23 Resistance - Two

Heaven Freezes Over

 

 

 

A half-hour later the Director had joined her, and he’d brought tea. He was eager to report on his talk with Eva and discuss the girl’s response to the news that she would not be “alone” when she woke up alone. He also very much wanted to process his own experience of the conversation, which had left him feeling uncomfortable – he didn’t get the chance: he hadn’t considered that Brigid would also be hearing much of the same information for the first time.

Normally, he would have been excited to share the story – how Medalion had been able to reproduce a limitless array of things from the “raw material” of the swarm, even to the point of creating fully habitable environments filled with dynamic community life. But there was nothing normal about these conversations anymore, and the audiences were less friendly now than they used to be. He could see that Brigid was no longer listening, and so he allowed a moment of silence, that she might gather her thoughts; it could be a lot to take in.

She was holding a small cup of tea in her hands, and marveling at the warmth and weight of it. The psychologist was processing these final astounding revelations in the only way she knew how, by wrestling her attention onto something concrete, blocking out the global implications in favor of the safety of simple truths at hand. When her patients were overwhelmed or anxious they learned to use their physical senses to become grounded, to reach out for something soft or maybe abrasive, something cold or warm, felt, tasted, smelled, whatever. Each could be a touchpoint in an anxious person’s need to be safely anchored in reality. Brigid’s attempt to get grounded in this moment was unsuccessful, not merely because the threat of anxiety was greater than she was used to, but because the very thing she was touching in order to become grounded was not real. It occurred to her that the ground itself might not be real either. ... ‘Don’t be mad, Brigid, of course the ground is real,’ she told herself, turning again to the warmth of her un-tea in one more unsuccessful attempt to focus. She felt detached from her own body, but only by a few inches, as if she were stuck in a failed out-of-body experience, unable to get free, bound to a marionette version of her fleshly self that she had forgotten how to control.

Then the Director was talking again, explaining how her entire environmental experience since arriving had been designed and built by a computer. And not only the occasional beer or breadstick – artificial meals were easy enough to accept, if only because science had been chasing the trope of food replicators for years. But, considering everything she’d witnessed since arriving, she was distressed to learn that his questionable vision for the future was happening, and that the core technology was even now represented at almost every level across the compound – the rooms and everything inside of them, the passageways, the networked technology itself ... were all machine-made and made-of-the-machine. Most astounding of all? Many of the staff were built from the same stuff as their surroundings. The latter fact made sense when she thought back over some of the weird interactions she’d had throughout the facility.

Any doubt she had was driven from her mind when Albert showed her the live feed of a town being raised overnight a short distance away. Not long before, she had looked out over an empty gravel plot a mile to the east, all that remained after the demolition of the burned City Center. He explained that the open space under its translucent dome was itself simply the top half of a massive sphere that would cradle the infrastructure of Medalion’s elaborate work of architectural stage-craft. He called it the world’s largest snow globe, half filled with the settled rubble of the passing present, sanitized and prepared as a foundations for what comes next. And what came next was apparently going to play out in an exact replica of an unremarkable suburban city center.

Some part of her knew that she wasn’t going to ease her fear or frustration by confronting the totality of a world she barely understood, and her attention unconsciously redirected toward problems of a smaller scale.

‘... So, you ... also made the room they put me in when I first came here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your Machine ... created the room from scratch? With unlimited resources?’

‘Yes!’ Then, with the attitude of instruction, ‘But no, not unlimited resources. It’s really very ....’

She cut him off, ‘And you made that room? Essentially the inside of a trailer, with ... wait, the furniture too?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can make anything and ... I mean, seriously Albert. Plastic furniture? I was in there, alone, for more than an hour! I thought I was going to lose my mind. Did you try to make it boring? ... Hold on!’ She’d suddenly remembered the blue-and-green ball; she pulled it out of her pocket and looked at it like she’d been carrying something of unexpected value; ‘Did you make this too?’

‘Well, yes! I mean, no! But yes. See, that was really something. The room was boring, I’ll give you that. But I was working with ... well, I tried to tweak the settings for the room because I knew you were coming in. It was going to be basic to begin with – we classified it as a temporary meeting room for visitors. But I wanted to further define the room as a therapy room because, you’re ... well you know, but as of that morning, turns out the system didn’t have a library for the kind of place where you do what you do. So, in a bit of a rush-job, I told Abdul to enter a couple keywords at the last minute, “anxiety” and “mitigation,” etcetera, etcetera. The sad truth is we just ran out of time, so I made the call to freeze the code because I wouldn’t be able to review. But at the last moment, the Machine ...,’ here he looked weirdly pleased, ‘just popped out that little ball.’

Brigid shook her head, unsure what to think.

