The Celestial Instructi0n (23 page)

Learning is non-sense if it is not in the context of other people,
or proceeding by your own volition. Machine learning as practiced by the Crux
produces freaks of nature as much alien to our species as silicon beings from
dead red dwarf.

Then,
are we left with a bare room, an instructor with a piece of chalk and the
student? With no benefit from our machines? We now have a new project, but one
that is not for everyone. The Cataract.

“The
Cataract is now the persistent project of the shadow lab. It is paradoxically
both the most permanent and complete exhibit of our human culture yet at the
same time the most forbidden, illegal, and troubling. To work on the Cataract
is as painful as a blind man reading a cactus. I hope you can learn more about
that project someday, especially since the Crux has thrust itself upon you.”

The train stopped at Central, Xtance got out with Joex following
her. On the platform, despite the crowd ebbing and flowing around them, she
continued.

“I am Xtance, or extance, or emergence, or, the intelligent and
reflective thing that appears from apparently nowhere from the quark soup of
the world. How is this not the most amazing thing in the world?” A drop of
condensation dropped on Xtance’s cheek and as if it were the most natural thing
for him to do, Joex wiped it off with the back of his index finger. Xtance
didn’t flinch.

“I am not afraid of submerging back into the soup because another
perhaps more complicated and nuanced being will emerge, just as billions of
billions of moral entities have already coalesced from insensate physical law.
We decided—at least I carefully considered and adopted the belief—that if the
technology wasn’t moral then it wasn’t suitable. And its morality had to be
teased out at the same time as the technology itself. It is no good to develop
an atomic bomb and only then develop an idea on when is it just and moral to use.

Morality is like the atmosphere, it gets thinner as you get away
from the surface, away from the people.

My father taught biology in a high school in California when I was
growing up. He would tell me this story again and again, changing the details
this way or that to reflect—I realize now—the inflections of my growth from a
child, to a little girl and then to womanhood. He would always ask me at the
end when he kissed me good night, what I think the story meant? I had answers
then and have a fresh answer now. My answer may be different tomorrow.

This is one version that he would tell: “Once upon a time there
was a Sultan who after years of fighting and privation, succeeded in uniting
the seven eastern lands under one law. His advisors urged him to establish a
harem, but he insisted that he would be happiest with a single lover and wife.”

“His advisors scoured the land for a suitable woman. They found
the exquisite Husna who truly was the most beautiful in the seven lands. Indeed
her entire life was occupied with seeking and displaying her beauty, which was
breath-taking and glorious.”

“Husna and her mother agreed that Husna was to become the Sultan’s
wife; a conclusion such as this had been coveted by Husna’s family since the
day she was born.”

“In celebration of the betrothal, the Sultan sent Husna a
nightingale to sing teru, teru, teru, teru each day to remind her of her
betrothed and the beauty around her. But Husna, while she enjoyed the thought
of being wife of a Sultan, did not care for spending time away from her life of
acquiring charm and attraction. She did not like the teru, teru, teru, teru
reminding her of the reality of caring for the bird or eventually the Sultan
himself and affairs of state.”

“In truth, it was the idea of being a Sultan’s wife which attracted
Husna and her family, but not the Sultan himself who she deemed too old and war-scarred
to be a suitable lover. She began to resent the bird’s piercing song and had
its cage moved to first to one room then to another until she could no longer
hear it.”

“A month passed, the wedding grew near, and it was announced that
the Sultan was to traveling to unite with his bride. Husna prepared herself
with all the best cosmetics and fragrances, the softest silks and the most
cunning woven cottons. She employed the latest means of softening her skin and
keeping her aesthetic body supple and pleasing in every sense. Finally, she
remembered the nightingale.

“Brought before her, the uncared for bird was dead. Husna was
beside herself. She brought ewers of warm scented water for the bird to soak
in, hoping that she could revitalize the Sultan’s gift if she just could
replace the nourishment which she had neglected. She brought plates of insects
and small creatures cooked in olive oil by her own kitchen master that she hoped
the bird would begin to feast upon and recover its health and song. But of
course nothing broke the silence.”

“When the Sultan arrived with his retinue he warmly greeted Husna
and her family. To Husna’s and her mother and aunt’s pleasure he greedily took
in her looks and wondrous beauty. With a reputation for inquiring about the
well-being of even the humblest of his subjects, he then asked about Husna’s
nightingale, which he loved for its bittersweet song, reminding him that there
was more than violence and brutality in the world.”

“Dead. Poisoned,” Husana lied, “here is its poor body” She
presented the bird still greasy and wet and ruffled from Husna’s frantic
attempts to revive it.

The Sultan saw the emaciated remains, the pooling rainbows on the
water, and the tufts of unpreened feathers, torn and neglected. He took the
bird into his own hand to warm its remains. He closed his fingers and thought
for a moment. No one spoke until he broke the silence.

“Husna, my betrothed. When you become my wife, you shall be kept
with your fragrances and oils for a month—sealed into your apartment alone,
without food or water or companionship outside your own reflection. Perhaps you
will learn to sing teru, teru, teru, teru to replace this poor one.”

“Or you may leave to seek out the beauty in others to replace what
you have taken away from the world.”

Husna had the sense of not further denying her neglect. She admitted
all. The Sultan knelt on one knee to kiss her thigh, but did not relent. She
considered and, while she treasured the idea of being the Sultan’s wife, she
preferred to live, even if unmarried and humiliated. And so Husna and the
Sultan parted.

The Sultan returned to his palace with the corpse of the bird to
bury in his garden and Husna was shunned from her home.

