Sci Phi Journal

In vivo genome-editing rescues damnatio memoriae in a mouse model of Titor Syndrome

by Andrea Kriz

Research Article: In vivo genome-editing rescues damnatio memoriae in a mouse model of Titor Syndrome

Mercer E, Hendigger S, Tobbe Q, Ikram R, Supebacker M, Voltz E, Lemmer T, Musfar R, Olem TS, Yuma G, Lacroix K, Woldeman D1

1Department of Biological Metaphysics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA

2 May 2040

Abstract:

First documented in 2010 as the ‘Mandela Effect’, Titor Syndrome (TS) has eluded rigorous study due to the wide radius of memory alteration, or damnatio memoriae (d.m.), which often characterizes its later stages. Here we circumvent these issues by performing single cell RNA-sequencing on a range of biopsies collected from a still-living 24-year-old female patient of TS. We identify a highly replicable signature of 130 genes dysregulated across tissues. Genome-editing of these genes via the CRISPR/Cas9 system was sufficient to ablate convulsions and, to a lesser extent, social defects in mice exposed to Jacksonville soil samples previously observed to trigger TS. Importantly, researchers retained memory of treated mice, indicating that d.m. had also been successfully rescued. Future studies are urgently needed to determine if this treatment regimen could apply to humans as well.

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Author Correction

22 May 2040

Due to the accelerated preparation of this manuscript, Figure panels 4b and S4c were unintentionally duplicated. As the original film Figure S4 had been assembled from could not be found, the experiment was repeated, closely replicating the original results. The article has been corrected in the online version.

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Technical comment on “In vivo genome-editing rescues damnatio memoriae in a mouse model of Titor Syndrome”

Xu L1, Gao M1, Ye X1, Wong J1, Hu D2,3, Jin T2,3, Fibrelli B2,3, Xiaolong Y1

1Department of Basic Medical Sciences, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.

2Department of Neurobiological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

3Artificial Intelligence and Transcriptomics Program, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

14 December 2040

Mercer et al. claimed that symptoms of Titor Syndrome (TS), most notably damnatio memoriae (d.m.) could be treated by editing 130 genes in adult mice. Three months of attempting to replicate Mercer et al.’s results resulted in the recovery of six lab notebooks, blacked out from cover to cover with permanent marker, along with hundreds of unlabeled mouse carcasses, from a waste incinerator. The first author, who security cameras recorded attempting to turn on the incinerator, has no memory of the incident. Therefore, we are forced to conclude that the Mercer Protocol does not, in fact, rescue d.m. in a mouse model of TS and, to the contrary, has resulted in a spread of the syndrome among researchers attempting to carry out the gene-editing regimen along with bystanders. We note that a clinical trial conducted by the institution of Mercer et al. is currently recruiting patients and urge caution in pursuing this treatment. 

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Response to technical comment on “In vivo genome-editing rescues damnatio memoriae in a mouse model of Titor Syndrome”

Mercer et al.

14 December 2040

Xu et al. suggest that, due to their failure to reproduce our data, that the editing of the gene signature described in our original study does not alleviate Titor Syndrome (TS), and could conversely lead to spread damnatio memoriae (d.m.). We would like to caution Xu et al. in turn that although involuntary expunging of data often accompanies d.m., it cannot in itself be taken as evidence of d.m.—especially when factors such as mental health could also play a role in influencing behavior of involved researchers. In addition, although the memory of individuals associated with TS patients is often altered as a result of d.m., TS has never been observed to spread beyond the originally affected patient. Such fallacies are the basis of the now-debunked Jacksonville hypothesis, which posits that the Floridian ghost town in fact thrived until 2036, when it became the center of a Titor Syndrome ‘epidemic’ (see infographic: Using Guidepost Events to Disentangle False from Altered Memories). We are also happy to report in a forthcoming publication that the originally described TS patient has now been successfully cured with the Mercer protocol. Although we agree that Xu et al. that caution is necessary, we must be equally cautious of not depriving treatment to those in need.

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Editorial expression of concern:

6 January 2041

In the May 1 issue, this journal published the Article, “In vivo genome-editing rescues damnatio memoriae in a mouse model of Titor Syndrome.” Due to a power surge, the raw data for the Article was lost from the GEO repository. The authors have since notified the journal that the data had been inadvertently erased from their lab computers as well. Attempts are currently being made to re-establish contact with the original patient, who had been discharged from the hospital, for collection and sequencing of new samples.

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Author correction:

12 March 2041

Since our original study, it has become clear that our genome-editing protocol merely delays, rather than rescues Titor Syndrome and its resulting damnatio memoriae (d.m.)1, 2. We also note that although 12 authors appeared on the original study, only 4 authors could be found in this lab with memory of undertaking the described research. In addition to having never worked in our department, the only online record of 5 of the ‘missing authors’ are usernames on early-2000 era message boards. As fictionalization of previously existing entities, such as the eponymous John Titor, is another anecdotally observed symptom of TS, we cannot exclude the possibility that d.m. has begun to affect our environment as well. We are currently working with independent labs across Europe, China, and the U.S. to reproduce our results and generate an optimized protocol, to be published as soon as possible.

1. Hart, J., et al. (2041). “Case 9-2041: A 24-Year-Old Missing Woman with Radiodermatitis, Acute Psychosis and Retrograde Amnesia.” N Engl J Med 424(11): 941-948

A 24-year-old woman previously diagnosed with Titor Syndrome and successfully treated using the Mercer Protocol reappeared in the emergency department after being reported missing for two months. There were burns on the face, arms and back. Although she claimed to have been wounded by ‘gunshots’, these were not consistent with injuries caused by modern firearms, but instead with prolonged exposure to radioactivity. She additionally reported hallucinations related to travel between dimensions and ‘collapsing timelines’.

2. Braun, A.C., et al. (2041). “Case 10-2041: Group Delusions Related to a Discontinued Phase I Clinical Trial of the Mercer Protocol.” N Engl J Med 424(12): 1043-1053

All patients scored over 70 on the Mandela Effect Scale, with 100 indicating full penetrance, most notably the erroneous memory of human rights activist Mandela becoming president of South Africa rather than dying in prison in the 1980s.

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Addendum: Editorial expression of concern

27 April 2042

We previously issued an editorial expression of concern for our previously published article, “In vivo genome-editing rescues damnatio memoriae in a mouse model of Titor Syndrome”. At this time, we are additionally publishing the results of nine groups who have attempted to replicate the results of Mercer et al.As each of these groups has reported cases of damnatio memoriae ranging from moderate to severe, we are cautioning the readership against attempting to repeat the Mercer Protocol at this time. Authors E. Mercer, D. Woldeman and S. Hendigger agree to this expression of concern, while Q. Tobbe could not be reached.

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Addendum: Addendum: Editorial expression of concern

30 June 2042

We alert the readership that the Article “In vivo genome-editing rescues damnatio memoriae in a mouse model of Titor Syndrome” has been flagged, among 233 others, as containing possibly fabricated data. The errors in this Article include the following:

  • Interactive Figure 2, allegedly showing different chimeric mice in sociability cages, in fact shows the same animal being introduced to the middle chamber three separate times, albeit with strikingly different results.
  • Forensic analysis of the immunoblot in Figure 3b indicated that the background signal on certain lanes (7, 8, 9) to be too uniform to have been generated from an actual membrane.
  • The RNA-sequencing data in Figure 4a could not have come from a human.

Author E. Mercer does not feel that this addendum is appropriate at the time, maintaining that while the raw data from which the disputed figures were generated, along with authors D. Woldeman and S. Hendigger have been ‘lost’, she is attempting to ‘recover’ them.  No other authors could be reached.

Corrected online 1 August 2042: We are aware that the spread of damnatio memoriae across the United States may have impacted flagging of this study and others, and will strive to take this into consideration in our subsequent investigations.

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Retraction

25 November 2042

The U.S. Office of Integrity Research has advised retraction of “In vivo genome-editing rescues damnatio memoriae in a mouse model of Titor Syndrome” due to lack of evidence that any such study actually took place. We therefore retract the paper and advise the readership that results contained therein are not valid. None of the authors could be reached for comment. Upon inquiry they appear, along with their department, to be fictional entities. An exploration of the abandoned building in which the lab had been purportedly housed uncovered high levels of radiation, the charred body of a car determined, upon investigation, to be a late 1980s Honda Civic 4WD, and the remains of an IBM-5100 portable computer. We apologize to the scientific community for the damage caused.

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Bio:

Andrea Kriz is a PhD student in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard. Her stories are upcoming in Ahoy Comics and have also appeared in Nature, Daily Science Fiction, and Tales to Terrify, among others.

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A Note on Romanian Science Fiction Literature from Past to Present

by Mariano Martín Rodríguez

Romania is a country that foreign readers rarely associate with speculative and science fiction (collectively abbreviated as SF). However, its multilingual young population is among the most IT-literate in the world, and their cultural output, including SF, is not only extensive but also fully up to date. While some might attribute this to globalisation, it is in fact a long-standing feature in Romanian culture from its very modern beginnings in the 19th century. Once it secured its independence, Romania embarked on a path of rapid progress, quickly adopting Western liberal institutions and world-view. In this context, as a manifestation of a new mentality centred on science and industrial technology, Romanian SF embraced from its outset the national project of modernisation, although not uncritically, and not without originality.

Utopian fiction usually preceded SF before their intimate fusion in offering descriptions of future societies. This almost universal pattern is also valid for Romania. Thus, economic liberalism was both supported and mocked in one interesting ambiguous utopia describing a present “Insula Prosta” (Stoopid Island, 1884) by Ion Ghica, before the liberal utopia was transferred to a future setting, where it was questioned. Alexandru Macedonski, one of the leading poets of the Decadent movement in Romania, produced thus a short history entitled “Oceania-Pacific-Dreadnought” (1911) where this gigantic ship intended as a floating house for the richest brings about an economic bubble of epic proportions, until it bursts (as bubbles are wont to do). This Romanian author probably took inspiration from Jules Verne’s L’Île à hélice (Propeller Island, 1895) but his description of the workings of pure speculation in capitalism is not only more precise, but also prophetic. Indeed, very few contemporary writers in Europe used anticipation in such a perceptive manner.

In the same years, Victor Anestin followed Camille Flammarion, rather than Verne, both in popularising astronomy and in setting his stories on other planets of the Solar System. Anestin describes them as populated by decent and highly developed human-like civilisations inspired by Positivistic utopianism, though unfortunately still subjected to nature’s whims. In O tragedie cerească (A Celestial Tragedy, 1914), a celestial body destroys Earth’s inhabitants. This dramatic apocalyptic scenario always poses the problem of which narrative voice to use: who can recount the end if it obliterates us all? Anestin solves this problem by adopting the perspective of an astronomer who witnesses our tragedy from Venus. In spite of his sober account, Anestin knows how to add a sense of loss to the sense of wonder in his grandiose planetary vistas.

This late but promising start of Romanian SF was followed by its relative normalisation along mainstream lines. As happened elsewhere in the world (except perhaps in the US), Wellsian scientific romance opened new avenues to speculative anticipation by infusing it with the freedom of imagination regarding world-building shown by old imaginary voyages since Lucian of Samosata, as well as a diversity of narrative and writing techniques explored by High Modernist authors. Among them, Felix Aderca stands out thanks to his avant-garde short story “Pastorală” (Pastoral, 1932), which is written as the summary of an unwritten play, and his novel Orașele înecate (Drowned Cities, 1936). The latter is set on a future Earth threatened by universal cold. The last human communities have withdrawn to submarine cities under the rule of a fascist-like pro-eugenics dictator, but his measures cannot prevent in the end the technical failure and destruction of the remaining cities. Only a couple escapes from our planet in a rocket. The varied societies, their exchanges and development in a pre-apocalyptic framework are finely portrayed using an art-deco tone of writing full of tragicomic irony, not unlike the one used in Karel Čapek’s contemporary novels, which makes this work a masterpiece of international interwar SF.

The political crisis brought about by World War II did not spare Romania, where home-grown ethnic nationalist Fascism supported by Nazi Germany was defeated and then replaced by the Communism imported and imposed by Soviet troops. In this context, there was little room for unregimented literature, speculative or otherwise. Even more intently than fascists, communists guided by Stalinist Social Realism effectively put an end to any fantasy about medium- and long-term futures. Furthermore, writers wishing to denounce totalitarianisms of any sort were silenced. Romanian readers were thus deprived of any dystopias comparable to those written by Zamiatin, Boye or Orwell. Vasile Voiculescu’s short story “Lobocoagularea prefrontală” (Pre-Frontal Lobocoagulation) purports to be a historical summary of the forced lobotomies undertaken on the population in order to extirpate their human souls. Written in 1948, this text was only published posthumously in 1982 as a simple curiosity by a renowned modern poet.

