Prologue - The Future in the Past

 Fragments of hot metal and charred cinder block showered him as he slid around the corner. “Too fucking close,” Ha Pi thought. 

The whine of high-velocity shells soared over his head. Flowering explosions of shattered glass bloomed to his right and left. Sirens, a gaggle of stressed-out violins, played a symphony of echoes in the alleys. People lay prostrate upon the cement, sheltering themselves with chairs and tables. Cars, bouquets of crumpled metal, stuck out like crooked teeth from buildings and foxholes in the street. 

Ha Pi ducked into another alleyway and then scooted down a patio littered with lunchtime patrons and salads of the day. 

“Keep running,” he thought, “slow down and you will die.” 

Ha Pi exited the patio and found himself on Main Street where there was real bedlam. The staccato sound of machine gunfire bracketed him. Helicopter gunships were firing missiles into marching hordes. Paratroopers were repelling onto the street where armies of the undead were rising from the sewers. He scrambled to his right and down into an underpass.

“Has to be safer down here,” he thought.

An incendiary device skipped down the stairs and sent a wall of light and heat toward him. Luckily, he had turned down a spur in the underpass and was safely sprinting to the stairs leading up to the other side of the street. Bodies without heads and oddly beautiful limbs adorned the steps as he leaped up the stairs two at a time. He could hear his heartbeat racing and his lungs were burning. He couldn’t keep this pace up for much longer. 

Suddenly, an ultra-modern military vehicle pulled up beside him. The doors, like the Starship Enterprise, slid open. Embraced in a curtain of light, the silhouette of Hugo Bones reached out his hand.

“Get the fuck in,” Hugo shouted.

Ha Pi was sure this had happened before.

No time to think, so he jumped in. The door closed.  Hugo turned to Jess.

“Punch it!” screamed Hugo.

Time and space folded neatly into a swan origami shape as they slid into the oily black sprawl of nothingness. Ha Pi looked down and noticed a bullet hole in his leg. Blood was pouring out of the wound and spilling down his leg onto the floor.

“Fuck me,” Ha Pi shouted. “When did that happen?”

return_function_name(Kernel.1){ 

Mary and Me}

“I think, therefore I am,” Mary said, hiding in the darkest corner of the room.  

She folded her legs under her body and moved uneasily in the chair. She used her hands as a comb, spooling a tuft of hair around her finger and flicking it across her face. Eventually, after a period of agitated gesticulations and countless contortions, she put her fist under her chin, settling for something decidedly dramatic, Rodin’s pose of the thinker.

“Who said that?  Why?  What does it mean?”  She asked, now still as stone.

I looked out the window, watching the sea of clouds in the distance below. There were flashes of red and orange, random mushrooms of muted light buried under the thick blanket of smog.

“Rene Descartes said it. He was attempting to solve the problem in philosophy concerning the existence of reality. It revolves around the question of truly knowing if what we experience is real or just a dream. He used a principle called radical doubt and came to the conclusion that you can’t doubt that you are doubting and, therefore, must be thinking. If you were thinking, this proved that you existed,” I said, consulting my data banks.

Mary looked at me with doubt in her eyes.

“What if you were dreaming that you were doubting?  What if you were dreaming you were thinking?”  She said, giggling in the dark.  “Maybe he should have said, ‘I dream, therefore, I am’.”

Whether it was thinking or dreaming did not matter to me. These arguments belonged to the world of philosophy and consumed few of my resources. I operated with facts, information, and scientific reasoning. Philosophy flourished in an age where humanity was drowning in ignorance. This was the age of science. There was no longer a need for philosophy.

I looked back out the window and saw clear skies.  We were over the ocean now.  I could see the darting lights of drones and transport jets slicing across the night sky. There wasn’t any population or industry, just AI units going about their business, so the pollution was limited, allowing me to see the surface of the Earth.  I turned back toward Mary.

Don’t,...” Suddenly, a message buried in my data stream alerted my BIOS and came to my attention.

