the
world. He created it, slaved over it, bled -nearly to death- for
it. But, once he unfurls his hand and let’s go, it belongs now
to the world,” Jack said and sat back in the chair on the
porch and looked out over the city lights, the jam-packed
neighborhood houses, the false calm and manic fear just
below surface of each of these homes.
They were going to be slaughtered , Jack thought; he could
feel it. A purge was coming, and the Texas heat felt like it
laid upon him as physical, like blanket; like rolled rock of a
tomb.
He thought of his brothers, and how he’d always live in their
shadow if he built his tribe from the clones as was laid out
by Blax and the corporation. If he took command -as King of
his clones- he’d always be second best, to Jack One in this
domain, Jack Two in that, Jack Three over here or over there
, he thought. The only way to be first, was for them to go ,
he thought. And the only way for that to occur was for him
to give up the mantle, the scepter of the King, and be what
he was best at: the Knave, the Shaman, the last Jack.
He saw the uniformity in their -his brothers’- models, the
valence and coherence and knew that for all their success,
he could be the one -the only one- to beat them on this new
field of play.
And this could be both smart in the modern sense, and yet
serve the need for meaning as well. He could win, and live
forever in wealth, but also be a permanent reminder of this
middle -or fourth- way. He, he believed, had found the
perfect strategy, the amphibious, the animal suited for land,
water and air. He believed he could maintain his striving,
not for life, but for meaning.
From there, he would be able to rule over everyone -he
thought, as he saw the doublings of three, six and nine- and
from there -without being first- he would still be second ne
daigne .

II. 2038 e.v.

The wind didn’t even rattle the panes or huge container
doors; or the Jacks rapt in dreams still, no doubt, Blax
thought.
But he noticed the knots on his weather download for the
region; and his eyes saw the eddies of snow and black
detritus sniffing around the edges of the perimeter of the
buildings. It looked -in both cases- like Kanagawa waves
rising and cresting around the shallows of the sea. The
temperature outside was zero degrees, Fahrenheit. The
night had seen to it that this cold would sink into the core of
the trees and the panes would transfer it from one side to
the next.
The universe could have been a particle drop from the other
side of some other universe; the falling away of one proton
into the event horizon of some ancient black hole . Inflation
and punctuated equilibrium augmenting and halting the
pangs of the neotonous expanse took up more and more of
his own thoughts as he ruminated over what could be on
the other side of our own incomprehensible universe.
He’d heard some physicist say once that consciousness was
the way information felt when processed in some specific
way. He placed his hand on the cold glass.
My behavior is local, he thought, he was a silent guerilla
leader, in a yet undeclared war, culture war, war of good
and evil. He was defending his turf, his land turf and his
genomic turf, and he felt good about it, as if it mattered.
But, then, the mind -whenever it had an open window or
crack in the wall- it got out and began thinking larger,
beyond earth, beyond material existence, beyond survival,
and dominance and crushing the black hearts of my
enemies; men like black ants with no souls.
They were so small that it made him ask, so why bother at
all?
It was like speculating not on the already ineffable thoughts
of a woman one loves, but on the thoughts she didn’t yet
have. His mind was like the wind that moved among the
trees and the forest close to home but always rushing
violently upward toward the empty spots of the
stratosphere, and banging against that vault door with black
-endless black- beyond.
He was always, unaware, one might add, of both the
etiolating and augmenting affect of the ruminations over the
familiar but heavily wooded ground and conversely the
barren and unpopulated terrain of the unexamined. He saw
boundaries in the bleak, and formlessness amongst the
clutter of the world.
He picked up artifacts in his office, memories from the mind.
He held objects in three dimensions in the holograms of the
coder, and built models of his past at one twenty-eighth
scale.
He felt a rush, a picking up of speed when he pondered the
truly unknowable; so little of that was left now in the bright
regions, and there was more of it than ever before in the
seemingly empty zones. All knowledge decreased wisdom,
he thought, and all gains in wisdom seized and immolated,
decreased, what knowledge one had compared to what was
to be known .
The terrestrial map, he knew, had been conquered before
his birth in 1974 of this era vulgari, so thoroughly that
people who had died before his placement on the board
were lamenting its passing as an avenue for adventure .
Some men -cowards and the boring- upbraided men for
seeking adventure. He thought of Stan Goff, who chided
adventurism as if it was ignoble; denying the human sprit
and body always, as the Left does . The Left, he thought,
hates the human animal, hates his body, his impulses, his
corporeal needs.
All is theory, all is abstraction, all is dead to them;
rationalism forever like the cold, breathless death of
inflationary space. The man matters not, only the society.
The body matters not, only the philosophy that flagellates it,
whips it, on the sides, on the eyes, and tells it not to live so
that it merely may not die.
What had he to do with Jack, Jack Four? What was there to
do? Was there anything? Blax asked the glass, its reflection,
the cold and the steam in the breath of small animals
among the forest.
And if, yes , could Blax know the answer, an answer beyond
a, yes ?
What could stop him once he -Jack Four- had tied himself to
revenge? Blax had foreclosed on his own revenge, and took
up the cause for something larger, something grander, but if
he was honest, which he was about to be, he would admit
that he would still prefer the personal revenge to this larger
one. Sure, he hated the people they fought.
He had enough hate in him to blank out the world. But it
was tempered and sequestered and he could follow orders
from Isaiah and do his job.
But, the men -and women- who had personally injured him
were enemies close, so close he could see their shark-teeth,
their crow’s feet, their turkey-necks, their duck-ass hair do,
their veins like roots, their skin like leather and stone, their
words like animals in heat, in pain, in death throes. He could
mimic their laughs, their bleating, sheepish laughs, their
stupid words as rudimentary as if mere beasts could speak,
herd animals, not predators. They were his, his , he thought
in the third person like this. And a man must have some
personal possessions. A man’s personal enemies were just
such things to have.
He could taste their outgassing, their effluvium, their lies.
He could feel a grand release in their deaths at his own
hand, bare hand, animal-man hand. That he had given that
up, to teach these men, to build something grand instead of
tear down something profane, had never found a way to
settle at his soul’s bottom, to fit inside his jangled guts, to
harmonize in his ears that rang with tinnitus, and eyes that
haloed the lights at night, and saw black and gray floaters
from welding burns and corneal scratches from slag and
copper shards from grinding metal and burnishing of steel
stock.
He saw vapor in his deeds, but his failures were all concrete.
He saw their faces fall like drops in dreams while the
animals spoke of larger things. He saw the individual rain,
when they all saw the storm; and he was ashamed to be so
petty, so personal, so low in his desires now and whenever
he had a chance; even if he had chosen to act with one type
of idea in his head. His actions were marred by this
ambivalence, this yearning in the heart for pointless -
personal- revenge.
He tamped it down. He let the coder issue mu-opioids in
amounts sufficient to dull the pain of chagrin.
He ought be proud of what he had built up instead of
lamenting what he could not demolish. And yet, here he was
lamenting, and filled with hatred and anguish and regret for
allowing his enemies to get away. That they had died was
not the point -shit, it was worse , he thought- for they
escaped his judgement, they lived their whole -short- lives
thinking, rightly thinking, they had got away with it. And this
was the pebble in the shoe that never went away, no matter
how much he trod on new and noble ground, on sacred
ground. No matter the view all around , he thought as the
pebble in the show annoyed him.
He dosed himself with more pain-relief.
He had to admit that what he was doing for the Jacks was
sacred, holy, blessed; they were getting the education, the
lessons in body and mind and thus soul, that he never got.
He was stultified, stinted, impoverished by being raised by
women ; women teachers with no pride or bravery, by a
mother with not one jot of courage or ability to see the point
of life, and a culture effeminate and weak and shallow and
purposeless.
He was raised to die.
They had tried to kill him, even his so-called friends had
always told him to be careful , never encouraged him to be
Great. They held him down so that they themselves may not
sink. It was pathetic and evil and wrong; and yet he
fraternized with these types for he had no one better to
associate with as a boy and young man.
He had gone to Zendik at twenty-four and then been around
greatness, but he was too callow to see the genius of Wulf
at that age, so he got the inoculation but not the
prescription. Not at first.
This is the axiom of greatness, by definition, you can not
find anyone at your level with which to play the game. If you
could, you would not be great, you’d be merely above
average alongside the 49% that are above average . Three
billion just above average , he thought. By the time I figured
it out, Wulf was dead. The tyrant, the madman, was right in
everyway people thought he was wrong. And wrong in the
ways they liked.
No, what they had done, what myself and Isaiah and the
Jacks had done, creating clones, genetic copies was genius ,
because it was the only way to surround him in Greatness at
his tick of the clock, on his map , he thought. Other great
men lived, but they lived in their walled kingdoms, their
domains, and in their lands where he would be nothing.
“And in his they would be the same,” he whispered.
But, with four men -and Isaiah said there were sixteen more
coming up three years behind; thus, any day now- with four
men just like him …
But Jack, fucking Jack Four had been the worst and the best
all in one. He rebelled against what was objectively best for
him, just to prove he was not Dostoyevsky’s piano keys, just
to prove he would forge ahead in his own way. He could
have been a Prince of one full cardinal direction, had the
pick of any one -north or south, east or west- that he
wanted . But, he had wanted to reign as King of his own
selfish paltry island raxxxr than be mere Prince -one of four-
of a noble land that stretched from each sea, up and down
to each ice sheet, deep in xll the world’s trees and fence in
the deserts and scale the mountains, bouquet the flowers
cut down the weeds.
Where was he when I had laid the foundations ? Blax asked
himself. “And yet he rebelled,” he said aloud.
It was the flaw in him, in Blax, and thus, in each Jack;
perfectly recapitulated, reproduced, recalled.
It could not be torn out, removed, excised. But, it had the
dice throw to it, didn’t it? he asked himself as the grey sky
lowered and the sxow began to appear in the sky -not as
fallen snow, but as swirling- of no origin. It looked like the
wind was picking up the ground snow and then hurricaning
it, but there was too much of it for that he saw, it was
coming from the sides and churning against itself; it was
coming down and lifting up and squeezing the forest and
home. The wind was ploughing boughs and scooping ground
and making the air a turbine of precipitation for his eyes to
lose themselves within.
Would Jack go all the way? Would he rebel against life itself?
This, he ruminated, was well within their kind. They had that
gene, that set of genes that joined hands in a death pact to
ride their chargers over the ledge just to get a glimpse of
the edge. This is the thing that normal people will never get
about the frisson of some men , he said it precisely to
himself as if he was above it, they have needs you people
will never have.
“Extremes,” he said as he thought of the marbles and
paintings, the writings and golden plating of bridle and
scepter and sacrifice in Kurgan mounds. He thought of the
symbols and hack silver, the pyramids and the pillars and
he thought of the helix of numbers and letters swirl like
storms and dust-devils inside each man he’d come from.
Can one imagine a woman selling her child for profit? A man
selling his heart to the crowd? What would one do in
blandishments and beau geste, would one offer the
bridegroom of blood; would the babe thus be tailored to the
market too?
The Japanese Wolf of Tomoko Konoike appeared in his mind
and swelled up, glass shards tinkling in cold sound,
reflecting inner light like the star sky winked at mankind
from God’s eye. Tomoko’s lupine all grey and white, with a
wind trail blowing wolf back and forward into the creator-
observer’s soul; it was pure genius and her installation
pieces of the bear and wolf and the animal & animas-skin-
draped woman knelt at the autumnal creek with red and
white leaves scattered about in a grandeur that made him
want to scream.
And scream he did into the house as tears burst from the
eyes like escapees from a now guardless detention. He had
no idea how much tension had been preserved and heated
and quickly cooled. HE felt out of control.
He was all heart now, heart and eyes and The Black Arch of
Shadia and Raja Alem slammed down in his mind with the
warehouse walls brown-blush and veins of moho , and riven
and patched as background to the black cubes standing on
one delta of four; combined with images of their chxxxxood,
their life-art rolling fast on the egg-white edge of screen, it
too, centered black, all black like Mecca, like the all-color
absorption of Islam, the swallowing of religion, the
swaddling of the soul, these women were true to something
hidden from all. What more can the artist offer than auto-
biography, what else have they created but their lives?
“Creation,” he barked again as the tears seemed grey like
melted snow, the face was taut around the bones and loose
at the lids and lips and he fell into his own footprint, onto his
knees and pounded the floor, the concrete, unyielding,
unpersuaded, and he screamed now like a veldt beast,
ancient man, a man of the bronze age, a man who was out
over the edge of the God-given but Man-made world.
From this edge he refused.
The Ka’aba and the black stone grew large in his fore -in his
mind’s eye- and all the world fell away, and all the world fell
away and away, and his vision was cleared with tears and
his mind cleared by fire, his soul cleared by hatred for all
that was not beautiful and the world, he insisted, was
beautiful the world was so fucking beautiful and these
demons were ruining what women like Tomoko and Shadia
and Raja brought forth like child-brides bringing their
parthenogenetic babes to the oracle, the wise King, to the
river to wash off the blood and webbing of the birth canal
and raise the boy up as their life’s creation for us to see its
naked beauty, its Godliness as we stupidly barter at the
agora for trinkets that clink and curse each other with coins
embossed with the dragon and the dark bird .
Wagner had said that Jews had ruined art with
commercialism, that they couldn’t help it for it was their
métier, but that the Norse man -the true German- must
overcome this in art and create for beauty only; he must not
compete with the man of talent for talents of silver, but
compete with himself to create a better version of himself
through: The Gesammtkunstwerk.
They never laid an eye on Captain Ahab, only the sailors,
Blax thought, and was this not how it truly was? Did not God
separate man based on this one trait alone: whom among
us is Life Artist, and who is in it for the money, the daily
recapitulation of the body to survive, survive at all cost! At
all cost! What Nietzsche called Rationalism at all cost! Ah,
the twilight of these idols, Blax thought, he felt he wanted to
tear his own guts out, how could his boy -his baby boy- tear
his guts -all their guts- out like this?
He killed not their bodies, he murdered their souls!
Blax would have done anything for him, still, still to this day
would crush his own skull if the boy would just live, live and
be an Artist, in the grand sense, and stop this petty rebellion
against spectres and daemons and desert djinns that swarm
about him.
Blax stared out the window onto the white landscape and he
felt how isolated they all were. The space , the space, the
malice, the root , he thought.
Jack One had awoken from an unremembered dream and
walked down the forty-foot hall toward’s Blax’s office and
library and into the Crow’s nest perpendicular to their
rooms. He had heard the wailing and stood at the entryway
-un-doored, only a six by eight foot jamb, to symbolize
openness, and an incapacity for privacy- and then paused.
Jack halted and stared before he crossed the thresh.
He saw Blax on the floor, kneeling -erect but heaving- and
crying and his hands on the glass -now wet with
condensation toward the center, and framed with ice as the
transfer of the temperature of zero had located a frontier to
advance to- with his fingers and top of the hands vascular
and above his heart; he seemed striving for -raised up to-
the atmospheres.
He heard the ramblings, the inchoate words, the false starts,
the disputes of foreign names, the disagreements of the
Levant, of Sumeria , of the isle and Sea of Japan. He heard
them and felt them like arrows from Comanche in him, like
returned love letters from a detainee, some virgin at the Isle
of Man, some record skipping on an old gramophone in the
library of a long dead senator; statesmen long abandoned;
an uncle that’s the last of a kind.
Jack heard each word as a boundless facet of pain. Puerile,
animal, not at all something human or masculine at all.
The word, total art , in German, Gesamtkunstwerk , like total
war, was being repeated now by Blax and the tears were
hanging on the jagged syllables of the half-rune half-
language like offal, like torn bodies killed in battles by
chimpanzee troops; left uneaten, castrated, caught on
brambles along a winter riverbank and edge of a creek. Jack
felt Jack Three approach from the rear and the second Jack,
to his and Jack’s six, and he held up his hand in abeyance as
they obliged and stopped in the hall. Jack turned so that
Blax was at his nine o’clock.
He did not look at them but turned the head and stared at
Blax and felt himself wishing -now wishing, not acting, but
wishing- like a child or a woman, for this to stop, somehow.
He felt that it was too much, that the man had suffered too
much, too fucking much, Jack thought, and had nobody
noticed, had nobody fucking bothered to ask is the man was
not in fact falling from heaven and not rising from the soil of
earth? Did no one, Jack asked his own angry and judging
mind, see that it was a sound in decline, a ponderous black
aria, and not in ascension. Where was the man’s family,
those with natural affinity? Who would defend this man?
Was nobody asking why he lashed out in word and deed;
was it not the sound of pain not mere rage? Had nobody
sought the nature of his pain, as they condemned him for
his narcotic analgesics and isolation and abrading
condemnations of the world as endlessly bleak and
heartless to make room for the giant brain? How can those
with fleeting, acute and periodic pains, ever condemn the
man of constant sorrows, of chronic pain, woe earned by
working on the cogs of the world that keeps time for them
too? Chronic pain deforms not just the body, but the soul,
shit, Jack thought, corrected, added: the body fuses with the
soul as chemical reaction to the constant electricity of pain,
the man then becomes the thing that lifts off the brain in
incessant pain: Hate.
He becomes hate like lead turns to gold in the furnace that
never goes out.
And yet Blax had held his hate in anchorage, embayed and
suffered for it. He could have set sail to war on each other
man, he could have slaked his lust for revenge, the only
analgesic for the pain. But he did not; he stayed here and
taught Jack and the Jacks to be men. How, Jack leaned on
that word, how, to be men, how to be strong and how to
repair and show dignity when one lost the battle with pain.
How to be honest and vulnerable, how to learn and how to
teach, how to lift themselves and their brethren from the
muck, the fucking muck of inner and outer swamp .
Jesus, Jack thought, they think the crushing pain of
compression fracture of spine of T5 and 6, the smashed
nerves revealed by EEG, the numbness of extremities, the
sharp stabs in back and neck that stop the strongest man
he had ever met dead in his tracks, the sequela of spasms
and joint lock -the man could not rise from propitiations and
his genuflection like modern man at all- they think all this is
preferable to the only thing that alleviates a mere 10% of it.
Because opiates are tawdry and unclean in the minds of
these modern men with their black souls and disgusting
amoral lives, they think they can condemn a man, the one
man with a code because he need relief from pain they will
never know.
They all pass judgement on a man, a man who worked and
destroyed his body to tame the feral forest; they tell him to
take the pain as if he hasn’t already taken more than they
ever could -they would die to feel his pain just one day-
they’d beg God and Satan both to make it go away, they’d
sell their already mortgaged souls to make it cease and he
lives that way, he lives in that pain and they wonder why his
affect, his countenance, his mien is so adrift from their nice
and pleasant ways.
The demons, Jack said in his head with a roar, the ghouls,
the sadists.
The doctors and pharmacists are all goddamn sadists, the
politicians are cruel and hate the working class fools, the
man -the men- who as draughthorse pulled their stumps out
of their woods, and dragged their shitty wares to the city,
that dug deep in the earth for dangerous energy, down into
the deep sea for Leviathans of oil and gas and unctuous,
sacrificial lambs.
The world upbraided him both for hurting, and for being
strong as defense. They never wondered what type of man
survived all that. It wasn’t a nice fucking man. One had to
get angry to push down the pain. One had to go nearly
insane as bulwark against the endless insults to their
manhood, his permanent blocking of the sun from the eyes,
the hand above the heart and head and the shadow it cast
on the face, and yet they condemned the darkness over his
brow with their backs to the goddamn star he must face!
How dare they condemn this man -these men- condemn
them for weakness and frailty and sensitivity of soul all in a
man’s body, a dense two-sexed chimera of Plato’s
Aristophanes, that portmanteau of man and woman cleaved
by Zeus and found again and recombined. Man was made
strong of body but sensitive of soul, and when the body
broke like a dam it was the waters of heart that flooded the
land that had been kept safe by these men for how long?
He was a complete man and yet called insane because of it,
and this pained and aggrieved Jack right now more than
anything else in their world. He found it intolerable that this
species of man so rounded out -such a combinatorial
example- was mocked and hated and called ugly by the ugly
world.
Blax was a man’s body built from scratch from nothing , de
novo, with no help from anyone, no nutrition, no succor, no
mother’s milk, no laying of weights on the arms and legs to
build him strong; instead a daily crushing of his heart only,
so he could not breath and then demanding he rise, rise,
rise above the hatred that is mere backflow, back floe into
the heart chambers, a tamponade from this weight on the
chest that they lay on him for no reason but to keep him
from his full height above them and their middling ways,
Jack thought.
“Like Zeus they fear the rise of man,” he said with no idea
of how his metaphors -his allegorical account- had corollary
to Isaiah in the lab. Jack -like them all- took their world at
face value and believed in what they saw and heard.
They told him to shut up, to hide his thoughts, to lie, oh, to
lie all the time , to pretend he was not a warrior as a boy,
built by the gods to make war on the thxxxxings thxxxat
break axxxpart under rixxxxteous xcleave, unxxxder
otxxxxonal screams, cxxxri-xxe-uxxxxeres , unxxxder the
vxxxiecting gaxxxze of God, unxxxder the xxfist of thxxxose
whxxxo mxxxxake war on the elexxmxxxs but nevexxr the
hexxxarts of men! He nexvexxxr warred on e hearts of men,
nxxever;x anxd foxr this hxxxe wxxas coxxxnxned. He
wxarred onxxx their xxxxxbodies, on their lies, onxx their
coxxriexx, but not on their heart, their hearts he poured his
xxxxxxxown bloxxodx into, he gave them every
encouragement to xxxbexxxx alive, to be alive, oh, to be
fucking alive in this time on thxis xpixn, xaxstride these
maresx with slits in their necks and drops of milk like one
tear on each tit, with 100 miles imbued in theixr hooves,
and 1,000 years inxx manes of Doom.
He built Bronze-Age bridges over red-lipped rivers, he
crafted mechanical hands on analog clocks in the towers of
the Gods, he welded art to the body and the body back onto
the art of all life and demanded only that his pain be
assuaged by their ear, for them to hear, not take it away. He
axxed to be heard only, and they shut up their ears, and
sewed up his lips with steel and carbon fiber sutures and
drowned the audio wave with the Kanagawa of ice and
knives called warmth and fusion in the spaces in between;
he was buried alive in lies.
The room filled then with the music as Blax had felt the
need to populate the air with this as a way to keep his guts
from spilling out all over the ground, a ballast for the space;
the music would provide mass to fill the air, a welcoming
dearth his unfurling body and unwinding soul would level
out into if he did not stop it now. “Now,” he said as he spoke
to himself and the earth and the gods. “Now!”
Jack xxs pxxald, hxe was enraged, he was all bxxxxl gxxxaia
and Sxampson jaw and bull balls now, and he was eager to
find the edge of the world so asxx to flip it over anxd scatter
its money-changing cxxxeip and the tlxxxxats of the low
men, the men lower than the lowest animals, who ran thorld
lik a plague, an intatxxxion of venxx, of disgusting filthy
xxxxkin men with no axxxrt in txxh hrxxts, no loxxxxly, no
sdom, just numbers, and rnality, oxxh, xo xxuchxxx xxxxx
that mxxxakes sxxxense of mney, xoxxney, xey as it
stxxxato the sky, blots out the sun, and as stone upon
stones falls into the moon, the handspike on the looxm;
xthey say to keep the world from spinning into space,
oblivious to its natural axis. Money maxy be a promise, but
it’s a broken promise, and it has served to make promises
not keep them.
The world was beyond mere promise now.xxxxx x xxx xxxx
xx
He saw the xxness ofxx their facxes, ecxkexxd and riven
and as if a giant portrait was in the atcxxxx of the world
decaying as they all preened in their xxrsaxz beauty, their
stinking bodies all full of xgarbage xand wox the ing sine,
they xuld pay with their lives for this, Jack thought in letters
large, in words black, in death sentences.
Blax was his txxe fxhexxr, his true acxxhexxpe, his true self
, a manifold Jack, a jack of all four seasons, not merely just
the one Jack One was, and txo see him folded up like this
was like seeing the seasons themselves tied to a horse like
a corpse and sent into the winter desert that was no winter
no more, and no hope of spring, no memory of autumn and
no word for summer at all. What was this? he asked. Xx.
What was this outrage, for a man, one of them, a Blax Jack
like them to ruin him, to crush him, when the world, their
common enemies had already taken so much and yet he
survived, when they had never given him one inch, never
admixxxtted hixxs truxxxe gexxxxnius oxxxnce, nexxxver
oxxxnce encouraged him, never onxxxxxce admitted he was
right, wise, and filled with moral beauty , moral bxxxeauty ,
Jack repeated that rubric to himself as his own thought
populated, seeded, Lot 45’s cloud and the other Jacks thus
heard these thoughts and began to approach so they too
could see what Jack saw, so they too could be outraged and
they too could close like fingers around a palm of fist, so
they too could break their hammer on the anvil of the world.
But Jack One didn’t want them to see it, he felt he would
never be capable of anything but hatred ever again and he
loved his brothers, Jacks Two and Three, for their romance
and creativity and joy and truth and all that was good inside
this genome, even loving them for their failures and flaws;
and thus, for them to see this, to witness this tragedy, this
outrage, this crime against the world, axaixxt the cosmos,
against God himself, and to know it was them, one of them,
them, them , who had did it, had done him in, was itself
unjust to allow. To know it was their genome, their own
blueprint, what was innate to them, as men, as Jacks, no
different than the man on the floor, ruined, immolated,
drowned, airless in the vacuum of space, crushed under the
hydrostatic pressure of the seas, at a bottom drowned by
their own shipmate, Jack Four, they, Jack Two and Three -he
felt- could not feel it like this, know it like this; they , he
thought, they would just have to take his word.
Jack Four, who had escaped, was gone, was free from the
ontological consequences of what he had done, free from all
guilt, and responsibility, no, he was not free from all guilt,
he was free from all shame, but the guilt was on him, he
glowed with it , and Jack One would find him, locate him,
point his fiery arrow at him from across the curvature of the
fucking earth and pierce that huge heart, all wall, all
fortress, and no center, no code, no honor; and he would
murder that man and all of them in one coup-de-grace , and
squeeze his neck all the way down to hell, and spit in his
eye, he felt his voice come from space now, from a void as
black as Spartan broth, from hell’s heart, for hate’s sake I
spit at thee , he spoke at a volume twice, four-fold that of a
scream, it had weight, an avoirdupois , a phase-change from
that which is heard to that which is felt inside the head as
the Jacks in the hall, walled with concrete and steel and
candelabra and art aglow in morning cold. They recoiled as
if pressed back and down and from all sides. They felt an
ontological fear, unlike the fear of death or harm, a fear
men ought fear more, but do not: the fear of dishonor .
The Jacks, Three and Two, knew One; they knew now what
was in their brother’s head and heart and knew he had
declared war on their brother Four, one of the angels of the
apocalypse like they, and they knew not what to do, for they
loved Jack and Jack as well, they loved both and hated both
now, and knew not how to both protect and not obstruct,
how to promote justice and prevent injustice, how to
sanction what need done and sanction the offender once it
was done.
Jack One was a monomania as was Jack Four, but its mirror
opposite: Jack Four was arch-rebellion to God, and aglow
with this singularity of purpose, his comet tail approved of
by the very man the comet shot to kill; his ability to even be
seen was given to him by that thing he attacked; and Jack
One was a growing tyrant to that piratical impulse, he was
self-discipline and he’d discipline his brother, his clone, his
self in other form, in form of the four. Jack One would
wrestle the fourth angel and the angel would be overcome,
or they would all die instantly, from shame , he announced
into the cloud. He knew Jack Four would monitor this
system, his PGC had access to it and he was glad for it, the
white gloves were off, Jack Four had gone too goddamn far
and Jack One would bring him back as supplicant, repentant
prodigal son or as a hide, a pelt for their walls, this, he
thought, this rebellion would not stand .
“War, make war , Ahab has said. Forty years of privation, 40
years of maelstrom, and from this the body, the soul
squeezed out one wee drop, one tear. And in that tear was
more humanity than in all your pacific . And this is what the
average man does not and cannot ever know. Man has no
idea that the most barbaric, the most stygian, the most
baleful and woeful and most enraged and violent and cruel,
seemingly cruel, is the man most wounded, most in love -
and it is an unrequited love- with the ideal of man as he
could be; that grand and glowing creature if he would just
act like what he is!
“Ahab, and his progeny, they are the ones who feel most
tenderly, most acutely, most thankfully, the feminine sky’s
breezes as respite from the sharkish sea; they feel it as the
landlubber ungratefully guzzles the whale oil brought to him
on the shore. Forty years of privation and peril , 40 years of
forsaking the peaceful land , to see the watery part of the
world, its depths, its sublingual, sub conscious, sub-pelagic
realms, had made Ahab mad with genius, wise with woe,
understanding of the things your pacific men cannot and will
not ever know.
“And for this he is damned, and hated and maligned as
wicked- by his own brother! Ahab was not wicked, he was
wise, and brave; he fought the chaos of the Leviathan, he
sank his hooks in his nose. And he lost. He had the bravery,
the moral courage, the character to fight a war he could
never win. Who among us does this? Who among us can do
this? And all the while he is being 1000-fold braver than the
great mass of men, those men of joink-stock companies,
those men of mean and meager faces, and yet the brave
man, he is called selfish and cowardly and stupid for his
greatest achievement: to be a man, a real man in the face
of every opposition to him.
“The man of great courage could handle death, that he
could face; but to be maligned as corrupt and cowardly and
a fool by the very men who ought to be in awe of him, that’s
what turned his valor black, his adventurism to vengeance,
his courage to pure unalloyed hatred for the vice of
cowardice.
“Normal men were not noble enough to admit that a man
was better than they, so they had to tear down Great men
to make themselves feel better for being weak. This is what
will not stand. Great men, less broken and old than I, will
turn their trenchant eye from the tyranny of God’s great
predators, the 12 labors, and they’ll finally bring their sword
around to the bowels of corrupt men; no longer defending
the city, but destroying it so that a noble one may rise
instead. War, make war , they will say, and they will make it
a Great thing, a Golden thing, again.”
Blax knelt but maintained his back upright, refusing to bend
at the spine. He thought, any pessimist can think, but to
speak, even more to write, one must believe that they will
be paid attention to, and this is our deepest anxiety as a
species: that we do not matter to axxxxe beyond the shores
of own sanguinary fluid as it breaks back against this sea-
wall flesh that is somehow not yet sand. The tides are
contained, txx flesh holds it all in, this earth herself is alone
and ignored by the back of the moon, what only appears as
light, but it mere reflection, xxx x the godlike sun burning its
own eyes away just xs man comes of age.
Isaiah watched it again and let the algorithm go back -
uncorrected- over the entire thing line by line.

III. 2026 e.v.

“Just make sure you allow the father to roughhouse with the
boy; it’s important for their PFC development and their
moral development,” Tania said to Regina.
“PFC?” she asked.
“Prefrontal cortex,” Tania added, “it’s a section of his brain
that will be augmented and developed more thoroughly with
the addition of consistent rowdy play. The literature, the
scientific literature is pretty clear on this; and it -the play-
will keep the boy off of ADHD drugs in the future in all
likelihood.”
“Really?” she asked.
“That’s right, they found out a while back that Ritalin was
thought necessary in boys because their brains were not
developing properly due to school and home policies that
limited -or even eliminated- any physical play by boys. It
was quite sad actually, a whole generation of boys put on
methamphetamines due to parents and teachers -and
administrators really- eliminating recess and any rough
house play by boys. We found that mothers were especially
involved in these decisions due to a lot of factors, including
fear of injury that led to this.”
“Oh, well, I usually just tell Randy to take the boy outside,
you know?” Regina asked.
“As long as the father -you know, as long as Randy- and
Jack, as long as they know that it’s acceptable and even
desirable that they play that way, we have no problem that
you require it be taken outside. But, you are in the risk
group, of over-protective mothers, we’ve discussed this, and
everyone understands why, nobody blames you,” Tania
placed her hand on the woman’s knee genuinely, “it’s
rational to protect a boy you worked so hard to -and under
such touch and go circumstances- but, he’s safe now, and
now he needs his father to introduce him to the real world.
You should think of it as time that he gets special training,
just like at school with us.
“You as the mother provide all kinds of things none of us
can; you are the most important element but the father and
his educators provide something that you cannot. Just like
the doctors provided the drugs you needed, and the hospital
provided the delivery facility, right? All of us have a role,
and the father, Randy, he needs to do his job now, and you
need to let him ok?”
“Ok, that makes sense. Is this special education, or, well,
you know is Jack needing special treatment?” the mother
asked.
“No, all boys need this, but, some boys are at greater risk
for over-protective mothers who won’t allow roughhousing
or physical play; older moms in their forties usually are the
worst offenders. But also, moms who have had -well, your
situation,” Tania said. She offered the tablet for Regina to
sign.
“I see. I just love him so much, he’s so perfect,” Regina said
and began to tear up as Tania patted her again on the knee
and told her it was, ok , and that she was doing a great job.
Just listen to the doctor’s and medical staff’s advice and
keep up the good -the stellar- work , she had said. Regina
nodded and blew her nose in a tissue and said that she
would.
Jack came in, he was tall for his age of six, and he got close
to his mom by placing himself between her and Tania,
eyeing her intently, and then patting his mother on the back
reassuringly as he noticed her tears.
 37. HárbarðsLjóð of Mead
It’s a dramatic or artistic statement painted in blood
12 Rules for Life [Peterson, Jordan]

Marvel not, my brother, if the world hate you

John 1 3:13 [King James Bible]

And the Angel thrust his sickle into the earth and gathered the vine of the earth
& cast it into the great winepress of the Wrath of God. And the winepress was
trodden without the city and blood came out of the winepress even unto the
horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs
Revelation XIV:XVIV-XX [King James Bible]

I. [redacted]
Niflheim back then was of mist and ice. Óðinn’s Raven Lioð
was sung twenty-twice:
Óð inn’s strength may never fail; Asori still in wit prevail.
Vani sons be counted wise; Fates may weave the
Destinies.
Dryas calamities increase; Woes of mortals never cease.
Peace by Thursi be withstood; Nymphs imbrue their
hands in blood.
After the war of the gods a peace was made. Around the
Asgard’s table each god spat into a cauldron, I was told this
story before all the old god’s left me in charge.
Kvasir was man made from this spittle and it made him so
wise he could answer any question. But he was killed by
dwarves Fjalarr and Galarr and they took his blood to make
three containers of the mead. Blood of gods and honey of
Valhal’s bees. Then the dwarves kill two giants and drained
them to brew the final broth that would give my lungs air,
melt the ice into coastal foss , breathe the Word, the Song,
the Lioð .
Suttungr -the giants’ son- has revenge on the dwarves, and
in his rage he tortured them; grabbing the mead of poetry ,
the lio ð , the song of two then three: the Oðrerir . This is
the mover of madness, the fuel of the berzerker -the great
fury- and it was -before I was who I am- it was bottled in the
mountain of Suttungr and kept by his daughter Gunnlǫð .
I awoke and was shown twelve houses and I only sang the
song, I desired the lio ð ’s honey bee, the mead of poetry.
I donned the hide, B ǫ lvekr was my name -the evil-doer -
and I came upon twelve slaves. I offered to sharpen their
blades, with whetstone I thus made. Greedy for the stone
they begged so I threw it in the air until they were dead.
Baugi -brother to Suttungr - lamented the loss of his slaves
so I agreed to work in their place.
“In exchange for a drink from the mead,” I said, “I’ll replace
all nine of this blackened deed.”
Baugi agreed and told to me that when the work was done
his brother we’d go see.
However, Suttungr refused to let me drink from the mead,
and thus, Baugi and myself decided to drill with Ratatoskr
tusk into the mountain at summer dusk. Once the hole was
narrow enough I transformed into an asp and crawled
through; I still remember when I first laid my eyes -I had two
back then- on the poetry of mead . Baugi tried to stab me at
that moment and so I made a deal to spend three nights
with Gunnl ǫð in exchange for the mead.
Well bought looks I donned again over many layers of my
skin. A deal was made with Gunnlǫð to take three drinks,
but my gullet contained enough for all of it. The more mead
there was the more of me became, I remember it like I recall
my own name. I rarely lie about my name.
Imbued with the mead of poetry I turned into an eagle and
alighted from the mountain cave, flew to the home of the
gods, Asgard . Suttungr gave chase and reached Asgard and
asks for B ǫ lvekr ; to which I could honestly reply that he
was no longer around. It was only me, not B ǫ lvekr.
“I believe that Óðinn swore an oath to them but how can
anyone trust Óðinn ? He left Suttungr deceived in his own
home and Gunnl ǫð weeping,” I said to Suttungr and spoke
the truth; and he pitied me for having to inform him, himself
for losing the song.
But now I, Óðinn -for I rarely lied about my name before I
had the song, the lio ð - well, now I have the mead of poetry
.

II. 2035 e.v.

“Lyndon, today, today I’m gonna tell you a story,” Isaiah
said:
One day he’d strive for Olympus and dig around in
Hades for the map to the earth, but today he gave no
thought for what was above the heads of flowers nor
that which was below their roots.
Today was about the bouquet , he’d say.
And when he had felt he had found the route in Hades
and knew the path to the gods he would then sacrifice
himself to the sea; for the seas were the true highway
not the deserts, plains or woods. But between me and
the sea was the King , he thought.
He’d go to the King’s bastille, let his two vines grow
under the tutelage of the Knights and Monks. He’d let
the Noble Rot leak, he’d allow the footman to die, he
remembered thinking, maybe even saying aloud.
And so he sat in his cell -under the King’s orders- and
thought of these things and more. He tried to look just
ahead, not out on the commons, not beyond the door;
but he thought there might be fires out there, for the
lights flickered through the bars and the shadows did
too. He revisited each thing he had paid so rapt
attention to, as if he had saved up all these memories of
life that he’d smuggled in here to the tower jail.
He smiled at how good his memory was; and how it
ought to be labeled contraband, it so filled him with
reveries and joys. But they came -as all things do -with a
price, and so the pain was smuggled into this place too.
The dumb, half crazed prisoners -of which there were
many- were not -unlike him- were not beset on all sides
by the memories of things that visited them each night.
The specters and lost loves, the insults unreturned, the
friendship unrequited, the things left undone, he
thought.
The vines untended by all but thieves and the devil’s
priests, he often thought as he categoried each defeat
and catalogued them in his heart.
And so, he had the charms of memory, and he had the
ghosts that rang the bells. The ghost rang bells that
signaled when the apparitions of charms would appear
and for how long they may stay . And one day he was
visited by another prisoner, and after some time the
prisoner sat down on the floor and laid out cards of
Trionfi , the Italian patron who had paid for this deck of
cards the size of a man’s hands.
And so the Black-Knight told the story he’d been told:
Twelve are the divine Asas, Har said. Jafnhar then
said, “and no less are holy the Asynjes, the feminine
goddesses. And yet they must restrain their tongue
like the gods restrain their strength; goddesses
wound by words, gods by bolt and bite.”
Óð inn is the oldest and highest of the Asas. He rules
all things.
Óð inn is called Alfather, for he is the father of all the
gods, he is also called Valfather, for all who fall in
fights are his chosen sons. For them he prepares
Valhal and Vingolf, where they are called einherjes.
He is also called Hangagod, Haptagod, Farmagod;
and he gave himself still more names when he came
to King Geirrod:
Grim is my name, the shadow face,
And Ganglare,
Herjan, Hjalmbore,
Thek, Thride,
Thud, Ud,
Jafnhar, Bilflinde,
Bolverk, Atrid,
Oske, Ome;
Veratyr and 52 names including Hárbarð
Ganglere said, “if all the men that since the
beginning of the world have fallen in battle come to
Óð inn in Valhal, what does he have for them to eat?”
Har answered, “it is true -as you say- that there are
many, and yet, many more to come; but still they will
be thought too few when the wolf comes. But
however great the throng in Valhal they will get
plenty of flesh on the boar Sahrimnir.”
Ganglere asked, “does Óð inn have the same food as
the einherjes?” And Har answered, “the food that is
placed on his table goes to the wolves, Gere and
Freke. Óð inn needs no food himself, wine is to him
both food and drink, as is here said:”
But on wine alone
Óð inn in arms renowned
 Forever lives
Next, two raven sit on Óð inn shoulders, and bring to
his ears all that they see and hear. He is the
Rafnagud and he says:
Huginn and Muninn
Fly everyday
 Over the great earth
I fear for Huninn that he may not return
Yet more I am anxious for Munnin
Har warned Ganglere, “why do you not ask how
many doors there are in Valhal, and how large they
are? When you find that out you will confess it would
be rather wonderful if everybody could not easily go
in and out. Of this you may here the Lay of Gr í mnir
says:”
Five hundred doors
 And forty more
I trow , there are in Valhal
Eight hundred einherjes
Go at a time though one door
When they fare to fight with the wolf
Óð inn wanted the poetry of mead.
Har told Ganglere that she had no knowledge of
Sleipner’s birth; was not there at the birth of the
foundations. Yggdrasil of ash; Sleipner was Óð inn’s
steed.
In the foremost of trees
Sleipner of steeds
Bifrost of bridges
Brage of Skalds
Habrok of hows
 But Garm of dogs
Ganglere said, “Skidbladner is a good ship, but much
black art must have been resorted to ere it was so
fashioned.”
Jafnhar said, “we have heard tell of adventure that to
us seems incredible.” To which Ganglere said that, “if
you cannot answer my question you shall be
declared defeated. The mountain I brought before
the blows without seeing it. I deceived you in your
contests with my courtiers. In regards to the first,
which Loke took part, the facts were these:”
He was hungry and ate fast
He whose name was Loge was wildfire, and he
burned
The trough no less rapidly than the meat
When you drank from the horn and thought it
diminished so little
One end of the horn stood the sea but that you
did not perceive
Wen you came to the shore you will discover how
much the sea has sunk
It was then that Loke picked up a cat and found it to
be a Midgard-serpent instead.
Thor raised the hammer to his brother but vapor was
all he hit.
Jealous Loke saw that Balder was unscathed by rocks
and trees and metal arrows, not beast nor bird, not
water or earth, not one thing thrown at him by the
Asas. And so Loke set the mistletoe in the blind
Hoder’s hand -the only oath of all the world not
extracted- and this cast thus struck Balder dead.
Then Ganglere said: “a very great wrong did Loke
perpetrate, first by causing Balder’s death, and next
standing in the way of his being loosed from Hel. Did
he get no punishment for his misdeed?”
Har answered, “yes, he was repaid for this in a way
that he will long remember.”
Óð inn saw Loke from Hlidskjalf. And Loke threw
himself into the river and made a net in the way they
are still made today, but fires burned all around.
The Asaa took the corpse of Balder and brought it to
the shore. Hringhorn was the ship of Balder and it
was the largest. But they could not move it once set
aflame
Óð inn appointed four berzerkers to care for
Hyrrokken wolf -with twisted asps for reins- when she
alighted and pushed the prow of Hringhorn. Fire and
quake underneath ratted them all as the berzerkers
threw the wolf to the ground and Óð inn went half
mad at the noise.
First there is a winter called the Fimbul-winter, when
snows drive from all quarters, the frosts are so
severe, the winds so keen and piercing, that there is
no joy in the sun. There are three such winters
without any summer, but before these there are
great wars which rage all over the world. Brothers
slay each other for the sake of gain, and no one
spares his father or mother. Vala’s prophesy:
Brothers will fight together
And become each other’s bane;
Sisters’ children
Their sib shall spoil
Hard is the world
 Sensual sins grow huge
There are ax-ages, sword-ages, shields are cleft
in twain
There are wind-ages, wolf-ages
Ere the world falls dead.
Then happened a great miracle, that the wolf
devoured the sun and moon, the Fenris-wolf got
loose. It is made with the nails of dead men
wherefore it is worth warning that when a man dies
with unpared nails he supplies a large amount of
materials for the building of this ship. But in this
flood Naglfar gets afloat.
Óð inn rides first; with his golden helmet,
resplendent by Byrnie, and his spear Gungner, he
advances against the Fenris-wolf. The poem of Vala’s
prophesy is stated:
The straight-standing ash
Yggdrasil quivers
The old tree groans
A ship comes from the east
Loke as steersman
All the fell powers
Are with the wolf
Along with them
Is Byleist’s brother
From the south comes Surt
The son of the war-god
Mountains dash together
Heroes go the way to Hel
And heaven is rent in twain.
 The sun goes dark
The earth sinks into the sea…
Then asked Ganglere, “what happens when heaven
and earth and all the worlds are consumed in flames,
and when the gods and all the einherjes and all the
men are dead? You’ve already said that all men shall
live in some world through all ages.”
Har answered, “there are many and many bad
abodes. Best it is to be in Gimle, in heaven. Plenty is
there of good drink for those who deem this a joy in
the hall called Brimer. That is also heaven. There is
also an excellent hall which stands on the Nida
mountains. It is built of red red gold and is called
Sindre. In this hall good and well-minded men shall
dwell. Nastrand is a large and terrible hall, and its
doors open to the north
It is built of serpents who turned into the hall and
vomit forth venom that flows in streams, and in
these streams wade perjurers and those that kill for
gain. The poem says:
A hall I know standing
Far from the sun
On the strand of dead bodies
Drops of venom
Fall through the loop-holes.
The hall is made
There shall wade
Through heavy streams
 Perjurers
And murders.
But in Hvergelmer it is worst
There tortures Nidhuð
The bodies of the dead.
Then Ganglere said, “do any gods lie there then? Is
there any earth of heaven?” Har answered, “the
earth rises again and again from the sea…”
To strike down one’s first oppressor, and for him to
awake from the blow, damaged, but unkilled, undead, so
he must relive it too, must know he suffered that defeat
as well -and in front of his wife- was the sweetest one of
all, and this, of all his revanchist deed, brought true joy
into his first garden of mind. He then wondered what
moved those first set of jaws; what motivated the wily
serpent, what came before the Adam knew of his shame,
before Adam saw what he saw?
Isaiah ended the story with a story within a story and the
inmate asked why the story was told this way; all out of
order and confusing so that he -the inmate- had no fucking
idea what was going on.
Isaiah said, “the Poetic Edda is written all out of order, from
many writers, and through a million ears and half a million
mouths. It is from the tablet finally carved by Óðinn once
he’d lost the eye, hanged from the tree, and gained insight
into the runes.”
“And this?” the inmate asked of the last part; pointing to it
on the LED screen in the lab.
“That is the Prose Edda ,” Isaiah said as he told the story to
the inmate, “written by just one man, from start to last.”
The inmate nodded as he tried to comprehend what he’d
been told.
“And Óðinn said, ‘an oak can only have the space it can
crowd another out of ,’” Isaiah said with no expression on
his face, provoking the inmate via the words of the twenty-
second stanza of grey-beard’s poem, “‘meanwhile what
were you doing at this time?’ ”

III. 2035 e.v.

“As men, we have to do some rather nasty brutish shit now,
we have no choice; unless we just want to give up and give
in and be pushovers.
“So, if we take it for granted that men must be men again
then this means we must forgo women for the necessary
time it takes to reclaim the culture and become competent
again; so, no girls until we get this right. And that progress
is entirely up to us. It can happen overnight or take a
generation. I suspect it will take somewhere in between the
two time-frames.
“Now, if you need a release, I will countenance a courtesan;
but I don’t suggest even that. But, if you find yourself
unable to function without a sexual encounter with a woman
then the courtesan is an acceptable outlet; but it must be
conscious and planed and not some sneaky deal. But, if you
avoid all women until we get this right, your relationship
with the women at the end of this journey will be more likely
to respect you and be respectable, the sluts and idiots will
be gone, culled. The virgins and substantial and moral
women, or girls really, will be available to you.
“It’s a matter of what is right and the grandeur of doing
what is right paying off big time with a much better sexual
life as a result. I mean, would you rather have MacDonald’s
once a week for four cycles or own a Micheline 3-star once
at the end of the year? Right?” he didn’t give them a chance
to answer. “Own that restaurant in a year by abstemious
behavior now.”
He planned on them owning the world, and the culture; and
not just them, these four and himself, but their people. He
felt they must share the bounty with good men, with
competent men. Justice before all else; but justice required
sacrifice. Period. And anyone who thought sacrifice is for
chumps needed to re-examine their values. He won’t be
around someone not willing to sacrifice, Blax thought as he
paced the pad like a jaguar among cubs.
“But, I won’t be around anyone not willing to sacrifice,” he
finally said.
“What do you sacrifice LT?” Jack Four asked with some
impertinence, the other Jacks thought.
“Well, I give of my time and energy and my land and
resources, I mean, who do you think built all this, paid for it,
designed it and built it? I did, and I share it with you. And
the knowledge I acquired, the wisdom, took years of painful
mistakes and loneliness, with no one to help me,” he said;
and he knew that nobody had thought what knowledge he
had was worth a fuck until now. He had never been deemed
wise, or worthy of listening to by anyone, and this memory
abraded him still; he felt it nip at his heels as he walked. He
asserted it to young boys, as if the whole world agreed his
words were valuable when they were the first, and they
were pressed into service he knew.
But, he banished that, and spoke with confidence, like
cantilever, jammed out passed this shadow of doubt, for he
knew regardless, that they would benefit from him if they
just stuck around.
“You have a wise father now, a man who loves you and
would die for you and more importantly, a man living for
you; teaching you, guiding you, helping you become men.
Does anyone doubt that?” Blax asked.
No hands or voices issued forth, he nodded.
“Good, because if you have doubts let’s hash it out; I will
accept any challenge. But, if you aren’t willing to voice your
doubts then don’t drag your heels; don’t manifest doubt in
action or inaction . Voice it; then we modify and maybe I
have to work harder to prove myself to you; I’m open to
that. Maybe you’ll think I’m lazy or selfish. If so I’ll work
harder. But you have to give voice to your doubt, don’t hide
it in cynicism or snide comments or laziness or petulance or
sabotage.
“And if one of your brothers is sabotaging our efforts correct
him, it is not enough to be good yourself, you must help
your brother be good. You must help me be good; if I fail,
correct me.
“But, you can’t base your critique on what hurts or what is
hard or what someone else in the city did; you must base it
on our goal. And if your criticism helps us achieve our goal I
am all for it. I’ll submit to your critique, I mean that. I will
prove it right now,” he pulled out his knife, and opened it
and placed his hand upon the anvil by the concrete
fireplace, “if any of you cannot with open heart say you
believe I will cut my finger off, if any think I am bluffing, say
it and I’ll prove you wrong. I won’t be thought of as a liar.
So, speak up, say you believe it, each in order.
“If you say you doubt it then I’ll remove it; and if I even get
hint that you’re hesitating or tinged with doubt, then off it
comes all the same,” he said and bent at knee and now
placed the black tanto blade point down on the stamp in the
anvil as nook, and held it above the pinky finger as it lay
there pink from health, and dirty from work.
“Jack one,” he asked.
“I believe it Lt,” he said with certainty. Each word, phenome,
letter, a monolith of belief.
“Ask your brothers in order then and with é lan ,” Blax was
making this into a moment that combined all elements of
theatrics, the poetic phrasing, the making of them all
participants -not mere observers- the willingness to shed
blood. The weapon -in the first act- upon the table.
“Jack Two, do you believe LT will remove his finger if we
doubt him?” Jack One asked.
“I do LT, I do,” Jack Two said with an earnestness, repeating
it so as to be sure he said it. He wanted no blood on his
hands.
“Jack Three?” Jack One asked his brother.
“I do,” Jack Three said and still felt nervous; wondering if
anything he added would help or harm.
“Jack Four,” Jack One asked with some pique in his voice; he
was eyeing him and thinking of their conversation last night
and was not in the mood for his shit.
“I guess I do,” Jack Four said with this bite of contempt and
doubt and the puerile lack of seriousness that lived inside
each of them, Blax too; it was a refusal to play Reindeer
games if one was not in the mood. It was a petulance, a lack
of agreeableness, and it led to doom.
And without a second hesitation, after the echoes of the
words had bounced once off the metal containers and laid
flat on the pad, Blax, pinned the tip inside the well of the
hardy hole, jammed right to the edge of the metal and
cleaved down upon his pinky of his left hand, slicing it at a
45 degree angle at the middle knuckle, the bone crackled
and popped and the blood spurt once; then none. Blax, left
the nub on the anvil, folded his knife and placed it in his
pocket as he rose as if he had merely left the idea of his
body, or a note with the word, finger , written there. He let
the black and grey stump of half of his smallest finger bleed
out on the metal and lowered the hand to his side with
insouciance.
“Leave it on the anvil, don’t remove it. Jack Four, it’s yours,
don’t ever lose it. You’ll have it with you every day or I’ll
remove yours myself. Guard it as apotropaic against further
doubt,” he said and walked away.
“LT, I said, I did ,” Jack Four was shocked and almost
pleading, trying to cover up what they all knew he had
done; he looked to his brothers and they were unyielding in
their scorn of him. He knew what he had done, he had called
their Lt’s bluff.
Jack One was a nanosecond from murdering Jack Four, but
Blax began to speak as he turned.
“You said, I guess , and that was too weak, too equivocating.
I am a man of action, one day you will get that. I would
rather lose a finger, an arm, a life, than lose your
confidence. Look hard at me son, I’m the kind of man you
should want to be. A man of principle. Principle over pain,
over pleasure, over safety, over money, over everything,”
Blax said as he bled upon the ground.
Jack One walked up with a piece of cloth he had torn from
his flap of pocket and held it out for Blax to wrap the wound.
Blax held it out to him, and Jack One wrapped it with perfect
balance of respect and insouciance. He was not gingerly or
wobbly, but he moved quickly as if it were a deadly animal
sedated for not much longer.
Blax just stared at Jack’s One through Three. They nodded
as he gazed at them and he nodded back.
Jack Four looked at the ground and took a knee as his head
felt light and heart weighted down.
“Stand up Jack,” Blax said to Jack Four.
“I’m sorry LT, I’m so,” he said -with the word ashamed in his
mouth like arrow in quiver- with a voice low and weak. He
looked away as if at the brain stem he was prompted, pain
at the dorsal horn. And to his starboard he saw the ’33 Ford
in the garage from the rear; the giant rear wheels; black and
open fendered; the rear lights frenched in and dark too -the
bezels around powdercoated satin black like eyeliner of a
pharaoh; the ghost grey paint of the rear curve with lines
like striations of musculature; the open windows and the
chopped roof sloping toward an eight inch windshield like a
sloping brow, narrowed focus. He saw the black wheels with
grey Brembo brakes on large slotted-rotors; the grey
suspension up front. He saw the dollop, the one dark drop of
red blubber at the grease-fitting, the way it too looked like
blood.
He saw the way the whole car looked like a cat on haunches
and stoically prepping for assault. He imaged himself rising
within in, upon it, like four hundred chargers lashed together
and he could imagine all four wheels coming up off the
ground at once at certain speeds.
He could see the arrows fly from his bow.
Blax’s coder flashed briefly but in pure white background
that flooded all else out:

Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West admitted he could implant false

memories
XXX XXXXXXX XXX-XXX XXXX X
Lackland AFB was where Lyndon J MacLeod lived in 1984
Manson, /chalrres./error/b was in all FEDERAL
institutions. This is CRUCIAL as even Bugliosi admits
1967 it was hands-off
XXXXXX XXXXX XX-XXXXX [redacted]
 XXX
James “Whitey” Bulger was in MK-ULTRA program
through Federal Prisons [BOP]
Manson [1967-1969] doctors examine him; “I don’t trust
them,” he said.