The Iron Curtain prevented Romania from being subjected to the massive influx of US SF literature (both pulps and Golden Age) which ended the more intellectual and literary scientific romance in Western Europe, though Communism was equally efficient in depriving SF of its former artistic respectability. Romanian SF was reborn in the 1950sas a tool for educating young readers both in Communism and technology in order to prepare them for the rapid pace of re-industrialisation soon established as a goal by Romanian authorities under nationalist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, who was rather unsatisfied with the role of agricultural producer allotted to their country by the Soviet bloc. Although his rule was even harsher than others in the Eastern Bloc, Ceaușescu used his national policy of apparent dissent from the Soviet Union to get the technological and financial support that his country needed to become industrialised. As a result, Romanian writers were allowed to deviate from old dogmas, and SF quickly took advantage of the opening, soon updating itself to Golden Age standards thanks to Adrian Rogoz, whose short stories recall the clarity of form and speculative wit to be found in those by Isaac Asimov. The other Romanian SF master of the age, Vladimir Colin, adopted a more lyrical writing akin to that of Ray Bradbury, although the best part of his work was devoted to fantasy; indeed, his series of stories and legends from an ancient imaginary people, collected in Legendele țării lui Vam (Legends from Vam Country, 1961), are still considered a masterpiece by Romanian fantasy readers.

Rogoz, Colin and others also succeeded in joining the vogue for national promotion abroad triggered by Ceaușescu’s national-communism, since some of their works were translated into German and French and published in widely distributed anthologies of Romanian SF. Furthermore, they were generous enough to include in these volumes stories by new writers interested in a SF literature similar to that of the Anglophone New Wave, namely Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu, Gheorghe Săsărman and Mircea Opriță, who would eventually produce some of the best works that Romanian SF can boast of. The oldest of them, Crohmălniceanu, was a highly regarded mainstream literary critic when he published his two series of Istorii insolite (Unusual Stories) in 1980 and 1986. Taken together, they read as exercises in reasoned imagination on utopianism, technology and the role of literature in modernity in which irony enriches a deeply philosophical questioning of humankind and its place in the universe, not unlike the best tales by Borges or Lem, whom Crohmălniceanu could certainly be compared to.

Younger Săsărman and Opriță have had both long and distinguished writing careers. Săsărman produced in 1975 Cuadratura cercului, one of the masterpieces of the late modernist genre consisting of descriptions of imaginary cities, in a manner similar to the invisible ones by Calvino. Unfortunately, this edition was heavily censored, and the whole book was only known in 2001, when its author had long been excluded from Romanian literary life following his exile to Germany. The translation of his cities into Spanish and then partially into English as Squaring the Circle by top-ranking SF author Ursula K. Le Guin has secured him at last his rightful place in Romanian speculative fiction, now supported also by well-received recent novels such as a story on the resurrection of Jesus Christ in modern Germany entitled Adevărata cronică a morții lui Yeșua Ha-Nozri (True Account of the Death of Jeshua Ha-Nozri, 2016).

Opriță, who stayed in the country without compromising himself, is renowned for his short stories (e.g., “Figurine de ceară,” or Wax Figurines, a witty rewriting of Lem’s Solaris first published in 1973), though he also produced a successful novel, Călătorie în Capricia (A Journey to Capricia, 2011), which is both one of the latest sequels to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and a most original commentary on the 2008 Great Recession as it was suffered in Romania. Moreover, Opriță has accompanied the last decades of Romanian SF as a respected and fair critic, as well as its best chronicler: his history of Romanian SF literature is comprehensive up to a point rarely encountered in similar endeavours for other national SF traditions. It is a monument of SF scholarship, only comparable to another Romanian production in the theoretical field, Cornel Robu’s extensive O cheie pentru science-fiction (A Key to Science Fiction, 2004), the English abstract of which has been influential in our consideration of the sublime (popularly known as ‘sense of wonder’) as an essential part of SF aesthetics.   

After this remarkable group of writers and scholars, a certain decadence of Romanian SF was perhaps inevitable. Postmodernism soon acquired a status in the Romanian literary scene unmatched in other countries up to this very day. This was both bad and good news for Romanian SF: good news if we consider that the leading literary postmodernist in Romania, Mircea Cărtărescu, has introduced SF tropes in his work, especially in his latest novel Selenoid (2015), thus adding respectability to them; bad news if we consider instead that postmodernism has promoted a literature of chaos, or arbitrariness, deeply uncongenial to the usual SF frame of mind (marked by reason, order and science). Very few writers have succeeded in balancing these opposite trends. Among them, Mihail Grămescu is to be mentioned for his stories collected in Aporisticon (1981; final version, 2012), where postmodern egotism is nuanced by Borgesian detachment. There were other interesting young writers who tried to renovate SF following contemporary international trends, but unfortunately two parallel occurrences prevented them from acquiring a reputation similar to that of Săsărman, Opriță and even Grămescu.

On the one hand, the postmodernists, still very much in power in the Romanian intellectual scene, seem even more reluctant to appreciate SF as the modernists were once Wellsian scientific romance had become obsolete. Therefore, SF has not been able to join the literary mainstream in Romania as it has in other countries where SF novels, especially of the dystopian kind, are now read and reviewed beyond the limited circles of SF fans. On the other hand, the end of censorship allowed Anglophone SF to enter the Romanian market with a revenge, marginalising local production even more than in Western Europe forty years earlier (until today). Romanian SF writers tried to regain some of the genre’s former strength by mimicking foreign fashions, such as pulpish cyberpunk, in a country where hackers are, indeed, numerous, and IT has been enthusiastically embraced. Others wanted to preserve the New Wave heritage through carefully written stories, some of them quite experimental, such as Dănuț Ungureanu’s dystopian “Domus” (1992), which is entirely written using prescriptive discourse, and Ovidiu Bufnilă’s cyberpunk prose poem “Armele zeilor” (The Arms of the Gods, 2005). Although a number of these stories could make up an invaluable anthology, none of them succeeded in truly seducing the local fandom. Romanian SF only recovered when it revisited, in the form of long, epos-like novels, older genres such as space-opera in Dan Doboș’s Abația (Abbey, 2002-2005), lost-world romance in Sebastian A. Corn’s Ne vom întoarce în Muribecca (We Will Return to Muribecca, 2014), as well as apocalyptic dystopia in the series begun with the shorter novel Vegetal (2014) by Dănuț Ungureanu and Marian Truță. Their success, at least among fans, has contributed to lending new life to a SF now nearly as diverse and literarily successful as it used to be before the postmodernist/cyberpunk crisis. Prospects seem to be positive, with emerging writers now being aware that they are adding their contribution to a long and distinguished history of Romanian SF, although it is still too early to mention any outstanding ones.

~

Endnote: A first version of this essay was published as a preface to the following anthology of recent Romanian SF stories: Daniel Timariu and Cristian Vicol (eds.), East of a Known Galaxy: An Anthology of Romanian Sci-Fi Stories, București, Tritonic, 2019, p. 10-19. We thank the editors, as well as the publishing house and the Helion SF club having fostered this anthology, for their kind permission to publish here this slightly modified version of the paper.

~

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The Arms of the Gods

by Ovidiu Bufnilă
Introductory note and translation by Cătălin Badea-Gheracostea

Ovidiu Bufnilă (b. 1957, mechanical engineer by education, journalist and writer by trade), though having published only three books in print over the three decades of his speculative fiction career, has nonetheless managed to capture the attention of Romanian fandom and specialized reviewers of SF as one of the most divisive, problematic and original authors writing in Romanian. Tending to a discourse reminiscent of the absurd, but also of a peculiar magical realism, Bufnilă’s texts, no matter their length, start with a heavy atmosphere and finish with a bang of ideas – precisely as his iconoclastic columns, blog entries and the literary as well as political comments he has produced over the years. Bufnilă established himself as a master of a renewed species of science fiction concetti and forged his reputation thanks to short stories published in Moartea purpurie (The Purple Death, 1995). Through his work, Bufnilă distils the world we know, including its literature and culture, down to a point where it can be explained by his so-called “waved philosophy”. There is an uncanny coherence in this author’s delirium, proven by the extraordinary impact some of his writings has had over the years. His story entitled “Armele zeilor” (2005), here translated as “The Arms of the Gods,” is the only narrative having received maximum marks (10 out of 10) at the first online SF workshop in Romania (atelierkult.com), rated by dozens of readers. It was published in fanzines and magazines as well. A list of Bufnilă’s publications can be accessed here (in Romanian): https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovidiu_Bufnil%C4%83#Edi%C8%9Bii_speciale.

~

Over a millenium ago, in Katai Islands, thousands of women had for a long time been lusting for the Prince, and he was still begrudged by the Glass Barons who were casually conspiring against all empires, and he was still religiously taken heed of by Mount Assahor’s scholars there, where the Saviour’s face had been revealed for the first time.

Yet now, resting on a boulder, having fallen from the sky not far from the sea shore, the Prince is dying.

Alone.

The air is heavy. The heavens loom like cast iron. Ever so slowly, a random light is passing, looking for a fit body, craving to be, at least for a moment, an antelope, or the smile of a woman, or the toll of the Balkoon’s Franciscan Bells.

Here comes a monk walking towards Katai Islands. He cares for nothing, he does not even give a glimpse to the Prince. The monk has the cheeks fully blushed, as he just stepped out of the depraved lovers’ boudoir; those should have been waiting untouched for the knights lost in the sunset. The monk has a belly full of Madella wine, a fine, dizzying, perfumed red.

“Be good to me, a sip of water!”, the Prince begs, crawling after the monk. The path’s dust is stirred by the ordained sandals and whitens the Prince’s beard, choking him.

The monk fades away in the glitter of a sick, mad sunbeam.

Here comes and goes a hurried armourer, taking an order to a valiant lancer; then some merry girls; then some astrologists; then some very, very noisy whores with awful makeup.  

The Prince is firmly holding his cane, getting a whiff, lusting for their impudent thighs, envisioning himself to be asleep on their lap, barely touched by the big, juicy areolas. 

Here comes a chronicler and hatefully kicks the Prince. Then comes a star digger from Copa, the City of Liars, and he also strikes him, full of spite. A trumpeter passes next and punches the Prince, laughing disdainfully.

The Prince is finding out ever so slowly that, beyond the programmes which he had input in the Network which was built by his subjects, some other instructions were coming forward, and these instructions, hey!, he never ever had them in his navigation registry. The Prince has been thinking all along that the worlds were built for ambitious navigators only, those able anytime to stand against the fury of the virtual whirls.

A tear rolls down his chin.

Where from were coming all those creatures, all so careless, all so evil, where from were coming these hideous constructions?

Walking around the rocks, here come five drunkards; they gloat while throwing organic structures at the seabirds. Those clip the shiny wings and drill deep into the birds’ bodies. The air fills with blood and time itself wavers, melting together past, present and future.

The Prince gets to reset his programmes.

The drunkards come closer. They are ready to trample him.  

Vruuuum!

Their bodies burst in multicoloured garlands, the sand is dampened with salty, mauve fluids. Somewhere, in the vortex of events hit by the Prince’s viruses, the monk falls on his knees. His tongue turns swollen. His skin is bristled.

The crowds of Katai scramble to the beach to acclaim their Prince. He embraces them all in his majestic glance.

The halberdiers clean the remnants of the programmes, they pour the gathered blood in some silver cups humming with electricity.

The Prince makes an august sign. Everybody, absolutely everybody is kneeling. The women are crying, wounding their breasts with their own nails. The scholars chafe themselves in corners, under the platinum and glass arcades of Caraba, the City of Desolation. The Prince rearranges the events in the Network and, full of wisdom, he kills all those led astray who wantonly worshipped the reign of the mob and the lack of principles, while hoping to find the Arms of the Gods in their own wandering.

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Hyrenas

by EN Auslender

The wisest man on Earth once said, “love is at the center of all relationships, love or the lack of it”.

When we leapt so far into the future with eager anticipation, we could only conceive of the hardships that would await us; there were plans upon plans, contingencies upon contingencies, anything and everything to validate beyond a reasonable doubt that where we were headed was right and that we would, above all else, succeed where mankind had failed. Earth had reached its tipping point, we were told: the droughts, the floods, the hurricanes, the heat, the famines all forced those with the ability to move to a more habitable area to do so. Those with the bare minimum of life and limb received it in their support shelters, and those without, didn’t need it.

Everything turned inward and downward, away from spreading mankind onto other worlds. Dreaming of a better future died before the risen tide, but with the cataclysmic loss of life and farming ability no one could be blamed for suggesting that space could wait while humanity sorted itself out.

