Axiomatic (42 page)

I don’t expect that I’ll march right in, though — any more than I expect the Earth to dive straight into the Sun. It’s been almost four years since Meltdown, and no attractor has captured me yet.

* * * *

I’ve heard dozens of ‘explanations’ for the events of that day, but I find most of them equally dubious —

rooted as they are in the world-views of particular attractors. One way in which I sometimes think of it, on 12 January, 2018, the human race must have crossed some kind of unforeseen threshold — of global population, perhaps — and suffered a sudden, irreversible change of psychic state.

Telepathy
is not the right word for it; after all, nobody found themself drowning in an ocean of babbling voices; nobody suffered the torment of empathic overload. The mundane chatter of consciousness stayed locked inside our heads; our quotidian mental privacy remained unbreached. (Or perhaps, as some have suggested, everyone’s mental privacy was
so thoroughly breached
that the sum of our transient thoughts forms a blanket of featureless white noise covering the planet, which the brain filters out effortlessly.)

In any case, for whatever reason, the second-by-second soap operas of other people’s inner lives remained, mercifully, as inaccessible as ever . . . but our skulls became completely permeable to each other’s values and beliefs, each other’s deepest convictions.

At first, this meant pure chaos. My memories of the time are confused and nightmarish; I wandered the city for a day and a night (I think), finding God (or some equivalent) anew every six seconds — seeing no visions, hearing no voices, but wrenched from faith to faith by invisible forces of dream logic. People moved in a daze, cowed and staggering — while ideas moved between us like lightning. Revelation followed contradictory revelation. I wanted it to stop, badly — I would have prayed for it to stop, if God had stayed the same long enough to be prayed to. I’ve heard other tramps compare these early mystical convulsions to drug rushes, to orgasms, to being picked up and dumped by ten-metre waves, ceaselessly, hour after hour — but looking back, I find myself reminded most of a bout of gastroenteritis I once suffered: a long, feverish night of interminable vomiting and diarrhoea. Every muscle, every joint in my body ached, my skin burned: I felt like I was dying. And every time I thought I lacked the strength to expel anything more from my body, another spasm took hold of me. By four in the morning, my helplessness seemed positively transcendental: the peristaltic reflex possessed me like some harsh — but ultimately benevolent — deity. At the time, it was the most religious experience I’d ever been through.

All across the city, competing belief systems fought for allegiance, mutating and hybridising along the way

. . . like those random populations of computer viruses they used to unleash against each other in experiments to demonstrate subtle points of evolutionary theory. Or perhaps like the historical clashes of the very same beliefs — with the length and timescales drastically shortened by the new mode of interaction, and a lot less bloodshed, now that the ideas themselves could do battle in a purely mental arena, rather than employing sword-wielding Crusaders or extermination camps. Or, like a swarm of demons set loose upon the Earth to possess all but the righteous . . .

The chaos didn’t last long. In some places seeded by pre-Meltdown clustering of cultures and religions

— and in other places, by pure chance — certain belief systems gained enough of an edge, enough of a foothold, to start spreading out from a core of believers into the surrounding random detritus, capturing adjacent, disordered populations where no dominant belief had yet emerged. The more territory these snowballing attractors conquered, the faster they grew. Fortunately — in this city, at least — no single attractor was able to expand unchecked: they all ended up hemmed in, sooner or later, by equally powerful neighbours — or confined by sheer lack of population at the city’s outskirts, and near voids of non-residential land.

Within a week of Meltdown, the anarchy had crystallised into more or less the present configuration, with ninety-nine per cent of the population having moved — or changed — until they were content to be exactly where — and who — they were.

I happened to end up between attractors — affected by many, but captured by none — and I’ve managed to stay in orbit ever since. Whatever the knack is, I seem to have it; over the years, the ranks of the tramps have thinned, but a core of us remains free.