‘Ok, huh. Well. Has anyone given any thought to these kids and what the architecture is going to do to their will to live? You took Eva from her home! And you have her locked up in a prison that takes design cues from an under-funded lab. I have more freedom than she does in this place, and I’m going nuts after a couple days. It’s bad enough buildings like this exist in the world, Albert, but, you had a choice! You couldn’t, maybe, allow for a little creativity?’

‘Well, Brigid, now, you’re making a valid point, but these choices serve a very important ... purpose.’

She looked disappointed.

‘... In fact, it’s critical. It proves the Machine can make intelligent choices by itself!’

‘Intelligent.’

‘Hah, well. We don’t tell the Machine how to design the buildings. We tell it what they are for and who works there and let it do its own calculations. If we tried to get creative, or, worse, asked the code to be creative, we’d have nothing to measure success against, and no assurance of a viable, or sustainable pattern going forward. As it is, we have high confidence that a few key parameters are all the code needs to generate environments suitable for living or working in.’

Shaking her head with an expression of doubt: ‘I don’t know, Albert.’ She wasn’t ready to let him off the hook just yet.

‘See, Because we told a computer to make us a sensible, functional, temporary meeting room, and it designed one without our help, we know the computer is smart enough to figure out these things on its own. Because the Machine designed a safe, conventional, unremarkable, boring building with all the right features and nothing out of the ordinary ... we can rest easy knowing that it’s unlikely to do anything that would cause our subjects any confusion. Right now, Doctor Tobin, we are doing everything we can to reduce surprises in a future where there will be no version 2. Just the essentials; no time for anything more.’

‘You and I might have different ideas about what’s essential. ... Personally, I don’t know if I can spend my last days under office lights. Where do I file a complaint?’

‘Huh. Well, maybe you should take it up with City Hall.’

‘I hope your new City Hall works better than the old one.’

Right then, he wanted nothing more than to tell her all the ways it was better than the old one. But he decided against it.

She said, ‘I’m still not entirely sure what we’re talking about, here, Albert? I mean, if creativity is such a problem, why don’t you just tell the machine what to build, what to do, and be done with it?’

He stood up, suddenly, and turned to look up at the tilted window of an observation room perched above the entrance doors. She saw it for the first time and felt her stomach sink. The Director signaled to the now-visible operator at a bank of controls behind the glass. By some trick of light or attention, she became suddenly aware of how large the space really was, and that it was filled with a more diverse ecosystem than had been apparent to her before. Her apple tree appeared to be growing on the edge of a miniature rain forest.

‘What do you think of this room?’

‘I think it’s a little paradise, Albert, relatively speaking.’

‘Heavenly?’

‘Sure ...? You’re going to ruin it for me, aren’t you?’

The temperature was dropping, rapidly, as he spoke.

‘Well, what makes this room heavenly? It isn’t only that it’s pretty, or that it somehow contains all the good things, you know. What do we expect from heaven, Doctor Tobin?’ He was using her title the way her mother used to use her full name.

‘Uhm, alright. I’ll bite. You can’t be talking about harps and clouds. ... Like resurrection? The dead are raised up? Like that?’

‘Um sure, I guess, yes! That’s good, since we’re talking about heaven – hold that thought. Now, while there are no harps in this room, we do have clouds! The experience of humidity in here ...’ as he spoke she became aware of an impossible steamy damp in the increasingly frigid room ‘... the humidity feels real, though we made it; we also made the warmth you felt when you first came in. But we didn’t need a fire for you to feel it.’

She was getting anxious again. The tea in her hand had gone cold, and was still not real, so it offered no comfort in this moment. She tried to pay attention to her breath, but that too had become complicated – what was she breathing in? Slowly she gave in, took a deep breath, a conscious choice. ‘I’m trying to keep up, Albert. I’m not feeling very warm right now.’

‘Well, no, Saint Brigid, you should be feeling very cold. Heavenly, don’t you think?’ He was getting that look of manic excitement again. ‘Think to your lessons! I’m assuming you have some Sunday School in your background. Day two of creation. What did God do on that day?’

‘I’m sorry Albert! I don’t remember what God did on day two.’

‘I know! Most people don’t. Not one of the memorable ones. Now, day one? Light and dark? Very popular. God says it’s good, yes, yes. On the second day, however, something very interesting, especially for our work here. On day two God clears an expanse in the midst of the waters, between the waters below and the waters above. And, he calls the expanse Heaven. Are you paying attention?’

‘... between ... the waters?’

‘Watch.’ The room was terribly cold, far below freezing, and their own breath was coming out in great clouds. But while she expected that the whole room might have frozen by now, the leaves still dripped with liquid water, the windows and walls sweated, and the puddled earth continued to slowly simmer, filling the air with the unctuous humidity of a summer’s day in a swamp. It became confusing – her senses overwhelmed her brain with conflicting signals.

