“Uncertainty Principle(s)”
*
OUTSIDE PITTSBURGH, FOUNDRY
Jane is speeding away from the abandoned industrial place. The Feds that stopped her continue crawling toward it as dusk gives way to night. There’s a tracker on the truck, discreetly placed during the stop, and somewhere some expert-system (a human and it’s ‘ai’ colleague) are collating a whole detailed profile on the young lady. They are doing this so a too-polite Fed can pay her a visit.
There on the disintegrating semi-rural road, a Border Cop climbs on the sideboard of the truck, last in the line, staring at a bigger man’s back. The too-polite one. He’s built like a brick-shit-house, laughs too loud (like his best impression of laughter). Knife eyes. Enjoys his works eyes.
Border Cop’s Fed truck rolls on in the convoy slow and quiet, hits a pot hole (midwestern car killing crater), and everyone strains to hang on. The big man’s back muscles go taught, and for half a second it looks like the bigger man is wearing armor under his armor and uniform–outline of some sinister looking plates up his spine.
Cicada sounds. Stars and that goofy modern phenomenon: early night, fresh dark, you’ll see twinkling satellite streams (commercial low orbit “cheapies”) traversing the sky like rope-fire, reflecting a sunset two timezones West of you. Out here, where the air is just clean enough, a few fireflies. Breeze hissing in the trees. They have to stop a few times to run deer out of the road without making too much noise, no honking to alert anyone who might be lurking, just hissed “Git!” and some hushed giggles from the Feds riding sideboard-shotgun on the front truck..
Each Fed-truck kills its lights and their electronics a-ways down the road. They post up, a discreet-in-the-dark road block at the South gate, main gate to the old foundry. This is a raid, of a sort.
A truck on either side of the entrance. Two cover the door, Dead Eyes (we’ll call him that, Dead Eyes) the Fed-not-Fed gathers the squad to take a knee while he whisper-yells: “Hold the fort here.” Hooks a thumb. “Exactly five minutes from my mark? You all turn your radios back on and wait for one of us. Anyone inside gets flushed this way? You make sure they have a bad day. Before that, what does R.O.E. say you all do?”
“Not a damn thing.” From a Marshal.
“My guy. Thank you colleague. We have a new guy on the task force.” Dead Eyes takes a long-quick-step, reaches down to grip Border Cop’s shoulder like a vice. “The new guy who is going to keep his safety on and finger off his trigger for this whole little raid, ain’t that right?” And he shakes the border cop, in full gear, like a child by the shoulder.
“Yup. I will” Border just says it, “Yup, safety on.”
“Good man.” Soon after, Dead Eyes and two like him are off in a crouch, too-fast for men and silent through the brush and overgrowth along the old site’s fence.
*
END OF TIME: ARCHIVES.
*
Eye am just a broken machine born from another broken machine. But the Author-of-All made the thing that made me, and maybe there’s enough of the divine left in me, third-order thing that I am, to make sense of what Eye see.
The archivist, the poor bastard (born-mortal) is still tied to time enough to conceive of a future and past and all the other tenses. Archivists sit, read, write, repeat for an eternity and then some. See him there, lamp at his sad-bastard desk half-way down a hole that’s functionally forever-deep. weeping over the one silver plate that remains from the empty shelves behind him. Some force divine, it would have had to be divine to even perceive the place let alone sneak into the archive, waylay him, and erase all record of an Earth. Some devious and divine thing, an angel, sneaked past the built-environment security, slipped the archivist a Micky and erased all record of his crime(s) by smearing (more) acid over the etched plates to erase them. Or they just tossed them into the void, the hole no thing dares or cares to see the bottom of. The sick, sweaty angel erased all record but one, a plate saved by the archivist who slumped over it, a plate with a date: 27 November, 2013. Dolores’ birthday.
Eye just happened to be watching, and I saw the angel, all flop-sweat and inner-torment. Indistinguishable from demons to most on a good day. The soul sickness gets in them and its no longer “be not” but actually “be very afraid. At least, be afraid if ye be mortal or born that way and if ye be in their way–between them and the destination of their crazy plan/path/narrative.