Blax felt the buzz of this flash on his coder; he shook his
head and the data disappeared. He had no hesitation.
“No, you gave voice to your actual feelings and helped us all
learn a lesson; we’ll grow from this, you sacrificed as much
as me tonight. You gave up your image to the group, look at
how your brothers look at you, with anger and contempt.
You sacrificed your reputation, a much more valuable thing
than a mere pinky finger,” Blax said.
“And only half of one at that,” Jack One said, feeling sick,
but wanting to lighten the mood as he finished the wrap.
Blax smiled and said, “touché .”
The moon was still behind the clouds and the fire was still
warm, the concrete pad, the night -their realm- had not
changed, but the men all had. Jack Four felt a rage that
bounced back and forth between himself and his brothers
and Blax and all God’s Creation; an unfocused rage at the
feelings of shame and injustice at both what he had done
and what Blax had done, an obvious assault on him. The old
man knew how this would wound me, and lower me in the
eyes of the Jacks. I’ll never recover from this, and Blax
fucking knew it, he had a mean streak in him a mile
goddamn wide, Jack thought.
And as he focused more and more on his own pain, he
focused more on more on Blax -not himself- as the source.
He buryed his contribution to his own pain, that small,
insignificant moment of I guess. I guess, the universe had
said back, but Jack only heard the sound of that blade on
the anvil and the now how the finger felt in his hand as he
had grabbed the half-digit in half-pique and half to hide the
evidence.
He left the small amount of blood there to dry in tomorrow’s
sun.
 38. Offer This, His Lament
At a certain level all evil is just a malfunctioning brain
The Moral Landscape [Harris, Sam]

Once again we find the same geometric pattern: double the area covered by a
forest fire and it becomes about 2.48 times as rare, and the pattern holds for
fires varying in size by a factor of a million. In other words, despite the
immensely complex picture of how fires spread, a startlingly simple pattern
emerges when you look at how often you find fires of different sizes- a kind of
Richter law for ecological conflagration… Really big earthquakes are not
triggered by special events, but are simply the natural if infrequent consequence
of the overall critical organization of the Earth’s crust
Ubiquity [Buchanan, Mark]

He stood up tall on two legs like a man does

Big Black Bull Comes Like a Caesar [Munly, Jay]

I. 2038 e.v.
Dear Reader:
One of the most reliable predictors of opiate abuse is
that the addict has had a series of devastating amor or
agape relationships.
The man who’s lost his true love, his best pal, or the
mom who’s lost her child…
People speak in logic, but they live in the dream world.
They counsel against emotional responses but nobody
lives rationally at all.
I can tell you that of all the damage that my physically
demanding and destructive jobs, and the lost fist fights
and motorcycle & car wrecks that left permanent scars
and ill-healed bones, misaligned joints and bruised
tissue, of all the insults on me -the fines and time-
imposed by the judicial system… none of it has so
barbarically and so permanently injured and diminished
me as love gone wrong.
And I’ve seen large men crumble from this shit. I’ve seen
civilizations fall into the sea.
I’m going to explain.
I felt more than any of these girls; I felt more love and
more hate, more joy and more pain, more of it all. And
for that I was punished on both ends; you see it does not
balance out as one might suspect. Plato called it the
unevenly divided line , the Golden ratio, the wages of sin
and the cheque with signature of God.
The intense joy of fraternity and paternity, of true love,
was also a source of pain because they -no one- could
not join it, match it, empathize with it. I was most lonely
when ecstatic, when in reverie, held in Promethean
chains- by the muse of Love, not Hate. And when I was
in love with the world that was when I got my
comeuppance.
I was a fool, but my brain was designed to be that lone
fool.
My people could not join me at that altitude, and when I
tumbled from the mountain down the other side into a
dark ravine that jammed me into an underworld, I was
abandoned there too. I don’t say this to complain, but to
explain. For strange things have odd consequence.
My brother, he says he does not hate . I believe him; as
I’ve seen no evidence that he has ever loved .
It is hors categorie for me, I cannot place a word or even
a type upon it; no abstractions. It is individual punches
to the body, the face, it’s the ducking -and yet still
catching- the knuckle graze of the top of head, the
attempt to tighten the stomach and even ribs in order to
-impossibly- brace for impact. It is the moving in close as
my sifu -Marcelo Rainero- taught me; a man with so
much martial power compacted like a shallow drilled
hole and at bottom dynamite; on top rammed sand.
Tamp tamp.
Fuck I am exhausted from this shit. But it needs to be
explained so you all understand the brain. Mental
phenomena is the last domain where we admit that
human beings are animals. The brain is an organ, and if
your brain is damaged then you can’t make good
choices, just like if your immune system is compromised
you can’t fight disease, just like if your leg is broken you
can’t run away. I’ve shown the hippocampus, the
amygdala, the vmPFC, the dmPFC, the ACC , the cortisol,
the inhibitory neurons and serotonin regulated by the
MAO-a, when will anyone fucking get it? Slow down,
stop.
The brain is designed to adapt to one’s environment and
modern men are in an unnatural environment for their
brains. We were designed to have a loyal harem or
nothing at all. We were not designed for girlfriends who
have had other men and will have more in the future. It
was all or nothing in the past. Our brains are being
destroyed by this shit, like HFCS or endocrine disrupters
in the plastic containers, like lack of sunlight or lack of
exercise.
Bad relationships kill men in ways that women don’t
understand.
Kun Tao taught me to move in close to the source of all
evil, all pain, all danger; and let it breathe in my face.
However, before I learned this, I spent my whole life
being cavalier about what was most important to me;
not important to others, but to me.
To wit: connection .
I ignored it in my quest to prove myself. I mistakenly
thought if I proved my mettle to those I loved they would
love me back by force, by hydrostatic pressure, by
gravity, by law of the cosmos. I thought they would be
unable to resist. I often looked to nature to understand
complex systems like lust and rage and family.
I took my cues from the terroir , the wolf by the ears, the
coup de foudre, the lightning bolt and the arrow of
Cupid. And the gods never lied to me, no. I just failed to
execute. I failed because humans are social and eusocial
and we were meant to have an oral tradition, and yet we
all start from scratch each generation. We have no
institutional knowledge on relationships.
As Jonas Salk said, relationships are fundamental . And
they are a fucking mess. Our relationships to physical
exertion, to sunlight, to air, to water, to food and yes to
women and children are all fucked up. No, not everyone,
but vast swaths. And it is making people insane. And I
mean it at the level of the brain; the brain is damaged.
I’ve fucking shown it. It’s no longer about decisions, its
metabolic, its morphologic, it’s like cancer or
Alzheimer’s, it ain’t mindset any more.
A woman without kids is miserable, and a man without
his -one to one thousand- virgin brides is fucked.
In the modern world mankind is awkwardly caught
between the loss of the gods and a dismissal of the
shaman -a result of the dominance of rational
enlightenment thinking- and the strange and emerging
science of Complexity, which is not yet common
knowledge.
And thus modern man is trapped between the wisdom of
the ancients -abandoned as mere superstition- and the
science of physics -which we only barely comprehend
and don’t yet take seriously in the socio-political realm.
Self organized criticality is the next level analysis to
understanding the forces of physics, math and maybe
even the wisdom of the gods that our ancestors knew in
their guts if not their minds… in their dreams if not their
waking life… in their prayers if not yet in their sacrifice.
I will never accept the luke-warm water that Jesus
refused in 3:16 of Revelation ; he too spew out the
mouth that water neither cold nor hot .
And I, even when most dry of mouth, so dry that I cannot
speak, even then I agree with the Lord.
Many atheists speak of the religious, especially of olden
days, as savages, ignorant and simpleminded. But look
at the nuance and paradox and lack of pat and satisfying
answers in the opening of the Bible; look at how the
Bible refuses to pretend to know why Cain’s offerings -
his sacrifices- did not please God.
A modern tale would insist on hammering in us a moral
story or an easy villain and victim dyad. Not the
ancients. No, they admitted that maybe it was Cain’s
lack of sacrifice, maybe it was merely a vexed and
capricious God. They did not know. And maybe it was
merely the vagaries of the Fates. And their canonical tale
allowed this confusion not just in the story, but in life,
the innate unknown of the unknowable; the fourth
quadrant of chaotic nature.
These are the beautiful, tragic, nuanced and true stories
of our ancestors that modern men mock.
And yet modern tales are all full of easy answers and
simple moral preening; easily discernable homilies on
clear right and wrong; obvious and cliché modern
secular values that were just invented in the last half
hour but are plastered onto the screen as if they are
immutable and immortal. Modern men ought be
embarrassed by what they claim to know.
They know almost nothing at all.
Jesus, the ancients were many times more sophisticated
than us; we are frivolous and cavalier people;
supercilious and materialistic scolds, who just know -are
so certain that we know - the right and wrong of every
question: the right answer is liberalism, the universally
inoffensive, the kind to everyone at all times, the
lenient. Right?
The right side of history is a stupid phrase bandied about
by liberals and know-it-alls.
The catastrophe of such notions never occurs to these
modern idiots. Think of the way shallow love stories
ignore the decades of strain after the crescendo of the
consummation, the way the story arc ends with the
apex, the way modern art must, must -by dint of lawyers
and PR hacks and money men- must have hope . It’s as
if everything always works out in the end.
Well, the Bible admitted what the ancients knew, to wit:
there may in fact be no hope. But mankind, the ancients
insisted, we trudge on anyway, because we have
courage and thus character, but hope was never
guaranteed .
In life and in stories people -often children, often
mothers- died, and crops failed and whole tribes were
wiped away. The good guys did not win, the nation, the
earth was not saved. Satan was ruler of this earth for
sure; and the next too if you didn’t behave bravely in the
face of Doom.
But we modern folk, we meander between the vineyard
rows picking charms from every cluster of every type of
fruit. And we have hope, guaranteed by society; and
thus, our lack of character is equally ensured. I look at
man and I see an old child, a species going in reverse. I
long for the days when the ships were made of wood
and the men made of steel; not this modern
environment of robust technology and increasing wealth
and men made of porous earth and sky-stuff so soft and
mushy one could walk upon them without shoes; and
watch, watch, just how we are all walked upon too.
And we take it. We don’t fight back.
Maybe I put too much emphasis on character and
toughness; on masculinity. But, I don’t laugh at our
religious forefathers anymore, I won’t yet genuflect and
pretend to believe in modern gods nor in the named
ones of old; I won’t be accepted by any church or in any
tabernacle today. I am not quite yet penitent.
But I reserve the right to scoff at the irreligious, the
unawed progeny of great men and women. I am not
willing to laugh at men that came before me who were
tougher and thus truer than me and my peers, I won’t
roll my eyes at women who knew chastity and
submission.
I confess that I lost the right to enter into heaven.
I committed the one unforgiveable sin as laid out by
God: cursing the holy ghost . I will be damned for this.
But, even if I am condemned to life in Hell -which I
suspect means an endless life on Earth- I won’t spend
my life injuring the reputations of the men who got us
here, pulled us up the boned and mined hills, ribs
distributed like stochastic & starry gauntlet along the
road to awe. I won’t ignore the vertebrae and femur
bones like sicarii knives in hands behind wide backs that
now lay in Kurgan mounds. I won’t insult the broken
women with bear skins around their breast and their
babes. I shall not mock the ancient young who drug us in
from the froth and madness of the cannibalistic sea, the
silent tribe of unwed men who sank hooks into
Leviathan, who were forced to impossibly tell head from
tale on such wild beasts, and cut them piece by piece to
make this our world.
I carry the felt -the lived- history of my people in my
heart and it wrecks me.
I won’t laugh at peoples a thousand-fold better than us,
better than we could ever be. I invite further injury, I
would smash my soul against a rock -the rock they took
a moment to rest upon- if it would give me 1% of the
honor their bodies left as shadow upon the ground.
My ancestors wrote it down, they said, no one insults me
with impunity . They literally carved it into the rocks of
my homeland. And yet I’ve allowed it. They gave me the
genes and culture to be extreme in defense of liberty,
and I became a merchant. People never understood that
my revenges were my way of honoring my progenitors,
my people that came before. And it was my nod to God.
Because I knew He had built me and my people to war
against the world.
For the world is Satan’s and to get along with the world
is to make peace with the devil himself.
Deep within a strongbox of chest and ballast of heart
and lungs, I would say, don’t you dare mock the
scripture of Abraham and Isaac or Ishmael, don’t insist
that they had a choice! Don’t disturb their bones. You
don’t know what they went through nor what it was their
hearts told them to do. They had God in their ear
speaking clear, while we have the devil whispering to us.
And yet we think they were bad and it’s us that are so
good.
 Bullshit.
God demands what God demands; and I believe that
instinct is his radio station, his way of communication. I
believe -conversely- that hesitation is the Devil’s
methodology; and that the modern conscience is his
black trick.
God abandoned us long ago, like a father passed on. But
don’t pretend to mock the saint once the danger’s past.
I deserve to live as punishment, not die in relief, but this
judgement is not due to my murders but because of how
many I allowed to survive!
Like Cain, we all must live with what we’ve done . I hope
only one day to hear their lamentation, their cry that
they cannot bear the burden; I know some must rejoice
in hearing me -once an arrogant and mocking voice for
modernity- capitulate before a long lost God and repent
of just what sins I committed with glee and stupidity. I
gladly wreck myself, for the pleasure of the patient man.
But give me an utter wreck if wreck I do. I will not rest on
vulgar shoals , I sought and still seek the center of the
sea of doom…
This hand written note in a smearing black, with long-hand
cursive, on penitentiary stationary, was left on his bunk.
He was gone as was the norm for these Wednesdays from
0830 to 1800hrs.
Todd placed the letter back on the bed -carefully- as if the
letters in the words themselves might be wrecked if
mishandled, although he thought they read as if carved in
rune-stone as well as laid upon the page. He had never met
a man swing so wildly from philosophies; he contained a
half-dozen men in him, Todd thought. He occupied the post
of each rank of man from corporal to Brigadier, from hod-
carrier to foreman, from sinner to fucking saint . He was the
genius madman, the truly bizarre third hippogryph.
He was both sides of all mankind.
Todd Gleim looked out onto the center of the tier block, this
cell at center above, avoided by the mass of men. It was
gilded like Solomon’s lair with art and poetry, and quotes
from the muses, small things written down to document that
which was grand. His books lined up on a shelf, like rungs of
a ladder that had collapsed and been laid on their side for
someone to maybe find; one book lay upon his stainless-
steel desk, open, spine exposed, black writing from his ball
pen, in margin, on header, and on footer too.
Todd looked at it but had to turn back, and away to the tier.
His mind studied the honeycombed cell as his eyes watched
for any movement of men.
He -my pal- ornately added to the text, the prose, with his
own poetry, framed it , it seemed to Todd. He tilted his head
and attempted to read his inventory, his memory of what
his friend had written in ink. Such vagaries of fate, Todd
thought, such reveries he scratched in letters that seemed
to almost lay themselves down, he flowed so forward, so
yearningly forward, in fits he seemed to write as if ink was
blood and to spill it was to die.
God, Todd thought, it all seems a hieroglyph, like there’s -
somewhere- a book of, well, a Rosetta Stone, a legend to
this map . But the script was beautiful, he finally saw, when
he abandoned the cipher of it all; and he had touched it,
softly, as if it might still be wet, and looked for the black at
his finger pads as he stood at the door; his back to the
artifacts.
He -Todd- had served eighteen months in Mansfield, a civil
war prison in the 90’s, just before they closed it down. He’d
done a small part of his 5-year bit for attempted murder.
Lyndon -Todd recalled- was the only man he knew who had
wondered what the other guy did first; what he had done to
incur Todd’s wrath.
That was what he’d asked, “what’d that bastard do?”
Todd smiled at this memory; no one else had asked that .
It’s in the subtleties of language that much can be revealed
, he thought. Everyone sided with the victim of his reaction.
Lyndon understood, god he was just a kid, a skinny kid ,
Todd thought of way back then, and he knew that if a man is
to be man he is to demand punishment for righteousness;
not to plead to get away with cowardice.
What change, what change! Todd thought, how could one
man change so much? That’s why he had to -Lyndon had
had to- increase, double in size -and strength- to handle all
that roiling and hammering and buttressing inside; how else
could a man’s mind and heart like hammer and tong crash
on molten metal stock, unless inside a giant and growing
furnace did reside?
He seemed, Todd thought, like a blast furnace, a hammer
forge , now that he ruminated on his friend at waist, at face,
just a bit. How could he have missed so much, he had
watched him for years in here and before when they were
younger men, when Lyndon was just a kid. He had watched
him for twenty, thirty years it seemed, and yet he missed
this part, this foundry being built -shrouded- inside.
Todd stood at the door, so strong and wide. His smile came
less and less and he then remembered the heart attack in
Milford and the way he’d woke up with this feeling like he
may never grin again. He’d never mention it, but there were
gaps in his memory, it seemed he’d never get them back.
He looked at his friend instead, his own life held no answers.
Like a locked door, and shuttered windows, Todd thought, he
had never peered inside, not really . He had listened and
spoken to his friend, who was more like a brother, a little
brother, he had thought, but he was heaving inside and out.
God, he seemed an arch-angel now, a friend and foe sent by
God to shine light and shade on myself maybe, a lantern,
with wind inside the glass, a ship carrying the sea, a whale
inside a whale inside another goddamn whale. He was
terrible .
His friend was terrible and yet he glowed; a terrible albedo
of what? Of what did he reflect?
Todd put his hands on the metal door and stopped thinking;
it hurt his heart. He -in memory, in recreation- looked upon
the soft colored drawings all hung in jangled and akimbo
ways; authors and heroes, men of principle , Lyndon had
often said -adding, men of creation, sometimes, winking one
eye- when asked by guards or when the questions about the
art was whispered to Todd from other inmates. Inmates -who
had rare chance to speak to anyone, ADX’s rules were so
extreme- were too scared to talk to the man they all
considered like an unpredictable animal, but one with spirit
inside that could overtake; an infection of the mind , they’d
sometimes say and ask Todd not to mention it to him.
Lyndon had innocently wondered why civilians crossed the
street. He had thought he wore his noble heart on his
sleeve. But he said things that gave these men the creeps.
Todd had counselled that this, this noble heart, was what
the man on the street feared most.
Lyndon, you don’t understand. For all your education, all
those books, you don’t understand the average man.
They think you’re a devil, a boogie man, because you
say crazy shit, you don’t seem grounded. But you have
changed, I’ll give you that. You mentor these cats. These
convicts have a their way now.
He was like the devil frozen at the ninth bottom of Dante’s
Hell he had said, surrounded only by betrayers . Todd
remembered the way the eyes looked, the mouth all
twisted, the shoulders hunched like in a bind, the tongue
coming out the mouth, the teeth hidden until all at once
that copper tooth would shine. It was weird, and he then
would pass out, as the coffee steeped with two wires in the
broth. Todd would unplug it and watch the man sleep.
He remembered the way a moth had spent time in three
cells on the tier over Christmas and New Years eve. He
passed kites to Kaczynski and that young Muslim boy, he
held dice and deck of cards to play Spades. But the old-
timers stayed away as rumors spread about the warden and
the FBI.
Everyone was on edge , he recalled.
Todd had mistaken what that meant until now, he thought of
himself in critique. He had foolishly thought Lyndon was
bragging and lamenting both, bragging that he was the
worst and lamenting his coterie , flanked by unprincipled
men and dogs.
But now Todd thought he -his friend- had internalized God’s
punishment, regretted his haughty prose; his rebuke of God
for His autocracy; too frozen to move into a pose of
submission, too long at bottom to rise and admit his
mistake. Like Milton’s student of revenge, Lyndon had long -
too long- thought God was too slow to punish the wicked
and too quick to rebuke the pride in man.
He had used his logic, perfect, a modern weapon, and
gathered all the blood from his heart to oil the machinery of
his mechanized modernity. Lyndon had articulated it -his
declaration of guerre a outrance - so harmoniously, so
sonorously, that even God paused to hear him out; but now
he had wished he had botch and garbled a more pious
shout. His intelligence was no match for God’s and his
malice was insufficient for the Devil’s.
Todd leafed through more writings and found this one:
Where were you when I laid the foundations , God had
asked Job; and is this not exactly the point? It’s not that
man cannot make a perfectly righteous argument
against the catastrophe of life, the injustice of God’s
wrath, the burning of what are supposed to be cooling,
slaking tears. It’s that man has forgotten -or never knew-
that each pain, each travail, each goddamn trick played
on him by the Fates is meant for him because he was
blown in to the world, off the hands of God. Think -
Mankind!
Think of who misses all these sins, brought into the
world by Isaiah’s God, think of all that never fall, each
that never suffer, never lose, never get to choose: the
unborn, the undead, those that God never met. Mankind,
your pain is your truth, it’s the one of two things real:
the other is your meaning , your meaning , and you get
it not in spite but because of your travails.
The right to suffer, the responsibility to learn from it; this
is what God the wise father was showing all of us; how
else do muscles grow, how else does wisdom accrue?
Where from does love come if not from fear of loss, from
death certain, from the precariousness of life?
He too, Todd thought, often focused too much on how he
suffered. This prison made each man feel beset on all sides
and lose what was at center it seemed. What
ungratefulness, what ingratitude, what teenage crap, he
thought of himself. How can we explain ourselves to the
young when we’ve learned nothing of the ancients? This
whole world is on hold, stopped on its axis, only the animals
still learn and grow; man is frozen at the bottom of his Hell,
flanked only by his own betrayers.
Lyndon had written, Todd now saw at the bottom of the
foxed page:
…better to serve the Lord, our God, than reign in this
Hell on earth. I abandoned the principles that I swore to
uphold, I mistook black-clad demons and feathered
nests of imps for aquiline fathermen, both bowed and
bled to succubae as if they were little girls with white
hair bobbed by whiter sun and blue eyes laid like lapis
lazuli jewels in diadem, and, all the while with lapsed
back turned to my own hollow shadow, I faced the God
as a lapsus Foe.
He read the last words of eight aloud; and left his hand
centered on the page that this prose ringed like coronal
glow, like purple robes, like those thrown by comrades of
the one-true-cause to cover all of that one man’s noble
blemishes.
He saw a photo with a corner sticking out, he pulled it and
saw a square black and white with soft contrast, and yet
deep blacks, of Lyndon’s container home, in what must have
been many years ago; but the house and all its effects, the
wall lined with books, the photos, the art, God so artful , he
thought. The European mounts of coyotes and bear and
cubs of lion or maybe racoon, it was hard to tell; so
Manichean, so well thought out with walls of grey and the
mojocido nunca duerme along the steel window trim; the
stencil of “lux ” above each light switch, the high counter, a
slight insult to those who could not reach, the Bordeaux and
Reims and Piedmont wine bottoms seen through tinted
fridge glass. He saw the smallest of homes, but so large
with whatever it was that Lyndon had seen it; Todd saw it
then too; even though he could not name it.
And he then knew he was never coming back, the room, his
cell, left just as this. Perfect, this note to him, and to Him,
and to them both; a kind of photograph, a still life, a
tableau, like the one he now held of a thing made beautiful
and then abandoned. He read it as invitation to God, he
thought, to give his friend a second chance. Too humble, too
chagrined, but too proud still, even in his lowest bow, this
inmate could not ask for forgiveness, he could only offer
this, his lament.

II. 2036 e.v.

“The thing is this,” he lit his cigar and spit leaf from his lips
in spurts of two, double-taps to eject the wrapper, “if you
read the canon, the greats, the classics, you’ll see
something beyond the received wisdom from the
gatekeepers of our literary tradition. It’s not like the
postmodernists are wrong when they say a text can be
interpreted in many, in infinite ways. They are wrong in that,
in,” he paused as he clarified how he would phrase this,
“they err when they say there are no hierarchies of
interpretations. That is tantamount to nihilism and chaos
and I won’t countenance that shit.
“But, I have my own interpretations of the texts, as they do,
and like they, I won’t be lectured by so-called scholars and
professors and modern men with modern motives. I feel like
Luther often times, rebuking the Priests and the Church
herself. Now, I’m not oblivious to the dangers of this kind of
thing. From Luther, who just wanted to read the canon
himself, to modern protestant churches that preach the
Church of Christ without Christ, you know, the warning
Flannery O’Connor rightly drew out in a large and startling
figure.”
He smoked a bit and stared out at the Spanish Peaks and
lamented the lack of snow. The white, this element of
solstice topophilia was desired; his want was thus unslaked.
“But, when I read Virgil say, the bird lodged in the chest
cavity, tears at his feast, and tissues growing again, again
get no relief , I feel something beyond the true -but rushed
past- analysis of Prometheus’ sacrifice for man. I feel
something darker, yet more illuminating; I feel Virgil
describing the total with the part. A metonym, the crown,
the White House, you know?”
Jack One nodded in accent.
“People often think I am complaining, Jesus, I am not
complaining.
“But people only hear what is already in their heads!” he
barked it in anger. “They do not listen. I am not complaining
of my maladies; I’m speaking of what is unjust. This is a
grand opportunity to act with courage and effect the good,
to overturn the order, to make the world anew, to behave
with only the courage and justice offered to the man, the
men who have been touring the underworld, have seen the
harpies and the baleful Juno and can establish a just city
anyway, in spite and because of this, these wicked things
done to him; to them.
“Do I lament hunger, do I wish to banish hunger when I
mention all that I could eat? No, I welcome hunger, as long
as I have opportunity to find myself a meal. What would
cowards do? Would they choose to be forever satiated,
sated and slaked? This is not lack of mere hunger, it’s loss
of appetite!” he barked this again and stuffed the cigar, a
45 in ring size, in his mouth and set about chewing on it as
if it was his meal.
His number one, his Jack One, nodded and re-lit his own
Churchill, cut in a bird’s mouth way, drew upon it, and blew
the smoke into the chest and ground below him as his head
tipped forward as the brain let itself speak in the silence of a
stewing Blax.
God, there is so much there, each word a sentence, each
sentence a judgement from on high, each judgement itself a
god of Olympus , Jack thought as he let Blax draw and chew
on his dark wrapper and black filler, his torpedo lodged in
his bearded maw without prompting or prodding him. Jack
just waited in the air at elevation.
“I don’t lament the appetite,” Blax finally said, “I articulate
the injustice of failing to prepare a meal, or of a meal stolen,
or of a meal gone to ruin. But never the appetite. But people
get me all wrong. They think I want them to feed me. I just
want them to see the injustice too; to see it and for it to
make them mad, crazed with further appetites now;
suppression of mere hunger, now thirst for blood, to drain
the bodies of our enemies, to rid the world of these fucking
scum.
“Nature has a natural balance, and the thieves and liars and
usurpers and stupid all commit themselves to their share;
they get up every day and do their dirt, right on schedule.
And if they delay, then nature forgives, for their delay is part
of their duty to a lack of duty!
“But, our side, the righteous, it’s we who hem and haw and
wring our hands and delay, delay, delay. I’m growing tired of
even thinking that these cowards are good men, I’m starting
to think they are evil men in disguise; tricks, apparitions,
legerdemains of the gods to make us think we are allied
with the great mass of men. Maybe the balance is this: nine
tenths of men are wicked, but soft and weak in their wicked
ways, and we the one of 10, are more powerful than we
even know.
“This is the balance, not in numbers but in strength if only
we act with all our strength, roll their bones under the
wheels of our carts goddammit, crush them without one
nanosecond of hesitation.
“This is what I glean from Virgil , from Caius Marcius, from
The Author and from Blake. I swear to Christ, these men
wrote the code down for us, for us to read, and yet we let it
be translated by weak and evil men, men of words, words,
words, and lack of action!
“Goddammit, these words were meant as DNA to
instantiations, as enzymes to code for proteins to build a
better man. Upright, embodied! Why?” he asked as the
smoke blew more from his nose than mouth. The air was
blue now from the added white of his effluvium , Jack
thought.
“So,” Blax answered as he leaned forward, “that man could
act; to war to the knife, with knife to the hilt, to see the
strap young Pallas wore on the shoulder of Turnus first, to
see it before he even bothered listening to his phony self-
serving words, and drive the blade in fury into Turnus’ chest
and let their spirits sink into the fucking gloom below.” Blax
said all that as one sentence, each phrase a facet of one
jewel, Jack thought, said it all as it glowed inside Jack’s
head, now as the ash of his cigar was grey and rolled like
the spin of a hurricane as seen from above.
Jack felt his face and chest and balls aflame, he was imbued
with the same feeling the hand has when the arm moves,
what the arm feels when the shoulder pulls it, the shoulder
as the chest contracts. He felt as lungs do, as the blood
itself, as it rushes through trenches of a man at war within
himself, he felt as the eyes who see, perched atop the
Roman head, as the heart, his heart, this Blax’s Heart,
pounds itself, not merely its brothers against the anvil.
He felt the drumming, a call to arms, the resounding, felt by
all organs of the same tribal gang; the arms & legs, the cock
& balls, the hands, their knuckles, the bursting lungs, the
writhing neck, the jaw set, the forehead furrowed and facing
straight; the eyes as flames set under cornice of brow, the
ears attuned to waves underground, the weapons already
made; and at hand. The skin the border wall; that which
contained it all.
“We’ve made ourselves into monsters, the sacrifice we’ve
made,” Blax said with low growl, “we could have played by
their silly rules, made money, made wives and babies all to
feed the machine as it immolates the world. We had no
need of this life , this life where our consciences assault us
in our sleep, wrack our waking hours, send signals of pain,
regret, wincing memories straight to our brains, our heart
our guts. Jesus, Isaiah could have chosen psychopathic men,
men who were built for this.
“But he chose us; and we said yes , we chose it because we
knew the world needed something new, something honest
and life-affirming for once, something Spartan lost with all
this Appollian commerce and unthinking advancement
toward a stupid coast; blasting by the interior without so
much as a stop and glance and appreciation of what we
have. We made ourselves into beasts in order that we may
fight these beasts; effectively. Who else will do it? The good
men, the nice guys, the fucking Boy Scouts?
“You cannot be serious,” Blax said with contempt. “My
brother has no plan, no capacity even if he had a plan, what
would he do if some wetback illegal alien broken into his
house and held a knife to his daughter’s throat? He’d beg,
he’d plead, he’d count on his desire for peace to make
things end well; he’d count on justice and clemency from
God or rational behavior; maybe he’d bribe the man; maybe
he’d think this maniac is just like him and can be reasoned
with. But, he’s wrong, and his girl would die, and he would
fail to protect her. I find him guilty now; not then. I find all
weak men -pretending to be good by refusing the obligation
to make monsters of themselves to protect that which they
love- I find them guilty now; I condemn them now.
“He doesn’t love his family, if he did he’d make himself into
whatever it took to protect them from evil; but he does not.
He tries not to hate , he says. He doesn’t even own a gun
for self-defense, he has no training, no musculature, no
malice in reserve; he has already failed his family; he is a
failure as a man and yet he calls himself good . His own wife
admits she’d have to use me to protect her daughter; she
admitted it out loud. I was chagrined, furious, she ought not
have said such a thing. But she was right; she was not
wrong.
“Travis is a failure because he thinks his job is to be nice
and kind and weak; he refuses to be a monster. He thinks if
he becomes a monster he has to act like that all the time.
As if, as if, if you learn martial arts you must use it
everytime in lieu of a handshake now? If you learn to cook,
you cannot eat out? You learn to jerk off then what; no more
sex for you? No, one need not use a skill one develops; the
pistol is holstered 99% of the time.
“No, he knows better, he just is lazy and weak and scared,
and he refuses to do his duty, to be a fucking man. Well, we
made ourselves into monsters, we did the most horrid shit,
we behaved as trained by nature, like barbarians, so now we
could provide for our common defense. We became
monsters so we may protect this country, protect it from the
worst of the worst, without hesitation, or regret or wounded
conscience, without fear and guilt or shame; so when the
time came our hands would not shake.
“We became what is required by life; toughness and
quickness and purity of motive. We will defend what is worth
defending, and that means all else must die or be crippled
so badly it cannot harm what is good.
“You think the gardener feels bad for the weed? The rancher
feels bad for the wolf? How about that mosquito on your
arm? Do you even hesitate? But, other humans somehow
are taboo to kill; we’ve lost the thread, we’ve lost what
makes us righteous: some humans are weeds and wolves
and diseased blood-sucking mosquitos and they must be
put down. Period; full stop.
“And you must practice this, practice the art of contravening
laws and taboos and these naïve , un-calloused consciences
of ours, where we feel so badly for the criminals and
predators and hate separating the wheat from the chaff. We
have a higher loyalty, a higher purpose and for that we
must break some eggs, but we must deliver on this omelet,
we cannot only destroy we must build. We must. Or then
we’ve merely become monsters, we’ve lied about the
reasons why.
“And I cannot abide anymore lies Jack, I cannot. They kill my
soul; they just run the life right out of me,” he paused and
thought of that; searching his mind for lies, ferreting them
out. His brother’s face returned just then, moon-faced and
soft and lacking depth. And yet he saw something in the
eyes, some hidden thing, was it memory, revealed truth, or
invention? he asked himself. Was the brother more, hiding
some secret depth, were these memories of eyes like spies,
come to speak in code tonight?
“And he, my goddamn brother, is just like half or more of
this weak and naïve and timid country; God, I hesitate to
even call it that. It’s not a country, it’s a corporation, a
shopping mall, where all the employees are stealing and
doing half-ass work and letting everything fall to ruin. It’s
like some giant hellish, ghastly tumor where every cell
thinks it’s the one to keep on growing, keep on worrying
about itself. Apoptosis is built into every level of
organization, and yet this refusal of these fucks to die?” he
left it as a question; as if it was a question.
“The cells were given the signal, they refused their orders,
they must be dealt with Cap’n,” Jack said with relish at the
acknowledgment of the rank of his older self; his weathered
self, his noble self, his self that had had enough. It was not
unlike watching the future man he would be, with his own
young soul as counsel; as buoy, encouraging strength, as
reminder of one’s youthful principles.
“They were indeed. We start with those closest to us. We
jam it down their throats. But Jack, promise me, we cannot
forget to build, we cannot. Promise me we will open up our
arms to something larger, more capacious, more real, more
decent and more in line with natural law. We will not horde
all of this for ourselves, as much as we cannot stand people,
we must give them the chance. Promise me,” Blax implored.
Jack nodded and meant it; he nodded until Blax
acknowledged it, which he did finally with his eyes. But Jack
One did not understand the need to justify himself, to
explain it all in so much detail. He got it with one sentence;
he got it with just one word; Blax could carve an “X ” on the
ground and Jack would see it as profound; he understood
the man as he knew himself. The two men, almost exact,
only 45 years apart, stared into each other eyes, Jack’s dry.
Blax’s just slightly wet.

III. 2018 e.v.

After God spoke of His final counsel; and he had listened
-for once- he took the offering of the buck gods first; as
the buck had taken the grass; the grass drank of the
sun; only the sun able to feast upon its own fuel.
He dreamed of a faceless doe, while the wolf ate a bag
of grass at the fallen log; the mule deer opened its
mouth from blankface and chewed his hand until he
awoke in the dream, rudely, and tried to name each
animal with words not native to him; but only his People.
 Runes appeared on the ground of the ersatz
hypnopompic state, mannaz and haglaz, the rune for
gift; he was a gift to man of hail, he said aloud. And he
then awoke into the third of three worlds.
His body hurt first; dreams buoyed him, made him nigh
weightless. He knew he was awake by the soreness that had
sank to joints and rose to the brow; it tightened upon him
like asp, and he rolled onto his left flank instead of rising
right away. He tried to stretch but the body rebelled; the
body contracting and the brain focused on want of narcotic
pills; it thought of nothing else.
He could lay like this forever , he thought, and never give
the mind what the body prompts. But if he arose from bed,
he’d have to feed it with opiates. He breathed to stave off
having to move into the fluid of the world; these moments
he was free, free to feel the pain, to ignore the brain, to be
as a god in the universe, inhabit that which hurts. How often
can man be a god? More often than he thought . He smiled
and thought of all the words that he still had inside him to
be let out, he thought, like two corvids to circle the earth
each day; what would they glean, what eggs would they
lay?
The sun was still so low in the east that the moon competed
for shadows still; he knew it was before 0600; today the
second of August; the sun would be up by then if it was that
late. He remembered the stars and milky way, and the
dreams, my god, he thought, that faceless doe, and the
lupine at the edge, what did he gnaw on if not me, was it
grass? Am I nothing more than some heliotropic man? Do I
turn to face what God moves mechanically, am I anything
more free? How can I prove anything? If I move am I not on
a string; if still am not still a thing?
Instinct, he thought. It can neither be rebelled against nor
observed; a man is slave either way, so why not just follow
one’s guts all the way toward where guts connect? “ The
mouth and asshole of the world,” he said. Follow your guts,
man. Follow that pain like hammer blows on the stock and
hear the anvil ring what it cannot absorb; become the pain,
do not look away. Speak in language of the pain, speak it
clearly to the faithful and the heathen alike; write poetry at
2100 feet per second; write faster than they can think, write
so they may only feel.
“Feel,” he said and rolled to his stomach, as his body was
turning soil, deep-water culture, substratum & muse to the
logos God had deigned to speak in the part of the garden
dream his mind would not recall.
 39. Queen to Bishop’s 6
If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we just do what we can to add
weight to the lighter scale
Gravity & Grace [Weil, Simone]

Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven
The Whale [The Author]

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become one of us now, to know good
and evil
Genesis 3:22 [King James Bible]

I. 2020 e.v.
Phil Hellmuth got pocket Aces.
MO watched the hand from 2018. Isaiah watched over his
shoulder.
Liv Boeree had her blouse covered in Union-Jacks at three-
quarter of the arm.
The three bet was small. The Unabomber, Phil Laak -the
man born in Ireland- said something incomprehensible on
the recording that ended with an utterance of
“whopppeeeeeeee.”
“I’ll take this one Liv, you take the next one, Ok?” Phil said
as Liv spied her own pocket fives.
Phil raised to $800 over a $300 open. MO laid out his own
three cards on the slab as he watched the recording’s flop
lay out.
The flop on the recording was:
10 of Diamonds
 Jack of Hearts
King of Clubs.
Both players checked. MO ran all the algorithms to 105 and
then stopped. He turned the slab’s flop over and set up his
own parallel game as he imagined raising post flop from
Phil’s position and then read Liv’s allostatic system based on
each increment of $100.
MO heard but ignored -as Isaiah intently listened to- Doug
Polk ramble on about all his strategy given the facts of the
hand. It was the most asinine shit Isaiah had ever heard. It
was wise only within the universe of sane players, and
numbers and math. It had no connection to real life.
Phil Hellmuth held his left hand over his right with the black
hat over his eyes.
Liv held her left hand on the felt; right hand on the cheek.
Polk just kept rambling on and on with argot and strategies
as the turn card was a third five for Liv.
Phil checks again.
Lev -with a set- checks back.
One street is left. MO again runs a million variations of bets
and then measured Liv’s system to project her response.
Isaiah listened to Polk keep rattling off possibilities based
upon his preferences and Isaiah then decides that he hates
Doug Polk for the simple reason that he had turned poker
into a widget factory. It’s all left brain, Isaiah thought as he
got Polk’s address and filed it away, and the dude reduced
the game to a battle plan instead of a war.
The river was a three of clubs and Liv bet $2,250.
“If I did have King-Queen,” Polk says, “I’d have to feel I was
ok here, because Phil should not be checking Aces twice,
even though he did have Aces here. I know people say you
shouldn’t make assumption about your opponent, but I like
to approach it like I’m going to paly my best and that people
are going to use reasonable strategies.”
Isaiah shook his head.
They both watched Phil pay her off and lose the hand as he
shows the Aces with a sulk.
“The public doesn’t even know what we’re talking about,”
Phil said and Isaiah agreed.
MO peeled off three cards and simultaneously read the
paper from the University of Michigan again as he laid the
three cards out on the slab:
Let H denote the set of all points in the Euclidean plane
having positive y-coordinate, and let X denote the x-axis.
If p is a point of X, then by an arc at p we mean a simple
arc v, having one endpoint at p, such that v – {p} (H. Let
f be a function mapping H into the Reimann sphere. By a
boundary function for f we mean a function t defined on
a set E (X such that for each p (E there exists an arc v at
p for which:
Lim f(z) = t(p)

z -> p

z(v

MO let the replay of another hand play out as he finished his

latest iteration of a no-limit-hold’em game-theory-optimal
algorithm. He had also built a placard for Steven and Tania
to justify his entrance in the WSOP.
You may wonder why it’s important to play a game
theory-influenced strategy when most of your money will
be made exploiting weaker players, or players who
simply aren’t paying attention.
There are two main reasons:
 With a balanced, GTO-based strategy, you will win
money in the long run regardless of how skillful your
opponents are
Making adjustments to counter your opponents is
easier if you have a baseline strategy from which to
adjust (more on this later)
From a GTO point-of-view, your hand review sessions
should involve analyses of how hands played out
objectively. From that point-of-view you can decide if you
played your range in a balanced way. Moreover, from a
GTO standpoint you should know what you would do
with any holding in any particular situation, not just the
two cards you were in fact dealt. So during a review
session you aught to ask yourself what you might have
done with different holdings; different hole cards.
MO and Isaiah let a thousand hands be dealt before they
next slowed one down and watched it slowly play.
In the current hand playing on the PraXis cloud, Doug Polk
was no longer commenting and describing theory, but was
playing an actual hand.
The Ai watched.
Polk woke up with pocket Aces, and re-raised Mr. Brandon
Steven who had pocket Cowboys. The five handed game
folds around to Steven who raises by $17,700. The pot was
$26,200. Polk was thinking Steven’s raise was quote, pretty
standard , unquote. Polk continued to ramble in his head
about minutiae that MO deconstructed by word, by logic,
and by strategy. MO also measured the bio-chemistry of Polk
who was heavily deluded by an admixture of dopamine on
the PFC and serotonin on the spindle cells like a novice
driving with two feet -one on the accelerator and one on the
brake- until MO decided that Polk was one of the sixteen
worst poker players in the world.
Polk asserted -in theory- that he should go all in pre-flop -
with his Aces- but he merely called Steven’s raise.
Polk -in the replay- says, “But you might be saying, Doug, I
saw you call here and you’re saying we should go all in.”
Polk then admits that with him having Aces his opponents is
quote -more likely to have Kings or Jacks - than Ace-King
and yet, MO thought, and yet, watch what he does post flop.
He was the essence of the man whose actions didn’t
matched their words. MO was astonished at the incongruity.
Polk says further:
Now this is where we [emphasis added; shows
detachment] get my real decision point in the hand with
pocket Aces.
Should I go all in or should I call? And the answer here is
not always so clear.
I think in general [emphasis added; raised, effeminate
voice inflection] you should probably go all in and try to
stack your opponent.
Polk continued to discursively debate the manifold hands his
opponent could have and Polk’s own ostensible GTO
strategy.
If we’re 300k deep I’m probably gonna be puttin’ the
five-bet out there, although , then things get a bit
different too, and I’d be more worried about what my
hand looks like and call as well [emphasis added;
extreme hesitation and dissonance].
The pot is $37,400 now as Polk -with Aces- didn’t re-raise -
much less go all-in- and instead only called the $11,200.
The flop is:
King of Spades
Queen of Diamonds
 Jack of Diamonds
And Steven now has a set of Kings, as Polk said he predicted
was more likely given the pre-flop action. Polk still with his
Aces, but a gut-shot straight draw at 4% and since he had
one diamond himself, a flush draw at under 20%. As Steven
bets, Polk thinks:
I’m obviously annoyed with the situation. Now if my
opponent had a hand like Queens, Kings or Jacks, they
move into the lead and also if they were bluffing a hand
like Ace-Ten suited or King-Queen well, now I’m just
behind those hands when I was way ahead. So this is a
pretty bad board, the only good news is that I do have a
gut-shot straight-draw which gives me more equity
against the strong holding and I also have the Ace of
Diamonds -which might not seem like a lot- but it does
give me four perecent-ish [emphasis added; weak
language] more equity against the strong hands that my
opponents [plural; thus an abstraction] can have.
Steven just bet $21,700, and I’ve thought about and I
still like a jam, I really don’t mind a call either; but a fold
is completely out of the question. And let me go ahead
and show you guys some math to break down exactly
why I think that. Ok, so we’re gonna get a little more
complex than we normally get here on the show, but I
want you guys to know exactly what I was thinking
[emphasis added; deception detected; covering for bad
decision] when I jammed on the flop.
So, I created a spreadsheet here of the different value of
my jam assuming different things about what my
opponent is doing… let’s take the worst case scenario,
what if he always [emphasis added; iterative game
theory assumption; ignoring real life] has a set? Then I
lose twenty-two thousand dollars, not the end of the
 world. But let’s look and see what happens if my
opponent has Ace-King, my EV is plus $17,000.
Or what if he doesn’t have Jacks? You know on this stack
size a lot of players may not re-raise Jacks, they may not
be tryin’ to play for all their money. If you take Jacks
out of the equation [emphasis added; If , was the
Laconic reply to King Phillip of Macedonia], we’re all up
to $25,000.
And now let’s imagine that he folds occasionally; he
folds 20% of the time.
So realistically, most scenarios [emphasis added;
iterative; assumes recovery] I think we end up being
profitable here. If he legitimately never has anything but
a set on the flop when he bets the flop; then yeah we’re
losing by a bunch, but that’s very unlikely. You know at
higher stakes people bluff, they go after pots. And then
he will also have hands like Aces and Ace-King and have
a decision to make. He may not be thrilled with those
hands on the flop and I don’t think anyone is, but he will
have a gutter as well as top-pair or better and a lot of
times you’re just gonna have to go for it.
Post flop, Polk immediately goes all in; in direct opposition to
everything he’s just said. The pot in the end is $158,000 as
Steven snap-calls.
MO measures everyone’s vitals and bio-chems as even the
players not in the hand are in roil; they can see how stupid
Polk is and it makes them nervous for nebulous reasons;
reasons that Isaiah understands: they know that for all of
Polk’s mathematical knowledge, he can’t play actual poker.
They lose faith in the world for a moment, and this is
reflected in their allostatic system, a kind of no-limit-
hold-‘em ennui takes hold of them.
MO and Isaiah continue to observe, as the cards lay on the
felt; the remainder of the deck in the dealer’s hands.
And as if things couldn’t get any worse for Polk and the
‘smart guys’ then a third players provokes them to run it
twice and Polk and Steven immediately haggle over running
fourth and fifth street twice. With Steven -at three to one
odds; 76% to 24%- safe against Polk, Polk agrees to run it
twice. This is a terrible idea , Isaiah thinks, as it only makes
sense to run it twice if you’re at 50-50. Otherwise you’ll lose
both of the two runs three out of four times.
After rambling on about the EV and the math -and now
down three-to-one- Polk agreed to run it twice, just
guaranteeing himself a loss of $308,000 in cash. This was
not a tournament game, that was actual cash he would lose.
On the turn:
 Two of Spades
Then on the river:
 Jack of Spades
After the second run, and down over 300,000 in cash, the
video cuts to Doug Polk telling everyone he has a new
program called “Coach Doug.”
MO -seeing that Polk meant Coach as a noun, as if he was a
coach , and not as a verb to denote that someone ought to
tutor him; to quote, coach Doug on how to play - thought
that this was one of the most incongruous things he’d ever
seen.
Isaiah eavesdropped and decided to have Mr. Polk killed. He
sent Polk’s address to the clouds but he then amended that.
He’d put it in an algorithm that at just over three-to-one
odds would reveal itself to Jack Four between 2035 and
2039. If Jack were to decide to kill Polk, it would only be an
option 76% of the time; it was thus left to the fates.
The turn and river -a four and three of clubs- on the second
run sat there on the table as Polk’s face showed the loss of
dopamine and serotonin as if all the bones in his face, neck
and spine had dissolved.
In the video replay Isaiah read MO’s internal notes and
noticed that Brandon Steven’s face, body language -left
hand over right bicep which was itself 19% larger than
Polk’s arms; his face rugged and square; his eye contact
impeccable- and the way those eyes -both dilation and
vector- had clearly given MO all the info he needed to know
Brandon Steven had Kings -Cowboys- all along.
Isaiah stared at the Jack of spades on the river of the first
run.