In the early years, the people of the attractors used to send up robot helicopters to scatter pamphlets over the city, putting the case for their respective metaphors for what had happened — as if a well-chosen analogy for the disaster might be enough to win them converts; it took a while for some of them to understand that the written word had been rendered obsolete as a vector for indoctrination. Ditto for audiovisual techniques — and that still hasn’t sunk in everywhere. Not long ago, on a battery-powered TV set in an abandoned house, Maria and I picked up a broadcast from a network of rationalist enclaves, showing an alleged ‘simulation’ of Meltdown as a colour-coded dance of mutually carnivorous pixels, obeying a few simple mathematical rules. The commentator spouted jargon about self-organising systems — and lo, with the magic of hindsight, the flickers of colour rapidly evolved into the familiar pattern of hexagonal cells, isolated by moats of darkness (unpopulated except for the barely visible presence of a few unimportant specks; we wondered which ones were meant to be
us).

I don’t know how things would have turned out if there hadn’t been the pre-existing infrastructure of robots and telecommunications to allow people to live and work without travelling outside their own basins — the regions guaranteed to lead back to the central attractor — most of which are only a kilometre or two wide. (In fact, there must be many places where that infrastructure wasn’t present, but I haven’t been exactly plugged into the global village these last few years, so I don’t know how they’ve fared.) Living on the margins of this society makes me even more dependent on its wealth than those who inhabit its multiple centres, so I suppose I should be glad that most people are content with the status quo

— and I’m certainly delighted that they can co-exist in peace, that they can trade and prosper.

I’d rather die than join them, that’s all.

(Or at least, that’s true right here, right now.)

* * * *

The trick is to keep moving, to maintain momentum. There are no regions of perfect neutrality — or if there are, they’re too small to find, probably too small to inhabit, and they’d almost certainly drift as the conditions within the basins varied.
Near enough
is fine for a night, but if I tried to live in one place, day after day, week after week, then whichever attractor held even the slightest advantage would, eventually, begin to sway me.

Momentum, and confusion. Whether or not it’s true that we’re spared each other’s inner voices because so much uncorrelated babbling simply cancels itself out, my aim is to do just that with the more enduring, more coherent, more pernicious parts of the signal. At the very centre of the Earth, no doubt, the sum of all human beliefs adds up to pure, harmless noise: here on the surface, though, where it’s physically impossible to be equidistant from everyone, I’m forced to keep moving to average out the effects as best I can.

Sometimes I daydream about heading out into the countryside, and living in glorious clear-headed solitude beside a robot-tended farm, stealing the equipment and supplies I need to grow all my own food.
With Maria?
If she’ll come; sometimes she says yes, sometimes she says no. Haifa dozen times, we’ve told ourselves that we’re setting out on such a journey . . . but we’ve yet to discover a trajectory out of the city, a route that would take us safely past all the intervening attractors, without being gradually deflected back towards the urban centre. There must be a way out, it’s simply a matter of finding it —

and if all the rumours from other tramps have turned out to be dead ends, that’s hardly surprising: the only people who could know for certain how to leave the city are those who’ve stumbled on the right path and actually departed, leaving no hints or rumours behind.

Sometimes, though, I stop dead in the middle of the road and ask myself what I ‘really want’:

To escape to the country, and lose myself in the silence of my own mute soul?

To give up this pointless wandering and rejoin
civilisation?
For the sake of prosperity, stability, certainty: to swallow, and be swallowed by, one elaborate set of self-affirming lies?

Or, to keep orbiting this way until I die?

The answer, of course, depends on where I’m standing.

* * * *

More robot trucks pass me, but I no longer give them a second glance. I picture my hunger as an object

— another weight to carry, not much heavier than my pack — and it gradually recedes from my attention. I let my mind grow blank, and I think of nothing but the early-morning sunshine on my face, and the pleasure of walking.

After a while, a startling clarity begins to wash over me; a deep tranquillity, together with a powerful sense of understanding. The odd part is, I have no idea what it is that I think I
understand;
I’m experiencing the pleasure of insight without any apparent cause, without the faintest hope of replying to the question:
insight into what?
The feeling persists, regardless.