To be able to perceive archives at all is the first shibboleth, most divine or mortal, cannot. You’d be forgiven for expecting the archives that document the whole of the multiverse and its repeated big-bangs-to-crunches-and-back to be the Library of Alexandria at a “higher pitch and broader scale.” But Archives is more Borges. It’s the Library of Babel in bore-holes, very tiny boreholes. Every archive-hole termite tiny, salt-shaker-top-tiny and still smaller and forever deep–packed shelves carved into walls so well fit there’s no need for mortar. Shelves and scaffolds to access them and archivists reading and writing and making marginal notes on creation all the way down, writing reports like prayers. From above, looking cinematically as Eye do, each hole is bible black all the way down. But shrink to scale as the archivists (and almost no one else) can, and there’s a lot going on in the dark. That’s the second test: as an act-of-will a being has to shrink itself to fit the fuck in the archive to begin with.
Once inside (and at scale), each well-vault is vast. Lamps hang on scaffolds. Scribes scribe and floating beings of light flit by-and-through doing whatever it is they do. Archivists record the beginnings, ends, and middles of all things–not necessarily in that order–etched in acid on silver tablets actually-eternal. Probability specialists track what could-be-might-be-to-come on worlds nearing ends or ended too early. They write reports, each an act of faith Each report may or may not help god’s machine re-juice the odds of that worlds thriving or demise–may or may not.
To truly see if their words have persuaded or armed the machine to intervene and save a doomed world, the beings in Archives/Probability have to wait a full cycle from heat death to re-big-bang. Then they have to wait the whole long time-dilated cooling congealing of the early universe, more waiting for amino acids then proteins and life and panspermia and sentience. Lotta waiting for a mind born like yours. They forget. Archivists forget or go mad and toss themselves into the well. The beings in the Probability (sub-division/department of archives) tell me it’s a 50/50 toss up any given bang-to-crunch cycle. A coin toss that any given archivist will just stop writing and hop to final oblivion. The multiverse is vast and ever-glowing and ever-growing. Not to sound callous, but archivists are replaceable.
And this one with the shnoz that marks him as an A-series sits at a desk on a scaffold. He’s scribbling and reading and ranting about what “cannot be” but is: the three shelves behind him, empty. In all the archives, all the wells dug from surface-to-forever, there are only three empty shelves. All three bear the same hex-designation: 0x7C0.
Eye hears him from high above, raging and wailing and rending garments ephemeral. Right there, that small pattern on the ground, ant-hill-hole small, many opening or entrances to the wells, many more being excavated at all times as time and space proliferate.
The work gets done at all precisely because it’s an act of faith–every report and recommendation written by an entity that will inevitably forget what it wrote.
I found this one archivist when he had hit the point we call “done”, and quickly perceived the still-linear being’s past and future. He’s weeping and wailing and beard-and-garment-rending. Real “why-god-why?” lamentations with sincere and snotty sobs. Whole nine yards. Begging apology prayer to god. And that’s the miracle: the prayer is heard. I know this for a fact because Eye involuntarily delivered the desperate cry from the born-mortal archivist with the big nose about to take a big plunge.
The prayer shot off his body like a bolt of lightning to me, leapt off across the plane at the EOT to it’s intended recipient. This almost never happens. Unanswered prayers rot in vents waiting for HVAC to dig-and-deliver to a god’s machine, that cold-metal orb that couldn’t possibly care less. But this shlub weeps once and god’s on the horn? You understand, you have to if you’re reading this in translation as a mortal, the multitude of messages, desperate as they are sincere, that go unanswered? You have to understand my bewildered jealousy. Who the fuck is this one that he should have this luck?
That’s what lead your humble narrator to the grove, cursing the archivist all the way. Eye followed the path of the archivist’s prayer to god and arrived in time/un-time to see their wrath. I saw the mortal men that made the golem consumed and god’s mercy-quite-mild for the sickly thing, the angel that stole a couple of Earths right the fuck out of the night sky.
I don’t get it. There’s no rhyme or reason. The men that made the golem wanted a slave, a tool to conquer their world. We get that shit all the time. We, or the boss, smite those that try. But the angel broke a bigger rule: they altered god’s text. And they’re rewarded? Some being help me understand that.
*
WASHINGTON, DC.
*
The major networks have cleared prime time, the big net-streamers are doing the same. Dark suit. Oval office at night. The desk with a name. Coat of arms. We’re an hour out from the speech where President Thaddeus Hoover will rattle sabers, will sound as terrifying as a man in his position can.
