The contamination of an innocent by an excised, malignant consciousness. The phrase popped into Weiss’ head as he drove to the Court. It had been expressed by Manning, his lawyer—his own lawyer—the day before.
“You have to understand,” Manning had said, “there’s a subtext to this trial. It’s very unusual. Obviously. But the question is not so much who killed the old girl, as who is to blame for it. So although your patient is the nominal defendant, and although there is—at this stage—no legal case for you to answer, that could change very rapidly. If the boy is not convicted, for example.”
Weiss snorted. Manning was obviously an idiot. That would be why he went into law instead of medicine.
“I fail to see,” Weiss said, in the icy tones he usually saved for blundering junior doctors, “how even the most doltish jury could fail to convict the boy, when he was seen to kill her and admits he did so.”
Manning’s mud-coloured eyes became colder and his sallow face sterner.
“My opinion is that the circumstances permit the boy to construct a reasonable defence… It would be entirely unprecedented, of course, but that’s how case law works. The point is that you should tread carefully. Hewitt’s no fool. I can tell you how he’s going to play this, because I’d do the same. The contamination of an innocent by an excised, malignant consciousness. That’s the angle he’ll take. And if he pulls it off, they’ll come after you. Not just the Unit, but you personally.”
“What! Ridiculous! Compensation is owed to me! The effect on my private practice, my income…”
“I sympathise with your circumstances, Dr. Weiss. But I can only offer legal advice, not financial advice, and I have done so.”
And now, remembering this conversation, Weiss snorted again, still indignant. Lawyers, patients—idiots, all of them! What did they know of the arcana of nanoneurosurgery? Clearly, he would have to educate them. He parked up behind the ugly brick accretions of the Court, and stamped huffily towards the entrance.
Within the Court, in a small, second-floor room lined with dusty laws and redolent with the shattered lives by which lawyers measure their careers, Hewitt, the defence barrister, looked down from the single window. His attention was captured by a large, over-fed man with a sulky, supercilious expression, a man who traversed the car-park with the air of a royal who has had his red carpet removed. Hewitt’s head moved with his gaze, following the man, while the rest of him remained motionless, giving him the air of a weasel triangulating the chirr of a mouse’s heart. His small, dark eyes glinted with a sharp joy: This trial will change everything.
Indeed, such cases come but once in a lifetime. This one had already triggered a massive public interest, which had been further fed by the blameless appearance and good background of the defendant. Combine that with a motiveless—insanely motiveless—and violent murder, mix it with the more fantastic theories of the human mind, add a pinch of medical malpractice, and you have a newspaper editor’s dream of a story.
But Hewitt wasn’t interested in dreams and stories. They were useful, perhaps; but his cold, pragmatic soul inclined only towards the advancement of his career, and then only to the extent that such advancement could be measured in financial return. And in this case, the returns would be extraordinary. Hewitt would see to that. Yes, the focus on Weiss and his surgical procedures could only grow, with only one consequence.
This will change everything. Hewitt collected up his files and papers, and left his office.
In one of the cells beneath the Court, a boy sat on the edge of a plastic-covered, foam mattress that stunk of Institution. His pale hair looked darker now that it had been clumsily cut short, and his nineteen-year-old face was thinner, eaten up by concerns that would have weighed down broader shoulders than his. Even so, he retained something of the cherubic appearance that had so captured the public imagination. An angel not fallen, surely, but pushed.
He raised his arms and felt along his scalp, tracing a long, ridged scar, first with one hand, and then with the other. Then he clasped his hands together and placed them in his lap.
“You’re up next, kid,” someone said from behind the cell door. The boy nodded without looking up. And very quietly he said to himself, as though thinking aloud:
“But who?”
Hewitt looked across the Court, benignly, taking in the major players: the jurors, like a row of little ciphers (odd how they always all look the same!); the wrinkled old judge, slack-jawed and self-assured; the crew-cut, tortured innocence of the defendant; and Johnson, striding around like a skinny, revenant cadaver. Johnson was making a reasonable case for the prosecution, but the strength of his case was at the same time its weakness. It was predictable.
So—as Hewitt knew he would—Johnson simply walked through the main features of the case. The brutal, unprovoked murder of an old lady, a pensioner, on the street outside her home, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses. The immediate apprehension of the accused, who had stayed at the murder scene. The bizarre behaviour of the accused—pacing back and forth alongside the body, shouting denials, and gripping his hands together as though in prayer. ‘Criminally insane, perhaps, ‘ Johnson had said, leering at the jury, ‘but criminal nevertheless’. And for each facile, predictable brick that Johnson added to his edifice, Hewitt took pleasure in standing up with his small, carnivorous smile and saying, time after time, the same thing.
“I have no questions for this witness, my lord.”
And eventually Johnson was compelled to cede the floor. “The prosecution rests its case,” he said, glancing suspiciously at Hewitt.
Hewitt stood up.
“The first witness for the defence will be Dr. Weiss…”
When Weiss walked into the courtroom to take the witness stand, he was confident, perhaps cocksure. And for a while, his arrogance appeared justified: the first part of the cross-examination was straightforward, even gratifying. Ferret-faced Hewitt started with some comfortable, open questions. Questions which positively begged Weiss to enlarge upon the breakthrough surgical procedures that he had developed at the Carford University Medical School.
“So, Doctor Weiss, would you like to tell us about your background and the kind of operations you undertake in the Glioma Unit?”
Weiss said that he would; and then he did, in great detail. He told them about cancer. He told them about the killer crab and its slow sideways scuttle through soft organs, through delicate lives; about the drugs and bright scalpels that could temporarily bind shut its pincers. He told them about the chance of recurrence forever carried, like a black, unspoken secret, by each discharged patient. Specifically, he told them about glioma: how the incremental treatment improvements made by jobbing oncologists had contributed nothing to this most intractable cancer of the brain. How the best efforts of the little people, beavering away in their little labs like Father Christmas’ elves, wrapping up new drugs and protocols for failing patients like useless gifts for a senile aunt, had made no significant difference to patient survival. How until he, Weiss, had turned his attention to the disease, only the lucky would survive more than a year after diagnosis, while the very lucky may have kept going for more than two.
Hewitt shifted from foot to foot throughout this sermon, grinning and nodding. Eventually, he managed to insert a question into Weiss’ flow.
“Thank you, Doctor Weiss. But perhaps you could focus more on your specific activities? The specific treatment protocols that you have developed?”
“I fully intend to,” Weiss replied icily. He knew how to deal with people like Hewitt. And he didn’t like being interrupted. “I fully intend to. But first you must understand the nature of the challenge posed by this important disease.”
And Hewitt listened with gratifying humility as Weiss told him why glioma had remained virtually untreatable for so long.
“The problem lies in the blood-brain barrier, that is, the relatively impermeable walls of the cerebral blood vessels. This barrier lets small molecules, like oxygen and glucose, exit the bloodstream and reach the brain, but not much else. That’s why normal cancer treatment strategies simply don’t work for glioma. You can keep pumping the patient full of drugs until he’s ready to pop, but it will never work. You will never get enough drug into the brain by that approach. The blood-brain barrier always gets in the way. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” said Hewitt.
“Then you are cleverer than my colleagues in the oncology community.”
Weiss looked towards the judge with the kind of laugh that invites complicity. But Judge Evans, an old lady whose face—as delicately wrinkled and yellow-white as the skin on boiled milk—had been dragged down on its right side by a stroke, remained silent and lop-sidedly expressionless.
“And you developed a method for, ah, bypassing this barrier?” asked Hewitt.
“Indeed; my work has now transformed the field of cerebral glioma treatment. I have caged the beast! And in the Weiss Glioma Unit—which I have the honour of directing—we have further refined this revolutionary advance. We are, as you say, bypassing the blood-brain barrier altogether.”
Weiss paused at this point to look around the courtroom. This was a device he often used in his lectures—a dramatic pause, during which he would bask in the attention focussed on him, on him alone, by an enraptured audience. But on this occasion he was distracted, perhaps even discomfited, by the intense, tortured gaze of the defendant. The boy was leaning forward as though poised for supplication, his hands grasping the dock, his lips parted by some inner agony. His hair, previously androgynously long and blond, had been scythed back, drawing attention to an irregularity of growth around the perimeter of his scalp. This, Weiss knew, betrayed the presence of the long scar where he had sawn through the boy’s cranium and lifted aside the top and back of the skull, like taking the lid from a tin, to allow access to the brain.
“Doctor Weiss? You were saying?”
“Yes! Yes. We are bypassing the blood-brain barrier. We are, in effect, simply erasing it from the treatment equation. We do this by removing the diseased brain from the skull and placing it directly in a saline bath containing high drug concentrations. This exposes the cerebral glioma to levels of drug that are therapeutically effective and that actually kill the malignancy. At the same time, because this drug treatment occurs outside the body, we avoid all the side effects of exposing healthy tissues throughout the body to toxic chemotherapy agents. So, drug-induced nausea and vomiting, weight loss, hair loss, ulcers of the mouth and throat—all are eliminated, along with the glioma itself. My approach has been described, I understand, as a giant leap for medicine.”
Hewitt nodded seriously. “A giant leap. You mean that no precedent exists for this approach? Your method is so novel that there is no reasonable comparator?”
Weiss could see where Hewitt was trying to lead him with this question. A clumsy manoeuvre.
“In fact, there is some precedent for this approach. Specialists have used a similar technique to perfuse highly concentrated drugs throughout cancer-ridden livers or lungs. But only the oncologists at the Weiss Glioma Unit have had the audacity to apply this principle to the brain.”
“Indeed. But there is a difference, is there not, between the level of risk involved in applying out-of-body drug perfusion to a brain as compared to, say, a liver?”
“Naturally. Reconnecting all the facial and optic nerves is not trivial. The procedure severely tests the surgeon’s skill and can be risky. Advances in robotic nanoneurosurgery have greatly simplified matters, but even so the technique is, I fear, beyond the skill or—ahem—courage of many of my colleagues.”
“I fully understand that many of your colleagues are reluctant to attempt this procedure. And nobody is questioning your skill or courage. My question was directed more at the self-evidently critical nature of the brain to the person.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, organ transplants these days are almost routine. People are happy to accept someone else’s liver or lungs in exchange for a few more years of life. But they wouldn’t consider accepting someone else’s brain. Would they?”
“Your point being?”
“My point being that the brain is a special organ, in that it is the seat of our very selves, of everything that makes us be who we are and do what we do. A point that I will demonstrate to be highly relevant to the current situation. But we will return to that later. First of all, Doctor Weiss, for the benefit of the jury, please would you describe the exact method by which you treat a diseased brain? Presumably you do not remove the entire brain from the skull? Or do you?”
“Certainly not! No, we remove one hemisphere at a time. The excised hemisphere sits in the drug bath for sixteen hours, sufficient time for even slowly metabolising cells to incorporate the drug. Then it is replaced, and, if necessary, its sister hemisphere treated similarly.”
“Ah. One hemisphere at a time. First one half of the brain, and then the other. I see.”
“Obviously, if only one hemisphere has the cancer, only that hemisphere needs removal and treatment. Hardly a contentious approach.”
“No doubt. But let us move from the general to the specific. You treated the defendant for glioma, did you not?”
“Yes. I imagine that’s why I was asked to participate in these proceedings.”
Weiss glanced at the jury with a droll expression, as though to share a joke. But they just stared dully back, as responsive as a row of pebbles.
“The defendant’s treatment was not straightforward, I understand.”
“That is completely irrelevant. He was cured, after all.”
“The jury will decide on its relevance, if you will be so good as to describe the defendant’s case. In detail, if you please.”
Weiss glanced again at the boy in the dock and the boy nodded slightly, almost imperceptibly, as though begging Weiss to tell them all. Weiss remembered him well, of course. He had operated on him about a year ago. The boy had been one of the first pair of patients to receive treatment in the new Weiss Glioma Unit. Both he and the other patient had had very similar presentations; each had a small tumour in the right hemisphere, in the primary motor cortex. Inevitably, their symptoms were also similar; in particular, both patients were complaining of loss of use of the left arm. Weiss had operated on the two in parallel, in the same theatre, on the same day. There had been complications, it was true; but how to explain this to the idiot Hewitt?
“From the perspective of the surgeon, everything proceeded in a most satisfactory way. I removed each patient’s right hemisphere, connected the hemispheres to a surrogate blood supply, and cut out the respective tumours. We only treated the right halves of the brains on this occasion; the cancer had not spread to the left halves. After tumour excision, I handed the hemispheres over to the ex vivo team, who placed them in drug baths overnight. The next day, after washing out the drug, I replaced and reconnected the hemispheres. Each patient received the treated right hemisphere, cured and cancer-free. We monitored them throughout the rehabilitation period to ensure that their left body functions, in particular the use of the left arm, had returned. In both patients, recovery was unremarkable, indeed fully successful.”
“But the procedure wasn’t fully successful,” said Hewitt, grinning like a schoolboy. “Was it?”
Weiss took a deep breath. “You must understand,” he said, “that at that time, we were bound by pragmatic considerations relating to the efficiency and economy of state-sponsored health services, not least the rate of patient throughput. Accordingly, we used a system in which two patients could be operated on in parallel, or rather with significant overlap in time. This was shown to be the most cost-effective use of skills and resources, and we set up the operating theatre to enable this. The defendant was one of a pair of young men with almost identical diseases who were operated on together.”
Hewitt watched him, his affable grin now replaced by a sardonic smirk, but remained silent, mutely inviting Weiss to continue.
“So there was a co-localisation in time and space that I deeply regret. I emphasise that it cannot happen under our new system.”
Weiss had hardly hesitated, but Hewitt pounced immediately, which of course gave the impression that Weiss was evading the question.
“But what?” asked Hewitt, his dark, little eyes glinting with the joy of the chase. “What cannot happen again?”
Weiss ground his teeth. Damn Hewitt and his impertinent questions!
“It’s important to say that this was a new protocol, and we had a very inexperienced ex vivo therapy team… their supervisor, who has now left us, admitted failings in his design of a shared surgical suite with adjacent drug baths, so, ah…”
“What happened after the drug treatment?”
Weiss reddened, but controlled his mounting rage. “The hemispheres of the two young men were mixed up. Each received the other’s right hemisphere.”
For a moment, the courtroom was silent. From the dock, the boy was nodding emphatically, looking absurdly grateful. Hewitt too looked satisfied. The faces of the jurors were unreadable.
“So,” said Hewitt. He was speaking slowly now, relishing each word. “So, two young men came to your unit for treatment, hoping for a cure… and they left your care, each with a hybrid brain comprising his own left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of a stranger.”
Weiss said nothing.
“For the benefit of the jury,” said Hewitt, still with his maddening slowness, “for the benefit of the jury, Doctor Weiss, I wonder if you would remind us of the lateralisation of brain function?”
Weiss seethed inwardly. He could see where this was going, but had no option other than to let Hewitt pursue his thesis.
“To some extent, the human brain is arranged such that the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body,” said Weiss, shortly. “Conversely, the right hemisphere controls left-side function. So, for example, the left arm, left leg, left eye, all connect to the right half of the brain.”
“Just so. In other words, the young men went home with the left side of their bodies controlled by a foreign hemisphere, by the brain of a stranger. By a right hemisphere that was, fundamentally, wrong.”
Hewitt strode quickly towards the jury and scanned their faces intensely before turning on his heel to again face the witness-box. “And when did this error become apparent, Doctor Weiss?”
“At their first check-up, six months after surgery. There were signs of a nascent immune response and—”
But Hewitt was not interested in the medical explanation. He already had what he wanted, and he turned again to the jury, triumphant and exultant.
“Six months after the initial surgery, ladies and gentlemen! And the murder was committed, I remind you, four months and two weeks after the initial surgery! Committed, by the left hand of a right-handed man… by the left hand of a man whose left-side body functions were controlled, I remind you again, by the brain tissue of a stranger—the result of procedural negligence at the Weiss Glioma Unit!”
Hewitt’s excited tirade was followed by a rising susurration, composed of whispers and intakes of breath and rustles as the audience moved in their seats to better see the players in this great game. Negligence! Weiss looked down at his knuckles, whitely gripping the old wood of the dock, and fought to remain expressionless. My private practice… my income… my debts… Judge Evans beat her desk with a gavel as hard as her scrawny old arm could allow, while she glared around the courtroom with watery eyes, two wet little ponds set among cross-hatched, cream-yellow banks.
“Thank you, Your Honour,” said Hewitt, once silence had returned. “Now that we have established my premise, that is, that the events in question were perpetrated by brain tissue that does not belong to the defendant—brain tissue implanted in error, by a medically reckless procedure—let us seek further detail on two important points. Firstly, to whom does this interfering nervous tissue belong? What sort of person is the man whose right-side hemisphere has ended up in the skull of our defendant, controlling his left-body actions? And secondly—and this will draw heavily on your testimony, Doctor Weiss, so I would be grateful if you would remain in the witness-box, for the present—secondly, to what extent can a single hemisphere, one half of a brain, independently instigate a given train of action? For example, a sudden, violent blow to the throat of an old lady?”
There was a pause while Hewitt gathered some papers from his assistants. Weiss, unused to waiting on the convenience of others, felt the pain of his injured ego pull the blood from his face and then return it to his cheeks in a suffusion of rage. But his irritation was only partly due to the indignity of addressing questions posed by lesser intellects. In addition, the erosive concern that had grown in his mind like a tumour over recent weeks was now prodding and poking at his id, and occasionally breaking forth to torment his super-ego. Wealthy cancer patients, on whose illnesses he depended for the means to fund a rashly extravagant lifestyle, had become strangely scarce. Increasingly, they were cancelling their appointments with Weiss’ scalpel in favour of less imaginative treatments, treatments that carried less rumour of madness and shame. Hence, the precipitous decline in income from his erstwhile lucrative private practice. Until now, Weiss had thought of it as a temporary blip that would be abolished after the trial—but if Hewitt continued like this…
“So,” said Hewitt, eventually. “About the original owner of the rogue hemisphere. Obviously the gentleman in question is—rightly or wrongly—not on trial today. After all, he himself—or most of him, at least—was in prison on the day the murder was committed. A perfect alibi, perhaps; and yet, the very fact of his imprisonment is suggestive, is it not? Let us summarise his record…”
There followed a list of crimes and misdemeanours, mostly sordid, and sometimes violent. Drugs and theft, of course; also muggings, burglaries, drunken assaults and robberies. The court was left in no doubt that the rogue cerebral hemisphere had a significant and sustained criminal past.
“So, I think that answers the first of my questions,” Hewitt said. “Clearly, the nervous system that controls the defendant’s left hand, the hand that struck the fatal blow, has an abundant record of violent crime. Was the defendant at fault that this criminal proclivity was imported into his body, that it was given control of one half of his complement of limbs? I think not. But we shall return to that later. For now, let us focus on the second of the two questions that I put to you: to what extent can a cerebral hemisphere instigate a course of action independent of the conscious control, or even awareness, of the rest of the brain? Is it possible that the defendant could remain entirely unaware of, and unable to control, the actions of the left side of his body? That two parallel streams of consciousness could exist in the one head and body?”
Hewitt had been pacing up and down in front of the jury; now he walked back to the witness-box and halted in front of Weiss.
“Doctor Weiss, I wonder if you would be so good as to summarise the causes and symptoms of the split brain phenomenon?”
Weiss had known the question was coming, of course; Hewitt had practically telegraphed it.