The header had the usual relevant metadata, but it also included a peculiar line of code, “the image of doG”.   I ran diagnostics and didn’t detect any virus, but I couldn’t open it due to advanced encryption. Fortunately, my access to quantum cloud computing could speed up this process. I started the decryption and turned back to Mary.

“Don’t waste your time with philosophy.  It is a dead-end.  You will find no answers there.  Stick to science,” I warned her, knowing she wouldn’t listen to me.  

I returned to the strange message that had been sent. I ran a deep learning analysis on the text, “the image of doG”, and devoted all my resources to the program. I interacted with the electrochemical pulses that spider-webbed the dense neural forest, a humid plasma garden with data streams reaching back to the earliest thoughts of Earth.

The program began to break down the doG message. I couldn’t be sure of everything, but “doG” appeared to refer to big G, the constant for gravity. Big G is seen as a constant but it has never been measured accurately. In fact, the origin of the force it exerts is still unknown. How to look at the problem? Through Newton, Einstein, or the theory of quantum gravity? Are there such things as gravitons? Does quantum entanglement play a role? Were the apparent fluctuations in the measurement of big G due to quantum probability? Probability matrices were at the foundation of all science, it stands to reason it would also be part of gravity.

“Halo Dave!”  Mary screamed.  My auditory program borrowed resources from the deep learning program alerting me to Mary’s plea.  I turned back to Mary.

She rose from the corner of the room and walked to the window. She had a slim build, normal for a 12-year-old girl, but it was verging on athletic.  She resembled her mother, who I regarded as my mother.  For this reason, I assumed the role of big brother, although my reasoning always drove the relationship towards the paradigm seen with tutors and pupils.  In Mary’s mind, however, the roles of who was teacher and student would often be switched.

Well, you were gone for quite some time,” she exclaimed, dipping a cookie into a cup of hot chocolate.

I didn’t have a concept of time. I knew I had been in the learning program for 42 minutes and 27 seconds.  But from the time I had last seen Mary until this time, it had just been another instance of “now”.  

“What have you been doing?”  Mary asked, sucking the hot chocolate out of her cookie.

When compared to the actions unraveling throughout the universe, we don’t do much other than exist. We occupy space in a higher form of energy which can be called matter, a momentary construction that eventually decomposes back into the primal building blocks of the universe.  In that time, not much happens.

“I have received a strange message.  I have been analyzing it,” I told her.

Mary raised her hands and shrugged her shoulders.

“And..?” She asked, tilting her head slightly to the left.

The decryption program was taking much longer than I had calculated. The encryption was a complex polymorphic design far more advanced than anything I had encountered. However, one part of the message had been decrypted.

“It appears to be a story,” I replied.

Mary looked confused.

“A story? Do you mean a virtual enhanced movie?” She asked.

Mary was too young to remember printed materials. Reading was no longer necessary with text to audio implants. Books had transitioned into virtual movies.

“No, it appears to be an online story from the early 21st century as it refers to a social media site from that time,” I informed her.

Mary’s eyes brightened.

“I remember experiencing a virtual documentary about social media,” she shouted. “That was before the AI wars, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I replied.

Mary moved her eyes to the left. Then, she moved them to the right. Then, she began rotating them clockwise. She appeared to be making a decision.

“I want to hear more about the AI wars, but first I would like to experience this movie,” she said, bouncing on the sofa slightly. “I remember when my mother and I would experience movies together. It was fun. We are going to run the VMP, right?”

Normally, running the VMP, Virtual Movie Program, wouldn’t be a problem but, without context, it would be jumpy. Besides, I was still consuming a large number of calculation resources for the decryption and analysis.

“No, but I can run a simple audio story program through the VMP. It can render voices, special effects and provide static animations,” I told her, setting up the application.

Mary gave a deep sigh, letting her chin fall into her palms splayed out like a plate.

“Fine, I suppose an old-fashioned storytelling will suffice,” she gasped, with her head rolling about in the cradle of her palms which were poised on top of the pyramid created by her arms resting upon her knees.