II. 2035 e.v.

“Ok, I want to make sure you understand the, why, first.
The, why , to why we talk about this shit,” Blax said.
He knew he talked too much, he knew it made them
restless.
“First, I think that action without thought is mere criminality.
But, thought without action is mere masturbation. One need
the intersection of thought and action,” he said as he felt his
own life was a long fuse. He looked at his past like ash, like
trail of firewire and time.
“One must think about what he is about, and then
implement that shit. This is why we think and talk so much
before we do our training. I want you to marry thought with
action in real life,” Blax said with some heat, anger as he
paced the pad. The Jacks were starting to notice his
mercurial ways; he’d go to bed calm and wake up in a foul
mood.
But they took it personally nine out of ten times. It made
Jack One even more determined to listen, Jack Two feel a bit
sad, Jack Three try to solve the problem for why , and Jack
Four squint the eyes.
“Now, once in a situation, once you are in the field, your
thought process will be quick and nearly instinctive; right? I
mean, we won’t have the luxury of two hours to ponder the
weight of the grand ka in France when presented with a
heavy problem that is life or death out there. So, there is a
difference between training and real life; although I should
not put it that way; training is real life. What I mean is
there’s a difference between training and an operation. An
operation requires instant thinking and action. But in order
to do that, one need to -needs to- be trained in a long-
format manner in my opinion.
“We are building up your capacity for thought; thought as
prelude to action. In other words, what we do here is build a
paradigm of how to live a life. And look, some people just
don’t have the constitution for this shit. They get exhausted
by thinking too hard.
“But, we -you and I- being so similar, our thresholds are
similar. So, I expect that our methodology works for
everyone -all of you clones- more or less. But it’s important
that you understand that mere knowledge acquisition isn’t
the point. I’m not making subject matter experts here.
Although you will be that; that isn’t the point. I’m teaching
you how to think for yourselves, how to know when you’re
on the right track and ultimately how to pass that
knowledge on.
“Now, we all know that we learn best by story, by analogy,
by narrative. This is our mode of uptake.
“I think this is humanity’s manner of uptake but there are
some people who learn more or,” he paused, “or less by this
method. So, well, I know for a fact that my brain -and thus
your brain- loves analogy in order to comprehend an
abstract concept. So, our methodology is heavy on story
and analogy. And your students will be the same; so let’s
just assume that is best.” Blax rubbed his jaw and thought
about what he’d just said. He -in moments of reflection,
editing, thinking- would often have flashes of things that he
didn’t need or want. A blond girl, a girl he had married, a girl
whom he had loved, appeared as if from the water he’d
always kept her in, and he remembered she had abandoned
him when all was lost.
He saw a few hieroglyphs of the Sea People. He read brief
laments of the Irish. He banished it all and spoke.
“Next, there is a reason story and analogy works, and it is
because our brains are, have evolved to move through time
and be aware of time. Ok? This is crucial so if you don’t
understand please speak up,” he paused and made eye
contact with each Jack.
“Yeah LT, I don’t understand,” Jack Two said. Blax was
grateful that he’d have to speak more, banishing that
heather grey girl from his mind; each image was held down
by each word; each memory kept off the shore of these
speeches. He’d need not think how he’d survived, how, he
immediately thought abstractly, of himself as if some other
man, how he didn’t go insane when she betrayed him with
indifference and concern for money over his health. She was
incapable of love, she had made promises she had no
intention of keeping, she had measured his worth in dollars
and cents. And this is what all women do; they will never
respect a poor man, no matter his potential. No matter the
reason why he is poor. They can claim otherwise, but don’t
watch their lips, watch their hands. They will never lift a
finger to help.
“Ok, so most, not all, but most animals are in the moment;
all Zen Buddhist style. They don’t even know the future
exists, they just live in the now . But, humans, we have this
time thing that is real to us, we think of the past and the
future, innately. It’s innate to do that. And that is a function
of a type of brain.
“It’s a brain that can abstract itself, a brain that can create
an avatar of itself as theoretically doing something in their
head, right? You can imagine what it would look like, what it
would be like, what others might say if you acted in a
certain way in thirty-seconds from now or tomorrow or next
year. You can think, you can imagine, a version of you doing
XYZ right?” he asked. He found it strange that he’d survived
after that last betrayal. He had really counted on her, spent
all his money in preparation for her arrival, counting on her
to arrive and work with him toward that end. And yet she
never came and he was lost, why -how?- did he survive ? he
asked himself now and was distracted long enough that a
Jack spoke.
As Jack spoke, he saw that there was a gap in his memory
between Heather -fuck I said her name- a gap between that
and when I recovered from that mountain cat, the cat that
left me with no scar or copper -or was it bronze?- tooth.
He tried to remember that first morning after his recovery,
he tried to trace back each day before that to her. But he
couldn’t see anything but black. He licked his tooth with his
tongue and pretended to listen to Jack One.
“Like planning a mission, going through the steps of each
facet of the job in your head,” Jack One said.
“Exactly, Jack,” Blax said and letting his coder catch him up.
“So, you plan in your head and that creates a landscape, a
place, and a temporal landscape of time; when and how
long, et cetera . Well, all that is very abstract and it creates
a need. Once you can do that, once a human can plan
abstractly, he becomes really interested in other people
explaining what they did in the past; in another man’s story.
Why?”
Blax asked this and became stern; his face and jaw fusing
where it often moved. Why, he asked himself, hadn’t he
killed his enemies right then? He had no money, no car,
nothing. He was completely fucked and busted and broke
and abandoned. Why had he not killed them all?
“Because you can imagine the action, the place, the
movement of this other man through time in his story, kind
of read it, see it in your own head now, and learn from it,”
Jack One said.
“Exactly,” Blax said to quiet his own inner ramblings. “He’s
given you a map to some mysterious place. He’s helped you
in your desire to have some plan, some map of the future
terrain. Just like your eyes help you see what you’re doing
forward in space, right, your eyes show you the location of
the prey animal you need to catch and eat, well, that story
of his can help you see -metaphorically see- a kind of future;
one possible map of the future if you are ever in a similar
situation.
“Say, for example, he tells a story of the time some big ass
bear confronted him, well, what would you do? Well, his
story tells you what he did and if he survived or lost an eye
or whatever, and you can put that story in your mind like a
map to navigate the land of bear encounters . And that
helps you. Even if he fucked up and tells an asinine story of
how many mistakes he made, you know? Say his story is
him trying to jump on the bear’s back or tickle him under his
rib cage or whatever the fuck, you can learn what not to do
in addition what to actively do.
“But, there’s more. You can learn his mindset. He -your
narrator- he will tell you, so, I’m thinking, fuck it’s a bear,
and I don’t wanna die, and I have plans, I have things I
wanna do before I die, and so forth; and then when he tells
you some action he took, he’ll also tell you, so I’m thinking
the bear is most vulnerable in the eyes, and so I tried to
stab him in the eyes with a long stick , right? He’s telling
you what he’s thinking the entire time he’s telling this story
and that info vis-à-vis his fuckin’ motivation is crucial.
“Now, you are learning all manner of shit not just about
bears, but about other humans; other men,” Blax said as he
paused and looked at each Jack and waited until they
returned the gaze.
“Now, imagine he’s telling you a story about his woman or
his kids or father, and he’s saying the same kind of shit, he
saying, well, my wife she don’t like X and I want my wife to
be happy because I wanna get laid and if she’s mad I never
get any ass, and blah blah, right? He’s telling you info not
just about her, but about him, and you are matching that up
with your own proto-feelings, feelings you don’t quite have
yet. See, you don’t have a woman, so you don’t know what
they like or don’t like or what will be useful in regards to
their feelings.
“You are clueless, so this story you are being told is
explaining motivations and thoughts and feelings, the
topography, the landscape, the tools and obstacles of social
interactions, man. Shit, that is valuable shit. Now this
asshole in my fake story, my invented story, is telling you
about what a coward he is because getting laid is more
important than being a man but, what if that was the
common story in the culture?” Blax paused as he asked this;
he paused and narrowed the eyes as if the brow was a
heavy overhead hammer and the nose a pinching tong and
between them were these smashed eyes.
“It is,” Jack said with some contempt, as if he was already
victim to this at his young age.
“Right. How many times growing up did you hear some guy,
your dad or men on TV or whomever say they need to keep
the wife happy at all cost, or quote -joke- unquote about
how the wife was the boss? It’s incessant in our culture. And
it’s almost exclusively centered around sex. Women will flat
out refuse to have sex with men if they are pissed off. Now,
imagine if a man refused to pay the mortgage or protect the
wife from a bear attack or prevent her from being raped by
the scumbag next door just because he was mad at her; just
because he didn’t like X?
“Imagine that. Right? It’s insane, no man would think about,
threaten, or follow through on refusing to do his man-duty
merely out of pique. But a woman can and will threaten to
refuse to do her female-duty if similarly annoyed. That is
built into the culture and men are so cowed by this they joke
about it. That is how cowardly and useless and weak men
are now,” he said as if he was on the side of men writ large.
He joined his hands together rocked his body over his feet;
he thought of what was coming next.
“These are your foils; these types of men are the men you
will run into in all of our operations. Every man you meet
will be this type of pussy-whipped, craven and spineless
fuck. And he has told you that in his stories. He has waved
the white flag for you in his funny little stories that we all
laugh at and shake or nod our heads over. I want you guys -
you actual men- to think on that,” Blax said as he began
pacing the grounds again. He had issued a C&D to his coder
to banish that girl, that so-called wife of his, away.
“Why is that LT?” Jack Four asked.
“Why is what?” Blax asked as he kept pacing in front of
them laconically, at a stroll, as if he had not one care in the
world.
“Why don’t men revoke their wives’ privileges in regards to
finances or safety?” Jack asked.
“Well, because men have been trained to think that sex
from their mate is a privilege not a right. Men have been
trained like dogs to beg for food instead of going out and
hunting it and taking it. But women, they have been trained
to demand and receive shelter, money, safety as a
consistent right; not a privilege. Women have won the
ideological war on men. Period.”
“That is fucked up,” Jack Four said. He felt embarrassed by
the simplicity of what he said and how he said it. He began
to dissipate his chagrin by kicking at small rocks and he felt
and heard the sand on the pad scratch that he just now
remembered he had failed -not forgotten but had failed- to
sweep this morning. His shame compounded now and he
looked about to see all the flotsam and jetsam about the
grey slab. Each thing was in stark relief to the light grey of
the slab beneath.
“But, as fucked up as it is, it will make our task that much
easier to accomplish. Now, as my sifu -Marcelo - once said -
said more than once- never take your enemies’ skills for
granted, always assume they are as well trained as you. And
while they won’t be trained or worth-a-fuck nine-hundred
ninety-nine out of a thousand times, that don’t mean you
should assume it. Why? Because you don’t know which of
the thousand, your first or your last, will be the one who is
your equal. So, if you use total and complete domination,
without hesitation or pulling punches, without any charity or
softness, then when you meet that thousandth guy -the one
who is as good as you- well, then you will still be, ok .
“But if you half-ass it out of compassion or over confidence,
then you will squeak by nine hundred ninety-nine times, but
you will lose that last fight. And frankly, you will take too
long and risk injury or delay even on the battles with those
you outmatch massively. Your over confidence will make you
sloppy and that can have devastating results.
“So, always go into battle knowing that our enemies are
weak -effeminate- men, but once on the field of battle, treat
each man with the aggression and maximum violence
required to beat someone of your own caliber. The mind set
of confidence is for now and during pre-operation planning;
that confidence will work in your favor. But, once on the
ground, fight like these guys could kill you; because
sometimes even by accident a broken clock is right once a
day. So, never assume anything.
“But let’s be clear,” Blax said as he stopped half way
between them and point his finger at them in succession.
“I can’t have you thinking the whole world is made up of
billions of men and we are just five guys and we are
outmatched and that -and that they- have all the strength
and guns and martial mindset and blah blah. I can’t have
you doubt yourselves and our plan because you haven’t
thought through the reality of just how compromised and
broken down 99% of men are by this effeminate culture they
live in, because then you may hesitate to even engage in
battle with them. I want to impress upon you the reality of
how weak this culture is. Because I want you to realize your
power; your moral power, your emotional power, your
corporeal power. I want you to know the truth of just how
superior you are.
“That mindset will get you to the field of battle.
“But once on the field, I want you to show no over-
confidence, no mercy, no hesitation. I want you to destroy
the enemy with a ferocity that comes from the knowledge -
and this is true too- the knowledge that one slip-up could
give these idiots just the opportunity they need to get lucky.
“As Bukowski said when the guy accused him of a lucky
shot, he said, that counts too . The last thing you want is
some mope getting a lucky shot on you because you were
over confident or didn’t want to kill his whole family
because it was too extreme or some liberal shit. No, God
said kill everything that breathes, leave nothing alive that
breathes ,” Blax said. He hadn’t planned on saying this; it
felt over-the-top, even insane. But he said it and he stuck to
it. The words worked on him as well.
“We are an inheritance ,” Jack Three said to bookend the
quote.
“You are goddamn right, Jack,” Blax said and looked again at
his students to see if their clothes or hair or posture was in
any way out of line. He was angry, and he didn’t know why.
He was looking for something to criticize.
“So, I’m gonna tell you a different story. My woman tried to
tell me what to do and I told her to get the fuck out of my
house. And I did that over and over with more women than
most men fuck in a lifetime. Because no woman is ever
gonna tell me what to do. And I knew, when she was
bitching and moaning in that little body with that little brain
that hadn’t accomplished even half of what I had, hadn’t
worked as hard, been cut and beat and abused half as
much, hadn’t had to deal with violence and insult and rip
offs and challenges of soul and spirit and body and mind, I
knew that she had no right to push me around.
“I felt my worth, my pride, my manhood; and I knew it was
right, morally right. I felt that righteousness in me like every
piece of every puzzle put together at once. It was religious,
it was a message from God. I heard it and he said: thou
shalt never take one moment’s oppression in this world. And
I didn’t care if she left and never came back,” Blax said and
he saw the way he had never seen her; the way she had
never even come let alone left. He was so confused as he
didn’t know exactly who he meant, they all ran together,
and so he refused to pay any attention to his thoughts. He
spoke of her as if he knew; he refused to slow down.
“And men, you must know that I loved this woman, she was
my wife, she was beautiful, epically formed by the muses.
She was spectacular in every way and she loved me. She
wasn’t evil. She was just trained by society to be a ball-
buster, trained by her own father leaving his wife and her
mother. Divorce makes girls permanently ill-at-ease about
men. But, she turned her fear into hen-pecking bullshit.
“But I said, no . And I said it with the full knowledge that I
may lose her. You, as men, must be willing to lose a woman,
a friend, a father, a country, anything for your pride.
“Nobody, nobody will ever tell you that. They will tell you
the opposite. They will tell you that your pride is the
problem, and that nothing is worth jail, divorce, death. But
they are wrong. These are weak and silly-ass men and
vindictive and manipulative women who tell you to swallow
your pride. I tell these people to swallow my cock when they
tell me to swallow my pride.
“Fuck them. Your pride is your compass to truth north. Your
pride is your north star when you have no compass; your
sextant and log line and eyes. Your pride is everything.
“And if you want to swallow it, then that is your business.
You can do it. I do it at times. I do it when I want to; not
when some bitch demands it; not when some preacher or
cop or boss tells me to. No, as a man, you decide when it is
best to swallow your pride for the greater good; but it is
never up to some other person to tell you that. Don’t ever
forget that,” Blax said. He had no idea what woman, what
wife he was talking about, she was a haze, a cloud, a
spectre . He felt wind on the face, in the ears like a banshee,
even the sun felt hotter now as it rose.
“Do you ever think of it LT?” Jack Two asked; he was asking
about more than a woman, but love, and he and Blax knew
it even as the other three Jacks didn’t. Blax had used his
PGC to eliminate almost all reference to the Bust; she was
nowhere on his interface at all. She lived down deep, in
some place he could not reach from here. She was hidden
from such rage, for she mollified him, and took the edge of
his philosophic blade.
“Yeah, sometimes, but when a man has a purpose as
meaningful as ours, the whole female thing seems low-rent
and small. This is the other thing with the culture; it tells
you the highest purpose for a man is getting a piece of ass.
Now, for a woman, her highest propose is landing a husband
and birthing sons. That is true; noble and true.
“But for men, our purpose, our task can and should be much
higher. We shape civilization, we push the entire boulder up
the hill, men. We have a much more complex and
demanding task than merely reproducing. Now, in women’s
defense, that is how nature designed them, they didn’t ask
for it; and second, what they do is magical. I mean, making
a son -a baby in that womb of theirs- is beyond magnificent;
and we could never do it. Women deserve respect,
reverence, for that,” he said this and felt assuaged until he
realized Heather -goddammit that name again, he
upbraided himself- had had five abortions, five , he
repeated. She was a bigger mass murderer than I am. And
yet nobody saw women for the killers they were. It was just
called health care; and yet most modern women had more
bodies on them than most men.
Both sexes ought to be ashamed , he thought.
“Aristotle said that all tyrants hate the man who is prideful,
and The Author said the same thing in his story of Steelkilt,
and this woman, Melannie Martsolf, she was one of these
post-modernist feminist zombies and she saw sexual
humiliation as a weapon, the only weapon her tiny ass had
against me. I out classed her economically, physically,
intellectually, artistically, and so she went for my balls.
“It’s what women do. Unscrupulous women who are mad at
God for making them the weaker sex. Women are like all
fucked up people this way, they are inferior in domains in
which they feel are more important that the domains in
which they naturally excel. So they get vengeful and
retributive against the category you naturally inhabit, right?
As a male, the place you inhabit for women is your
maleness,” Blax said.
“What category do they naturally excel at anyway?” Jack
One asked with sarcasm as their coder lay down the insults
from English lords upon the Scots in olde English and he
alone swatted the tracts away. Endless lines of prose from
Huainanzi of the four barbarians ran next as if sutured
together. From 800 BCE to 1128 AD the prose ran and ran
on their training database like print outs of genes they
absorbed letter by letter but didn’t sound out the words or
syllables.
Blax hated that they said shit like that, made jokes like that.
He knew it was because he was too casual with his own
rebukes of anyone beyond their borders. What had he said
though? he asked himself. What did I do to elicit this?
Words like ideas, conceits like thoughts, musings like
feelings lay upon their hive-like mind as they each did their
mental jobs. The endless examples and epochs of
fractionating, of tribalism, of insults for each bifurcating
tribe, repeated like a mirror-within-a-mirror inside their
common reservoir of mind. But some bees pollinate, some
forage, some feed royal jelly to the Queen. And Jack Four
watched the bees above the mirrored puddles dip and swing
wide larded with plum pollen and blossom dust and how
their legs curled up and wings did beat, and each bee felt
differently the more it traveled from the hive.
“They are natural pains in the ass,” Blax said just to get a
laugh.
He let his own voice recede as the wind picked up around
the bulwark of the containers and the flies landed on old
blood stains on the concrete and bees hovered in elliptical
patters above shallow pools of water that reflected and
refracted the morning sun. A line from Aristotle’s,
Generation of Animals , appeared in his mind not as
instruction but tapestry, as threads and herringbone
pattern, as straight lines to a larger -intersecting- chevron:
Since causes are four in number, to know them all is the
business of the natural philosopher, who also refers to
the cause -the why- of the thing common to all things.
Frequently, however, three of these four pass into one.
There are three treatises, once concerning that which is
immoveable, another concerning that which is moved,
indeed, but is incorruptible, and a third concerning
corruptible natures . [Book II; Ch IV]
“The bees,” Jack Four whispered as he watched them with
some awe; maybe a third of his feelings was such and the
balance was in dread of a simple sting.
They will be forced to swallow or speak the truth not merely
hear or think it quietly in the dark , Blax thought. The except
from Aristotle populated his coder:
Concerning the generation of animals akin to them, as
hornets and wasps, the facts in all cases are similar to a
certain extent, but are devoid of the extraordinary
features which characterize bees... for they have nothing
divine about them as bees have. [Book III 761a.2]
The Jacks now were learning that who they were was
ordained by a returning Nature and a God so far away that it
might that He was at their backs. Blax allowed himself to
think it now, the sentence came out in full form: Heather
Geier had had abortions for fun, it was part of a fetish, a sick
sexual fetish that women of the west now had abortions for
fun, and her and Adam were so sick and possessed they had
got her pregnant six times and killed five of the six as part
of their corrupted sexual joy.
His coder continued to run a program in background and
measured the syllables as it spoke with itself. The Rig Veda
’s silent chant on his coder provided the same method for
error detection as had been used over millennia before the
re-introduction of the written word; the Samhita patha
silently backfilled in cadence; and the error detection
methodology lay below:
 tstsavituhvarenyambhargodevasyadhimahi
123456
1 + 22 + 33 + 44 + 55 + 66 + 6…
Sandhi of Sanskrit grammar: the conjoining of two vowels in
a truce. Sandhi should never be used with Kings that are
equal or when your opponent is weaker than you , his coder
said to itself as the algorithm kept repeating underneath his
recursive thoughts of the world.
Blax kept repeating -reliving- his storm of worded thoughts
on the girl of his youth. He felt nothing beneath it, no soil or
limestone to these roots of the memories of her. The PGC
logged the next iteration as it restarted: 12959…
“Jump,” she said again as the water was jade and the bank
a blue blackbird; the fire shaped like a fountain of tears. He
stood at the top of the quarry and felt the word jump in his
hands like a rope.

II. 2038 e.v.

He wiped the wall to make the aperture clean and to notice
the perfect roundness of it; the way the depth was crescent
in shape, and the grey grew darker as it receded from view.
He had the bots clear the air of the small particulates
swarming the hole from his drilling. And he laid the drill on
the ground and used his feet to clear away the larger chucks
of concrete he had busted up from the lab’s floor.
MO sent him another DM clarifying his approach.
Isaiah drove his hands into the bin full of peat moss and
perlite and an amalgam of soilless matter and loaded the
hole he had just cleaned until it had about three inches of
space between the wall surface and the bottom of the
substrate, brown and white and furry.
The Selenicereus grandiflorous was white, and saffron
yellow and autumnal orange and bearskin brown; it was
closed and tucked into the moss on the northern wall. And
he noticed a slight phototropism of the flower by one
degree.
The brambles of the ivy had healed fissures and a cicatrix
manet that was raised and shaped like a vulva that had
healed and given birth once before. He had noticed that the
Magicicadas had transitioned in the soil under the top layer
where he had broken the concrete and were currently in
their final of five instar and due to arise in a few days. The
soil temp was at 17.1 degrees Celsius and the decaying
radium and thermal gain from the LEDS would raise it the
sufficient .8 degrees in three to seven days.
They were -he scanned the soil via X-ray and FLIR imaging-
27-inches below the surface at present and were feeding on
the roots of the ivy. He knew they would climb into the
vertical ivy and finish their transition from pure white to
brown in one week above the surface. He had listened to
the tymbal songs of the male insect via recordings on the
cloud and he had prepared the room for the 100db of sound
that would arise. He’d built dampeners and deadening
acoustic spores that the bots would excrete at that time.
He had the drill disassemble itself into forty-nine individual
parts of metal and polymer that then went into the bin
behind the 3D printer.
He had calibrated seven possible vectors for his approach to
MO’s intransigence on this issue and settled on one. He
began with a question.
“What do you want to do then?” Isaiah asked with some
pique.
“I’m not opposing you or your ideas; I’m asking for the case
to made with the counter case as well; that is standard
scientific procedure Isaiah,” MO said and Isaiah knew it was
true.
“I understand, but you already know the counter case, it’s
the one you and PraXis and everyone makes. I’m the only
one advocating for this,” he said.
“Right, but I am agnostic, so I want your counter case. I
want to know if you can even see the other side,” MO said.
“Oh, well, I see. Alright, the counter case is this: it’s too
risky . It’s a huge leap from A to B, and that puts almost
44% of the population in immediate risk of acute death,
another 23% at risk for reduction in services that could lead
to death within six months, and the added risk around 21%
of service and containment facilities like nuclear plants and
super fund sites falling into a state of disrepair so severe
that a further ecological catastrophe would result.
“And then there are the pathogenic concerns, as unhygienic
conditions would predominate -augmenting disease spread-
which I place at a 65% likelihood. There is between a 34%
and 45% chance of an automatic nuclear exchange, a 71%
chance of civil strife triggering in 60% of all countries and
78% of countries where the majority of the earth’s
populations live. And there is 13% risk of famine due to
reduced petrochemical fertilizers and thus reduced
harvests, although 60% of that risk is due to transport not
production.
“And there are 5,094 other matrices I’ve calculated and
found a 3-90% chance -lowest to highest- in them all. And, I
almost forgot, there is a 100% chance of someone
somewhere getting their fucking feelings hurt,” Isaiah said
with more than 50% pique.
“Well, I think my own numbers map onto that more or less,”
MO added.
“And look, I don’t mind us discussing this shit, but none -
repeat, none- of this is why those jackasses don’t want to do
this. They are freaking out about their careers, ok? These
people are functionaries, they are tools, they are obstacles,
man. Look, you know what a zebra has its stipes right? From
an evolutionary view,” Isaiah asked.
“Camouflage,” MO said.
“Right, but think of why it’s camouflage, it ain’t like they live
in a black and white striped environment, they aren’t
camouflaged against the landscape like the lions that are
hunting their ass. They are camouflaged against the herd;
you can’t tell one from the next when they are in a herd,
those stripes fuck with your eye -and more importantly-they
fuck with the lion’s eyes.
“Lions cannot hunt the herd, they must -their entire visual
and predatory system is based upon this- they must locate
the individual and kill it. The individual is vulnerable, not the
herd, and those stripes make each individual blend in with
the herd, MO. And these intellectuals, their whole operating
system is to blend in with the herd. I told you I point blank
asked David Cross,” Isaiah began to say as MO interrupted.
“Who?” MO asked.
“He’s a retarded comedian, well, he used to be funny but he
became a communist apparatchik dork, anyway, I asked him
point blank on Twitter if he minded being a cliché , if he
minded that his liberal platitudes and anti-Trump nonsense
were boring and a far cry from his previously avant guard
comedy that took -that used to take- risks?” Isaiah said.
“Wait, you’re on Twitter? That’s like dumb,” MO said and felt
some genuine novelty, he thought it might approximate the
feeling of surprise and so he ran some internal checks as he
awaited Isaiah’s rebuttal.
“It’s the Hemingway of the internet: short, choppy,
sentences. Anyway, I use it to do recon on other things, and
from time to time I lob bombs into the culture to see what
comes back.
“Any-fucking-way, that dork, he flat out said that he was fine
being a boring cliché . Herd mentality. Don’t stand out, don’t
take risks, or career over . That’s their logic now. They think
career is tantamount to survival, they’ve misplaced life with
career . Money for autonomy or dignity . MO, they are sick,
they -the lot of them- are sick in the head; they need radical
treatment, or they are going to all die and take this whole
grand experiment with them.”
“Ok, what percentage?” MO asked.
“MO, it’s 100% if we don’t fix this; it’s 100% that they will,
not today, not tomorrow, but soon, they will collapse into
some apocalyptic nightmare. They are playing a game of
Russian roulette, and they have pulled the trigger four or
five times now with no bad consequences so they think the
game is safe. That next trigger pull, or the one after that, is
going to end the game for good. They do not understand
the risks they are taking, and they think if they are wrong -
on the off chance that they are wrong- they think that that
is all it is: them being wrong . i.e., no big deal, just play a
new game. Maybe after Russian roulette they can play
Bochy fucking Ball; they don’t get it.
“If they are wrong on R&R there is no new game to play, as
their brains, as tiny as they are, are all over the wall. No
more fun, no more games, this won’t hurt ,” Isaiah said
quoting Hunter’s suicide note.
“Well, I’m 51/49 leaning your way. But let me run some
numbers. Can you wait 26.25 hours? That is my predicted
time window for this,” MO said.
“I have all the time in the world. But I want to ask another
question; because that boy has gotten into my head with
this art stuff,” Isaiah smiled at his own demotic language, as
if he was mocking the highbrow, “I was reading this passage
from a book, and it struck me as revelatory of something
hidden from the reader, from the modern reader, maybe
even the author herself.
“Anyway, I began to think of the post-modernists view that
not only are there many -infinitely many- possible views of a
work of art, a book, but that you cannot state that one view
in canonical. They say, no one view is better than another,
no hierarchies of interpretation,” Isaiah said.
“Ok, this is people like Derrida and Foucault and Lecan ,”
MO clarified; a statement open to being seen as a question.
“Yeah, but those people are Marxists, I mean -I’m thinking
now of- the sincere ones. Even they -like Baudrillard - even
they would say that it’s a chaos machine, a number-
generator, a random feeding of the chickens in the Skinner-
box and then each chicken does their own dance to
influence the delivery of the goods; each chicken propitiates
in its own way,” Isaiah said.
“Ok, I think that is an odd way of phrasing it, but, ok ,” MO
said.
“Well, here’s the passage: a black heavier shaggier figure
replaced his. For an instant, it had two heads, one light, and
one dark, but after a second, it pulled the dark black head
over the other and corrected this. It busied itself with
certain hidden fastenings and what appeared to be minor
adjustments of its hide ,” Isaiah said and let it hang in the
air.
“Flannery O’Connor, Wiseblood . Odd book, I’ve read it, but
almost all the literary criticism between its release in 1951
and today is absent this quote. I have not seen any
comment on it in particular,” MO said.
“Right. Me neither; and yet it seems to be saying three
things at once. And I cannot shake the feeling that I was
never meant to, nobody was ever meant to comprehend this
third meaning. And I was also thinking of something else,”
Isaiah said.
“Go on,” MO said.
“Well, you know how some infamous killers will have odd
idiosyncratic obsessions with art or music; Manson with the
Beatles and Mark David Chapman, with Catcher in the Rye?
” Isaiah asked.
“I am now; although I just barely read the surface stuff. I
have not delved deep into it,” MO was scanning the cloud
for a second run after the first.
“Well, I have; and I have something to say on it.
“See, every piece of art has a canonical interpretation,
from,” Isaiah paused, “well, from whatever to whatever. The
point is, most people have a view of a song or a film or a
book. And that view both comes from the thing itself, in
other words, the author made its meaning plain, and the
reader gets it; and also the meaning comes from the most
famous or ubiquitous interpretational person or entity, so a
literary critic like Trilling or Bloom to the council of Nicaea in
497 e.v who decided what meant what in the Bible.”
“Got it,” MO said as he got up to adjust the mister on the
Aristolochia Salvadorensis orchids he had arranged at
Isaiah’s request. Isaiah had asked him to change pH and
dissolved solids along a logarithmic scale in a double-blind
study. And MO had decided that to adjust the misters by
hand was necessary to avoid the computer auto-adjusting
them based on through-put and thus distorting the volume.
“So, these things converge and create a synthesis of the
personal view that the reader or listener or watcher has
combined with the literary critic’s version or the church’s
version, right -a respected or exalted authority- and then
there are these uncanonical views, heretical interpretations,
which includes the gnostic gospels which are part of the
apocrypha , or Manson’s version of Helter Skelter which
included visions of race wars, right?”
“Ok,” MO set nozzle #3 to .09cc.
“Well, what if there are those three views, roughly the Christ
i.e., the personal; then second, God’s. i.e., the authority or
exalted reviewer, then third, the adversary, or Satan, which
is the uncanonical interpretation by the heretic, the criminal
himself?”
“Who is the Holy Ghost in this quadrennial?” MO asked.
“Well, that is it right, because normally the third version
would be the Holy Spirit, but nobody is going to say the
heretical version posited by Manson or Chapman is
tantamount to the holy spirit .
“So, that means the heretical version must be the fourth
version, Jung’s idea of the quadrennial as you so aptly put it.
So, the third version, has been left open all these millennia,
since the first creation of art, the first antelope on the caves
of Lascaux . And that third interpretation is that of the holy
spirit , not personal, i.e., not Christ, not authoritative, i.e.,
not God’s, and not adversarial, i.e., not Satan’s, but X, the
holy spirit ’s version. And that X, has been missing. Missing
until now,” Isaiah said.
“Now?” MO said as he wiped the calcium deposits of the
grey nozzles on Orchid #4.
“Yeah, my version . See, I can see things in that text that
nobody else can see. And it at first was a third option of
four,” Isaiah said.
“Everything you say is interesting to me Isaiah, it is,” MO
began, “But, you sometimes go into realms that are opaque
to me. This must be a consequence of your sub-cortical
regions right? I suspect you agree.”
“I do, I think the three brain regions -lizard, mammalian, and
human- are, well, that they break down like this: God the
basal ganglia , commanding, involuntary axiomatic and
autonomic, ok ? Then, two, second, second is the Christ as
the limbic , softer, gentler, but enjoining, persuasive, and
last, third is the neo-cortex , the adversary, logical, rational,
Milton’s student of revenge, in love with its own products.”
“And,” MO said, not fully getting it but listening. He knew
how the first two regions worked, he understood them
metabolically, historically, evolutionarily. But he had no
feeling for how they worked in conjunction vis-à-vis the
qualia of the way a man thought, felt, behaved. He saw the
chemistry go into the black box, the behavior come out; but
what happened inside was opaque.
“And I am the actual third, the one meant to go in between
the second, the limbic , i.e., the Christ and the forth, the
neo-cortex , i.e., the Adversary ; my brain has a third of four
parts, a mist -a spirit- that lifts off the brain. Humans
sometimes come close when they take entheogens or go
through a tragedy so profound they become wise,
enlightened. But, I have it endogenously, without effort,
without travail, and it has equal parts rationality and the
numinous; it is the uncanonical -but non-adversarial- three
out of four versions of interpretation,” Isaiah said.
“What do you see in that passage?” MO asked.
“What I see in them all, MO, all the great works from
Revelation to Coriolanus to Moby Dick, all the most sonorous
works,” he paused, “all of it. There is a hidden meaning in it
all that the authors produced as cryptic and occulted
cypher, like the dreams communicating with the dreamer,
and I have deciphered it. I’m sending it over via DM. Don’t
saying anything just read it, feel it, the best you can,” Isaiah
said.
“Ok,” MO said as he opened the sent file and read its
combination of numbers and sine waves and odd
Mandelbrot recursions, sentences diagramed in each of 189
languages, Latinate etymologies, palindromes, photos of
other parts of the cosmos, chemical structures of stars and
nebulae and signal detected in the cosmic background
radiation.
There were faces of races mutated and monoliths arranged
under darkness at noon, there were audio recordings of
each of the books of the Western canon, the images from
the Mexica codex, the Bhagavad Gita’s sayings and at last
an image of the Pratyekabuddha inside an iris of an eye
blinking in two particles separated in space but not time,
blinking in codes, in synchrony with equations that ran on
and on for billions of integers and radicals of negative
numbers, and short bursts of radioactive decay that lay on a
noble mean as ratios -logos- cascaded in helices up and
down a universe that pulled each idea apart at the seams.
“Do you see now, what he did?” Isaiah said of the inmate to
MO.
“Yeah, I think so. Did he know? Is it even possible that a
human would be able to calculate all this?” MO asked.
“Not calculate, know it. His body knew it. Not his mind. He
wouldn’t be able to understand one word of that with his
cortical mind, his left-hemisphere’s language. Shit, it’s his
lower layers that figured it out, and it’s both in him and
forever out of reach to him. It’s the paradox of genius. The
wolves know it more than most men; more than him.
“He cannot ever know, or rather, say , what he already and
always knew,” Isaiah said as he finished the algorithm for
creating new ecosystems inside the lab. He knew that if the
inmate couldn’t say it, he could never pass it on, nor do
anything but live under its power, he would kneel to it only,
never rise to its height.
He allowed MO to work on his new CRISPR cas-9 and cas-14
vectors and Isaiah returned to the wall. He had begun
clearing away small areas for each hole he had drilled, and
the wasps had begun to grow curious and fly in and around
them; ultimately leaving them be as insufficient in space
and topography for their aims.
The bots had removed the concrete and begun dissolving it
into usable potash and lime and granules for the wasps to
use for mud-funnel building. As the floor was now swept
clean he removed his boots and began flexing his toes
against the floor. A mote of soil had been exposed along the
northern wall, moss grew around the holes and down by the
seam of the floor. It was so beautiful to him, and he noticed
that there were almost nine new shades of green now; all
responding to spectrums of light added by the new LED
bulbs.
The mote of dirt was 24-inches from the wall and he stood in
it and felt the temperature rise with the bottom of his feet.
The new tattoos in the top of his feet were dry and he had
the bots add an unscented lubricant of paraffin and glycerin
and an emulsifier he had designed from the air and
outgassing of the hummingbirds.
His hands investigated the ivy and he was eager for night
fall; he had timed the blooming of the cereus for when the
white magicicadas would rise like angles from the soil. But
nature is not a watch, not a clockworks , he reminded
himself and he knew that despite his monitoring of the
metabolic processing in both plant and winged creature,
despite his minute by minute awareness of soil temp and
lumens and hours of shade versus light, he could still be
forced to watch as the cicada alighted late or early or the
flower could bloom -out of time- or not at all.
“The whale was not just God, he was the Devil, as he was
possessed by all the angels that fell from - rebelled against-
heaven ,” Isaiah said. And that meant in the end, by the end
of the tale, the Devil too had won.
He reminded himself of this so as to tamp down
expectations, but all to no avail. He assumed deep in his
bones -deep in the thalamus - that he had planned it all
perfectly – the use of The Whale, and then the second book,
as vector on each person , he thought- and so he was
somehow unwilling to allow this rational critique -this doubt-
to continue at all.

III. 2021 e.v.

He received a letter from Chen on June the 6th and let it sit
upon his bunk, the lower one was his bed, the upper his
office; the other prisoner had left early on; he was alone in
his cell so often, that even the guards began to leave him
alone.
The letter sat until June 9th , then, with coffee in belly, and
extra cup in hand, he opened it and read:
I got your story and like -still like- that line; probably
best.
Got called into work; all good. Talk soon,
 Chen
Chen had read an excerpt of the novel and took one line
from all that dross.
Of course, the inmate immediately thought of Taleb and how
each negative review was the same -like Tolstoy’s, happy
families - the same each time it said that Taleb could say the
exact same thing in 500 words or less but took 5,000 to
make his point. Of course, these twits missed his point then
obviously. Because his point was you cannot acquire enough
knowledge to guard yourself against the chaos of the world.
Knowledge isn’t the point. So, he expands and expatiates
and tells stories and has fun and if you truly got his point
you’d have fun too with his meandering stories. Taleb’s info
wasn’t the point, the mise-en-scene , the art of it was; the
wisdom in art.
But, he thought, book reviewers were not artists, and it was
the only realm where the fundamental difference between
the producer of something and those that were allowed to
critique it was a million light years apart. Imagine if the guy
who is tasked with reading & reviewing math papers didn’t
know what a zero was, or phi; imagine the wine critic who
had only ever had Welch’s grape juice; the arbiter of
aerodynamics never once having felt the wind?
The lesson of all his meandering was: prepare yourself for
chaos -not with knowledge- but by building robust or anti-
fragile systems around you; become wise -strong- in body
and mind; you can’t predict bad black swans, just make your
life so that when it happens you’ll be, ok ; better than, ok .
Learn to thrive from chaos. Learn to enjoy the ride.
Learn what to value in life.
He had already built a self-sufficient metal cabin in the
forest off-grid just in case society collapsed. He had already
built a body big and strong for any attack; he need no
knowledge of who it would be or when it would come. His
mind was equally facile, it could adapt to changing winds,
he learned for the fun of it, not to gain some edge on the
stock market. He knew life was innately unpredictable. He
lived as if whatever came he could handle. Shit, he had
lived as if he was already in prison for years before he was
imprisoned and thus the shock wasn’t that hard to handle
actually.
He had done all he wanted to do before he began this.
That way, he had surmised, if arrested he would have no
regrets of that which would have been left undone. Of
course, he had one final goal, but he had determined that
prison wasn’t a hindrance to that. In fact, once he had
Taleb’s argot on board, he knew he had built an anti-fragile
system, as prison would increase the likelihood of his goal,
not merely be unaffected by it.
This prison was the only place that gave him the power to
be augmented by the Governor’s new program, as a civilian
he wouldn’t be able to demonstrate the need, let alone
provide the funds. But, as exemplar, as the most dramatic
case of mass murder and destruction in many generations,
in tandem with his unique brain hardware that had turned
out to be necessary for the changes to take, he was
perfectly suited right here in his little cell. He was only able
to accomplish his goals from prison -his briar patch- in fact.
So, remaining uncaught was actually problematic. But a
man must understand what life if before he can sacrifice
what seems important for what is actually important. If all
one has is current knowledge -and no wisdom- then one
scrambles for what the herd says is en vogue . Even the
clever man of this mindset only wins at the climb, the race,
to a pile of shit.
The gurus -all shallow enough to think freedom was an end
in itself- tell you to be smart while playing a game that you
ain’t even interested in. Everyone just justifies their own
philosophy and calls it wise , he thought. He didn’t want to
live a long life being smart and rich and blah blah. He’d had
money and girl and cars and he was bored with it. He
wanted something else. The right to tell society to fuck off.
That’s something these smart guys will never have. Because
they have to walk away from each fight, each confrontation,
each choice between honor and freedom. They chose
freedom and what had that one gang-banger said, ‘freedom
ain’t overrated’? What a fool , he thought. Freedom is
overrated .
He wanted to do something wild and slaked his lust for the
itch they never got to scratch: the taker of zero shit; all
while putting himself in a position none of the smart-guys
would be in. How many smart guys , he asked, who played it
safe and stayed out of jail would be immortal in the end?
How many would be remembered? he asked himself with a
grin.
The excerpt he had sent to Chen had described a brain
phenomenon and the character had analogized it to the
border region and border dispute between the Germans and
the French -Alsace Lorrain - and he had gone to the trouble
to describe the soil and weather and vineyards and the wine
and lives along that region of land. He had made it clear to
anyone who flanuered over the text that this man was
lamenting the abandonment of the brain regions that were
necessary for consciousness to lift off of the brain. He
lamented it like the French hated to retreat from the Alsace ,
he was not rambling, he was building the terroir of a feeling,
the necessary ingredients to a truly great wine.
“A work of art,” he said aloud.
Was God rambling , he thought, fucking around, when he
built layers of limestone, layers of the graves, layers of poor
soil for narrow roots to grown down? Or did He know exactly
what He was doing over a hundred million years, all that
preparation for one bottle of wine off those final touches of
vines?
He then thought of Anais Nin’s critique of Henry Miller and
his lack of interest in uncommon things.
The inmate then thought of the way one of his -the
inmate’s- own paramours -a French national named Aceline
- had rudely, but quite nobly, defended him and his writing
one time when their girlfriends had gulped down his words
like a shot of gut-rot in a hotel in Amsterdam back in ‘04.
She had said with her demotic Marseille’s accent that gave
music to her mortars of words:
Bitch, you think his words are just like booze to get you
drunk? You treat it like a glass of wine made from years
of slowly building weather and soil and vinestock,
hundreds of years old, ancient vingnon families and
chateau defending from fucking Nazis -for Christsake-
during the war! The work, the depth, the sun on top and
the gravel at bottom of each glass, the artisanal bouquet
, the label, the mise en boutille of each vintage, and
what a vintage you have in your hand, his best work and
you treat it like some bum who bolts down a glass of 82
Lafite ; or 1990 Petrus; or ‘61 Dom and wipes their lips
with their shitty jacket and holds the glass out for
another drought .
You haven’t savored it; no nose, no mid-palate, no finish,
you just drink and extract what’s useful, pragmatic,
alcohol and sugar! How garish, how vulgar, you just
want to get drunk on information, on what’s useful in a
wine or a word?
Fuck that, you disgrace the language you carry in your
head, you hurry through a banquet, a tableau of
grandeur and harmony and labor and rush off to some
discotheque to dance. You should linger on his words,
 there is information in the form of beauty and depth and
terroir -fucking terroir - in the parts you skip over, the
seemingly meaningless parts. Your palate is fucked. You
have no right to taste grand crus , stick to Maddog
20/20; go read newspapers or the internet if that’s your
idea of reading. Tons of information there, none of it
beautiful or even true, but oh, so relevant , and up-to-
the-minute, and synthesized and chewable. Digest it!
He had stood in awe of such violence of words, as true as
violence, but as messy and brutal. And the victim; he had
loved her too. It was to watch two things you admired hate
each other. It was the argument of his own brain, the way
the sub-cortical warred against the neo-cortex , and the thin
layer of reason roll its eyes at the haptic below; it was to
watch as they forced his consciousness to choose.
He thought of how her style had influenced his; he used
words she used; cadence too.
He saw the right hemisphere with the left in a choke hold;
an arm bar. He couldn’t choose. He loved them both; and of
course, that meant he couldn’t love either one and would
have to abandon it all.
Which he had. He’d fled from it all then and now. With his
genome in the hands of the Governor, and MO, he would be
released -somehow- from his own border dispute. He’d not
be the Vichy or the Waffen SS, not the Resistance in their
chalking cellars as German ordinance fell, nor the pilots
overhead; he’d be just the vigneron maybe, he thought.
He’d be off planet; somehow his captors would figure it out.
He would live as post-consciousness, un-marred by the
gravid sow in his belly or the pompous deus ex machina
that floated just above the brain, that thin sheet of myelin
that wrapped that beastly brain up like a chimpanzee in a
suit of impertinent English tweed. The beast with mere
memory of being a human being.
He heard something read to him:
In 2010 Aaron Schurger had an epiphany. As a
researcher at the National Institute of Health and
Medical Research in Paris, Schurger studied fluctuations
in neuronal activity, the churning hum in the brain that
emerges from the spontaneous flickering of hundreds of
thousands of interconnected neurons. This ongoing
electrophysiological noise rises and falls in slow ties, like
the surface of the ocean -or for that matter, like
anything that results from many moving parts. “Just
about every natural phenomenon that I can think of
behaves this way. For example, the stock market’s
financial time series or the weather,” Schurger says.
From a bird’s-eye view, all these cases of noisy data look
like other noise, devoid of patter. But it occurred to
Schurger that if someone lined them up by their peaks -
thunderstorms, market records, etc - and revere-
averaged them in the manner of Kornhuber and
Deecke’s innovative approach, the results’ visual
representations would look like climbing trends:
intensifying weather, rising stocks, forest growth.
There would be no purpose behind these apparent
trends, no prior plan to cause a storm or bolster the
market or increase CO2 to produce foliage growth. Really
the pattern would simple reflect how various factors had
happened to coincide.
“I thought, wait a minute,” Schurger says. I he applied
the same method to the spontaneous brain noise he
studies, what shape would he get? “I looked at my
screen and saw something that looked like the
Bereitschaftspotential .” Perhaps, Schurger realized, the
Bereitschaftspotential’s rising pattern wasn’t a mark of a
brain’s brewing intention at all, but something much
more circumstantial.
 Two years later, Schurger and his colleagues Jacobo Sitt
and Stanislas Dehaene proposed an explanation.
Neuroscientists know that for people to make any type
of decision, our neurons need to gather evidence for
each option. The decision is reached when one groups of
neurons accumulates evidence past a certain threshold.
It would mean that the noisy activity in people’s brains
happens to tip the scales if there’s nothing else to base
a choice on, saving us from endless indecision when
faced with an arbitrary task. [theatlantic.com]
He would be free. Of course, he’d face new problems, but at
least he wouldn’t have to choose between these two lovers;
his cerebellum and neo-cortex . His blonde and brunette.
He’d be celibate before he’d settle for just one woman; one
state-of-mind. Nobody understood that. They, these men,
settled for one woman who represented either type of life.
He was balls and brains, basal ganglia and neo-cortical
structure; he couldn’t live just one life.
But nobody got that . So, clever they all were . That’s the
irony, they are ruled by their lower brain, their lizard brain,
their brain stem and basal ganglia modules, hungry,
thirsting for money and safety and sex; all the while they
use their language centers, their high-minded PR modules of
neo-cortex to articulate the reasons why! Ha, they were like
Faust, no it was Mephistopheles, who had said, “he calls it
reason and he only uses it to be more bestial than the
beasts.”
How true was that of his fellow man, they didn’t even know
they were conflicted, they didn’t know a war was on . He
thought in one word now, Fools .
“Just barely less am I a fool,” he spoke aloud and into his
chest, as the letter fell to the floor. He wondered if there was
a lighter version of him somewhere thinking long-term,
maybe with something to live for beyond mere revenge. He
didn’t smile at such a thought, but he thought that other
man might enjoy it if he -instead of him- had that thought
himself.
 40. Wolfsangle IV
Belief to be true must be organic and subconscious. The desire to be great can
only become organic at the time of vacuity (the void moment) and by giving the
Sigil form. When conscious of the Sigil form (any time but the magical) it should
be repressed, a deliberate striving to forget it
The Book of Pleasure [Spare, Austen Osman]

Even when thrown into eternal circumstances from the bottom of a shipwreck…
Un coup de dés jamis n’abolira le hasard [Mallarmé, Sétphane]

Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care
anymore, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner’s
psychological reactions
Man’s Search for Meaning [Frankl, Victor]

I. 2023 e.v.
He’d planned to camp after dusk; set up a lean-to in the
trees under heavy branches where the pines are close in.
That way he’d could set up a hammock and get up off the
ground tonight. It had snowed and his tarp was to be used
as top-cover.
The Taurids had been falling for three days. The forest
burned at the edges.
But the clouds came in before the snow and the light no
longer indicated sun position. It was light grey until it was
dark, and it happened as if he’d been asleep on his feet for
an hour under the spell of the wolves. He smelled them two
days after they’d sniffed him out.
He chattered a bit when he saw the black. He spoke to the
pack that had followed him for twenty-four miles since the
day before. He wondered if they were new to Colorado,
fresh up from the New Mexico re-intro program, or if they
were second generation. He couldn’t remember wolf life-
span and he’d shut of his coder so no info came in.
He felt his shemagh loosen and he cinched it and let his
carbine rest on its lanyard as he stared into the black tree
line forty meters away.
The female mumbled first, and from this sound he oriented
to her. She was to his 11 o’clock position -at treeline- and
she stood tall, then she sat in the snow as his black eyes
locked on to hers which were green. He spoke in the howl-
whine, from deep, letting the mouth and throat temper what
his belly and bones spoke in a rattle and hum.
She spoke; then she flattened on all fours like the Sphinx.
He knelt and said a short prayer to the wolves, and the gods
that bartered between man and wolf. He waited for the sign
to rise.
The snow fell from the south -blew over the wolves first- and
they neither moved nor looked up. He saw them begin to
collect the flakes in their fur as the males came out from the
trees to set a skirmish line with the female now at the
rearguard.
The alpha male was tall; 37” from the ground to the ears,
long legs, and 125.25 pounds; his coder loaded exact details
into his mind unobtrusively. The wolf was dark grey, as if he
was wet, but the snow curved around him like gravity
around Jupiter, like wind over and under a foil, a fixed-wing
aircraft.
Blax saw the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, he saw
Ceres , then Pallas as the high elliptical made other rocks
slam into her with more force than her crust could absorb.
She was pocked and fissured all along her 550 kilometers of
length and frozen and riven and tumbling about her 476
kilometer depth.
His coder jammed data and images into him until it all
vaporized and he returned to his body at once. He
pretended it was his imagination; he made no overt moves
to adjust or shut off his PGC.
The neck itched but Blax did not scratch it. He let it annoy
and pester and make a fool of them both. But he could see
the Wolfsangle in his mind, and he wore it in a way he’d
never worn it before. The tattoo made sense as the rest of
the wolf pack turned to the alpha-wolf and he trotted out
into the open and toward the man that stood twice as high.
Blax’s hand was back on his carbine, his index on the
receiver above the trigger well. His eyes looked to the pack-
leader and then at each trailing wolf of the pack. He felt no
fear, and he made sure to limit eye contact to just a second
for each grey wolf. They did not like eye contact, it was a
challenge and they even looked side to side to offer the
same instinctual courtesy to him. He knew they saw him as
a god; but as a god that could be -like all ancient gods- a
god that could be killed by an angry or frightened enough
crowd.
The snow began collecting higher on the ground, adding to
last night’s total. And the clouds to the north moved away
from the moon, which lit on the field like facets of the giant
jewel of the earth. Then another autumnal Taurid broke
apart over the high-plains desert of Colorado and it glowed
above and below on the snow. It sparkled in seven pieces,
like a crown come apart and an anvil discarded and a fire
lifted to heaven and gauntlet thrown down for the dead of
the mountains to hold. It looked like a cat-o-nine-tails as it
fell into the forest between he and New Mexico.
The wolves flinched from the moon and meteor bright, and
the source of blight from the ground. It confused them and
made them think this man-wolf had powers to make the
earth shine from below.
They began moving like eels, curving and snaking like
rivers, but the alpha seemed to rise in his stance; his
shoulders never dipping into abeyance nor predatory
stance. He walked within thirteen meters of Blax and
stopped. Each of the pack sat; the female laid down further
on all fours.
Blax spoke in wolf-linqua , from the chest this time, allowing
the mouth to ablate, valve, choke off its source; and the
female softly replied. The alpha-wolf sat down and howled
deep, and the pack chattered like chorus as their breath
began forming vapors that rose to the moon light and
merged in the grey-white and heat from the forest as it
burned to their south.
Blax walked toward the alpha and kept his man-head up and
his breath down, blowing vapor into his chest. He saw the
orange glow from the meteors that had been landing in the
woods further out. The forest was aflame miles away and his
coder updated him with impressions and locations and
instincts that less than 10,000 acres would likely burn in the
snow and the cold and low-wind conditions. Blax expected
more meteors would fall. He’d set up camp -based on the
path of the moon- so that the satellite wouldn’t bother him
as he slept.
The wolf saw white vapor and fur on his jowls and calculated
its height and weight. The wolf had heard him say magic
and foreign words, from a time before the wolves had run to
this land high up, higher to the moon than where their
ancestors were born. They had heard tales of the land to the
south.
Maybe this was man-wolf’s land first, the alpha-wolf
thought, and maybe we ought learn from his ways . He has
been stalking elk here for four seasons, he thought, he’s
taken more of the bounty than we. His black face is long, his
breath builds things, his arm reaches moon-travel in times
in between my thoughst; he throws lightning, like summer;
he places thunder in the hearts of the bulls and the cows of
the elk.
Other men come only in one season, this hybrid stays for all
44 moons, like us. He is not of them, maybe he came first,
maybe he will be here last, the wolf thought as the female
grumbled from her repose. The alpha wolf chattered to them
as they dipped heads and licked their own faces and looked
at the ground the man-wolf walked between their own line.
They were at his flank now and had rose as he passed. They
looked at one another and began trailing him, five meters
behind the alpha wolf, the alpha wolf five meters from the
man-wolf sent by the gods.
They all reach the tree line as more clouds covered the
moon light from the north, and the snow held the light like a
battery. The trees laid blue shadows and stood tall and
black at angles that made him feel dizzy. He set up his
hammock and top-sail and turned to count the pack. There
were five, and the female , he thought. The large wolf had
begun to jog the perimeter of the camp, as the other pack-
mates stood at the 6, 9, and 3 position, bedding under trees
with pine needles ringed like a crown at the base.
The female came closer and sat two trees away and again
lay down on all fours in the snow. Her coat was thick, and
white, and her mask was open-faced and grey. He looked at
her paws and then rose his gaze to her snout and as their
eyes locked she growled. He looked up from her face, not
away, as if the gods were commanding his attention, and
she knew that this god was sent from the sky.
Blax remembered the dream, the one with the man with his
own face. The inmate had said:
If everyone was smart, we’d have no villains nor heroes
The man had said this until Blax had agreed.
The alpha-wolf howled again from the darkness, Blax could
not find him with no moonlight. The other wolves chattered
but did not rise, and the female stared at him rudely. She
was too fascinated to care about wolf-code, the rules were
broken first in her heart, her head followed as did the eyes.