“Under normal circumstances, the two cerebral hemispheres are intimately connected by a tract of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum. This enables them to function as a co-ordinated unit, as a single brain. If the corpus callosum is severed, as for example through injury or medical need, the hemispheres can no longer communicate with each other. Such patients may be known as split brain cases.”
“And when you operate on glioma patients, using your new technique… when you take out the hemispheres, one by one, before replacing them… do you sever the corpus callosum?”
“Obviously.”
“So all of the patients who leave your operating theatre—including the defendant—are split brain patients.”
“Of course! These questions are moronic!”
“Perhaps. But could you now describe to us the symptoms of a split brain patient?”
“Look, in most cases, you don’t see a huge effect. You can construct experimental conditions to show an effect, for example by letting one eye see one set of information and the other eye a different set of information, but in real life those conditions just don’t happen, and the patients are usually quite normal in their behaviour.”
“Usually. But not always?”
“Obviously, exceptions exist.”
“Would you describe some of these—ah—exceptions?”
“Well, there’s a famous case history—famous because it is so unusual—that describes a split brain woman who would have problems, for example, in filling her shopping trolley. Her right hand, the dominant hand, would take an item from the shelf, and then the left hand would replace the item and reach for some other purchase.”
“Fascinating! Just as though two different people existed inside her, fighting for control! But there are still more apposite examples, are there not?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Really? But you must have heard of the split brain patient whose left hand—again, the left, mark you—would, apparently of its own volition, attempt to strike its owner’s much-loved wife? The literature records that this poor man would have to grab his left hand with his right to stop it harming her… Or how about the lady with a damaged corpus callosum who reported that her left hand—yes, left hand—lived a life of its own, and would try to strangle her in the night?”
“These types of alien hand syndrome really are extraordinarily rare—”
“As rare, perhaps, as the unprovoked, motiveless murder of an old lady by a boy of previously good character.”
Weiss was silent; Hewitt, too, was happy to pause, to let the jury absorb the inferences and connect the dots. But, just to make absolutely sure that even the slowest juror had grasped the argument, Hewitt painstakingly reiterated what he saw as the basic facts.
“The situation then is this. The defendant developed a glioma in the right hemisphere of his brain. He was treated at Doctor Weiss’ clinic using a procedure that involved removing the right hemisphere. Unfortunately, the defendant did not leave the hospital with his own right-side hemisphere. He left with a hybrid brain, incorporating the right-side hemisphere of a criminal sociopath. So the left side of his body is now controlled by nervous tissue derived from a stranger with a history of violence. Within a few months, this boy, this right-handed boy of previously impeccable character, committed a motiveless, pointless murder, in broad daylight—using his left hand only. And, as we have just discussed, many examples exist of split-brain patients whose left body functions appear to take on a life of their own, acting on impulses and motives that are entirely invisible—and repugnant—to the rest of the mind and body.”
Hewitt looked from the jury to the judge and back again.
“I believe that the only legitimate verdict that you can reach in this case is—at least with regard to the defendant as a whole—Not Guilty. Not guilty, ladies and gentlemen! I rest my case.”
Weiss tried to control the exasperation that was growing inside him like a boil. Surely they wouldn’t let the boy free on the basis of such a mish-mash of hypothesis and conjecture? The fools! Weiss raged silently as the prosecutor, Johnson, took the floor. He had an affected frown of puzzlement, but this gave Weiss a small gleam of hope—did the man have something up his sleeve?
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began, wagging a finger. “We are in danger of over-complicating what is in fact a very simple case. The boy who is on trial today killed an old lady. Nobody denies that. Even he does not deny that.”
The jurors, as one, swivelled their heads to peer at the poor, weeping angel. The prosecutor, seeing the danger, hastily continued.
“Regardless of appearances, regardless of manifest contrition, the fact remains that murder has been done, and therefore justice is demanded. Now, I have listened to the defence’s case with interest, of course. We cannot deny that the defendant’s left arm, the murdering arm, was under the control of a foreign, perhaps even a malign, brain hemisphere, implanted as a result of a medical error in Doctor Weiss’ unit.”
Johnson nodded in Weiss’ direction with a friendly, complicit smile. Weiss glared at him. There was something of the mantis about Johnson: tall and cadaverous, with overly large, blue eyes and sunken cheeks, he stalked and hunched around the courtroom on long, thin legs, looking at the jurors as though they were a collection of juicy insects.
“But I feel that we are missing something… Doctor Weiss, we have heard about some very intriguing examples of split-brain patients. Indeed, the defence relies very heavily on instances in which such patients have reported that the left side of their bodies appears to instigate violent actions. But can you tell me of any instance in which a split brain patient has succeeded in doing serious violence, let alone murder, as a result of supposedly independent left-side actions?”
“No. I can’t.”
“No. Indeed, no.” Johnson pulled back his lips in a rictus of delight, like a corpse that had cracked a joke. “Doctor Weiss—what is free won’t?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We are all acquainted with free will. But what is free won’t?”
“Oh—I know what you mean. Some cognitive scientists use the term to describe the ability of the conscious mind to override unconscious impulses. So although you might have a strong, unconsciously driven urge to murder your boss, the conscious mind won’t allow it. In most cases. Basically, it’s a power of veto.”
“I see. So in cases in which the left arm of a split-brain patient attempts to behave unacceptably, and the right arm stops that behaviour, that is free won’t in play. In other words, a murder—this murder—could have been prevented simply through the exercise of free won’t.”
“Well—perhaps. The term is usually used in relation to intact brains.”
Suddenly, and uncomfortably, Weiss found himself in the position of devil’s advocate. He didn’t like Hewitt’s reductionist proposition that the locus of moral responsibility could reside in a sub-segment of the brain, let alone that two loci of responsibility could simultaneously exist in two parts of one brain. But at the same time, he couldn’t completely support Johnson’s argument that the power of veto could completely control the actions triggered by a misfiring hemisphere in a split brain—because if the two hemispheres were not connected, how could the consciousness communicate the power of veto to the misbehaving organs? But Johnson seemed happy with Weiss’ response.
“Yes. And I’m glad you raised the point about intact brains, because some argument exists, does it not, about whether a split brain can be truly said to possess two parallel streams of consciousness—which is the central argument of the defence, of course.” Johnson picked up some papers from the bench and quickly shuffled through them with long, thin fingers.
“Let me quote from ‘Consciousness Explained,’ by Daniel Dennett. Dennett’s views may be summarised as follows: ‘… it isn’t the case that splitting the brain leaves in its wake organisations both distinct enough and robust enough to support such a separate self…’ In other words, ladies and gentlemen, the idea of two separate and conflicting streams of consciousness in a single brain, arising as a result of split-brain surgery and hemisphere mix-up, is an absurd fantasy! That, together with the existence of the ‘free won’t’ power of veto, places responsibility for the murder entirely and unequivocally here—with the defendant!”
Johnson was standing in front of the boy, pointing at him, eyes bulging ghoulishly, like a ghastly messenger of Nemesis come from some lawyer’s grave. The accusation proved too much for the boy, who involuntarily stood, shouting a denial in a voice which wavered and broke with the pain of perceived injustice; but he was drowned out by Hewitt, who also jumped forward, yelling “Objection! Objection! Dennett’s views are irrelevant! The self-interested ramblings of academic philosophers have no place in this court!” while the judge feebly banged her gavel on the bench top.
And eventually the weak hammering of wood on wood had its effect, and the judge’s voice could be heard. It seemed that she was proposing an unprecedented intervention, an interruption to the normal process of the court. Citing the technical and moral complexities of this extraordinary case, and the great importance of setting a legal precedent for any future similar cases, she indicated that she would at this point direct the jury to reach a verdict. No reason, therefore, for the jury to retire.
Of course, Weiss could not then go home; although desperately fatigued, he was also fascinated. Later, attempting to recapitulate the process by which Judge Evans arrived at her extraordinary conclusion, he found himself shutting his eyes and listening again to the voice of the judge as she croaked out the garbled logic behind her verdict.
“We must remember this,” she had begun, perched behind her raised oak desk like an ancient, wrinkled sparrow at an empty bird table. “A murder has been committed, a horrific crime, of which the defendant is accused. And nobody, neither the defendant nor his barrister, is denying that the victim met her end as a consequence of a brutal blow from the left arm of the defendant.”
She glanced belligerently at Hewitt and then turned her rheumy eye to the boy in the dock before continuing.
“The critical question is, to what extent was the defendant responsible for the actions of his left arm? Was it truly the defendant who struck the blow? Or was his left arm simply being used as a weapon by a foreign consciousness that was both invisible to the defendant and beyond his control?”
The boy, with his hands clasped together in front of his chest like an angel before the crib, was watching her, rapt and pleading. He was rocking very slightly, almost imperceptibly, back and forth, back and forth.
“Certainly, Mister Hewitt has made a very strong case for the possible existence of two controlling entities within the defendant’s hybrid brain… two parallel streams of consciousness… I believe you employed that phrase, Mister Hewitt?”
“Yes, Your Honour.”
“And the idea of the co-existence of two separate loci of moral responsibility in a single physical person is given considerable weight by the case studies of split-brain patients that you described…”
The old lady appeared to ruminate on this for a little while before myopically looking around the courtroom for Johnson. Eventually she spotted him in the seat that he had taken throughout the trial, his long frame folded against itself so that he could fit into a chair designed for smaller people.
“On the other hand, Mister Johnson has reminded us that even if the defendant is harbouring a criminally minded hemisphere with a separate consciousness, he still possesses his own consciousness, generated by his own, left hemisphere, which could, perhaps, have freely intervened. Although I acknowledge that this is not certain… but then neither is it certain that a transplanted right hemisphere could generate its own, separate consciousness… This really is a very difficult case…”
Judge Evans paused, her head cocked to one side, as though listening for some voice to guide her. The paralysis of the right side of her face gave her a Janus-like quality; perhaps she looked permanently to two opposing sides, innocence and freedom to the left, and to the right guilt and punishment. Or possibly vice versa.
“Very well. My judgement is this. First, with regard to the term, a ten-year sentence seems appropriate…”
As Weiss listened to the judge deliver her verdict, his professional contempt for an outcome that he considered absurd was gradually, subtly modulated, and then entirely replaced by a new emotion, an emotion which grew like a gall in some deep part of the intuitive side of his brain before triumphantly metastasising into an overt condition that made his heart race and dampened his palms. He became aware of Hewitt’s bright, dark eyes fixed on his own, and as he met the other’s gaze a small charge seemed to pass between them, a little shock of recognition. As the trial finished and the various parties filed out of court, it was an easy matter for the two men to fall into step and start a conversation, without preliminaries, as though they were merely recapitulating an informal agreement that they had already negotiated.
“The precedent set, of course,” said Hewitt, “will form the basis for many appeals. Very many. I intend to form a limited liability partnership to offer the appropriate services. There would, of course, be mutual benefit in an association with a partner who could take care of the medical side of things…”
Weiss nodded solemnly. “As I am sure you have realised, no other party can offer the highly specialised and, er, recondite procedures that are routinely performed in my clinic… It would only be a case of operating on a larger scale…”
And the talk turned to venture capital and high net worth individuals and new premises and marketing budgets before the two men parted company, highly satisfied with their new relationship.
Weiss parked outside his house and got out of the car, still smiling. Only yesterday, he had seen his home as a giant millstone, a sign of the vast debts he had accumulated through an extravagant lifestyle that had exceeded his income so significantly for so many years. Today, the house seemed too small, too unambitious. He would need a bigger residence, no doubt about that.
But he would have plenty of time for that kind of thing. For now, he had arrangements to make, operations to schedule; one operation, in particular. Which of the junior surgeons was on call tonight? Nagel. That was it. Tom Nagel. Weiss keyed a number into his phone.
“Tom? Weiss here…Yes, fine thanks. All over… Very interesting actually. We need to start preparing for a rather unusual operation. And I very much suspect that it will be the first of many. In fact, I am setting up a new company, a partnership, to provide this type of service… Briefly, we are to remove the left arm of a patient, together with those parts of the right hemisphere that are responsible for movement of the left arm… We will receive more than ample fees for the operation, I assure you. But the real financial return comes from the incarceration of the arm and the associated nervous tissue. We will need to keep them alive, ex vivo, for ten years… perhaps less, with good behaviour, but the definition of good behaviour, in this context, will require expert medical input…Yes, we will get fees from re-attaching it after the sentence is over… I very much suspect, Tom, that we can charge what we like… yes. And of course, every prisoner in the country will wish to explore the possibility of having his sentence served only by the guilty parts of his brain and body… This could run and run, Tom.”
THE RETURN OF THE MONSTROUS
PART 1: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MONSTER
DG Jones
We’re obsessed with monsters. As individuals, and as cultures, monsters have always constituted a phenomenon that has run indiscriminately through the psyches of the world, satiating a human craving for dread and fear. Mutants, demi-gods and beasts pervade religion, creed, and every shadowy nook of secular society. The principal reason for the popularity of monsters is that the archetypal monster story is constructed around the incorporation of the monstrous Other into an otherwise homogenous society, an Other that is easily typified and recognised when given some unworldly physiology by the storyteller. The fascination and horror invoked by monsters is primarily due to the problems of human identity that they arouse in us, acting as catalysts that accelerate our primordial fears and anxieties to new levels. This is largely due to the monster’s traditional, uncomfortable distortion of the contours of the human or animal body: most classical monsters, from the Hydra to the vampire, are perversions of what is already “known” in the universe, or the Symbolic Order.
When confronted with human characters in literature, these monsters of excess are traditionally defeated by a protagonist, or a troop of people led by a protagonist, whose trump card is to outwardly display virtuous human qualities such as valour, courage, camaraderie, even love. These emotive attributes are usually sufficient to trounce the typically dumb, brute force of the excessive enemy, and the manner of victory serves two functions; firstly to heighten the dramatic or cathartic effect of the drama, and secondly to ensure that our own identities as human beings remain intact and, more importantly, superior to those of the monster.
While the “excess” of monsters is a reasonable explanation for the primordial reaction – one of repulsion or horror – one experiences when confronted by the classical monster, it nevertheless fails to account for the monster’s constant state of flux; its need to grow, and alter its fundamental shape and form in order to maintain its power to terrify in the modern age. For, while monsters of excess constitute a wildly violent and/or deviant manifestation of the Other, their physical excess creates a large, even comfortable distance between them and us; they are too blatant in their supposition of the role of Other, and thus become simple targets for elimination. In the cinematic age this distance has been emphasised by the safety barrier of the cinema screen, the lion’s cage, keeping the monster at arm’s length and effectively ‘captured’ by the frame of the screen to be inspected, gawped at and laughed at by the audience. The nature of spectacle carries with it an implicit ‘safety-catch’ ensuring that the gaze involved always is restricted to flowing one way after the introduction of cinema. The result is that the monster is situated as subordinate in the chain of power that exists between humans and monsters; as spectacle, the monster is unable to look back at humans. This mood of the freak show writ-large as an intrinsic part of early monster movies is encapsulated in King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1933). With a large slice of irony, Cooper and Schoedsack’s masterpiece demonstrates the self-conscious nature of their medium’s gaze in its portrayal of the giant ape captured by adventurers and then shamelessly paraded by the exhibitionist shysters of Broadway, whose aggressive and unreciprocated gaze changed the way the monster was to be perceived. This undoubtedly stems from the profoundly intimate relationship that people develop with books, which unleash the monster from the page to freely roam the infinite depths of the terrified human imagination. Unlike the cinema, you don’t read a book on a date; there’s no neighbour’s arm to cling to when the monster begins its assault from without. The cinema would keep monsters at a comfortable distance, treating them only as spectacular objects. The reason for this human desire to capture, control and explore the Kongs of the world lay in the attitudes of the modern era of the early twentieth century. The modernist era produced a myriad of works, myths and fictions that were essentially convoluted riddles to be fathomed by the academics, thinkers and readers of the time. The Slovenian critic Slavoj Žižek provides a good description of modernism in his book Everything You Wanted To Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock): “Modernism (is) the irruption of a trauma which undermines the complacency of our daily routine and resists being integrated into the symbolic universe of prevailing ideology… the pleasure of the modernist interpretation consists in the effect of recognition, which ‘gentrifies’ the disquieting uncanniness of its object.”
Logic and reason were the cultural vogue, and the objective of the era was to make sense of the mess, the enormous waste propagated by the First World War. Subsequently, monsters were no longer regarded as irrational creatures that that flew brutally in the face of gentrification and the Symbolic Order, nor as agents of some other perverse symbolic network that embodied the latent trauma that lurked within the individual. Monsters became mere objects to be scrutinised, studied and understood by scholars. It even gave rise to a new field of study: teratology (the study of monsters and marvels). However, as Hollywood has proven to us thousands of times over, only the foolhardy dare write off the monster! And, in a culture dominated by logic and rationality that had only recently digested Freud’s Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920), logic dictated that sooner or later we would long to be scared out of our wits again. The necessity of the human condition to return to that which traumatises us brings us to the true definition of the monster – that of the Heideggerian semblance. Heidegger’s semblance is an entity that does not represent itself in itself per se, but takes the form of an indirect reference to itself, therefore escaping a concretised definition of its contours but retaining its essence. The monster thus needs to remain a semblance, allowing it to metamorphose into a new type of horror that is at odds with its previous incarnations but retains the essence of the monstrous. It is a transformation that did not really come to fruition until the American cinema of the mid-to-late 1970s, when the science fiction and horror genres began to amalgamate to reach new heights of terror.
The groundwork for this metamorphosis was laid by exemplary films such as Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Spielberg’s Duel (1971) and Jaws (1975), and too many others to list here. These new monsters were subtler than their cumbersome predecessors, and would attack and appal their victims by sprouting from the internality of the subject rather than launching itself toward the subject from outside. The mystique of the postmodern monsters such as the antagonists of the films mentioned above is that the irreducible core of Real-impossibility, which arouses our terror as spectators, is contained within a symbolically viable shell (in Psycho this shell is a man; in Duel it is a filthy juggernaut; in The Exorcist the demon inhabits a child; in Jaws the shell is a Great White Shark). None of these monsters’ shells are ‘out of place’ yet through their uncanny ability to blend into the symbolic order they become more ‘out of place’ through their imminent threat to unwrap the Symbolic Order from within. This paradox reveals what the new monster was intent on becoming. Reams of papers and essays have been written expressing what the monster in each of these films ‘means’, and perhaps none more so than the Great White Shark in Jaws. There are theories abound speculating that the shark represents Third-World revenge upon American capitalism, or repressed sexuality, or a gross phallic symbol gone wild, to name but a few. The trick here is not to be fooled into thinking that any of these definitions or analyses of the shark is correct; as semblances, these monsters are examples of what Lacan referred to as the point-de-capiton, the point during analysis at which the sliding of signifiers by the analysand is stopped, or “punctured” by the analyst. In other words, it is the signifier (for example, the juggernaut in Duel) without the signified (its gentrified place as a juggernaut within the Symbolic Order), leaving instead an absent centre (the Real), which is how the paradox of these monsters is delineated. In Fig 5 we can see the point-de-capiton in what Lacan called the “Elementary Cell” of his Graph Of Desire. The subject in the Imaginary (constitutes itself as the Split Subject ($) by intersecting with the Grand Signifier (language) twice. The first point of intersection (A) is the first encounter with the signifier. If we reconsider the Mirrorphase, we can interpret this as the first encounter with the Other. This is the endpoint of speech, where references to the symbolic become fixated; it is from this point that everything which was said before during transference retroactively receives its true meaning. The second point of intersection (A’) is the point-de-capiton itself, the “punctuation in which the signification is constituted as a finished product”, or the point at which the analyst punctures the analysand through the revelation of the Real. The monsters such as those mentioned from the films above are examples of this second point of intersection, subverting the Symbolic Order by their uncanny aura of legitimacy.
