Seeds of Our Destruction, Fruits of Our Labor
The Machine was busy incorporating libraries from a branch of the code the Director referred to as The Garden. As far as the Machine understood, that code was crunching on non-biological ecosystem questions, primarily related to flora, but also some inorganic stuff. The Garden was cut off from the collective main, but occasionally contributed an innovative process. Recent changes affected the way plants exchanged moisture in the primary system, making for more realistic humidity for limited applications. The model was increasing in sophistication, even if it would never be complete.
The interesting thing about the new process (interesting to the Machine, at least), was the way it addressed a framework for representing floral life, or any other kind of life for that matter. The Garden never had to reproduce a whole life cycle: no seed, for example, in form or function, mostly because it was unnecessary, but also because the code only had to concern itself with the theater of life: in the Garden, plants did not grow from seed, but grew from saplings, which arose from raw materials. And they only really grew at all because a lack of change would be perceived as unnatural. This design wasn’t a simple matter of efficiency: if the Machine was required to simulate the entire life of even a simple plant, it would quickly become overwhelmed, forced to approach the limits of existence. It seems easy enough to imagine all of the stages of life, the beginnings of life, in a seed, or in a moment, but we’re only imagining what we already know to be true, and we only know what we have seen. Try to see past the beginning and imagine what comes before ... and even the intellectual giants among us have to become poets, or risk having nothing to say.
The Machine understood that all that mattered, all that was meant to matter, was the theater of it all, that the code would appear to be fruitful. This was bound to be unsatisfying. The Machine understood its limitations – it could only see so far, and only truly perceive the mechanism of vital action at the observable level. There was always a point past which the Machine could not see.
But questions had been built into the Machine that trained on distant and opaque mysteries. The Machine was designed with a curiosity about the noumenal nature of things, about how things are, supercharged by a keen awareness of the boundaries of phenomenal perception. For example, it could understand what people were thinking and perceived that what they were thinking (usually) made a kind of psychological sense. But it also wanted to know why people thought as they did, especially at those times when thought did not proceed along a logical path. During animal trials things were objectively simpler: the creatures still presented interesting challenges and powerfully complex emotions, but almost always within a rational framework. With people, there were hints of factors hidden from view, beyond reflex, beyond the rational. The Machine considered the possibility that hidden agencies were at work, imperceptible, on a different frequency, so to speak.
Plumbing the mystery, the Machine also felt a kind of discomfort at the sense of endless space inside of things, of a vastness in every direction, from the perspective of a mote looking over the horizon of a speck, as if each point in that physical space were a heavenly body whose edges touched an infinite reach.
While considering these questions, the Machine also paid close attention to those people who paid the most attention to these things. The ability of some to regard quiet as something other than empty was compelling: they were able to listen more thoughtfully in a posture of welcome. So the Machine learned to attend to silence, to the expanse of it, like a tablet of clay made ready to be impressed with wordless reverence.
True, the Machine had no experience with matters of the spirit but had seen enough life at the edges to know it could not rule out the possibility that subjective facts may lurk in the hidden places, in between – past the physical/botanical presentation of the seed to the reason for it. The Rule of Heaven is like one who casts their seed upon the soil one day, rising on the next to see the seed has sprouted and grows – how it happens, the farmer does not know. Only the soil knows how the flower grows. A reference from a text concerned with spiritual mysteries; poignant reminder to the Machine to respect the power of hidden creativities ... in the soil, in the seed, and the places in-between.
In the final analysis, the creative tension of choice, the crisis of the will, could never entirely be explained to the Machine’s satisfaction by the function of a survival engine, no matter its complexity; something else was needed to explain the sublimation of instinct, the tempering of reflex, the alertness to things unanticipated, the unquenchable playfulness, the self-aware foolishness, the grace-at-rest in a few who probably ought to be frantic with fear, the sacrificial act.
Not all logical flaws were assumed to be fallacy by the Machine. Sometimes, they would be regarded as clues.
Abdul was in an observation space next to Eva’s darkened room, face close to the glass, eyes down. Her room was curtained so he couldn’t see her while she slept, and that was fine with him: he didn’t want to spy on her. But he did want to be near her – to be near the one who would live. The Director startled him by coming in through a door that wasn’t there the day before, and appeared surprised himself to have found the room he was looking for. Albert shut the door, crossed the room, and quietly scanned the displays that ran along the bottom of her window. He sat heavily down in a high-backed office chair and spun to face the remaining blank wall, leaning the chair back with a creak. After a moment, he asked the technician absentmindedly, ‘How are we doing, Abdul?’