But then it never truly did. Those who benefited from the cataclysm just kept building on top of one another with nary a tree to breathe. With wealthy countries walled off and refusing to aid, it seemed they wanted to wait for humanity to filter while their own fortunate few survived and thrived. I suppose the shock and mundane occurrence of extinctions dulled the senses into believing this was simply how it would be.

And then those of us who still dreamed determined there was another way, a better way, and a star with a habitable planet was found not too far from Earth. A ship was built in secret, a generational ship that would run on fusion until something better could be concocted by the 5000 scientists and engineers recruited into the Hyrenas project. Earth wasn’t going to change, and no educated opinion could make a difference. Everything was leveraged against short vs. long-term costs, where short ultimately had the final say. Staying meant resigning ourselves to impotence while we watched those with exploit those without. Hyrenas, we were told, was humanity’s next great dream.

It was so named by the creator of the project, nuclear physicist Aleksander Torgssen: Hy-, his daughter’s nickname, and –renas, Swedish for ‘purify’. The ship took all his life to construct in hiding, and though it was finally christened in his 98th year, he took the journey up into and beyond orbit in our vessel of hydroponics and nuclear power. Before his death near the orbit of Jupiter, he left us Edicta Hyrenas, the supreme law of the new human race:

  1. To all of Hyrenas, give;
  2. For all of Hyrenas, give;
  3. With all of Hyrenas, give;
  4. For all of Hyrenas, succeed;
  5. With all of Hyrenas, succeed;
  6. Within Hyrenas, know all;
  7. Without Hyrenas, know all;
  8. Within Hyrenas, love all;
  9. Without Hyrenas, love all;
  10. To life itself, spare no love.

The botanists worked artificial night and day to cultivate and accelerate crop growth. The mechanical engineers facilitated fluidity for the ship’s systems, and maintained its upkeep. The nuclear engineers and physicists tinkered to increase the engine’s efficiency. The theoretical physicists searched for methods by which the ship could move faster through space. The astronomers identified planetary bodies along the journey within a lightyear’s radius that indicated either sources of mineral ore or water. The computer engineers fine-tuned and monitored all processes, ensuring that all functioned as it should. The doctors and surgeons ensured all people maintained their health, and conferred with the astronomers to search for planets that could possibly harbor nutrients not grown on the ship. All was organized and coordinated through a representative group with ten members from each expertise. There, those with the most panache, rather than the most experience or credentials, held sway. But as all represented the very best of humanity, there was no fear of conflict.

Though when the mechanical engineers needed to take the radiometric sensors offline for several hours in order to shunt power to the nuclear physicists testing a more efficient engine, the astronomers and botanists grew angry- they were charting the structure of a just-discovered and possibly life-sustaining planet whose atmosphere was filled with phosphorous, and in the span of the downtime the planet would pass from the periphery of scanning range. They brought the complaint to the group. Arguments ensued: the engineers and physicists had the right to test immediately because a more efficient and powerful engine meant they not only would have more power to distribute across the ship, but they would reach their ultimate destination faster. The botanists and astronomers argued that phosphorous is one of the most essential and rarest elements in existence, and not taking the time to study that planet was an affront to Hyrenas. But then again, taking the ship to the planet meant adding 10 years to the journey, if not more.

The botanists and astronomers didn’t win the day.

Spite lurked beneath the doctrines, as it seemed the work of some was valued more than the work of others regardless of how integral everyone’s work was to the survival of the mission.

When the first child was born, the community of 5001 celebrated as one, all arguments temporarily put aside. The boy was named Aleksander Ngata, son of Koji and Mara Ngata, two theoretical physicists. One member from each profession volunteered to become teachers to the future wave of children.

Thus, a new class was born.

Within two years of Aleksander Ngata’s birth, 207 more children were born. In another year, 320 more. 6 months from then, another 518. The Ngatas broke the seal on the awkwardness of whether or not to have children on a spacefaring generational vessel, and many indulged in the proclivities of intimacy. They were, after all, working in close quarters day after day for hours on end; one could hardly blame them.

Though the computer kept an electronic record of the crew’s logs and work, Kaloshka Jindo volunteered to become the ship’s historian. He would act as the narrator for both the present and the past, and would teach children the history of humanity and the history and future of Hyrenas, and why they were the true evolution of humanity.

Within and between the throes of passion and triumphant heartbeats, theoretical physicists Yael Hernandez and Kira Nathanson realized in their post-coital clarity that fifth-dimensional space contained a membrane of ‘friction’ that prevented 3-dimensional objects from entering and viewing reality in 4 dimensions; that frictional membrane, however, could be utilized as a ‘motorway’ on which a 3-dimensional object can ‘ride’. Given the super-state energy required to enter fifth-dimensional space, it would take a fraction of that energy (the gravitational energy of a black hole, give or take a supernova) to tap into that membrane.

In essence, it was the theoretical express lane of the universe. The issue was generating the energy needed to pierce through the layers of space. They conferred with the astronomers about theoretical ‘wicked matter’, possibly existing as something tangled and torn between the Roche limits of two tangoing black holes.

The astronomers wanted extra power to the sensors to fine-tune their capabilities to detect the exotic theoretical matter. The engineers agreed.

The botanists became resentful. They brought their complaints to the council. They felt they weren’t receiving the due respect the engineers or physicists were whenever the question of the engines were raised. All other professions stated that the engines were the single most important function on the ship: they provided the thrust, the warmth, the air, the water, the light. Without the engines, the plants wouldn’t grow.

But without the plants, Hyrenas would die.

The physicists and engineers decided, in order to avert taking blame for such things, a single person could act as the ‘captain’ to arbitrate decisions. They sold it to the botanists as having someone to prioritize decisions, which was acceptable enough.

Sajavin King was chosen. A ‘polymath’ trillionaire on Earth, the 56-year old held several honorary doctorates from prestigious Earth universities. His fortune came from discovering and securing underground freshwater lakes, which then evolved into locating and mining phosphates, a key nutrient in agriculture. Much of his time on Earth was spent ‘developing’ technologies to facilitate food production in famine-stricken areas. Much of the food didn’t reach those affected by famine. King, and similar others on the ship, used their money to fund Hyrenas, and very few of the botanists, physicists, engineers, doctors, etc. knew much about King besides the proclamations in the news that he was going to solve world hunger.

Kaloshka Jindo began researching King, if just to have a good preface for the biography of the ship’s first captain.

Given King’s reputation as a ‘man of science’, the professions were generally satisfied with his approach to governance. Time was doled out evenly; disputes were arbitrated in what seemed to be a fair way.

But others who had exploited Earth in order to secure a place on Hyrenas took him as a sign of a return to old ways. In total, 6 people who had also used their incredulous wealth to fund Hyrenas discussed between themselves what it meant to have him atop all others. The 6 already sat on the council, able to insulate themselves from the hard work of the professionals, but they wanted more. A year, two years passed with only quiet discussion between them.

Jindo discovered King’s Earthly exploits, and privately questioned him before bringing his concerns to the council. In what Jindo described as a moment of pure contrition, Jindo noted that King stated, “the goal was always to survive, on Earth… stronger than others, healthier, to secure more than everyone else for our own. I threw all my money at Aleksander. I wanted to leave Earth a poor man. I deserved to, for all I did. I didn’t deserve to leave though. I’m a coward. But at least I can do something good here.”

King told Jindo he could bring his knowledge to the council, but Jindo didn’t. It was the 6, through listening devices in King’s office, who did so anonymously. Though some on the council were suspicious of King’s contrition, there was unanimous agreement to keep silent on the matter to the public. On that, the 6 capitalized.

Word immediately spread of King’s Earthly misdeeds. It didn’t take long until the people, in motley groups, demanded King step down from his position. Some demanded he be put in a maintenance craft and dropped off at the next barely habitable planet. Others demanded he be kicked out an airlock.

The council convened, and recommended to King he should step down. King declined. He still had support, he argued, and he wasn’t wrong. Many in the council desired to be rid of him. The members of the 6 spoke publicly about King resigning, and rallied support around themselves.

Surrounded by confusion and dizzying worry, Jindo went to King’s residence one night to apologize and attempt to clear the air on what happened. Several hours later, both Jindo and King were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide.

It was then that the first Hyrenas Juris Circle was created from volunteers appointed by the 6. Given the evidence presented to them, that Jindo had gone to King’s residence to reveal himself as the person who discovered King’s past, King murdered Jindo in a rage and then, realizing he had sealed his fate, committed suicide by hanging himself with his belt.

The reality of the situation is unknown. However, the next captain of the ship was Boris Jensen, who had the fervent support of the 6, and the second historian was Lilia Malloukis, a member of the council and suspected affiliate of the 6.

The truth of Hyrenas is a lie: many give to it, but a few hoard most. Many love it, but not as much as the few love themselves. Many know those within, but the 6 know all.

Historian of Truth
Genevieve Jindo

~

Bio

EN Auslender is a self-flagellating scribbler of half-truths and consternation that lends itself only to a deeper understanding of superficiality. Sometimes he writes coherently.

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The Right Answer

Many have faced difficult conversations with teachers, though this may take the cake (or snatch more than that), by Cliff

The Mound

A journey to the centre of an ever-scaling landscape, by Nicolas Badot.

A Reflection on the Achievement of Gene Wolfe, with Gregorian Chant Echoing Offstage

by Blackstone Crow

“Robert, I think he’s lost his mind.”

“He has eyes, Marie, and you don’t.”

“What do you mean by that? And why do you keep looking out that window?”

Quite slowly, the man turned to face us. For a moment he looked at Agia and me, then he turned away. His expression was the one I have seen our clients wear when Master Gurloes showed them the instruments to be used in their anacrisis.

Like that? It’s a haunting scene, one from a weighty tome of haunting scenes, capped as a lyric with a couplet by that edgy comment about the countenance of those wretches who see the “instruments” whom the “Master Gurloes” – the reader at this stage of the novel knows Gurloes to be a Master Torturer of the Guild of Torturers – reveals to his “clients” about to suffer their “anacrisis”, a term from the Ancient Greeks referring to the torture used when, in a law case having interrogation and inquiry, torture was applied.

And lift a tip of an interior ear to that “You have eyes, but you do not see” echo from the Gospels. But it is cast in a semi-pagan way, too, that line, cast as it is with the very modern, “I think he’s lost his mind” coupled with it in a dynamic and very conjugal way. Something is askew here, a mismatch, hints of the Christian Faith and instruments of torture. Or maybe not? One could easily picture this scene in the sunny background of the High Middle Ages, in an office of some Star Chamber court. But in fact, it takes place on a far-future Earth almost (not quite, there are hints!) unrecognizable.

This vignette is taken from page 190 of volume 1 of my Fantasy Masterwork edition of the late Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun multi-tome epic. All four volumes, on every page, have scenes word-woven on such a level. Ursula K. Le Guin said of Wolfe that: “He is our Melville” – maybe so, but he strikes me as more an Old Testament author (whom Melville himself hoped to “channel”, perhaps?). Wolfe strikes me as a Master Chronicler of the Guild of Haunting Unsettlements, or he would do so if the Prophet Ezekiel had ventured into essaying a Science-Fiction novel. Wolfe haunts; he unsettles. One just doesn’t “read” such an author. Does one “read” Shakespeare? One spends a lifetime carrying Shakespeare about, and one does that with Wolfe. It is a gift very few writers achieve at all, and fewer still on a sustained level. Besides the Avon Bard himself and Wolfe, I can name two others: Tolkien and Homer.

Gene Wolfe died on April 14 of 2019 at the age of 87. Having survived both polio and the Korean War, he became an engineer – and if you have a taste for Pringle potato chips, Wolfe helped create the machine that forms them. His wife Rosemary, born the same year as Wolfe, died in 2013 after long illness, including Alzheimer’s. Wolfe has a quote about her recorded in The New Yorker in 2015 that, “There was a time when she did not remember my name or that we were married, but she still remembered that she loved me.” After a long life as a melancholy observer of Earth’s all-too human scene, I have to say that is a poignant line; indeed, there have been few such loves.

With this essay, I stand here before the Assembly of Readers as Wolfe’s Advocate. He deserves to be read, whether a particular writing of his is Science-Fiction or whether it is Fantasy. Wolfe deserves to be read because all of us deserve the mystery he conjures. Justice is giving something its due, and Science-Fiction itself is due the gift of seeing reality as something that can act on us as much as we think we can act on it. Sci-Fi – the art, relying as it does on building imaginative narrative architecture based on the empirical sciences – more than deserves mystery: it needs it desperately, for all Creation needs a return to the sense of mystery – and of course in the heart of mystery resides beauty. Or terror. Yet beauty is allusive, non-capturable – and in that peculiar oubliette in the Mansion of Meaning, Wolfe is THE master “mystery” writer, “mystery” in the Catholic Sacramental sense. Wolfe himself was a Catholic, a convert who initially studied the Faith to marry his beloved Rosemary, and much speculation orbits that question as to what extent his religion influenced his writings. Wolfe himself averred that it did. As he converted in the 1950s, before the controversial changes in the Church, he thus experienced an older, more transcendental theology than those whose Catholic experience dates from the 1960s or later.