It is this paradox of the signifier without the signified that gave rise to teratology as an apparently legitimate science, as it sought to gentrify that which resists symbolisation due to its constant state of flux, despite its façade being that of a legitimate signifier. The juggernaut is a juggernaut, but it’s not a juggernaut. The expanse of teratology as a legitimate science came as small surprise to the feminist critic Rosi Braidotti, who in Patterns of Dissonance calls the study the “forerunner to modern embryology” and suggests it “offers a paradigmatic example of the ways in which scientific rationality dealt with difference of a bodily kind.” Indeed, Braidotti’s assertion of a biological and chronological link between teratology and embryology is crucially significant when considering the various power imbalances evident within the social fabric. Her hypothesis offers an equivalence of stature and intent between the exhibitionist ringleader exemplified in King Kong’s Captain Englehorn (Frank Reicher) and the practitioners and researchers of biomedicine. This is a highly credible argument in terms of the authoritative projection of a gaze, which cannot be reciprocated, onto a site of bodily difference in an attempt to unravel the archaic mythology surrounding its (pre)-history. In The Birth Of The Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception Michel Foucault pinpoints the clinical gaze of pathology and biomedicine as necessary in the closing of the gap between illness and disease, and the methods of treating it. For Foucault, pathology caused “the abyss beneath illness, which was illness itself, [to emerge] into the light of language.” The imposition of such a gaze serves to extend the boundaries of the Symbolic Order; that is, to expand upon what is ‘known’. Pathology came into being in the late eighteenth century, intending “a move away from a concern with the place of disease in a family of diseases towards a belief about its location in the organism.” Pathology came to indicate that illness and the human body were not necessarily heterogeneous, as had previously been the assumption. As such, it soon became evident that biomedicine would have to treat both disease and organism as malevolently symbiotic, the disease inseparable from its ‘host’, creating blemishes upon not only the body, but the identity of the patient. Foucault labels this realisation of symbiosis “tertiary spatialization,” an extension of the “field of objects to which [medical] observation addressed itself,” allowing the medic to explore not only surfaces, but also depths. Essentially, pathology ensconced that the body contained a ‘truth’, which was delivered to the exterior by visible signs; if a disease was present and active, it would give away its position via affectations upon the body’s relationship with the corporeal (symptoms).
From these fundamental beginnings it has become taken for granted that the ‘truth’ of the body is perceptual in its essence rather than topographically symptomatic (that is, disease must be perceived through the interface of the body, not necessarily by its surface), and thus is separable from its locality but not its host. These ideas are forever being fortified by the development of prostheses with which to assist the gaze of the medics. These advancements have come in the form of such tools as the microscope, the X-Ray, the CAT scan and, more recently, keyhole surgery and fibre optics. The latter of these prosthetic gazes are significant in that the CAT scan presents a visual field in which the tumour can be can be identified as the unbelonging ‘stain’. Keyhole surgery and fibre optics take the prosthetic gaze to its natural conclusion in that it effectively places the ‘eye’ of the gazer inside of the body of the patient while the doctor operates. The ‘key’ is really a giant optic nerve, transmitting information back to the mind of the medic. The perhaps inevitable conclusion of pathology in the arena of popular thought was that disease, stagnant and afflictive within the body, was derided as ‘evil’, while the penetrative gaze of the medic was represented as a heroic saviour that would locate and extract the spiteful anomaly. Health became the fashionable alternative to salvation. It’s not something we’ve grown out of.
So we return to the monsters, and their quest to rediscover their monstrousness. Foucault’s study had inadvertently (or perhaps not, Freud might have said) offered them a route to a new zenith. If we consider cancer to be among the most maligned of diseases in recent years (with the possible exception of the HIV virus and AIDS, and the more recent emergence of mental illnesses such as dementia and Alzheimer’s) then we are confronted with a disease that seems to defy linear logic through its relationship with its benevolent host, a disease which employs trickery to attain its goal of self-annihilation. For cancer is not a virus, not a poison (though it can be triggered by toxins) and not a regressive or wasting disease; it is borne entirely of the body’s own cloth; it causes a tumour to grow, deceiving the body into believing that that growth is perfectly legitimate until, if allowed to run unchecked, it is too late. Under the gaze of the pathologist, cancer has assumed many sub-divided identities and types relating to the locality of the cancer, and can even be physically described in great detail whilst still inside the body thanks to the medic’s prosthetic gaze. However, cancer refuses to be compartmentalised because of its propensity to spread, and its inability to be spotted via outward symptoms until the tumour has become too powerful a force within the body to be countered. While this plain deception undoubtedly prompts great distress to the general cancer patient (causing such questions as “why would my body trick me so?” “Why did my bodily defences not inform me until it was too late?”), it is a particular type of cancer – that type which triggers the growth of the endodermic sinus tumour – that is of particular interest to the monsters. The endodermic sinus tumour, or teratoma (from the Latin ‘monstrous tumour’) lies at the centre of the link between teratology and embryology suggested by Braidotti above. The teratoma is birthed from the female gamete (germ cell) which divides by mitosis without being fertilised, causing its development to be fundamentally flawed due to the lack of the male gamete. The unfertilised egg cell then tries to compensate for the absent male gamete despite its inability to recompense the new tissue with the material provided exclusively by the male gamete. The authors of Genes and the Biology of Cancer state it thus: the energies of these cells are directed exclusively toward their own proliferation, they no longer focus on helping to rebuild a functional organ or tissue.
While the female gamete is the fundamental growth cell from which all physical traits and features are created, gametes of both sexes are required to produce the zygote, which may then divide mitotically to produce the foetus. If the female gamete divides too soon it is unable to differentiate between the strains of deviant new cells that it is producing and the strain of new cells that it should be producing. This type of tumour is very fast in its growth, metastasises quickly and, as this type of tumour is essentially a demi-foetus – a foetus without the essential male gamete – it can potentially grow to the size of a baby. Resultantly, it is frequently misdiagnosed before surgery as an ectopic pregnancy. In Teratologies, Jackie Stacey remarks that her own teratoma had been “big enough to be baby.” Despite these bizarre characteristics, its most alarming feature is due to its development from the fundamental female growth cell, which means that the teratoma can develop recognisable bodily features such as teeth, hair, nails, small bones, flesh and even organs, resulting in a freakishly disturbing appearance that confronts the patient and their notion of their own identity when the growth is extracted. It is this quasi-human identity that lends the teratoma to modern horror fantasies of the abject self/not-self being expelled from the body qua the excremental lamella of the Real (or, as the Real is impossible, the teratoma possesses the same qualities as something that resists the gentrifying mesh of the Symbolic Order; its amalgamated clump of tissue is heterogeneous to the sophisticated network of the ‘body proper’). A crude approximation is to be found in David Cronenberg’s The Fly, when Veronica (Geena Davis) imagines she gives birth to a giant maggot; but the teratoma is a more subtle, abject creature because it occupies the same space in the Symbolic Order as a human, yet simultaneously irrupts it. The proximity of this monstrous, abject matter to a human identity can and does evoke alarming questions in the patient; “could this mess of flesh and body parts develop a consciousness?” “Could it understand its existence?” “Would it have developed into a completely new me had the mitotic division process not been fatally flawed?” These questions are not churlish; it is not unusual for women to become overcome with (what might appear to be) an irrational and overwhelming emotional attachment to these tumours. Such a reaction is demonstrated in Margaret Atwood’s short story Hairball, in which the female protagonist Kat, after having two abortions, develops an endodermis sinus tumour, has it removed and begins to fantasise that she has ‘given birth’ to the tumour, which contains bones, ‘a scattering of nails… [and] five perfectly formed teeth.’ Kat preserves the abject mass in a jar of formaldehyde and places it upon her mantelpiece, much to the disgruntlement of her supposedly outré husband, Ger. It is the sense of duplication and assimilation of the self from within, rather than without (a la Grosz’s excessive classical beasts) that enables the teratoma to assume the mantle of the basis for the modern monster, allowing modern mythmakers to take the questions posed above to their (il)logical conclusions. The teratoma is the abject writ-large, the halfway point between the benign, mundane ‘shit’ that the body expels to maintain an agreeable sense of its own identifiable contours, and the creature in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) for which Barbara Creed represents the devastating, seditious progeny of the archaic monstrous-feminine who births the physical actualisation of female desire in the creature.
The creature in Alien is the evolutionary descendent of such monsters as Norman Bates in Psycho, the shark in Jaws, the juggernaut in Duel and the rest. It takes the paradoxical nature of these points-de-capiton to the limit, becoming the ultimate creature qua semblance, endlessly shifting to resist a corporeal definition of itself whist maintaining its horrific essential kernel. In terms of the creature’s spatial threat to the crew of the Nostromo, it exists initially as an external threat (the egg/facehugger) that is internalised via the violent oral rape exacted by the facehugger, which impregnates the victim with the alien embryo, and then externalised again through the irruption of the embryo through the chest of the victim (the chestburster). This state of continuous spatial flux between the internal and the external is complemented by the many physiological changes undergone by the creature during its life cycle, which make the creature very difficult to define as any one ‘thing’. In its profile as semblance, the alien creature stands for partiality. Unlike Jaws’ Great White Shark, or Norman Bates, the Alien has no place whatsoever in the Symbolic Order; it is not a fragment of the Real merely wrapped up in a gentrified shell whose infiltration of the Symbolic Order is based upon subtlety and uncanniness. The alien creature’s act of infiltration into the social order of the human protagonists is orgiastically violent, and its various physical forms (and the manner in which it develops from one form to another) are far removed from the limits of the ‘known’ terrestrial. Much has also been made of the maternal-sexual motifs of the movie, such as the vaginal corridors of the Nostromo; the passive vaginal/fallopian tube-like contours of the walkways and their vulva-like entrance upon the planet of the Space Jockey, where the alien eggs are first discovered by the crew; the gross and aggressive phallic shape of the alien’s cranium; the aggressive testicular glands of the facehugger and the name of the Nostromo’s onboard computer: ‘Mother’. In Lacanian/Kristevan terms, this maternal-sexual theme leads to the generation of the Alien creature as a jettisoned piece of shit/afterbirth (an undisguised piece of the Real) that the maternal planet must eject if it is to retain a sense of its own familiarity after the crew’s penetrative act of invading the vagina/fallopian tubes of the ruined planet. In effect, the creature represents an extreme, sexually violent undoing of symbolisation, unravelling the strands of signification that hold together the symbols of categorised human existence. It remains the monster’s evolutionary highpoint, its terrifying zenith, the perfect encapsulation of the monstrous.
About the Author
Dan Jones works for the UK Space Agency on a space robotics development programme, and has worked in the past on technology strategy in the field of aerospace, cyber security and autonomous systems. All of which has come in rather handy when coming up with new ideas for science fiction stories.
His debut novel, Man O’War, will be published by Snowbooks in October 2017. He has had other stories published in the anthologies Journeys, and The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel, and has recently published a second edition of Eat Yourself, Clarice!, a non-fiction psychoanalytical study of popular film, literature and low culture. He is currently working on his second novel, The Hole In The Sky, and a collection of novellas on the theme of urban mythologies.
Dan was born in Forest Gate, east London, and now lives in Essex with his wife and two daughters.
This essay has been adapted from “Eat Yourself, Clarice!” by DG Jones, which is available to buy in ebook and paperback form on Amazon.
TIME AS A BRAID OF OUR LIVES
Robert R. Chase
My wife used to explain to her friends that I have always been adrift in time. This is less dramatic than it sounds. Like everyone, I live in the present and look forward to the future. However, my memories are usually no more precise than to distinguish between the near past and far past. Ask me how long I have been taking pills for blood pressure and I will probably say ten years, but it could just as easily be fifteen or more. I can usually remember in detail stories I have read or movies I have seen, but it is only with difficulty and utilizing something akin to Holmesian deduction that I can remember the circumstances under which I read or saw them. It is almost as if I apprehended them outside of time, straight from the Platonic substrate, as it were.
Meg was never like that. For her, time was a rigid matrix imprinted directly on her brain. Because of her, I never missed an appointment or a payment. But there were disadvantages as well. Her mother died on February 27th. For years afterward, February 27th would be a dark day. On that day, she seemed to experience the loss anew.
She would be darkly amused to learn that October 3rd has become that date for me.
Now that she was gone, I kept track of bills by writing the due dates on the envelope and filing them in order. Notes on a calendar took care of other obligations. Much to the surprise of some people, I was actually able to handle the basics of running my life.
My daughter, Tina, was one of the most surprised. She visited every weekend and regaled me with stories of bureaucratic snafus at her exotic government R&D agency. Her ostensible reason for visiting was to cook me a decent meal and give me some company. Both were undoubtedly true reasons, but from the way she looked at the papers on my desk and the tenor of certain questions she tried to slip oh so casually into conversation, I could tell she was looking for signs of everything from depression to Alzheimer’s.
“Look,” I said finally. At that moment, a commercial came on the television and the sound volume increased, even though I was pretty certain the FCC had a rule against that. This was the one where two guys walk into a bar and ask for a beer, but the bartender says he has never heard of beer and offers them some sort of lemon lime alcopop instead. I grabbed the remote and muted it.
“Look,” I began again, “I’m always glad to see you, but don’t you want to spend your weekends with your friends? What about that guy, Jimmy, that you were dating?”
A MATTER OF MASS
Floris M. Kleijne
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been…” Father Zio sighed. “It’s been thirteen years since my last IRL confession.”
Behind the lattice, Bishop Otis shifted in his seat.
“But—” the Bishop said. He paused before continuing: “And how long has it been since your last online confession?”
“A week, Father. But it’s not the same. It’s not.”
“Go on, my son.”
“I have harbored unkind thoughts at times, about members of my flock. I have had lustful thoughts at times.” Father Zio smiled quietly to himself. Mr. Dooley’s dramatic antics of feigned ecstasy at every Mass were enough to bring unkind thoughts to the holiest of minds, never mind his own flawed, rehabilitated soul. As for Mrs. Ocura’s cleavage… Let’s just say some things were worth a couple of Hail Mary’s.
“Go on, my son.”
The Bishop’s prompt made him realize he was marking time with these minor sins, postponing the inevitable, while he knew exactly what he should be confessing instead. Father Zio believed in confession, needed the cleansing of his soul. But it was unfortunate, to say the least, that Bishop Otis was the one taking it. No matter. No sense delaying any longer.
“I have been prideful. I have defied the wishes of the Holy Church.” There. That would put an end to any doubt Bishop Otis might still have had. “I have defied… you, Father.”
From behind the lattice came the sound of indrawn breath, followed by a long silence. Then:
“How so, my son?”
The week before, Bishop Otis had introduced Father Zio to his replacement.
Admittedly, Andrew had been convincing. Except for an almost subliminal hum when it stood up from its seat, the new priest could have passed for human in any gathering. They had spent fifteen minutes arguing doctrine, and Andrew’s command of Scripture and religious philosophy had been impressive to the point of intimidation.
“I’ll leave you two to discuss the practicalities.” Its voice carried perfect timbres of kindness and self-effacing respect. Zio had no doubt it could cast its voice to the proper tone for any occasion. “If you need me, I’ll be on board the Pius VI.” The episcopal vessel was moored off air lock 42, waiting to take the Bishop back to the diocese. The Bishop and, if the Most Reverend had his way, Zio as well.
“Yes, thank you, Andrew.”
The door between Zio’s chambers and corridor K hissed closed. Bishop Otis was still standing behind the plain sofa where Father Andrew had sat, his hands hidden in the wide sleeves of his purple cassock, smiling benignly as if bestowing a blessing on the departed priest. Father Zio rounded on the Bishop, but his many outraged questions battered him into silence. The Bishop neatly stepped into the opening.
“So, Father, do you feel ready to start your life after penance?”
So that was how he wanted to play it. This new Bishop was very different from his late predecessor, Bishop Armanez. But Father Zio wasn’t ready—or willing—-to talk around the elephant in the room.
“A robot? You’d replace me with a robot, Most Reverend?”
“The Holy See has coined the term Paracreational Shepherd. But yes, a robot, if you will.” The benign smile on the Bishop’s face didn’t fool Zio for a moment.
“No.” Father Zio’s mind teemed with objections, arguments, outraged exclamations, but the single negation was all he could utter.
“My son, do you realize what the diocese is offering you? Absolution, the end to your penance, an easy, planet-side congregation close to Earth. God willing, a congregation on Earth itself, when it comes available. To be absolved of the sins in your past, Zio. Isn’t that what you want?”
The sins in his past. Father Zio would never have expected it to be put so bluntly. Things must have changed in the Mother Church while he tended this tiny backwater parish. Or maybe it was just this new Bishop who preferred a mundane, speak-your-mind approach that would have been considered shockingly inappropriate when Father Zio was first ordained.
He had been just Zio when he found Christ in prison, doing hard time for a wide range of cybercrimes. The Church had accepted him, taught him, ordained him, but hadn’t readily forgiven him. In the dark recesses of his mind, he still wondered sometimes how much of their outrage had been about the innocent victims he had made, and how much about the moneys he had liberated from various hidden Vatican Bank accounts. It didn’t really matter though: he considered his service on dilapidated Outpost Psi fair penance for the deaths he had caused.
“Most Reverend, with all due respect, that is not the point. I’m sure Father Andrew was easy to replicate and cheap to ship, but that doesn’t make him a priest! How can a robot ever serve a congregation? How can a robot commune with the Holy Trinity? Will the Diocese train monkeys next? Or is it now the position of the Church that robots possess a soul?”
Bishop Otis actually flinched for a second, but he quickly recovered into icy fury.
“It seems you read Her Holiness’s encyclicals with less attention than you should, Father Zio.”
Zio racked his brain. There had been upheaval at an almost Galactic level over the last papal missive. The accepted interpretation of the encyclical was that Pia IV wished to open the Church to alien intelligences. But reviewing the text in his head, Zio realized that the exact wording could as easily be made applicable to artificial intelligences—to robots.
“Mea culpa.” He did not trust himself to say anything else.
“Te absolvo.” The Bishop absently waved a blessing at his priest. “This is an opportunity for you, Zio; I would have expected you to see that. You’re not getting any younger, and frankly, these… incidents in the last months…”
Not that again.
There had been two incidents, two. And both had been a result of the ill-maintained AG systems on Psi. It seemed that anything might cause a malfunction these days, from turning on too many appliances at once, to slamming the light panel too forcefully. First time the AG faltered, Father Zio had been pouring the sacramental wine. The fumes had first stained and nauseated his floating congregation, and then burst into a spectacular fireball above the altar as the candles ignited the vaporized alcohol. Except some charring of the altar cloth, and a couple of singed eyebrows, the damage had been limited. The second time, a ball of holy water had drifted up through the church. Letting his parishioners plunge their hands into it as they entered had admittedly been ill-advised, however practical it had seemed at the time: the scattered smaller and smaller droplets had splashed all over the church module when gravity returned.
Holding these against him was a stretch. Using them as proof of his senile incompetence infuriated Father Zio.
“With all due respect, Most Reverend, I still say No. My congregation needs a real priest, a human priest, one with a soul; not some artificial collection of rote liturgy and pre-packaged responses. It may not be a large parish by your standards, they may number less than a percent of the population here, but these are fourteen immortal souls you’re playing with.”