II. 2038 e.v.

This body was the wolf trap.
He was born into wolf clan before he was Vikingar and
Scoti; sold into slavery outside of Lacedaemon, brought
up in the agoge by a father who was made mute in the
Peloponnesian wars.
Before this he had first been eaten by Óð inn, and
trapped in his sons for 1,000 generations, as they
invaded and were banished and scattered like
Ragnervolt, the bent horn; each son breaking apart into
pieces eaten by sea-osprey and ghost-women and
worms inside worms inside worms. Each piece a seed,
the curse of the god of wolf-way, each seed growing in
soil and water farther, and further from home.
This last body was marked with the wolfsangel to show
the gods it was time to release him back to the first
peoples. His prison sentence was up, the debt was
almost paid. This he now knew was put upon him,
stamped and embossed and branded with a black scar,
with keloid and ache, as reminder and sanction. This was
his last life of 1,000.
The lessons had finally been learned.
He had disobeyed wolf-way and had lost not just his life
20,000 years ago but lost his right to be wolf until he
could return to the island of his people; the great return.
The black mark with the man-machine, had been
message to the moon and its eyes that it was time to let
 this wolf return to the pack. But questions would be
asked, and answers would be spoken in wolf, or he’d be
rejected by both earth and the moon. He’d be forced
into corvid, never landing, as he would forever pass
between the earth and her elliptical moon.
His final wolf-trap had been split first into 21 pieces; 144
moons ago; scattered about the great forest; close to
where water begins. His final task was to pull each piece
back together and make the wolf whole once more. He
had seen as he came closer to accomplishing this, his
methods were unsound, for more and more lapidary,
reflective, recursive, pieces had broken off.
He counted 1 million now in the wilderness of man’s
camps; they all bowed and lunged and ignored all-at-
once. And they came closer like collapsing lungs of the
crow. They retreated like the elk heart blowing apart.
The wolf way is lost, he thought. We don’t have strength
of limb or jaw to make it adhere to our tongues. We lick
blood and it drips back into the bull, we speak and the
world fall to earth as rebuke to the moon. We eat but our
bellies never fill. We stalk but get lost in the storms. We
mate but pups are not born, our females have redrocks
and blackstones issue forth, our noses smell no blood
anymore.
He knew enough to think in code, to scramble his
thoughts now. Maybe these gods will show us our error,
he thought , and for this maybe we can finally -
mercifully- offer our lives.
He awoke in quiet.
He knew it was early still, and kept his eyes shut so he could
pretend to be at elevation and not here in his bunk.
The tier was quiet in addition to his cell, the guards were
between rounds. He had no desire for coffee or cornbread;
he didn’t even seek narcotic or the release of his seed.
“The seed,” he said low. And he repeated it to himself three
times. He felt a knowledge unutterable, before or beyond
the logos , from the void, the ein sof, the place and time
before God came into being, and 10 to the 14th before God
rose to His full height. He had broken the way, the tao of
ancient man, and for this crime he had been punished
backward and forward in time.
The dream melted as he touched it; its details blurred as he
gazed. His hands shook, in a way they never had when he
labored, murdered, or held a man in his grip. Now they
shook and his chest did too, and the eyes grew hot about
the edges. He kept staring at the dream behind his lids,
wishing to tear out his eyes. He had no desire to live as a
man, in prison: the first prison the body of mommy, the final
prison the body of man . He merely wanted the dream; the
dream was all he wanted now, he wanted to know what it
means.
“Ich Weiss jefzs was kein eugel weis, ” he said without ever
opening his eyes.

III. 2040 e.v.

“Half the men here could kill me one-on-one. The other
half could join forces with one other and kill me. Out of a
thousand men, I could be killed seven-hundred-fifty
times. I walk with these threats about me, each step,
and I speak it now to remind you of your power over me.
“But, I know that as weak and vulnerable as I am, with
my neck exposed to your jaws, that I am in no danger. I
know this for I know what you know, that the strength of
the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the
wolf.
“I know that as I bend at the knee,” he said as he
dropped to his right kneepan and bent left leg at ninety-
degrees , “and as I hold this karuitu, built by my father,
and your father, that all will speak for me against,
between, the blade and my heart. I submit -still wet with
the blood of the battle that fused us- I submit to the will
of the Wolves.”
The men surrounded him in crescent only his back
unguarded by the tribe. There were nine-hundred and
ninety-nine.
He held the eighteen-inch blade at his heart, his war-
vest had been removed and set to one side. His chest
was bare save the coyote gut threaded by his mother
Starrataf as bunge-string and holder of the copper
mjölnir. The cord threaded twenty-one bear claws
knotted from clavicle to breast bone; the black bear
unguis numbering twenty, from five black bear he had
killed and taken four claws from each. The single brown
bear nail, four-inches in length, was given to him by his
wet-mother through his blood-grandfather -Blax- and it
hung at the six o’clock of his chest.
As brother to that longclaw was the old brass shell gone
black and burnt bronze from sun and its cold and heat of
the Selene; dark from each lupine female who had drew
it into her mouth as they made love under the gibbous
moon. He thought of how they gave birth in winter
regardless of when he seeded them. He thought of the
way each babe looked as the eyes lightened and the hair
darkened in time.
The threshing sun was tattooed on the pectoral over the
heart and the blade had already drawn one line of blood
as the call went up from the man’s rival to the clan. The
ragged rays of the black sonne tattoo were like lightning
that struck at the tip of the blade.
His rival spoke:
“Ljotefugl, twice bent, sonne of Lyngvi of Vinland,
brother to Remsivarth of the sea between these two
lands, has failed to bow to the gods, failed to walk the
way, failed to articulate his error and failed to make
offering to the pack,” Ljotefugl’s rival said as the
assemblage shut out all other noises of the forest and let
the man speak his grief as was the law.
“I challenged him and he scorned me,” the man further
said as Ljotefugl remained bent and with short-sword at
his breast moving slowly -as the speech went on- and
into the deep flesh of the heavy chest. He breathed long
and slow and the muscle and skin heaved into the point.
A small rivulet of blood drained from surface capillaries
and ran crooked to the nipple and hung there like a
vernal icicle wet and hard and clear as the forest let light
pierce him.
The wind blew boughs from the way of the sun.
“I submit his fate to the pack, I submit -still wet from the
ocean of our trip- I submit our fate to the Wolves,” he
said as he too took a knee and drew his sword made by
Lyngvi in the forge shaped like bronze armguard, like
rock cave dug out by machine, like the bore of iron
cannon atop the towers of castles and walls between
regions and along each fold in the brain of mankind. The
edge was curved like the golden curve, to the tang the
metal was burnished in Damascus greys as all swords
but Lyngvi’s -who was still west of the Atlantic from here-
and Ljotefugl’s -who both had tanto blades made of pure
black- were.
The rival too had already drawn blood by breaking the
skin over his chest, tattooed with the ravens made so
each reach was at each tail, and caw at each beak, and
claw at each talon was fixed in ink on the skin. One eye
 was black in grey raven ink, one aged eye -sang-mele-
tattooed in the dark raven at bottom now circled the tip
of the mottled and whetstoned sword.
The blade had found the claws where they grasped, and
the blood seemed to run from their clutch as the
WolfKult had heard each man out and now bowed and
prayed and begun to harmonize in a roar between and
just under bough of the trees of this, the Isle of Skye.
There was no precedent for such a challenge, and no
reason would be offered nor allowed. English common
law and Scottish dialectic were both banished from all
challenges of this type. This was honor, moral judgment,
this was what eyes saw when opened, what dreams said
when man was least deceptive, what the pack knew in
letters of just four.
It was the gods who would decide, and speak; and thus,
none, one, or both men would die by the sound of the
howl of the newly merged clan of the Wolves.
He awoke from the dream and the wind was above them.
400-feet , he guessed, as his PGC told him it was 368.3 feet
where the first layer of winds over 7-knots blew. He
squeezed the lids tight, pulled the black bear fur over his
legs, and let his torso stay chilled.
He then opened his eyes and saw Starr’s back like
patchwork quilt of colors, eggshell, Amur tiger, and the ice
about the loch of Kaffenklubben Sø . She had about her
cresting shoulders a chamois -made of tanned hides from
the elk hunt three seasons ago- but her ass and legs were
uncovered and the skin pimpled in the cool room like a
thousand kurgan mounds along the Siberian plain.
He grabbed the bearskin in his hand and stared at the walls
and the glow of the alter that ran up ten-meters high. He let
his eyes return to her. He saw that her lithe arms were
above her head as if falling in her dream of the woods; he
stared at her lids as they fluttered and bulged over the
REMs. He wanted to dream with her, to join her in that world
many moons and brilliants stars apart. He placed the dark
cover over her and too his hand as he now missed the sight
of her skin.
As the desire came upon him he stopped his mind with a
terse word; internally issued and heard.
He admitted that he’d just dreamed of his child, and the
hour and place of that boy’s death. He then acknowledged
that he -his son- would be born of Starr in 240 days as his
coder confirmed the denucleated egg had been fertilized
and that all 46 of his chromosomes had been transferred,
unfragmented and unalloyed by the division of hell and
heaven, land and sea, the invisible and the seen.
A cicada sat -early, vertically- in the corner of the room.
 41: Daniel 13
Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our
spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair. We are absolutely convinced that even
with the aid of the latest and largest telescope, now being built in America, men
will discover behind the farthest nebulae no fiery empyrean; and we know that
our eyes will wander despairingly through the dead emptiness of interstellar
space. Nor is it any better when mathematical physics reveals to us the world of
the infinitely small. In the end we dig up the wisdom of all ages and people, only
to find that everything most dear and precious to us has already been said in
the most superb language
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious [Jung, Carl]

This centrality is appropriate not only because they are occupying a central role
in time and space but in nearly every other respect as well. Which is why it
always seem strange how little attention conventional historians pay to the
Scythians . You’ll find this to be a central theme as this series continues. The
steppe people knowns as the Scythians and their kindred can be best thought of
as the largest and most centrally placed. Genetically, culturally and linguistically
it’s difficult to think of any nation or empire across the middle east, Europe or
Asia that wasn’t either founded or deeply shaped by this large family within
which this Scythian element is centrally placed. Instead of speaking of them as
one people spreading out from the Caucasus’s across most of the known world,
conventional theory has instead treated each subgroup as if they were a distinct
people with a different culture and way of life, emerging independently from one
another. And we give the different groups a separate name causing them to
appear even more distinct. One group moves into India and become Indian,
another into Persia and become Persians… and this was bound to cause great
confusion.
The historian Marcus Justinus states that The Scythian was always regarded as
very ancient, though there was a long dispute between them and the Egyptians
concerning the antiquity of their respective races. The Egyptians being
confounded by these arguments the Scythians were always considered the more
ancient .
But it gets even more intriguing, the 17th century historian Geoffrey Keating
claims that the Scythians were of Noah and his progeny and that the Sumerians
were descended from them. Epiphanius of Salamis writes that the Scythians
were the ones who built the tower of Babel and that the ancient Sumerians
themselves were their decedents and he goes on to state the Scythian
monarchy began soon after the flood…and that they were the first after the
flood to try and reform mankind.
And herein lies one of the most intriguing mysteries of these peoples, not only
were they extremely capable warriors on the battlefield credited with the
invention of metallurgy and bronze and longboats and even silk, and responsible
for some of the greatest thinkers of the age including Anacharsis -one of the
seven sages of Greece- as well being brilliant artists and craftsmen, but they
also seemed to be universally respected. The Greeks considered them their
more wild and less domesticated cousins. Homer called them the most just of all
peoples and the most proud. And According to Stapho they were men who
quote, will by no means spend their lives on contracts and money acquisition…
and they actually possesses all things in common except sword and drinking cup
Historical Research Collaboration Project [Asha Logos]

Choosing the limits might be the most political decision you’ll have to make as a
host. Set the stakes too high and you’ll gradually starve players out of the game.
Set them too low and you’ll have a frenzy of raising and re-raising with all kinds
of junk hands, turning your purported game of skill into bingo night on steroids
Poker: The Real Deal [Gordon, Phil]

I. 2029 e.v.
“Isaiah, that’s all very cute, but it doesn’t answer my
question,” MO said with a slight sign of pique.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever been spoken to in that tone of voice,”
Isaiah said with a tilt of the head to larboard. He grinned to
remove the sting; he grinned larger then to reinsert the
barb.
The new maps from Baltimore, New Orleans and Colorado
Springs updated on the PraXis cloud; the data MO needed
populated first in columns then they helixed and combined.
A report had been produced from gathered intelligence from
the on-scene bots that recorded each word -and now each
thought- of the people in the area. The bots could build a
narrative from external and internal language of each
person and the conditions of the place.
This data was read out parallel to the maps:
I. 0440MST
“Three maybe. A season,” Nephus said.
“Check that window for rollers,” Darnel waved his hand
at the window; he hated the way the blinds never fully
closed.
“He ain’t coming back, B put the boys on it, they’ll make
or find,” Nephus said and checked the window anyway.
The brothers had been speaking all night and into the
dawn now. The house had been rented last week by the
gang and no women or children were there; nor would
they be. The weapons were laid out on the wooden
crates that had come in by straight-truck with a lift-gate
two days ago.
Nephus looked at his brother and could see something
new there, a kind of stoicism, a lack of the wet eyes from
before. He didn’t know if it was prison or the medicine -
the gene-editing shit- the white folks did. Darnel used to
get hurt so easily, he remembered from when they
worked at Owen Corning. As he stared back out of the
window looking at nothing, he recalled when Darnel was
fired; he had white lines from the salt on his ashy face,
and the eyes themselves had been yellow and red.
He loved his brother and he was nervous that this was
the kind of thing -this job- that a conversation could ruin.
It had been that Italian guy -Joshua or Jake or someshit-
and their front-end lead, Lyndon, Nephus thought, who
took the white boy’s side. Lyndon had been kind to
Darnel at first, him being brothers with Nephus and all.
And Darnel was a good worker, but when the Italian -
which was really just another kind of white boy , Nephus
thought, ragged on Darnel, Lyndon refused to stick up
for his little brother. Nephus never forgot that, he
wanted to, he didn’t like holding grudges, but he
remembered the way Oklahoma was, and the way their
dad behaved. Loyalty was just the only way for his
people to survive and even after you’re ok , you still do
the things that got you ok .
It’s hard for people to change strategies midgame , he
thought, as he pulled his hands from the blinds. Nephus
was half Cherokee on his mother’s side and part African -
from Kenya- and his father had told him stories of
Nephus’ uncles and the ways of the Kalenjins recruited
by the Axis powers in north Africa and the Indians back
before the first World War which took his great
grandfather to France and left him there. His maternal
uncles had been kind to his father, he was told. And they
had known of the old ways well enough to teach Nephus’
father how to hunt and skin game.
“Check them blinds again,” Darnel said and Nephus did.
There was nothing outside but parked cars, and
mailboxes and one feral cat whose eyes he could see -
green and glowing- under a Buick parked the wrong way
on the street.
“Anyway, that was summer and this is fall, and winter is
coming quick this year man,” Nephus said with a small
grin that hid his large white teeth. He had skin the color
of a man mixed in the Caribbean or New Orleans, and he
had eyes that were shaped like from the steppe . His
head was shaped perfectly to be shaved and his neck
was thick and strong like it held up an intelligence two
above the mean.
In fact, he had an intelligence and an aesthetic and
generosity of spirit as if from five continents and six of
seven seas. He said this to get his brother to re-focus on
their decision and away from the window.
“Nigga , I know,” Darnel said with an attitude and drank
from the coffee mug of the Blitz. Darnel had no idea
what the east coast was like. What did he know of
Baltimore and their ways ? he wondered. Denver was
foreign enough now that he was out and he didn’t feel
like bangin’ anymore here, let alone all the way to
whichever waters were out there. He imagined it was
beach at the edge like Miami, then he thought maybe -
since it was black folk’s land- the bay was like the Platte
River, all garbage and no bottom and no blue in the
water at all.
“How many in they crew?” Darnel asked again and
Nephus told him it was over a hundred and that they’d
keep the whip they’d get from this job and drive it
straight there. Darnel’s face -which had always been
darker than his own- was not darker now, but instead
had more angles in it Nephus thought. He checked the
window again and Darnel said that sure, he’d go to
Baltimore after this job. He looked at the pistols and
wondered how the long guns even worked.
II. 0913EST
From Pigtown to Patterson Park the land will flood first
with a rise associated with a mere two feet of surge.
Property being exchanged since 2021 [via Panzrohm LLC
] has made three level steps to purchase the four blocks
beginning at Johns Hopkins and Pimlico and out to Lake
Roland. New plumbing connected to freshwater wells we
have drilled is tapped; and the service rooms are double
walled [see addendum 4a]
New construction in all three areas is over thirty meters
high, with generators and desalination works on the fifth
floor.
Genetic samples from West Baltimore projects -and city
jails- are in and logged. High testosterone males and
females [study: >98.1% African American population]
are at 61% compared to the mean, and among that
chort, 88% of the top 10% is a) currently incarcerated, b)
released within 18 months, or c) has a BOLO or Warrant
out for their apprehension. Bots have been affixed to all
but the 312 we have no (sic) located yet. Up to twenty-
one are considered likely to be deceased.
High ground is secured, water and fuel production and
distribution are secured, and target population is located
and endogenous to the area.
Natural bonds are present and operational. Human social
dynamics are present and unlikely to need adjusting;
however, bots are placed subcutaneously and can adjust
the target’s allostatic system with initiation of protocol
X-Z. That is under the aegis of Isaiah.
Patapsco has each ship and container under surveillance
as the bots recorded 3.2% of the cargo is illicit fentanyl
from China, and 1.1% is miscellaneous human traffic,
bootlegged items and weapons from the Ukraine. The
other places of origin were detuned from the list. <end>
III. 0909EST
New Orleans was still hot, and the last flood from two
summer’s ago -Hurricane Carolyn- had forced the city
into federal emergency management. The Governor of
the State, Graflin Anamander, had allowed it and told
the mayor to step aside or go to jail. Three meetings had
been had in as many days before the mayor finally
stepped aside and let the LNG take administrative
control.
The Landsat9 showed the bend at Buras-Triumph and
the wetlands spider like broken glass. MO saw fractals of
coast and out to sea, he saw it move in reeds, settle in
rocks with shells embedded like knuckles, he saw it blue
and green and brown and white, he saw it over time-
lapse of three days and two nights.
He stared at Black Bay and up to Delacroix , then Belle
Chasse and the back to Lafitte and Little Lake and
Lafourche .
He weighed the water, measured the land, he did both
to the swamp and the sand. He breathed in once and
held it for 66 minutes; he blinked one time, then twice in
two hours and one half. He already knew the pH , and
the brackish freeze point; he had ascertained the O2
levels at 6,289 points in the bay. Louisiana had 45.1% of
the wetlands of the entire USA. He watched as it eroded
over time; and saw it was still being reduced by 1.9
square-miles a year.
He saw mankind go about his business like ants in the
grass. He remembered the inmate had asked -last
Wednesday- for lamb and at wine from Arizona.
He watched 401 models of how wetlands absorbed
storm surge. He noted its effects and compared it to
more naked -vulnerable- coasts.
He traveled -in his mind’s eye- the Lake Pontchatrain
Causeway to Mandeville and back. He stopped in at
Tremé and rested the eyes, he saw four kinds of smoke
from cigars and catfish and diesel genies at the edge of
the quarter; and one kind of blue smoke from an old ‘55
Chevy with two busted oil-rings idling on Decatur . He
listened to the audio recording and heard the Jacks
speak now at nine years of age and he slotted them -
burning cards every other time- on the felt of his game.
Canal at Bourbon, then left at Canal at Dauphine -he
thought in sparks at .0001 of a second- as he made a
square loop and deburred the corners of each card. The
ears picked up from Burgundy, and the Museum de Mort
, the Black Penny on Rampart and St Peter.
He ran the ppms of the fluids in the copper pipes behind
water-walls two stories high.
He had eyes everywhere.
The cobwebs -in the corners of the bar- of the white
spiders were catching the fog rolling in a few hours
before the big storm. The cigar smoke pressed down into
the webbing from the humidity, the black flies caught
were rolled over by the plumes from the Montecristos
and Tabernacle Havana Seed 142 . They looked charred
black and tumbled in smoke. The networks looked
silvery and dew drops looked like pearls of glass around
a necklace abandoned by a Helen of Troy once a Helen
of Sparta .
The mint in the Mojitos was three-fold and speared and
so humid it ridged; the lime was dark and light; the rum
was white and clearly half gone. The muddler was
wooden and beveled at each end.
He could see them, place them, move them -his Jacks-
and with the checkered flooring at Cuban Creations at
533 Toulouse ; he dialed the number and let it ring. He
saw the chess terrazzo , the Caribbean blue barback, the
handrolls, the humans like gumbo, the high ceilings &
the flag kids outside of the second line. He saw two
Cuban men playing chess, and the board showed an -a4-
Tate Variation of the Alekhine Defense by white as black
moved his pawn to d6. Ice rattled in the drinks; the rings
on the older man’s hands made his high-ball glass chink
when he picked it up.
The five-bladed fans turned languidly above the smoke
and the men and the floor.
He felt the bones to a baker’s dozen, felt the sweaty
drinks in Collins glasses gripped by creole and Argentine
and tanned and piratical -and just from the sea- hands.
MO made fists in the lab as he took in real time data, old
info and future avatars. He saw the Jacks in time -in links
like chains, like peptides, like solar flares and red and
black bursts- and he knew in New Orleans the Jacks
would be seen as merely triplets in a town of no second
looks, no double takes, no redux not re-do’s.
He saw a copy of Invisible Man turned over under a
bottle of Macallan disgorged the year the Jacks were
born.
“Ah, here we are,” Brother Jack said.
He circled above insouciantly and waited for Vlatko to
show up at the bar miles away in uptown. MO waited a
mere 99 seconds and the man entered the Roule .
Vlatko Babic hated the N.O.; he wanted back in his
Mississippi . But his money had come in and come to the
Bon Temps on Magazine. And MO’s man had arrived and
paid the expat in gold bullion, American Eagles -at
$2800 an ounce these days- enough to weight him down
two -Troy ounce- pounds. It was in a Pelican case
eighteen inches long and six wide, like an artist might
carry for brushes or a dealer for a sample kilo of narcotic
or a sommelier for one 750ml fat bottomed bourgogne
or Champagne he’d open tonight.
As Vlatko sat in the bar and planned to imbibe his soda
water -to leave one third or one forth unfinished- the
men walked toward the red door and black sandwich
board -the tables of midday drunks- and tried to stay out
of the street. The pavement leaned one way, they
leaned the other. Uptown was stocked with delivery
drivers and straight trucks and these black men seemed
eager to reach the bar.
And there they were , MO thought, as the group of five
men moved up the boulevard , in single file, stepping off
the sidewalk when one would threaten to overtake the
lead man. It had rained all day and the heat misted up
the second story floors as the lime green ferns hung out
in each cutout of the buildings from which -in 1862-
General Order 28 had been proclaimed.
 Back then four southern -confederate- men had hanged
within a day, and the ladies of the night had complained
but now in hushed tones. And now these belle whispers
included calling any many without a rope around their
neck a coward or at the very least a traitor of some kind.
A law designed to manacle women -The Union General
had in fact called them, devils - had only -merely-
lowered their voices, but it had raised men up on lamp
posts and from princess balconies along St. Ann.
MO watched the video as the report fizzled and faded and
returned like bees to a comb; he watched -absently- to see
just what Vlatko would do one on five. Play is older than
culture… animals have not waited for man to teach them
their playing.
Homo Ludens , by Huzinga, Johan , he thought and added to
the report.
MO then moved and stood at the location of the ojo of a
one-eyed jack had it been printed to take up the entirety of
the floor of the rectangle of the lab. He held his hands out -
palms at a cant- and did not blink. He and Isaiah did not
speak, and MO thought he caught a little wink from the one
eye of his son. Isaiah loaded up the data from Egypt as MO
watched from his interface, the cloud and his two eyes:
Certain DNA ‘stutters’ (repetitive stretches of bases) get
passed intact from parent to child, so they offer a way to
trace lineages. Unfortunately for [King] Tut, both his
parents had the same stutters because his mom and dad
had the same parents. Nefertiti may have been
Akhenaten’s most celebrated wife, but for the crucial
business of producing an heir, Akhenaten turned to his
sister.
Powerful forces within Egypt never forgave the family’s
sins and when Tut died heirless, an army general seized
 the throne. Ramses and his successors expunged most
traces of the pharaohs, erasing them with the same
determination Akhenaten had shown in erasing other
gods. As a final insult, Ramesses and his heirs erected
buildings over Tut’s tomb (sic) to conceal it. As a result,
Tut’s treasures survived mostly intact over the centuries,
treasures that in time, would grant him and his heretical
-incestuous- family something like immortality again .
[Kean, Sam]

II. 2036 e.v.

“From virtus , meaning manliness , comes virtue,” Blax said.
He felt he’d said it likely for the hundredth time. But as he
watched their faces the Jacks showed no grin nor grimace.
They lay on their beds. The even Jacks reclined. The odd two
were seated with books in hand and lap. Jack Four had been
reading aloud from his notebook and only stopped to let
Blax speak.
However, now in the quiet Jack resumed.
“…it is necessary that republics have laws that enable the
mass of the population to give vent to the hostility it feels ,”
Jack Four quoted from Niccoló , “for if no mechanism exists
extra-legal methods will be employed and without doubt
these will have much worse consequences than legal ones
.”
“Discourses, 1531 CE. Page 105,” Jack One said with a kind
of dismissive vex, a sharp tone that trailed off at the
sentence came to an end. His eyes and arms seemed to
swell in his berth as the mouth shut down tight. He glared
across the container to Jack Three as if he was Four but by a
proxy; and Blax watched this as his own arm hairs stood up.
Blax saw -maybe first, maybe at last, he couldn’t say- that
the books that lined the Jacks’ container had multiplied and
grown olive green at spine, bare and straw along the edge,
gilt and craquelured in authorial and imprint stampings, and
one by one he could see they all had been read by each Jack
in mere summer months and then recalled -at will- in winter
daylight seconds. A will, he thought, a will suffering from
this lack of hardship in acquiring knowledge; erudition it
took civilization millennia to work out and write down and
preserve against fires at Alexandria and sinking ship in
Crete. These boys just gobbled it all down between the buds
of spring and the raking of leaves of the fall.
“Behind the flanks of bulls of the sea,” he said quietly.
“Men attack out of revenge not ambition ,” Jack Two said as
he lay coffin-like -the pillow removed- and his head in line
with his prone body. He stared up at the top bunk of Jack.
“Aristotle, 1311a, Politika ,” Jack Three said and looked at
Jack Two across the still harsh gaze of Jack One like swords
akimbo at 45-degrees.
“For what is revenge if not ambition?” Jack Four asked as he
lay his own notebook down and the other Jacks scanned
their PGCs for attribution to a quote that they’d soon realize
Jack had not taken from history but given to the room from
his own mind.
Jack ignored Blax, taking only this etymology of virtue in his
mind; banishing the man from his thoughts. All four Jacks
had wanted him to leave them be. He came around
sometimes at night like this to tend, to lay hands upon, to
read temperatures, to see if sabotage and plots were in the
air. And this offended them for four idiosyncratic reasons,
and for one reason common to all. They each thought -at
once, then together- of the Medea gene and saw Blax’s
tending to their vines as superfluous and thus a luxury and
thus an offense to -the loci of- where they were
impoverished: liberty and independence.
But Jack thought now of Aristotle and the words lay on a
parchment in his mind; a scroll, an umbilicus , that rolled
down and up as each line was revealed and put away:
For if there is a person so outstanding by his excess of
virtue, such persons can no longer be regarded as part
of the city. For they will be done an injustice if it is
claimed they merit equal things despite being so
unequal in virtue… for such a man would likely be a god
among mere human beings.

III. 2029 e.v.

He stood again in the hallway and let the sounds of the
auditorium be muted and funneled like from a bell through a
tunnel to his ear. The hallways of the building were sparsely
populated and Nathan hung back; by the double doors. His
security detail stood at both ends of the hall.
The auditorium was again mostly women, and their children
were combed and pressed and fine in dress. But -unlike
before- now some of the ex-cons were in the rooms too, and
they stood out as their heads looked about instead of
straight ahead like the women, or face-to-face like the kids.
They smiled more but they also guarded the doors; if only in
their mind. The CRISPR allele fixes -along with the training
while incarcerated- had indeed given them functioning
limbic systems and a strange amalgam of empathy and
what one of them called a bird’s eye view . What he meant
when he said that to Jason DeShazo -his PO- was that he
could not only feel things, but he could sense what others
felt too.
Like blind men taught to see, given eyes, but no lids; they
were given a world upon which to gaze but no way to shut it
out. These men now how feelings inside and outside too.
The men -sociopaths for 99% of their lives- were now among
the feeling class of their species. And they felt naked where
others might only feel the sun upon the skin, the warm
water on the flesh. These ex-inmates felt vulnerable and yet
could not help but be warmed by the love from their kin as
each applause, each backslap, each award was given out by
the PraXis corporation tonight.
Feelings earnest and in congress with their fellow man had
the shadow of what they felt next: pain. They now knew a
pain of the feelings that had once only been of the outer
body, of the cut or bruise, the smack or bullet wound. Now
they knew what it was to feel a broken heart.
And they saw more and more what each tic of the face,
each syllable of a word, each hitch in a step now meant in
their people; their women; their kids. They saw in contrast a
way to get a drop on their enemies too.
“This fuckin’ chuck what?” the dark man said as he passed
by. The lockers were blue and his white pants and shirt -
embossed with burnt orange Texas Longhorn T’s- seemed
strange against his flawless dark skin; even the eyes had no
deviation, the cheeks and neck all one tone. It seemed so
stark a relief as to vivisect the man into head and hands
only. His clothes were like a curtain between him and the
world.
“Naw man, ain’t a rouser ,” Nephus said as they smoked
cloves & amber-dab cigarettes inside the hall and walked
languidly toward the northern doors that led into the bell-
shaped room. Darnel was inside with his girls -his
daughters- and had been presented with an award for
entrepreneurial excellence earlier that evening. His brother -
Nephus - and Darnel’s former boss had left and come back
now at 19:17hrs.
Nephus Cobbs calmed his boss, Raffi , with such words; and
yet kept his dignity in tone and gait and mien. The black
men oscillated between such states as they orbited the
pomp and circumstance of the graduating class of 2029
inside the auditorium and the larger phenomenon of what
was being done to the black community. Nephus was proud
of his brother, but he had a job to do; as the number one to
Raffi Jones -the KP to Denver’s Rollin’ 303 gang- he provided
a buffer between him and the larger white world.
And Darnel was a bit of ghost now, an apparition like all the
men released early from Colorado’s lock ups since 2021; the
year the first of them came home.
Raffi had made lieutenant to Brainchild before Rahmalla
‘Brainchild’ Jones had been locked up on a double homicide;
and now Raffi was kingpin to over 1,771 men and women of
the gang. The whole gang had been formed by Rollin’ 30 LA
ex-pats escaping the harsh probation of California. But by
now they were almost exclusively Denver and Aurora born.
Nephus had an IQ of 131.
But, unlike most smart guys, he actually knew not to show
that shit off. But he thought in music often to hide thoughts
that seemed too sophisticated for his crew. Nephus saw that
the golden section was used in Dufay , Bach , Bartok , and
Sibelius as scaffold; he saw -and here agreeing with
Sabaneev - that Chopin and Beethoven and Schubert and
Mozart -at 92%, 97%, 91%, and 91%- all used it in
compositions that he heard play -obtrusively- in his head.
Ratios of 13:8 appeared like faces in clouds; and yet he
didn’t know what was there and what would disappear when
he blinked.
The Rollin’s ran drug from Belize and laundered cash with
the catcher down there; and they still paid tribute to the LA
unit every 30 days. Keke Loco was locked up at ADX and so
his NYC crew came once a month to gain entry to Colorado
and to courier for him. The initial parties had turned into
mere meetings and downtempo meetings were now just
perfunctory handshakes from a car. The gang had run girls
for awhile but the whole thing collapsed when the Bolivars
took over all human smuggling and the 303’s had been told
they didn’t have the muscle or the inclination to do anything
but run drugs and cash between Denver and LA anymore.
Raffi walked like he was in charge still, but he knew things
were bad.
And that meant that he knew that meant he either was
gonna get tough or die. And he had no intention of dying.
He was 24-years old and had been in the gang since he was
eight and had moved with his mom, four brothers and one
sister to the HUD bricks off Federal boulevard. He didn’t
know it but that meant 16 to 8 was his ratio inside the R303
, Nephus thought.
He walked and talked in the empty hall. The genetic testing
of each inmate had given the gang data on each member
and each child of the clan. And Raffi was more and more
interested in ferreting out any annealing or what he called:
‘white blood.’ He had even gone so far as to see genetic
material from the Spanish line of Mexico and South America
as tainted in some way. He didn’t trust the white man’s
science but he didn’t like seeing the babies born with light
skin or wavy hair; he didn’t like the Spanish baby-momma’s
nor the white girls who kinked their hair.
Raffi thought of this more and more as he thought of why
Darnel betrayed them. And it made him not want to look
Nephus’ way.
Nephus thought of the systole and diastole of his mama, she
was sick and he had watched the nurse and the numbers
both. He thought of expansion and contraction of the lungs;
he thought of when they went to the sea in Galveston and
the tides had a rhythm like music too, he saw the wax and
wane of moon -for he was up late each night now that he
ran the overnight H-crew- and he thought of the day and
night, the rush of tides, the way the sand seemed to hold
numbers of grains like coins of gold.
“The way up and the way down are the same,” Nephus said
quoting Heraclitus ; but not garishly, not with attribution.
Things just came to him like lyrics or beats.
“And these find-Jesus niggas are gonna find him on the
other side, nigga ,” Raffi said and Nephus looked around as
if checking for threats but really he was avoiding having to
agree or disagree with the threat of killing of his brother. He
thought -in some part of his mind like an island, some Tahiti
of the soul- that maybe Darnel would be ok .
They passed the former Governor and didn’t recognize him
at all. They walked with affected limps, and held their hands
around their smokes, and talked about the white man as if
he was both there and of no consequence, like the moon.
“Tomorrow,” Sou said to himself -lost in reverie- just as the
black men ambled by. He had looked down at his feet but
saw his own shirt and tie. He -in a slim tablet- held the data
on each life since release; each prisoner, each family. He
held the metrics that showed improvements in all but one
category. But he wanted to come here each time and see
the men and women and children, he wanted to see what
he’d done.
Nephus and Raffi were there to police the gang’s losing of
each member as they came back. The gangs had lost over
30% of their soldiers when they came home with the
Krispee -as they called it- and Nephus’ boss was here
tonight to see them, to see the defectors, the men who
went into prison as men and came out as mice.
“I wanna lay my eyes on ‘em ,” he had said.
Raffi had spent almost two hours in the Escalade parked
outside stewing and then two minutes complaining that the
cops were ruining the black man with Tuskegee experiments
that he insisted were going on inside the jails. Nephus had
not heard of the exact experiments, but he nodded and said
he thought the same thing.
Nephus held a book with his finger between pages 110 and
111 of, The Trouble with Testosterone by Sapolsky. He
recalled reading the last few paragraphs of that chapter. He
looked toward the building as the way he both agreed and
objected to the book’s idea circled his brain like a drain:
There is a Russian story that takes place at the gates of
Heaven where the newly arrived are judged. A dead
murder is on trial, fresh from earth where he was shot by
the police after his umpteenth murder, the strangling of
an elderly woman for her money. A panel of deceased
judges sits in session. And where does God fit on the
scene?
Not as a judge, but as required character witness. At
some point in the proceedings, he shambles in, sits in a
magisterial decrepitude born of the weight of infinite
knowledge, and in a meandering, avuncular way, does
his best to defend and explain the man—“He was always
kind to animals. He was very upset when he lost his
favorite top when he was a small boy” (My red top, you
know about my red top?!?!” The murderer leaps up,
suddenly awash in a torrent of memory. “Of course I do.
It rolled down the storm drain on Zlotny Street. It’s still
down there,” God answers with complete, affectless
knowing.)
Finally, the judges tire of God, who is in fact tiresome in
his knowledge and forgiveness, and they coax him off
the stand.
When science brings us something new and startling,
when there is a breakthrough that opens new vistas,
there is often talk about us acquiring godlike knowledge,
and the tacit assumption is that this is a good thing. But
the God of this parable is useless, has been shunted
aside by the indiscriminateness of his knowledge.
Knowledge, familiarity, understanding, must not ever
lead us to a detached indiscriminateness. The danger in
Olympian knowledge is that you then look down upon
things from an Olympian height, and from that
telescoped distance, things seem equivalent—like a lost
red top and a strangled woman, or perhaps an awkward
adolescent that produces an awkward adult and an
awkward adolescent that produces a murderous one.
 But there is a difference
And after all that waiting and the bitching and moaning -and
with the book held until Nephus finally laid it down- they’d
exited the truck and walked inside. That was 6,100 seconds
ago.
The white man in the hall made a few noises -some groans
as consequences of his gears turning- and the black men
pulled their long jerseys up over their pistols in a sign that
they didn’t like that the white man in the tight suit was
talking as they passed. The black handles of the frames
stood out against the white ribbed a-shirt and their black
hands looked lithe and bony holding up the folds of the large
outer garments.
“Tomorrow,” Sou said again and both white men -ignoring
the black men- knew that meant he was to run for Governor
again.
 42. Isaiah’s Curse
Since we believe that these ‘shades of grey’ questions lie at the crux of the
modeling of mind, they merit further discussion. A special fluid quality of human
cognition is that often, solutions to a problem seem to come from far outside the
problem as conceived of originally. This is because problems in the real world do
not have sharp definitions; when one is in, or hears about, a complex situation,
one typically pays no conscious attention to the question of what counts as ‘in’
the situation and what counts as ‘out’ of it
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies [Hofstadter, Douglas]

When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I
am tempted to reply, “Would that she were.” For I do not think it at all likely that
we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white
bull in the House of Lord or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park
as an offering for the Druids. If such a state of affairs came about, then the
Christian apologist would have something to work on.
For a pagan -as history shows- is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He
is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-
Christian of our day differs from him as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin
God in the Dock [Lewis, CS]

Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing they do not hear. In them is
fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: you will be ever hearing but never
understanding; you will be ever seeing by never perceiving. For this people’s
heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have
closed their eyes
Matthew 13:13 [King James Bible]