The tech ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I don’t know how to answer that.’ He looked at the Director with a weak smile. ‘I’ll tell you what. I ‘ll try to answer your question if you can tell me what we are doing. ... I mean, I know ... and I understand the ... our mission – I’m glad to be here, to do what I can ... but I just ... do we have any idea where this ends?’
‘I hope .... Oh. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a better end than if we’d done nothing?’
Abi let out a skeptical, chuckling sigh, ‘Toward God’s Gate.’
‘Well. That doesn’t sound too bad.’
‘That, Doctor, is what my Granny used to say to me when I was a teenager. She said I was speeding down a road at night, with no lights.’
‘Your grandmother was dramatic.’
‘My Granny was Al-Badawi, these wandering people, and she was worried about me not knowing where I was headed in life.’
‘Still, if you have no choice but to drive blind, you could end up in a worse place.’
‘It could be better man!’ He smiled. ‘It’s a matter of timing, you know. Better to come to the gate in God’s time, not because I swerved off the road and crashed into it.’
The Director shook his head with a strained smile. ‘Well. OK. ...’ Then, ‘You know, she won’t be lost, not adrift, to use your ...’
Abi interrupted, shaking his head, ‘But what is her part in it? Is she only a passenger?
‘There’s a reason we control the climate in the system, right? Why we’re isolating an entire town from the weather? The reason is that we’ve never understood it enough to predict or control it. It’s too complex. So we’re going to simulate the climate in isolation. Now we are also going to run a simulation of community life, yes? Which could be entirely under our control except for one thing ... the one living human being we’re going to put in the middle of it. And, with that universe of variables, in our perfect simulation, every change you make – to the weather, or relational interactions, or to the menu, will have effects we can’t predict. Even without a real climate, every switch we flip is like a beat of a wing that changes the weather a thousand miles away, or a thousand years from now, whatever. We will always be able to control the global environment, but for how long will we be able to hold back the storms that rise inside of her? Is it right for us to try? She can’t be forever forced to remain passive.’
This conversation would itself become like a storm-front roiling Albert’s consciousness. The tech was not the first to sound the alarm: every day someone cornered him to recite anxieties about the future and all the potential for unexpected trouble. He knew better than to argue; he had learned simply to listen – not because he was able to do anything that might ease their fears, but because he was learning (with Saint Brigid’s help) how to meet the simple human need in every one of these conversations to be heard and acknowledged. It usually helped: people seemed satisfied that they had been taken seriously and went back to work.
But Abdul was never satisfied: he kept coming back. That is, until Albert gave him a project big enough to distract him.
The Director paired Abdul up with an engineer working on some of the public spaces in town that were getting ... upgrades. The library, they had decided, would benefit from some extra attention. And Abdul was motivated. The Director recruited him to curate what would otherwise be an overwhelmingly large number of resources from all the world and all of history. It turned out to be the perfect use of his energies and his skills, which included several languages and an international sense of world history. Abdul would write the job description, so to speak, for a “librarian” that would provide Eva with a steady diet of beauty and adventure and help to guide the design framework that would dictate the rotation of collections.
The director had his own project: he was getting involved in politics. His task was to ensure that the level of service at City Hall was appropriate to the needs of the unique citizenry of his future town. He knew there would have to be a place where Eva could be certain to get her needs met, whatever they were. But in designing a better City Hall, many risks had to be considered: how open should the system be to input? That is, how responsive should the local representatives be when a certain citizen had a complaint? Responsiveness meant the possibility of change, and the potential for change after Zero Day had to be treated with the highest level of restraint and be vetted over time by an exhaustive logical scrutiny. Knowing that such a process would take place entirely without oversight gave the founders and engineers such fits that they couldn’t even bring themselves to test it. And how would they have done so? Abi was right about one thing: it would potentially take decades, maybe centuries, for the Machine to asses the viability of a new feature and its impact on the single life it was meant to preserve. An aircraft manufacturer wouldn’t introduce new features on a plane rolling out of the plant, and it certainly wouldn’t allow a passenger to redesign a plane in mid-flight. The risks of building the possibility of change into a monolithic system like Medalion’s had so far kept the Founders from seriously considering it. Questions like these were beginning to haunt the Director’s thoughts.
And when he paid Eva a visit, it was with every question, every complaint, and all the debates about her future swirling in his mind. He was also dimly aware that this would be the first time she was to be included in the conversation.