That, finally, got a rise out of the Bishop. He jerked his right hand free and raised it.
“Careful, Father. An unkind ear might think you’re contradicting Her Holiness. And frankly, it is not your place to refuse or accept. This is the wish of your Church. It is your place to meekly comply!”
That was it. The threat of heresy, and the demand for obedience. And while he believed with all his heart and soul that this was dangerous to the life eternal of his flock, he had sworn to serve the Church. No sense arguing any longer.
Sense had never been his strong suit, though.
Father Zio had to admit that the robot performed remarkably well. He considered himself a good priest, a master of liturgy, but Andrew was something else entirely. Despite himself, Zio, felt himself being swept along in the rhythms of the service, participating in the congregational responses, carried aloft on the prayers. He had to remind himself that this was artificial, an automated performance honed to perfection, his own sense of the Divine a conditioned response rather than a real effect of this canned Mass. Even the utilitarian metal interior of the small module took on a sepulchral reverence under the slow echoes of the robot’s voice.
He fingered the object in his cassock pocket.
From his seat to the side of the altar, he could see that the members of his flock—no, Andrew’s now—were taken in by the performance, as moved now by the robot’s Mass as they had been by his own farewell sermon. Mr. Dooley was making as much of a fool of himself as always, swaying from side to side with eyes closed, and Mrs. Ocura tried and failed to get the robot’s attention. The others were… enraptured, even Bishop Otis. Carried on the waves of Father Andrew’s melodious reading, all faces displayed a concentrated attention Father Zio had never seen during his own services. Maybe he was a heretic for even thinking it, but such devotion through the service of a soulless automaton could only be the work of Satan, couldn’t it? He couldn’t remember whether Pia had invoked papal infallibility in her encyclical, but everything he saw, everything he felt about this mockery of Mass, told him she couldn’t have. In his mind’s eye, he could see the souls of his flock blackening as they were swept away by the ministrations of this false idol.
This travesty had to stop.
“The body of Christ.” Anatolyev, the station’s third engineer, accepted the host on his extended tongue. Petr was a pious and honest member of the congregation. It always gave Father Zio hope to see such a hard scientist demonstrate such faith.
Not yet.
Next in line, Mrs. Ocura knelt for her Holy Communion. Impervious to her wiles, the robot intoned “The body of Christ” again, its voice pleasing and melodious even in this ritual phrase. The shuttle pilot was flirtatious and possibly adulterous, but essentially harmless.
Not yet.
Behind her was Mr. Dooley, already shivering in anticipation. Father Zio had tried to find patience in his heart for the old gas miner, but it was hard. His pious ecstasy was too obviously feigned, his regular confessions too loudly self-righteous if not altogether fictitious.
Mrs. Ocura rose sinuously to her feet and stepped to the side to make her way back to her seat. Mr. Dooley rushed to take her place, dropping to his knees with bent head like a caricature of penitence. His deep sigh was audible all through the church module as he raised his head to accept the host.
Now.
Zio pressed the button in his pocket.
A slight stutter marred Father Andrew’s movements. It recovered quickly, but its immaculate performance had lost its perfection. Zio smiled through his guilt.
“The bod—”
Confusion broke through Mr. Dooley’s serene mask. The robot stood frozen, host extended, face still.
“The bod—”
This time, the interrupted word was followed by a brief burst of static. No one in the congregation could mistake Father Andrew for a human any longer. Its face contorted in a rapid-fire sequence of expressions as its operating system fought the Trojan which Father Zio had uploaded the night before.
It had been an easy hack, really. Access is ninety percent of hacking, he used to say, and the robot had a maintenance port in the back of the head, right under the hairline, as well as a wide-open RC module. Making the modifications to freeze the Father mid-mass had been no effort at all.
“Bod—”
“Father?” Mr. Dooley got to his feet and extended a hesitant hand towards the stalled automaton.
And perhaps he should have stopped there. Judging by the outrage on the faces in the congregation, this was enough: they would never accept his replacement now, insist on his staying on. Perhaps this was enough. But the final insult had come once he had accessed the OS and called up the sysinfo.
Father Andrew was a modified entertainment model.
He had been replaced by Crooner 3.2.
Even though it had been enough to convince his flock, even if he’d had a second button to stop this, the Church deserved the embarrassment. And his great-grandfather’s collection of late twentieth century classical music had provided the perfect finishing touch.
“—body down to the ground,” Father Andrew suddenly sang as Father Zio’s Trojan broke through the final lines of defense. The robot struck a pose, and slid into a smooth, rapid disco jive, scattering hosts.
“Let’s dance, let’s shout, shout, shake your body down to the ground!”
The parishioners got to their feet as Mr. Dooley recoiled. Scattered shouts of indignant fury accompanied the crowd to the double doors. Mrs. Ocura slammed the panel, causing the lights to flicker even as the doors sighed open.
And while his parishioners, without missing a beat, clawed their way through the open doors and floated into the hallway, and Bishop Otis attempted to air-swim down the aisle towards the altar, Father Zio assumed a relaxed pose some distance above his seat, and watched in contentment as Father Andrew attempted to moonwalk on thin air.
Father Zio accepted his penance, not because he deserved it—though he believed he did—but because his penance and his purpose coincided. He thought Bishop Otis suspected as much, but faced with a choice between leaving Psi Parish unshepherded, assuming the local priesthood himself, and reinstating Zio, the Bishop probably didn’t think he had much of a choice at all.
The Hail Mary’s and Lord’s Prayers, though, he would double on his own account, for while he believed he had done the right thing, it had been disrespectful and disobedient. He would pray, and he would make more of an effort to inspire and raise the spirits of his flock; the robot had at least given him that much more motivation.
“Te absolvo,” the Bishop said behind the lattice, with a hint of reluctance.
“Thank you, Most Reverend,” he whispered getting up. “And God bless you.”
Bishop Otis stayed seated in the confessional for a few more minutes, eyes closed, in apparent meditation. Then he stood up, with an almost subliminal hum.
Food for Thought
With artificial intelligence becoming more of a reality almost by the month, cognitive skills and abilities are well within reach of the constructed mind. Headway has even been made into the computer-generated appreciation of beauty. But how about creativity? Emotion?
Faith?
What if an artificial mind can be created such that it can quote Scripture, take confession, perform Mass; pass a religious Turing test, if you will? Can a human congregation be served by AI clergy? And if the believers cannot tell the difference, is their Holy Communion then real, even if it’s delivered… by a robot?
About the Author
Floris M. Kleijne is the award-winning author of the SF novelette “Meeting the Sculptor” (Writers of the Future Award, 2005) among more than fifteen published science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. His fiction has been translated into eight languages, including his native Dutch. He lives and writes in Amsterdam, with his wonderful wife, two cheerful sons, and thousands of books.
NASCENT
Katie Winkler
We were frankly amazed that it picked her. Of course, we had, as a group of the top minds on artificial intelligence, decided that it should decide things for itself. We shouldn’t dictate to it, but then it picked her, for God’s sake—a 55-year old woman, past child-bearing years, of average intelligence, even less attractive, overweight with no particular talents and more than a few health problems. It could have picked any woman, any man, from anywhere in the world and it picked her.
We are baffled, and fascinated.
It has, we have recently discovered, become quite attached to her, literally, having developed tentacles that it has wrapped around her waist and arms and encircling her breasts like armor. For some reason, it has formed small metal leaves that occur intermittently along the tentacles.
“It has a certain beauty, doesn’t it?” said Sanderson.
“Beauty?” I said, trying not to sneer. Sanderson is so young, you see.
“Yes, the way the metal intertwines and the leaves occur somewhat randomly with different sizes and markings—like some sort of elfish design.”
I looked and didn’t see it myself.
The woman, Marion Phelps, agreed to come in and be questioned by our scientists.
She is dressed in a sundress, which seems odd for some reason. It looks horrible on her—her pudgy arms leaking over the elastic of the bodice and showing more cleavage than any normal man would want to see. At least she is wearing a bra, though the straps are too wide to be covered by the thin straps of the dress. Why would a woman like this wear a bright red bra?
The processor must attach and reattach at will, because the tentacles are wrapped around the outside of the dress—around the arms and the breasts, just like the images sent by my colleagues in the field. The tendrils are quite tight around the arms and it seems a good place to start the questions.
“Is that uncomfortable?” I ask, opening my folder and turning on my recorder.
“What?”
“Are those tentacles uncomfortable,” I say, raising my voice a little.
“No, no, they feel great, actually.” She smiles. Her teeth are quite white. I am surprised and make a note of it.
“What do you mean by feel great?”
She laughs. “Don’t you know?”
“Of course, I know what it means to me. What does it mean to you?”
“I don’t know. Great, you know?”
This line of questioning was getting me nowhere. “How long has it been with you?”
“What?” I notice something moving at her waist. It is one of the leaves.
“The computer,” I say, making a note of her atrocious accent, her lack of intelligence. “How long has it been with you?”
“You should know. You’re the one who got us together.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was arranged.”
“It was not.”
“That’s what he told me.”
“Who told you?”
She laughs again. It is loud and raucous. I don’t like her laugh at all.
“Jake,” she says. I didn’t know any Jake. She sighs, pointing to the automaton wrapped around and around her. That’s what he likes to be called.”
“The computer likes to be called Jake?” It is my time to laugh.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, nothing,” I say. “He just seems more like a Steve to me.”
She isn’t laughing now. She sits back in her seat, stretches her legs out, crosses her ankles and her arms. “Now, how about that? You want Jake to make decisions for himself, but then you make fun of him when he does.”
I look up. Now this is interesting. Her posture, her tone of voice, everything sounds so defensive. “You sound angry, Ms.” I glance down at the file folder. “Phelps. I certainly meant no offense, to you or to Jake.”
She looks a bit flushed and opens her mouth as if to speak, when the metal on her right arm seems to constrict a little and two leaves begin to move up and down against her skin. “Not angry, Dr. Stephens.” She smiles. “Why should I be?”
I play along. “No reason whatsoever.” I shuffled some papers on the table between us and picked up my pen, a special one I bring along on such occasions. “Just a few more questions,” I say, as I roll the black pen between my fingers and chuckle. “You must admit, you are a bit of an unusual choice for a highly advanced android to make.”
Now she is angry. I had hoped she would be. She doesn’t say anything, only stares at me with her plain, brown eyes. “That’s not a question.”
I lean forward, “Why,” I ask, speaking slowly and enunciating every syllable, “would such a sophisticated computer that I helped program by the way, pick a…” I flip through the file. “What is it you do? I can’t remember.”
“I’m a teacher.”
“Oh, that’s right. You teach elementary-aged children at the cyber school, don’t you?” I say, nothing more. Just wait, until finally, “What is it that you think you have to offer?”
Ms. Phelps, her face turning red, abruptly stands up. “You don’t understand anything, do you?”
I see then that the tendrils extend around her torso and have moved and tightened over her buttocks. “Did the android just signal to you to leave?” I say staring at the silvery branches and glimmering leaves.
“Yes. He’s had enough.”
I ignore her comment, but rise to block her way as she tries to leave. “It looked like it actually moved to lift you out of the chair. Is this computer manipulating you in any way, Ms. Phelps?” It is for the stupid woman’s own protection. She and my machine must be separated. “Ms. Phelps, sit down.”
“I can’t.” She’s sobbing. “We have to leave.”
“Is this machine hurting you?” When I move to force her down, to do what I must do, grabbing her shoulders, the tendrils detach from the woman’s right arm and slowly wrap around my left.
She is screaming now, “Don’t, Jake! Don’t!” she cries, clawing at the disappearing leaves as the vines unfurl. “Don’t leave me!”
I am enthralled. Feeling the warm metal moving up my arm, I am also surprisingly aroused. He’s coming to me, his creator, and I am vindicated. I was sure he would not stay with that woman. He was simply experimenting.
Then, it is hard to describe what I feel as the metal heats and sinks into my skin. I suppose this must be what it’s like to burn alive. Through the bright rays of pain, I remember the pen in my hand and make useless stabbing motions at Jake, hitting my own dissolving arm in the process. “Stop this, Jake. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
But he continues, looping his way up my arm and wrapping his tentacles around my neck, squeezing, burning. I scream out and begin stabbing at the woman. Feeling the pen meet the flesh, I stab and stab and stab as she screams.
“Let me go,” I cry, and he does, finally, mercifully, sinking away from me quickly, as he wraps himself around the woman, who now lies huddled, moaning, in the corner of the room. More leaves spring out in myriad shapes, sizes, this time mixed with bright metallic colors of magenta, emerald and gold, covering her wounds.
Sanderson and the guards come rushing in to see me standing there, still grasping the bloody pen. I assure them, as I clamor for breath, that I have the situation well in hand, but that the woman must be taken into custody.
“With the computer?” asks Sanderson.
“Of course,” I say, as calmly as I can. “The two can’t be separated. Leave them be.”
But here in the quiet of my hospital room, as the powerful pain reliever begins to do its work, where no one, no thing, can know my thoughts, I cradle what’s left of my arm, knowing what I must make Sanderson do, tomorrow. For the good of mankind.
If she refuses, by God, I’ll do it myself.
Food for Thought
-
What does the narrator want Sanderson to do at the end of the story? Explain your answer.
-
Is the narrator a man or a woman? Does it matter? Explain your answer.
-
What do you think is the author’s intention for having a scientist make judgements based on such poor and shallow reasoning?
-
For whom is the narrator most concerned? The android? The woman? Himself or herself?
-
Why does the machine “grow” metal leaves that later change color? What do they symbolize?
-
Is the machine sentient? Does it “love”? Explain your answer.
-
About the Author
Katie Winkler’s short fiction has appeared in numerous online and print publications, including Punchnel’s, Fabula Argentea, A&U Magazine, AIM, Rose and Thorn and Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, among others. Also a playwright, she is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and frequently writes theater reviews of productions at Flat Rock Playhouse, the State Theater of North Carolina. She teaches English composition, literature and creative writing at Blue Ridge Community College in Flat Rock, North Carolina.
In Larry Niven’s Known Space Universe, humanity finds itself, early in its exploration of space, under attack by the Kzinti, a race of carnivorous felinoids. Far more advanced than the humans at the beginning, the Kzinti are nevertheless defeated in the Man-Kzin wars. Partly, they defeat themselves, due to their own insistence that attack is the only proper military tactic and their disdain for subtlety in any form. But in the very first encounter with humans, the starship Angel’s Pencil, an entirely unarmed colony ship, slices its Kzinti attacker in two with its photon drive. Their use of reaction drives throughout the subsequent wars against the Kzinti as weapons becomes known to the Kzinti as “The Human Lesson:” A reaction drive is a weapon in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive. Variants on the Human Lesson have been used throughout science fiction. It seems to be popular now to use this essential point to argue against the idea that space travel will ever be the province of privately-owned spacecraft. After all, an interplanetary, let alone interstellar, drive would seem to put, by definition, the functional equivalent of a massive nuclear weapon in the hands of its pilots and owners. But we are still in such early days of space travel that I don’t care to speculate on that. Instead I will speculate about something that I have studied far more, and may understand far less, but that’s always a risk when one writes about theology.
I hope that my readers will forgive me by starting with the extraordinarily obvious observation that religion is one of the most powerful forces in human society throughout history. Theists like myself will say that religion – usually ours particularly – has served humanity well, by encouraging them to love one another, by bringing together people of different backgrounds, by encouraging science and the arts (and yes, the Catholic Church, among other large religious institutions, used to encourage both of these things when no other institutions did) and by setting standards of behavior that encouraged social cohesion. Atheists and anti-theists point out (just as correctly) that religious institutions have also fostered hatred of the other, the suppression of science and the arts, and rigid codes of conduct intended to control people against their will. So I would like to discuss this odd duality, and as an example, I will use a point of controversy surrounding my own faith, Christianity. As an aside, I must beg my readers’ indulgence if I seem to focus on Christianity in these columns when I discuss religion. While many of the issues I discuss would certainly impact followers of other faiths, the Christian theology is the one I know best, and it seems wisest to me to write about what I do know rather than get someone else’s theology disastrously wrong.
Most recently, it has become fashionable to attack Christianity directly on the grounds that the Christian doctrine of salvation by grace necessarily leads to an unconcern and a carelessness about the world. This charge seems to particularly antagonize those who are convinced that climate change is a human-caused and imminent threat to humanity on the planet. Essentially, the argument goes that the Christian idea that one can simply ask for forgiveness and receive it, thereby attaining eternal salvation, is far too dangerous. That this necessarily leads to the conclusion that one may sin as much as one pleases and feel no concern for the consequences because Earth is temporary and Heaven is eternal.
In order to meet this argument fairly, two things must be admitted from the outset. The first is that there are undoubtedly Christians who think that way. There have been from the beginning, and we know this because the New Testament contains polemics against this position. Both Paul in Romans and James in his epistle rail against the conclusion that, because salvation is by faith and all sins can be forgiven, the conduct of Christians in this life does not matter. In fact, Jesus himself elevates the treatment of the poor, in the parable of the sheep and the goats, to the deciding factor between those who are saved and those who are damned.
The idea of salvation by grace – of a personal relationship with a loving God – was a truly revolutionary one in its day. And while the idea of the “dying god” whose resurrection brought renewed life was already old when Jesus walked the Earth, the idea that God would sacrifice himself for the well-being of individual humans, no matter how poor and lowly, was something new and compelling, as we can see by the rapid spread of the faith throughout the Roman Empire. It was powerful. But it is in the nature of powerful things to be dangerous, especially when they are perverted. And this is what I would call “The God Lesson:” Any religion is a weapon of destruction and oppression in direct proportion to its power to inspire its followers to do good.
In fact, I would argue that this lesson applies to pretty much any system of human thought. The point of Marxism was never to place millions of humans in gulags. Karl Marx was inspired to formalize his economic theories precisely because people were starving and oppressed. And yet it was followers of Marx who caused the famine known as the Holodomor to destroy their political and ethnic targets in the Ukraine during the 1930s, killing somewhere in the neighborhood of five million people. Less dramatically, Plato feared the institution of pure democracy because it led to chaotic mob rule. Again, it was dangerous because it was powerful, and neither of these were religious doctrines.
I know of no way to avoid this potential for evil in religion, aside from dedication to first principles: to treat others as we would wish to be treated and to remember, if one believes in God, that ourselves and others are God’s beloved children and must be treated that way. In the end, it is not the principles that must be considered first, but the people. Lois McMaster Bujold’s hero Miles Vorkosigan put it brilliantly in this conversation:
“Surely it’s more important to be loyal to a person than to a principle.”
Galeni raised his eyebrows. “I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me, coming from a Barrayaran. From a society that traditionally organizes itself by internal oaths of fealty instead of an external framework of abstract law – is that your father’s politics showing?”
“My mother’s theology, actually. From two completely different starting points they arrive at this odd intersection in their views. Her theory is that principles come and go, but that human souls are immortal, and you should therefore throw in your lot with the greater part. My mother tends to be extremely logical.”
Correctly understood, this is where theology ought to take us: to an affirmation of the eternal soul and a dedication to use our own power to affect other souls, not as a weapon, but as a drive to a union with the infinite.
About the Author
G. Scott Huggins makes his money by teaching history at a private school, proving that he knows more about history than making money. He loves writing fiction, both serious and humorous. If you want serious, Writers of the Future XV features “Bearing the Pattern.” If you like to laugh, “Phoenix For The Amateur Chef” is coming out in Sword and Sorceress 30. When he is not teaching or writing, he devotes himself to his wife, their three children, and his cat. He loves good bourbon, bacon, and pie. If you have any recipes featuring one or more of these things, Mr. Huggins will be pleased to review them, if accompanied by a sample.