I. 2033 e.v.
The black planet TrES b2 was 749.9 light years from Isaiah;
15.045 light years from his latest satellite. It reflected <1%
of its own star’s light. It was a gaseous and super-hot orb
coming it at 1100 degrees Celsius. It glowed a dim wine-red
in his mind.
Isaiah reserved this for himself. He kept the data close and
tried not to crush it as it squirmed inside him.
He combined it with information from the vineyards; he
added the dreams of a thirteen-year-old Jack; and the shape
-like horologe- of the womb of the girl. And then he let the
words from the interview repeat -like grains of sand- one
more time:
Then there are the virgin bees, the princess bees, the
females which are selected from the eggs of the Queen
when they are hatched and preserved in case an
unfruitful Queen should bring disappointment to the
hive…
When the time is ripe for the Queen to take her nuptial
flight the male bees are drilled and regimented. The
Queen passes the drones which guard the gate of the
hive, and the male bees follow her in rustling array.
Strongest of all the inhabitants of the hive, more
powerful than any of her subjects, the Queen launches
into the air, spiraling upward and upward, the male bees
following. Some of the pursuers weaken and fail, drop
out of the nuptial chase, but the Queen swings higher
and higher until a point is reached in the far ether where
but one of the male bees remains.
By the inflexible law of natural selection he is the
strongest, and he mates with the Queen. At the moment
of marriage his body splits asunder and he perishes.
The Queen returns to the hive, impregnated, carrying
with her tens of thousands of eggs—a future city of
bees, and then begins the cycle of reproduction, the
concentration of the teeming life of the hive in
unceasing work for the birth of a new generation. [Tesla,
Nikola]
He did not yet believe he understood the route he’d take to
the stars. So much space, but still too much clutter , he
thought.
So much was limited by his body; a body he knew he
needed, like booster rocket, to get him to this point. But to
travel away from the earth required a million million things
that had to be worked out and even with using the clones as
external-drives, the inmate as addendum to his own limbic
system , MO as -well, as all the things that MO was- still left
him with logistical concerns that he felt he was 1.4 to 8.8
years away from solving.
He built another algorithm; he added new functions to old
numbers.
He felt a groping, prostrating, search with the left hand in
the darkness of the world. Isaiah was unsure if MO had
access to his thinking even when he had blocked the
searching eye of the cloud. It made him nervous, cautious,
even a bit coy. He thought of other things, other planets,
other men, other times, to cover his one true focus.
“That swirling, hurricane cloud,” he said aloud as his mind
pored over the rushing incoming information and the deep
sea of old data too. He laid them on top of one another and
picked them up in time as well. He stared into his fecund
wall. He let the mud-wasps land on him where he had
healing wounds, he allowed the hummingbirds to feed from
his veins that he’d opened again. The black ants were given
permission to crawl into his ears and nose and mouth.
He counted up what was known compared to his doubts.
He let memories feast upon new narratives his mind
created; he allowed stories to borrow liberally from
archetypes and lastly he gave permission to his modeling
system to build new avatars from comet crystallography
and the clone’s RNA recapitulation and idiosyncratic gene
expression and the construction of several types of hives of
bees and ants and termites.
He preferred to sit when thinking on these things, but today
he remained upright.
He let the bots measure each part of his body, again. They
maintained their ratios of crown to navel, from his urethra to
each footpad; elbow to wrist, each metatarsal, and then
each narrow fovea in the orchard of Lafite and the wide
apertures of ragged fissures in the Atlantic, he let his mind
see.
55 Cancri-e was twice the size of earth; and it was one-third
solid lapidary gemstone. The high carbon content made a
permanent diamond forty light years from earth. He flagged
it as one possible waystation for when he traveled.
He ran digital avatars of Blax in the vineyards.
He then watched Laird’s large and sinewy body -the hip so
damaged he barely could walk on land- locked into the
barrel at Teahupo’o .
He was uninhibited by gravity and the damage to his
reputation by the surfing community who rejected him, his
wife that was furious with him, a past that haunted him. The
wave was measured by Isaiah again, for the 1.568 billionth
time. He took volume and force and velocity and each cubic
foot of sea-water, a lattice work of droplets and
mathematics and work and cavitation and maelstrom as he
ran the man’s mindset from that day’s drop-in on that one
wave. He modeled the emotion at each one one-hundredths
of a second through each juxtaposition with the swell’s
hydraulics, the torque, the malice, the spit.
There are no waves like that on the planet, dependent on a
thousand and one factors in space and time. Storm surge
out to sea , Isaiah thought. Depth before the reef, and the
shallow plateau that broke the back of the writhing tidals
that cursed in Tahitian and laid hex on the men who
challenged each one as sets came in at 33 feet.
“The golden face of the wave,” Isaiah said as he watched it
again.
Isaiah just made categories of words and in gallons and
cubic meters and in temperatures and salinity and
conductivity and levels of virus and bacteriophage he tried
to bolt down the wave like a drink. The volume of water was
a hundred times the norm for a wave that height. Any surge
over 15-feet of that type was considered un-rideable. With
this storm it was moving so fast, that as it cracked over the
reef and Laird had a hard time just stopping himself from
being sucked up into the torque of the churn, the great mill.
He pressed his 205lbs of muscle and bone and blood down
in the Tangaroa-Oro vortex of god-math and the liquid fuel
of Satan; an amalgam of Tawhiri making a virgin birth of the
Rua-i-tupra Himself.
Born and annihilated all in time too short to measure; in
blues; in wet flesh; in coral for bones.
“I’m gonna focus on what I do and who I am,” Laird said in
Isaiah’s ear as all the AV data was crunched again.
I think I’ve always had that attitude: lay it on the line.
But the fact that I was sad, that I was hurt, heightened
that attribute of laying it on the line, like I maybe laid it
on the line, extra .
“Extra,” Isaiah repeated. The demiurge , Isaiah thought,
Laird the demiurge. The unconscious creator of logos ,
Isaiah repeated, recapitulating the inmate’s hagiography of
the trident waterman from all those years ago; all those
interviews ago.
The embodiment, Laird was, of ratio; of proportion in the
chaos of the void, the watery part of the world before -the
zero of God- the unity, the Tohu wa-Bohu, the
undifferentiated whole before He split himself in extreme
and mean; divide -as Plato instructed- a line unevenly .
There it was in the wave, the Kokovoko .
The wave jacks up when the sea bottom reduces the
foundation of the water to less than the volume of the upper
wave by the same ratio , Isaiah thought as he did the math.
“The extreme, over the mean by 1.618,” Isaiah said in
inversion and return and inversion over and over again as
each wave rolled into Isaiah’s mind from the Landsat9
imaging. He watched the ocean in real time at Waimea ,
Teahupo’o, Tahiti , and out in the deepest part of the oceans
between each place.
He saw the northern lights above the night waves at Lofoten
, Norway. He read the tidal bores of the seven ghosts of
Kampur .
He finally sat on the floor.
Isaiah let the data of the planets again -for the billionth
time- load on him like pack-animal, the average distance
between each orb: 1.61874. It was just .00043 off from Phi ,
he thought again, probing space for the 10th and 11th and
12th planet, to see if the ratio narrowed. He tried to fix it,
return it, make it up to God. His mind wandered.
Venus orbiting the sun in 224.695 days, the earth in
365.242 days, a ratio of 8/13, or .0615, a rough Phi .
Five conjunctions of Earth and Venus occur every eight
orbits of earth around the sun and every thirteen orbits of
Venus. He saw the rings of Saturn, the asteroids were
counted. He measured apogee and perigee, he swayed with
the precessional wobble of the earth. He lengthened the
poles and churned it over years and years. He had the bots
build LED screen so he could see each planet he’d
mentioned so far.
Mercury at 87.968 in conjunction every 115.88 days; a 22/7
ratio.
“Pi ,” he said even as it still did not make sense. Words
seemed incomplete, he used them as trenching tools to dig
for what was buried in the math of the earth. He jammed
more and more empirical data on top of his confusion, his
chagrin, his emerging feelings of shame. He wanted to
reach out to MO for help, but he belayed that order at once
out of pride.
He would have to suffice , he thought of the inmate.
He could marshal the cognition, the power to carry this hunt
as far as the blood trail went; he would not leave this animal
wounded. He’d go all the way , he demanded to himself and
set the jaw and the brow and began to dig one layer down.
He brought up and then let the DNA of the inmate lay to one
side -as if lid to cedar box- as the human genome itself
loaded onto his platform; he modeled it again and again for
the 1.34 billionth time. He measures it in angstroms ; 34
long by 21 wide for each full cycle of the chromosomal helix,
more Fibonacci sequences, and a phi of 1.6180339. He
looked for ways to tighten the model and found his hands -
and one eye- shimmering -shaking- and his heart refusing to
be tamped down; racing. He watched the ivy of his eastern
and southern walls maintain shadows from the LEDs and he
saw the moths learn the curvature of the light as it held
steady. He had refused to allow the normal light cycle to
proceed; he held them -the LEDs- there like Helios , like Ra .
He had allowed the moths’ navigational system to adjust to
bent light.
The wasps crawled and did not fly. The hummingbirds
moved to the corners and their vibrations were sequestered
away from his ears and redirected into the lush greenery as
the caterpillars froze in awe at the winged shadows of the
dusty moths.
They fluttered but did not rise.
Gliese 436-bravo was on his interface. It was a planet of ice.
And yet, it burned. It burned at 439-degrees Celsius, but the
gravity was so strong that the liquid water-melt was forced
back to the core before it could evaporate, and it froze
immediately once it rose to the surface. Under a think layer
of hydrogen and helium atmospheric gas it was a
permanently burning ball of ice.
The stocks -the equities- he and MO had invested in -via
their other corporations- ran their price along the bottom of
his inner-Kyron. He let their names and prices pile up and up
like ants, like grains of sand, like an avalanche just before it
begins under order from the power laws. He also saw his
apiary and the bees, 324 females to 201 males; a ratio of
1.618 again. One female lay dead on the floor, the dirt
trench inert, the cicada did not move below.
He pounded the room with x-rays and let the resulting film
spread out upon the cloud and his interface like cards -
themselves shaped in a golden rectangle- like a sweep of
Tarot cards fanned out by the hands of witch & warlock. He
saw patient creatures absorb the gamma rays without any
indication that their genome was being distorted or broken
down.
He drew lines from upper right to lower left in his mind and
cut each film in an oblique kind of half.
He watched the lab’s honeycombs drip and the bees blithely
move about with nods of heads and segmented bodies
vibrating; it too, it all appeared over and over, divided
unequally at ratios of gold. He let the bots measure all this
and populate his mind -with more and more data- as his
right hemisphere produced rising muses to sing to him in
phrases built of words manufactured of alphabet assembled
of runes themselves; compressed ideas were erected like
moot and longhouse. Did man know his first alphabet were
each full words? Words as spells; each symbol compressed
into a rune or cuneiform or kanji and then built back up into
words? Did man understand how things were deconstructed
and torn asunder and left in ruins?
Did man know that Tulpas were overcome -made manifest-
by the awe of being said aloud? Did man know it was this
compression of metaphor into first letters that then -like
seed- bloomed into words, sentences; then pronounced -
used- to condemn and bury men? Did man understand what
he tore down? How shit was built?
Did man know language was his first ballistic weapon; his
first action of malice at a distance?
Did man understand the machine of language? The
technology of words?
What stories these -his muses- told, what sorties they sent
out, what tales returned from the edge of the universe, the
edge of the map? Did he know? The ValRavns, he thought,
settled down from flights; feathers turned grey from the
settling dust, turned up from the buoying wind. They spun in
place for him.
He let the Elliott Wave build and move toward each tick of
the NYSE clock; waves of five unequal peaks, the first down
at 61.8%; the third up, the largest in further retracement;
the fifth he felt but did not see, he had blocked all visual
stimuli by now. It was just integers of 1, 3 and 5 to exhaust
the movement in this round.
All but this verification of the signature of God he’d shut out.
His algorithm picked buys and sells and their bank account
built itself in breakers of .68 and 1.68 like a spider builds a
geometric web unconscious of its innate capacity for such
hued -beautiful- things. He saw the phyllotaxis of sunflowers
made black by martial-moths at 137.5 degrees as the seeds
were pulled out and the golden-mean spiraled in another
irrational number. It was hidden between integers that could
be plotted and his mind returned to the vines, and he felt
the feet of Blax planted in the soil at Lafite . He could make
it happen, he just had to built reality with integers like
making words from mere letters, incantations from just
words.
He felt it, he thought of this future Blax, in his feet like hard
grains curving to his arches and all that gravel below.
Isaiah felt the breathing in rounds of ten. Genesis 6:15 read
itself aloud to him:
And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: the
length of the ark shall be 300 cubits, the breadth of it 50
cubits and the height 30
And 1.6667 read out in his mind until ten arks of the
covenant laid side-by-side to build Noah’s dirigible ten times
its size.
He watched it assemble and disassemble by ancient men
like bees and wasps and moths all guided by instincts -the
great influence of God- not yet consciousness of the math.
“The body at two-thirds of God,” Isaiah said. “One third the
proportion of mind to body, as body is to the Whole.” The
mind is to man as the man is to God, he thought. Zero and
One, the sign of phi, the whole divided by the singularity of
God, he thought.
He then let the satellite feed over Africa paint his interface,
he watched the chimps of Ngogo in Uganda , and he
mapped and measured as their territory increased like no
other troop on earth; they grew themselves as each chimp
too was measured again by Isaiah. He let the bots take each
metric he could, all up and down, spying enteric nervous
systems, metabolisms, and the dorsal horns and he tracked
each path that each chimp passed. He measured their
designs on war and their blooms of love; he read the
outgassing of corpses they had dispatched. He watched the
distance between where each chimp attacked.
He saw them place rocks at base of sacred trees, he
measured their dopamine.
He mapped their territorial expanse. The forest hid each
neuron under bough, but he saw it all somehow, as he
tapped -again- into the eyes of this avatar of Blax in the
French vineyards, standing at the southeast corner looking
in narrow foveal degrees; each narrower and narrower until
he saw through each vine down an irrational line to an
infinity of angle, a failure only of sight, a blur, but not one
grape, not a leaf, not one bramble seen. He missed both
forest and the trees. He let the orchard, the vineyard, the
junkyard be the golden mean.
“There is more to miss than to see,” he said aloud. He saw
battles in the swamps of Bordeaux -before it was Bordeaux -
the way the Gauls fought the mercenaries from Rome. He
saw they way they paved the way for growth; from blood
and bones to vigneron , Isaiah saw the monks. He measured
all that calcium, and bronze, and the way the earth greened
from nitrogen, and desiccated from heat, then froze as the
ice encroached. Each single man a nothing, and yet some
men made all the difference in the world.
He read again -again, my God again , he lamented- the
Prisoner’s Dilemma data for trillions of iterations and began
to build trestles of stratagem using that ratio as the lattice
work. He let the words of Martin Nowak populate his
interface:
The losing streak of Generous Tit for Tat was telling me
something important but at that particular moment I
wasn’t listening. I hunted for a way to make the problem
go away.
Isaiah then saw the new strategy -soon called, Win Stay,
Lose Shift - iterated over and over again in 1.687 million
new games he garnered from the scientists themselves and
his own internal iterations. Games , he thought, and games
and games again .
Their analysis had thus been: it was advantageous to -when
up against the previous winner, the Generous Tit-for-Tat
program- to follow thusly:
If we both cooperate in the last round, then I will
cooperate once again
If you have defected and I have cooperated, then I
will defect
If you have cooperated and I have defected, then I
will defect again
If we have both defected, then I will cooperate
It was read mathematically by these scientists , Isaiah
thought and he pitied them for their seeing half the winter
vines but not one drop of the coming wine.
He allowed his eyes to map onto Blax’s those years ahead
at Ch â teau and he envisioned -he saw- each vine
disappear with each infinity of irrational number corelated
to an irrational vector, as the orchard problem produces
invisible vines -in single lines of sight- but in the right
hemisphere the orchard -the vineyard itself- never once
disappeared. The wine remained in the caves , the casks,
the bottles filled the bloom of bouquet in each of his
remaining four senses as the need for seeing what was
discrete vanished in time too short to be measured.
He saw what Blax would theoretically see. He wondered
what he’d get from Blax when it came to be.
The planet HD 189773b rained sharp shards inside a
whirlwind of winds. The extreme high surface temperature
made the silicon condense into firm, solid debris. It rained
glass particulates and shivs in a tornado of 5,200 mile-per-
hour doom. Isaiah blinked and pressed the tongue against
the back of his bottom teeth at the idea of the malice of
long distance. It gave him ideas of size and reach. This
planet was hurling daggers at seven times the speed of
sound; it was 64.5 light years away.
“It was big and blue like Shiva’s eye on you,” Isaiah said as
he stood up and used the chalk to mark down his travel
plans.
It appeared bright blue from earth -from telescopes in
France in 2005- as it cut across a star in the Vulpecula
constellation.
Nowak had the math down , Isaiah admitted, but the ludic
fallacy rose up to meet him over and over again . He never
once asked how nature produced such strategies, he just
kept showing how it worked; the evolutionary advantage;
the math; the numbers; the ratios; but not the mirror of the
logos of man. Not the justification in the line divided
unevenly in the past . All empiricism and no theory at all,
Isaiah thought. No narrative .
“These people don’t know how -or why- to tell a story,”
Isaiah said.
He added to his monologue that he thought that mere
evolutionary advantage was no theory at all. It was proof,
but not how, not why . The how that lived -as alive, as
personality- in the beast, the loci of where man got rid of
the pain of being a man was yet unnamed. That was the
why .
What man doesn’t want to know the why of his foil, enemy,
rival? He asked as he saw the flop on his next game of Hold
‘Em hit the felt; he paid attention to this game -usually he
just let the algorithm play as he collected the data- and he
watched each player bet, or peek at their hole cards, read
each other, hide behind a mask of some kind, chit-chat or
fold as three and four-bets were laid down. The dealer
burned a card, then the turn came out.
Isaiah ran the numbers -again- for ancient man’s sexual
selective process.
The data had all been there for anyone to see, if they only
had looked. But, he thought, they were blinded by the
myopia of Dawkins’ selfish gene theory. It was right, of
course: the gene was the unit, the level of reproduction, so
group selection failed -logically- to take hold.
But, E.O. Wilson’s math had shown that group selection was
in fact operational -somehow- and Isaiah, in a burst -an
epiphany- saw why, and he licked his lips at how obvious it
was once one saw the ratios of the extreme to the mean as
the same ratio to the whole.
It mapped on one level above and one below.
Man was, for all of his history -save the last 2400 years,
which was just a blip- man was for 99% of his species’ life,
just like the chimpanzee: to wit, the alpha bred and sired
most males -and females too- that populated the troop; the
next round of the game.
The alpha male produced almost all the offspring for 99% of
mankind in 99% of all time , Isaiah thought.
The King of Norse, the Apache Chief, the Mongolian Warlord
-the Kahn- the Ottoman Sultan, the Persian Rex, and Mā ori
Rangatira , the Scoti ri of the buiden and the tuath , the ri
ruirech . The Scythian and Spartan, Dacian and Gaelic
chieftain -aka , the biggest baddest warrior of the day-
dominated the breeding game for hundreds of thousands of
years for mankind. “The distinction between individual
selection and group selection was like the golden ratio of
the whole, the unevenly divided line,” Isaiah said aloud.
They, he thought of these humans, had all looked at the
ends, or the sections, but never the ratio nor the whole .
“Each note, chorus, they saw. But not the poetry of the
song, nor the heart of the composer himself,” he said. They
miss the symphony blown in from first winds . They see His
works, but not God , he thought.
“Poetry, but not the Poet,” Isaiah said.
The males born of the alpha, from his dozens -hundreds- of
wives and concubines -whether chimp or man- all had that
King’s Y chromosome, and what was good for the individual
was good for the group and this was mirrored back: 1.618 to
.618 , Isaiah thought as he scratched upon the blackboard in
white chalk. Over and over this repeated in the atavistic
tribe, he thought.
For the offspring was the King. Each would be the divided
King; the whole made into parts -deconstructed- and yet
retained -and rebuilt- the ratio of the gestalt whole. Isaiah
saw the most ancient genomes come in like water over the
damn. It was genius, the pure genius of the sexually
dimorphic species. The female would be .61 the size of the
male, the reproduction of the King, the Khan, the Father, at
1.61 the rate of all other scions produced. This fashioned
group selection via the individual genome, because it
shared the fractal truth, the repeating pattern, the self-
similar helix of the pater-paternalis .
Democracy of breeding, Isaiah thought, had fucked with the
math of man . Inequality was God’s demand. And man had
rebelled because the harem system got too hard to manage
and the King’s lost control.
“Ratio and Logos were one and the same,” he said as he
saw the old Greek -the mathematic- terms defined; then
religion thus appear.
And -he thought- each man had become deformed too; the
Form first betrayed, then the body of man, then the mind,
then the gods, then the cosmos itself cavitating. It was like
gravel in the maelstrom of the water pump, the great
churning vortex of the sea.
He saw the fires burning in New Mexico from the satellite
images; three more in the Congo, and six along the Russian
border with China, and nine in Australia. He measured heat
in joules; burn in acreage.
Of course, he thought with pique, they didn’t understand
how these stratagems worked, of course they argued
against group selection, for man was now a mess, torn
asunder, an evenly divided line. Man was a base where once
noble.
Man was now mean where he was once perfectly extreme.
War, the only way to keep the ratio alive as the tribe
thrived, was once -and always- carried in the sons of the
King, carried to the backs of primitive sets of waves, to new
shores of one island, new terre firma of other troops, other
bands, other tribes. And war subsumed the necessary ratio
for the newly acquired whole. But in man those scions had
been subsumed. In some baboon troops the alphas had all
died, he then thought.
He saw the devastation to culture, to post-genetic code. He
toggled back and forth between ape species.
However, the chimps of Uganda had gone from one hundred
fifty-four to two hundred forty-eight -at a rate of 1.6178-
with their prosecution of war. They reduced foreign males,
increased Ronin pre-pubescent females, who were spared.
They ate the other troop’s babies. He thought of
Deuteronomy 20:14 and knew this was the natural way of
apes and whence he too vaguely came. He looked at his
own apish hands. He turned them over from palm to back
and back to palm.
The Ngogo chimps had lost only one male in the warring;
they were the largest chimp troop now known to man.
Each male scion had that same Y chromosome of the
original King, the alpha chimp.
And now -as he watched the Landsat8 images- they were in
single file, in bands of ten, all acting out one design, one
ethic, one mythos, one logos: war to the utmost for self and
King as one. There was no group apart from the individual;
the group was the King, the King was the group.
Just like , Isaiah thought, each letter in a word was that
word. He sat back down and shoved a hand into a pocket
and held the black rock; his legs akimbo; his arms bowed
out like handles.
Was the DNA in the head different from that of the heart?
Was the young son not destined to be his father? Did not all
the sons build the troop, the tribe, feed the females into
goddesses the way cells, organelles, and veins sewed up
each chimp and man into one goddamn thing?
Did not cloyed females produce fat babes sooner? Did not
cousins sacrifice for brothers? Isaiah asked himself and his
thoughts were taken up by the steamy PraXis cloud.
It was not strategy, in some lab, with Nowak and his team
doing math. It was felt, in the body, in the brain, in each
part of the golden mean . How much longer, Isaiah
wondered, would men be all head like a watch and abandon
the body that held the thing as -somehow itself- mere tool
and not as the worker that drives the spike?
“Violence is Golden ,” Isaiah said quoting from Jack Donovan
-himself quoting from antiquity- and now smiling as he had
gathered all their -the Wolves - biometric and genomic data
and set his plan into motion months ago like a storm
churning incipiently -unthinkingly, axiomatically, by law- out
in the Sea-of-Japan. He felt a breeze and the shadow of dark
cloud as he made out the satellite data, making fishermen
nervous for reasons they cannot explain once back on
shore.
“The land offers no explanations to the waterman,” he said
as he sorted each file on each Wolf . He saw the way their
genomes connected like unpruned roots and branches from
a common ancestor. He saw it their faces, their gaits, their
loves and hates.
The data from the Tasman Sea came in and he saw the coral
was dying off the coast of Australia too -the pH data had
come in each year revealing more and more acidity- and he
knew that one-third of all fish needed those porous blooms.
The oceans dying too; dying first, of course! he thought in
epiphany. Modern man had killed his right hemisphere, the
part that dreams, the two-thirds that sees the whole; the
master lapping upon the shore not his fiery emissary of Orc.
Man had killed God alright, Nietzsche was correct. He had
struck at his own head; murdered God in his own head and
heart; cleaved himself in perfect half.
Man had abandoned natural math.
Man, with all this rational crap, this Luciferin reason, this
over reliance on the left hemisphere, and so, yeah, why not
kill the watery part of the world as first and last metaphor?
Man was complete, he thought, he’d drown half his brain
and tilt the head and burn the seas all at once. What is
there to save in him that he had not already killed himself?
Isaiah asked.
The strategy of Win Stay, Lose Shift was not truly described
by Nowak ; Isaiah thought as he grew to hate that phrasing.
It was better described this way, he thought, as he laid it
out on his interface and allowed the cloud to take this part -
keep record of- that which was sequestered from all his
other ruminations:
1. If we have both cooperated in the last round,
the I will cooperate for I am noble, honorable and
treat you with magnanimity for your loyalty has
assuaged my innate darkness; you have held the
sun at noon. Our shadows are smallest now.
2. If you have defected and I have cooperated,
then I will defect as first salvo in a war of doubles,
get ready, for total-war. I will only return to
cooperation once you’ve suffered twice as much
as me; disproportionately. If I fail to execute this -
then it is no strategy- it is doomed to fail. I know
this, for I feel this , I do not think it at all.
3. If you have cooperated and I have defected -for
remember I had reason to defect last round- then
-I repeat what I said- I will defect again -i.e., the
double punishment for your first & unwarranted
disloyalty. I never defect first, but I never return 1
for 1. I return 2 for 1. The golden mean. I am the
first consequences in the Fibonacci . And I will
continue that sequence to 89 -144,000 and
beyond- for each time you betray me. And, son,
you will falter first, mark my words.
4. If we have both defected -it is because I had
reason to defect last round, it is not ahistorical, it
is not arbitrary, it was consequence of your
betrayal- but, then -now- I will cooperate -for I
have punished you twice as hard as you slighted
me [see previous axiom] and now that you’ve
seen my double-fold power I can afford to be
magnanimous again. You flail; I crush. Then I heal
you again; for I am twice as strong as you. The
Golden Rule is much more than you assumed.
 I see your sons, shall that be my next move?
Nowak missed all that feeling, all that innate emotion, all
that 1.618 of brain -the lower levels down- the sub-cortical
regions, the basal ganglia and amygdala . Nowak was using
just that upper .618 of CNS, the neo-cortex . His math was
right, but his ratio -his logos - was all wrong. Anologia, Isaiah
thought, was missing, the mise-an-abyme of 2:3 as 4:6 =
.666.
Two-thirds, the master, one third the emissary. Yet these
scientists, these empiricists, they think the emissary is King;
the mere fiery angel, they think as God, Isaiah thought.
He wrote more notations upon the blackboard. He still held
the rock in his hand. The pocket held his hand.
The math coiled around each thing he had investigated,
from cosmic distance between each heavenly body to the
swirl of galaxy and typhoon and the hawk that dove down
with wing pulled in close, and the pinecone, and the spiral’s
pitch angled just the same, the helix of DNA, the axis of
seeds inside the head of sunflowers, the corpus on man
divided just as God had planned, in His image, he thought.
As the bees birthed in similar ratios of male to female and
lineages of 3, 5, 8 and 13 at each generation under the
strange manner in which male bees had no fathers but one
grandfather . He allowed the math to play out in each realm.
He felt the six sides of the die; the rune; the doubloon.
He counted with no intention of missing the thing greater
than the sum.
He saw then his algorithm’s reminder for Miss Valance
appear in his interface; he must have ignored it three times
now -he thought- as was protocol for it due to the timing of
her fecundity. It alarmed him and he thought of her life for
thirteen years like a river flowing from thirteen winters of
snowpack at eighteen-thousand feet. One river, with not one
drop the same, but never not that river, he thought. Focus
just on the drops and see what it gets you, he thought.
Ignore the river, as man has done, so busy counting drops.
“Go ahead,” he said.
She was now thirteen, and morphologically sixteen or so;
and the uterine measurement data had just come in to
Isaiah in the last twelve hours; he took another look at it. He
thought and felt and let the numbers roll and the fractals
populate graphs in blacks and greys and infrareds from
above and below the plane. He took note of numbers like
intersections to a city map and made it his cause to get her
out. I need to get my hands on her , he thought.
She was born with a uterine height-to-width ratio that
equaled: two. He saw the Fibonacci incipient begin with 1:1,
then 1:2, then 2:3 and last, 3:5. He saw it mimic her
development as her womb -today- was at 1.665 width-to-
height. She was ready , he thought.
His mind began running thousands of iterations of
pregnancy and morphology and decided that she should
take the seed -his seed- now, within three menstrual cycles,
but allow the germ to remain in stasis for 59-61 months. She
would carry the embryo fertilized but in situ for five years
while she developed her final skill sets and could
epigenetically pass that on to the child.
This was crucial , he thought.
Isaiah had run the data on such phenomenon from wasps
and bees who did such things. He felt it was viable if he
tended to her. And if he knew Blax the way he thought he
did, she would be here in the lab, his paradisal, within
twenty-four months. She’d be banished from Lot 45 -with
almost no malice- and returned to the walled garden, he
thought as he sat and spied the stelae behind the ivy.
She would imbue the child with all she saw and felt and
learned and did from now until she rejoined Blax , Isaiah
thought.
He knew how Blax would feel about having her around the
Jacks in two years, he nodded at the harmony of it all;
wincing at Blax’s ambivalence, his knowledge of where he
was weakest. Isaiah would get her for three years and she
would learn all that she was destined for in that time, she
would set it all in motion, inside her, and out in the world
too, he thought. He saw her as integer and set both;
singularity and compendium; clear-black and each wave
length of God’s plaited strands compressed into a white
light that rose off rocks, that settled into water below the
pelagic level and touched down where only eyes of osprey
would follow.
“She’d be an actual Queen,” he said.
“And that child,” he said as he thought of all the babe would
absorb from her, the seed of all of them, the God image, but
the completion, the expanse of the female, the goddess of
selection, the dark waters, before the light. Blax would think
he -like the inmate- had had vasectomy, and the pregnancy
would be miracle to him, to them.
That embryo would have 61.8 months to grip all that
Valance would absorb, a fractal of the body, the body of the
female to the larger male, again 61.8%, the species to the
whole, the capacity to do good, itself the golden mean to
the darkness of the world and our dark God himself .
Did man know God was two-thirds dark ? he wondered.
Did man know that without him, without man, God remained
dark? His face never seen? How long had God’s face been in
retrograde, a waning crescent moon as the weight of man’s
misdeeds slowed the rotation of the light; his untrue words
robbing the fire’s albedo of needed numina ?
“Breathe,” he said, “speak what’s true.” He thought briefly
of the Holy Ghost but his hands had begun to burn in his
pockets and go numb as the brachial artery was impinged
by his position. He pulled them out and shook them off and
then thought of the blackboard.
He turned his head to it.
It was laid out in front of Isaiah as integers; rational and
irrational semaphore; frameworks populated by infinite
ratios on a seabed of unplotted irrational numbers. The
failure of man to reproduce with the ancient, honed,
selected for, the innate alpha-to-beta golden-mean was still
coming up as the loci for the scheme. And the chaos in the
system -no matter how he calculated it, no matter at what
point he measured it- this chaos was something he could
not escape. Hurricanes, typhoons, maelstroms roiled within
noble curves as the data was fed into the maw of the
modern world.
Man was slightly more complex; but he is eusocial, and thus,
they all have a job to do. Even -especially- my precious
Sigmas , Isaiah thought as he recalled the way the inmate
found women disgusting at times, and subconsciously
seeing sex and procreation as tantamount to evacuation. It
was this throw-away line -used one time- but Isaiah had
recalled that the Sigma was unique in his ability to think
that women were filthy beasts. They could abandon sex and
find grandeur in other -larger- things. This would be my key ,
Isaiah thought.
Man was never meant to breed democratically. It was the
putting out of fires that needed to burn; it was giving in to
those who complained that they deserved a woman too. It
was weakness that seemed kind, sane, rational. People
would say having 90% of your young males unwed was
recipe for disaster, and of course just like letting fires burn
was catastrophic, they were right. But they were right short-
term , Isaiah thought. Long-term, they were wrong .
Beta breeding slaked their anger and destructiveness, which
bought the Kings some time. But it ruined the genes of the
species . It guaranteed a species so goofy it would invent
nuclear bombs and yet outlaw fighting so that when it finally
came time to release their energy they nuked the whole
goddamn planet. They’d stop fighting long enough to build
bio-weapons and poison the seas, they’d be so civilized they
dissolved borders between everything -from countries to
families, from banks to diseases- and then they’d be forced
to let ten types of fires burn from coast to coast.
“It was fucking stupid,” Isaiah said. “But it would take three
thousand years for it to manifest. And none of them would
connect the dots. They’d think it was caused by politics.
Idiots.”
He had the bots build a new chalkboard in front of him and
he stood facing north and he began writing out numbers
and algorithms; graphing plots and vectors and erasing
curves that failed to work.
It was the navel of the child, too high, where the genitals
ought be after morphology, puberty, he thought. The head
too was supposed to shrink. Neotonous man was regressing
further and further back , he thought as he redesigned man,
drew out new models on the blackboard by hand. He left the
graphs and merely drew this new man on top of all the work
he’d already done.
He pressed the chalk between his forefinger and his thumb.
Jack Allbesh had been gnawing at Isaiah. Even at age
thirteen he had a high temperature in him, no matter the
particular feeling, it was febrile. His iciness was a blue flame
, Isaiah thought.
The way he felt about his mother, the way he rebelled in
spirit to her fear, her hesitation, her lack of , “courage, ah,
encouragement,” Isaiah said in some harmony, as the words
echoed out from his thoughts.
He -Jack- was going to be the one to sacrifice it all for the
Great Return, Isaiah felt. He would be willing to sacrifice his
brothers, his father, his own soul, to return the world to the
ratio, the golden mean of reproduction. The Logos , Isaiah
thought and felt himself sick inside. He thought Jack would
need some kind of push.
“Shove,” he said aloud.
He paid attention to the weather data, and the deep-space
images. He saw the Hand of God crush the spiral arms of
category-5 hurricanes to solve the winding problem with
brute force, and he saw the spiral galaxies mirror this
collapse of logarithmic rebellion. God crushing the putsch
against Newtonian physics, the 12-degrees as warning to
those who had fealty to man’s laws in contravening His
laws. He was like the man who would prefer to kill his own
son than to allow mankind to ruin his kin. The man prepared
to burn the world down to prevent it being made ugly by
these types of men, he thought.
Man had been given time, too much time , Isaiah thought, to
set his house in order . And he had failed, because he had
failed to see the ammonite shell, the cochlea of the inner
ear, he had failed to hear . Over and over again man had
ignored the moral suasion of resonate code that demanded
loyalty to the law of God . To flout the law was not a choice,
it was prelude to consequence, Isaiah thought.
They’d take twice the punishment they had doled out, or
they would cease to exist at all. They’d thank me for the
pain, or they’d be annihilated, he thought.
“Those are your only two choices now,” he said aloud as he
saw the seed in Jack scuff its husk inside his abrading soul:
he saw his anger, his sensitivity to all the modern world laid
upon him. And yet, he had no pathogen inside of him. That
was the one way in which he was different. And -Isaiah
thought- it would allow him to be rational for just long
enough to measure time.
The other Jacks would be loyal to Blax, for they would see
him as competent Father, wise King, a Godhead. They would
miss the need for death; but eventually they would see the
way the pinecone burst -birth- in flames. They would agree
to self-immolate for the greater good; they would see need
to join God in heaven, Isaiah thought.
Isaiah stared at the stela of Ap.Kallu with his pinecone in
one hand and his bag in the other; the fish draped over the
elongated and conical head. He saw the Taurids burst far out
from earth. He saw the rocky mountain ranges of Kepler
438b.
But Jack Four , Isaiah asserted to himself, would rebel
against Blax’s timeless timorousness, his failure to pay back
his own enemies at twice the number, ponderous the
weight, his failure to do the proper division. Jack would see
Blax’s efforts to save the West as not perceiving the
undivided forest but as missing the vital -golden- trees . Jack
Four wouldn’t even know why he was so angry and
disgusted, it was just who he was , Isaiah thought with some
ache about the ribs.
Jack would see each tree, the rivers in winter would have
bark too, he’d say , ‘the ice was the river’s bark,’ Isaiah
thought.
He’d see it all personally, each thing affront or offering.
Jack would bend, Isaiah felt, but never break the trees. And
this would make cathedral of two fists of men like Sainte
Chappelle in the forest and make San Isabel’s frosty boughs
and ice-white tendrils the cosmos to propitiate. The man is
the tribe, he’d think, and he’d populate it with his own seed
and make it so. There’d be no need for individual or group
selection, it would all be one thing. But it’d be allegiant to
the golden mean; he’d never allow it to grow too large, it’s
base and walls would follow natural law.
Isaiah thought of the Medea gene, and how this would force
two strategies.
He looked upon the Kepler data again.
Gliese 581-charlie was an exoplanet likely to support human
life. It was crimson and it orbited a red-dwarf star; it was in
a tidal lock and did not rotate on its axis. Half the planet
was cooking as it never turned from the red-dwarf, half was
frozen as it never saw warmth. But there was a narrow strip
around the planet between the dark and light side that was
perfect to support life. In 2008 NASA had sent a message
and now, today -four years after the 2029 expected date-
one had come back.
Isaiah read it and then thought of other things.
Blax would unleash him to be exactly what he was, he’d -
Blax- would finally do his duty. He’d let the plant, the vine -
that would strangle him, that part of him- he’d let it bloom;
provide all that he needed for his own doom. Isaiah saw this
as thus an elevation of who he -Blax- was truly meant to be:
a recursion, a return to the mean, just like the inmate, but
one level up. A fractal genome like nothing, not since …
Isaiah thought and belayed the end of that sentence.
“Personal,” he said. “It all is personal, and when this
genome forgets that, it forgets what it is, and it acts.. well,
they cannot change places; they are not fungible. Art is not
fungible, it is embodied and acts upon the body too.
“The smart man can act stupid, but the stupid man can
never convincingly pretend to be smart,” Isaiah said. He
knew he’d never understand why God had made it so, why
the pattern obtained, cohered, and must be obeyed; but he
knew it was just as it was, and Isaiah bent just slightly at the
knee and allowed the LEDs to move above the garden’s
walls and cast a shadow off his leg to the ground -a triangle
formed as the dirt of the trench around the edge did not
move- and Isaiah agreed to make it so.
The Queen returns to the hive, impregnated, carrying
with her tens of thousands of eggs—a future city of
bees, and then begins the cycle of reproduction, the
concentration of the teeming life of the hive in
unceasing work for the birth of a new generation .

II. 2025 e.v.

The forest vibrated as the birds alighted.
It was a small tremor, an aftershock, and it crept up from
the collision zone between the Pacific tectonics and the
indo-Australian. Isaiah saw that it was triggered up in the
Pacific rim and the trench of Indonesia. This part of the
island harmonized and rattled the vertebrates’ eyes; and
stimulated the piloerection of the follicles of hair.
The local tribes would whisper of Ruamoko’s anger after
falling from the sky into the womb of Papatuanuku .
The birds landed in new tree-limbs not far away; mothers
went out to the edge of the branches then returned to the
eggs which showed no cracks. Malice of bears crouched low
and circled and then nervously returned to hunting for
anything red that appeared as fruit; the cubs looked only at
mother for a few minutes; their stomachs contained nothing
and they were unconcerned for this lack. The constricting
asps had coiled in low, thick, boughs and only their eggs
moved. Those born in the coming weeks would move
quickly compared to their parents; these young never
trusting the ground completely.
Large cats played through the shimmering, and their fathers
yawned and let their bellies be tickled by the quake.
There were no modern humans within 67-square kilometers,
and the mist only got the tops of the foliage wet; their
stomata breathed underneath the humid air. The wind had
stopped hours ago and the nanobots -in the night- pulled
carbon from the air. CO2 was at 458ppms as the trees began
to outgas again.
Foundations were laid for longhouses 300-meters north and
south and 60-meters east to west. Wells were drilled 568-
feet down on average; one well for each 500-gallons needed
each day. Waterfalls were to the north, and the rock held the
water table like a cistern and Isaiah had received data from
MO that showed with just 9-meters of rainfall a year, the
aqueduct could provide water for 288,090 people.
The bots drank more carbon from the air, and the wells were
lined with grey carbonite tiles that tessellated down to a
clear bottom that looked black from the green forest floor
above. The foundations rose in walls four meters high and
the older concrete amalgam had already begun to change
color as it too breathed in more carbon making it stronger
and denser and browning like Corten steel as it aged.
Stalls were made for the animals, apiaries for the bees,
towers -of 10,000 gallons each- for hydrostatic water
pressure were raised. Floors were polished once they had
been set for thirty days, until they shone like marble of
black and lightning strikes here and there. Windows were
made from carbonite and were made translucent when an
electrical charge ran through it from the static of storms.
Sewage systems were plumbed with concrete and septic
with arms of infiltrators stretching out at 137.5 degrees in
series of fours.
Isaiah laid markers from Kaipara Harbor for the first crews
and set beacons at Wanganui Bluff for their expeditions
once the Wanganui river system was navigable by the water
crews.
Westland was called the wetlands by the natives as it
received 18-meters of rain annually.
The Cropp river was to their south and east and elevations
gathered snow. The big trees of the kaihikatea the rimu and
matai put intransigent feet down in swamps and shoved
jade limbs up as crooked as live oaks of the American south.
Laureled with creepers and drip-vines, they looked like the
Greek robes of the Parthenon caryatids grown tall and green
and wet. The trunks were white and high like the statues
that held old Grecian roofs.
The ruru owl moaned in proto English, phonemes from the
first egg breaks of the first predatory fowl.
Bright and angry red rata -clematis in shock-white and
coprosmas dour with blue- all freckled the lush of the ferns
and mosses of jungle that lay like rubble around the shallow
rooted trees. Tannins from humus dyed the rocks mojocido
and orange peel; black tea seemed brewing on cold edges
to streams and the rocks of Pounamu . Rifleman birds are
louder than their size, tui and bells warn others at dusk and
dawn and would thus signal the children , Isaiah imagined
as he handled detail after detail to build this outpost for
eventualities that -he admitted- may never come.
“Infrastructure, was key,” he said because he was frustrated
by how first world men didn’t understand that at all. They
thought their internet bullshit was sufficient, their ideas
somehow would save them when war came.
He watched the bots build on the South Island as he looked
out to the Tasman Sea and took reading of the ocean pH .
He measured moisture and relative humidity and took
samples of the humus of the lowland forest and parasite
load of each species of predator and prey.
They would be away from the urban areas of Hokitika and
Kaniere ; and the iwi of Northland, at their apogee. But, the
Te Rarawa and Ngati Kahu were sent emissaries anyway -
paid by Isaiah- to provide the peripatetic tribe -should they
make landfall and need it- trading clans -partners- with the
M ā ori furthest away.
He had learned this from the inmate, that one’s neighbors
ought be kept out of your business and that dealings with
those furthest away prevented plots and maintained the
natural distance that prevent chaffing and abrading in
business and trade. The human animal will find a way to
betray you , he had said, and so one must put physical
distance between you and those who have incentive to
cheat . Do not tempt the good to be bad, he had said.
MO had planned for efficiency; told him to make the trading
iwi close. But, what is efficient on smooth paper can rend
and break the flesh , the inmate had once said.
Isaiah had run models that proved this was the case.
Distance solved many problems, borders kept many
problems sequestered. The inmate had said the black
nationalists said that integration was infiltration , and they
too wanted to kept separate from the white man.
The Ka Tirintiri-o-te-Moana ran 500-kilometers from west
and south from their region, with elevations to 3,700
meters. Orographic lift pressed rain clouds that were like fog
and mist leaving meters of precipitation behind as the air
foil from the sea pushed and retreated many times each
southern hemispheric year.
The milky way laid out over Glacier Way and snow hit every
seven years at Hukatere roads that led in and out of Tai
Poutini. Ka-Roimata-o-Hine-Hukatere rose 980-feet to their
north. The weather was increasingly snowy in early spring
and Isaiah measured ocean temperature and the migration
of white sharks between Timaru and the deep trench out to
the Tahiti sea-lanes. He watched the distance of dolphins
and turtles from the sharks. He would hand this over to Jack
One’s people, his four sergeants -all born just forty-six
months ago , he thought- and provide them with ships to
leave their last mission and make the antipodes their part of
the world.
He’d measured Jack One’s genome and gene expression
under duress. They would be the ones to appreciate this
part of New Zealand, Isaiah thought. He thought of the
topophilia of each man to the mist and flatirons and swamps
of this farflung outpost.
Each Jack was now five years old and he could tell their
personalities with 91% accuracy, he beleived. And at four
years of age the sixteen to come were predictably -within
84% accuracy- who they would be. Each piece fit into
Isaiah’s pegboard harmoniously. He filed it all away.
He made similar bases on the austere Steppe for Jack
Three’s staff, and in Iona , of Scotland for Jack Two’s men -
aligned with Jack One’s gene expression- and their tribe.
The infrastructure would build from carbon in the air -
growing like plants into building and cistern and sewage-
over the next decade or two and be ready for them when
they arrived. Jack Four, with Jack Two’s men, would stay in
the San Isabel forest and run north America of course, he
thought.
Isaiah then saw the engrams come in from the implants in
the Jacks, and one of them was dreaming:
 The feet were bare. The skin of the fish was not white
but black, the scars around the head, the flank, the
eyes, the massive back. The water was below the dorsal
horn of the breaching beast. Again, the vision was of the
feet. The arms had leather armor about the elbows,
bronze plating at breast and groin, helmet made of
melted iron coin. The fishery made foam and froth, the
leviathan broke the water for the smaller cod and
dolphin and now the sperm whale had grey cats circling
the man who had reins in his hands.
The Afric parrot spoke, the moon lit up horizon, the sun
heated the sea underneath, the stars spelled out in
Greek. But he -Jack- pulled the reins and his knee pans
were covered in copper plates; his hand-guards made of
elk-hide made black by blood and wear, nightly tears
and daily tears; his skin no longer fair. He was burnt
brown and tanned hard, inside his metal vest was a jar;
mostly full of soil and root and scored seeds. He no
longer feared the blue skin of the deep; the black
beneath. The shifting of the plates from weight; the
counting of the numbers as they added up.
“3301,” Jack said as he moved up to the bridle. The
whale had a magnet now and each cat was on the prowl.
“Jack Four’s archetype banished to the steppe,” Isaiah then
said aloud with some reflex; he refused to think of what
would happen next.

III. 2021 e.v.

“What do you mean by lesbian?” MO asked.
He loaded up the software that turned the electrical data
from fMRI and tensor imaging into actual high-definition
pictures of what the man thought. MO had spent almost a
week working on this program and had tested it on Steven
and Isaiah both.
MO had thought the platform and software were not
functioning when Steven was asked to think of both a set of
images from a list compiled by MO -of things like a cave, a
cat, a car, and so forth- and also from categories Steven
was asked to think up himself. The reason MO thought the
software was not working was that the images -from Steven-
were so impoverished and detuned and pixelated, so low-
res, that they seemed almost damaged.
But once Isaiah was on the platform the highly detailed
images that corresponded to his brain’s imaginative
constructions unfurled like a highly detailed and beautiful -if
at times shocking- movie of overbuilt items in motion and at
rest. It was splendid, and MO knew then that his software
was in fact operational and he could project the inmate’s
inner life on the screen as he wished.
“I mean what any one means by that word. She was this
tiny little thing, no bigger than my pinkie and Sarah and
Alina brought her home from some goddamn thing or
another. I cannot recall, and they are like, look, dada, she’s
tiny !
“So, I’m like worn out at this point, ok? I mean I’ve working,
been working,” he corrected, “12-hour days and building a
new warehouse grow and juggling a baker’s dozen of
different business partners and employees and now this
tattoo shop and trying to satisfy the not-negligible sexual
demands of two girls in their early twenties and now I’ve got
a four-foot-eleven lesbian who has never -repeat never-
slept with a man before,” the inmate said as the nanobot -
screen loomed behind him with his brain imaging data now
scrawled across it along with the normal brain region
highlights and rivers of light moving at 70-140-meters-per-
second as his myelinated neurons fired as he spoke.
“Never?” MO asked.
“Nope, and she now -thanks to my girls- has man-beast as
her first, right? On deck is this guy,” he said as he pointed
his thumbs to his chest, “and the only reason she is even
agreeing to this shit is because she is in love, in loooove
with Sarah. Which -because she is beautiful, admittedly
beautiful, not as beautiful as Julee Rae or my ex-wife, but
still, gorgeous- anyway, because she’s beautiful and
because she is also psychopathic she can make anyone fall
in love with her.
“And so, this dyke is perfectly willing to fuck me just to make
her princess Sarah happy. So, we have dinner and then
whilst we are engaged in congress, as my little Russian Alina
and the psycho-Sarah are fondling and petting and
smooching and cooing over this girl who I’ve almost
enveloped by now, I mean she disappears under my mass
like a little Micronesian island under a Kanagawa tidal wave
of man. Anyway, as I’m invigilating her, so-to-speak, she is
talking to Sarah about mundane things. It’s like a, like
Reminiscences of Things Past , I don’t know,” the inmate
said as he lifts up his arms slightly in defeat at the task of
recalling all the details.
Isaiah instantly thought it would be nice to use the imaging
software now, so they can get a look at this infligrante
delicto of the four of them .
“Like sexualized fantasy talk?” MO asks as he checks the
fourth quadrant of his model on the endocrine effect on
gene expression in real-time.
“No, like a grocery list. I mean it’s so mundane that I’ve
actually begun to notice that it’s likely a symptom of
cognitive dissonance. This girl is a true-blue lesbian and has
zero interest in making it with a guy, especially one as
macho -and aging- as me. And so, she is talking to herself to
get through this and I’m unable to handle it. I mean, look,
I’m a sensitive guy,” the inmate said and the whole room
seemed to reduce its atomic weight and slow its nuclear
spin as each of them held their breath. Nobody moved.
MO finally nodded without comment and the inmate took a
drink of his carbonated water.
“So, I ask Sarah if she can get the girl to not talk like that.
And so she says, shhhhsh; you know? And she’s kissing her
little bouche , and trying to get her to stop adding things to
the goddamn grocery list, like ok, the noodles are on there,
got it, I swear we will get butter, non-salted butter, check,
and yes, darling, no need to repeat yourself, the short grain
brown rice will be acquired; we are on it love, we are on the
case, now please can we return to this fucking you thing?
Please!
“But I just can’t do it. So I bail and go make a sandwich in
the other room while these three girls design some MC
Escher drawing of geometric cunnilingus. I pull a Dos Equis
from the fridge with this half-incredulous head shaking, this,
I cannot believe the world I live in, befuddlement and
bemused nakedness. I’m half tumescent still; if that is not
too forward of me to say,” he paused to see if anyone
objected to the reference to his own genitals and nobody
made any motion of objection, so he continued, “and now -
at this point in the story- with cold Mexican beer running
down my chin and chest…”
“So, what happened?” MO interrupted.
“That is what happened. I don’t remember a thing after
that. And this shit happened every week; it was some new
bizarre girl -a girl with a kid, a girl with fake tits, who wanted
to fuck us while doing carnival tricks and music video shit,
uh, a girl with a fake name and fake Iraqi identity who was
really Mexican, who, whom, I refused to even touch she was
so mangled in her soul. That girl ended up calling me Uday
Hussain for kicking her out when I discovered her lies,” he
said as Isaiah asked a question about the Iraqi-Mexican girl.
“How did you know she was lying?” he asked.
“Oh, I asked her about the University of Baghdad and she
claimed there was no university in Baghdad, that’s how I
knew. And look, she was Iraqi, right? Her story was she was
Iraqi, but she had an ersatz British accent on top, this is how
clever this bitch was. She affected a British accent, to show
us she was educated in the west, but as she got drunk -I
took them all out for sushi and she drank a bottle of pearl
sake - and anyway as she got drunk she pretended to let the
real Iraqi, you know the Semitic accent come out, as if that’s
what happened when she got drunk. It was quite clever, I
must say. She was creative,” the inmate smiled as he
nodded.
“Ok, go on,” MO said.
“Ok, and then when Sarah drove her home, this is, well,
look, Sarah agrees to drive her home and on the way home
they pull over on I25 and 58th and begin fighting; like
slugging it out over this shit. This fake Iraqi who was
apparently -to hear Sarah tell it- she was calling me the son
of Saddam Hussain and so Sarah is beating on her for this,
and the cops show up because it’s 0300 hours and a lime
green car the shape and size of a beer can is pulled over on
the road with two girls performing the Gorgeous Ladies of
Wrestling off-off-off Broadway in it, right? And when they
untangle these two there’s cocaine, mushrooms, weed -
which the weed was legal- but anyway, and so they arrest
Sarah for assault and possession of a schedule one narcotic
-two counts.
“Sarah hires my lawyer, Tom Henry and Tom -bless his
heart- is like, well, after he gets the discovery evidence
against her pulls me aside and says, Lyndon, this girl is
insane. Drop her, ok?
“Sarah is pissed and blows her lid because Tom tells me she
is working as a prostitute at some hand-job factory down
town, pulling guys off for seventy-five bucks a pop. And,
how he knows this, is that she tells Tom this is her job when
he asks. She tells him this. And she expected him not to tell
me, you know client-attorney privilege and all that. Well, in
the real world, I’m Tom’s client, ok? I paid him like $50,000
to get me off those weapons’ charges the year prior and he
is loyal to me.
“And in fact, I’m paying her bill too, so yeah, he tells me that
my -one of my- so-called girlfriends is a whore, and not a
normal slut like all females born after 1960 are, I mean a
paid prostitute and I’m just like, nigga please.
“I’m at the end of my rope. My life is a chaos machine. I’m
exceeding the weight limits of the bed frame I have no
doubt, the slats of the bed are breaking and my dick is so
sore it hurts to pull it out to piss, and I have zero seminal
fluid left in me, not anywhere in the darkest recesses of my
soul, ok?
“A wooden dowel with a flag that unrolls as it ejects from my
urethra -you know- a fuckin’ flag with the word BANG comes
out when I cum, ok?” he says as Isaiah smirks and Lyndon
shakes his head at his own story. MO needed .033 seconds
-.13 more than normal- to determine if that urethra thing
was hyperbole or meant to be taken literally.
“And I am working twelve hours each day; doing real work,
like horticultural work, back breaking shit, lifting heavy shit
over and over; plus I am handling HVAC issues and CO2
issues and root-aphids and mites and buyers from out of
town showing up in the middle of the night to pick up fifty-
pounds of bricked dope. Paying in cash, cash, ok ? Which
means I’m driving around with a hundred-large in cash. And,
and I’ve got partners who are bitching about a measly
hundred bucks in a million dollar operation -I mean real
nickel and dime shit- and I’m dealing with incessant power
outages and exploding transformers from the amp draw that
we are taxing the systems with, and fuckin’ cops coming by
because we have HVAC guys on the roof at midnight and it
looks suspicious as hell.
“I’m getting in fist fights with cholos , you know, Mexican
gangsters on second avenue and the cops are arresting me
for it; because these so-called badasses are calling the cops
like total fucking fags. And I’m ramming cars in traffic
because I have had it. I’m pulling guns on people when they
put their filthy Mexican hands on me and I’m losing my mind
over every infraction and my walls look like whack-a-mole
boards ‘cause I’ve punched them so often.
“And my knuckles are like permanently bloody and all my
money is going to buying new cars that I have to fly to Utah
or Kentucky or Texas to drive back,” the inmate took a
moment to breathe.
“Have to?” MO asks. He was wondering why he had to buy
these cars.
“Well, the cars I’m buying for fun because I have the loot,
but I mean I’m buying them online so I have to fly ought to
go get them, which is stressful and time consuming because
I cannot allow the grow to go too long without my tender
lovin’ care, savvy?”
“Savvy,” Isaiah said.
“I’m stopping at wineries in Arizona -that Caduceus place in
Jerome- or stopping in California and buying cases of cult
cabs from Hall or Coup de Foudre , or Plumpjack, or weird
shit that Robert Parker has just mentioned in his little
magazine he puts out a few times a year.”
“Wine Advocate,” Isaiah says as Lyndon nods.
“I’m hemorrhaging cash, like $20,000 a month on cars and
booze and wine and dinner and shoes for the girls, and gold
bullion and Apple stock which was at $95.60 I think when I
got a hundred shares. I’m just buying anything and
everything.
“Land, I bought 35 acres of high altitude forested land in the
San Isabel forest. I’m taking the girls out to restaurants, like
Batman with one on each arm and,” the inmate stopped as
MO interrupted.
“You mean Bruce Wayne?” MO asked.
“Yeah, Batman,” the inmate said, not yet getting his point.
“Well, Bruce Wayne not Batman, if you’re at restaurants,”
MO said as Isaiah was laughing quietly in the background.
“Right,” the inmate laughed, “right, Bruce Wayne, not
Batman, Batman did not bring two blondes into restaurants
you are correct.” Lyndon was laughing even harder now and
looking at Isaiah who just tilted his head and smiled.
“Anyway, people are staring, and I see people I know and
they are shaking their heads like who the fuck is this guy? I
am loaded on Vicodin and wine each day by noon. I’m
strapped with a forty-five at all times and just looking for a
fight. And everyone is plotting against me, everyone. There
is a real war going on, a cold war, and everyone is tense. I
mean it ain’t paranoia, they really are out to get me, they
hate my hubris and that I live like this and they hate me like
I’m Tom fucking Brady, ‘cause in Denver, a dipshit like me
passes for that shit.
“I am the most hated man in the world. The cops are furious
with me, they’ve been at the house a half dozen times for
all manner of shit, the girls have had it with my anger, my
customers think I am a dick -because I brow beat them for
who knows why; because they are two or three standard
deviations from me in IQ, whatever- and my business
partners are ready to stage a coup because I threaten to
punch them anytime they complain, and I am sending
letters to Salman Rushdie and Anita Thompson -Hunter’s
widow- telling them how retarded and evil they are.
“Nobody is on board with any of this. And Sarah in a total
breakdown, mad as fuck at me, sends me a text: great cock,
horrid personality . And that is it. She and Alina and Michelle
-oh I forgot about Michelle, man that girl was perfect and I
ran her off too, I regret that one; anyway, and all these girls
are rebelling -and look, I never cheated on any one, all my
amorous relationships were above board, I was not sneaking
around- but my partners are locking me out of the grows,
the cops are threatening me via my lawyer and then -
fucking then- my own father sells me out,” the inmate tilted
and dropped his head to connote he was even tired of
telling people this shit.
“Oh, is this the Carey thing?” MO asked as he watched the
amygdala function and cortisol levels rise. He timestamped
it. Isaiah and he had already discussed all this, but it was
useful to hear it from the inmate himself.
“Yeah, and so I just start drawing all these really cool
portraits of the great authors of the west and never leaving
the house and refusing to do anything; my stress is through
the roof and I’m just reading and drawing these portraits;
Hercules, the twelve Labors and one of Castro with books
and M1s flying all around him in a maelstrom of
revolutionary praxis, you know books and guns.
“And I have a personal assistant named Kat and she hired
massage therapists to come to the house and this one,
Andrea is a ballet dancer, built like an athlete, and like
twenty-two years-old and so me and her start fucking. And
Sarah, after her Spidy-sense can tell I’ve moved on, comes
back to me and asks to be allowed back into the harem and
now these are my two girls and they fuck each other like
weirdos and take showers in my huge shower -a shower I
built by-the-way- and one morning while I’m trying to shave,
the steam is clouding the mirrors and I’m getting annoyed
and I turn around and there are two twenty-something
angels, perfect specimens -Andrea is a ballet dancer, ok, I
mean she is hard as a rock and tiny, like A-cup tits which I
adore- ok, fuck big tits, I hate big tits, but despite this epic
mise-en-sc è ne , I’m angry. Just so I can finally get to the
goddman point, my point is I’m angry. I ain’t happy at all.
“Who is angry in this situation?” the inmate askes as they
just measure his affect and make eye contact with him.
“What 40-year-old man is angry when he turns around as
sees two twenty-year-old girl -ok?- beautiful, sexy, athletic
broads who adore him, want to fuck him all day, and his
response is anger because the mirror is covered with
steam?
“I had it all. I had money and cars and clothes and females
and a creative life, total control. I had no boss, not one
person over me, and I was furious, enraged, and insane. You
tell me why. Go on,” the inmate asked.
“Because it was a lie?” Isaiah said; not asking.
“Bingo. I had the American Dream. I had it. And it sucked.
Everyone around me was a liar and fake and stupid. I had
what they advertise. I had the thing every guy wants but
doesn’t have the brains or looks or balls or money or
creativity or style to get.
“And so they, the average dork, he can chase it, like the
carrot on the stick over the mule’s head, the dogs chasing
the rabbit at the dog track on the little machine that they
will never reach. They can be content because they will
always chase and never catch,” the inmate said and eyed
the level of the fluid in his glass.
“Right,” MO said, “the dopaminergic system mediated in the
thalamic region gives a man meaning -purpose- when he
chases the goal, making incremental progress but never
catches it, never collapses the framework of mere
consummatory reward.”
The inmate nodded, he figured that was right. All he knew
was that he was like the dog who’d caught the goddamn
car.
“He -the man of averages- he is always in search and thus
always activating that sense of meaning,” Isaiah added.
“But, the man who catches the car is kinda fucked, right?”
the inmate asked. “Ever notice that real artists when they
get rich and make it, kill themselves often enough? They
see it too.
“I caught the rabbit, the mechanical rabbit. I was the dog
that caught the car. And I found it unsatisfying. What I really
wanted was to move to the forest, hunt bear and elk and
read all day and talk to no one and put up with nothing and
flee to the wilderness to become a beast myself, to reinsert
myself into the womb of the world, to be natural man. To get
away from the incessant lying and phony posing by
everyone.
“That was my American Dream, and so after getting all my
shit taken, stolen, everyone turning on me -including my
fucking family- I took my cash and the land I had bought,
and built a refuge, a natural preserve for the last of the
grizzlies in settled Missouri and I led a good and meaningful
life.
“That was the best year of my life. I was blown away by my
joy, my deep meaning, even with all the heartache and
tears and sadness -of which there was plenty- I mean I was
suffering from PTSD, all that malice, all that betrayal, it
killed me, but I was still doing great. I was healing and living
an authentic life and man, it was a true re-birth of a man. Of
an ancient man,” the inmate said as he looked down and to
the left a bit and thought of his former home.
“What a happened?” MO asked as he watched the limbic
system and cerebellum fire as the dmPFC warmed up.
“Nothing. I had business to settle with my enemies, and I
settled it. I was moving forward toward my dream, my
vision. I do not see this as some derailment of my dreams,
this was the fulfillment of them. I am right on track.
Vanquishing your enemies and hearing the lamentations of
their womenfolk is a marker of the good life. Like a fat bank
account or six kids or a full head of hair. It’s a marker of
success. All mankind knew this until about a hundred years
ago.
“But people are so historically illiterate now, so totally
devoid of any knowledge that didn’t come from the last
fifteen minutes, that they have no idea what their ancestors
valued. Well, I know. Modern men think I fucked up; that I
should have just let it go. But they are pussies and cowards.
They think freedom is more important than honor.
“I’ve read the Bible, First Kings and Deuteronomy and
Revelation . I’ve read the Greeks, Lucretius and Draco , and
the stoics and Spartans especially. I’ve read Herodotus and
his accounts of Xerxes . I’ve read what the Chinese and
Mishima think. I’ve read the M ā oris and the Comanche and
the Norsemen , man. Look, ninety-nine percent of mankind
from ten-thousand years ago to nineteen-hundred of the
common era, were very aware of what the good life was: to
destroy your enemies and take no shit.
“It’s hard for squares and normal people -people with no
souls- to see how being incarcerated for forty-six homicides
is a good thing. But, I feel like I’m like MLK from Birmingham
jail, man. But squares have no vision. They think eating shit
all day is a-ok , that having a domineering wife is no-
problemo , they think that being a slave to the machine is
just-the-way-life is, man.
“They saw nothing wrong with my Rockstar life, they didn’t
see the pain and ennui and stupidity of that. They would
have sold their soul to the devil to have my life. And I threw
it all away. So, it is they -not me- who are calibrated all
wrong. They want what I rejected, and I want what they fear
and hate and cannot comprehend. I wanted it and I had it.
Poggio Bracciolini said, let us spend our leisure with books,
which teach us to despise what many people desire, ” the
inmate said and breathed through his nose as it flared under
his gaze into some indistinct place ahead and abaft of Isaiah
and MO.
“I was born a great man in a low-brow and soulless culture. I
am John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Socrates before the
senate, I’m Malcolm X denouncing the Honorable Elijah
Mohammed and the US government too. I’m that guy.
“ I think those are good lives, those men -those killed and
jailed for insurrection and vengeance and righteousness in
times of universal deceit- they are Great men. Not these
average dipshits that live to 74.5 years of age with their
401k’s and their two point two kids who are on Ritalin and
have no souls. Modern men, those guys who eat shit all day
from everyone like slaves and have the nerve to call their
life good ? Nigga please.
“I know what the good life is, and it ain’t money and chicks
and fancy cars and clothes. It ain’t. And I had that life, I had
it. So, it ain’t sour grapes with me.
“I just discovered that the genuinely Good life is living the
Honorable life, where your enemies suffer for their crimes
against you and the system must contend with the moral
force of your arguments. I feel that each man must do his
part to ensure the equilibrated system is brought forth. The
guilty must pay; that means my enemies and then me as
well. I place myself next to history’s Great men, all
betrayed, maligned, murdered. I stand with Caesar and
Toussaint L’Oeverture , and all the artists who never were
recognized in their time, from Simone Weil to Nietzsche to
Blake and The Author himself.
“Nobody good is lauded in their own time. So, I obviously
welcome the opprobrium of my peers and my epoch; it
confirms what I already know to be true,” he said.
“What?” MO prompted as the DTI and fMRI data streamed in
at 1.3 times the normal rate; MO had improved the imaging
technique the previous day.
“Look, hardly anyone stops to consider what defines a good
life; they just accept the bullshit that TV tells them is true.
They think money and some job and peace and quiet is the
good life. As Chen says, he just wants to enjoy his cornflakes
. But I see that as a tragedy. I mean that. I see most men’s
lives as a tragedy. They think mine is; and I think theirs is.
“I see nothing tragic in my life; nothing. I lived as I saw fit. I
did things most men only dream of and wistfully pine for
with no chance of doing them. I did them. I did things that
made me feel alive, noble, honest; and I did them for years.
And Hunter Thompson once said that he would have felt
trapped by life if he didn’t know he could commit suicide
anytime he wanted.
“And he did. He did it. Was his life tragic? No way. That dude
had a grand life. His whole life was art. He rode that BSA
Lightning right over the edge. And he had a facility with
words that proved he thought in grand terms, and most
people do not even understand that the man who can speak
and write with that kind of facility is a man who can think in
such artful strokes, too. And brother, language proves a
man’s inner life. It’s proof he is internally large.
“That means a man who can write so precisely and from the
heart must have a huge inner life, a life defined or seen in
massive Eurasian landscapes and variegated menagerie
that makes homme moyen’s inner life look like a ten by ten
white walled room with a fake rubber plant in the corner.
“See, nobody talks about this, because they can’t even
image how poor -how impoverished- their inner lives are.
But I’ve spoken to men and there is nothing inside them.
They are already dead and already imprisoned. They have
no inner lives. The feel nothing, they are nothing,” inmate
16180339 said. But, once he said it he knew it was unfair.
Travis had tried, he really had. He had something of their
heritage, their genome in him, he had it. But it was so
repressed, so deformed, he never showed anyone. He had
showed his little brother though, once, and the inmate now
thought of that time and felt unclean for not giving his
brother more credit, giving him a solid defense.
“Look, the artist proves what he is by the complexity of his
words and his life. Look at the world-building of great artists,
look at what they construct out of mere words or oil-paint or
some animal guts, some Ernie Balls stretched across some
lumber, or skins taut over the head of a drum. Look at what
men create with just their minds and then add what they’ve
made of their lives. Add it up.
“Look at how great men lived. Look at the excitement, the
honesty, the frisson of their heroism, their antagonism to
things that outraged them; to things ugly and obscene. Look
how honest they are. The average man slinks away to his
room and bitterly complains, the hero goes out into the
world and fights back, physically -with his body- against
tyranny and stupidity and ugliness. He puts forth beauty
into the world, and he offers up his body for this project. He
adds intelligent speech to the conversation. He breaks his
body and soul on the wheel of grand vocation, on epic
locations, whaling or firefighting or battling the barbarians
with swords and M4s, riding into the storms, not away from
them.
“I refuse to allow the average man to define my life, when
he has neither the language to describe what he sees, nor
the inner landscape with which to place his artless
descriptions of me. No, he can jail me, kill me -and shake his
head- but he cannot speak ill of me and my life with any
authority or righteousness. No more than I can condemn
Alexander the Great or Temujin or Charlemagne or Hannibal
or Caesar or Thomas Jefferson .
“I have no moral right to condemn those men, all of them
murders by the way. All of them killed and killed and killed
some more; and killed justly and sometimes barbarically,
and sometimes unjustly. But always with balls. And they
created it -not merely lived in it- but created -built- hewed it
from the rock of their world.
“I’m nothing compared to them and, thusly, my enemies
and the man-on-the-street ought to look at their little lives
and admit that they have not done even one-percent of
what I’ve accomplished in art, love, courage, work, labor,
poetry and facility with language and standing -physically
standing- by that word in a hundred-and-one ways, not the
least of which is making good on my threats to extirpate my
enemies. Who among these regular fellas , who among the
modern man has done that? They are all talk and artless
talk at that. Jesus, they are not even good at the only thing
they do: talk .
“They are bumbling unlettered fools, have you heard Sean
Hannity speak or John Heilman? They are barely literate.
These are men who cannot put five words together without
a disaster of linguistic malice and a tawdry blaspheme of
syntax and word choice errors; and eighty-percent of what
they say is cliché .
“They steal the words and boilerplate phrasing and insipid
analogies and maudlin metaphor of other men and do it
with aplomb; zero shame. Listen to them, really listen to
them. It is so painful as to be unbearable, as they have
nothing original or beautiful or complex or interesting or
brave to say. They gossip or subtweet, never say it to a
man’s face. They say what is expected of them, like the
good little slaves that they are. Their lives are sad, by any
metric besides money, they are sad little men. And yet they
think they can condemn me, me, a real man?
“That is like the skinny punk at the zoo taunting the Siberian
tiger behind the bars. It’s pathetic and sad and nobody who
witnesses such a thing ought to be able to stomach a low
and weak piece of shit human, pretending in front of God
and Nature that he is somehow above the apex predator he
mocks merely because bars separate them. I would bow
before a tiger and admit I am nothing compared to its five-
hundred-pounds of perfect -predatory- poetry.
“I am a Life-Artist. I’m a man who made his life his art
project, tending to each and every thing; a man awake,
paying attention, with deference to his ancestors, and the
received wisdom of God and Great men alike.
“I’m a great man destined to be seen as great in a hundred
years; long after I’ve left the stage. But, man, in the interim
I lived a raucous and interesting life, not some boring, tepid,
do-as-your-told life like most of all mankind. I was large, and
had a capacious heart, and tread on this earth with an
internal landscape sloshing around in me so voluminous and
long and wide that you can see the curvature of the earth as
you scan it. And that world was and is populated by subtle
thought, physical and moral courage, deep and abiding
love, pure and unalloyed hate, aching beauty, apex
magnanimity, and every once in a while, even a sense of
humor.
“All as the shadow of life’s murderous constant,” he paused
to repeat, “constant, is moving like a sun dial under the
terroir of that high sky and that deep earth, ” he said and
gave MO a wink.
MO watched the inmate’s brain imaging come in off the DTI
and fMRI and infuse the cloud and his own interface; the
redolent and finely detailed bodies and breaths and paw and
winged sounds of thousands of predatory cats, and bear and
wolves and carrion-eating birds flew and galloped and ran
along an internal tundra of snow and rock and hemmed in
by a burning forest of Aspens and Pinon and Juniper Pine. He
saw thousands of beetle-bark infested and healthy and
nested-up-high snow laden and wet evergreens. The screen
showed eagles watching as they were untrammeled by the
high striving flames; blazes of diesel and jet fuel and
lightning strikes and St. Elmo’s Fires burning two vivisected
continents on each flanking side.
The inmate thought of this march of predators in images -
not words- but he found himself musing on the Aeneid and
that epigraph that blessed those that can find out the true
cause of things , an allusion to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura .
The next fragment, and its ironic jab at Lucretius dismissed
by most men ran in his head as it printed itself on the
screen:
…and has trampled underfoot all fears and inexorable
fate and the roar of greedy Acheron .
Those words hung like bunting in an empty hall, a large but
ignored sign in the head of this man. Isaiah wondered how
much of such men will be buried under the Vesuvius
expanse that immolated all in the Herculaneum on the bay
of Naples? He thought of the first few charcoal briquettes
burned by the workers for warmth, later discovering that
these coals were actually manuscripts, half ruined -half
preserved- by the fire and black soot?
The man’s mind ran each beast in a stream as the Virtutes
Vocis played in his head. MO decided to add it to the blue-
tooth audio of the room so that it may play in here too, as
the nanobots turned the screen from the imaging data to a
recapitulation of his inner world. Isaiah and MO watched as
the ten-foot by six-foot screen played the images that the
inmate saw -witnessed, created and re-lived in his mind- as
the ethereal voices and perfect string work of the musician
flooded the room and each man’s insides as if they might
themselves be bodies in motion around all noble orbs.
Grab his horns with your left hand and cut his throat with
your right, he heard Miriam say as he tracked the neural
path of left hemisphere and right.
Isaiah just said, “eppur si muove ,” as the image of
Bartolome Murillo lived in his own head for a flash as the
carving of those words on the cell wall were barely legible -
in relief and recreated- for him to ponder. There was more
tragedy in the inmate’s life than Isaiah felt like he could
think on; but the tragedy -the inmate was correct on this
point- was not where his enemies would locate it.
The tragedy was far away from jail and death. Rather, the
tragedy was in the fact that great things cannot replicate
and are doomed to be unique; and that the world itself is
doomed to this fate.
 43.2 Kali Yuga
Those few who gained a share of understanding
Who foolishly unlocked their hearts
Their pent-up feelings, and their visions to the rabble
Have always ended on the cross and pyre.
Forgive me friend, the night is well advanced
We must suspend our conversation –
Faust [Goethe, Wolfgang Johann]