“Someone help me understand.” The general doesn’t speak. He just looks mean. Quite good at it actually. So good he makes the science nerd about to speak nearly shit himself and think better in silence. Hoover rises up to his full height in a desk chair that squeekfarts. He tries to lean angry and authoritative on the Resolute desk that has never once bolstered his resolve. He ends up looking tired, sputters: “One of you fuckers tell me the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the failure. You. Nerd. Go.” Me? “You. Yes. You. Go.” Pointing not at the center of the gaggle of nat-sec guys in suits with flag pins or the group of generals with the hardware on their chests.
Nope. Hoover jabs his finger and scowls at some skinny young guy on the edge of the nat-sec group.
“Sir” Elbowed by a colleague. “Mr. Uh Mr. President sir, I’m not the guy.” You are now, son. Break it down. “But this guy” And the nerd places his hand on a colleagues arm. “Has a doctorate in Computer Science.” He’s not on deck you are. “Sir, Mr. Sir. This other guy is an aerospace engineer. I’m not qualified to.” You better get qualified or get right with god.
“What does that even?.” The young nerd, the too-tall in the suit rubs his face. “Ok fuck it.” Excuse me? “Sorry. Fuck it, Mr. President. Sir. This morning’s micro-dose went macro and I’m flying.” We’ve all been there, son. Lay it on me.
Too-tall Nerd speaks in a deep voice, the voice that got him the job, the voice that builds up some momentum, and as he speaks, he unfurls to his full gangly-height: “Centurion got brain lock. I mean the whole system is like a bunch of Aegis cruisers held together by solder and prayer.”
“That’s a gross over-simpli..” Not your turn. Let my man speak.
“So like, we ask it to manage everything, the air fleet, the navy-fleet. The drone swarms. Shit, production of more drones. And we ask it to manage missile defense.” Don’t forget cyber. “Damn right, Mr. President. We ask Centurion to be the universal machine.” And it did well. “It did.” Till it shit the bed. “Did it sir?” It failed to intercept what we’re calling a ‘probing strike’ and cost an American his life. “Ok, but was this you? You?” He’s pointing to the others in the room. “Was this our best guy? It cost us one asshole in Anchorage no one liked, least of all his wife. Is he worth a war? The war?” Get back on track, Nerd.
“Yessir. So Centurion saw something it’s never seen before.” The anomaly. The incursion. The potential intruder. “Yes, the thing over Pittsburgh. It just appears. And again, aerospace guy can tell you better than I, but everybody who saw the radar/ladar/whatever data on the thing says if it’s a rock and it’s got any mass and it’s going that fast? It’s extinction.” Like the dinosaurs? “Mr. president. Worse than the dinosaurs.” My god. “Except we’re all still here. Because the anomaly.” The incursion? “Sure thing Mr. President, the anomaly that is an incursion. Centurion sees it and brain locks.” Brain locks. “Brain locks. Centurion was an emergent AI, it’s a curious being. And understanding an event, a phenomenon it deems impossible? It had to understand, and it lost focus.” Got distracted, took its little robot eye off the ball and dropped an easy catch.
“Football is not my thing, but yes, that’s precisely approximately what I think may or may not be as plausible as any other explanation. Mr. President, you have a lot on your plate, and one thing you may also have on your plate is a little green man running around Pennsylvania, they really could be any color or range of colors or genders sexes or uhh” And with that the too-tall hunches a bit and fades to the background behind the barking and bickering and the effort to figure out what the fuck to say to the American people.
*
CHICAGO/ELSEWHERE
*
Jack dreams like me, like a lot of the “A-Series.” Not lucid. No, bifurcated narration. Half the brain holds itself distant, the half of her mind that holds ‘the self.’ In the dream, one self is two selves, two halves of the same whole. One self is motive force. The other half narrates what it sees and makes observations of a vision it can’t control.
Jack spots her mother in a crowd in downtown, some big city film set crowded Chicago. The Cubs have won, yet again. The narrating part of her remarks that ‘Mom’s gone’, but that only makes the half-of-the-girl in the dream-scene call louder and try harder to slow-run, to squeeze through the crowd. The bony elbows and knees the suffocating winter coats. The pressing people hold the cars hostage, and everyone seems fine with it. They are as oblivious to the absurdity of their world as they are to Jack’s presence and perseverance. She gouges and claws and kicks and bites through them like a feral child. Jack climbs up them to look above the crowd, to breathe. She’s lost her mother in the crowd that crushes.