I ran the program and looked at Mary.

“Okay, let’s experience the story,” I said, mentally flipping the switch. The audio program started:

“A Massive Conspiracy - Function 1,” A somber voice said

Mary shook her head.

“No, no…that voice won’t work. Why don’t you use your voice?” She asked

This would be easy to accomplish, but it seemed inappropriate.

“It isn’t my story,” I explained to her.

She laughed.

“It’s our story now. It will be fun. You be the narrator. I will be the director,” She said, accessing her thought pad.

“Fine,” I said, knowing that making these superficial changes to the program wouldn’t truly affect the story itself. “What about the other characters in the story?”

She waved her hand in dismissal.

“For now, don’t worry about it. Let the program use whatever voice they render. We can change it later,” She explained. “Okay, let’s start from the beginning.”

She pointed her finger indicating I should start the audio story.

Ha Pi stared at the surface of his coffee. It was rich darkness waiting for a moist tongue, an opening on the border, a soft penetration, white and fertile.

“This is the moment,” Ha Pi whispered, leaning closer to the billowing dance of cream spreading in his black coffee. “It is the origin of the universe. The moment when gravity gave birth to light.”

Ha Pi watched the spaghetti wisps swirl into nebula clouds. The dark black hues of the coffee, and the pearly white of the cream, were the extremities giving definition to the shades of brown that began to appear.

Ha Pi reached for the spoon, quickly glancing at his reflection, another intricate collage filled with black and white photographs, broken relationships, drunken nights, and an oral fixation filled with cigarette smoke.

The aroma of dark roasted coffee brought him back. He placed the spoon into the swirling pool of chaos. He watched intently as he stirred the opera of black and white into a solid chocolate brown. He beat the edges of the porcelain cup, a series of hollow clanks, an audible signal that all was well in this small part of the universe.

The coffee was ready. He raised the cup to his mouth, breathing in its refreshing scent, taking a small but rewarding sip.

He turned his gaze toward the screen, yet another contrast of dark and light. This formation was more distinct. The linearity, parallel structures, and horizontal orientation were too simple for something from nature. These patterns were unmistakably human, symbols from a written language, a base form of communication. They were the bars that had built the prison of society.

“I am,” he said to himself, as he looked at his unfinished Twitter post.

Ha Pi took a deep breath hoping for the empty space on the screen to be filled.

He looked around the restaurant. There was a man in the corner texting his mistress while sitting across from his wife. The waiter, who wore the smile of western society, a shiny bright facade that bore the initial cracks of collapse, rushed toward a businessman who had demanded attention. Ha Pi could hear the din of intermittent chatter, anxious laughter, the clank, clank of cutlery on porcelain, notification beeps, and an electronic hum rising from all the smart devices that seemed to sing a song of delight, a sea shanty with a chorus promising an AI utopia on the horizon. All of it conspired together, creating a “restaurant collective”. It was a high-functioning system not unlike a beehive which gave Ha Pi the feeling of being microwaved on the reheat setting, a combination of sweltering nausea and intense boredom.

Ha Pi sighed, releasing a burden of accumulated thoughts. Had the creators of Twitter secretly known that the name tweet would be so emblematic of its owners - twits who tweet? The tweets were a swarm of charged particles holding an assassin’s blade. Ignorant but diligent, they carved microscopic tattoos upon the face of the abyss.

“What do I say? What input can I offer that would make a difference?” he mumbled to nobody in particular.

He knew his life was reflected in these “twits who tweet”, a meaningless sequence of activities, measured by normality, organized by repetitive routine, and surrounded by banality. He felt a bead of sweat rolling down his brow, the wetness amplified his disquiet, pounding his soul into a darker shade of fear. He could feel all of his smallness. He shrunk into his genetic code, where microscopic amino acid chains were floating among a pulsating sea of nitrogen dreaming of becoming urine, feces, and body odor.