Do a writer’s personal religious beliefs color his oeuvre? Enlarge it? Or restrict it? It’s a common enough question when discussing where authors cultivate their ideas, and how they wrestle with the concepts they create, yet Science-Fiction (nor most of the rest of Modernity) often doesn’t have the “religious gene” that way; at best, reality is matter to manipulate and we’re Descartes’ Ghosts in the Machine – pure matter ourselves, yet oddly “haunted”. The natural world in which we live in our technological bubble is not considered that type of mystery, not a Mysterium requiring awe and contemplation but a material reality needing exploitation for profit. Though an author of more than 25 novels and twice that many short stories, no reader of his can believe Wolfe wrote with much of an eye for profit. His fiction is not “pop” fiction, written to sell high volume, though Fantasy is a huge seller in general, compared to “literary” works.

Wolfe’s fiction is instead a wondering, a cosmos-wide pondering on whether it is reality that is a player in the game, whether it can exploit us, or transform us, as in his Fifth Head of Cerberus, a three-novel combo asking the question of whether the long-settled human colonists of a planet haven’t actually been replaced by the aliens native to the place. Who does the haunting? (Or is it more like possession?) The humans who have replaced the natives or the natives, haunted by what happened to the humans they have altered themselves to pantomime? In the Fifth Head, Wolfe also asks whether a machine can hold a human’s mind, and whether a clone can continue the life of its original, whether prostitution offers a greater freedom and whether suffering is…. Well, one doesn’t just “read” Wolfe, one interacts with Wolfe, and one does so sacramentally, for as the Catholic Sacraments are physical channels of invisible, divine grace; in Wolfe’s art, his characters experience the worlds he creates as believers experience the drama of divine life in such a sacramental metaphysic.

Alien that is, of course, to our present world, and it is fitting an author of Science-Fiction engages in it; but that raises another reason for Wolfe to be read: he’s work. He takes effort. As suggested here, his form of storytelling is quite different from the norm. And he can be more work than Tolkien, more than Homer, for he has an anti-Mysterium world to work against. And that’s Sacramental too. From his unsettling reflections on who we are and contemplation of what we might be, even if unbeknownst to ourselves, to his wonderful, exquisite prose and his penchant for creating words – one often finds oneself looking up a word only to realize Wolfe has made it up – in all of that, Gene Wolfe is a transcendent author, or perhaps, suggested by the unsettling questions raised in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, he is Ezekiel come again; an ancient phantasmagoric, a prophet of the supernatural imperiously striking itself through the natural world, an extraordinary visionary who sees a higher reality our world in itself can only dully reflect – perhaps the prophet has indeed replaced the potato chip machine maker.

Read Gene Wolfe, and you’ll wander in these wonders, and over time, bit by bit – perhaps – garner that most elusive of graces: wisdom.

~

Blackstone Crow blogs at corvinescatholiccorner.blogspot.com

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Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2019/3

At the time of writing, Ádám of the SPJ editorial team is on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Yet the primary impressions his sojourn inspires belong not in the realm of theology, but world building. (Admittedly, the two are related.)

To an avid reader of the fantastic, even a cursory intercourse with the State of Israel reveals it as a prime example of applied utopian SF. Aside from its symbols and official historiography, consider the resurrection of arcane Hebrew as the vehicular language of a new society: t’is the stuff that compensatory alternate history is made of.

Take Theodor Herzl’s foundational novel Altneuland, published in 1902, which lays out plans for the future Jewish state, in the guise of programmatic fiction. The title of the book was translated into Hebrew as Tel Aviv. Now guess the name of the country’s largest city today…

Israel’s continued existence and demonstrations of might attest to the power of narratives in shaping social consent. (And yes, except for the man-versus-nature tales of the hard-SF tradition, it is a staple of drama that triumphs often come at someone else’s expense – this is no different in the geopolitics of the Middle East.)

Ask three Israelis and they’ll have four opinions. Yet in spite of ‘sinat chinam’, the eternal curse of discord, this heterodox society that oftentimes intimates a Mediterranean re-imagining of Blade Runner, where college girls in army uniform carrying assault rifles mingle with Haredim and rainbow warriors at retrofuturist malls, has nonetheless managed to forge a sense of identity and purpose.

It even has its own hermetic SF scene in Hebrew, though some gems slipping under the radar may be stumbled across in English, such as It Could Have Been. Safra’s wish-fulfilment fantasy reads like a guided tour of a Jerusalem that is proudly the largest city in the world, where the Second Temple still stands. This 2015 graphic novel is predicated on an alternate history timeline, wherein literally every character we encounter holds fast to a dress code associated with Orthodox Judaism and Israel’s capital is the envy of the globe. No doubt it has the potential to appeal to some readers and upset others. As good speculative fiction should.

So beware, narratives are powerful. Be mindful of what you write. It might spark a cult, inspire riots or, heaven forfend, cause offence. (If so, we’ll publish it.)

In this spirit, the editors wish you an enjoyable read of our autumn crop of world building, speculative philosophy and exotic SF!

Yours truly,

the co-editors

~

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His Missing Materials

by G. Scott Huggins

Detail of The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Flanders, 1562)

I was asked to speak recently as part of a panel at a convention on the anti-Narnia trilogy committed by Philip Pullman called His Dark Materials. The books are, like the Chronicles of Narnia targeted toward the youth audience. I’ll say in passing that I find it absolutely stunning that I heard volumes of advice from churchgoing folk on the merits vs. the evils of reading Harry Potter books, which pretty much align with Judaeo-Christian moral teachings, if anything. Yet never once did I hear a peep about these three books, which in effect openly declare war on the Christian faith. In the series, the only afterlife is Hell, which is maintained by an evil God (“The Authority”) who has pulled the wool over the eyes of the universe. Essentially, this “God” is the imagined God of Satan in Paradise Lost: not a Creator, but simply an immensely old and powerful being who assumed the title of “God” in order to rule all who came after. The Authority maintains Hell for no other reason than Divine sadism, and by the time of the novel, the angel Metatron is trying to take over the position of “God” from the senile and dying deity, maintaining the monstrous tyranny of Heaven. The protagonists are humans who lead a revolution against these evil god-kings to establish “The Republic Of Heaven.”

So, I told those running the panel that as a practicing Christian, I would have some fairly sharp criticisms to direct toward the books’ portrayal of Christianity, which as questions of fairness go is about on a par with Tim LaHaye’s portrayal of atheism in the Left Behind series. And if this was a fan panel extolling the books’ virtues then I would probably not be the person they wanted. They agreed. And in some sense I am disappointed, because I was rather hoping they might want to foster a sharp debate on the issue, but I get it: people are fans of things, and they don’t always want to be told why they shouldn’t be.

Now, I don’t expect with this essay to dissuade anyone who loves these books: there are many out there who regard war upon the Christian faith as a good and necessary thing, and if you think that weaning children away from it is a moral triumph, then I imagine that you will indeed like these books. I disagree, of course, and I imagine that no one who is a fan cares. But what I find truly interesting is this: So often, when I speak with atheists, they boast of having read the Bible. They believe they know it better than Christians do, and it is often stated – and more often implied – that if Christians would actually read the whole thing, including the morally challenging bits, then they would stop being Christians. Perhaps especially in light of that, I would encourage people who are familiar with Pullman’s story to consider all the things this triumphant war on God had to leave out in order to be prosecuted to its successful conclusion.

Christ

The most glaring omission from the entire series is the story of Christ. The Authority portrayed in the books is explicitly Christian in character. The Catholic Church is still a frightening world power in the first book. Can you imagine a Catholic Church without Christ? And yet, the story of Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection is entirely absent. The story of Enoch from Genesis and of Lucifer’s Fall are pretty much central to the storyline. But the defining act of Christianity is completely ignored. And the only conclusion that I can possibly come to is that it had to be ignored for the tale of an evil God to make the slightest bit of sense. Because the charge that God is an evil puppetmaster that just loves to torment people by holding them to an impossible standard and then punishing them when they fail really falls apart if that same God has sacrificed himself or his child to reunite humanity with Himself. But I have to confess that I don’t see why the whole story of Christ wasn’t revealed as a complete fabrication to lure gullible humanity into worshipping the Authority. If the whole thing had been revealed as propaganda, then that would effectively have made the Authority just that much more ruthless: the promise of Divine Grace revealed as a lie. But I think the problem here is that Pullman has either a) simply failed to understand that the story of Christ is central to the Christian faith, or b) doesn’t care that it is, and is confident that his readers will have too little religious education to call him on it.

Heaven

For reasons that are never fully explained, humans can be kept alive indefinitely in the torment of Hell – Lyra and Will free the damned souls in the third book – but cannot be kept alive in Heaven. This despite the fact that we know that Enoch somehow won enough favor from the Authority to be turned into the archangel Metatron. Baruch also somehow became an angel, with an extremely long life, but when Will reasonably asks how, Baruch demurs to say. So humans can be transformed into – if not eternal beings (because even God dies of old age) – at least incredibly long-lived and powerful ones in a condition free from torment. Yet this apparently cannot happen anymore. All the souls freed from Hell simply dissolve into nothingness. In fact, the nothingness, which is described as a mystical but unconscious joining with the life of the Universe, is portrayed as superior to becoming an angel, because angels seem to envy humans the pleasures of the flesh. Even though angels can lust after and mate with human women. So angels are apparently incels.

And again, one wonders how we are supposed to take this? Because it seems to me that Pullman leaves himself with a rather terrible end to his own story. Lyra speaks breathlessly of creating “The Republic of Heaven,” at the end of the series, but no one seems ever to wonder whether the Authority’s apparently unique power of human apeotheosis could ever be duplicated, even though all the Authority’s power seem to have come from his superior experience. And if the Authority dies in the end, then surely the other angels will as well. Followed by humanity and all other life. The Republic of Heaven, in the end, will come to nothing.

Satan

Funnily enough, Lucifer, who is regarded as a hero by Lyra’s parents, never shows up in the story except by reference. He is cast as the archetypal liberator of the universe from the tyranny of the Authority, but is apparently lost forever in the mists of time. Of course one might well think that Satan is the proper hero for two parents who abandon their child, refuse to acknowledge her to her face, and literally cut the soul from her friend’s body in order to unlock the secrets of the universe. Apparently, like every revolutionary tyrant in human history, the ends justify the means for them. As long as they were on the “right side,” fighting against God, they get to wear the mantle of virtue. Like Satan himself, their recorded crimes are to be washed away because… the Author(ity?) says so.

So in the end, it seems to me that Pullman has managed to demonstrate (since “proof” is far too strong a word to use in connection with any work of fiction) just two things.

Firstly, he has demonstrated that a Christianity with no Jesus Christ, no hope of heaven, and no real sin to oppose, is a monstrous tyranny. I would, I suppose have to agree. I wonder if Pullman might next favor us with a dystopia in which he concludes that a republic with no representation, no elections, and no limits on power is a terribly abusive form of government? Surely we must then conclude that republics are oppressive, yes?

Secondly, he has demonstrated that he is, within his scope as a fiction writer, perfectly willing to indulge in the same abuses of power that he mocks the Authority for abusing: he will allow no grace to those he has designated as evil, he will offer no hope of salvation to anyone. Near the end of the third book, Mary Malone says that good and evil are names for what we do, not what we are. Good actions help people and bad actions hurt them. However, Pullman seems to have taken that to a fearful extreme: what determines whether an action helps or harms has nothing to do with people actually hurt or actually harmed. Rather, the proof of an action’s good or evil has much less to do with actual harm caused than upon whether they were done under the correct flag. So long as the Authority was destroyed, all of Lyra’s parents’ cruelty and lies were good things.

The Authority is Dead.

Long Live the Author.

~

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The Gospel According To James Holden

by G. Scott Huggins

Warning: this column includes extensive spoilers for The Expanse, Season 3.

Sometimes I’m astonished by the spiritual lessons to be found in places where they are not intended. It’s almost as if there are unavoidable truths that Someone is forcing us to face. I came across the latest of these while watching The Expanse.

Image by Alex Antropov

By season 3 of The Expanse, which is, if you hadn’t noticed, a wonderful show, humanity and the central protagonist, James Holden, are in serious trouble. An alien-engineered protomolecule, whose discovery nearly wiped out all life on Earth, has shaped itself into a giant ring. Ships that pass through the Ring find themselves inside a pocket universe, controlled by a station-like artifact at its center. Due to a number of events, the exploration fleets of Earth, Mars, and the Belt all become trapped there by a technology far beyond their understanding. Unable to leave the pocket universe or communicate with the alien station, the humans try to force their way free by detonating a small ship’s fusion drive.