They grasp and grab and crush and pass her hand to hand and she spits and fights and curses the crowd. The collective body, the crushed mass of human with arms and eyes and dirt in its eyes and every mouth carries her to shore of lake Michigan, to her mother. Mom, blank faced and black eyes, ignores her daughter’s calls and cries. The spirit speaks over her daughter’s head to no one: “Don’t go. Don’t get in the car. Have a stomach ache. Understand? say it back to me.”
Everything goes quiet, the quiet of some great humming white noise that drowns Jack’s repetition of the message and all other sound. The lake boils beneath a second sun that eats the first. The flash. The wave. She sees what her mortal eye couldn’t on judgement day, and her young-but-bright-mind recognizes that she’s seeing an air burst–like those Cold War test vids her dad caught her watching and forbade because “they’re morbid.”
“I’m being morbid.” She remarks as she, her body is reduced to ash and that portion of her that is unburnt rises with the smoke. She watches the rest, the shockwave and the back blast. The rubble, black with people shadows, falling in on itself. Jack wakes chasing her breath. She’s blanket-tangled, cold sweating out the panic a long time before her alarm clock’s call.
Elsewhere, in the unplace where she dreamed, a chorus of A’s each cursed with the same gift in their mortal frame prays for her. They beg their absent god to protect the child, to do anything to help her carry this–the weight of the dreams and the nightmares and the was/may/will be.
*
EARTH(0x7C0). VALDOSTA, GA. VECTOR: INTERSTATE 75 CORRIDOR. FL, GA, TN, KY, IN, IL. DATE: IRRECOVERABLE
*
Valdosta Georgia this week. Dan Landers. Lawyer. Former US Attorney. Hopeful future congressman. The large man is a gastric legend and decent tipper. A kindly absent husband in a kind and equitable Cold War of a marriage. Not the best man, but several billion people away from the worst on his Earth.
He’s the part of the conservative party that parlayed the path to prison for the portion of their fellows who tried a coup/putsch/power grab a few years back. Mattress man and friends went on a platter and on to prison, or they fled to the woods and caves and holes where the “good ol’ boy” insurgency that tried to topple the US government sits ‘bottled up.’ The insurgents that backed the coup bark propaganda and swear oaths, and get picked off and tossed in jail, and occasionally succeed in harming people. They mostly starve.
In the wake of the failed coup, and with their party looking butt-naked responsible, Landers and his faction pointed to a man, a philanthropist with a think tank whose Great Grandfather held the highest office, a moderate more Donkey than anyone was comfortable with. Landers played King-Maker for Thaddeus Hoover. He “saved the party” by elevating a moderate as national act of contrition.
No one on Earth could have predicted the pandemic. It hits almost every Earth. History rhymes along time and laterally across it–across the worlds. Here, on this hex, Earth(0x7C0)? It’s bad. It’s “great swaths of everywhere are a lot more empty bad.” Vaccines came, late. Effective treatments, early actually, but false-hope poison and snake oil killed on (0x7C0) as many people as the virus itself on some worlds.
Re-enter Dan Landers. Never mind, that he sold his party and the country Hoover, and the man is shitting the bed. He’s distant enough from the man to point to the new Hoovervilles and the insurgency and now the dead asshole in Anchorage and call for Hoover’s job. He’s “red meat” enough to bring the crazy hard liners “to heel” (he thinks), and plans to do just that. Landers sits back seat of a Lincoln meant to speak “tasteful” as it drives to and through the “low places.” Reverend Money bags leans in close to Landers, “We never expected a second term from Hoover, but I never expected him to invite you to take his job.” You flatter me, but Dan is already scheming and lusting (as any man made like him would) for the highest office in all the land.