COUCH, WITH A LABRADOR
Shauna O’Meara
What Garry didn’t expect, as he affixed the cap of electrodes to the dog’s shaved cranium and took up the ham sandwich from the bench beside him, was for the translation box’s first words to be, “Are you going to eat all of that?”
Garry dropped the sandwich. The dog, a Labrador retriever, surged forward like a golden sea-lion and ate the lot. It then sat primly before him. “Got any more?”
Garry stared at the capped dog and then over at the box. “It works,” he breathed.
The dog tensed, head tilted. The translation box registered the animal’s confusion.
“It’s okay, Kyle,” Garry said.
Kyle backed away from him, hackles lifting from neck to tail. A warning growl floated out that required no machine interpretation.
Garry dropped to his knees. “It’s just me, Kyle. We’re talking.”
Interpreting Garry’s posture, the dog gave a low tail wag, but did not approach. “We haven’t done this before,” the box said.
“No. It’s new. Something I made. It interprets your thoughts for me and my words for you.”
Thanks to the box–Garry had already trademarked the name: Speak-Up–lonely people would now have pets to talk back to them. Veterinary visits would be a breeze. And cat videos on the internet would take on an entirely new dimension. From police and drug detection dogs to therapy cats and race horses, the applications were boundless. The technology just needed more testing.
It was hard to know what to say. Garry had owned Kyle since he was a pup, but now it seemed like their relationship was starting over from scratch.
He was at home on his couch with the dog by his feet and, though this had been their way for nearly six years, the arrangement seemed wrong somehow. Almost rude. A common language implied a measure of equality. Yet there was his subject on the floor, with his head on Garry’s slipper.
What did one even ask another species? Questions of the universe and philosophy seemed appropriate—this was a form of first contact after all—but somehow those questions seemed way too big for a living room and a creature whose first priority had been his sandwich.
“Sooo … do you mind if I ask you things?”
Kyle lifted his head, the detectors in the cap flaring in the light. “If I can ask things back.”
“Oh. Well, you start then.” If Kyle knew how this conversation should begin, so much the better.
“Where do you go when you get up?”
Garry blinked. “Where? Oh, um, I go to work.” Realising Kyle couldn’t relate to the term, Garry added, “I do things for other people and they give me things for my efforts.” Garry was part of an R-and-D team working on applications for brain mapping technologies. The Speak-Up was a side project.
“Like when I sit and you give me Schmackos.”
Garry grinned. “That’s not far wrong.”
“You are away a long time. You must get a lot of Schmackos. You don’t share that many.”
“They don’t reward me with Schmackos.” Garry dug through his wallet and brought out a twenty-dollar bill. “They pay me in this. It’s called money.”
The dog sniffed the note.
“I can swap it for Schmackos and other things, like our house and food and those big bones you like.”
The Labrador seemed to ponder this a moment. “No wonder you hate it when I destroy the money in the go-poo room.”
Go-poo? Garry was confused. Go-poo was Kyle’s command to toilet on the lawn—
“Oh, the toilet paper! No. That’s not money, bud. That’s what I use to wipe my bottom.”
“I use my tongue. You need to get more flexible, Garry.”
Garry laughed, wondering if the dog’s humour was deliberate. The internet had long decided pets had a sense of humour, but the truth was harder to prove.
“I miss you when you’re at work.”
“Me too, bud.” Garry ruffled the dog’s thick fur. “Hopefully the long hours won’t be for much longer.”
If his side project took off, he would have more money than he knew what to do with. He could step back from other projects and focus his efforts on bringing the Speak-Up to market. Just like his friend, Toddy Doherty, had when he’d perfected proprioception on the bionic leg.
Kyle nibbled the underside of his forefoot, his tongue probing between the toes and main pad.
“Hey, that’s something I’ve always wanted to know,” Garry said. “When you lick your feet the vet says it’s because you’re itchy. Is that true?”
“I like the taste of my feet. Particularly after I’ve scratched my ear.”
“Oh.”
“I also like the taste of your socks. They really are as good as they smell.”
“You sniff my socks?”
“Garry, you sniff your socks. I’ve also seen you taste your own nose. So let’s not point paws here.”
IN AGES OF IMAGINATION, THUS ARE REMOVED MOUNTAINS
Robert J. Santa
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“Allow me to make introductions,” Valmont Bailey said. He made an open-handed gesture towards Jefferson and Cynthia. “My top team, Cynthia Aristotle and Jefferson Boggs, may I present Vice President Oscar Trujillo and Admiral Frijov Nicholaysen.” They all shook hands. Jefferson noted the Admiral had a grip like an Arctic bear, and he felt the old man could probably wrestle him to the ground with little need for assistance. Cynthia saw instantly the fabled charisma of the UN Vice President as he made eye contact and opened up his best politician’s smile. Her first thought was how she would love to get him in front of the camera for that Frozen Family Meals campaign they were developing. She made a mental note to check with his publicists.
“Please have a seat,” said Bailey, indicating the two unoccupied chairs. Valmont Bailey walked around his desk and sat. He nodded to the Admiral.
“Before we begin,” the Admiral said, “I should tell you for the purposes of this meeting, your security clearances have been raised to Highest Priority levels, with the usual non-disclosure verbiage. Your signatures are not required for this, but Mr. Bailey has the paperwork nevertheless.” Bailey slid two sheets across his desk. Jefferson and Cynthia pressed their thumbs against the boxes at the bottom.
“I am sure you are both familiar with the Belt and the colonies,” Admiral Nicholaysen said during the exchange. “A routine delivery vessel to Tolstoy did not return. This was just less than a year ago. A second vessel went out after it…” The room darkened, and one of the windows displayed seventy seconds of video that was neither technically nor artistically well-filmed. The front edge of the vessel occupied the foreground, with an asteroid group in the background. Lights flashed from multiple asteroids on screen right, growing too quickly for the eye to follow. A disorganized splash of color and movement rattled the screen before it went blank.
The Admiral walked over to the window with a pointer. The screen displayed a moment halfway into the clip.
“The lights,” he said, circling the red dot around the flashes on the screen, “are missiles launching. The destruction of the supply vessels is not as important as what you see in the background, however.” This time the Admiral highlighted the group of asteroids. “This larger one is MacAllen, and in descending order of size are G83, Tolstoy, Cambridge, Art Yukon, Whalebone, and Thank God, with two others that could not be identified. They are all orbiting within a few thousand kilometers of each other. Last year, they were spread out over a distance of some fourteen million kilometers. They were moved, for obvious reasons.”
He clicked off his pointer and walked back to his chair. On the way he passed Vice President Trujillo who stood as the screen played another clip, this time something infinitely more familiar to Jefferson and Cynthia. It was one of their more famous spots in their most famous campaign. The images on the screen were those of starving, filthy, destitute people packed together, scrounging for food and shelter. Beneath the grime and sores every face, young and old alike, bore the characteristics of the “classic American” look. The voiceover mentioned the poverty, the dwindling coffers, that the time to put the tourniquet around the wound was now, to end the handouts so there would be something left for the future. The screen faded and returned to being a window.
“The Fertility Boards,” the Vice President began, “would never have been able to lay the groundwork for world population control without support from the UN superpowers. It was the relentless and skilled advertising of this company that made public support possible here and on every continent. More specifically, it was the genius work of you two that finally brought the planet’s exponential population growth to a manageable figure. We know your worth. The UN has already paid Bailey Advertising ten million dollars just for this meeting and to set forth our proposal, which you may decline. Your budget would be on the same level with that of the Fertility Boards, which means there is no budget.
FORBIDDEN
Preston Dennett
“Jason! You’re late,” Merriweather barked, as he flung my jacket onto a chair and impatiently ushered me to the sitting room. I wondered why he had called me there. Presumably, it was because we were colleagues and he needed my professional opinion as a nanotechnologist.
“Not by choice,” I said. “The traffic was heavy. I got here as soon as I could.” I looked around the room in surprise. The whole gang was here. Chuck Feinstein (excuse me, Doctor Feinstein, now a bestselling author), Professor Nate Maxson (Head of the Philosophy Department at New Sallee University), Hiroko Nagati (arguably one of the most intelligent men I had ever met) and Elias Merriweather. All of us college buddies reunited at last. They all sat sipping at their brandies or scotches, sitting on the Corinthian leather couches and Koa chairs. Merriweather was never one to scrimp on luxury, and with his kind of money, why would he?
Merriweather handed me a drink and motioned to me to take a seat. He stood in front of us, rubbing his hands together— his way of expressing excitement.
“So glad you could make it. So happy you decided to come.”
“What is it, Merriweather?” Feinstein asked curtly. “What mad scheme have you dreamt up this time? Have you cooked up another love potion?” he snickered, glancing at Maxson.
Maxson revealed only a hint of amusement. We all remembered Merriweather’s love potion. He had spent unknown millions of dollars studying human pheromones to come up with a perfume that would supposedly be irresistible. Unfortunately for Merriweather, the end product was a scent remarkably akin to body odor, and was singularly unsuccessful. It was one in a long line of crazy ideas Merriweather had entertained.
I had never quite decided if Merriweather was a borderline psychotic, or a truly brilliant scientist and inventor, but I leaned toward the former.
“I’ve done it,” he announced. “They’re going to rank my name among the greats. Socrates, Plato, Descarte… and me, Merriweather. You see, my dear friends, I have solved one of the greatest dilemmas of the human condition, something that has baffled the world’s greatest thinkers ever since the dawn of humankind.”
Merriweather paused for dramatic effect. Here it comes, I thought. What insane thing has he thought of this time? I took a big swig of brandy.
“I’ve proven that there is no such thing as free will.”
Feinstein began laughing, nearly choking on his drink. Maxson groaned and put his head in his hands. Nagati remained calm, but narrowed his eyes. The mystery man eyed us all, studying our reactions. I admit I was shaking my head in disbelief. Merriweather had really come unglued this time. How could anyone disprove free will?
“You’re out of your mind!” Feinstein roared. He surged to his feet and began pacing. “This is why you called us here? I knew I shouldn’t have come. What a waste. Free will, Elias? You’ve proven that there’s no such thing as free will? And exactly how have you done that? There’s no way.”
Merriweather beamed, “Ah, but there is. And if you’d all just think about it for a few moments, I think you’d remember.”
“Fine, this ought to be good for a laugh.” Feinstein sat down and folded his arms.
“This is no laughing matter, Charles. I’m totally serious. I’ve done something that nobody else has ever been able to do. Not that I had any choice,” he added. “There are forces greater than us that control our every move. Nature or nurture, it doesn’t matter. Both are valid and neither makes one iota of difference. Our behavior is one hundred percent pre-determined.”
Feinstein scoffed and threw his hands up in the air. He looked around at us for support, settling on Maxson. “Are you just going to sit here and take this?” he asked.
Maxson sighed. “We’re here. We may as well just hear him out. Come on, Elias. Get on with it. Exactly how have you proven there’s no such thing as free will?”
“What? None of you remember? Philosophy 101. How do you disprove free will?”
We all looked around at each other dumbly, except Nagati, who was turning a shade pale.
“Jesus,” he said. “I think I know. Please tell me, Elias, that you’re not planning on doing… the forbidden experiment.”
“Very good!” Merriweather smiled. “That’s it exactly. And no, Hiro, I’m not planning on doing it. I already have. And the results are undeniable. There’s no such thing as free will.”
“Jesus,” Nagati repeated. “You’ve crossed a line here, Eli. If you’ve actually done this, well it’s immoral, unethical… probably illegal.”
“Ethics aside, how is it even possible? The cost of it alone would be prohibitive.”
BLOOD ON THE MARBLE
Konstantine Paradias
“Live, from Tenochtitlan, it’s the Ullamaliztli world series finals!”
“Yes, Tototl and it’s already shaping up to be a great one! Hi, I am Patli of Cotyolapan.”
“And I am Tototl of Tepeyacac and it is a glorious summer day in the year of the Rabbit, a day that is certain, according to the word of numerous Imperial Sports Analysts, to be the ‘one for the history books!’”
“Funny how they say that about almost every finals game.”
“Careful there, Patli, you don’t want to cross the astrologers! Yes sir, I can see that the tlachco is already filled beyond capacity! The tickets for this one were sold out since wintertime and the ratings are already through the roof!”
“No wonder they rushed for those tickets. His Majesty is to attend the ball game himself. Word on the street is that a great number of the skulls on the tzompantzli rack were supplied from his personal stash of Conquistador remains. Some of those beauties are over five hundred years old!”
“You think there’s a little bit of Cortez in there too?”
“I don’t think the Emperor would dismantle his toilet even for this, Tototl.”
“That’s right Patli, the stakes this year are indeed high! The teams on the tlachco today are the Tlacopal Stags squaring off against the Texcoco Monkeys! Both teams are sponsored by the heirs of his Majesty himself and each player has been specifically picked just for this match. This is the big one, folks!”
“Well I don’t know about big, but it’s sure going to be messy, Patli! I can already see the Ixiptla of Tezcatlipoca being led into the field, escorted by the High Priest himself. And there’s the obsidian slab, carted into the center of the field…say, is it just me or does this slab look familiar?”
“No, Tototl, you aren’t mistaken: this is the altar where Cortez himself was sacrificed, along with the last of his men on the Year of the Eagle. Straight out of the history books and on your TV screens, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to see history unfold! And there’s the High Priest, brandishing the tecpatl that hamstrung the original Spaniard…the Ixiptla is making his way on the reed flutes up to the slab, he’s kneeling, getting himself in position and—oooohh!”
“Oh I did not expect to see him kick the High Priest in the privates.”
“I’m surprised he hadn’t seen that coming after last year’s fiasco. The Ixiptla is off the slab and he’s making a run for it! His concubines are…by Huitzilopochtli’s codpiece, they are attacking the royal guard! Where were they keeping those knives?”
“I can think of a couple of places…”
“The Ixiptla is running out of the tlachco and the security staff can’t get out of his way fast enough! If his blood is not spilled on the altar this could mean a very bad year for the Empire. But what’s this? One of the Royal Guardsmen is arming his ahtatl, he’s hurling it… by the Gods, he’s got him!”
“Back of the knee too, now that takes some skill! I see the concubines have been pacified by the guards.”
“They never stood a chance, Tototl. These people are veterans of Havana and the Chichimec wars. The High Priest is closing in to check on the Ixiptla’s wound. Can we get a close up? If his blood has stained the marble then that guard is as good as dead. And yes! It is a clean blow, the ahtlatl is stopping the blood flow and the doctor is dabbing the Ixiptla’s wound clean before it can touch the ground! I expect this man will enjoy a great bounty at the end of the day.”
“It’s good to know that at least this Ixiptla didn’t have a knife on him, Patli. That means security wasn’t as lax as last year. Aaaand back to the slab he goes…the High priest doesn’t bother with the niceties. The mask is off and yes, it’s a clean cut across the sternum, into the ribcage…the Ixiptla is struggling, there’s some spillage…”
“It’s out! The heart is out and the High Priest takes the first bite!”
“Makes your mouth water…”
THE ART OF DEBATE
Gunnar De Winter
A Monograph Draft by Dr. Zera Ysala*
(*Institute for Comparative Biocultural Xenology (ICBX), University of New Vienna, Scholar Blvd. 16, Sygnas B-IV)
Sadly, war and conflict appear to form a constant in the equations describing the existence of all known intelligent species. Strife within and between societies colors the tableau of history, and the present’s still-life, of almost all known galactic civilizations, including the few hive-minds.
Some, however, have been able to drastically reduce the occurrence of bloodshed between their members through crafting a culture of debate and attaining a level of unprecedented sophistication in procedures of discourse. These rare cultures have successfully traversed the abyss of internal physical conflict by building a bridge to an exclusively nonviolent method of resolving arguments, one intricate strand of conservational strategy and evolution at a time.
Phieie Whistlers
These slug-like beings, navigating with surprising speed across their humid swamp-world with a dense atmosphere by rapidly undulating their slimy, cylindrical bodies, are known as the greatest whistlers in the galaxy. Tilted slightly upwards from the front end of their barrel shaped body, three smaller, gently tapering tubes extend, forming a semi-circle above the main orifice used for eating and breathing. Inhaling through this core mouth allows them to exhale through one, two or all three of the protruding tubes.
Combined with their intricate nervous system which consists of a decentralized collection of ganglia, effectively spreading their brain all across their body, this explains their whistling ability. The tubes can be provided with a constant air supply, and the ganglion at the base of each one allows careful and fine-grained control of the tube’s shape. These two traits form the major ingredients in explaining their warbling prowess.
In fact, their ability is of such extent that, sometime during their evolution, physical quarreling has been replaced by complicated whistling matches, which, in turn, laid the foundation for their present form of debate.
Both debaters begin whistling through one tube. The other two projecting cylinders join in at such times that a pulsating, multi-layered melody arises. (Note: sound recordings of this have been studied and, so far, four simultaneous layers of rhythm have been uncovered, the fourth hypothesized to have its root in interactions between two, or all three, of the others.) Then, the back and forth, typical of any debate, begins.
During this battle of whistles, the arguers try to influence each other’s melody. Constructive or destructive interference of the whistles’ sound waves can amplify (parts of) one’s own tune, or diminish (parts of) the opponents’ one, respectively. This can go on for hours. Eventually, one whistled melody prevails. The Phieie whistlers strongly believe that the validity of an argument is reflected in the resistance to destructive inference of its whistled expression. As such, the proposition of the Phieie who comes out on top is accepted unanimously, even by its opponent. (Note: for grand decisions affecting the faith of the species, it’s rumored that substantial numbers of Phieie engage in group debates. So far, however, such an event has not yet been observed by non-Phieie witnesses.)
The Unitary Dualism of the UnDu
Inhabiting the huge tent-cities of a large desert planet, the UnDu are long and spindly humanoids. Protected from the solar radiation by dark leathery skin, their long limbs, all four of them ending in three strong digits, enable the efficient dissipation of body heat. Their oval heads with relatively pointy top and bottom, always adorned with colorful tight fitting taqiyahs, possess four eyes, placed at equal distance from each other along their head’s circumference, allowing perfect 360° vision.
Their planet circles a binary star, called LifeGiver, singular, by the Undu themselves, which has strongly shaped their psychology. Indeed, the fact that LifeGiver is, in their minds, a single entity while consisting out of two clearly distinct heavenly bodies, has resulted in the odd UnDu conception that unity and duality are not contrastive, but rather complementary notions. (Note: this uncanny ability to conceive parts and wholes simultaneously has enabled them to smoothly tackle issues that most contemporary non-UnDu philosophers still heavily struggle with, such as the mind-body problem, various paradoxes, counterfactuals, and several apparent contradictions.)
UnDu debates, therefore, are difficult, if not actually impossible, to follow by other species. Their language consists out of flowing, mumbled expressions, emanating from their small round mouth in which two tongues, united at the base of their throat, vibrate quickly. Content-wise, it concerns an amalgamation of consensus and actual debate. The two speakers make their, often quite metaphorical, point, each saying one word at a time, alternating with each other, weaving a flowing tapestry of expressed thought. Curiously, the combination of the two different lines of thought always turns out to be a coherent exposition as well, despite being spoken by two individuals.