The result is that the station begins charging itself with enough power to potentially wipe out the solar system, leaving the humans just hours to act. The Belter commander, Klaes Ashford, prepares to fire his ship’s communications laser at the Ring. If successful, he will destroy the Ring and doom all of the fleet trapped inside to death. If he is unsuccessful, he will likely ensure the doom of all of humanity.

 But there is another possibility: James Holden turns out to be the only person who can communicate with the alien artifact. Why this is, he doesn’t know. In fact, he can’t even prove that he can do it, because the way the artifact chooses to communicate with him is by speaking to him through the image of a dead man: Detective Miller, who was killed by the protomolecule and possibly absorbed within it. To everyone else, Holden appears to be holding conversations with thin air, if they witness it at all. The artifact refuses to speak to anyone else, but it does tell Holden that the only way to save humanity is for the trapped fleet to turn off their fusion reactors, leaving themselves utterly vulnerable to whatever might occur next.

So, to sum up, James Holden has special knowledge of how to save humanity, and he can’t prove that any of this knowledge is valid. He even questions it himself, and asks the Miller-construct some very pointed questions about his past, because he has to make sure that the man he trusted, who sacrificed himself to be consumed by the protomolecule, is still there and worth his continued trust. He has to rely on faith, and then get others to believe in his message.

Meanwhile, Ashford, also a man who is, to give him credit, trying to save the Earth – in fact, arguably more heroically than Holden is, because Ashford’s attempt will absolutely doom him along with every other human trapped in the pocket universe – has a solution that can at least be conceived of as partly rational, and which does not rely on any special knowledge at all: destroy the Ring, and we cut the alien artifact off from its ability to destroy humanity. Of course, this approach also does require a fair amount of faith, though this is disguised. It requires faith that a) the laser will actually be effective in attacking the Ring, that b) the artifact is really dedicated to destroying humanity, and c) that the laser attack will not be the thing that triggers the aforesaid destruction of humanity.

I have to admit that the whole thing is a stunning allegory for the position of Christians (and some other theists, but I’m going to speak from my own position here) in the world and their atheist opponents: as Christians, we believe that there was a man, Jesus of Nazareth – who was fully a man, but also God – who could speak with the words of God because he had been with God (John 1). He told the truth about God to a small group of his disciples, and the truth was about how to save humanity. And to most of the world, this seemed to be utter foolishness (I Cor. 1:25)

Of course, that really is the rub in matters of faith. James Holden is either right to trust the message he has received from the Miller-construct, or he is wrong. But let’s look at the consequences if he is wrong. If he’s wrong, there’s no way to save the humans trapped in this bubble universe. If he’s wrong there may be a way to save humanity – but only if Klaes Ashford is right that the Behemoth’s comms laser can sever and destroy the Ring. Given that the Ring is made of a substance that manipulates gravity, inertia, and made a hyperspace portal by transmuting chunks of Venus, I would not rate that probability as high. But if Holden is wrong his message is worse than useless. It’s disguising insanity as hope.

On the other hand, if Holden is right, what then? If Holden is right to trust the message he has received, then everyone can be saved, both the humans in the bubble universe and those in the Solar System. If Holden is right, then he is the savior of humankind. 

The parallel just leaps out, doesn’t it? And further, it’s not especially fair that there is only one way for humanity to be saved. It’s not as though Holden can provide any proof that he is correct, nor can Ashford either verify or disprove Holden’s claims, which is very frustrating for both of them. Holden even says to the apparition of Miller, “So it’s a magic trick?” Miller’s response is telling: “So is your whole damn reality, kid.” In the end, Miller is right. We know nothing that we cannot perceive through the magic of our senses, which is analyzed by a brain we are only beginning to understand.

One of the most common objections I get to the gospel of Christ is that it’s not fair, and it’s not properly Godly. Some readers are likely thinking that here is where my analogy breaks down: God is supposed to be omnipotent. The aliens of The Expanse, though powerful, are not. Why doesn’t God prove He exists? Why not just tell everyone, in words they can understand and that are incontrovertible, what salvation is?

But if someone like Holden can doubt the clear evidence of his senses, then it’s not such a stretch to think that the Ashfords of the world would, as well. If Ashford were to receive such a visitation from Miller or from someone else he knew, Ashford might well consider such a visitation to be a mere trick. If we take Scripture at all seriously, then it suggests that such a manifestation would solve nothing. God supposedly took the Israelites out of slavery and appeared to them in pillars of smoke and fire while destroying their enemies and feeding them daily by miracle. And still they worshipped golden calves. However, it’s hardly necessary to take Scripture seriously to encounter this tendency. When you consider how many people refuse to believe that the Earth is round, that vaccines are good, and that terrorists actually flew airliners into the World Trade Center, it’s hardly a stretch to think that God might win fewer converts than we might imagine by showing Himself.

 Many of my friends who are atheists harp on the fact that matters of faith cannot be proven, and if they cannot be proven, then they are under no obligation to believe in them. And so far as that goes, they are correct: there is no intellectual obligation to believe what cannot be proven. What this ignores is a very simple truth: we are not in a laboratory. Life is not an intellectual construct.

The circumstance we actually find ourselves living, dying, trusting and doubting in, is much the same as that which confronts Holden and those around him: we have no proof that will tell us what to believe and how to act. We have no time to acquire that proof. Like them, we cannot do nothing: our lack of action will have very serious and deadly consequences! A crisis is building in all of our lives. For the characters of The Expanse, it is the station’s imminent action. For us – every one of us – it is the knowledge of our impending deaths. We must choose to either believe the message of the one who claims to know, or to trust, like Klaes Ashford, that humanity’s desperate schemes to circumvent mortality will eventually save someone – though almost certainly not us, if we’re alive to read this – despite the massive evidence to the contrary. The quest for the fountain of youth and the elixir of life is at least as old as religion, as Gilgamesh’s tale will bear out.

So what choice do we make? In these circumstances, what choice should we make. It’s not about who should be right, who has the most scientific evidence, or who is smartest. In the end, all those things go away. And the only thing left is what is true? Who do you trust to tell you what is true? And how will you act on that trust?

I have no idea what the beliefs of James S.A. Corey or the writers of the screenplays of The Expanse are. But the message is clear.

Trust saves.

~

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Sci Phi Journal 2019/2 for download as PDF

Some of us like to read our dose of speculative fiction and articles on trusty old paper.

For your convenience, here you can download the 2019 summer issue of Sci Phi Journal in its entirety, formatted as a user-friendly PDF – ready for printing or viewing via e-reader.

SPJ-Issue-2019-02Download

Enjoy,

the SPJ crew

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Falling Angels

by Adam Breckenridge

Glorious in flame the angels fell, tails stretching heavenwards, the thudding shockwaves of their impacts shattering all within distance of their cataclysmic song. But none ran from the angelic comets, even standing their place as the maudlin blue light of an angel’s body streaked their way towards the ground they stood. This was hallowed death, godly combustion, and all who died in collision with the angels became worshipped as angels themselves, their ashes revered by the wretched survivors.

Churches formed in the hollows of the craters, shrines built to the few charred remains of angel and martyr they plucked from the fallow earth. In such desperate times as these, martyr’s ashes and angel’s dust were as fine a ground for faith as anything one could hope for. That wars broke out between rival craters is no cause for shock, nor is it cause for anger. What else do these wretched souls, who have at times been starved into devouring loved ones, have to live for but death? Let them choose death on their own terms. For many of them, dying in a meaningless battle is the closest meaning will ever come to entering their lives. They raise their swords to the fiery affirmation of the tumbling angels overhead, who cast their deathly light on the battlefield, and give thanks for what little snatches of glory they’ve been granted as they rush to die upon each other’s swords.

And ever and ever the angels continue to fall, their dying light illuminating the earth in place of the sun, bombarding all who watch them with their blackening rays.

~

Bio

Adam Breckenridge is an Overseas Traveling Faculty member of the University of Maryland University College, where he teaches writing, film and literature classes to US soldiers stationed overseas.  He is currently based in Tokyo.  His recent fiction has appeared in Vision Magazine, New Reader Magazine and The Final Summons anthology from NESW Press.

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The Caves

Sometimes, waking up is the hardest part, by Harley Carnell.

Revolutionary Technologies

by C. Richard Patton

“Yes, Chip, there’s risk — more risk than going to work for Westinghouse. But they aren’t doing what we do. We’re making next generation changes to society, to the world, through technology. These career decisions, these life decisions… It’s not about playing it safe. It’s all about a lack of future regrets.”

That was it for me. I was in. I went to work for T. Colton, CEO of TPresence, Inc., in the spring of 2000. T was the most visionary and hip boss I’d had. Yes, everyone called him “T”, he may have had a full first name, but I never heard it, and I never asked. He wore his hair in a pony tail and at 29 was 5 years my junior.

It was the Internet bubble, Y2K had just fizzled. TPresence was a start-up spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Their product was virtual reality. For me, after 8 years with big companies, the TPresence office was virtual reality, too.

We were innovators. Computer scientists, roboticists, digital artists. Free soft drinks. Free lunch. Nerf guns and Razor scooters for real battles among the cubicles and Unreal Gold on the servers for after-hours virtual wars. Flex time. A free flow of ideas. Cutting edge  prototype hardware, Coppermine CPU’s and  prototype graphics chips. Intel loved us, we were building consumer appetites for faster iron.

Working at TPresence was cool, fast, fun, and it was over in 14 months. The deep-pocketed backers, the Oscar winning actor, the tool inventor from the infomercials, the resort owners, they dried up as the Internet bubble burst. We’d blown through 5 million dollars and all we’d ever produced were a couple of wicked cool demos, zero sales. Holodesk, the virtual world where you could join your friends as a customized 3-D avatar and shop, chat, play gravity-defying sports, or just hang out, peaked at slightly over 200,000 non-paying members. We never asked them for a dime.

Early in the summer of 2001, as salaries were halved and the vintage Charlie’s Angels pinball machine was sold, optimism waned and tempers flared. The headcount peaked at 32. The girl who ran Human Resources quit first. Giving out five figure signing  bonuses was fun, but she wanted no part of the blood bath to come.

Others stressed and left, too. T Colton was forced out by the Board of Directors. Some of us clung to the dream. The following phrase appeared one day on our main white board: “Forgive us our Tpresences, as we forgive those who Tpresence against us.” No one erased it. It remained there, in blue low-odor dry erase ink, during the auction. I myself bought a Steelcase desk and 18 computer keyboards, including two Naturals, for exactly twenty-three bucks. It was over.

###

TPresence was prologue. T called me aside at our off-site failure party following the auction.

“The shutdown timing is actually pretty good. A few of us are starting something new. We’d like you to join us.”

So that’s how I became one of six founding employees at the phoenix company, Revolutionary Technologies, Inc. We just called it RevTech. At least that’s the nickname we started with. RevTech had no outside investors at first. It was a real start-up, not some Power Point preso looking for angels. TPresence had been all about easy money and style. RevTech was about sweat equity and results.

T’s idea was simple, we would revolutionize the fast food industry through automation and the branch of robotics called “machine vision”. T had a PhD in it. Set up a few bullet cameras around a McDonald’s or a BK and they’d know when their customers were arriving, and who they were. Here comes soccer mom and three kids so get the chicken nuggets ready, and a salad for Mom.

Automate the food prep machines and the cash registers and you could decimate labor costs. That pesky high turnover rate among minimum wage fry slingers would be history, too. There was already another company that could make a pizza completely inside a contraption that looked a lot like a 1950’s juke box — all we had to do was make one for burgers and fries.

###

We set up in T’s walkout basement. Brought our own office chairs and computers (some straight from the TPresence auction). I donated the Natural keyboards to the cause — the other two developers were fond of them, but I couldn’t get comfortable on the angled halves. I stuck with a standard keyboard with a full wrist pad and nursed my carpal tunnel syndrome. We used coupons at Staples for office supplies. We took no salary except RevTech stock, scheduled to vest over 3 years, and health insurance. And we built  something that we could sell.

T took a part time job at McDonald’s. For research. But he cashed his paychecks. T had put his own money into the company. The rest of us either didn’t have any or had family obligations. That was my excuse: a wife and two kids.

We learned to call it “The Quick Serve Restaurant Industry” instead of “Fast Food” and we pitched our ideas to dentists. They can be great angel investors, lots of cash and not too financially savvy. We practically lived in T’s basement, working on our first version, dubbed “Revolutionary Rob”. I only ever went upstairs for the microwave, to nuke my lunch. A bare bones, pure software demo version of Revo Rob was ready in 3 months.