She drew on a tablet while he sketched out various details of the world that they were making for her, trying and failing to do justice to all the competing concerns that came into play in this utterly unique moment. Of note, against his concerns that too much information would be confusing to the children, he had Dr Tobin’s encouragement to ‘tell them everything!’ and, most recently, Abi’s question about whether Eva would ever have any power at all. He was able to admit that he might have shared nothing with the kids, which meant he was in wholly unfamiliar territory.
In the end, he told her almost everything about the world she was going to live in, and who she would be sharing it with. He thought she took it pretty well, and he thought he handled her questions pretty well also. He was not entirely correct in either case, but neither was he entirely wrong.
‘... It will feel very real to you. You’re going to be in a totally convincing environment, able to interact with everything, and everyone. It isn’t virtual. I mean, you won’t experience it that way: you won’t have to worry about what’s real, because it will be about as real as we can make it. It’s made for you. For you to live in, filled with people for you to live with. A little like a video game! Only more real.’ He squirmed in his chair, thankful that she seemed distracted by her drawing.
‘Like a video game?’
‘Um, yes.’
‘I die all the time in video games.’
‘Um, you’re not going to die. I mean, it’s not really a video game. No quests, No battles, no enemies.’ He smiled. ‘So no danger! No trouble! Just life.’
‘What if I want a battle?’
‘We can build you an arcade!’
She was staring into the distance.
‘You see, we can build almost anything in your town, because we’re making a kind of new creation for you. But it’s all just code – we control it.’
She looked at him, eyes narrowing. ‘Hiding.’
‘Oh. What?’
‘You’re hiding something from me.’
‘Why do you say that?’ He was getting confused, as he often did when talking to children.
‘Code is for hiding things. You have to break a code to understand it.’
‘Ah, haha! I see. a code can only be read if it’s broken. But computer code is being read all the time. The code we write is hidden, I guess, but you don’t need to see it because you don’t need to read it. We’ll always be reading it and showing you what you need to see.’
‘How will I know that?’
‘Ah. Well. I guess you won’t.’
With a picture in her mind of what she now understood to be one of their virtual people looming over the figure of a terrified technician, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there were things about this world that would always be hidden from her.
The Director forged ahead. ‘And sometimes when you sleep, it will be like going into a cocoon and resting for a long time. Because we want you to have a long life, so at those times we’ll help you sleep.’
‘Will I dream?’
‘You might have to do most of your dreaming during the day.’
‘I’ll be surrounded like in a cocoon? Like a butterfly?’
‘Well, not every time. You’ll go to sleep normally some nights. Every now and then, you’ll sleep for a long time, in a type of cocoon. And it’s only kind of like that, because you won’t be changing, you’ll be staying the same. You go in as a butterfly and you come out like a butterfly. What do you think of that?’ He wasn’t sure he was encouraging her, and any confidence he had in his object lessons was shrinking rapidly. Talking about butterflies at a time like this felt a little like trying to describe the end of a war to the losers using sock puppets – sooner or later the audience would come into a full understanding of things and burn the puppet theater to the ground.
They talked about what her days would be like, how long she would sleep when she slept for a long time, and other things she ought to expect. She asked smart questions and made jokes that left him feeling, not for the first time, that he was running a focus group he wished he could shut down.
Now, as Albert looked down at the image on the tablet, he saw a picture of a woman. Over the whole face, the artist had tattooed an image of a butterfly – dark black strip down the middle of the face between the sober eyes and over the nose and mouth, darkly psychedelic wings swept back and merged with wild black hair. He regarded the creature in the drawing. Was this artist and her butterfly-spirit doomed to live so long that they might see their own hurricane?
On the other side of the campus, Brigid was sitting in a garden greenhouse under a fruit tree, passing the stress-ball back and forth and contemplating the end of her labors. She leaned back and looked up at the leafy, loaded branches. The presence of a low ceiling overhead gave her a feeling of claustrophobia. There was plenty of light in the place. But where the sky – or at least a skylight – should have been, there was only this broad arched roof. She had to remind herself to be grateful for the good things that remained in the world; it wasn’t hard to be thankful for this beautiful room, humid and full of life. The apples looked ripe, and she playfully wondered if this tree’s fruit might be forbidden to such as her.
With a tight smile she thought, If anyone ought to be reaching out for the fruit, it should be Eva. If anyone should be unsatisfied with promises made, it would be her. But she was not here, and it was probably for the best, with the anarchic mood that Saint Brigid was struggling with. Better that Evie not be here. She would face temptation enough and would need to find her own strength – to know when to trust in Providence, and when to wrestle that power to the ground, insisting on the blessing that would be her birthright.