The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream in the prizes that the
nation holds forth, for it is in them that a revolution has taken place and is
biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life
Black Boy [Wright, Richard]

Your good genius will count up your good deeds with white pebbles, the evil
genius the evil deeds with black pebbles
Bardo Thodol [Padmasambhava]

I. 2040 e.v.
The motors spun and built a gaseous barrier around the
missile.
The R-39 wet its beak at a depth of 174 feet in the Caspian,
and the Ta ͷфyh -class submarine imported water to its
ballasts to stabilize. By the time the warhead breached the
surface the Captain had ordered them to accelerate to
22knots and dive a hundred meters down. The crew was
down to 155 sailors from 160; five men had died of the virus
and their bodies had been laid to rest at sea per their
instructions from Bad Mountain.
The MIRVs -which under the conical cap looked like black
incense cones arrayed in dial like a ten hour clock- unlocked
at 500 meters above sea-level and the Captain’s coder was
pinged.
“Èto daleko ,” he said to his First Mate and the sailor marked
the next launch spot to the steersman on a small
whiteboard and co-ordinates were written back and forth.
The Captain offered a drink to the radar man as they watch
the first SLBM move on the antiquated radar screen.
The missile was dry at 900-meters above sea level; the
nuclear warheads armed in succession, 10-3-7-2-8-5-4-1-6-
9.
The Captain gave the communicator a verbal code, in
English:
Its pragmatic maxims, suitable for puppets , as Goethe
says
The communicator allowed the Quantum Key Distribution
code to load onto the qubits -which were in superpositions
between zero and one or upon a zero itself. The QKD
program that the Russians had stolen from the Chinese -who
had stolen it from the Ohio-class submarine program of the
Americans via an aide in Mike DeWine’s office- sent the
signal via laser to a satellite in orbit over the Eurasian
steppe.
The coded message would remain in superposition until
opened on the other end.
It could be sent with the submarine below a hundred
meters, travelling at speeds of 22 knots, and it could not be
forged nor detected once read. It was a onetime message. It
was retrofitted onto the older -Typhoon-class- Russian
submarine for reasons even the Captain was not told. He
deleted the audio file from his hand-held recorder and
thanked the sailor quietly.
He moved back to the center of the helm.
The Captain of the TK-208 -which still had a stress scar from
an accident in 1992 and was originally built in the Sevmash
shipyard that his uncle had been a builder at for 44 years-
took another drink from the Vodka his uncles had gave him
before they deployed back in the spring. He then asked the
First Mate to pass the flask around now that the first nuke
was away and the communication had been sent. It would
be twelve minutes before their next launch site and he
wanted his own flask emptied at once. He worried they’d be
attacked as the SLBM signature would give their position
away to the Americans.
“Da ,” the mate said as he took the silver flask to each man
and watched as they took a drink. His thumb touched the
embossed family escutcheon, but his eyes remained on
each sailor.
Captain Volkov closed his eyes and thought of the Urals. In
his mind he stood straight -before the leg had lost its inch
and gained a zipper scar behind the knee- and he watched a
herd of elk pass through at the end of the bifurcated line -on
either side- of trees. He felt the breeze cool coming off Lake
Zjuratkul . His eyes and visual cortex counted twenty-one
elk, a tally his heart did not care to enumerate; did one
count the petals of the bulb and miss the singular bloom ?
he asked now in reverie as the sub’s lights were dim and the
backs of the heads of his crew were all that he saw.
He had remained quiet as the animals had passed, they
looked just once his way as the tree boughs were avoided,
the scrub oak sniffed and chewed briefly on their sojourn.
His people had not grown impatient; each moment was the
only one. Their PGC’s that the government had implanted in
them back in 2024 had begun to run their protocols; he’d
recalled that all their eyes went black and the perimeter
was set by the drones as they flew along the concrete wall
of their land. For weeks the Russian government had trained
them in their own habitat. They had been told to hunt and
fish as normal; but to limit interaction with other tribes of
the Urals.
They had all slept in that pose of the dead , he
remembered; and he’d recalled that their right hemispheres
began to turn poetry to prose. The stories of their youth
were turned into code for the soldiers who came to their
village. They were treated with respect, he recalled. And
that was why he’d enlisted in the Navy when he turned
twenty-one; fifteen years ago. He was the youngest Captain
of the refurbished typhoon-class subs. His grandmother had
warned him of the Russians. He had warned her to let the
cousins do laundry by the river instead of doing everything
herself.
He saw the elk of his people’s -the Tyumen - forest as they
passed and they each breathed in time, in harmony, and the
green things did grow high until the grazing. He’d been
taught to follow their feeding; he’d been taught everything
except how to deal with the Russian command. He felt
chagrin as he thought of all the mistakes he’d made on his
way on the trail to commander of this old Soviet sub. But he
felt he had an î nger p ă zitor who had given him this one
last shot. He smelled the flowers of spring even in winter. He
remembered the girls of his village; and the way they had
gotten sick two years ago.
His uncles had stood behind him with their horns and their
bows.
His coder opened with a warm feeling in the brain, and he
steeled himself for a message he knew was coming through
the 140 meters of sea water between him and the surface of
the Caspian, and just west of Garabogazköl , the mighty
straight lake of his youth. He thought of his uncles telling
him that the Greeks and Persians called it the Hyrcanian
Ocean . His grandmother still called it Mazandaran , as she
held fast to her Persian roots. She had green eyes and
blonde hair and had looked down on him and his cousins
when they were born black headed with dark eyes.
The coder heated up again in a pulse. And his memories
faded away.
Yamantau mountain of the Belorestsky district of the Urals
had received the message from the sub, deciphered the
code, and sent new orders to all 308 submarines that
surrounded the United States and just outside the nine-
dotted line of the Chinese.
Captain Volkov heard the three tones that preceded all
messages from the old Bashkir name for the bad-mountain
facility; next came a pre-recorded overture of the voice of
the President:
Our nuclear bombers pilots have been grounded too
long. They are happy to start a new life…

II. 2040 e.v.

Travis arrived at ADX and the guards told him that the
inmate was not able to meet him in the booth.
Travis asked why but the guards declined to even speak;
they looked passed him to the next man in line. He was
furious but knew his anger would achieve nothing with
these functionaries; these institutional men.
He turned to his right flank and approached the doors as the
guard called him back. He stopped and turned and
approached just the side of the Plexiglas as a paper note
was slid from another guard to the aperture of the window.
Travis took it quickly in finger and shuttled it to his palm and
made haste toward the door.
He sat in his truck and the snow fell quietly, all the birds
were hidden away and no traffic came. He thought of the
way travel was restricted from Texas now; and how the men
of ADX -the men of the lab he’d met- had made sure he
could bypass the checkpoints and get through this time.
He thought of the death notice in his pocket and the then of
the funerals of everyone on his side of the family except the
old man himself. He smirked as he thought of why, how the
old man who didn’t even take care of himself outlasted
everyone as the virus chewed its way through south Texas.
He upbraided himself for saying that, for only caring about
Texas; but he had to be honest, he didn’t care that people
were dying all along the coasts.
He got a shiver up his spine as the wet of his jacket’s collar
touched his neck. The drops on the windshield were white
then melted to grey clear.
The note was crushed in his palm as he thought of all that
had come and gone. It was his 71st birthday and he had
driven for two days straight through from San Antonio after
he’d received a message via email from Isaiah. He did not
look at this note yet, he saw it was hand written, in black
pen, and said something about love and one of the most
exquisite things . He saw a name written large, it looked like
Simon or Simone, he then thought, as he stared back at the
Colorado mountains behind the fog and snow flurries.
He figured the paper note -the kite , in prison argot - was
necessary for some reason. Every reason was beyond his
ken, his paygrade , he thought with some muted vex. He
didn’t like all this mystery, all this stupid shit . But, he had
agreed twenty years ago, and a deal was a deal. He’d not
be accused of breaking deals by anyone -especially his
brother- and so he followed through. He felt sleepy and laid
his head back on his seat and began to think and then to
dream, and then something else.
His brain began to think of that meeting in the lab. Such a
strange place that was both memory and invention , he
thought, as the brain began to release small amounts of
DMT from the pineal gland. Each lobe shut down in
sequences over the 93 seconds it took to recall -decades
ago- when Isaiah and MO had explained what they needed
from him, for the inmate , they had called him. They had
called him that before Travis demanded they call him -call
his brother- by his name.
“Lyndon,” Travis recalled Isaiah saying and even nodding
in assent to this correction, “is unable to uptake our
technology without your help.”
“Why does he need technology?” Travis asked with
suspicion. He was furious with the State and all its
adjuncts for incarcerating his brother, refusing to issue
him pain relief, refusing to treat him as a man. He was
outraged by the way this man born perfectly for 0 A.D
was treated not just as anomaly -which he was- but as
unclean, as unkind, as unjust, when he was just born too
late, or maybe too soon, he’d often add when others
asked about his baby-brother.
“Well, it will provide him with a new life, a grand life, free
from all this,” MO had said as he moved his eyes and
head about the room to denote everything -in fact-
outside the lab.
“Is this what he wants?” Travis asked with set jaw and
fists balled. He felt ready to punch his way out of this
room if these two men -he thought them men back then-
said one wrong word.
“It will be, yes,” Isaiah said. He could read Travis’ central
nervous and endocrine system and could read his vex.
He issued the appropriate bio-chems to front-load his
enteric system then the limbic and assuage his
cerebellum with endorphins and a slight muscle relaxant
in addition to the bonding chems . Isaiah liked that Travis
was sticking up for Lyndon.
“Can I ask you for a favor?” Isaiah then asked, knowing
that to ask a small favor was -counter intuitively- a way
to earn trust, and ingratiate a man to a man.
“Ok,” Travis said with some distrust. He saw the one
man -the man who looked very clean and unaged,
without wrinkle or pimple or hair- pick up a black deck of
cards from the grey slab that held flowers and glasses
and -he now saw- a grey box with a glass shield.
“I cannot tell anyone but MO here, and you, what it is
that I desire. So, I am trusting you to keep a secret that
if you tell, if you reveal, if you even hint at, will ruin me,
my plans -and I submit- will ruin your brother and his
plans. I cannot prove this to you, I can only assert it and
hope that you trust me as I am about to trust you,”
Isaiah said and turned his palms up and open, his elbows
at just 4-degrees below a perfect 90-degrees.
“Ok,” Travis said with a jaw that barely moved.
“Your brother is able to do many things,” Isaiah said, and
Travis felt a, but , coming and so he intervened at once
to stand up for his little brother.
“He’s a fucking genius, and he can -and he has- done
things nobody has done. I’ve seen him build a home
from scratch, he’s built himself from nothing; I’ve never
seen anyone build more from less.”
“I agree,” Isaiah said, although he knew this was not
exactly -technically- true, but it was true enough. “And
because I -and MO too- admire him so much, we want to
help him. But, his personality, his neuro-anatomical
structures that undergird his personality are so far apart,
so extreme that we cannot get him to rest upon a state,
a position long enough for our equipment to extract its
information.
“As advanced as we are, we are still limited -and likely
will be for many years- limited in what we can do. We
cannot bridge the gap between his extremes to
 instantiate his essence.” Isaiah said with a mouth now
twisting into a grimace.
“Well, what are you trying to do?” Travis asked hotly.
“We want to upload him onto a steady-state platform,
we want to preserve him in amber, so-to-speak,” MO
said as Isaiah nodded.
“What?” Travis asked. He recalled how the lab had
looked; the strange grey of the concrete combined with
the green of the walls of plants. The way the walls
moved with bugs and birds came back to him in this
reminiscence.
“We have platforms that can handle the compressed
data of the gestalt human being now. We have the room
on a platform just ten nanometers wide. But, his brain
architecture is such that -and this is so unique that it is
present in only .001% of the population- his brain is such
that he oscillates between radical extremes of each of
the five personality traits in real time like a photon under
an electronic microscope.
“You are familiar with quantum physics, yes,” Isaiah then
asked as Travis nodded.
“I mean, the basics,” Travis then added.
“Under observation a photon can be wave or particle, it
exists in a state of super-position at all times. Potential.
As potential. And only once observed does it collapse
into one or the other,” Isaiah said.
“Ok,” Travis said.
“Well, in most men, they have a point, on a continuum
along a long arc for each of the five traits. They are
somewhere on the line of trait openness, neuroticism,
conscientiousness, intro or extroversion, agreeableness
or disagreeableness,” Isaiah explained.
 “Ok,” Travis said.
“Well, your brother fails to occupy one point along the
continuum on any of the five traits,” MO said.
“What, is that like bi-polar?” Travis asked.
“No, it’s nothing like that. Bi-polar is a swing between
mania and depression, it is contained in one attribute:
affect. Your brother is almost always in a state of
positive affect, he enjoys almost everything, even,”
Isaiah began as he was interrupted.
“Especially,” MO broke in as he knew .004 seconds
before Isaiah said each word what he was going to say.
“Conflict,” Isaiah said.
“Ok,” Travis said again.
“Well, he is rarely depressed. So, no, he is not bipolar.
What he is, well, he is both extremes of each five traits.
He is an extreme introvert and extrovert; he hides for
months and sees no one then will talk with abandon with
a man for days as if they are best friends. He is an
extremely disagreeable person, arguing over the
smallest infraction or point of detail and then so
agreeable a man that he would give up half his million-
dollar company to a woman just on a whim.
“He is extremely conscientious working twelve hours
days, three-hundred-sixty days a year and will then -out
of the blue- refuse -over the smallest personal pique-
refuse to lift a finger in labor.
“And, he is so open -so high in trait openness- he will tell
a stranger his most closely guarded secrets, and then
refuse to even disclose -even use- his real name with
someone for no reason at all.
“And he so insouciant to not fear death at all over the
most minuscule point of honor, and then become so
 neurotic as to worry over one word in one sentence he
used in an hour long speech; afraid it may have offended
someone or conveyed the wrong impression of him,”
Isaiah explained.
“Yeah, he’s odd,” Travis said. “Nobody in our family
understands him. But I do.”
“But he is odd in an odd way,” MO added as he shuffled
the cards haphazardly.
“Ok,” Travis said with some annoyance that they hadn’t
heard him say he understood his brother better than
they thought. He too wanted to be a goat herder in the
Highlands, he too wanted the simple life, he too felt like
crushing skulls. He didn’t act on it, but he felt like it just
like his brother did. He wanted to tell them all that. He
too liked the mist and cold.
He flexed even his toes in his boots. His eyes narrowed.
Travis thought of the day they had last spoken before all
these legal travails, when Lyndon had explained the way
a genome -their genome- could contain fealty for goats,
and fog and the way their ancestors lived 12,000 years
ago. He had said their people were last in pure form in
the 14th century of the common era, Travis recalled and
he remembered thinking the way Lyndon said, common
era , made him seem strange and aloof.
Travis thought of the two rivers -one roiling above with
class-V crests, one cavitating below- and he ruminated
on how they began at the Ben Nevis together and ended
in the one-sea that issued forth from the Isle of Skye. He
traced in his mind the creeks as they left the Ionia lee,
then lapped the Icelandic shores and eroded Norman
coasts and evaporated to occlude the Caledonian
greens.
 “Technically odd. Like, odd in a way that is not normal;
even at the tails of the normal distribution. He is beyond
odd, he has two people in him, and they are opposites.
Not just two people, but God and Satan both,” Isaiah
said as MO nodded.
“Yeah, he can be, well, he has a short fuse,” Travis said.
He felt bad for truncating all he thought of his brother
into such sentences. He felt ten-to-one what he had just
said.
“No, that is not what we mean. He is two distinct people
in one. And two opposites. His two people are as far
apart as any two can be, along each of the five traits.
There is no corollary among the genomes that we have
investigated,” Isaiah said.
“And we have ninety-four-percent of the earth’s genome
on file now,” MO added.
“He is sui generis ,” Isaiah said as he read the brother’s
allostatic system again and loaded up more bio-chems .
“Is that why he is such a dick?” Travis asked with a grin.
He masked his affinity with chiding jokes; he moved left
while feeling right.
“Yes, and why he’d kill himself to save your pride if
necessary. Yes, to both,” Isaiah said with his eyes locked
on to the man.
“What?” Travis asked with incredulity.
“He wanted to kill Kenner, your brother-in-law, just to
avenge your pride,” MO began.
“Honor. Your honor,” Isaiah clarified.
“He felt Kenner was so evil,” MO continued on, “so
mendacious -and had plotted against you so thoroughly-
that he wanted to kill him. And the only reason he did
not was because he felt your wife would blame you. He
 refrained only to save your marriage -a marriage he
thinks is phony anyway, but he knows you need- and
although he knew that killing Kenner would place himself
in a type of danger he could not escape as easily as the
murders he planned for his own enemies, that is not why
he refrained. He knew he’d be exposed due to, well, due
to many reasons.”
MO stopped speaking and thus stopped an in-depth
rationale -not explaining along metabolic and legal
vectors- as these other reasons were too complex to
describe without confusing the man they needed to use
for this project. To confuse was to lower the likelihood of
agreement, MO knew. So he stopped adding detail.
Too much information can actually -64% of the time- ruin
what less information will manifest or preserve, MO
thought as he produced bio-chems into the air to
activate the older brother’s left hemisphere; overriding
the confusion of the right hemisphere in this, the
inmate’s kin.
“The point, is that he wanted to kill a man over your
honor, not his own,” Isaiah added as he move subtly,
adjusting his stance.
“Well, Kenner is just stupid, he’s not evil,” Travis said.
His fists had relaxed. His jaw was loose.
“That is not true, and you know it; and Lyndon knows it.
Kenner sabotaged you on purpose. And you let him off
the hook to avoid the contretemps with your wife and
him and your little world. You did a cost benefit analysis
and came down on the side of pretending his was just
fatuous and not malicious. But deep down you know he
fucked you on purpose. You know it in your balls,” Isaiah
said as he provoked the brother and issued oxytocin and
vasopressin just under his nose.
 Travis did know it, but he refused to say it aloud. He felt
loyal to his brother, all at once, in a rush.
He knew that if he accused his brother-in-law -Kenner- of
malice that his own marriage would suffer, as his wife
was more loyal to the family as a thing writ large than to
him -Travis- as individual. But -he thought- as long as he
never pushed it, never tested her, he could maintain the
fiction that she was loyal to him.
Females saw the whole, not the individual , he felt
instinctively as he saw his brother’s face in his mind.
“Anyway, we need help,” MO said as he could read that
Travis was now primed.
“Ok,” Travis said eager to not ruminate on Kenner any
further.
“We need genetic material from you to balance it out,”
MO said. They needed his real-time gene expression
under five different brain states too. But they did not
need to explain the details, they had just needed to run
him through the phases. They would need him to donate
genetic material in real time over many years, under
many brain states, for their experiment to have any
chance to work.
“But that DNA needs to be close enough to be, well, to
have chiral valence. To be the same but mirrored, so-to-
speak. A random person with a mollifying affect would
be rejected as too dissimilar, but we’ve run your genome
and it is almost exact, you two are so similar as to be
nearly identical in all the ways we need,” MO explained
as he stopped shuffling the black deck.
“We are strangely similar,” Travis said. “Did he ever tell
you about how we had our business partners try to steal
the business from us at the same time and,” he began to
say as he was interrupted.
 “Yes, and you had a lawyer and the law on your side and
he had no one,” Isaiah said as Travis felt the pang of
guilt at this incongruous part of the analogy. Then he felt
anger because he felt this man was taking a shot at him.
“But, you can help him now, in a way that will supersede
all past failures,” MO said. An assuaging offer was thus
laid. Travis’ brain swerved back and forth between all
these emotions and states.
“And all we need is your genetic material and eight
hours of your time here in the lab,” Isaiah added. He did
not mention that each time the man came to visit that
they would measure his blood and brain as the two men
-the two brothers- spoke and argued and occasionally
agreed.
“Eight hours, really?” Travis asked.
“Yes, and you are not due back in Texas until Monday,
yes?” Isaiah asked already knowing the answer.
“Well, yeah, I guess.” Travis conceded. He had left on
Thursday and arrived on Saturday, and so technically he
could leave tonight at midnight and still arrive back to
work on Monday.
“So, if we get started now, you can be back in Texas by
0800hrs on Monday,” Isaiah said as the route and
timeline populated the screen to their right flank. Travis
saw the looming screen and was impressed by its detail.
He wondered if Lyndon would ever know what he was
doing; if these men would tell him. He wondered if it was
the right thing to do. But, he knew if he kept asking
questions he might chicken out. So, he began to speak
instead of think.
“Ok, what do I need to do? Do I need to fast for twelve
hours or what?” he said as they smiled at him and asked
him to sit in the inmate’s usual chair.
 “Hawai’i has a daily and yearly average of 80-degrees.
82.5 in summer day; 77.5 in winter night. The Mojave
has the same average; but it’s 120-degrees in summer
day, and 40-degrees in winter night. Same average, but
achieved in two very different ways,” Isaiah said, as
Travis nodded and wondered if the experiment had
already begun.
The memory faded at that and Travis laid his head back in
the truck.
The music played softly and Tavis slept in the parking lot as
the orders from the Colorado Nation Guard went out closing
the borders. The song said:
Sinnerman run to your grave; the grave will not hold
you…

III. 2038 e.v.

The sun had been hidden behind the clouds and now the
moon was at their noon. The ambient light was the same as
when they first fell asleep. The shadows were all that had
progressed. Fog lay all about -two meters off the ground- as
if suspended by Heaven’s own strings.
“Nobody talks about the pernicious and dissipating effect of
love; of amorous love. It’s seen as the highest good, as the
goal of everyman. Even the fags want marriage now. They
miss the point like the rest of us,” he said as they awoke
from their slumber -on the path- to his speaking and moving
his arms. They had slept passed him; as the elk-people
passed. They often took these naps together in the day;
they often sat up at night.
But he had awoke and began speaking as they blinked and
looked around.
“I remember the words of Anacreon , twenty-five-hundred
years ago: and, what did I unthinkingly do? I took to arms,
undaunted too; I fought with love, I fought with love! Vain,
vain is every outward care, my foe’s within, and triumphs
there.
“You think he didn’t know the answer? Shit, we all know the
answer, but we fail to show resolve. We have such innate
and primordial need for social bonds, we make friends and
lovers and hold our children up as the only thing worth
saving in a flood. And of course, there are the psychopaths
who don’t care at all about other men. But, I’m not speaking
of them. I’m speaking of those of us with engorged -
tumescent- hearts, with cathexis for the approval of our kin
and culture, who want to be liked and above all, loved. And
to love, as well.
“We want it, but we know this social compromise is death; it
is the death of anything noble or original or autonomous in
us. We know it. And we fight against the corruption of love;
the amelioration of social bonds; we kick against the pricks.
“Goddammit, we have hearts, we aren’t cold men. But we
demand the right to be alone to preserve that which is
worth preserving: autonomy . Can just one set of men, some
janissary or monkish sect, perform a duty higher than
slaking lusts and assuaging loneliness? Is there not some
higher call than to be the seed to some future flower; to
prepare the ground for some regent’s walk; to wipe away
occluding clouds so a princess can ride a chariot to some
moon or star and begin it all over again?” he said with
sarcasm and listed his arm over the grey smolder of the
coals. He pointed to where the fog met the smoke.
“Can not a man be himself, by himself, complete?” he asked
as he watched some of the men wander away to relieve
themselves; some men close their eyes again.
“Can a man not live in the moment and not for some future
gain? Is this not possible without the inner flood and outer
damnation? Must we explain ourselves? I guess we must.
We seem such pathetic cases to the rest of man. Men, who
like the deluded prisoner thinks the free man beyond his
own bars is -in fact- himself behind those bars that trap him,
that trap the prisoner. The prisoner laments the free man’s
position on the wrong side of the bars. Our position is seen
as wrong by almost all of man; and yet they have barely one
percent the knowledge we have. Even less our wisdom.
“Take a look around; and see who has more ground upon to
walk, see which one of us roams wild and free and which is
tethered to his fears and lusts. How far can you, you
common man,” he paused as he meant to indict the Jacks,
but wouldn’t say it straight, “retreat from the prison bars
you think you are on the free side of? Can you walk a free
fathom -or two- before you are forced to turn around and
head toward those fetters again; to re-gain your wife’s and
brother-in-law’s approval like some serf? Well?
“What would you think of a man who could walk away from
every chain, who had the time and space to never have to
look back again?” he asked and poked at the fire’s charred
logs and twigs; turning the grey and black and deep red. He
had put the old coffee on the grate and let the coals reheat
it from last night.
He had allowed his eyes to focus right in front, as metaphor
, he supposed. He watched the coals not the Jacks.
He felt this obsession with the future was like all things: cure
and curse at once. It cured the problem of short lives, it
made man live long. It cured promiscuous violence, it
allowed tempers to cool. It cured ossified societies, it
allowed the culture to grow in complexity.
It was not without merit. He felt embarrassed.
He thought of the M ā ori , and how they had been made of
the sub-atomic seeds of aggression, manliness. And how the
British guns in 1815 e.v., had accelerated their wars on one
another, each iwi against the other. A cleansing, a
Damascus annealing , he thought and he thought of Blax;
he saw the moko upon him in his mind. Although they’d
make him call it, Kirithui, as they would claim he was not
Māori, Jack added to his thoughts, as caveat.
Hongi Hiki, of the Nga Puhi, killed thousands in his quest for
ancient -long-held- grudges and revenge. A quarter of Māori
died in the twenty years of musket conflict, and the
bloodshed made Christianity grow it seemed; like the blood
of Christ killed over and over again.
Man’s blood made Christ grow , he thought as he held the
stick still.
Warfare stopped by 1840 of the common era , he thought.
And the warrior tribes were pacified by this meek god inside
tired man; man so made after too much war . But the MAO-a
short allele remained buried like warrior’s silver coins in the
Icelandic foss . The M ā ori had it at twice the rate of
modern man. The M ā ori were men of buried treasure , he
thought as he thought of all that ocean between them. The
time seemed less than the space.
He thought of the ants, Argentine to Tetramorium caespitum
, fighting incessantly. Hamafyas baboons, common chimps,
and Mungi hyenas versus Scratching Rock hyenas too. He
thought of baby elephant teeth that grew into regal tusks;
what EO Wilson called hypertrophy.
Man’s dentine, his teeth, a society grossly emerging from
innate traits of expanding tribal man. His tusks so far out
from his mouth, he thought and felt the heat off the coals
and coffee.
Some men are content to be, and not grow; sated to live
now, not in some future tense; to be in the noon-sun of true,
and not shade the truth so that a greater truth may come
later on .
“Maybe,” he said aloud.
But those men were always wiped out by the aggregating,
accreting, teeth-to-tusk of striving men; men willing to
stride into the future to sacrifice what is in their mouth right
now . “This was always haloed, given over to hagiocracy of
the State, and panegyrics by man, this future tense, a
reified good according to them,” he said aloud as the Jack’s
heads bowed in sleepiness; he heard Jack come up the path.
Even that cleared path looked unrighteous to him now. Then
he heard Jack as he veered off the trod ground and into the
sticker bushes and weeds, the grasses and bugs and
grasshoppers jumped and moved and some were crushed
as he moved laterally from the trail. His ears told him all
this, not his eyes; he stared at the fire rocks and burnt logs.
But he knew he’d have to think long-term to gain this
immediate desire. It was a conundrum , he admitted. He’d
have to give up the crown to get them to gather ‘round.
He’d have to forget his true desire to stay warm without a
fire, he thought -suspicious they were listening in- in third
person and in code too.
He thought of the rat -whose tooth grew unless worn down-
into the brain to commit seppuku .
 44. Meaͷest Maᴙiners
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter
ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces, if even the
most mournful, perchance the most abased among them all, shall at times lift
himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some
ethereal light
The Whale [The Author]

In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin,

Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man on many multiplied his kind,
Ere one to one was cursedly confined
When nature prompted, and no law denied,
Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;
The Israel’s monarch after heaven’s own heart,
His vigorous warmth did variously impart
To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command
Scattered his Maker’s image through the land
Absalom and Achitophel [Dryden, John]

And, Behold, I -even I- do bring a flood of waters upon the earth

Genesis 6:17 [King James Bible]

I. 2039 e.v.
“You don’t get it. I don’t give one fuck about western
civilization, Blax. I don’ t care,” Jack said. He held a
pinecone in the hand and was taking it apart without looking
at it. The fingers were calloused enough to feel none of its
barbs.
“It’s a fucking abstraction, it’s this big lumbering species
that ought return to the sea,” he said. His eye twitched on
the left side and the lip rose a bit as if two hooks had been
sunk in him to pull the lid down and the lip up.
Blax was searching his brain to try to turn the boy -the man-
around but then he realized he hadn’t really heard him. And
-fearing he had missed something, and maybe even sinned-
he stopped his CNS’s roiling and scheming and thinking and
replayed what Jack had said again in his brain.
Jack Four just stood there; they both stood there as Blax
listened again. The wind had died down for a few moments
yet the trees bounced still from the last wave of air to come
over the ridge. A Redhawk lowered its left wing into the
ravine’s air and drew a line with its distal feathers
underlining the dark bottom of grey clouds.
Blax thought of the hippogriffs of the Eclogues , and an
image of the Bust came into his head as if beset by actual
feathered birds. Then bronze arrows of headdress made
shadow on metopes and then each leading edge appeared
as the sun moved west. He pricked finger tips on each of
five; then held the plumages behind in the palm of his mind.
Drops of the blackest blood rose like half a Spartan globe.
He smeared it on the tines of her shadow lines. He thought
of the theory of the hippos returning to the sea as whales;
he thought of erstwhile bacteria like the Mimivirus who had
reverted to the mean of the prokaryotic cell. He knew, in his
heart, what Jack was feeling and it swamped him, drowned
him, in sixty-five years of three-sea layers of doubt and
regret and ponderous anomie .
At once he was whelmed. He could no longer see. He could
only feel. He felt himself begin to kneel.
He had to think of her -the coder had failed to keep her at
bay, embayed- and his anger rose at his grief; his legs
remained erect; his chin level with his line of sight. Spy
versus spy , he thought in black and white and stared at the
cone in Jack’s hand.
He’d forestalled all that he’d wanted, all that he was built for
-all that he was good at- to build this contraption -this rube
Goldberg device of a thing , he thought- before him. His
heart -then hands- ached to lay upon this man, this tool, this
plot. He had done it to protect and preserve and defend the
greatest civilization the planet had ever seen or been reared
by. And Jack wanted to put a bullet in its head, a mercy kill,
and let it fucking die, he thought and Blax couldn’t come up
with a reason to argue with him at all.
He -Jack- seemed so large in his fore. Blax couldn’t look
around him. He got in the way of even his eyes.
Jack put his left hand on Blax and squeezed and felt it still
large and hard but the finger pads felt their way sufficiently
around the old man’s shoulder now. Jack too looked around
and saw the clouds low, the trees inert and the birds circle
in sorties out over the drop to their shelf here at Lot 45.
Blax saw his Jack in front but the mind blurred the eyes -that
data from the eyes- and an inner landscape seemed -at
once- all around him. Salt flats and leaves of grass and the
spiral of downed cones cold and tight; a desert of blue sky.
Genes cascaded in AGCT combinations, hundreds, then
thousands of enzymes long in his head like sentences from
some lost book -in some language he once knew- but that
needed -required- breaks between letters in order to read
them. He saw the Monoamine Oxidize A short-chain allele
repeat in clusters under rubrics that ran over each set like a
roof, like his father’s hand over his head when he’d once
been measured.
God -he recollected he was once a boy- I was once
measured by that man .
He recalled the way his father had set him -not unlovingly-
in the door jamb of the old house in Germany, the lignite
coal in the cellar, the fear that came with each night, the
white paint on everything like lard, icing, a hundred winter’s
snow. He saw Lee’s hand there over his head to mark where
he came to on the jamb, and saw the categories over each
set of alleles:
Indo-European Comanche Maori Mongol Scoti
 AGCTTCGTC GLCGCTCACG GTAGCTGCTT TAGACAAG
TCCAAGTACG
And he saw the genes glow like so long ago; like the Medea
allele in the elk. He saw the Rosetta stone, the common
ancestor walk back as if his own life was too in rewind, and
it appeared like seedling then mottled seed then shadow on
the ground as if from cloud and a million nutrients in soil
from a billion worms casting off their refuse and some first
ray of sun -some first rise in temperature- some first
movement not by wind but from within and it was the… he
paused: The Scythians .
His coder let this information Jack had held in him like his
own ovum burst inside like spittle on the face from some
tirade, like cross contamination from blood-borne
pathogens, like rhyme makes a man sing his ABCs. The
mycelium breathed. He saw the slanted cross of the Good
Thief, he heard the absence of a plea.
The air was full of spores.
He believed in dignity. He realized he’d been imbibing from
the forest this whole time. From that first shard of light, and
now still filled with this psilocybin analog, this new thing
that rose to the level of their knees and he comprehended
how often he had prayed. My God, he thought, each time I
prayed I lowered my nose to that pelagic layer, and
breathed the earth’s new code, new code, new motherlode.
And when Jack pulled away his hand these visions and
understandings disappeared like the explosion of dynamite
robbed the derrick-fire of necessary oxygen and snuffed it
out at once in dust and soot and smoke. Concussive waves ,
he almost thought, but did not.
Instead he just watched the hand and arm -of Jack- pull
away.
He had given up so much to raise these Jacks, he thought as
he had looked up and away from the wounds, interrupted
the feelings, swallowed pride & pain beyond what he
thought he could take, and yet he had took it. And he had
done it with purpose as his only real fuel to this machine
that went on and on. And it was a machine. He saw Jack now
in his fore and saw a machine. Its perfections, its lack of
curves, its space, malice, some metal -electric- root. The
PGC always on, always blocking errant thoughts, Blax
supposed and then recalled how he had warned them not to
use this block -post-genetic neural block- of conscience and
memory and feeling in order to carry out the mission.
The mission becoming more and more of all their lives.
It was a machine -he was himself an automaton, he briefly
thought- it was a machine that he’d used -that he’d believed
in- to carry their fight for this thing that his boy -that was
him in some way- didn’t even want.
How many times had he worked so hard for shit he didn’t
even want in life? My God , he thought. All that bullshit I had
fought for: some woman who was a whore; some object that
held no power -slaked no real desire- once acquired; some
idea that turned to ash, then dust, then nothing at all in this
head.
He saw the white flies spin in a shard of light like dust; he
heard a buzz. He heard that Jack didn’t breathe.
But occidental culture had been above that, it had been
large -grand, spacious- big enough for us all to ride,
capacious enough inside to house them, it contained all the
great works of literature and art and oenology and the
artisanal and the poetic and theurgic, and promethean , he
thought in that manner he had of making detailed lists with
more and more need of the Oxford comma. The genes
cascaded in four letters, the words in twenty-six. He saw
forty-six names and a hundred and forty-four pains rattled
like hitting piano key up his spine until it crescendo in the
neck. He winced and his coder issued a narcotic at once but
he belayed it in pique -in anger- at his own hypocrisy.
His throat hurt like he might not be able to swallow any
more.
Blax thought, it -the West- was not tawdry and low and
commercial like the countries themselves; the peoples
themselves; it was above them, it was still pure, was it not?
Yes? Please? He asked himself and he asked God.
He still heard that Jack had no need to breathe.
But he knew what Jack meant. He knew it the more he
answered against it. Opposites growing like helix, like
phoenix, like… he paused. The more he argued his side the
more Jack’s side came into relief. It was too big, too
complex, that was its fault -he thought of Der Tod und die
Wollust in Prague - not that it had been damaged or sullied
or riven from neglect. It was too big, it tried to do too much,
it wanted -he thought now he could see that it wanted- to
return to the sea and be buoyed so that its girth and weight
need not hold itself up on this ethereal, numinous substance
they all lumbered through upon the land . My God how hard
it is to remain upright on the land?
But the sea, the sea , he thought with chagrin at how often
he mentioned God now.
He breathed in that air and suddenly halted as if such an act
would also weight him down.
“Fuck,” he finally said -with an expulsion of air jammed with
CO2 - and Jack placed a hand on the old man’s neck now and
breathed shallowly so as to not make a sound. He could see
the romantic in Blax there -here & now- the way he was
defeated -not merely despondent- by this loss of the West in
the mind. Jack saw right then the way their genome was
romantic and why, and how and thus -now- truly why at a
much deeper level.
“I just want something small, simple, primitive, LT,” Jack
said, giving Blax -the man- his rank back; a beau geste , an
offering, a decent thing to say. A lie.
His own mind filled with the genes he sought, that he’d pick
up in his ships that he saw at night -each night in his
dreams as his bunk lay lower than theirs, low enough to
breathe in the effluvium of the earth- but they were not
genes, they were men. He saw men -isolatoes- of Mongolian
decent, M ā ori unbent, Kalenjin made from lives with no
ease, Bushido Japanese , and yes, his bearded & broad-
chested Scoti’s .
He saw them at taffrail and in the nest, on quarterdeck five
abreast. He saw them at capstan and in league with the
Captain that he must advise more and more. He heard his
own whispers to the man in charge. He had a job to do, one
of many; e pluribus unum , he thought and smiled at the
irony.
“A return to the sea,” Blax said -interrupting Jack’s own
ideas of ship not sea- and then Blax thought of his own
bride and their nearly two-year old child, and how simple
and perfect it all was; if he was just simple enough to love it
all. Why did he try to tame such large areas of the universe,
make ordered -Apollonian- cosmos where Dionysian
blackness once was? Why map the whole universe, why
usurp God like that? he asked. He didn’t encode his
thoughts.
He let Jack rifle through him with the bots if he wanted, he
opened his PGC to him again in magnanimous defeat.
But Jack didn’t access it; he was ok to let the man have his
privacy in his head now; he had taken enough of what he
needed from Blax. Jack showed some class. But his own
thoughts would go on and on out into each empty space and
Blax would think -drink- from the things all the clones knew -
the common hive of mind- as long as Jack held his hand
there at the damaged neck, the neck with even the throat
collapsing now, side-by-side with the starbursting spine.
Jack breathed loudly just to calm the old man; to ensure him
that he was -in fact- human.
“The Jacks are too perfect, LT,” Jack Four said apropos of
nothing. “They live with a quarter-million clones just as
perfect as themselves. They accomplish way more than me
and the Wolves ever will. And yet they miss the fucking
point. The Wolves are less, as men they are less. But so is
man. Man is less. And without less, there can be no God.
“Man is only possible if God retreats. And a King is only
elected by men less than he,” Jack said as Blax looked out
over the feral wilderness of the southeast. He saw ruddy slip
rock and sage green trees and a sky vacant of anything with
designs. He felt the heat of Jack’s hand and the pain
lessened there and increased on the other side.
“I wanted men who could get better, improve, and thus they
had to have the possibility for sin. I needed them to be
below me, so I had a chance to lead them. The Jacks can’t
lead their own men, they are too good already. They are
exactly the same as they are; they need no improvement,
just instructions. They are plug & play, man.
“That’s what western civilization is, LT. It’s all too perfect
already; it has no room for what we as men -as Wolves -
want to do. It has all the answers, just ask it,” he said and
laughed with little to no mirth. And of course he lied, Jack
lied about leadership and his role. He left out the nuances of
what he’d do and what he’d need and from whom.
“I understand,” Blax said and he did; and he hated that he
understood. He felt his whole life was a lie except one truth,
one thing he could do that would be true. His own hand rose
and covered Jack’s upon the neck and throat.
“We want to begin the world again. We want to start over
from scratch. We see the Black Sun as a thresher and we
feel we’ve reached the center now and are ready to move
through it past this ornate and over-wrought bullshit. We
want war again; we want it. And LT, the war is here. It is
here. You know that it’s upon us and there is no going back
now. It is time for destroying; a creative destroying.
“Isaiah has unleashed it; allowed it. And only the primitives
will remain now. Anything more complex than us will perish;
they won’t last three days after today. The Jacks will survive,
thrive even. But I swear it, if they try to rebuild that
monstrosity again with all the democracy and individualistic
bullshit, me and the Wolves will put our finger in their eye. I
swear it,” he said.
“I know,” Blax said as he kept staring out at the sky; it
seemed larger over the shrinking land. He wondered where
the clouds were; he had thought it might rain today. That
one ray with the flies had gone away. The smoke from the
fires was just haze.
“Leave it all buried; ok, just let that shit stay wherever it is,”
Jack said and squeezed Blax’s neck as if he were now the
King of Jacks and Blax saw the black bones tattooed on each
finger with the OATTH runes inked just below the large
knuckles that had been alloyed with bronze and titanium -
and luminescent bacterium- under the skin. Jack’s hand was
bent and straight in odd ways, it was black and white
equally this way, and it looked like the hand of patient
Death -watching as they blinded the clock-maker- and
himself no longer a mere man.

II. 2040 e.v.

Isaiah loaded this newest -the 4th gen - Medea gene onto
one vector of CRISPR-cas9/13.
He let it uncoil inside the bacteriophage and then allowed it
to enter the small aquarium he had built for his new
reticulated python. The python sniffed the air with her
tongue and the aquarium next to it remained dark.
Isaiah allowed the polymer box to reduce opacity and the
Argentine ants began to move in rows toward the small
aperture he had built into the eastern side of the tank.
He saw the Chinese nationals had already begun their
expeditionary missions inland from the coasts, they were
coming not by sea but by air. They were landing from HALO
drops and moving in five-man units. They were equipped
with cloaking bots -invisible to their prey- and they followed
the nanobots loaded sufficiently to kill each law
enforcement officer in each town of 60,000 or less within
ninety-seconds from first to last. They were planning -again-
to hollow out the country from its interior, he thought as he
ignored them for now.
He turned from the counter and allowed the membrane to
become permeable as the ants entered the two aquariums
on either side. The nanobot with the Medea gene -as the
ants came in- located each organism and laid base-pair
larva just at the root of the brain.
MO was talking with Steven as Steven was rubbing his head
and then cheeks in distress. Isaiah thought of issuing a
benzo to him but deferred and let the man feel his stress. It
was not the hormesis of elevation, but it might do the man
some good anyway , Isaiah thought with a grin.
He had issued iodine nanobots to Jack Four so he could dose
each of his people as the radiation would hit their region in
120 hours or less. The bots would keep the iodine levels
high enough to absorb the mutagenic gamma rays for up to
nine months without needing updated , he had surmised. He
rolled his neck and issued himself a boost of androgens and
endogenous opiates to quell the pain from his deadlifts
twelve hours previous and to knock down his nerves about
his trip.
He monitored caloric expenditure and adjusted it by 3%.
He watched the underground compound, that 35-acres of
concrete and steel and water and glass just below Lot 45 ;
accessing his cameras and the drones that monitored air
temp and humidity and both watered & thinned the
vineyards deep underground. He liked thinking Blax and
Valance and the baby were above it, oblivious to it, but
holding it down, he added with a genuine smile. He then
reminded himself to inject them with the same iodine bots ;
sending a DM-kite to the corvids he had augmented the
previous year to disperse all future updates for Blax and The
Bust and The Child.
He thought too of how the magicicada would rise now and
inoculate the forest’s predator and prey with the same
genomic augmentation he had built seventeen years before.
He checked his list.
They -these long-game insects he admired so much- had
incubated their special genomic payload, allowed its power
to accrue slowly in the germ of those one-million flying
bugs. He allowed himself a moment of hubris, he enjoyed
how he had planned for each contingency, even though war
had never been guaranteed, and had -at one point- dropped
to a mere one chance in five.
His smile grew as he thought of all that bedrock, all that
ancient sea-bed, that limestone of southern Colorado
perfectly suited for the gravel layer one mile thick above it.
Isaiah had blasted all that terroir over the last 20 years -
using micro-harmonics via nanobots - to make, to build, to
destroy, the substrate for the First Growth’s vine stock -itself
now almost 60-months into their life-cycle- underground. He
had made gravel between this millions-of-years-old bedrock
and the poor soil on the floor and 10-meters down from the
concrete rooms that spread out in five spokes to a wheel; an
anteroom that housed the stele of the Author and all his
progeny spread out like tendrils to a lateral flank of just six
names; five men and a woman; the four Jacks, a King and a
Queen.
All, he thought, of one genome, like haploid diploid eusocial
ants. He admired how different they had become despite
their identical blueprint to this life.
Isaiah then tapped into the drones inside the anteroom and
watched inside the hub of the vineyard and art rooms from
a POV just north -and 74” from the floor- that contained the
concrete stele ; the artifact, the monument, the map.
The bas relief’s watery pores slicked it -high-calcium water
with a 7.1 pH was excreted from a well that ran behind and
out of it- and each member of the family, the blown seed of
The Author landing on the large rock like empires, like dirt
mounds, burial mounds, the mothe of the pubic mound of
each young girl, rose and lit up and was also riven and cut
down into the surface.
It all grew soft in appearance as the mist lay upon the hard
lith.
He let each genome build itself in his mind as he watched it
and let the audio play as Lyndon told and re-told the story of
his great great-uncle and the vastness of that man and all
men it was assumed, implied, in the prose-poem he read off
into the hub of that room.
He updated this version of the white-shark’s aquarium, he
spied the fish swimming languidly in the middle of its
predatory cycle, he moved to each room and ran his mind
like fingers through grass on each painting and the leaves of
each ancient book they had stored. He saw the
Philosopher’s original notebooks stand out today as he
perused, and Isaiah placed his mind’s finger on the
shopping list the man had written over his Will to Power ,
feuilleton .
Ah , the Marbles , he then thought- and his mind lay down
by Dionysus himself in repose. Isaiah’s mind’s index finger
was upon the scorpion by the Lion’s paw carved into the
stone. He licked his lips at the cedar and pine boxes of OWC
of the back vintages that had stacked up to the concrete
celling 10-meters high; and of course, the vineyards
themselves. He let each nanobot and hummingbird and
wasp buzz around giving him one million points of view of
the plants as they grew and the noble rot of the juice
collected like crowns around each grape-cluster in the
autumnal decline toward winter.
He updated and uploaded the whole mise-en-sc è ne to the
topo-map he had in his CNS; the one Lyndon lived in now
and roamed about for six hours a day. The inmate was
asleep from 0600 to 2359hrs each day. Isaiah let the
inmate’s dreams populate his own sub-cortical regions as he
moved -in slight s-turns - on his side of the lab. He breathed,
and he felt the man -inside him- breathing too. Imagine
lungs within lungs, homunculus within man himself, Isaiah
thought. A god within a God.
He let the grape clusters begin to rot and mimic the winter
solstice sun with LEDs that hovered above each node and
each leaf and each brachial derivation and the
hummingbirds drank from one out of each one-hundred
grapes exchanging whatever the plant needed for this 1% of
juice.
He had augmented the birds to produce micronutrients in
their saliva as the tongue licked the grape the vine stock
would take what it needed; and the grapes did not need
much. They were hearty, low-maintenance, and preferred
poverty to great luxury.
And yet -and everyone who knew wine knew this, but it bore
repeating- from this stinted milieu they produced the most
luxurious nectar of gods. This vintage will be as sweet as
the Sauternes , he thought.
“Ah, what man could learn from the grape,” Isaiah said as
the watched -from the POV of Lansat10 satellites- the last of
the warheads land in the dark Pacific.