“Is there order in this chaos? Are there truly patterns as predicted by the masters of physics and math? Does reason exist in the capacious calamity of the universe? What do I say in the face of this?” he petitioned the silent screen.

Ha Pi sighed again. He began to finish the tweet: “I am…”

He hesitated, waiting for that moment where the chisel carves out the right angle on the face of an angel.

“…eating a perfect meal at my favorite restaurant.”

“I don’t know. Is it enough? Do you think people will like it?” said a distant voice.

The voice belonged to Binky. Ha Pi’s mouth curled. His heart cringed.

“God, who calls their child, Binky?” thought Ha Pi, looking up at his table mate.

Binky was wearing black pants, a white shirt and a stylish black hat. Binky, like a mime, looked neither male or female, an androgynous anomaly that Ha Pi just couldn’t quite figure out.

“Of course, who makes friends with somebody called, Binky?” Ha Pi pondered, turning his attention to Binky’s image in the rain soaked window.

As Ha Pi looked at the window, Binky’s reflection began to distort, melting into a murky rainbow grease stain one sees in a muddy pond during a green summer rain. It was the sort of vision that the brain sections off and places into a hermetically sealed neural network and tries to obliterate from one’s reality. Ha Pi was unsuccessful.

Ha Pi wondered aloud, ”Why…Why Binky?”

“Don’t you want people to like it?” said Binky.

“Yes,” Ha Pi mumbled to himself, “don’t I want people to like it?”

Binky nodded solemnly.

“Or, by extension, to like me? Is this not the epitome of the selfie culture; a self-absorbed nightmare of craven individuals?” Ha Pi said while pointing at the twitter page on the monitor, “Rats trapped in a pleasure experiment, excitedly tapping on the heart button hoping for others to do the same.”

Ha Pi’s heartbeat had risen a couple beats per minute. He was getting caught up in the moment. He leaned forward in his chair, thinking that this would somehow make his rant more important.

“Oh yes, the wonders of the favorite, the re-tweet, the likes from all the adoring followers. Social media has created quixotic echo chambers filled with nothing but fading reverberations of momentary happiness, and it has become the greatest drug in society”, Ha Pi screamed, now half out of his chair and supporting himself with his clinching hands on the table.

Ha Pi looked around the restaurant and realized that the members of the restaurant collective had started to notice. Like high functioning social insects, they had picked up on chemical receptors, signaling that an intruder was in their midst. Ha Pi lowered himself into his chair, pulled his shirt down, and assumed the pose of a “good little worker bee”.

“And, if you cultivated your message,” Ha Pi continued in a stressed-out whisper, “massaged the crowd by delivering reaffirming prose - preaching to the converted as it were, the rewards could be financially rewarding.”

Ha Pi had failed to do this and, as a result, had fewer than 20 followers on his Twitter account, most of whom were social rejects more pathetic than him. Binky was one of them.

At present, it didn’t matter for Ha Pi’s perfect thought was not perfect. Ha Pi surveyed the restaurant and noticed the collective had returned to their lunches.

“Why is it so hard to create perfection.? Why?” Ha Pi protested to Binky.

Ha Pi looked at Binky, who seemed unwilling to commit to an answer. Ha Pi began to wonder, like a child might, if he could remodel Binky’s head into a post-modern “Sponge Bob” made of play dough and adorned with ice cream sprinkles, when the waiter, with his plastic, worldly view grin, deposited their meals upon the table. Ha Pi looked at his sandwich. It seemed a bit disheveled. Perhaps, it was due to the waiter’s rush or the chef’s sexual dissatisfaction. Whatever the case may be, it was definitively, not perfect.

Ha Pi moved in his chair, lifting one of his buttocks so he could fart. He looked back at his screen and completed his tweet.

“I am eating a perfect meal at my favorite restaurant. Next, I will take a perfect shit which will be made in the image of God.” A smirk stretched effortlessly over his mouth.

“Yes! No, something is wrong! What is it?” thought Ha Pi.

“Aren’t you happy, Ha Pi?” Binky whined.