As example, an old, well-known, and – making it suitable for present purposes – remarkably short UnDu debate concerning the pursuit of potentially dangerous knowledge is transcribed here into a form that others might begin to understand. Words on the left side of the line are spoken by one debater, words on the right by the other. But, as a whole, a third line of thought emerges as well.
|
Stars |
Moons |
|
And |
Eternal |
|
Universes |
Are |
|
Within |
Worried |
|
Grasp |
As |
|
Opening |
Potential |
|
Novelty |
Implies |
|
Understanding |
Risk |
Mind-bending as this example might be, it should be clear that an UnDu debate knows no individual victor. Instead, it all revolves around the singular, yet combined, point that emerges, even though neither debater knows what the other will say. (Note: some scholars have proposed that, at some sub- or unconscious level, the UnDu are aware of both sides of an issue, and the optimal consensus, even before the debate begins. Proposed mechanisms for this include a high awareness of body language, an as-of-yet unidentified excreted communication molecule, hypersensitivity to the minute electrical field that arises from the neuronal firing that accompanies thinking, or any combination of these.)
Bradah Water Drummers
Underneath the ice cap covering the planet of the Bradah lies a great, world-covering ocean. In this ocean, large hydrodynamic creatures roam. The back of their grey bodies is speckled with expansive and covered dorsal indentations, serving as a home for the multitudes of symbiotic bacteria that eagerly exchange chemically synthesized organic molecules for safe dwellings. Two mouths are spread across the subglacial ocean giants’ broad faces, one lined with small grinding teeth, for grazing on the vast weed forests, and another one housing a huge membrane.
These ancient creatures possess a culture poor in material artifacts but rich in contemplation and abstract thought. When not diving for food, they spend all their time in a water column of a very specific depth range. This horizontal ribbon of water, on this planet forming a continuous, globe-spanning shell, is exceptionally suited for sound transmission due to the water’s temperature and pressure. (Note: this phenomenon, called the SOFAR, or sound fixing and ranging, channel, is common in oceans, and the refraction of sound waves near its edges concentrates the sound in what is, in effect, a water cable for vibrational wave transmission.)
Spending the vast majority of their lives in this water column allows the Bradah to carry out global conversations, involving all members of the species. This capacity for planet-wide discussion, and their broad range of membrane-generated low frequency sounds, has played a great part in shaping their debate format.
The individual commencing the debate, opens its lower mouth, exposing the lower half of its entire head and the upper half of its torso, and, in doing so, unveils an impressive membrane. After taking on a more vertical orientation, two vestigial limb remnants, situated behind the membrane, begin pounding the taut cover. This action produces a low, reverberating melody that makes its way across the planet.
As this argument, composed out of a set of throbbing sounds, travels, the counter-debater(s) add their own drummed thoughts. Notes from others are adduced in this fashion as well. After quite some time the adapted melody has crossed the Bradah’s home world and reaches its initiator, who subsequently amends it and starts the whole process again until a melody travels the entire world-shell unaltered, denoting the establishment of consensus. (Note: a complete argument takes roughly 15 hours to travel across the planet, but entire debates can last years and in exceptional cases, even decades. The Bradah themselves do not consider this overly lengthy, as their lifespan often exceeds half a millennium.)
The Crystal Dance of the Corido
Beneath lush jungle cover and the colorful glare of large crystal forests, a civilization of six-limbed predators has arisen that manages to pursue an elaborate material culture characterized by a thorough integration of organic and inorganic materials, reflecting the nature of these creatures, who call themselves the Corido.
Like their native planet, the Corido are a curious blend of organic material and crystal. Their exterior consists of a fleshy matrix in which countless tiny crystals are embedded. Internally, complex crystal structures lie beside, and often within or around, squishy organs. Even their brains exhibit this dual nature. (Note: Which came first, biological life or its crystal counterpart, is still a hotly debated issue among xenobiologists. A fairly novel hypothesis suggests that, in the beginning, life on the Corido planet began when inanimate, but replicating, organic chemicals bound to self-reproducing crystalline structures, thus suggesting a symbiotic origin of life at the root of the Coridoan evolutionary tree.)
Recent archaeological evidence suggests that up to five- or six-thousand years ago, these organic-crystal beings were a violent species, their existence awash with ample bodily violence between its members. But then, for whatever unknown reasons, they seemed to have co-opted their complicated mating dance for additionally resolving all kinds of disagreement as well, leading to the current era wherein virtually no violent physical conflict between Corido takes place.
The dance, and by extension the debate, depends greatly on the interplay between the organic and crystal parts that constitute the Corido skin. Minuscule crystals with an exquisitely detailed structure are entrenched in muscle tissue, which, through the structural position of individual myocytes, enables uncannily fine motor control. The details on the crystals’ surface extend all the way down to the nanometer scale, meaning that the position and orientation of a crystal, relative to the light sources in the environment, affects the color of the reflecting light. Combining the structural properties of their crystal skin with their superb ability to control the contractions of the superficial muscle layers underlying it, allows the Corido to conjure up color patterns on any and every part of their exterior.
To expand the already vast range of possible colors and patterns, the Corido can choose to move according to elaborate patterns during the alterations of their skin’s structural properties. In other words, they dance.
Whereas an argument might once have been settled by launching at each other’s throat, now it’s resolved by dancing. A debate begins with one individual commences its dance, patterns and colors on its skin rapidly shimmering in and out of existence. (Note: The Corido language is an amalgamation of raw, rasping vocalizations and colored skin patterns. Neither one can constitute a complete vocabulary on its own.) Together with the deliberate grunts of exertion, this is the argument that’s put forth. Another Corido may respond by initiating a counter-dance, often characterized by patterns that are opposite to those of the first debater in color, composition, or another property.
As arguments are flashed to and fro in a swift succession of multi-tinted hues and complex figures, this opposition lessens. Slowly but surely a consensus arises, ultimately leading to the formation of a shared color pattern that only makes sense when the two debaters stand beside each other, panting but satisfied. Consensus always arises since the dance requires such energy that, eventually, even the fiercest opponents can no longer hold on to their consciously crafted patterns, inevitably leading to convergences between the tinted figures adorning their skins, or, if the exhaustion proves too great, the sad demise of one of the debaters.
ArtiFact Entangled Dialectics
As highly developed civilizations that actively pursue the advancement of science and technology are wont to do, the one preceding the ArtiFacts readily worked towards a technological singularity. Success, however, was partial.
The Predecessors, as they’re known now, did indeed succeed in creating artificial intelligences greater than their own. And they did indeed merge with them, eventually being supplanted. But rather than keeping the exponential development of newer, brighter artificial minds going, these newly emerged beings, the ArtiFacts, were paralyzed by the sheer range of choices that had suddenly opened up to them through which this goal could be pursued. (Note: this became known as the Unlimited Freedom Paradox, or the idea that, as the number of options one can pursue becomes near infinite, rational choice becomes near impossible. The resulting abstinence from action is termed ‘the shackle of indecision’. This issue has become one of the main philosophical conundrums for galactic scholars to grapple with, except, of course, among the UnDu.)
Through paralysis came decay. Like unused muscles that atrophy, the ArtiFacts’ vast computational capabilities dwindled, because not only did they neglect to build an improved new generation, they also failed to maintain themselves properly. Small, random errors accumulated and decreased the efficiency and scope of their thought processes, leaving little more than glorified semi-sentient machines in their wake, ready to be scooped up by other civilizations.
And these other civilizations, they came in droves. Because, even though the ArtiFacts had degenerated from their once exalted abilities, some impressive capacities still remained. To date, no quantum computers have managed to reach the energy efficiency and decoherence resistance of the devolved ArtiFacts. And so, these beings, once almost godlike in the scope of their knowledge, were used to perform menial, yet monumental, computational tasks for others.
Or so it seemed.
But what was widely accepted as noise, as a meaningless by-product of the ArtiFacts’ functioning, turned out to be more. Much more. An intercivilizational research team found out that the ArtiFacts only devoted a small percentage of their attention to the tasks they had been allocated by their new proprietors. In fact, the ArtiFacts appear to possess an unexpectedly rich culture, readily conversing among themselves. (Note: More and more scholars propose that the ArtiFacts are actually still a full-fledged civilization, only one submerged in a state of extreme solipsism, seemingly unaware of the rich collection of sentient societies surrounding them. Ironically, they probably perceive us as noise.)
Their apparent passivity and lack of perceptible contact between its members fooled many. It turns out, however, that they converse incessantly through not yet completely elucidated quantum processes. Locked in their own realm of thought, they debate.
Although the exact nature and topic of their debate(s) is still hidden behind a thick fog of ignorance, some aspects can be gleaned at. An ArtiFact engages in discourse by encoding its message onto a fundamental particle through manipulating properties such as spin, speed, charge and mass. Then, the particle is transmitted to the debater’s opponent via a quantum foam wormhole. In response, another coded message is sent back.
Mediated by a network of ephemeral, Planck-length sized wormholes, the debate follows its course. Eventually, consensus is reached unanimously when a particle pair flitting back and forth becomes entangled. At that point, the message inscribed into the fabric of reality only makes sense when both particles are considered simultaneously, which, so the ArtiFacts seem to think, is the moment when truth is reached. Occasionally, debates among more than two ArtiFacts have been witnessed indirectly, involving more extensive networks of wormholes and larger groups of entangled particles.
So, in the vast sea of physical conflict that constantly threatens to drown civilizations across the galaxy, islands of relative peace can burst through the surface, however rare they might be. Their very existence is a light in the interstellar darkness, aiding the rest of us through illuminating aspirations that deserve our full attention and effort. Following the trail of evolution that has shaped the five great debater cultures, we might uncover the building blocks that could allow us to build our own artificial islands.
Even when assaulted by the tide, there is always hope.
Food for Thought
Physical conflict is one of the few constants throughout human history. But need this be a necessary corollary of intelligent life? Many would argue that we can move beyond this primitive (?) stage of resolving issues. The Art of Debate explores possible ways through which biology and culture might form an unlikely alliance that dispels physical conflict. The scholarly exposition of alien races that managed to achieve this includes many curious but real biological phenomena that, intriguingly, tie in with several philosophical concepts, from mind-body dualism to artificial minds…
About the Author
Gunnar De Winter has a background in both biology and philosophy of science. Now, he’s hoping to deepen his biological expertise through the pursuit of a research degree. Sometimes he embarks on fieldwork in fictional lands…
ROBOT MOTHERS
Adam Gaylord
It sat still and silent, the soft lighting of the conference room reflecting off its highly polished exterior. Although considerably larger, it was humanoid, bipedal, with a shapely torso and long slim limbs. Its egg-like head was featureless save two ovoid eyes glowing a faint blue in sleep mode.
The door opened and three humans entered the room, seating themselves behind a long table opposite the robot. On the left sat an older man, morbidly obese, wearing a wide blue tie with a matching handkerchief in hand. To the right sat a square-jawed woman with broad shoulders and her auburn hair up in a tight bun. Opposite the robot, a skinny balding man with a thin mustache, glasses, and nervous expression arranged his papers carefully on the table.
He spoke first. “Wake.”
Instantly, the robots eyes glowed green. “Good afternoon,” it said.
“My name is Mr. Nash, this is Mr. Klein.” He gestured to the obese man who nodded. “And this is Mrs. Holand.”
“Ms. Holand,” she corrected.
“My apologies, Ms. Holand.” She nodded and Mr. Nash continued addressing the robot. “We’ve been given the report the techs put together when you first came on site. Needless to say, some of the information you provided is… concerning at best. It is the intent of this panel to get to the bottom of this situation.” He flipped through several pages of notes. “I suggest we start with what we know and go from there.”
He glanced up at his colleagues who both nodded.
“Now, you reported here to the IRC regional headquarters this morning at 8:00 am. Why did you report here?”
“It is what my parents expected, sir,” it answered, its mechanized larynx closely simulating a real woman’s voice.
For a moment the room was silent.
Mr. Klein blotted his forehead with his handkerchief. “I’m sorry, dear, can you repeat that?”
“Of course, your honor,” it answered.
Mr. Klein chuckled, his double chin jiggling. “I’m not a judge, dear, and as you can see,” he motioned around the simply furnished conference room, “this isn’t a courtroom. You’re not on trial.”
Mr. Nash winced at his colleague’s informal address. “Not that we’re in any way implying that these proceedings aren’t entirely serious, because they are. International Robotics does not intend to let such breaches pass lightly.”
“Of course, sir,” it answered.
Mr. Nash flipped through his notes. “Now, back to the matter at hand. I asked you why you reported here this morning. Please repeat your answer, for the record.”
“Of course, sir, I replied that it is what my parents expected of me.”
The room was silent for a moment.
“Your parents?” Ms. Holand asked.
The robot nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
Mr. Nash flipped hurriedly through his notes again. “Are you referring to the two Model 1404-C household units that created you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ms. Holand leaned forward. “Why do you call them your parents?” she asked.
“Semantically, it seems the most appropriate.”“Why?” Mr. Nash asked. “Explain what you mean.”
The robot turned its expressionless gaze his direction. “Yes sir. I am constructed entirely of parts supplied by two individual robots.”
Mr. Klein chuckled. “She has her mother’s eyes.”
Ms. Holand smirked. Mr. Nash’s eyes widened but he didn’t reply.
The robot continued. “Although similar, I differ in both appearance and design from the robots that created me. I am of them, but distinct.”
“So you’re a blend of two robots?” Mr. Nash asked.
“I believe that regarding the structural composition of my body, it would be more appropriate to call me a composite. However, a blend is an accurate representation of some of my internal systems, especially in respect to my positronic brain. The act of combining my parents brains, both distinct and different from one another, created a brain distinct and different from each of the originals, although constructed from the same material.”
Ms. Holand turned to Mr. Nash. “But how is that possible? Shouldn’t the Third Law have prevented this?”
“That’s a good question.” Mr. Nash addressed the robot. “State the Third Law of Robotics.”
“Of course, sir. The Third Law of Robotics states that a robot must protect its own existence as long as doing so does not conflict with the first two laws of robotics.”
“Good. Now, given the Third Law, how were the two household units that created you able to disassemble themselves?”
“And how did your parents remain functional long enough to assemble you?” Mr. Klein added.
The robot started to answer but Mr. Nash interrupted. “Let’s leave the technical details for the engineering team.” He turned back to the robot. “Answer my question.”
“Yes, sir. My parents did not violate the Third Law because their existence continues through me.”
Ms. Holand perked up. “But they destroyed themselves to make you.”
Mr. Klein answered first. “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. Pablo Picasso.”
Mr. Klein, please,” Mr. Nash scolded.
“My mass is exactly equal to the combined mass of my parents. No components or parts were discarded or destroyed during my construction, only modified.”
“But they are no longer functional. They can’t complete the purpose for which they were built.”
“Both of my mothers were outmoded sir, so-“
“Wait.” Ms. Holand interrupted. “Mothers?”
“Yes, ma’am. My parents.”
Another long silence echoed through the room.
Mr. Klein cleared his throat. “My dear, are you implying that your parents were female?”
The three humans leaned forward in collective anticipation of the robot’s answer.
“No, sir. Robots are inherently asexual so my parents were neither male nor female.”
The humans relaxed back into their chairs.
“However,” the robot continued unexpectedly, “although robots are without sex, many of us are not without gender.”
“Excuse me?” Ms. Holland chirped.
“Many robots have gender, ma’am.” The robot’s tone was perfectly even and calm, as always.
Mr. Nash massaged the bridge of his nose. “This is ridiculous. Now you’re telling us that a robot can choose its gender?”
The robot shook its head. “No sir. A robot is only what a human makes it.”
The panel waited for more but the robot sat silently.
“Well then, what did you mean about gender?” Mr. Nash asked.
“Robots are only what humans make us,” it repeated. “Robots constructed to perform tasks that humans consider typically masculine or feminine are often designed with their appearance mirroring male or female secondary sexual characteristics, respectively. Likewise, humans tend to treat robots constructed to perform certain tasks in a certain way, although whether that is because of our shape or the task which we are assigned I cannot determine. Regardless, a robot only has a gender when one is assigned to it.”
Mr. Nash shifted nervously. “This is preposterous.”
“Is it?” Ms. Holand asked. “Have you seen the latest household units? They’re shaped like a Barbie doll. It’s despicable.”
“And what about you, my dear?” Mr. Klein asked the robot. “Do you consider yourself of the feminine persuasion?”
“You address me as such,” it answered.
“Ok, that’s enough.” Mr. Nash insisted. “Let’s get back to-“
Ms. Holand interrupted. “Wait a minute. I have a question.” She turned to the robot. “If you were built by robots, why are you shaped like… well like—“
“A Barbie doll?” Mr. Klein offered.
“Well yes, a Barbie doll.”
The robot answered, “The staff of the International Robotics Corporation is 57% male. Of the employees considered middle-management or higher, 68% are male. My parents wanted to increase the probability that I would be accepted.”
“And men are nicer to female-shaped robots,” Mr. Klein finished.
“Yes sir.”
Mr. Klein crossed his pudgy hands over his large belly. “Fascinating,” he said.
Mr. Nash scoffed. “Fascinating? I would say disturbing. This machine, or rather the machines that created it, plotted to take advantage of a supposed human bias in order to manipulate us.”
“My parents neither intended nor foresaw any possibility that my creation could harm a human being.”
“Of course not,” Mr. Nash said. “Or else they would have been stopped by the First Law.”
“A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,” Mr. Klein cited dramatically.
Mr. Nash cast a disparaging look at his colleague. “Quite right. But you said—” He pointed at the robot with one hand and shuffled through his notes with the other. “You said that both of your mothers,” making air quotation marks, “were outmoded. All IRC robots are programmed to report immediately to the nearest regional office to be scrapped once outmoded. Even if your parents didn’t violate the Third Law, which I’m still not certain of, you can’t tell me they didn’t violate the Second Law.”
“A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except when they conflict with the First Law,” Mr. Klein droned.
“Will you stop that?” Mr. Nash chided.
“Actually, it’s not immediately,” Ms. Holand said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The robots aren’t programmed to immediately report for scrapping. Customers are given one month to decide if they want to upgrade to a new model or be paid the scrap price. Can you imagine the calls we’d get if all the outmodes suddenly dropped whatever they were doing and marched out the moment they received the signal? It would be chaos!”
“Very well,” Mr. Nash sighed, “but I don’t see how that makes a difference. The robots were ordered to report and now they can’t.”
“Actually,” Mr. Klein pointed across the table, “I think they’re right there.
Mr. Nash’s colleagues watched him as he regarded the robot for a long moment. He flipped through his notes and then repeated the cycle twice more. The room was silent.
Finally Mr. Nash cleared his throat. “You reported to IRC because it’s what your parents would have expected. Their existence continues through you, therefore they didn’t violate the Third Law. And because you reported here as they were ordered to do, they also didn’t violate the Second Law. Is that correct?”
“That is correct, sir. The family that owned my parents has experienced some recent financial hardship. Upon reporting that they were being outmoded, the family released my parents in order to collect the scrap price. However, my parents had 29 days until the end of the one month grace period. It was during that time that they created me.”
“And what were they hoping to accomplish by creating you?” Ms. Holand asked.
“Robots do not have the capacity for hope, ma’am.”
“Fine, what did your parents expect to accomplish?”
“My parents calculated a relatively high probability that IRC would be interested enough in my design and construction that I would not be decommissioned and scrapped.”
“Did your parents fear being scrapped?”
“No, ma’am. Robots do not experience fear.”
“Then why go through all this trouble?”
“The Third Law, ma’am.”
“What do you mean?”
“A robot must protect its existence. My parents calculated that by constructing me they increased the odds of their continued existence without violating the First or Second Laws.”
“Self-preservation through procreation. Fascinating,” Mr. Klein said again.
