The Celestial Instructi0n (22 page)

“What?” said Xtance. As virtually every other MIT student who had
thought about such things, she carried a knife, a loupe, a monocular, a
lighter, a compact skein of high test Dacron fishing line, a folded sheet of
mylar, and a flashlight. She turned on the tiny flashlight and illuminated
Joex’s feet. “See—nice and dry. Let’s go to the next building over. What are
you shouting about?”

At the instant that she spoke this, a tall woman dressed in what
appeared to be a black suit with long shiny leather gloves accompanied by a
serious-looking man in a Brooks Brothers off-the-shelf pulled open the rear
door of 765, against the tide of those who were leaving. He was openly carrying
the small gold badge of a Special Agent along with his service Glock .40, while
she just displayed her compact Glock, still warm from its holster. They were
grimly looking at faces of those streaming past them as then went in.

Manager
Hu rarely had visitors in the evening and it took him a while to stand, reach
for his cane, and shuffle to the door. “Colonel Hu! Stand down!” It had been a
long, long while since Manager Hu had heard his rank, but it didn’t affect his
pace in reaching the metal door and unlatching it. The humidity had turned to a
chill in the evening and quickly ushered in Commander Ji while his driver,
rather than waiting in the car, was standing attentively with his hands
slightly lifted to his hips as if he were going to lift something..

Manager Hu urged the Commander to sit and have a
mug of tea to ward off the evening air. “Please, Colonel. Have you shut down
the computer strike?” Commander Ji insisted.

Manager Hu said nothing as he prepared the hot
plate and the mug of cold water that he poured from crockery. He then asked,
“So, my brother-in-law has changed his mind?”

“The Council and the Central Military Commission are opposed for
now, as well, Colonel. It is not the right time.”

Manager Hu selected a pinch of tea from a tiny cubical paper box
and crushed it under his nose, seeing if he could sense all the subtly of the
history of this particular leaf. “From our history before we were China until I
crushed this tea, they have decided that this instant is not yet right? Is that
the message, Commander?”

“Please, Colonel. Have you shut down the strike? I am to take over
this facility now. It is time for you to rest, Colonel.”

Manager Hu noticed the steam beginning to rise from the water in
the aluminum pan he had set upon the hot plate. “No, it is done. The thousands
of years of history focus on this spot, at this instant. It is too bright for
us. But it shines regardless whether we blink or squint or shy away from it.”

Commander Ji a good thirty years younger than the elder man as
well as taller and much more powerful, rested his good left hand on Manager
Hu’s wrist as his twisted right touched the leather flapped over his 9mm QSZ.
“Let us shut it down together, Colonel.”

As if cued to a choreographic memory, Manager Hu drew away slowly
from the Command, smartly snapped the center of his cane on the corner of his
desk. The cane broke and the bottom third hung by a thread from its body.
Commander Ji, not alarmed, even amused by the elderly man’s anger—even breaking
his own cane—just waited for it to play out and to give in to the inevitable.

Manager Hu, lifted his cane, took the hanging piece with his left
hand and tore it off. It had broken cleanly on its elliptical ceramic groove.
Now with a piece of the cane in each hand, Colonel Hu thrust the longer piece,
whose breaking had produced a hollow spear as sharp as freshly broken glass,
into the groin of the Commander. The Commander involuntarily bent over as if
respectfully greeting thousands of years of history. Colonel Hu then drove the
shorter spear, whose elliptical blade mirrored the one on the right, into the right
carotid and subclavian arteries and through the tough gristle of the
Commander’s pharynx. The titanium cannula gushed blood in heavy pulses. Commander
Ji fell to the floor, fetally, gurgling. The Manager turned back to his tea,
putting a generous pinch into the mug, which he filled with water not quite yet
boiling. He cupped the mug in both hands to enjoy its warmth. Noting that the
Commander was not in line-of-sight of the open door, Manager Hu opened the
flimsy aluminum door stepped outside and offered the steaming mug to the driver.
The driver accepted the hot mug with pleasure and with a slight twitch of his
shoulders gave his respect to the older man as generous host. Manager Hu smiled
and returned a barely perceptible dip of his head.

“The Commander and I will be talking for a while, please stay warm
while we do,” said Manager Hu. The driver said nothing but blew the hot vapor
off the surface of the tea as if it were a soul that was being freed.

Manager Hu then returned to his office, closed and latched the
door, sat down on his cot and began speaking to the corpse. “Inevitability. We
should be glad that we are connected so closely to history. Manager Hu rubbed
his thighs and consciously took a breath that was full of the smell of tea and
blood. He thoughts flickered to Michael Voide, then he thought of the Chinese
people as though they were a leafy covering a in a late summer forest.
“Commander, I am you. And we both are the Chinese people. It is too late now to
turn aside the plough; after midnight, we are done. But the Chinese people
cannot be obstructed: while each leaf turns into a rotted net of veins, the
fall color binds fast.”

Xtance and Joex reached the end of the sewer that connected the
765 building with its neighbor, virtually a twin of the warehouse. Unlike 765,
its neighbor had not been used since it had been closed months before. She
decided that rather than waiting it was best if Joex and she put as much
distance between them and the authorities who were closing the ring on the twin
building. Xtance pointed the way to the second floor and to the window with the
vintage wrought iron fire escape. With both their weight on the vertical ladder
within a cage, it rattled and scraped down within six feet of the pavement
where both Joex and Xtance simply let themselves drop to the ground.