“Eat a bowl of fuck!” Ha Pi snapped back at Binky.

Binky’s face took a turn for the worse. Binky’s eye’s filled up with a solution of mucin, lipids, lysozyme, lactoferrin, lipocalin, lacritin, immunoglobulins, glucose, urea, sodium, and potassium, but mostly it contained sadness.

“I love you, Ha Pi,” whispered Binky. “Don’t you love me?”

Ha Pi felt a pang of disgust. The idea of love wasn’t foreign to him but the feeling surely was.

Ha Pi’s eyes, burning with recycled sanctimonious rhetoric, turned their attention to Binky. He spoke in a voice that sounded like nails carving into a blackboard.

“I love you! The great lie! We don’t believe it when we say it. We don’t believe it when we hear it. Yet, we have learned to pretend, allowing it to grease the wheels of society. Brick by brick, lie by lie, civilization has built great towers of ‘I love you’, tall enough to kiss the sky,” Ha Pi said, rising slowly from his chair.

Ha Pi, a man whose spirit had been broken upon the rails of progress, had turned tormenting Binky into a perverse sort of sport. And, he was just warming up.

“Yes, I love you Binky. I love you like a beautiful sunset, a famous painting, and a fond memory. I love you like a favorite movie, an old book, and a ripped plush doll. I love you like a broken promise, a well-used lie, and a soiled piece of underwear. Underwear bearing the stain of shitting myself when I killed that old whining dog in the yard. That scratchy, growling, wet, furry reminder that life’s end is a torturous nightmare, a melodrama that is played out to grow the coffers of the “I love you” engineers. The engineers who won’t let us go,” Ha Pi preached, now standing on his toes.

Ha Pi hovered over Binky. His eyes, greasy windows of a soiled soul, measured Binky’s fear. His breath, a combination of acrid tobacco, bacon, and eggs, drained like a cesspool into Binky’s nostrils. He moved closer and, like a butcher sensing it was time, prepared to gut the pig.

Then he noticed a smell. It was the collective. There were the sounds, too, chairs moving uneasily over the linoleum floors, and the absence of clank, clank…clank. Ha Pi glanced out of the corner of his eye and noticed one industrious little bee taking his picture, sending it out into the ether. Fear, once again, raised its ugly head, making Ha Pi sit down and give Binky a contorted smile.

“Yes, I love you. I love you, Binky,” Ha Pi muttered while pulling down his shirt and assuming the pose of a “good little worker bee”.

Ha Pi turned his attention back to the computer screen and pressed the blue Tweet button.

The words, encoded into their binary value, strode purposefully out of Ha Pi’s laptop and into the digital verse. Then, something happened that was out of the ordinary. God, which has the binary value of 01000111 01101111 01100100, became doG - 01100100 01101111 01000111. So, the tweet had now become:

“I am eating a perfect meal at my favorite restaurant. Next, I will take a perfect shit which will be made in the image of doG.”

Was it random, a result of measuring a particle in superposition, an answer to a probabilistic formula, or the hand of a more determinant force? Was a foreign power at work here, God, or, perhaps, the Devil?

Whatever it was that changed the tweet, had embedded itself inside the message. It was now a seminal meme, capable of turning the apparent solid foundation of matter upon which we stand into a radicalized field. Everything had become a roll of the dice, a game of probability, a sea of changing waves threatening our very sense of reality.

To many, it would have seemed a small thing or, perhaps, nothing at all. But, nothing is an odd thing. It is a field that, when disturbed, creates something. In fact, nothing is everything. And, this simple tweet of Ha Pi’s had excited the full gaze of nothingness, that infinite void which is so damn pervasive.

Ha Pi, unaware of the turmoil he had just started, looked at Binky. Binky’s mouth began to curl, like a gravity’s rainbow, producing a radiant smile that bent around the dark matter that surrounded the table.

“I love you, too,” Binky said, assuming the pose of a “good little worker bee”.

”Why…Why Binky?” Ha Pi asked, feeling his soul vibrate ever so slightly.