Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (29 page)

The debate about the Vlad Enigma gave birth to a general interest in problems of disinformation. The Prisoner’s Dilemma was dragged out of heavy mathematical tomes and popularized. The Turing Machine was reexamined in tabloid newspapers. The Empedoclean paradox even got mentioned on the Johnny Carson show.

Two Berkeley acid-heads, known on Telegraph Avenue as The Cat and The Dog, dreamed up a more intense disinformation matrix in 1980. “What would happen,” The Cat asked one day in the Cafe Mediterraneum, “if we bought a truck and painted on the side of it INTERNATIONAL COCAINE IMPORTERS INC., and drove it around the streets?”

“In Berkeley,” The Dog said, “the cops would just laugh. They’d be sure it was another put-on by the Hog Farm or the Merry Pranksters or somebody. But in San Francisco they wouldn’t take a chance. The first cop would stop the truck and search it.”

“Nah,” said an unsuccessful poet named Robert W. Anton. “They’re more hip than that in San Francisco. But in L.A ….”

The debate spread from the Med to Moe’s, from Moe’s to Sather Gate, leapt the Bay to appear in Herb Caen’s column, eventually spread from coast to coast as a tag-end poser to cap all discussions of the Vlad Enigma. Finally,
taking the logical experimental step, a San Francisco theologian named Malaclypse the Younger actually painted a truck in very tasteful and professional lettering and drove it around the Bay Area for all to see:

He was stopped and searched three times the first week—once in Sausalito, which is the cocaine and Vaseline capital of Unistat and has particularly suspicious cops. He was never stopped in Berkeley. After the second week he was no longer stopped in San Francisco. Immediately a whole fleet of similar trucks began to appear.

Disinformation had been incarnated. “All hail Eris,” said Malaclypse, a pious man in his own odd way. Virtually none of the trucks was stopped and searched after the first month. Cops who had made horses’ asses of themselves in the joking phase of this uprising of surrealist politics refused to take the risk of being laughed at again. Nobody cared to guess how many of the trucks were really carrying cocaine.

It all became academic when victimless crimes were redefined in the Code Hubbard.

GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

President Hubbard’s way of encouraging the Longevity Revolution was characteristic. She established a yearly reward of $100,000 for the
nonscientist
who made the most important contribution to the fight against aging. Since the scientists engaged in life-extension research were already one of the two most heavily funded groups in Unistat (the other was the space engineers), scientists were amused, but not offended, by this wild idea.

The first year there were 5,237 entries submitted. A spot check by the Beast showed that 4,023 came from the new leisure class—ex-workers who had invented themselves out of several jobs and had $50,000 to $80,000 annual incomes. The others came from people who had been unemployed by these inventions. Evidently, many of them were getting bored with a life that consisted mostly of fucking, TV, and vacations, even though that had been what most primates imagined they would do if they didn’t have to work for a living.

The second year there were over 30,000 entries—much as Hubbard had expected.

The Longevity Revolution was having its inevitable effect. People who were expecting to live for centuries instead of decades were spontaneously taking the Next Step in their thinking. The hominids of Terra were becoming reoriented to the search for Immortality.

And a second trend was becoming obvious. The majority of practical, testable hyper-longevity proposals were coming in from the colonists in the L5 space-cities.

The domesticated primates of Terra were beginning to consciously guide their own evolution toward becoming Cosmic Immortals.

To Justin Case it appeared that the administration was the first government in history to take Beethoven seriously. To him, Hubbard’s whole philosophy was obviously derived from the last movement of the
Ninth.