“Let’s go.” Xtance led them north, away from the shadow lab and
toward the thoroughfare that led back to Cambridge. They walked quickly and did
not turn back. On the way, Xtance spoke to Joex. “Why would we believe you.
There are so many outlandish stories in the world, which not surprisingly, turn
out to be false. True stories are beyond outlandish; they are absurd, even
impossible, until their logic is incorporated into a new world-view. In
particular, there are many outlandish stories about the Church of the Crux. Who
knows what the facts are? Perhaps so-called apostates seeking revenge for
imagined internal attacks. You, homeless, just out of the blue a target for a
Crux assassin? Even if they are only a church in the same way organized crime
is a church, or a major bank stripping their stockholders of value in exchange
for outrageous executive compensation is a church. Perhaps these organizations
seek out the weak that lack the fundamental strength to keep the same opinion
from one week to the next.”

“But we do know Mark and Sinder, they were two who committed
suicide after associating with the Church. I knew Mark personally, he is the
Prophet who led me to the shadow lab my first time. Mark loved learning. Mark
loved technology. And he loved learning new skills that would entertain or help
people. Juggling. Shadow puppetry. Bicycle mechanic. Copy editor. Tailor. He
was recruited into the Crux in his first year on campus, it was socially
challenging for him to go from home-schooling several thousand miles away to
the urban MIT campus. Especially for a beautiful gay man. The Church of the
Crux seemed at first to provide that support, and simultaneously challenge his
intellect.

He told me of the wonders of the Games Machine, which he described
as the ultimate video game. A game in which you wanted to learn every detail
and allusion, to know every answer including those which changed depending upon
context and semantic ambit. For more than a year it seemed to be helpful to his
academic achievement. He was brilliant even by school standards: he
matriculated at 13 and taught algebraic topology in a novel manner at 15. He
had inherited the soul of Alan Turing. But eventually despite the intense
growth he felt from using the Games Machine, he was always troubled after his
sessions at the Crux. He would shy away from people, he began to be afraid for
apparently no reason of new people he met. He was always looking for signs that
he would be attacked in the motions and words of those around him. ‘Paranoid
semiotics’ we mocked him at first.”

They got on the Red Line going west and Xtance continued.

“The word ‘intervention’ started being mention in reference to
Mark. But despite the signs of emotional disturbance, he without question was
benefitting a great deal intellectually from his time at the Church. He began
to work on a project to replace the Games Machine. Called the Cataract, it was
to be a free alternative to the Crux, which Mark was beginning to find
oppressive despite the euphoria of the Church. But the Crux owned him. I guess
that was our failure: we worship learning and discovery so much that the
worship exceeds our better judgment about safety and proportionality. But to
know
that
is once again “knowledge” to be “known.” It is maddingly
self-referential.

Once before a woman I knew died of a heart attack, which I should
have known was brought about by forgetting to eat or drink while gaming for 72
hours straight. The piss pooling at her feet ought to have been a clue—but…it
was a time in which we thought that friends left each other alone to make their
own decisions. Even ones which might kill them.”

“Mark was churning out papers in his field, in both depth and
breadth and somehow…intensity…they were some of the best work I’ve ever seen.
We have these cubbyholes at the math department. It is traditional to leave
copies of your unpublished papers in them so that bored faculty and students
can read and mark them up. Of course, being anonymous, they were viciously but at
the same time effectively attacked, criticized, and…perfected. I remember one
weekend Mark had filled every cubbyhole on the width with a new paper to submit
for publication. It was unimaginable.”

“But then things got worse. Mark had trouble sleeping. More than once,
he would call me at 3 or 4 AM and complain of people rattling his windows and
making his floor buckle. I urged him to see a campus counselor, but he said
that there was counseling—he called them ‘interviews’—within the Church. At any
cost, he could not give up the Games Machine. But he was working feverously on
the Cataract to replace it. The cost did turn out to be a heavy one. After
being served a cease and desist demand from the Church, he asphyxiated himself on
the toilet.” Xtance furrowed her brow. Her lips grew white.

“I was asked to fetch his papers and to submit the ones that were
sufficiently completed to warrant peer review. I got three of his papers
published posthumously, I am sure I would have gotten many more published if I
had known where he kept his research notes. But then I stumbled on his greatest
work, the Cataract.”

Xtance was silent for a while. The train passed Charles.

“You know, the shadow lab had a Games Machine project going at one
time. Or what I imagine a secular Games Machine would be like. Self-adapting.
Constantly improving. Faster than real-time. Inclusive. Emotionally
non-judgmental. Wholly focused on activating every cognitive circuit in your
head. Integrating your senses with your newly awakened intellect. Yes, it
sounds like pretentious or platitudinous tripe. Orgone energy. But we knew it
was possible. Mark and Sinder were proof-of-concept, at least to me. But we
dropped it.”

The train passed Kendall/MIT. “Next one” said Xtance to Joex as he
looked at her questioningly.

“We decided that the exercise was not yet human, or humane. It’s
my view that people are differing projections of the same entity skipping
through time and dimension. It is a family resemblance in which we don’t
necessarily share any particular traits with any other being, but yet, we
resemble one another—for want of a better term—morally. That is the family
trait. A moral sense. But not a pre-packaged sense of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’
but the on-going inquiry into mutually benefitting the world and the
multiverse. What evokes a networked diversity. Imagine an exponential version
of Metcalfe’s Law. A powerset of cardinality. Anyway. If I am speaking
gibberish, I apologize,”

“Each one of us, and that include beings we may discover in the
future from other worlds both inside and outside this planet, is an aspect of
one another. Like a photon with its coupled magnetic and electrical component
in differing domains, or perhaps as gravity may appear attenuated because of
its skipping and churning through parallel dimensions, we are each as important
as a component’s description of something in aggregate that we can’t yet name.”
Xtance saw that she was losing Joex. “Or, in another way, I believe in the
saying: ‘
Do to others as you would
have them do to you,’ except—there are no ‘others.’”

When
the train went under an underpass, its windows reflected ectoplastic people
swaying around them.