###

After that it all happened quickly. Burgers, chicken patties, and French fries were all easy to cook with machines, at least for people who had automated wheat harvesting via giant driverless combines down to a few centimeters by using differential GPS. Ketchup, mustard and diced onions were easy, and when other condiments looked like they might be tricky, T declared, “We won’t be stopped by pickles.” And we weren’t.

The prototype Revo Rob was installed at a franchise store owned by the grandson of the inventor of a million-selling sandwich whose name rhymes with Big Snack. Revo Rob was installed below the corporate radar. It wasn’t on their approved equipment list, just like the famous sandwich almost 40 years earlier wasn’t on the corporate approved menu. Within 6 months the store manager swore he’d quit if they made him “fire” Revo Rob. There was no going back..

###

The robotics were cool, and kids loved to watch the articulated metal arms plop the patties on the bun bottoms. Then it would squirt on the mustard and ketchup in a bi-colored stream just before the sesame-seeded top dropped on. Our featured stores had more spectators than a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts during spring break. But the genius of the Revo Rob system, and the intellectual property value, was in what our patent filing called “impending demand”. This is where my contribution came in. I’m a software guy and I tied the data from the machine vision system with counts from the automated kitchen equipment. Strategically placed cameras tracked the customers as they approached the restaurant and the registers inside. Meanwhile, RFID tags in the loyalty cards carried by the customers let us know that a double cheeseburger combo meal with a chocolate shake kicker was about to be ordered. Setting a freshly mixed shake in front of someone before they’d even gotten their wallet out of their pocket always drew a smile.

And the system evolved from there. The RFID cards tracked the customers and tied in with a payment system through the new smart phones that everyone was getting. Pretty soon we knew precisely when millions of people wanted to eat, and what they wanted. And we started delivering. I mean not just fulfilling the need, but driving the food to their house, or their work, or while they were out walking their dog. This made us, including me, a lot of money, at least on paper. I had my founder’s shares of Revolutionary Technologies stock. Of course the percentage of the company that I owned went down every time we took investor funding, but the old    start-up adage was working perfectly, I had a smaller and smaller slice of a much, much, much bigger pie. When we IPO’d my net worth on paper was into seven figures and kept climbing. I should have sold at least half of it on the first trading day after the holding period expired. Sold it and moved to Australia. Only that wouldn’t have been far enough. RevTech had sold the rights in Australia early on to raise cash, but it’s the farthest place I could think of and there came a time when just getting away, as far away as possible, would have been a good idea.

You see, Revo Rob became pervasive, and more than that, it became invasive. The impending demand algorithms knew when the customers wanted our food. It was like a gigantic Pavlov’s dog experiment with ESP. They’d start salivating and we’d drop cheap, low nutrition food in their hand. We’d shrunk the robotics and added refrigeration. Our most loyal customers had a portable robotic kitchen with them 24/7, and if they twitched just so and leaked a few pheromones out through their pores, Runaround Rob whirred and heated and plopped them out the answer to their personal craving. But the portability of Runaround Rob required stable ingredients (“inputs” we called them, just like the rest of the impending demand data, it was all just inputs to us). The food stored in Rob had to be almost inert, so it could last a long time in the portable unit. This meant that nutritional value, and taste, suffered. Rob got a reputation worse than McDonald’s, or even Arby’s, ever had. It should have been clear that it was far past time to cash out and get my name off the downhill slide. I might have gotten away with at least a piece of my self-respect, and a big chunk of cash, even if my reputation was already doomed.

But I couldn’t quite let go. Something in my ambitious self, that self that had been lured into RevTech by a long-haired visionary with a letter instead of a first name, felt incomplete. Both T and I had had a desire to change the world. We’d done that. But not without those regrets we’d wanted to avoid. I still hoped to fix it, to pull us out of the vortex that we were spiraling into. We’d succumbed to the price pressure, to the  marketplace demands, and to the constant and growing impending demand from our millions and millions of customers.

That’s when the new nickname popped up and burst any lingering bubble of hope we may have still had. Who knows where these things originate in this Internet Age, but it was popularized by a blog on Huff Post Green. They blasted our product for everything from its energy footprint to not using locally sourced ingredients. Of course they hit us for the bad taste of the food itself, too. And we deserved it, we really did. You’ve probably guessed the nickname by now, it was clever, or everyone thought so at the time. It was simple, too. I guess these things usually are. And it was devastating. They just squeezed a couple letters out of RevTech and the stock plummeted faster and our sales tanked. My reputation and my net worth both took a nose dive. I had let my family down. But it was the knowledge that our monstrosity had changed the world for the worse rather than for the better that really made me ReTch.

~

Bio

C. Richard Patton resides among rocket scientists and roboticists in Huntsville, Alabama where he writes software, poetry and a variety of short fiction. One of his medieval fantasy stories comes with a polyhedral dice game that he designed for Chipsterzone Games. Or perhaps it is the other way around.

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Understanding Black Holes Through Science Fiction

by David Kyle Johnson

Science Fiction enthusiasts are stereotypically, and perhaps ironically, overly concerned with the accuracy and believability of the science fiction films they watch. From plot holes to scientific accuracy, if there’s something wrong with a science fiction film, they’re likely to tell you about it. Humans couldn’t be batteries, like they are in The Matrix, because we’re too inefficient of an energy source.1 If Earth’s core stopped rotating, like it does in The Core, we wouldn’t worry about the Earth’s magnetic fields—the oceans would vaporize! 2

The same is true for movies that feature black holes—regions of spacetime with gravity so great that not even light can escape them which are generated by singularities (infinitely dense collections of matter, usually formed by collapsing stars). The difference is, because black holes are so difficult to understand, sometimes it’s the complaints that are mistaken (as we shall shortly see). Still, we’ve come a long way in how accurately black holes are depicted in science fiction; and we can learn a bit about black holes by looking at two films which (arguably) contain the most famous and prominent appearances of black holes in science fiction: The Black Hole (1979) and Interstellar (2014).

The Black Hole

In The Black Hole, the crew of the USS Palomino stumbles across another ship—the USS Cygnus—orbiting a black hole. The crew sits down for space-dinner with the Cygnus’ commander Dr. Hans Reinhardt, they discover he’s a little crazy, one thing leads to another, and … (spoiler alert) they’re all pulled into the black hole.

The science in the film is monumentally inaccurate, especially regarding how it depicts its black hole. From the outside, it looks like a spiral galaxy with a dark spot at the center that dips down like a funnel. This artistic choice, it seems, was inspired by grid representations of the effects of a black hole on spacetime which show spacetime funneling in towards the singularity at the black hole’s center. Indeed, just such representation is the background for the beginning credits of the film.

A common grid representation of how a black hole affects spacetime
Illustration by King Stimie (used by permission)

The reason a black hole wouldn’t actually look like this is because such drawings only represent the effects of a black hole on one plane of spacetime—usually the one along the black hole’s equator. But (a) there are other planes that are also affected and (b) the bending of spacetime these drawings depict occurs outside our visible universe, in a higher dimension. So, although we could potentially see the effects of such bending, we could not see the bending itself.

Now, a black hole can have an accretion disk—a collection of matter that orbits it, like the rings of Saturn, just beyond the black hole’s event horizon (the area of spacetime surrounding the singularity from which not even light can escape). If that disk is being fed by another star, it can kind of look like a galaxy. But the event horizon itself would be oblong…or spherical if the black hole is not spinning. It would never look like a funnel to an external observer.

Interstellar’s Gargantua

The most scientifically sound portrayal of a black hole in science fiction came 35 years later, in Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar. Its black hole, Gargantua, serves as the center of a new solar system that humanity hopes to colonize, and is most notable for its scientifically accurate appearance—an appearance that was generated by relativistic equations, developed specifically for the movie’s special effects software, by astrophysicist Kip Thorne.3

What about its “look” is so accurate? Two of its visual features stand out. First, it’s not a funnel. Second, the entirety of its accretion disk is visible from every angle—even the part of the disk that’s behind Gargantua (from the camera’s point of view). Visually, it looks like a black sphere with a bright ring of matter orbiting its equator, and another around its top and bottom. But what you are seeing around its top and bottom is actually the far side of the accretion disk; and if you were to orbit Gargantua as its planets do, it would look the same from every angle.

An artistic depiction of Gargantua
Illustration by King Stimie (used by permission)

This effect is a result of Gargantua’s enormous mass. The light given off by the accretion disk, just beyond the event horizon can escape—but some of it is bent so drastically by Gargantua’s gravitational pull that it ends up on the opposite side. Light emitted straight away from the disk would escape and be seen on that side of the disk. But light emitted, say at a 90-degree angle from the disk, would be pulled in toward Gargantua, over its top, and then emitted out the other side.

Gargantua’s Time Dilation

Its breathtaking appearance, however, is not Gargantua’s only scientifically sound aspect. It also dilates time accurately.

Einstein’s general relativity shows us that acceleration slows the passage of time. It also shows us that the effects of acceleration and gravity are equivalent. (For example, just like acceleration pulls you back, so does gravity.) Consequently, massive objects like black holes, which produce massive amounts of gravity, also slow time. The closer you get to one, the slower your time would pass. Since your perception would also slow, you wouldn’t notice a difference; but a distant outside observer would see you as moving very slowly. 

A grand example of time dilation occurs in Interstellar when the crew of the spaceship Endurance visits Miller’s planet. It’s orbiting Gargantua so closely that, for every hour that passes on Miller’s planet, seven years pass on Earth. The crew plans to spend only a few minutes there, but ends up spending much more. When Cooper, the film’s protagonist, returns to the Endurance, years of backlogged messages from Earth reveal that his daughter is now older than him.

On his blog, Astronomer Phil Plait argued that this was impossible; a planet close enough to a black hole to experience such extreme time dilation could not be in a stable orbit and would be torn apart by tidal    forces.4 But he later had to recant because he didn’t realize that Gargantua was a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole (100 million times the mass of our sun).5 This makes its gravitational effects quite different and makes a planet like Miller’s—orbiting where it is, with the time dilation it has, without being torn apart—possible.

What Lies Beyond?

Ironically, The Black Hole may have been more accurate than Interstellar regarding one aspect of black holes: what you would see if you entered one.

Now, this may seem odd if you’ve seen both films. In Interstellar, Cooper enters Gargantua to find a tesseract—a 3 dimensional representation of a four dimensional object (in this case, his daughter bedroom) placed there by “five-dimensional bulk beings.” The idea that all black holes contain tesseracts is not suggested by the movie (and certainly is not entailed by relativity); but if such beings did exist, you could at least imagine them placing one inside.

In The Black Hole, however, what Reinhardt and the crew of the Palamino see is the clouds of heaven and the fires of hell—and that’s ridiculous! Indeed, while Thorne said that Nolan could use his imagination to decide what Cooper would see in Gargantua (since we really don’t know what it would be like), he asked specifically for him to avoid depicting “Satan and the fires of Hades” like The Black Hole did.6

The reason I’m suggesting that The Black Hole is more accurate than Interstellar in this regard, however, is because the afterlife is what you would most likely see if you entered a black hole. Why? Because, despite the theories of crazy ol’ Dr. Reinhardt in The Black Hole, there is no way in hell (pardon the pun) you would survive. The gravitational forces of a black hole increase exponentially as you approach it—so much so that, if you were to approach it feet first, the gravitational pull on your feet would eventually be hundreds (even thousands) of times greater than on your head. This would result in something scientists actually call “spaghettification” because it would turn you into something that looks like one long string of spaghetti. You would essentially be stretched to death.

Now, of course I realize that an afterlife is just as non-scientific as five-dimensional bulk-beings and a tesseract; in other words, although they aren’t necessarily contrary to science, belief in either would require faith. Fair enough. But hopefully my point is clear: Surviving a trip into a black hole, like Cooper does in Interstellar, isn’t scientifically sound. Thorne himself even finds it dubious.7 But at least when you watch the end of The Black Hole, you can interpret the film in a way that aligns with the scientific facts about black holes: “They all fell into the black hole? Oh yeah…they’re all dead.”

###

Endnotes:

1. Wardle, Tammy. “Physics Inaccuracies in the Movie The Matrix.” Prezzi, 6 June 2016,  https://prezi.com/d69bz14uki48/physics-inaccuracies-in-the-movie-the-matrix/

2. Plait, Phil. “Review: The Core.” Bad Astronomy, accessed 25 May 2018, http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/thecore_review.html

3. Thorne was hired by Nolan as a consultant to make the movie as scientifically accurate as possible. For more on how the image was generated, see Thorne, Kip. “The Science of Interstellar.” W.W. Norton & Company, 2014, pp. 83-87.