Since a cat has the Buddha mind, even Marvin Gardens had had his own experience of the First Noble Truth. He had made the mistake, once, in 1981, of eating a heavy slice of hash-candy from Afghanistan instead of his after-dinner snort of coke and somehow there was an eruption of activity in the grief circuits of the thalamus.
The tramp did not move.
He saw the skull beneath the skin, like
Eliot; the tears poured and he sat there, weeping for allflesh, for alltormented flesh, for alltormentedfuckingflesh, howling in anguish at the withdrawal of the nipple of self-absorption. He was in Belsen. He stood in the white light as Hiroshima was incinerated. He watched the Grand Army retreat in the snow from Moscow. The tramp fell eternally toward the sidewalk and he saw the wolves close in on the terrified caribou, the smirk of Caligula and all sadists everywhere, the parents of a thousand wars weeping with him over murdered children (“We should be gentle with children,” a Voice said reproachfully from a window in space), and for a minute he had a crazy religious vision that WE HAVE TO STOP THE KILLING there is no other way and it is too late for another alternative it is exactly that simple and you can even repeat it in italics
we have to stop the killing
and he was so excited at the sudden clarity of it that he could see his whole future as nonstop witnessing to the truth of this vision. He would invent his own TV show and become a supersalesman and sell it to the top network and it would be the Corporal Works of Mercy Hour. It would have no acts of violence or hurting. It would just be decent people doing decent things, as enumerated in the famous passage from Aquinas: visiting the sick and imprisoned, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless, aiding the oppressed, comforting the afflicted, and praying for us all.

It was that simple, beyond all the irony and agony of his tortured humor, and you could even say it in one word:
ahimsa.

Yea-a-a-ay, God! Glory, glory, glory.

He staggered to his desk to record this revelation, but when he got there microamnesia had already set in and he couldn’t remember what it was that had seemed so clear
and important, but another Voice was coming through and he scrawled rapidly:

At that very moment, in Los Angeles, Eve Hubbard decided she was going to run for President.

“So that,” Justin Case concludes triumphantly (he is dreaming about giving a lecture to an audience of trans-vestites), “the elements in the montage may be of any number—five, fifteen, fifty, whatever—and there be any emotions you can imagine implicit in each one of them separately. Nonetheless, the total emotional effect emerges from the montage, not from the elements. Film is the visual demonstration of Fuller’s synergetic geometry.”

“You’re fuller shit!” one of the transvestites yelled.

Who shit? Justin shit. Bullshit! Who shit? He was being carried around by the time-dwarfs in a jeweled chair wearing the Crown of Thorns. It was Mardi Gras. He was having a swell time. He decided to go on lecturing them.

“The montage of Chinatown or Chapel Perilous takes us to the Lair of Fu Manchu—the center of Power—the occult Nine Unknown Illuminated Ones who rule the world—the secret of capitalism and ownership—the cruel Cross that separates inside from outside, without windows.”

But then he wet his pants and they were all laughing at him, laughing mockingly and childishly, as they closed in with the tar and feathers. They had found out he was a no-good shit.

   “In other words,” Blake Williams lectures, “what collapses the state vector and er um determines or ah least ways brings it about that a new quantum state appears can only be a Hidden Variable implicate in the whole system—the biggest whole system.”

“You mean when Ignatz throws the brick—”

“If Ignatz is a quantum physicist and is throwing a photon, Krazy or Schrödinger’s Cat can be in any of several eigenstates, um, yes, so that in effect the whole universe participates in the ah decision as to whether the Kat will be hit by the brick um ah or the photon ah as the case may be.”

“Professor,” Natalie asked finally, driven to the Edge, “are you putting me on?”

“My dear I am um merely giving you the most consistent and literal interpretation of Bell’s Theorem as developed by Dr. Jeffrey Chew at U.C.-Berkeley and Dr. Fritjof Capra in
The Tao of Physics.”

“The whole universe
decides?”

“Well there is um a certain degree of metaphor involved….”

“You know, Professor”—Natalie sits up and gives him a level glance—“I met a midget once, a nasty little son-of-a-bitch, but he told me something I never forgot. All that exists is metaphor, he said, and
whoever controls our metaphors controls us.”