Here the story stops because even long accounts can never tell the
entire tale: it was said that the Sultan died alone, revered by all, never
finding true love; but that Husna, old and withered and full of remorse and the
sense of a world larger than herself, died ministering to lepers, the most
reviled and feared of the sick.” Then my father would always say, “What do you
think that means?”

“As a girl I thought this story had to do with arbitrary
patriarchal power—asshole men, or stereotyped woman’s vanity or even how stupid
it was to marry.

Now I think it means that you cannot wait until the end to remain
humanely connected to one another, regardless of the power of the distraction. You
cannot just neglect each other and trust that we can make up for the starvation
until some hypothetical future. We need to nurture differing aspects of ourselves
and each other every day, for even a great power is irrelevant, becomes alien,
if it becomes twisted and skewed from its human source, as, for example, the Games
Machine.”

The Games Machine, as I understand it, has no morality. It is in
every sense an alien life form with utter disregard for human or any other
life. Let’s put this crudely: I believe that you cannot understand an alien
until you have fucked them. The Games Machine has no aspect that cares to be
fucked. And so, it is not a moral being and so—unsuitable. Xtance mocked
herself. “If you were to try to master the intricacies of this position,” she
fluttered her eyes in an exaggerated manner, “you would have shriveled far past
uselessness before making any progress into its mysteries.”

Xtance looked up at the lattice of tiles on the wall. For every
instance of the word ‘I’ in what I have used, you may substitute ‘we.’ And the
things whereof I cannot speak, I must remain silent.”

She smiled. “You realize that if asked in a year or two what my
father’s story means, I may have a completely different answer. He is pretty
sick now and I hope that he will hear my next interpretation, if he can tell me
the story once more.”

With that, she grew quiet. She acted as though a great weight had
risen from her. She relaxed. “I know a place to rest and to watch this morality
theater play out. One who calls himself Jimmy Hoffa, an expert in stable symbol
automata. Jimmy realized that he had become a brokerage excubitor some years
ago. He would have gone to college, but as he explains, while writing the
application entrance essay he started out in the usual way, but concluded that
he would be better off self-educating. It has worked out for Jimmy.”

Xtance noticed Joex’s flagging attention—he was blinking in an
exaggerated way just to keep his eyes open—and trailed off the explanation,
“the brokerage realized that his trades, although with virtually no capital
behind them, had a consistent return over the years of more than thirty
percent. “They simply mirrored them with vastly more money, and concealed them
under a welter of hedges, integrated counter-parties offsets and leveraged swaps.
He would make thousand dollars in a year, while they would make a hundred
million. Statistically regressed with other seemingly prescient small
investors, or “excubitors,” it made ordinary front-running as primitive as
knocking over a lemonade stand: the brokerage realized that an individual’s
intuition dwarfed the significance of his actual wealth. K
indersher wisdom is still wisdom.
” Xtance drifted off into silence,
watching Joex. “Yeah, Jimmy Hoffa is the man.”

Joex was just exhausted and he could hardly feel his legs. He
wanted to piss but was too tired even to try to find a toilet. He understood
fragments of Xtance’s conversation. “Sounds as if the brokers were falling for
the Gambler’s Fallacy. The little guy might not have any special insight at
all. He might have been just lucky.” He would tell her about the Games
interview later. First, sleep.

“But the Statistician’s Fallacy cancels the Gambler’s Fallacy.
That is, the mistake of assuming the underlying game is a fair,” Xtance
murmured, as to herself.

She did say one last thing as walked up to Mass Ave and then out
River Street, as if she suddenly had realized it. “Some day, the Cataract. But
for now, the motley itinerant enterprise of the shadow lab is our Games Machine.”

First Celestial Michael Voide was speaking to Cassandra Jones
through an encrypted link. “You tell me that you have spoken to this student
Margaret Mahoney and that, leading the exodus of this techie commune, was hurt
while being questioned. But that misses the point: when did Joex Baroco die?”

“We don’t how he left. We are ransacking the building looking for
hidden exits, perhaps a disguise. Obviously, he had help. Ms Mahoney said that
one they call a ‘prophet’ named Xtance was with Baroco when he left. She says
that Baroco guessed his role, the link with Riu. His knowledge is close enough
to be a problem. His memory has some context now. He is linking spies with Riu.
“Robert Marks” with switches, spies, and the Internet. Though, I doubt even
with the knowledge that he or anyone around him can do anything of substance.
Are you going to alert the Chinamen that they need to execute?”

The First Celestial was picking at a fingernail. It was bleeding. He
was insane with anger. “A lot of people are disappearing, but not the one I
asked you to disappear for me. These malformed mighty geeks could be a threat.
I will tell the Chinese nothing. Let them figure it out. That reminds me that—
Jim Rauchmann. Jim, Jim, Jim. Isn’t it better to vanish in ignorance, with a
calm mind and peaceful body?” The First Celestial tore another strip off his
bleeding nail, well into the quick. He breathed in with the pain.

“Yes, First Celestial,” said Security Throne Jones.

“Return to your parich when you are through. Strike that. Come
directly to me. I have another calling for you, Throne.”

“Yes, First Celestial.”

“Now, let me talk to your driver. I am sure he would welcome some
spiritual counseling directly from the First Choir.”

Cassandra did not need to be a soothsayer to divine the purpose of
the counseling. Her urge to obey without question and her urge to survive
fought without quarter within her; externally, but she was as icy calm as a
Games interviewee not wishing to receive further chastisement.

“Driver, the first Celestial would like to interview you
personally. The driver turned and held out his muscular arm for her phone. He
also had a calm and untroubled face.

Meanwhile, the absolute master of the Church of the Crux began
tearing at another nail.