Collected Essays (43 page)

Note on “Tech Notes Towards a Cyberpunk Novel”

Written 1994.

Appeared as “18 Tech Notes Toward a Cyberpunk Novel” in
Mondo 2000
, Summer, 1994.

Whenever I’m working on a novel, I maintain a parallel “Notes” document where I write down, among other things, technology ideas. Most of the ideas in this excerpt were in my notes for
Freeware
, and many of them ended up in that novel. Others ended up in my novels
Realware
and
Saucer Wisdom
. But I felt these fragments took on a nice energy when sorted like this.

The formats of this piece and the next one were inspired by Bruce Sterling’s memorable “Twenty Evocations” of 1984.

Alien Contact (With Marc Laidlaw)

Rudy’s Part

What is an alien? In science-fiction, just about anything can be an alien. The man from the saucer, the woman from the cloud of light, the child from the pod, the ape, the saurian, the squid, the bug, the machine, the lava, and the vegetable—all of these have been science-fictionally imagined into alien beings.

The word “person” comes from the Latin
per + son
, meaning
through + sound
. A “person” was originally a mask through which an actor would speak, so by extension, a person is any entity through which a mind speaks. Each and every aspect of the world can be imaginatively regarded as a “person,” and any person can be imagined to be “alien.”

What exactly is it that makes a person an alien? I think the characteristic feature of our fictional aliens is that they are acting on plans and purposes wholly other than ours. The alien mythos is a dramatized restatement of this basic existential fact: others exist. A childish person is barely able to grasp that there is any consciousness other than his or hers. But one day, with a terrified snort of surprise, Birgit (say) realizes that Sylvester is actually a
person
. A conscious entity. A startled grazing cow snaps up her head. Snort?!?

In fiction we like to add a second, yet more alarmed snort of surprise—Birgit realizes that not only is Sylvester conscious, he is in fact interested in goals wholly other than she. Perhaps he is a flesh-eating zombie, or a cunning robot simulacrum. Snort! He has a mind. Double snort! His mind is unlike mine.

Snort! The lamp on my table has consciousness! Double snort! But it’s not human! Do I now flee from my lamp? Or shall I worship it?

Fear or worship of aliens are both false solutions. Fear of aliens stems out of a self-centeredness so strong as to produce a terror of the
other
. And worship of aliens is a self-abasing, masochistic response stemming from a desire for annihilation and a terror of the
self
.

The lampshade quivers gently. Sharing in the undivided Divinity operating within everything, my lamp is surely alive. It knows things. It knows how to turn on and off, and it knows how to fall off the table. It knows knows gravity and it knows electricity. Dear lamp, it’s nice to have you here. Thank you for existing.

If that sounds close to worship, I suppose its true that I do have a touch of the odd desire for annihilation, a yen for the mystical merge into the Cosmic One, a touch of self-loathing. It’s hard work being alive, and some days I’d be more than willing to have the aliens take me away. But wait! A small door in the base of my lamp is opening…

Alien contact stories are easy to think up. Let’s imagine a few of them:

Here comes a jabbering little green man with soft antennae on his bald head. His name is Xqzwjk and he’s wearing a gold diaper. His flying saucer is the size of a car, and it has a transparent dome on it. Screech, he lands on a beach and meets Birgit in a bikini. Earth women are beautiful! “Take me to your leader…later!” goes Xqzwjk, jumping into her arms and snuggling against her breasts. Oh, oh, here come a policeman! Xqzwjk draws a raygun out of his diaper; the gun’s barrel is podshaped with radiator fins. Zing! The policeman’s clothes disappear; he runs off yelling. Birgit spreads out her blanket and unpacks her picnic-basket. Xqzwjk bites into an apple. Slobber, slobber. He can’t believe the wonder of it. Birgit shows Xqzwjk the apple’s seeds. All right! He gives Birgit a giant diamond and flies home to be a fruit-farmer.

Ricky roams a night meadow with his dog. Big light solarizes him; something like a giant chandelier is right overhead! A mothership! The dog barks like crazy while a magic beam draws Ricky up into the ship. He’s met by lipless big-eyed folks in silver overalls. One of them has long hair. His/her name is Symphony. S/he takes Ricky off into a little room with a bed and pulls down his trousers. Ricky’s face blurs in ecstasy as he delivers a semen sample into Symphony’s three-fingered hands. Later he wakes, alone at home in sticky sheets.