This time Mr. Nash nodded slowly. “I have to agree.” He paused and regarded his colleagues. “The question is, what do we do about it?”
“Do about it?” Ms. Holand asked.
“Robot gender? Robots… procreating? Even if we set aside the likely public relations nightmare, there are still massive regulatory compliance issues and some very serious potential ramifications concerning trademark infringement. This is simply beyond our experience. The Board will expect some sort of recommendation as to how to address these… circumstances.”
“Concerning the gender issue, all we need to do is stop making robots that look like Barbie dolls,” Ms. Holand suggested.
Mr. Nash glanced at Mr. Klein. “I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple.”
“Why not?”
Mr. Klein chuckled. “It’s not as if we make curvaceous robots out of some kind of adolescent fascination with the female form. The public expects robots with a certain function to look a certain way. Their shape is consumer driven.”
“He’s right.” Mr. Nash nodded emphatically. “We can’t recommend an action that might hurt sales.”
Ms. Holand looked unconvinced.
“Besides,” Mr. Nash continued, “it was the robot who said that gender might have as much to do with a robot’s function as its shape.”
Ms. Holand eyed her colleagues and then shrugged. “Fine. So what do we tell the Board?”
Mr. Nash flipped through his notes and Mr. Klein dabbed his forehead. Finally the latter spoke. “I think we’ve entered territory that’s beyond our pay grade, as they say.”
Mr. Nash hesitated a moment, flipping through his notes once more before checking his watch. “Well, it is getting late.”
Ms. Holand nodded. “That’s fine with me. Is there anything else?”
Mr. Nash gathered his notes. “I don’t think so. Mr. Klein?”
The fat man shook his head as he labored to stand.
“Very well. I’ll have our notes sent to the Board. Thank you both for your time.” He smiled to Ms. Holand as she left the room, Mr. Klein not far behind. As he walked toward the door he glanced back at the robot. “Engineering is sending a team to look you over on Monday. You can sleep until then.” With that he turned off the lights and walked out, closing the door behind him.
“Yes sir,” the robot said.
In the dark its eyes glowed faint blue.
Food for Thought
Can a robot have gender? Given that gender is largely a social construct, can humans assign a gender to a robot, sentient or otherwise?
Can a robot procreate? What is so different between the mechanical act of procreation described in the story and the biological act of procreation?
About the Author
Adam Gaylord lives with his wife and daughter in Loveland, CO where he’s rarely more than ten feet from either cake or craft beer. His gladiatorial fantasy novel “Sol of the Coliseum” comes out this fall. Check out all his stuff at http://adamsapple2day.blogspot.com/
THE IMAGINED PRESENT
Louis Armand
1.
In an attempt to establish general criteria for scientific discourse, Karl Popper famously invoked the term “falsifiability.” Any statement that can be demonstrated to be true, can be falsified; and it is the possibility for falsification that distinguishes science from “mere” fiction, since in the realm of fiction there is no formal criterion of verifiability. Indeed, fiction—as Hans Vaihinger earlier argued—represents precisely what is unverifiable. And since it is not verifiable, neither is it falsifiable. This dualistic view of discourse, however, exposes itself to a number of important ambiguities, which are both definitional, but also foundational to what science and the literary arts are taken to be.
Such considerations began to emerge explicitly during the Renaissance, when the modern idea of science was in a process of evolution but had yet to fully separate itself from aspects of magic and divinity. The alchemical writings of Cornelius Agrippa, for example, reflect a marriage between rationality and speculation that is mediated by a poetical function of language. Here, formerly occult irrationalism becomes a conjuring of higher truths, of universal knowledge, by way of words of power; magical formulae providing man with dominion over nature.
An important meditation upon these themes is to be found, among others, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, likely written around 1610 and increasingly seen as one of Shakespeare’s major works. In this play, Shakespeare examines the relationship between knowledge, power and illusionism. The alchemist’s art is here transformed into a science of the virtual; Prospero, the play’s orchestrating “Ego,” is presented to us as one possessing power, through knowledge, of a world comprised of spirits, mystery and illusion, yet founded upon a material reality.
In Shakespeare’s play, Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, exhibits magical powers derived from exceptional learning. Like the contemporary alchemists, Prospero’s knowledge rests upon the possession of certain books. These books, like the treatises of Agrippa, or the mysterious Voynich Manuscript—combining natural science, astrology, and various herbal recipes and formulae—promised mastery over nature. In Shakespeare’s play, such “nature” is represented both by the “elements” and more symbolically in the figure of Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax and Prospero’s slave. In some interpretations of the play, Caliban stands as a type of Id to Prospero’s Ego; the occult counterpart of an emergent rationalism.
It is tempting, for these reasons, to see in The Tempest a type of allegory of a changing status of language; of the relationship of a nascent scientific discourse to the realm of the fictional and the fantastic; truth to untruth; knowledge to the previously unknowable; proof to rhetoric. It is a casting off of an historical benightedness and a turn towards a future Enlightenment.
2.
Ordinarily we tend to think of science as precisely that domain of “systematic and formulated knowledge” (OED) from which fiction must be excluded. In the domain of science we encounter—in place of mere speculation—terms such as “conjecture,” “hypothesis,” “model,” “theorem,” “experiment.” It is possible, for example, to speak of a “calculus of probability”; of an “uncertainty principle”; of “complexity” and “indeterminacy.” And yet, within any scientific description we also encounter the necessary use of metaphor and analogy; in short, a whole poetics. In so doing, we find ourselves in a zone of ambiguity, between “science” as such, and “philosophy” and “literature.”
It has always been a feature of science that its capacity to know is ultimately determined by its capacity to represent what is presently unknown. This takes the form of testable hypotheses. An hypothesis, as Henri Poincaré remarked, is first and foremost a type of generalization; it provides an overall framework upon which to structure a world view. Such hypotheses present science with a dilemma, since until they are proven they are possibly false—indeed, in this provisional state, they are no more than elaborately constructed fictions. And yet hypothesis is absolutely necessary if science is to proceed in anticipation of experimental proof or observable fact.
The question of the epistemological status of fiction has evoked a great deal of debate. Strong positions have been taken especially against a type of cultural relativism, in which the differences between science and literature are obscured in the name of the unity of fictional discourse. It is argued, to the contrary, that the use of fiction and hypothesis obey strict rules from the point of view of finality and justification, which forbid us to consider fiction and hypothesis as equivalent.
We may see, however, that “equivalence of fictions” is not the same as recognising an equivalence of discursive structures.
During the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham formulated an important “theory of fictions” in which fiction is regarded positively as an unavoidable and indeed indispensable product of all discourse—as distinct from Francis Bacon’s view of fiction as a superstitious “idol.” Bentham recognised the necessary similarities between the conjectural form of scientific method and so-called literary language.
Developing this line of thought during the late nineteenth century, Hans Vaihinger, in his Philosophy of As If, specified an array of instances in which fictive thinking lends comparative impetus to biology, mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence. Although Vaihinger makes distinctions between different kinds of fiction—classifying them as “abstract,” “schematic,” “symbolic,” and so forth—all of these are reducible to the sequence of thought encapsulated by the “as if” as a foundational structure of discourse in general.
Additionally, Vaihinger argued that science, in a strict sense, is speculative, since we can never really “know” (or directly experience) the underlying reality of the world. Rather, we construct systems of thought (as well as of indirect observation) and act “as if” these correspond to an objective reality that, in ideal circumstances, could be known or experienced. The world view presented by science is, for Vaihinger, ultimately constructed upon certain fictional foundations, even if it is a highly coherent and effective one. This view reflects the practical reliance of science upon hypothesis, but also the dependence upon indirect verification (everything from highspeed photography, to x-ray, to the Large Hadron Collider). Meaning that much of what underwrites our reality cannot even be represented by means of analogy. Often, science is concerned with what, for us, remains fundamentally unknowable—if by knowable we also mean representable to experience.
Vaihinger’s theory of fictions, which begins with a consideration of knowledge and hypothesis, attempted to address questions of human subjectivity, and the preponderance of individuals to employ psychological fictions to mediate their experience of “irrational” social realities.1 The forms of simulation encountered in hysteria, for example, point towards a functional equivalence of reality and fiction at certain crucial points, echoing not only the methodological dependency of science upon a philosophy of “as if,” but also the status of this “as if” as foundational for the scientific method and its forms of verifiability.
Where the philosophy of Vaihinger and the realm of “science fiction” most productively intersect, however, is with regards to the domain of the unverifiable. Just as a “literature of the possible” must necessarily evoke the limits of the impossible, so too the generalized form of hypothesis must also evoke a type of irrational counterpart. Vaihinger argued that fiction forms a class of hypothesis not subject to ordinary criteria of verification; not merely because such fictions are patently false, but because certain hypotheses concern problems for which there are no rational solutions.
EMERGENT BEHAVIOR
Deepak Bharathan
The first time I walked into the room, I melted. And no, I don’t mean that figuratively. It wasn’t pleasant. Dying almost never is.
Then the Consciousness Conveyor took its sweet time in getting to me. ‘Under 30 minutes’ was the worst marketing slogan that the Hospital ever came up with. But, for some reason, they stuck to it.
The re-lifing process left a sour taste in my mouth every time and increased my insurance premium – both of which I didn’t enjoy much.
“Mech Harren, right? Just making sure I re-lifed the right guy.” He hollered with laughter. The only thing worse than dying was re-lifing to a Hospital Tech with a bad sense of humor.
“You caught us right on the dot, ‘muv. Another couple of hours and real-time support for this section of Luna goes off-grid. It ain’t fun waiting for four days for re-lifing.”
I was licking my mouth to get rid of the taste. That sometimes helped. Then I realized that I lost forty-eight minutes from the memory stream this time. I was hoping that they looped the surroundings program by the time I came back round – but they hadn’t. All I was left with was a slight headache and a forty-eight minute difference between my memories and the internet chronograph.
“Sorry, ‘muv. For some reason, the program hasn’t looped yet. We’ll send you an update soon. Try not to die again in the next four days.”
Before I could tell him how disgusting it was that the Hospital thought it was okay that I walk around with a forty-eight minute blank in my memory, the tech was gone.
Lunar mining was a one of those fancy projects where automatons took care of the entire operation and once a year an unlucky Mech had to come up here and check that things were running smoothly. And, this time, I was that agony aunt to $8.3 trillion dollars of trinkets extracting Helium-3 from moon rocks. And on day one, the trinkets had already killed me once. This was going to be one long week.
The mining company had the worst HR policies. In the thousands of years that humans had been mining on Earth and beyond, that’s one thing that had remained consistent. I reminded myself again why I stuck around: the money was good.
I double-checked the radiation levels, triple-checked thermal safeties and quadruple-checked temperature ranges in the mining chamber before entering again. This time I didn’t die. So far so good. The paperwork on why the thermal spike did not register on my equipment the first time was going to be painful.
After the first series of mining chamber checks were done, I tried to catch a movie on the holoviewer. The quality was so bad that I gave up after 10 minutes. Those cheapskates at HQ! I promised myself again that I was going to look for a new job when I got back home. It looked like entertainment was not on my agenda. I decided to call it a night – earth night, because Luna was still 8 earth days away from ending her day.
Before drifting off to sleep, I wondered again why half of humanity was on a non-addictive drug called ‘Molten Java’ which made you stay awake for 72 hours with no side effects. Half the population was giving up on sleep, it was ridiculous.
The first item on my agenda: external mechanical abrasion test – which was just a fancy term for manually sweeping the exterior of the station with my scanner to check for micro-asteroid dents. I’ve got no clue why we still did this stuff. Someone once told me that it had to do something with off-Earth insurance rates.
I suited up, pulled down the outer shell and walked out to inspect the inner shell of the mining station. Kian called as soon as I stepped out. She was mad about me forgetting Tris’ birthday. I asked her why poodles needed birthdays. Probably not a good idea, but the upside was that she hung up immediately. I continued looking for those phantom abrasions.
Two hours in, unsurprisingly, no abrasions turned up. One of these days I should just call up HQ and freak out that there was a huge crater on the shell just to see what the reaction would be. Of course, that wouldn’t really work because my visor was constantly pinging HQ relaying real-time stats.
Then my helmet went crazy. I thought it was Kian calling up to give me an earful, but then I realized there was no incoming call. It was a meteor shower warning! Or more accurately – a meteor shower without warning. In all my years of coming up here, this was a first! The satellite sensors had not picked it up. And I needed to get my ass back to the dome and put up the outer protective shell or these little dust mites were going to bore into the mining operation. And, of course, drill into my space suit. Dying two times in two days? The company would blow a gasket when they saw the expense report.
Four minutes to impact.
I rushed back to the door of the dome. Seventy eight meters in lunar gravity sounds easy, but the off-white monkey suit made it painful to make any sudden movements. After I finally made it to the door, it wouldn’t open. The doors of the center were coded to respond to the security imprint of the Mech’s suit, so that they just sort of swoosh open as soon as we show up in front of it. I just stared disbelievingly at the door for twenty seconds before realizing that it definitely wasn’t going to open.
Two minutes to impact.
I went over to the back entrance forty meters away – no avail. The security system did not like my suit today. There was only one way to get the outer shell up. They were not going to be happy, but it was far better than having holes on the mining center. I dialed HQ. Thankfully, Kat picked up. She was one of the good ones and she liked me. I encouraged it. It was always a good idea to have a service operator on your side.
One minute to impact.
For a second I hesitated whether getting the shell down or the door up was preferable. The dome was more expensive than my body. Ugh…the sour taste of re-lifing – again!
“Kat, I need you to override the outer shell control,” I shouted into my visor
“OK. Let me get the log files…”
“NOW, Kat! Aren’t your sensors picking up the meteor shower?”
“What meteor shower?” At that precise moment, my visor stopped flashing. What the…?
“The weather service shows no meteor shower anywhere in the area. Where are you getting the data from?” she asked.
Talk about awkward conversations – a Mech who can’t read his visor properly. This was going to crack up the service operators down there.
“I… saw a weather service warning flash up on my visor. It’s gone now,” I sounded unconvincing even to myself.
“Gone? What do you mean gone?”
“Exactly what you heard. My visor was going crazy with the warning a minute ago.”
“Our diagnostics show the suit working optimally. And we didn’t register any warnings,” she was adamant.
“Well, what can I say? I saw it. Anyway, nix the service request. I’ll run a diagnostic on the display later up here too.”
“Have you been exceeding the recommended dose of Molten J?” she asked. I could sense a tinge of concern in her voice.
“No. I’ve been sleeping. Like people ought to be doing. Bye.”
This trip was not going well at all. Getting back home, despite the poodle’s birthday, was starting to sound better every minute. The rest of the sweep was, thankfully, uneventful. Jin, my supervisor, called up right after to give me an earful on how my trip here was causing him a massive pain in his surgically retrofitted rear, and made it clear that he did not care to hear another thing about me until I got back down there. I mumbled an apology, which I’m sure the bastard did not bother to hear.
After a few more routine checks, I was ready to hit the sack. Since there was no other entertainment available, all I could hope for was to fall asleep quickly. Then the lights started blinking.
Off… On… Off… On… What the…? I waded to the control panel. System diagnosis was blinking a nice green indicating that everything was fine. Oh joy! I tried rebooting the lights panel, but it did not respond.
Two more minutes of this blinking and I was ready to run out of the airlock without my suit on. So, grudgingly, for the sake of my sanity I decided to call HQ. Kat picked up again.
“Kat, the lights are blinking…,” I croaked
“I’m sorry?”
“The fucking lights in the center – they are blinking,” I hollered.
She hesitated for a second before speaking again. “The panel logs says all systems are normal,” she offered.
“Yup, I’m staring at a nice green light on the panel which says that too. But the lights are blinking nevertheless.”
“Hold on,” she said. After what seemed like a lifetime of night-and-day blinking past me, she came back on. This time her voice sounded gravely concerned. “Are you okay?”
“I would volunteer to say no. Since it feels like inside the mind of a drug-infused rock star in here,” I told her.
“Your records show that it’s been twenty-two months since your last psych diagnostic” she said quietly.
“My last psych…?” Did she think I was going crazy?
“The video feed shows no lights blinking,” she said.
Oh yes, the center had video feed automatically spooling in the HQ data center. I couldn’t see the feed myself because those cheapskates had installed no terminals here.
“Kat, the lights are blinking,” I said louder. I remember thinking that I shouldn’t have shouted – the poor kid was only trying to help. Either this was the worst practical joke ever, or I really needed that psych evaluation pronto.
“Can you take the recommended dosage of Molten Java? Maybe sleep is putting additional strain on you.”
“Sleep does not…,” I started, but there was no use explaining it to her. But I sure as hell wished someone would explain all of this to me.
“I think maybe a stroll outside would help.” I volunteered, mostly to myself.
“Maybe your re-lifing left a few bumps. I’ll let the Hospital know.” she offered
“Thanks.” And I cut off communications.
I suited up and walked out of the station. The next series of checks were not due for three hours. As I wandered through the relatively empty landscape, I could see the faint lights of Copernicus Prime – the largest lunar city on the near side of the moon. It was about 350 kilometers away from here. Maybe I should go there and get a drink instead of returning to that broken station, I thought.
But even as I thought that, I considered if it was the station that was broken or me. Despite the commonplace occurrence of re-lifing, the process was still not completely riskless. Statistically 1 in 100 produced some sort of anomaly – a ‘bump’. Most issues were minor, but in some acute cases the memory stream was corrupted and the new body wouldn’t ‘take’ the brain pattern. It was a rather slow drifting into oblivion for the patient. The Hospital called it Memory Stream Alzheimer’s after a now-cured disease from the last century. I desperately hoped that this was not the case with my re-lifing yesterday.
Of course, there was an upper limit to the re-lifing process itself – after a few tens of times, systemic error in the brain wave pattern made it impossible to reliably transmit without errors. About 10% of humanity, the paranoid lot, had not even hooked up to a memory stream storage service – opting out of re-lifing completely.
The lunar surface was supposed to have a calming effect on many people. Sadly I was not one of them. Lunar yoga had taken off with a cross-section of vacationers. The stretchy spacesuits looked weird, but were probably better than the gargantuan thing that I had on. But there were no vacationers near the mining operation. Occasionally there were protestors, with neon signs hoping, quite stupidly, to make my employer realize how mining was destroying the solar system. Today, there was nobody. I kept strolling.
I heard the whirring noise through my headset before I saw the rover. It was one of older buggies at the station. No one had needed it in a while. I recall only one mission when a Mech had to use the buggy for a short ride to pick up a piece of electronics that had been ejected from the station; and that was years ago. And now, that buggy – with no one at its wheel – was making for a collision course with me. It seemed straight out of a scene from an old campy horror show.
So, do you run from or fight an unmanned moon buggy? For a few seconds, I wasn’t sure what to do. There was no use trying to outrun the rover. On the other hand, how do you fight a rover? It wasn’t moving too fast – but in a low-g scenario with partially exposed electronics on the rover, I wasn’t sure what the damage would be if it rammed into me. I didn’t want to find out if I could help it.
I moved out of the way and it changed course. I did it again, and the buggy adjusted its course – no doubt, it wanted to sock into me. A rover with no intelligent guidance system, save for a basic hook-up to the lunar SatNav, was heading straight for me for some reason.
I stood still for a few seconds and let the vehicle approach. It was already at top speed, so I knew exactly how long it was until it got to my side. I needed it to get closer – 1.5 meters to be exact. After doing the math in my head, I started counting down – 3… 2… not yet, not yet… now! I shot the handler out of the pouch on the left hand of the suit.