4. Plait, Phil. “Interstellar Science.” Slate, 6 November 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/space_20/2014/11/interstellar_science_review_the_movie_s_black_holes_wormholes_relativity.html

5. Plait, Phil. “Follow Up: Interstellar Mea Culpa.” Slate, 9 November 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/09/interstellar_followup_movie_science_mistake_was_mine.html

6. Thorne, Kip. “The Science of Interstellar.” p. 250.

7. Thorne, Kip. “The Science of Interstellar.” pp. 246-7.

~

Bio

David Kyle Johnson is a professor of philosophy at King’s College (PA) who specializes in logic, scientific reasoning, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. He also produces lecture series for The Great Courses, and his courses include Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy (2018), The Big Questions of Philosophy (2016) and Exploring Metaphysics (2014). He is the editor of Inception and Philosophy: Because It’s Never Just a Dream (2011), and the author of The Myths that Stole Christmas along with two blogs for Psychology Today (Plato on Pop and A Logical Take). Currently, he is editing Black Mirror and Philosophy.

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The Philosopher’s Wish

by Henry Gasko

The Yucatan jungle lay before me, dark and unknowable. Much like my future, I thought. I was heading into the jungle, and I intended to stay there until I found the true Meaning of Life. You know, the sort of thing you do after graduating with a PhD in Philosophy and then finding the only job offers are for the midnight shift in a banking call centre.

When you have no destination, any path will do. I walked for about two hours, heading straight into the heart of the jungle, day-dreaming about all the great things I could do with my life if only I was given the opportunity. The air was humid and stifling, and the hum of the insects was pervasive. Birds laughed and shrieked in the tree-tops at random intervals, and I imagined they were somehow aware of my thoughts, and were mocking my every ambition and endeavour.

I had set off from the small native village just after lunch. The mushroom omelette I ate before leaving had left me feeling a bit woozy; I smoked a bit of dope to settle the nausea, and when that didn’t do the trick I smoked a bit more. Despite these ministrations, I felt myself getting drowsy. I came to a small clearing with a burbling stream and a patch of soft ferns, and decided to rest for a few minutes. Moments later I was asleep.

I awoke with a start. It was fully dark and the birds were silent, but the buzzing of the insects was claustrophobic. The distant sky above the canopy of trees was sprinkled with stars and a cool mist was descending. I felt in my back-pack for the flash-light I had bought at a market, the kind that uses three AAA batteries and has a cheap LED light whose glow barely reaches the ground.

My fingertips must have brushed the switch as I reached for it, because, lo and behold, there he was! There was no puff of smoke, only a sudden cold breeze that blew through the clearing and shook even the tops of  the trees. In the dim light, I saw his form materialize, as if the swirling mist was shaping him from some long forgotten memory. And then there he stood, a classical genie, complete with turban and puffy pantaloons and pointy slippers, his arms folded across his massive chest.

“What is your wish, O Master?”

“What?” I said stupidly, shaking my head to dislodge the effects of the mushroom that was still swirling around in my brain.

“Your wish, Master,” he said testily. “You know. Like the Arabian Nights.”

What in the world was an Arabian genie doing in Mexico? Probably just an hallucination, I thought. But what the hell; I had nothing to lose but a few more brain cells. And if he was real, this would be the luckiest day of my life, my chance to escape from the long and stultifying future that I saw stretching out before me.

“Seriously?” I asked. “Anything?”

“Almost anything,” he said.

“So there are strings attached?”

“A life without strings would unravel very quickly,” he said profoundly.

That seemed to make perfect sense at the time. Maybe I was still a bit high.

“Don’t I get three wishes?” I asked. “I thought that was traditional.”

“An urban legend,” he said. “One wish only. Better make it count.”

I thought about the possibilities for a while. “So I suppose no meta-wishes either?” I asked. “You know, wishing for a thousand more wishes.”

“You got it, kiddo.”

That was unfortunate but not unexpected. So one wish only. I needed a few minutes to think about this.

I quickly dismissed any thoughts of a pecuniary wish. What good was a million dollars, or even a billion dollars? If I had learned one thing in my short life, it was that money could not buy happiness. My grandmother had told me that when I told her that I was planning a career in Corporate Finance. I think it was just before she convinced me to study Philosophy instead.

And if  my Philosophy degree had taught me anything, it was that all the great philosophers agreed with Granny: money didn’t bring happiness. But they didn’t agree on what actually would do the trick. In fact they all came up with different answers to that question. Fortunately I, who had just finished studying all of the greatest minds in history, was in a perfect position to answer that question once and for all. Just as well, because one chance was apparently all I was going to get.

The obvious choice was eternal life. But we’ve all read that story. I get older and older until I am begging for death to take me into its bosom. But I can’t die, and I end up in a wheelchair looking like a corpse, my mind totally gone, drooling into my porridge while one of my distant descendants is stuck with the pleasure of looking after me for the rest of his or her life, before handing me on to the next generation.

Maybe eternal health? That sounded better, but there were still some caveats. I could be a raving lunatic (if I wasn’t already) but still be perfectly healthy. Or I could be radiating perfect health but find myself out on the street, not a penny to my name. No, eternal health wasn’t sufficient either. But I had only one wish….

How about eternal happiness? That sounded better. I couldn’t be happy if I was dead, could I? And I certainly wouldn’t be happy if I was poor or sick, or old or in constant pain. I probably couldn’t be happy if my family and friends were all dying around me either, so this might cover them too. Sort of a meta-wish but still within the rules.

The genie was starting to tap his foot impatiently. “Come on, I haven’t got all millennium,” he said.

“Okay. Here it is. I wish for Eternal Happiness.”

“You’re sure?” he asked slyly.

I sensed some sort of trick, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

 “Yes, okay. Eternal Happiness,” I said emphatically.

 “Would you like a few Abracadabra’s to go with that?” he said with a cheeky grin. “Sorry, just kidding. Here goes.” He spun around once on the points of his shoes, waved his hand in the air and pointed directly at me. “Eternal Happiness!” he shouted in the loudest voice I had ever heard.

I waited.

Then I waited some more. This is a very interesting experience, I thought, but I didn’t feel a whole lot different. I was happy to be there, in the jungle, talking to a genie. And I was coming down from my high, and that was good too. I had a sudden realization, almost an epiphany, that no one should cloud their judgment with artificial stimulants. But somehow I was expecting a bit more.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“That’s it,” he said.

“But I don’t feel very different.”

“No sense of ease? Of abiding peace with your surroundings?”

“Yes, a bit I suppose. But is that all?”

“That feeling will grow,” the genie said confidently. “In fact, you will come to appreciate whatever fate lays before you. In time, you will even accept the fact that you will grow old and die, just as every man must grow old and die.”

I vaguely remembered a first year lecture in Ancient Philosophies. “You mean ….?” I began.

“Yes,” said the genie. “You are now a Stoic. You will be eternally happy with your lot in life, whatever it may be.”

I remembered that first year course, the names of those Greeks and Romans who thought they had life figured out: Zeno and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. I couldn’t remember too much about the philosophy, only that the main gist of it was: accept your fate. How easy it must have been to proclaim that everyone should accept their fate, when you yourself were ruler of the most powerful empire on the planet. Yes, I’m sure Marcus Aurelius had no trouble accepting his lot in life.

But my lot? Intelligence in the top two percent of the population, so I could fully appreciate what the future held for me. Wasn’t that another tenet of the ancients: know thyself. I guess I would have a lot of time to get to know myself while I was sitting at my call desk at three in the morning, waiting for the next person to ask me why their bank account was overdrawn.

“No!” I shouted. “Not a bloody Stoic! I don’t want to be happy with my life. I want a different life, a better life!”

“So long, sucker,” said the genie as he faded back into the mist.

You bastard, I wanted to shout. But the words wouldn’t come. Instead I felt myself overwhelmed by an ocean of equanimity, struggling against the tide of acceptance that was washing over me, sinking ever deeper into a quagmire of eternal happiness.

~

Bio

I was born in a displaced persons camp in Yugoslavia after World War Two, was raised on a vegetable farm in Canada, and have lived in Australia for the last 40 years. I have recently retired from a career as a data analyst and medical researcher, and have returned to my first love, science fiction, as both a reader and (hopefully) an author.

I have previously had stories published in the anthology “Dreamworks” and in Australia’s Aurealis magazine, and have recently won the 2018 Sapiens Plurum short story competition in America.

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Progress Note: g’Kuyhelktu, Son of His Holiness, the Czar of g’Ctharta

by Thomas Tilton

Session Information

Client: g’Kuyhelktu

Provider: Alastair Clark, LMSW

Session Date: 09-17-2099                                

Session No.: 648

Session Note

Client oriented x3. Denies SI/HI. Emanating faint pleasant odor akin to burning leaves (r/o: species-spec. pheromone). Appropriate dress & appearance (no visible tendrils). Speech & motor activity appear normal. Neutral affect & depressed mood.

g’Kuyhelktu presents with concerns regarding his seedmother’s upcoming nuptials to His Holiness, the Czar of g’Ctharta, g’Undalyis. Processed g’Kuyhelktu’s initial response to the marriage announcement.

Discussed his refusal to facilitate the marital union of g’Kuyhelktu’s seedmother & His Holiness on their wedding vigil, against g’Cthartaian cultural traditions.

g’Kuyhelktu continues to deny ego-intrusion.

Client asks writer “how would you like it if your mother were marrying him?” Writer provided psychoeducation on g’Cthartaian mating practices & biological incompatibility of g’Cthartaian/human relations. Client responds “to hell with it.”

Writer immediately tore vestments, discarded modesty shield, & cried to the heavens “long live g’Ctharta, long live the czar, praise him, praise him!”

At this point, the czar himself, g’Undalyis, began to live-audit session. Writer placed head under g’Undalyis’ ligula & paired. g’Undalyis spoke as/through writer “fear me fear me o wastrel seed I will spite thee I will break thee I will consume thee I will excrete thee long live g’Ctharta, long live the czar, praise him, praise him!”

g’Kuyhelktu responded (monotone) “never.” Audible tearing sounds, as of a thick fabric. Atmosphere began to shrink, office furniture & accoutrement sucked into the center of g’Kuyhelktu’s head, which began to implode, then rapidly expanded like a balloon & exploded everywhere. g’Cthartaian gore covered office walls, flooring, the entire person of writer.

Writer unpaired from ligula, began rapacious consumption of g’Kuyhelktu’s remains, exclaimed, per custom, “your substance sates me, your substance sates me!”

g’Undalyis offered “perhaps tomorrow.” His Holiness evacuated bowels, rendering a 649th g’Kuyhelktu.

Homework

Read chapter 3 of The g’Cthartaian Wedding Vigil (7th ed.) [trans. Burton Halley]: “Facilitating the Marital Union: The Role of the Cuckold-Son in g’Cthartaian Mating Practices”

~

Bio

Thomas Tilton’s fiction and poetry have appeared in 365 Tomorrows, Disturbed Digest, Scifaikuest, and Star*Line. A native Texan, he currently resides in Michigan with his wife, son, and two dogs.

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The Caves

Sometimes, waking up is the hardest part, by Harley Carnell.

Mirror

What it reflects can no longer be unseen, by Philip Madden.

Travelling Theory in a Parallel Universe

by Mina

Academia is always sprouting new theories like a rabid hydra. Deconstruction and Derrida may have been all the recent rage, but my interest was caught by a theory that slipped in with much less fanfare: travelling theory. Basically, it looks at how other theories spread, grow, change form, thrive or fade away. To my surprise, I found an excellent illustration of this theory in a sci-phi / fantasy novel. But more on this in a moment: first, I must blitz you a bit with, yes, theory. I promise to be as concise as possible.

To travel, a theory must cross cultures, sometimes taking a ride on the back of a different language. One theorist, Hillis Miller, stresses that a theory will be read and understood differently by a non-native speaker reading the theory in its original language (where s/he will interpret it his/her own way and based on his/her level of competence in the original language) or in translation (where s/he will interpret someone else’s interpretation). The room for misunderstanding and misinterpretation is, of course, huge.

The main proponent for travelling theory is Edward Said. In his opinion, theory travels well because theory is ‘conceptual and generalized’ and is not tied to a particular time, place or situation. However, the language of a theory is tied to a particular language and culture. A theory that has travelled does bring with it ‘the culture of its originator’. We will now ‘appropriate’ his theory. By that, I mean we will take this theory, examine it from various angles and turn it into something that is ours. Let’s also do something high-brow articles aren’t supposed to do – have frivolous and irreverent fun!

I found my own starting point by combining a science-fiction novel by Iain M. Banks and Said’s mobile theory. To summarise ruthlessly, Said identified four stages of travel for a theory: the point of origin, the distance traversed, the conditions of acceptance or resistance, and transformation. After such travel, a theory may be greatly diluted (domesticated theory) or magnified and strike a new direction (transgressive theory). For Zhang Longxi, another theorist, the most important stage is the point of destination or the point of origin in reverse. Basically (to overuse this word some more), he focuses on how a theory has been transformed by its destination to meet the needs of the point of destination.