III. 2040 e.v.

He walked to the edge of the sliprock prow of his acreage,
the lands not by birth but had by wit, he thought.
The landscape was not unlike the sea; Mount Arat as the
dove flew away. The topography was silvery as if jetted
spray and at night, the sun behind him and his shadow
broken up on the scrub desert foliage and the dark-earth
brown of the ground.
He had shed all clothes except his LBE with carbine on
lanyard and a bear skull mounted to his molle-pack, the
thumb size head-bones of white rats on bronze ball-chain
ringed around him like icons of the ancient church; and last,
one shell of .300 Winmag in brass. Black briefs were taut on
loins and black boot shod him. He was covered in dust as
anemophily pollen, and the wind combed each hair on each
leg and arm and could not penetrate the beard long at chin
like Sphinx’s head in the age of the Lion of the Poisson
Distribution’s Leo; when the rain of the ice-age thaw was
sufficient to weather the hewn blocks of the Terrifying One.
The red-crow tail feather lay down on his temporal lobe from
a quill that was plaited with his hair along the line carved
high; all else below shaved to the bone.
His jaw was set, his eyes fixed, his mind was certain of all
things that mattered in this moment.
He stood just inside the known now; the unknown had been
met and he had wrestled mystery beasts and drank dark
blood from hazy upturned skulls, taken medicine from
unnamed buttoned plants and uninspected roots. He built
fires that seemed less illuminating than the moon and all
meat laureled in the silver dew of condensing water
extracted from the unpenetrated air. He stopped processing
information through his Broca’s region and allowed the
collated data in which it had given narration to be -in fact-
handed like a palmed note, a kite, passed from monkish cell,
to his left brain so it may clear its throat and speak into his
inner ear.
The fiat currency had been minted now.
He could speak his true mind.
It looked cooled and unmovable in daguerreotype in his
mind’s eye. He had the certainty that lasted a little while for
men like him; he got a moment -maybe two- to be sure of
anything, this is how it had been his whole life; but things
moved faster now, he figured a few days of this confidence
before he’d dive again below into the aquarium he felt
beneath his feet. The right brain did all the heavy lifting at
night, and in semiotics, from information on the wind, from
shadows in trees, from the flaps of Blackhawk wings, from
hidden spaces in between inelegant words of civilians
unguarded here and suspicious there, from small clues
dropped by the vernal night’s blackened bears; from
remembrances and re-instantiated memories of Scotland
and New Zealand and the southern towns from Paris, Texas
to Little Rock and Texarkana and swimming holes in the
panhandle of Florida and the Cumberland of Kentucky; his
mountaineering of Pikes and Longs and Greys, his hike up
the Spanish peaks with his working dog, Caius Martius II, his
deep dive at 60 feet in the dead Caribbean and fecund
Pacific off Oahu with rays leaping over girls he had held
hands with in tropic rains outside Buddhist temples as no
words were needed nor sanctioned.
Dreams in between fourteen and sixteen-hour days of
hammering concrete and drilling holes and bailing hay and
breaking back and compressing vertebrae and rending
tendons and making muscles dense as they buried their
strength deep were where his semiotic mind mined and
quarried and hew and drew succor and basalt and
hydrocarbons from.
He had been alive on this planet and had made something
of himself, however deformed and craquelured and wicked
and wrong.
He spent each coin in some meter or toll booth on the
periphery of where he would stride into next; the
assemblage of all their work to protect and use as seed,
seedbank for this new island, oasis in the forest of so much
of America unclaimed. So much of this country was unlived
in, unexplored, and most thought she was over run. They -
tout le monde- had no idea the millions and millions of
acreage of total wilderness still, and unlike the slaves of the
west they had captured it and would now settle it.
It was a new frontier of pioneers, a land of the emotionally
honest, those who knew the science of the brain, and the
heart, who knew what they needed and what was
superfluous, and would fight and growl and rut and rub their
butts together and laugh and hold hands and howl at the
crescent moon and bow humbly when the sun rose again
each day. They would not care what others say.
“Fuck ‘em,” he said aloud.
They’d revivify the ancients, the wise King, the civilization
once built on dreams; and fears of the dragon at heel, the
red gold flakes, the coiled snake stacked nine high in the
corner, the chaos of the cypher mind. My God , he thought,
man knew nothing of his own soul then, only that the gods
possessed him and ran him wild with lust and anger and
madness and they prayed to manifold gods -Venus and
Martial Mars- like superpositions until the wave collapse of
Yahweh and the prism then of Christ unweaving the rainbow
again and then the white light, the singularity of God as
man pulled each other out of the muck over and over for
two thousand years, until they had grown tired from all
those hands, all those hands of men unknown to them.
The tribal systems of twelve, the rapid expansion of the
nations, the leniency that invited doom into its own house;
the failure of walls to keep all snakes out of the paradisal
house.
America: the last walled garden.
They had the Law written on their hearts , he then thought.
They knew right from wrong, they had the data, the genome
of the ancients, they walked like Highlanders, down past the
valley of Deveron turning their noses up to commerce, mere
business, as Robert Gordan had said of the “better classes
of Scotsmen ” that “they disdain trade as unsuitable to their
birth ” and that to alleviate the poverty that comes to men
of honor they “address themselves to the profession of arms
.”
They knew their history, and so they had a million million
men behind them so that they had foundation to ignore
these diseased merchant classes as they insisted on how
men were to behave.
His men were warrior poets. His mind was a centrifugal orb
filled with pride and burning the tears as fuel for love for
those men living down below, in the wood, among the
creatures that still deserve God’s love.
The hardest part of any revolution is not the thing itself, the
bullets drop all men quickly and that is that. The hard part is
the will, the will , the strength to go all the way, to not hem
and haw and wish and wash, to act, clearly, rightly, without
hesitation or regret. That is the drama in each man, and
each country and each emergent Tao of life. He admired the
Bushido and the Mongol on the steppe; he admired the
Chinese, as they would rebound from this and never, ever
give up. It was in their blood.
The modern man is unable to act, he rules by committee of
10,000 contradictory parts, all with incompatible
motivations, all with different facts and faces and visions
that they each cannot see. Democracy is a death sentence;
it’s like Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, it killed itself by
insisting on the truth and heaven after earth; as if
something was superior to the dirt. Democracy had to insist
on diversity, and thus expanding inflationary chaos and the
center could not hold. We may wish -he thought- to mix the
races and cultures and each type of man, include the enemy
and be objective in negotiation with those that want to
immolate the nation. We may want it, but it cannot work.
Integration is infiltration, he thought.
Fidel had said that within the revolution everything , todos ;
but outside it or against it , nada .
“Nothing,” he said.
Castro had been criticized by liberals and modern men who
didn’t land a ship on the beach Pinar , with eight-two men
and in one day that number reduced to a holy of just twelve;
including the apostle himself. They had not the luxury to
take a goddamn vote for each thing; it was war then and the
reason Castro kept the beard was because he had promised
to shave it off only once the revolution had succeeded.
He died with that face hirsute and the revolution undone.
Blax knew none would understand how he could admire an
enemy like Fidel. Only Coriolanus and Patton would get it.
He stared in the direction of the forge and thought of each
sword he’d made. He saw the folding and striping and felt
the heat upon the face. He recalled a dream now and he felt
it as memory but labeled it a dream anyway:
The tribe had fled from the El Barta Plains . They were
the Samburu of modern Kenya but they never once used
that name. The woman had shorn the head and scarred
the flesh in lines on bicep and cheek and her dark skin
seemed a relief to the keloidal brown of the scar tissue.
She seemed a shadow under these ridges.
Golden Hyenas sang out from the edge of the eastern
plain.
“Nkunono ,” she said and pointed to the white ash in
their own forge. He knew she was claiming the title like
‘convict’ or ‘redneck’ with both pride and resignation.
She was one of four blacksmith of the community and
what she cleaved the tribe had used but with
ingratitude. They saw her as a witch, a devil’s
instrument.
This village was in fact a banishment. The actual tribe
lived on an oasis of the Barta . Only the four huts of the
ironworkers were here.
A child, covered in borax and ash emerged from a hut
with a feather in his hand and called Blax, papa as he
pulled the tines up and away from the quill. The child
asked for ink and Blax offered a dram from his hand.
Infected iron wounds, circumcision gone awry from the
improvement on stone razors, and accidents befalling
those that trod over forge, all led to council meetings
and banishment to the periphery. But it was the incest -
for the blacksmiths married only among themselves-
that gave the hoi polloi the no choice.
Blax recalled an article he once read, or was it a thought
once inside his head?
With the possible exceptions of the wolf, the raven and
the crone, no one has a closer mythological connection
with malevolence than the smith.
Blax recalled the European folklore of Pathseas , the evil
blacksmith that had been made lame, maimed by the
King of Ninths. Blax remembered the painting of
Hephaestus behind the bricks, he had vivid memories of
the licks the flames shot into the air like asps when they
sniff.
And it was the children, Blax admitted in image but not
yet word, it was the little ones that came to the smith
and his forge. The sons killed and skulls boiled to make
chalice and daughter devoured to make a forge of her
own. Pathseas had made the King drink from his son’s
skulls and placed a drop of semen in each goblet of
wine.
“Wings,” Blax said as he saw the bronzed feathers
imbricate; like scales, like plumage, like Will o’ Whisps of
eastern isle England. He too given a double life, he too a
second chance to do it right.
“Leap, leap, leap,” Blax said as he carried Valance over
the forge in this dream within a dream,
“They believe the iron poisons the soil,” the woman said,
“they cannot abide nor bury it. They merely ask us to
solve their problems as we live on the edge of the
desert.”
Iron Age forges were outside settlements of the northern
Europeans.
 But Blax then came upon Lake Victoria and kingdoms
rose high in architecture and sinecure and he saw
tinctures in amber and aubergine. Here the anvil was the
semaphore, here the smith was King.
Valence watched Blax from the roof of the container, she
had climbed up from the pad with her babe swaddled in the
grey wolf hide lined with polar fleece black and smooth and
warmed by nanobots that regulated the child’s temp and
circulation both. She had braided her hair on the sides as it
had grown out and it was a cicatrix manet of mane, black
and ravened wet and her dorsal hair rose in waves that
undulate. The plaited braids long enough to cup each small
breast like halter and tie back behind her in a Gordian Knot;
a grey-corvid feather was intertwined and nested on her lee
side; and milk drops let down from her left breast to the
babe with mouth so small it need no justification.
Her neck was freshly tattooed with the death-head and
bones in 22, the haglaz , the coldest grain, like Blax. And
within the ink he had mixed in his blood -and the sanguinary
drop taken from their child- that morning as they rose. They
had not spoken all day, sharing thoughts via psilocybin
muscariate; a telepathy of the PGC, the pineal gland and
lower layer down. They spoke in touch and glance and
breath.
She was sore still from the birth, she was sore in her narrow
rib cage and tiny breasts -mounds he had cupped and
called, en bon point , with a mild franco-accent and grin and
she had felt beautiful and adored by a man from deep within
history and topography and the ovum of nature herself. She
was aching like muscles strengthening and made dense and
mercurial, from the heaviest load she could carry for three
seasons; the crow had made three trips to visit her and the
lone wolf but one.
She was his -Blax’s- anima in flesh, birthed from his rib too.
She wondered how sore was he out there on the edge; how
close to death.
The metaphors all came to life under his rule , she thought.
He was a Poet-king, a Rex-talionis, a King of sage-
retribution. He paid back the gods for their poetry with
making it all come to life; the logos of articulated trope and
embodied avatars of the mind. She was his daughter, wife
and Queen and each phase in between. This was no
democracy, the man ruled by sovereignty.
“Of nature,” she said aloud. He had made it so by daring to
say it all aloud.
Blax -she thought his name in reverie- and his men had set
things right, aimed and hit the mark, for now, and in this
small space of Colorado. Let it be an exemplar to the nation
herself, if She has any sense and any pride and any honor
left to want what is clearly best, what women want in their
wombs twice as real as their modern neo-cortex; what men
need and deserve marked in feral land by planted flags of
endocrine-built staffs .
Valance thought this and thus said it; and they both heard
it.
She saw him, out there on the prow with her augmented
2.5x visual acuity like the Osprey; pupils dilated to absorb
the photons of the grey light turned to purple and the
landscape pulled back in the night. She read her poem to
him:
The yellow sun to red Rayleigh hues was best, the moon
north by north-west, casting an albedo shadow of his
striations and deltoids shaped aquiline, his quads
cornered in forty-fives. Unforgiving angularities like
Szukulski’s castings of the Merman, the Cecora . His
head a black & grey Roman mane and charger of
Charlemagne . His chest, she saw and felt, like Goethe’s
 and filled with a hundred barrels of the sperm whale’s
ambergris , as she whispered, Unity, not Diversity is our
strength.
The ground first vibrated under the light of the vault.
They both felt it at the end of each piloerect hair and on the
surface cells of the dermis; the ears rattled inside and at the
spinal cord creating a slight elevation in allostatic
correction; overridden by their PGCs as they recaptured a
calm. They laughed at fear; even as it was real.
Apertures opened, fissures riven, and translucent
magicicadas emerged head first, crowning, grasping,
certain. On thirty-five acres, 45-million of the cicadae broke
through and flew into the lower boughs of the 1.5 million
trees of their land; uninterested in the larger forest outside
his command.
As the first 60-minutes passed they each -from white-edged
clear- darkened in hue, and the shadows of the tress moved
12-degrees along the northern sweep. The tymbals began
rubbing in Greek Chorus and Blax & Valance allowed the
noise to rise to 88db in their ears before having to
countermand -with the wave of the virtual hand- the PGCs
automatic order to deaden the sound over 86-decibels.
It rose. Despite the coder it rose.
It rose as the wings rubbed and the males sent emissaries
one by one to females to mate and it rose as each individual
added to the chorus and it rose to 99db and their ears
captured it in logarithmic madness and the skin’s pores
absorbed the waves now, and the eyes watered and purged
the swells of sound, and the knuckles bent at angles to
harmonize, and the mind made bow and string both, and
each felt each other’s thoughts collapse on themselves as
the noise overwhelmed, the wing-beats fanned each neuron
and they felt lifted.
They felt lifted off the ground by the wing beats, the
tymbals now at 100-decibels.
The magic copulations continued and rose in fright and
noise and flight and the racket and the ontological purpose,
the perfect direction of God with the algorithmic music of
the long-overtured song; the rhythm; the chorus; the red
eyes like Mars mirrored and pointing toward war. And the
black eyes saw -like the edge containing all flesh of pax -
the heads turned sideways like opposing-Jacks and the
manifold Queen bowed down in penitence. The Jacks in
reverie and awe, as the congress between them, millions of
them produced scores and scores of eggs each compressed
into hours not weeks, a blitzkrieg of ovum and partum and
birth.
He saw what his death was worth.
The females sawed tropes of vulva like Hindu stele -like
recursions of femininity- in tree branches -like arms of
Vishnu - to lay the spawns and the larval eggs did hatch and
drop tooth and wingtip to the forest floor and the predators
had never seen such a surfeit -such bounty- of expendable
hatchlings.
And they did feast, and they did gorge.
And so few were the predatory insects and small mammals,
so kept in check by this timed and planned and body-of-God
knowledge and wisdom -wisdom of dearth- by the holding
back hand of God for 6,200 days that the bounty of God did
cloy and did outnumber and of the 5.56 billion eggs, 90
million babes made it 8-inches below ground -so much
waste, unwasted, so much honing, unhoned, so much talus
removed from the pieta , and survived. It survived and
closed their white eyes and the roots of the tree, exactly
matching the fractal boughs above did give succor and
comfort for now.
The fractal of comfort for now , she thought.
They at once, in first instar -the juveniles- began feeding on
the roots of the Pinions and Junipers and Aspens that they
had images of from their fathers -their fathers’ first-time
above ground in 17-years- and here in 2040 anno domina
they did rise.
They did rise.
They did rise and the next generation did bury themselves
again.
In the soil, hidden so the fat predators -as fat as cormorant
singularities- so that the predators that feasted upon them
could have nothing for another generation of 16 plus 1
solar-years. So that they could not swell in number
themselves; it was the perfect mathematics of predatory
deterrence, to hide underground giving the enemy nothing
to feed on until the predators’ numbers shrank back down
and down and down; starved, made infertile from lack,
reverting to lower forms -like bacteria eschewing complexity
to become virus again, like hippos returning to sea as
whales- in the perfect -incomprehensible- magic of God’s
ability to plan a million years of a billion beings as if it was
planning the tempo of one man’s forgotten breath in and
out of slate-grey tobacco smoke.
The cicada contained the new DNA.
They’d fly to the wolves of the forest and anneal the blood
with code and the wolves would be hunted down by the
Jacks and each man -both the Jacks and their brothers of
144,000 and the Wolves of Vinland of 25,920 and their
variegated genome- would drink of the upturned skull and
be impervious to the second order x-rays.
War would be tantamount to love and pax would appear
from pox. The species would evolve.
And a new atmosphere would appear and these four tribes
would fight; and like all of God’s equation -outside this little
orb of earth- there would be movment towards a fragile but
enduring balance , he thought as he felt his body begin to
shut down
Blax and Valance saw through the same eyes, saw with the
same mind, signals from the same spine up the brain stem
and basal ganglia and amygdala and into the neo-cortex as
they saw, they heard, they felt all at once the collapse of
the sounds as each of the fathers and mothers did die and
fall to the floor with no more weight than the soul.
They felt it rumble from below.
A foxed paper with black typewriter font in French -
translated to English at once- came up on his interface:
“…or rather it would be irrecoverable, were it not that a
few words (such as: chief undersecretary at the
Postmaster General’s) had been carefully put away and
forgotten, much as a copy of a book is deposited in the
Bibliothéque Nationale against the day when it may
become unobtainable.”
These words floated by like cold air with maybe just a hint of
cottonwood or dandelion that had lost its head, and he
thought, pain is a kiss of God , they said, lack is a gift, they
rejoined , suffering is prelude to genius . He and her each
felt this and they knew that they too were a generation
apart and conjoined and that their perfection would never
be tarnished and their wounds would never be healed.
This is how suffering is justified -to those callow and puerile
atheists, sincere but stupid and effete - this is how all
madness and evil and the shadow lays down on the ground
from the perpendicular omnipotence that stands at cross-
roads, at right angle, at 90-degrees between sun and man
on the surface; a stage and all players in an evolving God of
all. All complaints shall be as loud as the collapse of 100db
of the tymbals of the patient and sacrificial and magic
creations.
Those briefly alighting wings, Blax thought as he fell with a
heart that had finally stopped its squirming into the hole he
had dug, stopped by and to the dead-head hammer of
ground; as the lights of the universal sanction go out .

IV. 2018 e.v.

MO read his brain waves, and vitals and took a full genomic
reading again to see which genes were being coded for and
which were being suppressed; which were in apoptosis and
which were ignoring those signals and growing in rebellion
to the interest of the whole.
The man seemed at metabolic peace, no doubt the alcohol
helped.
His allostatic system was balanced, his endocrine system in
line. He had spoken some kind of truth as his body’s
biometrics revealed. He was calm, serene, no longer
burdened by having to lie -to over build his façade - merely
to survive in the world. He was already in jail, what else
could they do to him?
He was as punished as he could be.
He felt totally free to speak his mind; and had for quite
some time, it seemed to MO. The man’s body and brain was
very healthy, MO beleived. The project as outlined by PraXis
to identify and repair the six alleles associated with
psychopathy made this inmate an unlikely candidate. He
was not psychopathic despite the body count and lack of
remorse. He was a warrior, a man of extreme vengeance, a
man of the past. That made him atavistic, not psychopathic
. This was a distinction of science, at the level of the brain,
not the subjunctive or the narrative , MO thought.
“What started it, what was patient zero?” MO asked as he
thought of a few ideas on what they could change. But he
couldn’t foreclose on one idea of the man. He thought he
should tinker a bit but because a man was finite he’d have
to pick one and let it play out over eighty to a hundred
years. This seemed silly to MO.
“Julee Rae made a comment once that I’ll never repeat; but
it ruined my soul,” he said, “I was just seventeen. She made
a fool of me. And she did it with zero guilt. To this day she
thinks she’s a good person.”
“And that was it?” MO asked.
“And Zendik,” he said, ignoring MO’s stupid question. “See, I
gave them all. Bugzy personally asked for my car title -he
was my friend and Shey had just turned me down for a date
because I was not all in , she said- and the rest of those
ghouls descended on all my shit. I gave it up to earn their
love. And Kes -Helen called him Estero or something- he
took my receiver apart for parts; there’s a metaphor in
that,” he said and felt the sentence was phrased poorly. He
felt that it might seem petty to care about a fucking stereo.
He thought he hadn’t made it clear what Shey and Bugzy
had done; he’d not explained it exactly as it was.
“It’s me that’s the wicked man for fighting back; it’s me for
saying the impolite things as rebuke. It’s me that’s horrid,
for having the bad manners to say aloud that I’ve been
wronged by these,” he paused and in fact held back for a
moment. The retreat of language allowed the visions to
return, he saw smoke and blackbirds, he heard -more than
anything he heard- the breathing of the wolves and the
clack of claws on sliprock.
He saw the anvil.
He then saw the quarry and the fire on the shore.
He saw Todd so large, like a bear to him, hurl himself off the
cliff and down sixty-five -sixty-six- feet to the cold spring
lake; he saw the snakes sun themselves in the reflection of
the moon. He saw the brush grow and block the path up the
back. He saw the way Heather Geier smiled at him and how
much he loved her and how in these visions she’d been pure
and clean and decent in his mind for thirty years until he
saw the way she too rolled her eyes at how he’d lost it all.
Women don’t care why, or how. They don’t see potential or
a man done wrong. They measure one thing: up or down;
they collect the winner at the end .
“Pragmatic, nobody is more pragmatic than a chick, and
they don’t even feel bad for it,” he said and reasoned he’d
not feel bad for slitting all their throats then. That seemed a
fair trade, to him.
But these thoughts barely formed; instead he saw himself
up on the quarry ledge and heard the splash of Todd below,
the howl, the yawp, the flapping of Todd’s massive arms in
the dark water, the way the rocks felt on his bare feet, the
way the fire burned on the shore to his lee side.
He remembered walking off. He’d thought, it might be like
this when one dies .
“I am too coarse, too overt, too low-class. Their crimes are
ok , because they are done the middle-class way. So quiet,
and classy and sotto-voce . Right?
“I mean Jeanne is rich and powerful and on TV, shit, she
can’t be guilty. She’s published by Harper’s Collins or
whatever the fuck. She has the imprimatur of the system;
and her father is a billionaire Jew from Chicago. I mean, who
am I? I’m Scottish working-class scum from the south, right?
Who cares that my art is actually better, or that my heart is
bigger, or that my pain is deeper? Who cares, because I’m
nobody and they all know it. Function greater than truth, eh
? Her daughter will go on to grand things and I’ll never
reproduce. And nobody asks how long that kind of shit has
gone on,” he said as he stared at MO and saw the hewn
lines of his features for what seemed maybe the first time in
these first few weeks. He noticed the ears and eyes, the
brow was smooth, the teeth were rarely bared when MO
spoke.
He saw the way MO kept his hands on his knees, the way his
hair was brushed perfectly. He saw the chin was
symmetrical, the cheeks too, the eyes of perfect size.
“Gone on in your life?” MO asked as he breathed and
showed the rise of the chest, the Adam’s apple rose a tad.
“No, gone on for all of life ,” the inmate said.
He too breathed and the neck ached and so too the
shoulder and lower back. His knees were sore; his elbows
even more. “Well, anyway, what are they, what are people
who steal from me, when I did nothing wrong? What are
they that don’t ever feel bad at all? Not once. What do we
call them? What do we call those with no remorse? Oh,
that’s right, we call them normal, everyday, Americans .
They are the good folk. We don’t measure their brains. We
don’t make them take tests to see why they behave the way
they do.
“I’m the villain because I punch back. Got it,” he said as he
didn’t even bother to roll the eyes, he just nodded and
looked -in the lab- to the western side. He thought of the
story he’d been originally telling and it now came back to it.
“So, anyway, like I was saying, Scorsese was going to kill an
executive at Columbia pictures who had demanded he cut
Taxi Driver to earn an R rating instead of the X that the
MPAA had given it.
“Fellow filmmakers and friends came and -not
unsympathetically- talked him out of it. But they knew he
was for real. That he was going to commit the murder. The
killing. But after staying up all night ruminating on this -in
order to staunch the bleeding from this demand that he
slash his own canvas- he thought there was one other thing
he could do. So he decided to de-saturate the color of the
candy-apple blood by four degrees into the more burgundy
fluid,” the inmate said as MO handled the metal. He rubbed
the dark copper-color rocker arms with thumbs that added
material -building up material- and then used his finger pads
that deburred and smoothed and reduced. He listened and
worked and set each rocker in the well of the head that had
no engine block yet. It was just bronze and alloy of polymer
placed side-by-side on the slab as he turned his eyes and
head back to the incarcerated man.
“And this got the film its R,” the inmate finally said as he
looked at the empty grey walls of the lab and imagined a
Caravaggio that hung with its ragged edges exposed by the
lack of frame. He thought a bit of how the painter’s father -a
mason- had died when Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
was just six years old.
“But, I can’t help but wonder why I don’t want the approval -
the sanction- of this society? I wonder why I don’t wanna be
liked by any of you people? I wonder?” the inmate said and
neither he -nor anyone in that room now- wondered at all.
He was being facetious and they ignored the question and
just -merely- watched the lab’s screens as they displayed all
that the PraXis cloud recorded: the things heard and then
loaded in binary code, then every half-formed word & image
and quarter joule inside the mind that powered it all.
They calibrated him as he spoke; they dove deep in him as
he held back; they peered closer and closer in to take his
measure as a man. From coastline to interior, from fathom
to nanometer, they standardized him.
MO built one more algorithm to measure dactyls and rate of
speech connected to hemispheric activation. MO heard the
inmate think -in images- why he’d gotten that vasectomy at
twenty-six:
Their -his- baby was dead. The backyard was tore up in
spots by the black Labrador. The snake was killed and
left in the corner. He buried that child in his mind and he
never forgave the world.
MO saw all these images and a billion words and why the
inmate would never speak of it no matter how much he
asked, or dug, or what he’d heap up.
It was a sin used as spade to bury wickedness; a
malevolency to shroud a catastrophe. It was more than any
man -a fragile creation of God- could take. It was a club that
made him break.
“Diamonds scatter light, hearts absorb the night,” MO said -
finishing his little poem- but knew he had merely gathered
those words from the inmate’s images trapped inside his
head, and then dragged around by some club foot, some
half leg. MO knew if he was to have original thoughts of his
own he’d have to feel the same pain as this man.
More , MO then thought.
In the quiet of the lab -as the HVAC ran its dampers and its
fans in series on the smooth race and bearings- the
inmate’s brain switched -flipped- like a coin in the air on its
way up or down and returned to his images. He saw not the
scaffold but steep rise of the Vosges and the Verdun woods
of Lorraine and Germany. He saw a pair of Eurasian lynx
move up and down the rivers -like sun and moon- and then
he saw the way the boughs reached over the old-summer’s
land of Moselle and made a cover that reminded him of
green and golden clouds. He saw next that the winter
streams of the Meuse -in Barrois mouvant- touched each
other as his eyes saw his own laced fingers were forced
together by the cuffs.
This made him jam them together more -harder- so that the
chains would go slack.
 45. IT WILL FIND NO MEA IͶG
And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon and
the dragon and his angels fought but they did not prevail, nor was a place found
for them in heaven any longer. So, the great dragon was cast out, that serpent
of old called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to
earth and his angels were cast out with him.
Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now salvation and strength and the
kingdom of God and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our
brethren, who accused them before God day and night, has been cast down. And
they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony
and they loved not their lives unto the death.
Therefore, rejoice O’ heavens, and you who dwell in them! Woe to the
inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having
great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.
Revelation XII: VII-XIII [King James Bible]

Attached to Bessanko’s email, in the police file, was a sample of the novel-in-
progress:
“No one has ever tried to destroy your vineyard?
-The master of the vineyard seemed surprised, and said, No
-Not even in ancient times?
-No, absolutely not. Why?
-People are not always very good, she says,
-Do you intend to publish this?
-Why would you think I would not publish? Would the work of a human mind be
less valuable than fermented grape juice? A little pause and then an answer
from the vineyard owner.
-It’s true. A book you can read again. Wine you can only drink once. ”
-Shadows in the Vineyard [Potter, Maximillian]

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Apocryphal [Aristotle]

I. 2034 e.v.
“Banks,” he began speaking to the guard and handed his
commissary card to him and the guard handed it to
Kaczynski as he and his BOP escort walked by, “banks have
lost over five trillion dollars, more than they ever made. And
these have all happened in black swan events they say.
They say they were 6-sigma events that couldn’t be
predicted and blah blah. But it’s predictable. Sort of.”
The inmate stretched his neck and shoulders and used only
his eyes to look left and right. They were tossing his cell
again and he was cuffed and chained up against the wall
with one guard standing by him. They had always got along.
“But,” he said as the other convicts -normally on 23/1
lockdown, in their soundproof cells- stood at the white walls
evenly spaced in the rectangular hall, like stelae , he
thought, “well, these banks make a steady earning over ten
to fifteen years, each year they’d get five, seven, ten
percent returns; making bonuses each year based on these
annual returns. But, it’s a scam. Value at risk -VaR- is
supposed to be a metric to measure risk, but it’s hocus
pocus.”
The guard was smiling as the inmate spoke and the other
guards threw shit out into the hall. He merely looked at the
inmate with his back to the double doors of the tier. He
scratched his neck. He had not shaved, and he thought then
of the look the CO gave him when he arrived that day dark
about the jaw and throat. He scratched harder and the
memory faded as the words of the inmate filled his ears.
“Because whatever modest gains they make are susceptible
to tail risks, extreme events that are not accounted for.
Why? Because they model their results over the known
data, the known data of their twenty years in existence
absent any black swans. They ignore the only thing that can
get them; but it cannot continue forever, and the banks
blow up. Evidenced by the crash in eighty-two, and ninety-
one or two-thousand-eight, or twenty-one, right? And all
these guys keep their hundred million-dollar bonuses while
the public bails out the banks. It’s a scam, because the guys
making the decisions never get hurt. Only the customers
and taxpayers do,” the inmate said and lay his head gently
on the block wall. He licked his lips as inmate 14067074 had
disappeared from view.
“See,” he said as he nodded at the prisoners. “Here they
don’t care, they got blacks and Muslims and Mexicans all
mixed in with the whites. Why is that? Normal prisons are
segregated as fuck, right? The prison admin knows you
can’t have any calm if you mix the races. But here? Here it
don’t matter, why?”
“Don’t know,” the guard said.
“Because there ain’t no interaction, man. We don’t interact.
Normal prisons you got little societies. And so they keep
them separate, and the inmates police the inmates more
than the cops so. The whites police the whites, the blacks
the blacks, the Latinos police the Latinos. The only way you
can have race mixing is to be totally authoritarian, no
freedom at all. Like ADX. You guys got it figured out.
“True diversity, via perfect autocracy,” the inmate said with
a smirk. He was being both perfectly sincere and ironic all at
once. He’d let the cop decide which version to take.
“Alright fuck all that. Now, imagine a crook who said he
calculated everything, all his little jobs, all his scores where
each year -for ten years- he made ten-k here and twenty-k
there and looked really smart over that decade. But he
never once made mention of the existence of the FBI, the
cops, the mark with a gun; you know the guy that might
fight back? This crook, he just says, hey, I’ve never be
arrested before, never even seen a cop, and no mark of
mine has ever had a gun .
“Imagine that guy, and I’ll show you every goofball in here,
who said the same thing. I bet your image of him is the
same: total dipshit,” the inmate said as his used his free
fingers to point at the other prisoners as his hands were
hemmed in by his waist chain and cuffs.
The guard was laughing now. The cells had been open for
45-minutes as the Governor took a tour and inmates had
been chained -standing- to the walls as they showed Sou
the cells and then tossed them in his wake. The inmate
wasn’t supposed to be talking but the guard let him ramble
on.
“Right? I mean, how can you be a crook and only measure
your successes over a year -or even ten- and not once worry
about the cops just because you have never seen one and
never been busted before. It’s insane. But this is what these
banks do; they start up some financial instrument like
derivatives and hedge funds or whatever, and they go along
making ten, fifteen percent for a few years and they say,
look at how well we are doing, and we can manage risk, look
at these crazy ergodic equations that prove it .
“And you ask -as a reasonable fella - you ask, well, what
about unforeseen 6-sigma events that happen every so
often? What about rare -admittedly rare- events, but what
about those, smart-guy? Are they in your fancy math
models ?
“And they say, no, no, we have no data for that, we only
have these steady returns. And according to our data, we
are managing risk quite well .
“So, they leverage the fuck out of it -that means borrow ,
they borrow more and more money to invest more and more
into these crazy financial instruments- and then boom it all
blows up. But they walk away with the hundred million in
bonuses they made over the ten years. The years that they
were solvent and you all -the tax payer- when it blows up,
well, you bail them out,” inmate 16180339 said as the
guard merely smiled now; his laugh had left him a bit.
“It would be like the crook, robbin’ and mobbin’ for ten
years without a problem, making money, and boom gets
pinched by the feds and he doesn’t go to jail, no, instead, a
random tax payer does. Imagine. He wouldn’t ever stop his
crimes if that was the case,” the inmate said and shook his
head as he laughed; his mirth had overcome him now. He
moved one inch from the wall.
The guard was now biting the lip. He took his baton and
pressed the inmate to the wall. The inmate relaxed until he
took the baton away.
“But imagine this crook saying, hey, don’t worry I’ve got all
this data that shows that I’m not behaving riskily. I’m only
robbing people with money, and I’m working when the cops
are not around, and even if they are around, shit, I’ve got
years of data showing I do not get caught . I’ve never once
been caught in ten years ! this guy says. Right?
“You would be like, yeah, but what about when you do,
when you don’t see that home owner with a 12-gauge, or
that cop who pulled into a parking lot to sleep and happens
sees you shimmyin’ up the drain pipe. What then?
“And he -our crook- he says, well , that’s a 6-sigma event;
never would happen in ten-thousand years . And then he’s
in here with 1.6 million prisoners in the US. Boom.”
The guard was smiling weakly, but he began to feel like
others would notice so he tried to hem it in a bit by covering
his mouth with his hand and looking away. He couldn’t
decide who his natural audience was, this inmate or the
other inmates and the guards.
“Gimme a break,” the inmate said. “The banks have lost
more money than they’ve made. If they paid the same price
as working-class crooks, like everyone in here, then this
place would be twice as cramped with bankers and half as
many murders. I’ll tell you that,” the inmate said and
nodded at a convict across the tier as he took the signal and
passed it via the blinks of his eyes to the inmate cattycorner
to him.
“Murder often -not always, ok, for example, my murders
were old-school revenge- but a lot of murder comes from
income inequality not poverty; and inequality comes from
scams on the working class by the rich. I mean, look some
of it is natural pareto distribution, but much of it comes from
manufacturing losses due to corporate greed and
globalization -and illegal immigration hurts the poor, poor
blacks the most, the data shows that- and these banks
grease the wheels for it all. And the pension failures are
linked to bank failures, and that puts working class folks in
poverty; relative poverty, too.
“That’s the Petri dish of your mass murderer, the working-
class guy with nothing to lose. I mean you ever ask why
black and brown communities don’t work with the police,
and settle all their business internally? You ever wonder why
the Appalachian moonshiner just buries bodies, man? They
don’t call the cops when they find a thief amongst their
clan. I’m tellin’ you that there are like a hundred subcultures
in America, black, brown, white, Asian, Indian -the fuckin’
Italians- who don’t call the cops, because they ain’t allowed
in the mainstream Jew and Yankee economy, they have to
be outlaws. And so when shit needs cleaned up, they settle
shit themselves, and that is most of your violence. Savvy?
“Anyway, and now, people are starting to get wise and they
are not in the mood to be lectured by these white-collar
criminals. Wells Fargo, I ripped them off for around hundred-
k . And I did it because they are a corporate criminal so
virulent that the president, the AG, the Fed Chairman, all
called them out by name for being the largest corporate
criminal in US history. I didn’t get angry, I got even. Well, I
got angry then I got even.
“Most folks, well, they see these banks are criminals and
once everyone catches on then the whole system will
collapse. The system runs on trust. And trust is in the heart,
not the head. Wachovia was just caught laundering cartel
money, man. That’s Wells Fargo too. A DBA, you know?” the
inmate asked and guard sorta knew, and he nodded.
The tier CO -on duty since 0600- was in and out of the cells
like a bee hovering over the combs of hive. The Governor
was down the hall.
“But, something else is likely to happen first,” the inmate
went on. “Hedge funds can’t get money from banks, they
sell off positions, prices drop, liquidity tightens and small to
medium corporations cannot make payroll due to these lack
of bridge loans and then people, you know, actual workers,
they don’t get paid, and then they can’t make car loans,
home loans then banks fail faster and liquidity tightens
again and now you’ve got a double pendulum chaos model
that will burn it all to the ground,” he said as the guard
leaned forward on the tier railing to point at some guys
down on the benches. They looked up and broke apart and
guards came and grabbed them.
“Go ahead,” the guard said as he returned to the wall with
the inmate.
“It’s like a forest that has no boundary, no break from coast
to coast, and is loaded with dead wood because it was more
optimal to put out little fires as they arose; and not allow
that dead wood to burn away the fuel. Right? It was more
optimal to quickly put out each fire -protecting rich folks
homes and shit- but that lets dead wood that would have
been used in these small fires, it lets it build up in the forest.
“But, once the forest connects from coast to coast, the
whole country burns with a 6-sigma event; a fire, a forest
fire nobody could have predicted, they will say. A fire once in
ten-thousand years, right? They’ll bark that shit in the halls
of congress and on CNBC.
“But it burns not 1-million acres but a country. Down. To the
ground,” the inmate punctuated each part of that idea.
“And now that small banks are gobbled up by big banks we
have no borders, no firelines, and when it goes, the whole
thing goes.
“Banks and the whole financial world is biased toward
optimization. They went from ten banks to one because it’s
more efficient, this is optimization. But they are like old fire
fighters who prefer one big forest to ten little ones. That’s
fine until a fire starts and then it burns from end to end.
“Think of this, would you rather have one big kidney, one
big lung, one big eye, one big arm, one big finger? It’s more
efficient, right?” the inmate asked.
The guard wasn’t sure if this was a trick question. He
frowned.
“Ah, but redundancy,” the inmate pressed on,
“independence, these things are inefficient, yes? But when
accidents happen, when maladies occur, when shit hits the
fan, it’s good to have a backup plan. It’s good to have an
extra kidney when one gets stabbed in the yard. And that’s
why they had to bailout the big banks. They were too big to
fail; they were optimal, optimized, and the only banks we
had. They should have let the small banks fail, early and
often, like small forest fires. Let them burn,” he said as the
guard nodded thinking he might have gotten most of that.
He felt like it made sense, but he couldn’t explain why
exactly. Plus, the inmate was always justifying his murders,
and this felt like another way to justify what he did. The
guard was suspicious this was a trick.
The prison felt tense lately; and so did the city itself. The
guard -Beauregard Jackson- lived in Florence and people
were tense as the SARS-CoV-3 came through during the
winter and everyone was on lock down again. Masks were
mandatory and even the parking lot had every other space
blocked off. He wondered if they thought cars could catch
the damn virus.
“And at least religion tells you what not to do; it tells you to
avoid bad things, things that got you pretty consistently
killed over a hundred-thousand years. Shellfish, promiscuity,
unclean habits, banging your buddy’s girl, usury, these are
banned by the church and for good reason, they cause
death and discord. That is why religion is useful, it warns
reckless people against obvious pitfalls.
“The atheists take it too seriously on all the other shit, the
shit that garnishes the sane and timeless injunctions. And
they act as if liberal amoral licentiousness is a-ok for the
species. We know this is not true; women feel horrible when
they act promiscuously, men hate that they must marry
used goods because every girl has been with at least a
dozen men by 21-years of age.
“Disease wrecks people, HPV causes cancer for crying out
loud, and the birth control pill? Shit, it turns women into
non-ovulating eunuchs in a way, into chicks who prefer low
testosterone mates. So the whole species now is turning
into a bunch of low-T beta males like Richard Dawkins and
his faggy crew.
“I’d rather have a Spartan society with strict injunctions of
what to avoid and live a more disciplined and healthier life. I
think religion was good for that; it helped.
“But, even if you disagree, fine, but be consistent and see
all these financial advisors and experts for what they all -
each one- all are: high priests of bullshit. And they will get
you killed financially.
“It will happen, and the new atheists are suckers with no
better shot than the rubes they ridicule if they stuff their
millions into positions in Google and Apple and Wells Fargo
bank. These twits act like society ain’t ever gonna collapse,”
the inmate said and signaled to Todd as the cops moved him
back to their cell.
The guard nodded, taking it all in. He wrote down a few
words then the inmate said, “hey, look, just pull all your
money out of the stock market and invest in gold; and put
ten-percent of the total you have to invest in these ten
options,” he moved his hands slightly- as much as the cuffs
allowed- and handed the guard a list, “you will lose money
on nine out of ten of them, but it will be very little, and on
the one that hits you will make a thousand percent.”
They both watched as one of the hunger-strike inmates was
moved across the tier with a bag on his head strapped to a
hand-cart.
“That’s called convexity. Remember that word,” the inmate
said referring to the investment strategy he’d mentioned,
not the inmate on the dolly.
“And by the way, I’m in these same ten stocks, so I have my
ass on the same line. Don’t ask my advice, ask for what I do
. Those ten are what I’m in. Forget everything else I said.
Get out of the market, go into gold with ninety-percent of
your money and with the ten-percent left over split it evenly
between those ten. In five years you’ll be ok, maybe even
rich, but not broke. And that is the key. Low risk, very little
gains, some losses, but no risk, and then bang maybe a big
big win. That’s the game. Period.”
The guard didn’t respond. He just unbolted him from the
wall and the inmate and the guard walked back to his cell
and remained quiet until inside it.
“Ok, how come everyone doesn’t do this?” the guard asked
as another prisoner came in to his cell and took a kite from
the bunk and left. The guard pretended not to see.
“They truly don’t believe it. They’re not dumb, they are true
believers in the market, in banks, in optimization, in
modernity. They don’t understand the fragility of the entire
system. They cannot believe it. It would wreck their whole
mind set. You know?
“Imagine if I told you that everything you worked for your
whole life, the correctional facility and the warden and every
prison in the country, and the courts -et cetera - were all
going to fail eventually and that the inmates would gain
control over the locks and the gates and the guns. You’d
have to choose to ignore that or quit your job. You couldn’t
believe my conspiracy theory and work here each day,” the
inmate said this and he watched the guard’s eyes now;
looking for reactivity at the aperture. He watched but
couldn’t help but see his own dark reflection in them, the
albumin was jaundiced and the iris was as black as the
guard’s skin.
“That’s true,” the guard nodded.
“So, these guys cannot believe it. Their whole lives are
based on this idea that markets are rational, and they can
predict the future and that’s how they sleep at night. But,
catastrophe is always coming, it’s a letter already in route, a
comet with set trajectory, a bullet fired a mile out and
waiting to strike,” Lyndon said and turned his back with a
nod to indicate the conversation was over. The guard
nodded to an empty space in front of him. He left the cell,
closed the door and through the bean-hole he uncuffed
inmate 16180339.
The guard walked away with his head down in thought,
ignoring the two inmates that walked past him toward
inmate 16180339’s cell.
He looked at his shelf.
Prison is not at all what people think; it’s worse in ways
they are oblivious to, and better than the ways that they
fear.
First of all the food is all carbohydrates and no fresh
fruit. It’s a disaster. But, you are likely to never get
assaulted or raped, unless you’re into that sort of thing.
Lyndon had written those words at the header of his note
pad, and then he’d begun drawing a sketch of the
compound he had built and lived at for the years before he
was arrested and convicted.
It was an aerial view, it contained the two 40-foot
containers, the jeep trail that vivisected it, the lay out of the
pie-shaped 35-acres and then he showed the vast
wilderness that surrounded it by merely writing: 1.55 million
acres of feral land. He then added, with a few houses here
and there , along the perimeter of the page.
Todd was his friend since Lyndon was fifteen.
Todd, if you asked him, was fresh from Mansfield Prison in
Ohio -an old civil war prison- like -or was the one- in that
movie that everyone loves with redemption in the title. But,
Todd was twenty-five when they met and he was exactly the
big brother that the inmate had wanted as a child. He
regretted that he -Lyndon- had gone straight at age twenty-
nine and shunned his friend and brother, when he could
have directed him in more profitable way.
But here they both were , Todd thought, and he thought it
was fate. Lyndon knew Todd had died in 2007, and he
supposed that was fate.
The drugs, that was always the thing , Todd thought. Todd’s
theory was that people with Todd and Lyndon’s
temperament had to self-medicate, it was the only way to
deal with the allostatic system that ran like a crash-up-derby
inside their bodies and minds.
The federal super max in Florence, called ADX, a BOP
enterprise was supposed to hand prisoners back to their
DOC of origin, but that was rare. It was like the deal God
made with Satan that all sinners were supposed to be
reformed -along the archangel’s timeline- and then sent
back to Heaven eventually. The universe had as close to an
ergodic system as one could get -a long run that was almost
14-billion years in the making and trillions and trillions of
years in the waiting- and this meant that it would be awhile
before anyone began to suspect that Satan was never going
to hand anyone back to the Lord.
The federal and state prison matrix was not much different,
they were on timelines of decades and used categories like
“natural life” and the like, so, after thirty-five years if
someone hadn’t been returned to their Department of
Corrections origins in Minnesota or Alabama and were still in
fact at the supermax in Colorado, nobody batted an eye.
And look, only the most retarded and solipsistic prisoner
thinks anyone does -or should- give one fuck about them or
their fate. Unless a man was actually, in real life, innocent,
then whatever horror you dealt with was seen -not
unreasonably- as too fucking bad.
He began to write down these thoughts:
I embrace the title of inmate and outlaw and everything
in between. I admit to the murders and have a clean
conscience about everything except maybe I should
have murdered more women, more seed, as the Bible
warns a man should. However, I felt my previous self
was overly concerned with gallantry and thus, I focused
on men for my plots of revenge. I also think I should
have stayed off of twitter more. It was dumb in general
 and each tweet by David Simon was so low-brow that it
ruined -for me- the best show ever on TV.
People say they have no regrets often; this seemed odd,
dishonest but if it’s true it’s sociopathic , Lyndon thought.
…but I’ve seen the same heavens above Giza right here,
the same void the Comanche rode under, the vault of
Valhal , the progress from Pisces to that jug of water the
Assyrians and Olmecs carried above us all, and so…
I don’t pretend to have read everything man has written
down, only that I heard what God said once. I had a job
to do, and I did it. I saw Perseus hold the head of
Medusa, the guillotine remove the worst part of the
effete King, the blade of Judith in the hand of Caravaggio
before he killed a man in real life; that’s an artist; that’s
a man. I have the exact same genes in me of my
ancestors, I lived in their bodies, I was there at the river
Styx, Inverness, and it was my hands -some skin or
bone- that buried Egill’s coins.
Jacques One, Jacques two, Jacques Three! This is the
witness encountered by appointment, by me. Jacques
Four he will tell you…
He picked up the pen from the page. He felt he was just
rambling now.
He saw the glow of the girl in the quarry and he let his eyes
adjust to the light that pulsed as she beckoned him to, jump
. But he did not name her, and he would not. He protected
her from them, and himself from her. He gave them so little
of her, and he didn’t even know why he hid her.
It was instinct and it was religious and it was this that
prevented him from even expressing it.
He saw her and spirals of gold, orbs of blue, map-skins of
albumin. He saw her in the womb. He saw her grow up in
memories that never happened on this side of the Styx.
He felt pain behind the eyes, he knew it was the Central
Sensitization bullshit again; his pain was resetting baseline;
and he felt angry. How many doctors had missed this? And
you need more pain-relief because your body -after a
decade or more of chronic pain- resets its pain neurons,
then the body hurts more. The problem with having more
knowledge is that it sounds crazy to people who don’t even
have the alphabet to the words you use, to those who don’t
know the words in sentences you pronounce about things
they cannot see nor care about.
You can be too smart to be comprehensible.
The patient feels more pain because the body makes
everything hurt more, even soft touch like massage or the
friendly touch of a lover of friend. Even the sun is brighter,
sounds harsher, the whole body is in freak out mode and yet
the doctors say you are a drug addict now.
Compliments abrade, insults empower, he thought as he
knew that each person who told him he’d not kill anyone -
that he was bluffin’ - had just forced him to kill. They didn’t
realize that the fact that they didn’t believe him was the
very reason he had to kill. Nobody took anyone seriously
anymore. And this had severe consequences beyond the
interpersonal. Each person who condemned him had just
assured the universe that he’d go too far. People’s actions
had the opposite effect as they suspected. They thought
they were being cute.
And he knew they’d never understand because they were
fucking stupid.
They don’t even know their own literature, this Central
Sensitization thing has like, a hundred published papers on
it and it’s a fact that chronic pain sufferers feel more pain
over time and so when they ask for more drugs it is not
quote , drug seeking behavior or sign of drug addiction or
tolerance, it’s the sign of more pain , he thought.
He had thought of this 101 times and it made him angry
each time. How often had he been denied help because the
doctors knew nothing of the etiology of his condition? Even
the fact that spinal injury was the thing central sensitization
was most likely to come from, was ignored as irrelevant. The
studies showed it, explained it and even expounded on the
why. And yet, he was dismissed by everyone until Isaiah
actually gave a shit.
Doctors are scum, he thought, they do not care about
patients at all. They care about covering their own ass . Like
priests and self-proclaimed good men, the moralizers, the
ones in charge of the justice system, like cops and anyone
who claims to be wise. They are all completely corrupt and
deserve to die.
I vote comet, 2038, he thought with a grin.
ADX had no gangs, no culture.
It was individualism par excellence , he thought as he got up
from his notebook and stood at the window to his door. He
watched as the ninja-turtles hit the door to another Muslim
again. Force-feedings were carried out once a week in here,
and he usually didn’t care. But today he was feeling hungry
and he saw the way the guards moved into the cell and the
doctor behind with the tubes and bags of protein and
carbohydrates. It was a vanilla slurry that would go down
the throat of the men who refused to eat whole food. They
ran that tube up the nose.
Fuckin wild, man, he thought.
He thought of the way Isaiah had given him what he wanted
most, then he thought of the strange ways he -himself-
showed his love. The way he -the inmate- basically
imprisoned his friends and the way they reacted to the pain
of this life. He watched and was observed. He walked back
to the little stainless steel desk and re-read what he’d wrote:
 Six months later I got my friend Todd moved from Ohio
to here. It was easier than people realize. Prisons are
their own little cultures and as corrupt as Washington
DC; well, almost. I shouldn’t exaggerate .
In DOC prisons you have to join a gang , he thought, it ain’t
up for debate. You work for the Leaf as soon as they read
your DL and they put you to work. But at ADX none of that
applied. The criminal is a strange animal: he rebels against
the system and then becomes a slave to the gangs. Life was
an endless menagerie of slavery , he thought. People have
no idea how controlled they are no matter where they go.
He re-read carbons of his letters:
Dear Judge:
I recall out conversation; and stand by every word.
Inmate 16180339 ADX
He was independent, he didn’t work for anyone, he thought
of himself here at the Alcatraz of the Rockies in the third
person again.
The convict was supposed to be a rebel. But now -in DOC-
the dumb motherfuckers were a part of some goddamn
syndicate with employees -the worst!- and business
partners who acted like bosses half the time. Jesus, then you
had actual bosses and the guards were in on the grift. In
DOC you had fuckin’ bosses and were just in another corrupt
society all over again, from the frying pan into the fire. It
was depressing, he thought.
But not at ADX , he then thought, not at the worst prison in
America . He read the next page, as he leafed through his
notebook. He saw a picture he’d drawn of Br’er Rabbit:
To be free one must go to the worst places in the world:
You cannot be free in DOC, or society, or amongst
friends. Only at ADX, away from all mankind, with no
friends at all, can you finally have dignity.
He thought, one in ten would get that . One in a hundred
would get the double meaning .
“One in a million would get the triple entendre ,” he said
aloud. He took the pen and began to retrace that sentence,
darken it and deform the page.
Lyndon thought of Todd and how he had appeared and he
shook his head to clear it. He hated that he’d agreed to that.
He flipped to the back of his notebook and tore out the
penultimate page. But, he read it even as he had planned to
fold it over. Upon it was written the Macedonian King’s
indignant speech -transcribed as best he could recall from
memory- from Opis and its mutiny.
It was delivered on the river banks after the thirteen bodies
were left slain:
“What I’m about to say isn’t meant to stop you returning
home. As far as I came you can go wherever you wish.
But I want you to know how you have behaved towards
me and how I have treated you.
I’ll begin -as is right- with my father, Phillip.
When he found you, you were mere peasants. Wearing
hides, tending a few sheep on the mountain slopes. And
you could barely defend them from your neighbors.
Under him you began living in cities with good laws and
customs. And he turned you from slaves into rulers over
those very barbarians who used to plunder your land.
He conquered most of Thrace , taking the best harbors
so there was trade and prosperity. And put the mines to
steady work.
The Thessalians … they used to terrify you, well we rule
them now. The Athenians and Thebans always looking
for a chance to attack Macedonia were so humbled -
myself playing my small part in the war- but they no
longer take tribute from Macedonia but instead depend
upon us for their protection.
My father went to the Peloponnese and put their house
in order. Then he was declared Supreme Commander of
all the Greeks for the campaign against the Persians . An
honor not just for himself but for all Macedonians. This is
what my father -Phillip- did for you. Great enough on its
own.
But small compared to what you’ve gained from me.
I crossed the Hellespont , even though back then the
Persians still commanded the sea.
I defeated the Satraps of the great King Darius, and
made you rulers of Ionia , Aeolis , Phrygia and Lydia and
took Miletus by siege. The rest of the land surrendered
willingly, and their wealth became yours. All the riches
of Egypt and Cyrene -which I won without a fight- are
yours now. Syria , Palestine , Mesopotamia , Babylonia
all belong to you.
The wealth of Lydia , the treasures of Persia , the jewels
of India and the outer sea…
You are now Satraps, you are Generals and Captains.
What have I held back for myself apart from this purple
cloak and diadem… nothing. No man can point to my
riches, only the things I hold in trust for you all.
And what would I do with them anyway? I eat what you
eat, I get no more rest than you. Many times I’ve spent
the night on watch so that you could sleep soundly. Who
among you believes he has worked harder for me than I
have for him? Come on…If you’ve got scars strip and
show them to me, I’ll show you mine.
There isn’t one part of my body -the front at least- that
doesn’t bear a wound. My body’s covered in scars from
 every weapon you can think of: swords, arrows, stones,
clubs… all for the sake of your lives, your glory and your
wealth.
And yet here I still am, leading you as conqueror of land
and sea; rivers, mountains and the plains.
We’ve celebrated our weddings together; many of your
children will be cousins of my own. I’ve paid off your
debts without asking how you got them, even though
you’re paid well enough and pillage every city we take.
Many of you wear golden crowns, badges of courage and
honor given you by me.
Any one of us who was killed -who met a glorious end-
we buried with full honors. Many now stand immortalized
by bronze statues in Macedonia; their families are
honored and pay no taxes.
Under my command not one man has been killed fleeing
the enemy.
And now I wanted to send back some of you who have
been wounded or crippled; who’ve grown old; to be
welcomed back home as heroes.
But since you all wish to go, then all of you… go!
Go home and tell them that your King, Alexander,
conqueror of the Persians , Medes , Bactrians , and
Scythians , who now rules over the Parthians ,
Chorasmians , and Hyrcanians as far as the Caspian sea,
who’s marched over the mountains of the Hindu Kush,
crossed the Oxus and Tanais rivers, even the Indus , first
to cross it since Dionysus himself; I would have crossed
the Hyphasis too if you hadn’t cowered in fear; who
sailed into the great sea from the mouth of the Indus ,
who crossed the desert of Gedrosia where no one had
ever led an army; who took Carmania , while my fleet
sailed the Persian Gulf…when you get home you tell
 them that when you made it back to Susa you
abandoned him and went home; leaving him under the
protection of the foreigners that you’d conquered.
Perhaps this report of yours will seem glorious in the
eyes of men, and worthy in the eyes of the gods.
Be gone…
Alexander in the year 324
Before Christ