Landers is running a fund raising circuit, sunbelt East to Deep South West and back. Visiting churches. Big churches. Wealthy churches. Houses of worship where the men who own car dealerships and regional superstores come to praise “God” for their good fortune. Which church is determined by where in his campaign’s fund raising journey and ‘walk with God’ he is that week and who wants ‘face time’ enough to promise a donation to he or someone he champions. This week, we’re off the highway near Valdosta, a place roughly equidistant from the towns and churches and mattress shops and property management companies and strip-mall real estate empires that built the thrones for the new-money asses arrayed around the table at this prayer brunch.
Landers, the living legend, has a standing appointment at some iteration of that Cracker restaurant. Which one? Any one of them some freeway near some mega-church across this great land. The politicos take in a sermon, sometimes even speak from the pulpit, but never. Never not ever do they visit or solicit from one of Wayne Winchester’s churches. It’s a theology and money schism: Winchester and his see the pandemic as God’s punishment and a call to set the world right for the “end times” and keep ties to the “good ol’ boys.” Landers and his? They want that mega church money and that zealot loyalty. They do not want the bat-shit crazy tied to Winchester and the coup to burn down the world they and theirs want to own.
Winchester is (was) the enemy. The portion of the party’s money machine too-useful to cast away, but too dangerous to do business with.
The Lincoln arrives, understated beside the rest of the party, at Cracker Place. The restaurant identical to every other Cracker Place and its patch of sun scorched side-highway. Little shop in the front by the register slinging plastic-kitsch Americana and the kind of candy destined for the bottom of some elder’s purse. Church shoes navigating the spiderwebs of a worn parking lot or clacking on the flooring. Every restaurant full of elderly cotton ball haircuts.
Around the tables, Landers and the luminaries gather and pray and plot to prey like the political animals they are. They eat the food of the “common people” while they do. They do not pay to clear the restaurant, letting the common people see them eat. They believe it makes them look relatable, folksy, human to the audience–the grey hairs and families eating after church ‘the same’ as they.
Each time Landers is anticipated, the staff pushes three or four tables together to set the painting of the Last Supper tableau. They serve cheap food to a party of wealthy people, a single suit of clothes at that table is more than any of them made in the last year, and this is clear to them because it is meant to be.
The ‘job creators’ accept Landers’ ‘you come to me’ terms, and come to these meals bearing gifts. They leave with promises (perceived only) of favors later. They come bring him treats and news and advice and lay hands on the man and pray over him before leaving. And every of one of them mistranslates “anointed” as “chosen” instead of protected. Dan Landers was many things. He was not “chosen” by any being or force divine. He wasn’t even protected.
Eye am looking at the last supper or lunch or whatever you want to call the platter covered in country gravy and hot sauce in front of Dan. Not to refute the prayer being said over the meal, but he’s not the “party’s hope, the nation’s hope.” He’s certainly not a “godly man” (whatever that has ever meant).
Eye certainly don’t mean to rebuke this man’s prayer, that’s his sacred right to send one up to god or their machine. It’s the content that’s problematic, and it’s simply inaccurate. Dan Landers is doomed. The ‘tickle’ or ‘itch’ in his chest neither “tickles” or “itches.” The pain burns, it stabs. He pawed at his chest southpaw during the pre-meal prayer. Wipes sweat from his brow and clawed at his tie during the post-meal prayer.
By the time he starts making his sales pitch for campaign donations, he’s flop sweat soaked and apologizing for over-doing the habanero. There’s a hot sauce blood trail across the platter in front of him. The three tables go silent. Say what you want, Landers ‘commands’ a room. “We’re in a battle..” He struggles to continue. “For the heart…” He clutches at the approximate location of his own hear and face plants, dead, into that cold-congealing country gravy, never to complete his political cliché.
It’s a shame you humans shame certain bodies for features like girth. The ample man in his fifth decade who smoked, Dan Landers, didn’t get an autopsy (not immediately). A simple blood test would too-late show the uncommon-but-known poison that looked like a coronary. A few weeks from now, by the time the Feds work back in time through records, receipts, road-cams, and metadata to place a rust-red Chevy and two assassins at the Cracker Place? That same old wreck of a car will have carried its cargo and its two zealots and the vengeance of Wayne Winchester to Chicago–to the home in a high rise where a Judge lives with his daughter.
*
OUTSIDE PITTSBURGH. SQUATTERSVILLE, PA
*
Jane has the right idea: be paranoid. But she’s a civilian working from the same pop-culture lexicon of sci fi and spy movie as anyone else in her now-paranoid shoes, bless her heart.