High in translunar orbit floats a supernally ancient craft. Klaatu and Tuulka, the craft’s sole inhabitants for lo these three thousand years, hang watchfully in the weightless cabin. They have hugely domed craniums and tiny little hands with no fingernails. Their cabin walls are lined with TV monitors, all showing scenes of everyday Earth life. Politicians, office-workers, lovers. “They are fools, Tuulka,” hisses baleful Klaatu. “Yes,” singsongs happy Tuulka, “but they are beautiful fools.” “I think it is time we put an end to these beautiful fools,” rasps Klaatu, AND PRESSES A BUTTON! The screens flare…

Professor Bradley and Pedro hack the last vines from the entrance-way to the lost temple. “Beware of the Great Old One,” say the hieroglyphs on the door, but Pedro smashes the door open with a boulder. The Prof throws in a flare to light the interior. Error. The Great Old One is a giant squid from another dimension, voraciously carnivorous and able to fly. The temple’s stones slide aside like grains of sand as the Great Old One rises. Hugely quivering, it hangs over Pedro and the Prof, who fire futile rounds from their puny pistols. Now the Great Old One’s tentacles snag Pedro and its pearly beak bites off Pedro’s head. The trans-dimensional squid drains every drop from Pedro’s bod. The Professor stumbles off in horror, while jungle parrots scream and flap away…

Kenny Dugan, senior pilot, exchanges some cozy banter with Barb, his chief stewardess. Suddenly the plane’s controls go haywire and a formation of screaming silver fried-egg-shapes whips past. “Kenny!” gasps Barb. “Did you see?” Kenny gets on the radio, but no one believes him! Twenty minutes later, the the fried-eggs’ energy rays have reduced our nation’s capital to rubble. “Why, Kenny, why?” sobs Barb as they circle over the ruined city. Kenny sighs and sets his jaw. “I don’t know, Barb. It’s just—did you ever dig up an anthill?”

Ron and Conrad, college roomies, are walking back to their dorm. Their path is wide and sloping, lined with stately elms. It is after dusk; there’s a big moon on the horizon. Ron becomes agitated, “Conrad, what is that thing up there?” Conrad: “That’s the moon, pinhead.” Ron: “I’ve never seen the moon like that. It’s too low, it’s too orange.” Conrad : “That’s because—” He breaks into a lurid scream as the great yellow “moon” darts forward and gobbles them up.

Wimp ‘n’ Dweeb hunch over a large computer screen, faces lit by the flickering light. “What do you mean, you can’t exit this program?” asks Wimp. “How about if I cut the power?” Wimp touches the switch and a surge of electricity turns his head into a smoking black skull. The machine’s speaker crackles. “Listen well, flesher, to what you must do.” Dweeb’s glasses glint as he nods his fealty.

Keiko the pearldiver has been noticing something strange about the dolphins. They watch her in a new way, sly and knowing. Perhaps it has something to do with the nuclear sub accident?

Joe the janitor has been noticing something strange about the monkeys in the lab. They watch him in a new way, as if silently amused. Perhaps it has something to do with the experimental brain-drugs?

Geraldine the housewife has been noticing something strange about her husband Marc. He watches her in a new way, cold and alien. Perhaps it has something to do with what happened at the séance?

Snort! It’s conscious! Double snort! It’s other!

The U.S. immigration service calls people from other countries “aliens,” but they’re not really. They’re conscious all right, but they’re not very other. Even if someone’s idea of a fancy dinner might be a ringshaped pan full of gray water floating fishballs, tentacles, and congelation of striped goo, he or she is still, after all, primarily interested primarily in food, shelter, sex, and the possibility of raising children—just like me.

It’s actually pretty hard to have a human be a convincing alien. The Consciousness part is easy, but the Otherness is hard. I guess the feeblest attempts at aliens I’ve ever seen are the sponge-heads on the 1989 TV show “Alien Nation.” These are whitebread folks without an ounce of Otherness in them. The main character’s a
TV cop
, for God’s sake. The Cosby family is more Other than these guys.