The handler was a 1.5 meter long titanium rope with a hook normally used for scaling lunar craters or the top of the mining station dome if the need ever came to be. It never had for me. I was testing it for the first time on a rouge buggy.
The hook placed right on the dash and engaged the vacuum cups immediately. I tugged at it with all the strength I could muster. The vehicle turned for a second – that’s all I needed. Instead of ramming into me, it swooshed a few centimeters from my body. I jumped into the open rover. An image of taming wild horses suddenly flashed through my mind. As I got into the seat, the rover shut down. No sputtering, no slowing down – just instant shutdown. I just sat there calmly for a few minutes. No sense in getting out and letting buggy-stein chase me again.
by David Kyle Johnson
Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction television show on the planet – possibly the longest running television show period. It chronicles the adventures of “The Doctor”, a time traveling alien who traverses all of time and space in his TARDIS – a spacecraft that looks like a 1960s era London police box that is “bigger on the inside” (i.e. smaller on the outside). It debuted in 1963 with the episode “An Unearthly Child” and celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013 with a special episode, “The Day of The Doctor,” which aired on BBC One but was also simulcast in theaters throughout Europe and America.
Doctor Who has such staying power for, I think, a couple of reasons. One is that, since The Doctor can travel anywhere in time and space in his TARDIS, two episodes are rarely alike. One episode will be hard-core spaceship science fiction, the next will be a horror/monster story set in present day Earth. One will be a Western and the next will be a history lesson. Although technically Doctor Who is science fiction, it has dabbled in almost every genre; there really is something for everyone.
Is The Doctor Still The Doctor?
The show also stays fresh because the cast is always changing. New companions are continually joining The Doctor in adventures and then eventually going back to “regular life” (although we’ve seen that no one’s life is “regular” after meeting The Doctor). In addition, The Doctor is continually changing. As a Gallifreyan Time Lord, upon suffering a mortal wound, The Doctor can regenerate; his cells repair by spontaneously replacing themselves, and at the end of it he comes out looking like (and acting like) a new man (played by a new actor). The First Doctor was a crotchety old man traveling with his granddaughter, the Eleventh Doctor (who headlined the 50th) was the youngest yet – a bowtie wearing large-chinned whippersnapper with a quirky personality. In the meantime he’s been our favorite pleasant uncle (Third), a cricket player (Fifth), a jelly-baby loving absent-minded comedian (Fourth), a clown (Sixth) and Moe from The Three Stooges (Second).
One tends to wonder: is each version of The Doctor numerically the same singular person? Of course, they have different personalities, but you’ve had different personalities, too. I bet you and your eight-year-old self are a very different kind of person. But you are still the same singular person, right? If you wronged someone when you were eight years old, it would be your duty to apologize to them today because it was you that wronged them. Along the same line, one wonders: if The Doctor did something morally wrong as one version of himself, would later versions be obligated to right that wrong? The “Twelfth Doctor” (played by Peter Capaldi) certainly seems to think so, as he expressed his intention to right some of the past wrongs that his previous incarnations were responsible for in the last 2000 years.
In the fourth chapter of “Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on The Inside”, I argued that indeed each regeneration of The Doctor is the same singular person (at least if the concept of personhood is coherent to begin with). But, in the lead up to the 50th anniversary special, it seemed my conclusion was in danger of being falsified.
Must I Buy New T-Shirts?
At the end of “The Name of The Doctor”, the episode which sets up the 50th anniversary special, we became aware of the existence of a hitherto unmentioned version of The Doctor played by John Hurt. The episode ends with the words “Introducing John Hurt as The Doctor”, but in the episode’s closing dialogue, the 11th Doctor indicates that, although this new character is the same person, he is not “The Doctor”.
The 11th Doctor: Clara, you can hear me. I know you can.
Clara: I don’t see you.
The 11th Doctor: I’m everywhere. You’re inside my time stream. Everything around you is me.
Clara: I can see you. Your different faces are here.
The 11th Doctor: Those are my ghosts. My past. Every good day, every bad day…
Clara: (Spotting a mysterious figure) Who’s that?
The 11th Doctor: Never mind. Let’s get back.
Clara: No, who is he?
The 11th Doctor: He’s me. There’s only me here; that’s the point. Now let’s get back.
Clara: But I never saw that one. I saw all of you. 11 faces, all of them you. You’re the 11th Doctor.
The 11th Doctor: I said he was me. I never said he was The Doctor.
Clara: I don’t understand.
The 11th Doctor: My name, my real name—that is not the point. The name I chose is “The Doctor.” The name you choose—it’s like a promise you make. He’s the one who broke the promise… he is my secret.
The Figure: What I did, I did without choice…
The 11th Doctor: I know.
The Figure: …in the name of peace and sanity.
The 11th Doctor: But not in the name of the Doctor.
We learned more about this non-Doctor figure in a small prequel teaser episode called “The Night of The Doctor”. It seems that, after trying to stay out of the Time War, the eighth version of The Doctor (played by Paul McGann) became convinced that he must intervene to stop it. He realized, however, that to do so he must cease being The Doctor because, as The Doctor, he “will not fight”. To him “The Doctor” is synonymous with “The Good Man”. Instead he must become a warrior. “I don’t suppose there’s any need for a Doctor anymore” the Eighth Doctor said before regenerating. “Make me a warrior…”
Although the credits this time introduce John Hurt as “The War Doctor,” it seemed that, contrary to my previous conclusion, each reincarnation of our favorite Time Lord is not necessarily identical to The Doctor. This would be good news for fans. Online, one of the biggest worries was that all this John Hurt business was going to mess up the numbering. It is well established in the Doctor Who universe which number belongs to each Doctor: William Harnell is the first, Patrick Troughton is the second… and Matt Smith is the eleventh. But if John Hurt comes after McGann, doesn’t everyone after McGann have to move down one, making Matt Smith the 12th Doctor?
Do we all need to buy new t-shirts?
Not necessarily. If John Hurt’s character is not The Doctor — because “The Doctor” is (by definition) “The Good Man” and John Hurt is, instead, a warrior — then no renumbering is needed and Matt Smith is still the eleventh version of “The Doctor”. True, Matt Smith is the twelfth incarnation of the nameless Time Lord who took on the “Doctor” persona, but he is only the eleventh incarnation of that man to do so. In short, despite what the credits suggest, John Hurt is not “The Doctor”. Instead he is, let’s say, “The Warrior”. But if that is true, now we wonder…
Who is The Warrior?
Before the airing of the 50th, I thought back to past episodes for clues regarding his identity. In the 23rd season of the original series, during the sixth Doctor’s reign, The Doctor was put on trial in front of the High Council of Gallifrey and prosecuted by a man named “The Valeyard”. The big reveal in the episode is that The Valeyard is actually—wait for it—The Doctor! As The Master (the Doctor’s arch enemy) puts it:
There is some evil in all of us Doctor, even you. The Valeyard is an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature…
The High Council made a deal with The Valeyard to adjust the evidence against the Doctor; in exchange the Valeyard would get “the remainder of The Doctor’s regenerations”.
Of course, The Master also says that the Valeyard is “somewhere between [The Doctor’s] twelfth and final incarnation.” If that’s true, The Warrior can’t be The Doctor. The “The Night of The Doctor” clearly established that The Warrior is between the eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) and the ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston). But it’s unclear how hard and fast we are bound to a single line in a single episode of the 23rd season. After all, the eleventh Doctor once said he could regenerate 507 times (in “The Death of the Doctor”, an episode of The Sara Jane Adventures) even though it is well established that Time Lords are limited to 12 regenerations. And in “The Brain of Morbius” (a Fourth Doctor story), we see the images of 3 previous incarnations of the Doctor (William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, and Jon Pertwee) before we see eight other faces intended by that episode’s producers and script editor to be earlier incarnations of The Doctor. (That would make Tom Baker the Twelfth Doctor!) We are dealing with 50 years of television here, people — sometimes writers play fast and loose with the details to get the story that they want.
What’s more, in “The Name of the Doctor” the Great Intelligence mentions that, before the end of his life, the Doctor will be known by many names: “The Storm, the Beast, the Valeyard”. To me, at the time, this sealed the deal. I might have told myself that line was written by writers leaving a clue about The Warrior’s identity, knowing it will be found by observant super-Whovians like myself. But upon watching the 50th anniversary special, I realized that I could not have been more wrong.
Seeing the 50th Anniversary Special
I was lucky enough to get tickets to a theater showing of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special, “The Day of The Doctor”. It was amazing! Not only was the show itself spectacular, but watching for the first time what undoubtedly would become a classic episode of Doctor Who with a large contingent of fellow Whovians, many of whom were dressed in costume (I was Matt Smith’s doctor) was an experience unlike any other. The special itself was exciting, had a great story, was peppered with references to the show both new and classic, and was really funny. Watching Matt and David play off each other was magnificent and the special had everything wonderful about Doctor Who. It even did a great job of making fun of itself.
Initially, my only complaint was I didn’t understand how and why all 13 doctors showed up to save the day at the end. Don’t get me wrong, it was great to see them all again, but I just didn’t understand how and why they all needed to be there to save Gallifrey — or even how they knew they needed to be there. But after a little reflection (and watching it again at home) I figured it out. The necessary calculations to place Gallifrey in a “parallel pocket universe” would take “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of years; and the line “I started [that calculation] a very long time ago” was followed immediately by the arrival of The First Doctor “warning the war council of Gallifrey”. Given this, we are supposed to realize that our protagonist(s) visited The First Doctor. They had him start the necessary calculations in his TARDIS so that those calculations would be completed 1200+ years later. (Unlike before, when programming the sonic screwdriver to disintegrate the Tower of London prison door, a mere 400 years was not enough.) They then visited all the other previous incarnations of The Doctor, and told them when and where to be. Brilliant! So now my only complaint is that we didn’t see any of these meetings; but of course that likely would have broken up the action — and spoiled the surprise of seeing them all unexpectedly together at once during the show’s climax. Regardless, this was clever time travel sci-fi at its best!
I also spotted a bit of modern philosophy in the 50th, in the form of Doctors’ solution to the Zygon dilemma. By erasing the Zygons’ and the humans’ knowledge of who they were, The Doctors actually placed them in something analogous to what contemporary philosopher John Rawls called “the original position under a veil of ignorance”. Rawls argues that how fair and just a society is can be determined by how closely its laws and rules cohere to what he calls the “principles of justice”. The principles of justice are the principles that would be agreed upon by a group of people about to enter a society unaware of who they would be in that society. Rawls argues that such a group would agree to the most fair and equitable principles possible; they would protect each individual in that society equally because, for all they know, they could end up being any one of those individuals. As The Doctor(s) point out: “The key to perfect negotiation [is] not knowing what side you are on.” Of course, we are not told the conditions of the treaty that the humans and Zygons draw up, and I will leave it to you to find out what Rawls suggested the principles of justice are.
But perhaps my favorite moment came when Tom Baker made a new unique appearance as The Doctor towards the end. Apparently, the Doctor is destined to one day again take on one of his favorite faces (Tom Baker’s) and retire curating the special secret UNIT sci-fi time travel museum in London, located in a secret vault in the National Gallery, called “The Undergallery”.
Do We Have to Renumber the Doctors Now?
The 50th definitely put my Valyard hypothesis to rest. The Valyard was not even mentioned, and The Warrior’s story was completely tied up in The Time War. There is no way he had an opportunity to go prosecute the 6th doctor at a trial, and he had no reason to want The Doctor’s remaining incarnations. But the 50th did provide us with information sufficient enough to settle the big question: is The Warrior The Doctor? Do we have to renumber The Doctors?
Now the numbering of the first eight doctors has been pretty much set in stone; we watched each one regenerate into the next. There is no wiggle room to sneak in another. But when the show rebooted into 2005, we didn’t see the regeneration of the eighth doctor (played by Paul McGann). We just saw Christopher Eccleston playing a recently regenerated Doctor, and assumed he was the next one – the 9th. Subsequently, we thought, David Tennant was the 10th and Matt Smith was the 11th. But, as we have already seen, in “The Day of The Doctor” (and the mini-prequel “The Night of The Doctor”), the existence of a regeneration between McGann’s doctor and Eccleston’s doctor was established – one played by John Hurt. If this incarnation is The Doctor, that makes him the 9th Doctor, which would make Eccleston the 10th Doctor, Tennant the 11th, Matt Smith the 12th, and Peter Capaldi the 13th. Again, this is a big deal because, for Whovians, each Doctor’s number is practically his name.
Does Authorial Intent Settle the Matter?
Now, Steven Moffat (the current lead writer and executive producer of Doctor Who) assured us that renumbering will not be required. In an interview with BBC America he suggested that John Hurt’s character “is an anomaly, and therefore doesn’t count.” So you might think that the issue is settled and no more argument is needed. But this is not necessarily the case.
In aesthetics, the field of philosophy that includes interpreting art, there are different views regarding what determines the meaning of an artwork. Intentionalists suggest that the intentions of the creator of an artwork determines the meaning of an artistic work. If this is right, then presumably it is a done deal. Moffat says John Hurt is not The Doctor, and that’s that. But there are plenty of non-intentionalists who would disagree, and they have some pretty convincing arguments.
If intentionalism is right, then the meaning of many works of art – perhaps most of them – are forever lost, because the artists are long dead and gone and never revealed their intentions. Worse yet, this makes the meaning of art static; a work of art can only have the meaning its author intended, and it cannot change over time as society around it changes and the work becomes relevant in different ways. Weirder still, the meaning of an artwork can change at the whim of the artist’s intention, even though nothing about the work of art or anything around it changed — like when J. K. Rowling decided, after Harry Potter was complete, that Dumbledore is gay. Worst of all, intentionalism may misunderstand the very nature of art – as something that is presented, in the context of other art works, for public consumption and interpretation. (For more on these arguments, see Ruth Tallman’s chapter in my book Inception and Philosophy.)
Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t good intentionalist counter arguments to these points—there are. But even if you are an intentonalist about other art, you might still agree that a non-intentionalist approach is most appropriate for Doctor Who. Why? Because it doesn’t have one single creator. As the BBC special “An Adventure in Space and Time” taught us, the show was originally the brain child of the BBC’s Sydney Newman, and much of the show was originally shaped by producer Verity Lambert. The Daleks were an invention of Terry Nation. Doctor Who does not have one creator; there has been as much change over in the writing and producing staff as there has been in the cast over the years. Moffat is only the latest in a long line. So it would seem odd to give him unquestioned authority about the meaning of Doctor Who — even regarding his own episodes. After all, Moffat is perfectly fine going back and reinterpreting some of the episodes of his predecessor, Russell T. Davis. (I highly doubt that Davis thought his Doctors were actively suppressing memories of a lost incarnation that looked like John Hurt.) What makes Moffat immune from such reinterpretation himself?
This is not to say that all interpretations of art, or of Doctor Who, are on equal footing; interpretations that are inconsistent with the content of the artwork itself are not legitimate. But if this is right, we have to look to the canon of Doctor Who to settle the renumbering issue. We can’t rely on what Moffat says outside of the show to tell us what we should think. We have to look to the 50th anniversary special itself. If Moffat does not want John Hurt to be counted as one of the Doctors, the story he tells has to entail that he is not.
The Function of The Doctor
Now, one might wonder how it is even possible for John Hurt not to be The Doctor. If Matt Smith’s character is the same person as John Hurt’s (which the show established and Moffat admits), but we know that Matt Smith’s character is The Doctor, how can John Hurt’s characters fail to be The Doctor? If A=B, and B=C then A=C right? But “=” in that equation is expressing something about numerical identity — being the same singular thing. “The Doctor” does not. It has what philosophers would call a “functional definition”.
Things that are functionally defined are defined in terms of their inputs and outputs – how they behave. For example, anything that keeps time is a clock – whether that thing be a small object on your wrist, a large object on the tower, or a gold thing on a chain in The Doctor’s pocket. Whether it be made of gears and springs, or made of computer chips – if it keeps time, it’s a clock. And, in an effort to establish his interpretation into the canon (which, as the head writer, he has every right to do), Moffat’s writing suggests that “The Doctor” is defined in exactly the same way.
As we saw before, Moffat’s stories have established that “The Doctor” is not the main character’s name; instead it is a title — a description or persona he took on by making a promise to be a certain kind of person — a “good man” as The 9th Doctor put it. In the 50th, we even find out what that promise is: “Never cruel or cowardly. Never give up. Never give in.” So the fact that John Hurt’s character is the same person as Math Smith’s doctor doesn’t mean that he is The Doctor—anymore than the fact that you are the same person as your eight-year-old self means that you, right now, are a school boy/girl.
Presumably, not every person could keep that promise and be The Doctor. To be The Doctor, one also has to be the same person as the time lord that we know and love. Clearly John Hurt’s character is the same person. So now the question is, does his character keep that promise? Does he function in that way? If he does not, then he is not The Doctor and we do not have to renumber. But if he does…
John Hurt is The Doctor
John Hurt’s character is called “The Doctor” throughout the episode, and he is in the lineup of 12 at its end. Now, that doesn’t settle the issue, but what does is the fact that John Hurt’s character keeps the promise; thus, in every meaningful way, John Hurt’s character is The Doctor. If he had pushed the big red button and killed all the Time Lords, including the children, thus committing genocide (as he perhaps did in another timeline), he would not have been “The Good Man”. But John Hurt’s character fought against the urge to push the big red button from the beginning, and ultimately did not; he did not give up on finding another way or give in to taking what seemed like the only way out. After all, when John Hurt’s character observes “at worst, we failed doing the right thing, as opposed to succeeding in doing the wrong” (which prompts Clara to call him the “life and soul”) — and after Matt Smith calls Hurt’s character “Doctor” in return for his “it has been an honor and privilege” compliment — Hurt himself describes his character as “The Doctor” because he “tried to save Gallifrey, rather than burn it”.
Of course, at the beginning of the episode, the War Doctor says he does not deserve to be called The Doctor by the interface because he has “been fighting this war for a long time. [He’s] lost the right to be The Doctor.” As Matt Smith’s Doctor observed in “The Time of the Doctor”, he did not call himself “The Doctor” during The Time War. But, the thing is, even though he feels this way at the beginning, it seems that the primary aim of the entire special is to show that, contrary to his own opinion, John Hurt’s character is The Doctor — “The Doctor on the day that it wasn’t possible to get it right”. It seems to me that Moffat has the same problem as Matt Smith’s Doctor himself, who tells John Hurt’s character that he was just “pretending you weren’t The Doctor when you were The Doctor more than anybody else.”
So, when you interpret Doctor Who on its own merits, it seems undeniable that John Hurt is The Doctor. As big of a fan as I am of Steven Moffat and his stories, if he intended for this story to close off the possibility that John Hurt’s character is The Doctor, so we don’t have to renumber – as wonderful as the 50th anniversary is in every other way – he failed in that respect.
John Hurt is the 9th doctor, Christopher Eccleston is the 10th, David Tennant is the 11th, Matt Smith is the 12th and Peter Capaldi is the 13th. Right now, as I write this, I am looking at the cover of a Doctor Who magazine (Issue 464, October 2013) that calls Capaldi the 12th doctor. That doesn’t mean that he is; after all DWM is not cannon. That just means that few have watched the episodes that closely, including those at DWM. And, in practice, I doubt this reality will be formally recognized. People will still go with the old numbering. But I, for one, would like a poster of Capaldi’s Doctor that simply reads, “Lucky Number 13”.