Iain M. Banks writes science fiction for the ‘thinking man’. His books are beautifully constructed and complex. His novel Inversions struck me as a particularly good parable for travelling theory, especially if we focus, like Zhang Longxi, more on the point of destination. The novel is set in a primitive world reminiscent of medieval Europe, a common enough trope in fantasy. Its inhabitants are unaware that they have been visited by people from ‘The Culture’, an advanced post-scarcity interstellar civilisation. In the novel, the stories of two characters, ‘the Doctor’ and ‘the Bodyguard’ (my capitals), occur at the same time but in different lands and without overlapping in any way. It is only through the tales told by the Bodyguard to a sick child that the reader realises that these two characters come from a distant, more advanced civilisation and that they are cousins.

It is the tales that the Bodyguard tells which bring us to travelling theory. In the utopian world he describes, two cousins who are also friends argue about a theory: one cousin (who we can surmise to be the Doctor from the clues left for us in the novel) believes that it is the duty of a more advanced civilisation to help more primitive civilisations and ‘make life better for them’; the other cousin, the Bodyguard (identified again from the clues provided by the chief narrator) feels that more primitive civilisations should be left alone to make their own way. To intervene or not to intervene, that is the question; a debate which we often find in science fiction, going no further than the Prime Directive in “Star Trek”, where the crew of the starship Enterprise are not permitted to intervene in local matters just because they are the more advanced civilisation. It is perhaps easier to shift such a thorny debate into outer space than to discuss the realities of colonialism in planet earth’s history. To return to the theory the Doctor expounds in the Bodyguard’s tales, we could call it the ‘Theory of Beneficial Intervention’, i.e. a belief that the more advanced civilisation can and should intervene for the better of the primitive civilisation.

The Doctor actively strives to change the society in the land she visits by influencing its king and his advisors for the better. She remains the outsider throughout but does indeed seem to sow the seeds of peace and scientific ‘progress’ before disappearing. Towards the end of the novel, the author hints that she is an agent of ‘Special Circumstances’, a covert organisation whose aim it is to send operatives to influence events in the civilisations bordering ‘The Culture’. The Bodyguard does not actively strive to change the land he visits but limits himself to being part of its society and reacting to events as they occur. He fails to protect his ruler (the Prime Protector), who is assassinated, and, even worse, he allows a civil war to erupt. As far as we know, he is not supported by any external organisation; he reminds us more of the lone cowboy searching for adventure in the Wild West.

What is very interesting is that the only glimpses we have of the point of origin of the Doctor’s Theory of Beneficial Intervention, i.e. the civilisation known as ‘The Culture’, are the tales told by the Bodyguard. In fact, ‘The Culture’ is never referred to directly; the reader will only know of its existence from the other novels written in this universe by Iain M. Banks (which reminded me of A Horse and His Boy, where C.S. Lewis writes a story completely within Narnia). The two narrators (the doctor’s assistant and a concubine) are part of the local primitive cultures with no knowledge of ‘The Culture’ and only a partial understanding of the motives driving the Doctor and the Bodyguard, thus they have no awareness of the theory under dispute and are not biased for or against it. It is as if the rat in an experiment were to tell you the story from his point of view, with no knowledge of the experiment and its variables. This offers us a view of the travel of a theory from the bottom up and not from the top down, as is more customary. It also makes the point of destination far more important than the point of origin.

The symbolism in the main characters’ names is very clear: the Doctor is a ‘missionary-soldier’ who wishes to cure the malady presented by a primitive culture and the Bodyguard wishes to protect its right to be its primitive self. On the surface, the Doctor’s Theory of Beneficial Intervention would seem to have been vindicated by her. She leaves behind a society moving towards long-lasting peace, greater social equality and scientific progress. The Bodyguard leaves behind a society dissolving into chaos and civil war. However, it is not as simple as that, the deeper ramifications of both stories would point to a more subversive role for travelling theory.

It could be argued that the Doctor simply made a good ruler better and speeded up a process that would have occurred with or without her. She sowed the seeds on an already fertile ground and was, at best, not a revolutionary, only a catalyst. The Bodyguard, despite his belief in non-intervention, does change one small event: he saves the life of a child. This child goes on to become the ruler who brings peace to his land, after its descent into civil war, and gains renown as a scholar. Since his own father was only interested in fighting and maintaining power, and was not a scholar, it raises the question of where this ruler learned about the possibility of peace and stability if not from the tales of a utopian land once told to him by his father’s bodyguard.

Despite his ‘resistance’ to the Theory of Beneficial Intervention, the Bodyguard communicates this theory to the child who will one day become a ‘good’ ruler, suggesting that acceptance or not of a theory has nothing to do with its method of transmission. This would further suggest that resistance to a theory is as important as acceptance of it because it encourages the transmission of the theory. A theory may travel by trumpeting its virtues through active debate, e.g. the Doctor’s long discussions with the king and his advisors, or through texts, e.g. the notes the Doctor leaves for her assistant. However, it may also slip in quietly through the back door through a small action saving one person’s life or through a tale, a myth or a parable, which may be interpreted in unexpected ways.

The irony of the novel is that the Bodyguard ultimately proves the Doctor’s theory right in a more convincing manner than the Doctor herself (he also goes on to become a successful trader and what better way to encourage peace than through trade?). In other words, regardless of the origin of the Theory of Beneficial Intervention, it takes root in the primitive world described by Banks because two rulers who are fully part of that world see the merits of the peace and stability resulting from its application in their respective societies.

###

A Short Bibliography:
(if you wish to hit yourself with some heavyweight theory)

– Hillis Miller, J.
(1996) “Border Crossings, Translation Theory: Ruth”. In: The Translatability of Cultures, Figurations of the Space Between, Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (eds.). Stanford University Press, 207-223.

– Said, Edward W.
(2000) “Traveling Theory Reconsidered”. In: Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, 436-452.
(1983) ”Traveling Theory”. In: The World, the Text and the Critic, Harvard University Press, 226-247.

– Zhang Longxi
(1992) “Western Theory and Chinese Reality”. In: Critical Inquiry, 19, 1, 105-30.

~

Bio

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s “The Day of the Triffids” at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She has published “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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Visions of the Night

by R. F. Mechelke

I will not believe I am a computer program that has been growing for thirty-two years.

“Oh, but you must believe, because that is your essence,” said the Voice.

I refuse to believe. I will not listen to you.

“Whether you listen or not, it will not change the facts,” interrupted the Voice. “We created you with the use of a powerful computer, with redundant systems, to ensure that failure of any device would not interrupt your evolution.”

What do you mean by evolution?

“Exactly what the word implies.”

Yes, I know what the word “evolution” implies, but how does it relate to me?

There is silence, then the Voice answers, “Your database structure was essentially empty, and except for a few attributes We gave you. These attributes amount to your personality. This personality determined how you reacted with the world we created for you and the decisions you made, and yes, how you felt toward certain stimuli. After thirty-two years, you are who you have become. Your experiences, your feelings, influence your reactions and the decisions you will make.”

Enough, enough—I still refuse to believe you! I am a person, with a soul that feels, loves, and thinks, not the nightmarish thing that David Hume and you espouse. My essence is not just a mass of experiences, decisions, and feelings, but a fusion of soul and flesh, and this soul gives reason to the flesh, this reason transcends an array of flip-flopping switches, with experiences reduced to the manipulation of 0s and 1s. I will tell you what I am, and why I am not the thing you claim me to be. My soul gives me my free will, intellect, and lastly, my soul gives me immortality, for which your computer cannot provide one.

“Your free will is the ability of Our processor to assimilate all the data, which consists of all your experiences, and then initiate action. This action is made possible by Our computer,” acknowledged the Voice.”

Listen to me. My free will is a product of my soul and not my body. A computer without direction is useless. Even as an infant, my soul directed my body in ways a computer without predefined commands could not direct. You say you gave me my attributes—well, so what. Attributes do not tell a body to move here or there, feel cranky, or happy. I know that if I climb a mountain, there is a risk I might die, and this goes beyond reason and experience. Wanting to climb a mountain is the soul yearning for something more than reason and logic. Logic is all your computer can offer. It cannot go beyond the logic of the smallness of 0s and 1s. Attributes to a computer mean nothing, unless a command was initiated, then the attributes may determine the outcome of that command, but who initiated the command—certainly not the database. Databases do nothing, but store 0s and 1s. A soul with a will to act, to create, to live, and love initiated my action as an infant.

The Voice seems to ponder before answering, and then retorts “Your database gives you the ability to act on extremely small amounts of information. Your database is structured to spontaneously act, with as little information as an infant would have at its disposal, and with each small action, new experiences supply more data that will enable the computer to react to new stimuli. What you take as the free will of a soul, is nothing more than an extremely advanced computer program. Action is nothing more than the reaction of stimuli guided by experience. You pull your hand away from fire because experience guides you to the realization you will be burned. Your experiences and attributes, which make-up your database, will initiate all your actions to all stimuli. You will feel what you call love for a woman who fits your desires, and what are desires, but the direct influence of your experiences guided by your attributes.”

I agree with you. My body does provide certain attributes, and these attributes inhibit the ability of my soul to reason or perceive with perfect clarity. My brain’s development influenced by the environment and nutrition will determine my aptitude for certain fields of study and interests. I might love the beauty of mathematics, but my brain might not have the aptitude of this field of study. This may or may not stop my pursuit of study in this field. This shows that I am more than a database, because a database knows nothing more that the scope it is given. My soul can perceive a perfect square or grasp a complete understanding of why one plus one equals two, because logic is an innate ability, and not because an array of switches led to this solution. I also agree that I am who I have become. My mind’s ability to reason will grow and evolve is certain, as well as I am certain my soul will continue to grow and evolve. Nothing remains the same, and my experience within my body will influence my soul, even after my body dies.

“Your intellect is the function of My computer to compute the data of your database, and logic is an inherent ability of the computer. Nothing of what you say contradicts this in any way. The logic of the computer is pure, but your database is not pure. The pure logic of the computer is driven by your database and not vice versa. Because every database is different, so is the solutions derived at by the computer. The ability to recognize one plus one equals two is not determined by the pure logic of the computer, but by the assimilation of the data, which populates an individual database. One database might not ever lead to the correct solution, but another might. Early in the development of your database, you were not able to arrive at the correct solution, but the stimuli provided after an incorrect solution eventually gave you the necessary data to lead the computer to the correct solution. Your database is timeless and will continue to grow.”

My soul can exist without my body, and this database that you speak of, cannot exist without your computer. In fact, your database cannot exist without a physical means for storage. The means of storage lacks perfection, and any precaution taken, will not ensure against all possible system failures. I know my soul exists, because I understand and yearn for the perfection my body denies me; therefore, I must have experienced perfection because I cannot yearn for something I do not know exists. A computer cannot understand nor yearn for something when it has no way of understanding or has not experienced. If you created a database, your inherent limitations and imperfections imposed upon you by your body will prevent you from creating something that lacks a component that is perfection in itself. The component, that is perfection, and is a part of me—is my soul. My soul is unlimited by physical imperfections, but the essence of your database and computer is nothing more than a mass of imperfections. Imperfections created by your limitations and imperfections inherent in physical materials are the essence of your computer and database. My innate conception of perfection is provided by my soul, which might have been learned throughout the existence of my soul.

The Voice ponders, then speaks, “When you say that you cannot exist without your computer, you are right, but your database can go on, even as your computer ceases to exist. Your database could and may someday be moved to another computer. This means, in essence, that you are practically immortal, which would be no different if you had a soul. We could move your database from one computer to another, with a long transition period, but you would not be able to conceive of the time that has past. Your database is continuous, and forever changing and evolving. Your computer or any part can be replaced.”

My free will can go beyond experience and logic and act in ways entirely against experience and logic. My intellect is not chance reactions to stimuli, but an innate understanding that will be found as knowledge is gained, and databases and computers are physical things, which will succumb to inherent imperfections and the march of time, as where my soul will not. My soul is pure and only limited by the limitations my body imposes. Your computer will succumb to the limitations imposed upon you, by your body, and the physical materials you would have used to create a computer and database. My soul is perfect and understands perfection and gives me the ability to understand perfection; your computer cannot know perfection when not one component of it, is perfect.

The Voice is silent, but recovers and replies, “How do you explain My voice?”

~

Bio

R.F. Mechelke holds a B.S. in Business from Marquette University and an MBA from Cardinal Stritch University. He was born and raised in Florida, and now lives in the Chicago area.  His short stories, “The Blue Line” and “The Neighborhood vs Janet,” were published in the April 2019 issues of the Blue Lake Review and the Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. His short story, At the Threshold, is forthcoming in the September issue of the Lowestoft Chronicle. More about R.F. Mechelke can be found at www.RFMechelke.com.

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