Then, suddenly, without any sign that change was coming – no blast of air from a duct, no furnace or fire that she could see – the temperature began to rise to match what her other senses were telling her, and the humidity reduced. Her perceptions found equilibrium again. ... But she had about two seconds to feel normal before the air became oppressively hot, and the damp earth beneath their feet solidified – as the dirt, the puddles, and everything else in the room froze solid with the sound of glass un-breaking in the time it took for her to gasp. Breathing was feeling unsafe again. Every ostensibly living thing in the room went rigid and quiet. Except her. She was overheating and wanted to peel off several layers of clothing. Squirming uncomfortably, she felt panic when she realized her shoes were locked in what had been soft mud only a moment before, but now was hardened like cement. Her panic slid to despair as she finally had to recognize that the ground was no longer available as a touchpoint to reality. ‘Please ... make it stop,’ she said in a barely audible voice.

The Director waved a hand toward the window, and the room almost instantly snapped back into a recognizable state. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I don’t have any delusions, but we have real power, here. There are limits, certainly; but, well ...’

With an anxious edge to her voice, she said, ‘Yes? What ...?’

He responded quietly, slowly. ‘What must it mean that we are introduced to heaven in this way, so early in this creation story – that heaven is first defined as this space between the waters? What’s going on there? In the simplest sense? If you knew nothing else about this reality, because nothing else exists? If all we knew was ... water, separated, and the expanse in between? What happens in between?’

‘I don’t know! Nothing?’

With an exaggerated shake of his head, he said, ‘There is no such thing as nothing, professor, you know that! What happens in the midst ... of the waters?’

She was staring directly at him. With a start, she suddenly grasped the rules of the game – ‘Change,’ she said. ‘Water changes. It changes state.’

‘Yes!’ He clapped his hands. ‘Yes. How is it that water goes from sea to sky and back again? from cloud to rain, to pools, to mist, to cloud, to snow, and ice? State change. Liquid to gas to liquid to solid to liquid to gas. And all of this is our first introduction to the power ...?’

She was nodding, slowly: ‘... Of heaven.’

‘The space in between. First defined by change.’

She was calmer now, but still wore a strained expression: ‘Okay ...?’

‘You must see it! This story about the mystery of the miracle of creation – one of the first expressions about how things come to be – tells us that in this place ... this place!,’ here he spread his arms expansively, ‘things may change their form without ... forgetting what they really are.’ He became more quiet himself. ‘People always talk about heaven as the end of the road, the end of time, a destination. What if, instead, it’s the air we breathe, right here, right now? And that the here and now is not limited to what we see or touch or feel?

‘What if this place where we’ve lived our whole lives ... is that place between the waters, where there’s a power to make things that are present, material, measured, and contained suddenly boundless, uncontainable, and maybe ... maybe more pure in the bargain. Like mist making its escape from a puddle? Or, where powers immeasurable, pure, and uncontainable may become physical, bound, incarnate?’

He reached down to fill his cupped hands with water and spoke with a simple, calm clarity she hadn’t heard before. ‘... Now. Water becomes a metaphor for the possibilities: vapors take form and manifest as liquid or solid in ways that can shape the earth or change the course of history. Water has all kinds of power ... to restore vast ecosystems or flood the earth for a new beginning – streams in the desert, glacial erosion; baptisms in a river or armies drowned in the sea ... tides, tears, torrents.’ He laughed shyly. ‘Well. We learned how to create things out of thin air! Doesn’t this creative power connect us to the first ... to the beginning? Maybe creation isn’t finished yet: there’s something going on here. Something that doesn’t go away. I mean. Water is essential, powerful. Maybe we are too?’

She spoke with a calm voice. ‘Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing ... of the true nature of the children of God.’

He looked heavy, sad, all of a sudden. ‘I don’t think that what we are doing is equal to the mystery of creation. ... I know, really, all we’re doing is a piece of complicated theater that might help our kids enjoy some life, with the hope that something better may take shape one day.’

After a pause, he spoke again in a barely audible voice. ‘Maybe what I really want is ... to know that I won’t stop existing. Even if I’ve evaporated, and left the puddle behind, and you can’t see me any more.’

There was silence between them as she looked at him. He avoided her gaze. Finally she smiled, and spoke. ‘So. You made all this, and you still can’t find it in your heart to coax your heavenly Machine to try incandescent lighting and maybe some comfortable furniture? ...’ He gave her a half smile and a shrug.

‘Albert. You’re right. It isn’t just that it’s pretty, or powerful. It’s heavenly because for all the uncertainty around what we are doing, it speaks to our hope that with so many things disappearing ... maybe not everything is coming to an end.’ She felt these words rise inside of her as if they were meant to be spoken as much for her own sake as his.

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Then I’ll say it again, Albert. It’s heavenly, this thing that you’ve done.’

Startled by an apple dropping to the ground between them, they turned and looked up to the control booth, where the grinning op leaned over a microphone: ‘Gravity, my friends.’

Brigid smiled, turning to Albert with a gentle laugh and a nod. ‘Old school. Respect.’