“As an anthropologist,” Blake Williams said, “I must agree. Are we living in an occult thriller, a porn movie, a philosophical treatise, a sci-fi novel? It depends on which parts of our experience we choose to highlight. That brings
us to the question: Are we writing our life-scripts, or is there a Hidden Variable, as the new quantum theories suggest?”

“You mean the whole universe will decide what we’re gonna do next?” Natalie wanted a straight answer.

“Well um that’s the alternative to saying there are multiple universes where anything that can happen does happen ah and it’s quite democratic, really, since every lesser system within the whole system gets its vote.”

Natalie’s semantic circuit was working on overload. “You’re telling me that each of us and the chair over there and each atom in us and in the chair and in Marvin’s cocaine—we all get one vote?”

“Um perhaps we have carried the metaphor till it staggers …”

“It sounds like Mozart’s music,” Natalie said, seeing the window again. “All as mechanical as a clockwork and yet as free as a dream….”

GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

President Hubbard had largely abolished crime by abolishing prisons.

This was one of her most astonishing achievements, since most primates thought prisons were preventatives, not causes, of crime.

Eve Hubbard, needless to say, had always been a unique
Terran, which was why she was the first Black President of Unistat. Although she was, like most brilliant people, extremely good-looking—the genetic link between health, hedonism, cleverness, and good looks (the “bright-eyes-and-bushy-tails” gestalt) is true in all species on all known planets—Eve had dropped out of films after a smash success as the supersexed ebony android in
Gentlemen Prefer Clones
. She had gone on to major in philosophy at UCLA, and was almost denied her Ph.D. because her thesis was a thorough rejection of all philosophies hitherto invented by Terran primates. She went on to become one of the first neurogeneticists. In fact, it was due to certain discoveries in primate genetics that she had decided to go into politics next.

The Code Hubbard, the most important revision of primate jurisprudence since the Code Napoleon, divided all crimes into three classes.

Crimes against convention
—so-called victimless crimes—were not penalized at all. A citizen could be interrogated about each behavior only after complaints by a minimum of one hundred neighbors. The interrogators, a group of trained neurogeneticists, would then publish a report, either mildly recommending
relocation
of the heretic, or, much more commonly, strongly advising the neighbors to mind their own business.

Many libertarians objected to this, since they wanted victimless crimes abolished utterly. Hubbard had pragmatically realized that such libertarian penology was impractical until the primates totally outgrew the morality delusion.

Those who chose relocation were assigned by the Beast to an environment where their heresy was “normal.” Most of them found that the Beast recommended an L5 space-city, and most of them liked it when they got there. They had
futique
genes.

Many of the heretics, of course, chose to stay where they were and go on annoying the bejesus out of their neighbors. This is the typical recalcitrant streak found in certain domesticated primates on all planets.

Crimes against property
were regarded as improper economics requiring adjustment. The felon was compelled to pay in full the value of that which had been appropriated or destroyed. If unable to pay, the felon then had a literal “debt to society.” The government paid the victim, and the felon repaid the government by working at half wages on some socially useful project, such as longevity research, space research, or just as a forest ranger in the growing number of national parks that were appearing since Industry was moved off the planet into Free Space.

Crimes of violence
were defined as the natural, inevitable, tragic, but intolerable resultant of some combination of genes, imprints, and conditioning. The biots who committed such acts were sent, without condemnation but irrevocably, to Hell.

Hell had previously been the state of Mississippi. After the aborigines were resettled in an environment suitable for two-circuit (prehominid) primates, Mississippi became Hell by simply surrounding it with a laser shield that made escape impossible. Everything within the shield was intact. The violent biots were free to do what they wanted, and they soon had several forms of feudalism, war, piracy, commerce, slavery, and other early primate institutions functioning in a manner that seemed normal to them.

Many violent biots and gene pools moved to Hell voluntarily, since it was the only remaining part of the world that fit their notions of proper primate society. Among those who migrated en masse and established sizable governments or robber bands in Hell were the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, the American Nazi Party, Hell’s Angels, and most of the People’s Ecology Party.