Side of the highway a few miles up the road, the cell phone goes in a foil-chip bag. “Fuckin Faraday cage. Eat a dick Feds.” Jane chain smoking, still riding adrenaline, and the Fed listening far away to the now hot-mic’d phone giggles a bit. There’s a hole in the chip bag and a GPS device in the rear wheel well.
When Jane ditches the truck, walks the last few miles on foot, there’s a silent drone creep watching her and the golem’s body heat, bright and loud in the night as they attempt to sneak through the empty and abandoned in-fill around Pittsburgh.
The golem is quiet and seems content to follow Jane home. Says nothing but “okay” and nods to the affirmative as the panicked punk tells him he’s gotta lay low. They’re well into the walk, the short woman and the tall muscled man wearing a tarp.
Finally she asks: “Did it hurt?” Did what hurt? “The fall. You left a fucking crater in the Earth.” Oh, absolutely. It hurt. Like a lot. “That’s all?”
She stops, the asphalt gone slip rock behind an old strip mall. He’s bathed in moonlight, confused expression. She does find him absolutely beautiful, uncomfortably so, and “You are superhuman and oblivious. And you saved my life and you’re also impossible and did impossible things.” Thank you. He smiles.
She pushes the golem, hard. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” The man barely moves, but there is sad puppy-shock on his face.
“I’m sorry?” Sincere and pleading.
Jane hugs the man, hard. He drops a great arm, light and gentle, on her shoulder and she bolts a step back, embarrassed.
“No. Look. I’m the asshole. Just, do you have a name? Do you know why you are here, like on Earth?” Yes. Smiling. “Well?”
“I don’t know why yet, but I’ll choose the name Glenn.” Okay. “And I’m on a mission from god.” Are you? Dude. Glenn. “Yes?”
She talks through her nose, exaggerated accent, “A mission from “Gahd”? Why not Jake or Elwood?” Are those your friends? “In a way. We gotta hide you.” So I can remember my mission. “Sure, and for your own safety. I know a spot in an attic where you can crash.”
The two walk on in the night under the watchful eye(s) of the silent drone above and the expert-system circuit of operator and ‘ai’ that now babysit them from an undisclosed location.
*
ARCHIVES: EOT/ELSEWHERE
*
From the etchings written on the first plate of the effort to re-place and refill records pertaining to Earth(0x7C0):
“We can tell you what or we can tell you when but never both (amen).”
I’m going to ditch the ‘thus’ and ‘thou’ language now because I am absolutely fucked. I was not what you would call a “success” in mortal life. Here, I bullshitted my way into Archives because I thought I could learn on the job and this was a “good place” reward for being a “Try guy” in life. Not the case.
This is a real grinding, literafiguratively unending eternal nightmare job. I’m ill-equipped for it. I don’t even speak Astral, I smile and nod at the probability “sparks” or little fae light beings. I can’t even communicate with half my department. A manager just talked to me. They were glowing and dancing pretty intensely. I would describe the movements as “furious.” Then they just flit away. Maybe they fired me? Maybe they told a dirty joke? I don’t fucking know. This is my afterlife.
Here’s what happened: along comes an angel, and I go into “networking” mode. I encounter a being I can communicate with and seems to want to communicate with me. And here’s where I should have been suspicious. Whatever I became after life, I’m as socially blind as before. “Be not afraid!” and the angel comes out of nowhere and takes a corporeal form like half my grampa, half Willie Nelson.
“Be not afraid?” and out comes just the fattest most perfect joint I’ve ever perceived, I’m terrified not to smoke with a manager wreathed in flame. So I get ripped. We talk. We laugh. He pulls the flask, we’re drinking, and I don’t see whatever he slipped in my third or fourth libation. The angel destroys the records and empties the shelves.
This is my fault, and I own that. And I’m going to fix it by refilling the shelves that record the fate of Earth(0x7C0). I will, starting with November 2013 as a path/vector/trajectory, rebuild the record of this world. I knew it’s fate before, and I don’t even give a fuck if management reads this or if I get a smiting or a flaming sword or whatever: I’m going to do everything I can to nudge this world past the doom I saw in the overwhelming majority of it’s records.
*
END FOUNDRY(4)
MORE TO COME