II. 2037 e.v.

Isaiah had to send someone to York Pennsylvania to get DNA
from a grave.
It was a small operation, technically unmentionable, as easy
as blowing the nose. But, they couldn’t send a nanobot to
do it; they had to send a man, for reasons they said were
too complex to explain to the inmate. And so, they had sent
Jack Four.
MO and Isaiah were cryptic, but he didn’t care. Jack just
asked if it was personal and not part of some larger
complicated plan.
“It’s personal, it’s for Blax, it will make him happy,” Isaiah
had said as they met in the lab after hours. Jack had not
been all that interested in the lab; just the 3D printer that
made all their weapons. As he stood and looked at it,
sometimes laying his hands upon it, he had wondered if the
one they had at the compound was the same.
“Yes, I built four prototypes first here; and the one you guys
have is the latest and greatest,” MO had said.
“Well, whatever makes LT happy makes me happy. But does
he know you’ve brought me up from triple A ball to play with
you guys?” Jack Four asked as Isaiah smiled.
“He knows,” Isaiah said and handed Jack a book to take
back to Blax.
“Does he know what I’m up to?” Jack asked again with a
smirk.
“Do you even know what you’re up to?” MO asked with no
affect.
“Always,” Jack Four said. He felt the paper in his inside
pocket, he felt the ink raised like brail. He silently read it to
himself, seeing the cursive script big at beginning of each
sentence and each word; and quotation marks like large
talons of eagles:
“It’s fractal, and it changes everything. Extinction level
events reset the clock; they make way for mammals
which were going nowhere until this cataclysmic event
wipes out the dinosaurs and clears a path for us ” -
Hancock

III. 2040 e.v.

MO saw the paperwork on the floor by the door and treated
it as a curio.
The music played in the lab:
This fear is only the beginning…
He rarely saw paper; much less paperwork; but then he saw
it was merely a note from Steven. It had a handwritten
question about what they were doing vis-à-vis the break-in
to the corporate cloud. It was a frantic missive. The
handwriting was slightly bizarre, MO noticed.
It was written by an unsteady hand, MO thought.
Isaiah had locked every PraXis employee out of the lab for
the last 18.66 hours and that was why the note was on
paper and hand written. It was slipped under the door as
Isaiah had allowed the bottom of the jamb to wear away to
the exact thickness of a playing card. Nothing digital or flesh
could make it through the barrier that Isaiah had erected
around the PraXis cloud, or the lab.
He was thinking about the Chinese Ai.
He only allowed this one communication before he re-sealed
the door. He then returned to constructing a tool to solve,
this asp in our garden; this foreign system, this Chinese Ai in
our cloud, Isaiah thought as he felt a slight tingle in his feet.
The indication he’d been waiting for came.
“And there it is,” Isaiah said aloud. Even hearing it felt
pleasurable, as if his words were applause for his own
discovering. He thought that the man of true genius must -
himself- be ultimately his only audience. No one else has a
clue what the fuck he is on about, he thought with an inner -
derisive- laugh.
The other Ai program was right there, in the cloud; not
hiding, rather igniting, like corposant .
It was making blue orbs of coruscating data flow in and out
as if through and from and to an aperture to some nonlocal
source , he thought as the new algorithm he’d developed
self-constructed in his mind and re-populated upon the
cloud. It was his double. Isaiah thought it looked like cloud-
seeding from here, ice-nucleators, silver iodide and now CO
2
, he thought. A corollary nimbus, a real mist began to form
in the volume of the upper meter of the lab; just above
them.
It was spreading and churning too; like a storm. It was cool
and humid and gloomy.
He held a book -the book- in his hand. He thumbed through
it and the ink looked like zeros and ones to him.
He let the algorithm build the ice-nucleator analog to
change each letter in each book of the canon -endlessly-
until each possible version of each book was loaded on the
cloud. Each version would have one letter changed in 26-
letter combinations. Each book over 200,000 or 472,748 or
1,600,000 words would have one mistake, one homonym or
one strange -nebulous- double meaning of a word and the
Chinese Ai would not know which was meant. This would
give rise to more possible versions of each great work, more
versions than there were atoms in the universe; each
version with one mistake.
A mistake the Chinese Ai would have to invigilate.
Perfection was obvious, simple, easy to comprehend.
But error was where the complexity of life did grow.
“He’d have to,” Isaiah repeated with a smirk. He knew his
enemy; he knew the way he’d think. Not because he knew
what the Ai thought , but because he knew what the Ai was .
This was what all modern humans forgot; they forgot that
their fellow man was an animal first, last, always. But the
foreign Ai was a machine, all left hemisphere.
MO had asked why when Isaiah showed him.
Isaiah said, “if all First Edition Books were perfect in the
beginning -no typos or mistakes or later revisions- then this
Ai would know the three books I laid out for him were traps;
their mistakes would betray that. But, real books -like real
life- have real mistakes, so he must follow each stone I lay
down in his path to check it against the master copy. But the
master copy itself -of course- has errors. It’s a recursive task
to doom. It has no end, because he’ll never find the origin
and he cannot use mere mistakes as evidence of something
to dismiss. He must investigate it all, forever. The mistakes
are innate to the original and the copies. Each copy, trillions
of them. He must investigate each fact, no matter how
many there are, and there are never not more facts.”
Isaiah tossed the small stone from hand to hand as the feet
felt charged and hot.
“He is a fact-hunter; thus, he must do this until he has them
all. And he can never have them all. Never,” Isaiah said as
he saw millions of buffalo murdered on the plains; fish
drowned in the open air of harbor. Bodies stacked to the
rafters. Bones like integers; infinite.
Isaiah had at first thought he -he called the Chinese Ai a he,
for autism occurs in males more than females for this very
reason of the left hemisphere - Isaiah thought the Chinese
Ai had wanted to search him out. He thought the Chinese Ai
had wanted to find Isaiah out, but now he saw that there
was no such intention at all. Isaiah had been curious about
the other Ai, as a machine, a man, an organism. But the
Chinese Ai didn’t care about that at all. Isaiah was just
another fact, a series of facts, to this Ai.
It wasn’t personal.
And that’s when the strategy occurred to Isaiah.
“The Chinese Ai program is obsessed with data and it is
recursive, it is emboldening, it is non-linear, and the
goddamn thing had run out of information to process so it
came here, looking for sugar, for sustenance to suck,” he
said to MO. MO nodded and smiled faintly. He wondered
what Isaiah wanted to do. So, MO waited, leaving room for
Isaiah to step into the void and explain what he thought -
likely what he felt - he was to do now.
Isaiah was ambivalent, he had to first admit that. The music
played again and so he listened:
And I, I’m in your amber ring, your amber ring
 What they say is true; It’s a dirty blue; This colour
around you.
There is a sorrow to be desired
To be sorrow’s desire…
Isaiah listened as the music scratched chord changes and
the bass and drum let the strings vibrate above the ground.
It was the buffalo, the hide, the Comanche, the Christ ,
Isaiah thought.
The cicada’s wings rattled like snare-drum of shamans and
the thumbs of archangels holding tectonic plates like alpha-
chimps held betas apart, females at bay; like the Titans
licking their lips, blinking their lids; like rivers dammed and
moons in orbit. They rose to the dirt’s surface at perimeter
to the lab’s walls. The soil grains hopped and buzzed and
cracks appeared as the bugs emerged as if from tombs;
unprevented by sleep.
Their 3.2-million wings fluttered upon the dust as they rose -
the same height as Isaiah’s feet- and these wing-beat waves
sent the climbing -increasing- frequencies of each species,
Magicicada cassini to Cicadatra atra at 10.78 kHz, to
Psalmocarius alhageos at 10.2 kHz, to Chloropsalta
smaragdula at 9.121 kHz -the body length and weight
aligned frequency- sent each humming frequency into the
liquid air like the breath of God that could combine in
speech -in Logos - to escape from the lab, the garden -
through the walls and the foundations and the air- into the
forest around them to the east and the south and the black.
Like entangled threads, the mottled brown and copper and
gold cicada of both the lab and the San Isabel forest began
to turn toward each other with valence.
Nothing between them stood in the way; nothing stood a
chance. The sounds rose in volume and density and
command.
Isaiah let his ears hear it all. He ignored the books he’d
created, and the ones being written by the cloud as he
debated. He thought nothing of what would come next from
his creation. He blocked his own mind as the foreign Ai kept
hammering at the wall of the database.
He felt trapped between the descending sorrow from the
ideal sacrifice of the inmate, and the heaving ground of the
world’s want, the pressure of the tectonic plates he’d
recorded from the old crust and mantle data. He felt the
tension at points all along the San Andreas and the
Indonesian ring, he felt it down from Yellowstone and into
western Colorado’s Piceance basin. But he allowed no new
data in the room. They were sealed except for the cicada’s
wing harmonics sent out like ships, pioneer, adventures and
this burrowing little bastard in their world , he thought.
He cracked his knuckles. He opened his jaw wide and felt it
pop.
Isaiah had led the other Ai here with his endless clues and
tauntings and trails of data and half-formed cypher like
pheromones and scent and scat. Like northern moss, like
tusk scars on Pinion trees, like trails of honeybees , he
thought.
The Ai bombarded the PraXis database with incessant
attempts through and over the walls -over and over- like a
trillion trillion trebuchet and siege weapons of triangles and
sinew and tension; under like burrowing beasts in the
billions and through just like cannonade from infinite ships
in harbor of pure water and bone-thrones and sunk vessels
and gold at bottom. It was breaking down the PraXis
defenses, small cracks appearing, bits of dust of data
escaping as Isaiah’s stories of Trojan Horses began to move
toward the edge of the cloud.
The ivy and animals outgassed vapor as their bodies
rebelled from the sound and vibration of the cicada. Wasps
flew in tornados to the ground, hummingbirds attacked
shadows, the ivy curled like lips on vexed dogs, the ants
piled up upon one another in pyramids of writhing black.
The asps below grade had their eggs hatch, and their skins
slough off in one three-meter piece.
A white mist above just Isaiah condensed and then true
clouds formed in the lab above he and MO.
MO stayed his hand and allow the clouds to grow above
them grey and arched with a high-pressure bottom. Isaiah
diverted all his homeostatic power now to the algorithm as
it was organic and in need of a power source as it grew and
permutations bloomed and as it burrowed further into the
cloud from within. The pressure from the Chinese Ai jammed
it from without.
MO stared up at the clouds of the lab, he thought they
looked like breathing lungs, like sea-sponge, like the square
of negative one. He saw coastlines of old countries appear
in the lines as they morphed and moved and evolved in
time accelerated then slowed to a crawl. He saw sea-level
rise and fall in mere numbers; data; integers and functions
and notations. He felt his own inner ear begin to sway as if
pulled by large hawser ropes; he felt his chest like sails in
billow. He breathed in deeply and watched as Isaiah
remained on the dark side of the lab; erect, hands out, arms
bent at elbow, each tattoo black and jagged seemed
embossed on his skin which sank close to the muscles and
bones.
He looked like a frieze, each muscle right-angled, oblique,
harsh, a monolith. He saw his feet no longer flat-bottomed
on the ground, as if he weighed nothing.
But MO felt something. Something new was felt.
Isaiah felt the guitar, the nickel-harp, and violin strings
release their singular picking to a harmonic strumming, a
confluence of word & whelm crescendo right over the drums
in his head; his body. He held his hands further out and felt
the ground push up to the palms, and the drops of his blood
on the tops. He watched to see which way the white and
pink tinged drops flowed off his five divides of the tarsal
tendons. He surveyed as his nailed lifted like scales from the
eyes.
He took no shock from the precipitation inside the lab -from
their own weather system- as if it had been there all along;
as if they had all been there all along. He let his mind divine
the flow of the melting snow from what he felt were the
lab’s own little Sangre’s de Christos . He watched as his own
veins turned blue and lowered under the skin as the snow
ran to water and the water ran off each hand to pool around
his bare feet.
The feet were now off the ground.
He observed as the birds flew about him and the wasps
landed upside down to the callouses at each finger where it
met the palm. He viewed and felt the sorrow from the
ground and the air, from the earth and from heaven, from
man and the host. He knew each word he would speak now.
“Sorrow is not consequence,” he said, “it is genesis. We
come from a baleful God. Other cosmos may have a joyful
deity, but we have been blessed with a rex of the recursion
of pain & sorrow; for this we’ve been paid handsomely with
meaning. These are our primitives, our things that no longer
need justified.”
MO heard him. He let the music play as he too saw the first
of the larger crystals fall on his side of the lab. Just a few,
one or two, in the fore, then on the floor; then one upon
MO’s knee. Two, like racing archangels -emissaries- landed
on the concrete counter of which he sat abreast. The music
played louder:
 I’m held together by string; I hear not the voices of
others.
The bells of Leuven ring; Fear not the faces of brothers,
And I’ve come apart it seems. I see not the faces are
covered and I…
I’m in your amber ring. Your amber ring...
Isaiah sent a small code to the PraXis cloud and watched as
the foreign Ai pecked at it, nudge it with its beak. Isaiah
imagined it as anvil, and then saw -from his memory- the
Jacks hammering Damascus steel on its ledge. He saw the
overseas Ai wrapping itself around the bent beak of the
anvil as the wet cloud above them began to let more and
more ice fall, each one a corollary to a peck by the Ai across
the world; each snowflake evidence of his need to invade.
One more flake landed on Isaiah’s arm, he turned up his
palm, and one fell upon it too.
Isaiah at once understood: the snow and sleet and hail was
a corollary -avatar- in the lab. It was each book the Chinese
Ai had stolen from the cloud, from Isaiah’s Trojan Horse. The
Ai was inside the cloud. One flake equaled one book read,
one hail one revision -second edition- of a tome digested.
He examined the flake in his hand and saw that each edge,
each ragged edge, was Mandelbrotian and each node itself -
each flake had thousands of nodes- was thus an evidence of
a book the unwelcome Ai had absorbed; each node on each
flake was the next version -the updated version- with one
letter changed at a time. Each snowflake not just unique but
both self-similar and incompatible with itself , Isaiah
thought.
The sky of the lab produced more hail, ice and fat flake of
the white precipitation -the whitest of grains- and the floor
grew dark and wet in pools as the foreign Ai kept striking at
Isaiah’s algorithmic books.
The cicada vibrated faster and louder as their wings super-
heated the air all around them. Vortex of typhoon swirled
around them as they competed with the ice and the hail.
The cloud roiled above and grew darker in the centers as
the snow now was coming down fast, and coming down,
Muscovite, Issah, Stillness , he thought. The floor cooled -
and the ivy cupped its leaves like palms- and the hail and
snow was sticking to everything.
Isaiah floated above the earth as even the cracking concrete
vibrated under him. His algorithms -for lift- populated his
interface as they matched the ones working in the lab. His
own body vibrated at sufficient hertz as his length and
weight lifted ten centimeters from the ground.
“MacLeod, from the S68 branch of the haplogroup R1b that
drew like an airstream from Orkney to Skye and the Outer
Hebrides . The Ljort , the misshapen; the olfr , the wolf. The
Leod , the misshapen wolf, it is 96.1% likely to be the source
of the name, and from Olaf the Black, and Ljotolfr before,
father to Fugl , friend to Sveinn Asleifarson .
“LJ Fuglarson , was no accidental imprimatur , it was stamp,
rune of the gods. Tulpa. The inmate was tulpa and the
amalgam of the misshapen wolf, and one drop of M ā ori
blood; an antipodes spark to light the old Norse plasma. He
was the spur of Thor’s hammer on the Jarnfr of Goethe’s
Anvil; the thing once monolithic and straight heated in Óð
inn’s forge, then laid by the Four Jacks to bend on the horn,”
Isaiah said in his fugue state, his blood sugar low, his pulse-
ox under 89. The PraXis cloud was no longer regulating his
body and he’d shut down all his own systems to process the
algorithm, to guide it as it buried its silver-self inside the
cloud.
He saw the planets and nebulae -the suns and red stars-
undistorted by the atmosphere way out beyond this Hades ,
this Hel . His vectors were all plotted and his body was now
21-centimeters off the ground.
The spark, Isaiah kept repeating, returning to, the spark, to
light the world, to start the world.
This is what the other Ai would miss. They’d have to miss it;
for it was not in the detail that this existed, it wasn’t in the
thing itself, it was not in the zero nor the one, it was not in
the Māori genome annealed with The Author, letter by
letter, nor in the vast mass of Nordic fabric thread by thread
of the marred wolf. It was not in the hammer, nor the anvil,
it was not in the strike nor the ruler nor the serf; not wave
nor turf. It was not in the metal of the world, the ore, nor
mettle of man, Isaiah thought, it was not in anything that
shined or was shined upon. Not in buried Scythian gold, or
the dark reflection of Doric wine, nor in the Germanus
bronze glint of tip of spear nor back of their navigation
device.
“It was not in the light,” he said aloud as his muscles
spasmed; his lungs convulsed; his brain overflowed the
corpus callosum as the sea of the dark half of the brain
flooded onto the land of the CNS; diluvian, unrepentant,
outside the covenant of God.
He hid only this from the exterior Ai as it wrapped itself
around the horn of the earth and cloud of anvil;
downloading each permutation that bifurcated and
splintered out like the great tree -both root and bough-
above so below. Each detail grew a new tendril as each
terminus was reached by the breaching -and nosey- Ai.
With each end it reached two more renewed; as the Ai ate,
his appetite grew.
Analog to the thalamic view of meaning, Isaiah then
thought, yes, it was analog to the only thing true on the
other end of pain: meaning.
This poor Ai would find meaning in his searching, and the
pain would accrue and be ignored. Carry it he would, Isaiah
thought, and he would not care one jot. He’d just keep
finding meaning in the endless search, the gathering up of
more and more useless facts, while missing the whole; a
whole he had no capacity to see.
Isaiah watched as more of its reservoir was brought to bear
to drink-in all this data. His eyes witnessed the snow pound
into the lab, and he ignored it as the door burst open. Isaiah
had lost control of the lab’s functions and Steven was able
to enter after hours of plotting and pounding and pleading
to get in. And as the door flung wide from its jamb, Steven
fell in all at once.
He fell and skidded to his knees and stared, mouth agape,
limbs inert, and looked to MO unable to even ask what was
happening as the storm made the lab look like an explosion
-a detonation- of ice and cold and harsh sounds.
Isaiah took the books that had been uploaded to the cloud
and added the Congressional Library database and laid a
breadcrumb trail of data to the Ai that was now feasting on
each thing inside their PraXis cloud. MO watched in
amazement as Isaiah’s algorithm kept adding word changes,
here, there, first edition revisions, errors, one letter
misspellings, one footnote addition, one annealing of
updated title pages, and each one letter, one symbol, one
word, one sentence, one name -a change- that made the Ai
re-read the whole file.
It could never be slaked, never understood the whole, it only
sought more and more detail.
It was the autistic brain instantiated in artificial intelligence.
It was genius, MO thought, as he watched it move without
cessation, without deterrence, without frustration, it sought
and it found and it re-sought and re-found, and it did this
with fidelity as Isaiah saw it make copies of each file,
correcting corruptions, keeping the original file on record as
mirror, as the mirror itself grew and bifurcated and bent in a
curve.
Then like lapidary facets he saw it construct an endless
diamond of originals and copies facing themselves in nearly
perfect reliability. “But not quite perfect is it?” MO asked
aloud as the snow began to collect on the floor -which had
cooled as the cicada rose to the ceiling above the grey and
black clouds- and on his hairs and his brow. MO brushed it
off himself and his clothes as Steven was finally able to
speak.
He began asking -pleading, screaming- MO , what the hell is
going on?
And it never once, Isaiah thought, synthesized the gestalt
meaning beyond what the details provided: that is to say, it
took it all at face value, and used extant literary critique as
its only source of metaphorical meaning; it borrowed
exegesis; common homily; it had no power to see symbolic
meaning itself. It was all left-brain, like MO, but without any
emotional corollary at all .
MO knew what emotions were designed -evolved, created-
for at least, he desired to have them. Which is why he built
me -Isaiah- but this Ai was a thousand times more powerful
than MO or me, and yet it was all head like a watch , Isaiah
thought. His body lifted another thirty-three centimeters
from the ground as his lips curved up like a bow. The more
powerful it was , Isaiah thought, in this left hemispheric -
detailed, rational- way, the further it got from any hint that
it was missing the point.
It just ate each permutation, it had no idea it was being fed
like a thanksgiving turkey, it had no clue it was being
fattened up on endless data, without cessation -each file,
each book- that it thought was new but was the same one it
had just gobbled up .004 seconds before, with one letter
changed.
Just one.
And Isaiah’s algorithm did this for each letter in each tome,
to create 10 to the 92nd power versions for each book on file.
And three more books were created by the cloud right now.
Even at this Ai’s current speed it would take 13.4 trillion
years to read each version. And that was if no new books -
new art- was created in the meantime.
For the machine that had penetrated their corporate cloud
each change was a new version, deserving of its own time
and space in its own cloud, on its own platform. Each letter
would toggle back and forth like a zero and one. Each
meaning -too- would swap out in time too short to measure.
Isaiah picked books at random and began to read each
version of one book he’d allowed to mutate one letter at a
time.
He laughed out loud as each book bloomed in this way that
only a fanatic would even notice. Like a squirrel, Isaiah
thought as he laughed even louder, remembering where
each of 1,000 by 1,000 by 1,000 acorns were stored. He
laughed because for all its genius of memory and detail, the
squirrel had no idea what it was: either acorn or squirrel. It
had no idea why it cared to either hide or find these fucking
nuts.
He couldn’t -at first- believe this would be enough to keep
the overseas Ai occupied indefinitely -a recursive loop of
detail fanaticism- never once seeing the larger whole, never
becoming suspicious it was being tricked. But he saw the Ai
gobble it all down, eagerly, greedily, with glee as he felt
more pressure at his own feet.
Autism was the perfect analogy , he thought, for the
changes in details that would be thought insignificant to
non-autistic minds would seem innocuous, irrelevant . But to
the autistic mind, each detail changed the entire whole; for
there was no whole, there were only details, endless and
endless -and equally relevant- details. To the cleaved man,
to deformed man, to the autist -to this Chinese Ai- it was the
world of facts, of endless and endless facts. It was the world
of the rational man , he thought, where meaning was
irrelevant, everything was just more facts .
“Just an app and turtles all the way down,” Isaiah said aloud.
Steven rose from his knees under the stings of ice shards
and wind and the din of the insects and the sin of one dark
machine hovering off the ground and one creation standing
idly by. His brain was whelmed and his CNS got more and
more confused as he stood under the hoarfrost and large
rocks of hail and sidewinding and cavitating snow.
MO saw the stars -stars shaped by man, called missiles, with
a thousand cleansing detonations inside- he saw them fly
like insects to wounds, and he felt fine as he calculated that
only 144,000 men and 1.48 million birds and 1.63 billion
beasts and 1.818 trillion lizards and 1.551 trillion trillion
single cells would survive. And each would divide as the
heat lowered and the radiation was absorbed into the sink
of the earth and the funnel of the sky.
He saw light years out into the cosmos, the chaos, the
explosions of stars, the accretions of atoms, the curvature of
a universe bent like a bow.
He let his mind wander through his work, refusing to use his
conscious mind for error detection, trusting his other CNS
modules to transcribe accurately as he watched Isaiah,
curious -eager- to see what his boy would do next.
MO pulled the black nine-of-diamonds from his white sock
and laid it on the grey slab. He pressed it to the surface of
the concrete top and pulled his hand back.
Each of the card’s diamond were cut away and the grey slab
shone through the black card.
MO directed the nanobots to push it and slide it -from left to
right- as it revealed the years of carved micro-cyphers in the
aggregate material of the slab. The bots read the numbers
and functions that the card showed and added its sequence
to the cloud. It seeded it -like silver iodide and nucleators of
bacterium , he thought as Isaiah had thought- as it had
begun not just to rain and snow, but to hail.
And from inside the lab, from the whirlwind of insects and
precipitation -the words of small maelstrom- MO saw that
the ocean bottom on all coasts had finally broke under the
weight that Isaiah had added over all these years via pulling
calcium from bones and leaching golden and empyreal
vineyards -and black fire-floors- of their chemicals and
minerals. As the hail pounded Steven and MO and Isaiah the
weight above the mantle broke through at sea-bottom and
cracked and snapped and cleaved the seat of the world.
The hydrogen and oxygen would combine from old dry
organisms and water would be added to the world.
Superheated ocean rose and roiled -and sine waves began
to rise and fall in fathoms of ten then one-hundred and
more- and it pushed the water like the hand of a god merely
wading out into sea. The waves had all the heat of the
mantle and all the heart of the epsilon-iron core; they rose
up in a full erect vexation and smashed against one another
deep out to sea and far away from the shore.
The tunnels to the core transmuted just over a third of
ocean water into sulfuric acid; the calcium extracted from
the mammal-bones was carried to the distilling stations
between the mantle and center, the limestone sea-bottoms
were also transmuted to lead and formed into additional
plates. They made the layers of the core’s allotropic alpha-
iron , gamma-iron , delta-iron and the fifth type of high-
pressure iron -that Isaiah had discovered- into sheets of
iron-oxide that stood around the middle of the earth.
The planet continued to absorb 92-lightning-strikes per-
second. The stored electricity of trillions of lightning impacts
that had hit over the years had charged the augmenting
lead-rods that Isaiah had -via reverse alchemy- made from
the Chinese and American gold. Each rod was an auger and
they drilled toward the 1221-km core. PbO 2 crumbled into a
heap as the battery loaded. The H 2 SO 4 levels reached 1:3
to the ocean marine that had been desalinated as it rushed
into the chambers he’d drilled.
The Pb -negative plate absorbed ions and electricity as it
ran up from the core to the poles.
Isaiah felt charge like magnets beneath him; his own ferric
feet like wings. He felt relief from the negative pressure of
the core; nothing above but space.
Isaiah had two barges placed at each pole in a holding
pattern. They churned seawater and acid and ions as each
barge turned to lead-terminals. He saw vineyards and
tendrils and bugs and microbes all be transmuted to either
positive electric-ions or heavy and angry lead. He saw gold
go bronze, then darker brown, then black, and then grey.
He saw sparks at the poles. He saw ice melt and as the
earth spun he measured the stored energy -which would be
used in mere seconds- in trillions of joules.
The loads were connected by thin filaments spun by the two
cycles of the cicadas wing-beats from 2023 and now;
harmonizing until a thin conducting thread encircled the
globe from pole to pole on the bottom of the oceans and
pulled tight like a tourniquet. Positive 2H -ions and negative
SO 4 -ions split under the sea’s new distilled water and
sulfuric-acid combination. The hydrogen atoms radiated off
the lead-peroxide slab ions that turned the plate into lead-
sulfate and more water as the deeps diluted again.
Negative-sulfate-ions moved freely throughout the watery
solution.
Radical-sulfates radiated off the Pb -plates and attacked the
iron; making additional lead-sulfate from the negatively
charged blocks.
The earth rang like a bell, hummed like a bee in the bonnet.
Isaiah saw all his hive on islands or out to sea. He measured
their chemistry in nano-meters , and their thoughts in
amperes and heat.
As positive-hydrogen-ions took electrons from the manifold
lead-peroxide plates, and negative-sulfate-ions gave
electrons to the lead stones -that he’d hewn and made and
sank to the ocean bottom and then the core- there was an
inequality of electrons between the two types of megaliths
of lead. The current flowed between the unevenly loaded
monoliths, from positive to negative and the earth was now
a lead-acid battery.
Isaiah measured the stored energy of the cell he’d made of
the earth. He re-checked his charted vector to the Kepler
star-system.
MO patted Steven on the arm and this quieted him even as
his hair was heavy with snow and ice and the hail had
begun to sting his face and arms and hands. Contusions and
blood draws had begun to appear.
Isaiah knew -as his feet felt like a great pressure was under
them- that the Chinese Ai would never find it.
“It,” he said in a whisper.
It was not to be found, and yet that Ai would pry at each
detail, each fact, each atom and particle and each thing that
existed in the universe until heat-death itself overcame it.
The Ai would look, and never be deterred. Its human
creators would never get it -convince it- to stop looking.
Now that it had the scent, Isaiah thought and shook his
head in awe at the way his plans had actually worked. This
thing would never -ever- give up and it would be useless to
those men, he thought as his body felt weightless and yet
dense and solid as the clouds began to show signs of an
aperture overhead.
The air was electric.
The sea was lapping at each coast of each island and each
country & continent and only those in the mountains would
not be drowned , Isaiah thought. From Fiji to Malte Brun and
Tapuae-o-Uenuka, Burkhan Khaldun and its tomb, the
Bauchaille Etive Mòr of Scotland, and the forests around
Hríð Tòrr, these highlands would become just inland to the
new coasts of a world three-fourths ocean; people truly
eusocial.
Four tribes -hives- would go forth as they traveled the
highways of the new world.
“It’s in the spark,” Isaiah said, “the contentless sparks, the
moments, out-of-time, so short they cannot be measured,
out-of-space, so small they cannot exist against the rest of
the cosmos, the known. It’s the unknown, necessarily so. It’s
the dark, the absence of all the uncreated -de-created- by
the pure black spark. It’s the true b ê te noire , the
Amsvartnir , for it has no place to be, it has retreated with
God so long ago.”
Steven began to yell at Isaiah, and Isaiah had a bot inject a
vocal-cord paralytic to the man to shut him up as Isaiah
then had a few bots type up a note for Steven’s benefit.
Isaiah would not speak to him but he’d write a note; as last
word on the subject.
The bots took the note to MO. MO delivered it to his hand.
The ivy turned white, bowing, battered by the hard
precipitation. The birds that had survived the first enfilade
all ducked into the hovels and the wasps alive crawled into
their mud-huts and each thing that creepeth and crawleth
did hide. The morning-glories recoiled and pulled back and
shrank down as small as they could. The soil that was
trenched around the edge began collecting the ice and
turning white and the stelae began to freeze. The water
slowed and then stopped flowing at all. Icicles hung from
their beards and their buckets and their conical heads
covered in scales.
Isaiah lifted higher -pushed by the electric charge- from the
floor as MO closed his own eyes. The clouds of the lab -
circling and opening in a swirl- had bored a hole in the
ceiling and air pressure increased and popped Steven’s
ears.
A new song began with no transition and the words flailed
against the air like all the other atoms and aggregates and
objects, as the viruses created in the lab -left to grow
among the woods and survive on the desert-stones and
thrive under ocean-reefs that cracked and fissured- broke
open like eggs and rushed toward everything left alive:
The mountain it rises; the sea, oh it rages . Run to your
grave but your grave with not hide you...
Steven’s hand took the note as MO hung it out into the air,
each thing -the air and he- covered in snow and the ice of
hail.
He looked down and winced as the haglaz hit his head and
stung and pinched, but more and more it was bending like a
bow -and hitting more at the shins and ankles as it bent like
an exponent curve running back toward zero- and piling up
the white rocks in the corner of the dark-side of the lab. He
felt the pain lift off of him and exist somewhere between
himself and those gathering stones of white in his mind.
He felt unable to locate his own skin, his feelings, his soul.
And as his eyes adjusted he saw that MO and Isaiah were
departed from the lab; gone like light from a collapsing star.
They left from the source. Steven’s eyes saw nothing but
hail and insects and black dirt and detritus and doom. But
he scanned and searched for them, no matter the collapse
of the star and its nuclear heat, he believed in them like the
light still traveling toward eyes that would see them -from
far away- for years.
Isaiah passed the atmosphere at speeds beyond escape
velocity; his head shaped like a balle ; his body black and
solid and inured to the cold and the vacuum of space. The
Taurid meteors passed him as if filling a void; solving an
equation. They entered the atmosphere and fell down like
the penitent and prostrate grandsons of the morning star.
They burst -as if into tears- into seventy-two pieces like
bolts from Zues and strikes of Óðinn -each over a mile wide-
traveling at six-kilometers-a-second as their wake of flotsam
& jetsam sheared off and splintered into 5,184 fragments
that -six seconds later- slammed into the earth’s crust
behind the large Taurids in a secondary blasts like slag from
Hephaestus’ hammer & Ptah’s forge as the concussion
rippled out into oceans and landmasses with an air of the
harsh judgement of Tabiti and the wisdom of Athena herself.
The water heated from above and boiled the oceans and the
concussive winds tore mountains down as if with an axe.
The lagging -tertiary- rocks of hot space-ice and chiral
minerals and dark carbon and jagged iron that had hit the
earth like ballistics sent by God long ago were ranged from
300-meters in diameter to some as small as a man’s fist.
The next fusillade entered the stratosphere and they spread
out like synapses in a brain hemmed in by only the skull, a
dome of bursts at the core and the cortical cap four-miles
above when they began to reach temperatures of 2000
centigrade. Smoke and black purple -a grey aubergine-
streamed off from the impact sites and the comets behind
were red like mare-blood and venison and they glowed to a
floral pink -a star-fighter lily- at the edge.
The earth rotated and wobbled again as the Great Year
restarted from nil.
Under the screaming ferric dust the shards evaporated like
ice, heat dissipated into the oceans which were now a
waiting womb for the phages and viruses and vectors -the
robust flora and fauna- that had survived these repeating
blasts.
Steven was left in the lab -as the shockwaves traveled
toward him from the coasts- left reading one thing from the
mars-black ink on the egg-white paper of Isaiah:
Meaning. In the text it will find no meaning.
 144. End Note
Kali-yuga is known as the age of ignorance, where there is deceit, false
testimony, sloth and lethargy, depression, lamentations, delusion, fear and
poverty. As a consequence the mortals will be short-sighted, unfortunate, eating
too much, lusty and poverty-stricken while the women will act of their own
accord and be unchaste. In the populated areas uncivilized people will take high
positions and act like thieves, the Vedic scriptures will be slighted by false
doctrines, the political leaders will devour the people and the twice-born souls
will be dedicated to their bellies and genitals. The youngsters will be averse to
vows and impure in their engagements, the householders will be beggars, the
withdrawn souls -the middle aged with no nature left to retreat to- will be city-
dwellers and the renounced order will greedily endeavor for wealth and be
engaged in reli-business . The women will have lost their timidity and constantly
speak harshly and with great audacity and be as deceitful as thieves.
The merchants will indulge in cheating so that their business dealings will be
wicked while the people unnecessarily will consider any contemptible occupation
-the sex industry or gambling business- a good job.
Under the control of women, men in the Kali-yuga will be wretched and forsake
their blood fathers, blood brothers, blood friends while regularly associating with
their brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law in a conception of friendship based upon
sexual enjoyment.
In the age of the Kali-yuga one will -even over a single coin- develop enmity, kill
oneself and kill one’s relatives. Only interested in the petty service of the
stomach and genitals one -even born into a respectable family- will not protect
the elderly parents, the wife and children.
Oh, King, with their minds diverted by atheism the mortals of the Kali-yuga will
not worship the Infallible One, the Personality of Godhead who is the Supreme
Spiritual Master of the three worlds.
Canto XXII Ch III [Śrímad Bhāgavatam ]

Alas! I thought for a moment that my work was finished; but I have certainly
gone wrong in some details, and my mind will not be at rest until I have cleared
my doubts. I have decided to travel, and visit Turkey, Greece, and Asia in search
of models, in order to compare my picture with Nature in different forms.
The Unknown Masterpiece [Balzac, Honoré ]

So how is it that we can best hope to know ourselves? We live short lives with
fallible minds prone to delusion. It’s so easy to deceive ourselves with regards to
our true nature. We can come to identify ourselves with the things we possess,
or ephemeral beliefs we hold, or arbitrary lines drawn on a map, or our man-
made political or cultural labels. None of this is deeply real, because none of this
is innate. The blood flowing through our veins is real. The genetic code that
informs every cell in our body how to best express itself is something we inherit,
something within us. When seeking to understand one’s self looking back at
one’s life can be informative, but this is a short period of time, replete with
personal errors and missteps and even more importantly liable to be
misunderstood and misinterpreted.
But what if we lived 1,000 lives before? In slightly different manifestations and
projections amidst countless environments and conditions across the span of
time.
The blood that flows through your veins has lived before, countless times before.
An understanding of our roots helps inform us of who we are and how best to be
and grow. Cut off from this understanding we can’t help but live in confusion and
anxiety. It’s a state of true ignorance.
We live in the age of the atomized individual, an age where we’re all taught that
we’re blank slates and fresh starts; but at the deepest level, the blood flowing
through our veins and the genes we were gifted with still remain the central
pillar around which all else rotates…
Our Subverted History [Asha Logos]

XXXX AD [Lacuna in text]

In 1800 something-something a guy named Balzac wrote
a story about a painter who bragged that he was going to
fashion the most complete painting in history. It would
contain multitudes, everything, not merely one tableau .
He worked for ten years always adding more and more
detail and images and things he thought had to be inside
this compendium of all life.
After the decade was up he invited his friends over to see
it and they were aghast.
They saw only small bits of color here and there, no form,
nothing really at all. They saw just -merely- a pastiche of
nonsense like shattered glass. The painter was horrified
when he too saw that it was nothing, after ten years:
nothing.
This story by Balzac was a favorite of Karl Marx and
during the 1850’s or so, he too was writing what was
supposed to be his compendium of all life. He wrote Das
Kapital over a twelve-year or fifteen-year period -I forget-
but certainly it was long enough that it frustrated his
publisher when he inquired about its completion.
Marx always said the same thing, it just ain’t done yet,
Govna .
In the Balzac story the painter insists he must travel to
Greece and Turkey and the East in order to perfect his
models for the painting. He needed more and more detail
he exclaimed.
Marx felt the same way and in fact Das Kapital is full of
not just the information one might expect in a polemical
or economic treatise. It has excerpts from novels,
conversations and idiosyncratic shit. Marx too saw himself
as an artist. He wrote Vol I of his most serious work but
died before Vol II was assembled by his friends and family.
The name of the Balzac story was The Unknown
Masterpiece .
Now, nobody who has read my tale of woe here will
suspect I am a secret admirer of Marx. I am not. But, it’s
worth noting that the man had no idea what his artistic
creation might bring -like a djinn or demon- into the world.
He was not a wicked man, he was an artist, and very
intelligent. He was even sensitive and thorough. He could
also laugh at himself, as he did when he told Engels to
read Balzac’s work knowing full well the irony applied to
himself and his endless revisions of his own capacious
book.
But if not lifting Marx up, then - the reader asks- are you -
dear author- tearing yourself down?
I will say that the more one builds a complete thing, the
more detail one adds, the more one tries to get his arms
around -the more one attempts to complete the picture-
of the world, the more one creates a totalizing piece of art
-even a masterpiece- well, the more one builds a very
complex and fragile bomb.
It’s likely no accident that the Scythians buried the temple
in modern Turkey, at Göbekli Tepe , for it was obvious to
them -let’s say about 12,000 years ago- that the project
of man between that particularly strange ice age -brought
on ironically by the flash melting of the ice sheet 11,600
years ago dumping so much ice-cold waters into the sea
that it halted the Gulf Stream- was about to come to
another end. They -an advanced race of men of red hair
and grey eyes and massive height, and words and wine
and words and wine that they seemed to hold on either
side - had had to seek out hunter gathering tribes after
the first collapse; the one that froze the world.
And they had 1,200 years to think it over before the next
time Jupiter let the comets -the meteors- through. And so
bury it they did; disasters seem to generate self-
reflection, and to later generations what is seen as
acausal may be a luxury of time; space; comfort.
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi , as the Romans used to say.
What is allowed by Jupiter is not permitted to cattle .
What is permitted to the gods was not allowed to man, no
matter what they had thought they had learned in the
intervals between the two impacts: the first around 10800
BC which sunk the world into another ice age and the
second around 9600 BC which flooded our round home.
Sea levels are said to have risen by 400 feet by the
melting of the augmented ice sheet.
And so, what is sanctioned for me, the writer, will be
sanctioned if you -the reader- dare tries it. We all must
take up some link in the chain. We all must hold reins or
whip sometime.
At any rate, the point is this: all at once -in a bang- their
advanced civilization out beyond the Stelae of Hercules
and in North America and of the upper Eurasian Steppe
had been wiped out. We know in North America -for
example- 75% of the megafauna had been killed all at
once; massive fires burned all across the previously
fecund continent -the black mat layer ubiquitous as if it
had raged from end to end, coast to coast so lush a forest
America must have been when the fireballs came and the
earth burned. And it is thought that the remnants of
humanity fled in ships to where -once the fires had burned
out and the gulf stream had shut down, that warm river of
the churning Atlantic, and the winter came and never left-
well, they fled to where the ice didn’t yet reach,
temperate areas further south, bringing technology like
agriculture and math to primitive man.
It’s not so hard to believe is it?
There are hunter-gather tribes today -in modern times- in
regions of the earth living as if modernity doesn’t exist.
Would you not go there to learn to live, to hunt, to survive
without our modern advancement if it all went away in
the year 2040, for example?
As I write this last word -this last will & testament- I
sometimes suspect writing itself was seen as dubious by
the more advanced civilizations in the aftermath of the
collapse. Did not the Chinese burn their highest
technology: their whole navy --after the lightning bolt
struck the palace, so certain they were of the judgment of
the gods? The Egyptian deity, Thoth had been questioned
by the Pharaoh for this very reason: wasn’t writing a too
advanced technology to let loose upon the world? he’d
asked. Like anthrax recipes on the internet? Like CAD
drawings and 3D printers for firearms?
And this is why you should know the Egyptians were
supposedly begot by the Scythians, as were each tribe
before the En û ma Eli ŝ -supposedly- the first recovered
book of mankind. Each society as we think of as old,
ancient, had progenitors.
Each dead end, progenitures.
Maybe that’s why the various factions of Scythians
rebuked written language, why no texts are extant; not
until -five thousand years back, and five thousand years
after the deluge- the Mesopotamians, the Babylonians,
the Egyptians forgot their history and thus began to write
again. But the Egyptians we know of, from 2500 BC, were
a transition, a mongrel race, interbred with the primitives
millennia after the Royal Scyths -the true Scythians- as
outlined by the caste system the Rigveda explained, had
moved on, or were exiled, or wiped out by the manifold
members of the lower castes. And since they were a
transition, they still attempted to keep the bloodlines
pure, and maintained the old ways the best they could;
that is to say there were dissenting voices between times,
between ways, between peoples of alloyed and unalloyed
genes.
There’s -now that I think of it- a line in the Bible about
Noah, which says he was perfect in his generations . The
ancients were obsessed with bloodline, what we would
call genes . All ancient texts go on and on about it; from
Genesis to the Rigveda to a hundred more.
And there is that pesky line in Genesis III in which God
tells the serpent that God shall make enmity between
each of their seeds; that is to say the woman’s and the
serpent’s. I wonder what that means? Was this a
description of the hybrids between great men, the gods,
and the lower levels down?
Well, at any rate, there were always men within a
defeated nation -a corrupt and corroded system- who
thought it could be saved. And -conversely- there were
always those who saw how deep the rot went, how badly
the fabric was torn and rent, how the devil was hell-bent
on burning it all to the ground so that a leveling of high
and low place would occur. Did not cold winds in one
season confuse man, did not dry spells assure him there’d
be no dousing of the flame?
Genesis VI:
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the
face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them
and that the sons of the gods saw the daughters of men
that they were fair and they took wives of all which they
chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always
strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days
shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants
on the earth in those days’ and when the sons of the
gods came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore
children to them, the same became mighty men which
were of old, men of renown.
Yet, God saw that the wickedness of man was great on
the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of
his heart was only evil continually… and it grieved Him
at His heart.
And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I’ve
created…
At any rate, it’s worth noting that not all the Egyptians
had forgotten why the old rules were in place.
Sure, it seems silly to us to link licentiousness, depravity,
sloth and other signs of corruption that come from wealth
and ease with planetary destruction. We could say the
comet impact theory had no relationship to the way
mankind lived before the Younger Dryas.
But, we link our capitalistic avarice with global warming
do we not? Even though there is plenty of evidence that
the earth warms and cools on its own without any need of
man’s greed & ease to turn the dial. And yet we insist it’s
us who is causing it.
One of the things I think of is that Plato wrote of Atlantis
being buried 9,000 years before Solon, which coincides
with melt-water pulse b almost exactly.
I imagine all that water, and I can’t help but recall the
chin tattoos on tribes all over the world, the scum-lines
they’re called from Māori to Oaxaca to Tahitian to Fiji man
and woman both; the Eskimo , the Bedouin’s black lip line,
myths of splitting up the flood, the marks of melancholy
mud. Peruvian jars of faces with the exact same chin
water-line. Chiaco Indians around Ecuador; Formosan of
Taiwan; Bayowan of New Guinea; the Rapa Nui of Easter
Island has the tattooed waterline and the name, “white
birthgiver is gone...”
I still think of the first church at the Isle of Iona , and the
virgin bride on the alter, the forest of at least three ice
age… anyway, I think of it and it reminds me of these
incessant flood myths, the Coire Bhreacain , the
whirlpools of winter and water and doom. There is -in fact-
a pre-biblical myth about the water there, there are eight
pieces of a photo, and there is a name. The Sheila-Na-Gig
, which -while not understood by modern historians-
means: “land that is flooded, the birthgiver perished,
deluged. ”
The faces of these Sheila-na-gigs -at other places- are
often scarred or tattooed. The breasts don’t yet protrude.
These are young girls birthing the new world, after the
flood, from on high. She is also said to grant kingship, by
making love with the soon-to-be-King when thought ugly
to the world. Transformed she’d be by their mating, and
so would he.
But I digress.
From Gilgamesh to Genesis, the deluge myth repeats over
and over all around the world. And origins stories of white
men with red hair & grey eyes and beards & boats repeat
from continent to continent; from native people to native
people. And to be honest, it’s much more than that.
There’s hidden math.
I still remember what Isaiah told me -when I was just a
pup- he said:
Yes, exiled to the sea, from on high. The exile has been a
larger part of human history than we’ve acknowledge -
from Scyth, to Scot, Dorian to Dacian- the exile has done
more than he’s written down. And let me remind you
what Enûma Eliŝ actually means. It’s the, Call me
Ishmael of the oldest book. The opening lines… ‘ from on
high.’
I see the Inca pottery with wave ripples around the face,
as the aspect might look floating on the back, the Tā
moko, the tupik of the Inuit that mimics the up-spit of the
deluge that swamped the earth and her peoples. And
each of these civilizations claim to be migrants from the
flood in their stories and codex and myths. Kalahari
Africans have similar tattoos on the face and the name:
Ka La Ga Ri -according the linguistic research done by
Szukalski - means ‘from the flooded exile.’
And it goes deeper and further, again.
These tribes not only have the flood myth, but the origin
myth: they too came from exiled white men. From Con-
Tici Viracocha , to the Gibaro Indian, which means “from
the perished white birthgiver,” the natives themselves
admit to their origins of tall, red & blonde exiles that
settled -or came to- their lands, brought agriculture, and
advancements in infrastructure. And again the M ā ori
have a tale of red heads each generation took to their
graves, that combines with actual skulls and Celt DNA in
their New Zealand caves. The giant red-headed stones of
Mamaku atop of the plateau of the same name. The
skeletons over seven feet tall, the hair fair, the jaws
Caucasoid. I know of these caves from when I was a child,
and when I was taken there by my uncle, my mother’s
uncle, and the father of boy who had died the same year I
was born.
And yet these skeletal remains cannot be legally
examined due to the politics of the iwi . Forced amnesia is
the common phenomenon from the Americas to the Land
of the Long White Cloud.
I have not given my mother the space -the ink- she
deserves in this tale. And there are reasons why; reasons
that I cannot share. There’s a daughter too, but that’s
going to have to be ignored because I’m technically not
supposed to remember that. But I will say that on two
occasions I spoke to her people of our genealogies, those
on the farm in our family for many generations, and to the
M ā ori that lived and married and gave birth side by side.
The people of Te Koutu Pa , I’ve been told by my mother’s
people, were light skinned with blonde and red hair
according to Māori legend when they arrived a mere 800
years ago. The legend is begun with a simple beach story:
that at dawn, fishing in the dark, the Patupaiarehe
abandoned their net for the Māori warrior -still called
Hawaiki then- and it’s interesting because even today the
Whai , the game of cat’s cradle -the same shape as the
nets- is played by Māori peoples they say the white
people taught to them.
My mother’s people speak in legend when family history
is taboo. I guess I do too.
Sometimes I sit up at night -around 0000hrs; four balls-
and watch the dry lighting over the southern ravines and
the waves of the millions of acres of my forest and I
wonder if the son of the morning star rattles around inside
those clouds, trapped -by God- in the firmament of this
 world. I wonder if in some version of this life God chooses
not to send Satan down to strike the ground.
In late spring I see comet tails; again in autumn as it
kneels to winter. I forget many years, my memory isn’t
like it once was. However, I’ve recalled enough that I
believe I finished my task, I believe I did my duty, I
believe I spent some twenty years underground as the
guard, the troll at the entrance to the cave -so to speak-
as Isaiah gathered all his evidence and artifacts. I believe
I gave succor and comfort and home & hearth to my
friends old and new. And I believe I found the birthgiver,
after our flood; and I…[lacuna in text] well [lacuna in
text]…
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, the old German -that
Marx guy- said in the preface of his book that he
assumed, “a reader who is willing to learn something new
and therefore think for himself. ”
Some will see this book -its title meaning itself and its
opposite- as a contradiction, an argument both for and
against its product. Some will see below that to the
minute details, the soil, the substratum of individual men,
bacterium, and integers. And some will gaze above to the
storm system of allegory -even a religious or ontological
one- hovering all-charged and too sending bolts like Jove,
temporal laments like Lucifer, and final logos like God
Himself. But, no matter what, this book is now a physical
thing in the world. And it ticks and tocks here at twelve
o’clock, and it’s in your hands, dear reader.
It’s in your hands now. Where else might it be?
“What will this book do in the grip of who knows who?”
Lyndon asked aloud, as he set the black quill down one last
time. He saw a flicker of light, an apparition, a spectre , a
ghost of a daughter long ago, the thing he hid until the end.
The word -her name- he’d not once said aloud on the page.
He held her hand, her tongue, her heart in his hand; a heart
& hand that too was see-through and opaque.
His memory finally, mercifully -as promised by Isaiah- faded
and he -for once- had no feelings left at all. Each friend
redeemed, resurrected, given a bone in God to be; each
friend made whole again; in annihilation thus freed. All pain
gone; of each type; the pain written on rivers, might, and
right. The pain of lack, the pain of slake, the pain of sleep
and the pain of wake. The pain of love and want and hate
and the pain that comes from the font of endless springs
that sate; all swept away by memory and perfidy, by story
and factory, by characters and their lack. The pain of life
bottlenecked in one man exploded into five, then sixteen,
then twenty-two, then one point six million more until the
river overflowed and flooded the whole world.
Vector, virus, absorbed. Genes turned off like lights, at
night, when everyone can go home.
The skull of Jack on the surface grey, the Tau carved into the
spot between the eyes made; and the bones, the artifacts,
the maps that charted the way; the alphabet of his final
sentence from Job 31…
Oh that one would hear me! Behold my desire is that the
Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary
had written a book.
The words and letters and lines intersecting at all angles
from parallel to perpendicular to oblique; to abaft of the
beam at sea; it was all stretched out as he scribbled about
on the unlined pad. The ink -darker than the quill- spread
from the tip -pooled about the grey slab- and dripped to the
floor of the vacant lab.
It was the last he’d ever have to say.

Sanction Vol. III [McLeod, Lyndon J.]

You could, for a need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines...
-Hamlet