If you start out with a nonhuman “person,” the Otherness comes almost automatically. Here it’s the Consciousness part that’s hard to pull off. The most extreme failure at suggesting Other Consciousness I’ve ever seen was in a particularly psychotronic “Outer Limits” episode where a man and his wife are terrorized by…tumbleweeds. The tumbleweeds do nothing whatsoever. They simply lie there in a pile on the black and white videotape. Certainly they are Other, but no matter how hard the music thrums, it’s hard to believe they have Consciousness.

Since they are so often imagined as complex machines, UFOs are much easier to invest with Consciousness. And since they are presumably Not Of This Earth, they are Other as well—unless, as so often happens, we fill them with silver-overalled sex-freaks. What’s the story on UFOs anyway? They’re tailor-made for science-fiction exploitation of course, but how come so many people really and literally believe in them?

The most interesting book on UFOs I know of is the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung’s
Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
(Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press), first published in German in 1958. The book resulted from a short newspaper article about UFOs which Jung wrote in 1954. In this article, Jung says:

“So far only on thing is certain: it is not just a rumor,
something is seen
. What is seen may in individual cases be a subjective vision (or hallucination), or, in the case of several observers seeing it simultaneously, a collective one. A psychic phenomenon of this kind would, like a rumor, have a compensatory significance, since it would be a spontaneous answer of the unconscious to the present conscious situation, i.e., to fears created by an apparently insoluble political situation which might at any moment lead to a universal catastrophe. At such times men’s eyes turn to heaven for help, and marvelous signs appear from on high, of a threatening or reassuring nature. (The “round” symbols are particularly suggestive, appearing nowadays in many spontaneous fantasies directly associated with the threatening world situation.)”

Over the next four years this cautious statement was repeatedly picked up by the international press, who often presented Jung as an “eminent saucer believer.” When Jung issued denials of this, he was ignored. Struck by the readiness of the press to print pro-UFO stories rather than anti-UFO stories, Jung began to muse on the question of why it should be more desirable for saucers to exist than not, and his musings led to
Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
.

The book begins with the observation that we are in the midst of a great historical “changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or “gods” as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche.” The objective fact is that we do now have a modern myth of flying saucers. But are the saucers physically real? Jung distinguishes three possibilities: 1) yes, there are real saucers which are the basis of our myths about them, 2) no, saucers are a just a shared mental archetype which produces our UFO visions, or 3) although saucer sightings are caused by a shared mental archetype, physical saucers do happen to physically exist as well, and this double causation is an example of cosmic synchronicity.

“Archetypes” are not really so complicated as one might think. As I point out in my book
Mind Tools
(Houghton Mifflin, 1987) archetypes are meant to be minimally simple concepts. Small numbers like one, two, three and four are archetypes. Two, for instance, is the archetype of Otherness, of Sexuality, and of Opposition—nothing more intricate than the basic idea of
two things
. In Jung’s opinion, the saucer or the UFO is an instance of the Circle archetype. The Circle suggests Unity, Wholeness, and—due to its mandala shape—Balance. The Circle also suggests the Egg and the idea of Health. In the cold war 1950s, it was common for political cartoonists to show the earth as cracked in two by superpower tensions. Some of these tensions remain, but today’s ecological fears for the Earth are better summed up in the image of a dirty, scarred planet wrapped in plastic and covered with toxic sores. An unblemished celestial disk is a perfect antidote to either of these unhappy visions.

When he speaks of “synchronicity,” Jung expresses his belief that he universe is endowed with overall holistic patterns that do not arise from chains of cause and effect. The old religious view of a world made all at once by a wise Creator is a synchronistic world-view: in God’s created world, all the parts are set into harmonious motion together, and wonderful coincidences are everywhere. The mechanistic steam-age physics of the nineteenth century led away from this concept, but today’s quantum mechanical worldview fairly convincingly validates synchronicity, at least on a small scale. It is indeed in the nature of our world that coincidences do happen more often than mere probability would suggest.

For a science-fiction writer, Jung’s third option is of course the sexiest. In this viewpoint, saucers are real, but our sightings of them have no causal connection with them. Our UFO sightings are produced, as one would rationally expect, by our need for Unity and Health. Yet the divine synchronicity of the Cosmos has brought it about that real saucer-like objects are actually present. Even though the UFO believers are fantasizing, there really is something there! Ian Watson’s fascinating UFO novel,
Miracle Visitors
, has a field day with these notions.