I think: I’ve travelled in circles, all these years, and where has it brought me?

To this moment. To this chance to take my first real steps along the path to enlightenment.

And all I have to do is keep walking, straight ahead.

For four years, I’ve been following a false
tao —
pursuing an illusion of freedom, striving for no reason but the sake of striving — but now I see the way to transform that journey into—

Into what? A short cut to damnation?

‘Damnation’? There’s no such thing. Only
samsara,
the treadmill of desires. Only the futility of striving. My understanding is clouded, now — but I know that if I travelled a few steps further, the truth would soon become clear to me.

For several seconds, I’m paralysed by indecision — shot through with pure dread — but then, drawn by the possibility of redemption, I leave the freeway, clamber over the fence, and head due south.

These side streets are familiar. I pass a car yard full of sun-bleached wrecks melting in slow motion, their plastic chassis triggered by disuse into autodegradation; a video porn and sex-aids shop, façade intact, dark within, stinking of rotting carpet and mouse shit; an outboard motor showroom, the latest —

four-year-old — fuel cell models proudly on display already looking like bizarre relics from another century.

Then the sight of the cathedral spire rising above all this squalor hits me with a giddy mixture of nostalgia and
déjà vu.
In spite of everything, part of me still feels like a true Prodigal Son, coming home for the first time — not passing through for the fiftieth. I mumble prayers and phrases of dogma, strangely comforting formulae reawakened from memories of my last perihelion.

Soon, only one thing puzzles me: how could I have known God’s perfect love — and then walked away?

It’s unthinkable.
How could I have turned my back on Him?

I come to a row of pristine houses: I know they’re uninhabited, but here in the border zone the diocesan robots keep the lawns trimmed, the leaves swept, the walls painted. A few blocks further, south-west, and I’ll never turn my back on the truth again. I head that way, gladly.

Almost gladly.

The only trouble is . . . with each step south it grows harder to ignore the fact that the scriptures — let alone Catholic dogma — are full of the most grotesque errors of fact and logic. Why should a revelation from a perfect, loving God be such a dog’s breakfast of threats and contradictions? Why should it offer such a flawed and confused view of humanity’s place in the universe?

Errors of fact?
The metaphors had to be chosen to suit the world-view of the day; should God have mystified the author of Genesis with details of the Big Bang, and primordial nucleosynthesis?

Contradictions?
Tests of faith — and humility. How can I be so arrogant as to set my wretched powers of reasoning against the Word of the Almighty? God transcends everything, logic included.

Logic especially.

It’s no good. Virgin births? Miracles with loaves and fishes? Resurrection? Poetic fables only, not to be taken literally? If that’s the case, though, what’s left but a few well-intentioned homilies, and a lot of pompous theatrics? If God
did in fact
become man, suffer, die, and rise again to save me, then I owe Him everything . . . but if it’s just a beautiful story, then I can love my neighbour with or without regular doses of bread and wine.

I veer south-east.

The truth about the universe (here) is infinitely stranger, and infinitely more grand: it lies in the Laws of Physics that have come to know Themselves through humanity. Our destiny and purpose are encoded in the fine structure constant, and the value of the density omega. The human race — in whatever form, robot or organic — will keep on advancing for the next ten billion years, until we can give rise to the hyperintelligence which will
cause
the finely tuned Big Bang required to bring us into existence.

If we don’t die out in the next few millennia.

In which case, other intelligent creatures will perform the task. It doesn’t matter who carries the torch.

Exactly. None of it matters. Why should I care what a civilisation of posthumans, robots, or
aliens, might or might not do ten billion years from now? What does any of this grandiose shit
have to do with me?

I finally catch sight of Maria, a few blocks ahead of me — and right on cue, the existentialist attractor to the west firmly steers me away from the suburbs of cosmic baroque. I increase my pace, but only slightly