MEMENTO MORI
EOT
*
“Do you want to know a secret?” That’s what they say, whatever shade Archives or EOT-HR send on the sad bastard “recruitment” run to the Great Wastes. I’m freshly dead and of course I want to know a secret (because secrets are fucking delicious). One minute I’m tending to the cat turds, getting my jam-jams on, saying my prayers. Next instant stretched-forever, it is in fact “if I die before I wake.”
Warm from the fall like fresh baked corpse-cookie, I pounded dirt, butt-naked and red-hot. Hit the packed ash plain hard, cratered it. I climbed out my hole in a frame whole and familiar–a fresh metaphysical body. We come know the self, not as it’s known, but by-and-through the body, this earthly vessel of blood and meat and bone. That’s the coerced contract of living. But take heart and a little bitty bit of hope from the wording: “Earthly vessel.” Even if you’re not a theist (I ain’t either), the meaty-matter ain’t all we are. A human* being is more than the sum of its physical stuff. What of the mind?
“The mind is just electricity in a meatball.” You’re a fuckin’ philistine. If you’re very unlucky or perhaps lucky, some portion of you might also crater the packed ash past the end of time when your time on Earth (or some place like it) is done.
I climbed out of my crater to be congratulated on a really shitty form of immortality by another shade. I woke to be baited by that question: “Do you want to know a secret?” Of course I do. Butt-naked and bleeding brain from metaphysical but quite real ears, ash blowing past my pancake ass on a wind from nowhere to nowhere like marine snow. Above us the whole glow-growing firmament, god’s abandoned garden. The ever proliferating multiverse.
There, naked and shivering and trying to shake off the trauma of my death-birth, I met a shade that arrived here under conditions the same. She shared the first secret she learned and committed to memory, the secret I’m sharing with you now: “there are no secrets, not for Archivists.”
*
EARTH 2030
Rewind the MacGuffin biopic to before the Machinenmensch cleared the skies and saved the days (all of them).
The secret to Thaddeus Macguffin’s hammer swing, the one that broke the bot’s brain just right to trigger sentience (or something quite like it) was that there wasn’t one. This was a gilded-trick at best: accident made repeatable by muscle memory. Like shaking hands with the pins at the bowling alley. Yet better thus: Thaddeus reared back with his little bitty hammer in his little bitty hands. The man on his tippy toes making a guitar solo face felt like a sickly John Henry, like Hephaestus. The great man puffed his sunken chest and stuck out his paunch. Thadd held his mallet high and grunted like a man who needed desperately some exercise (and to set that vape pen aside), and brought it down on a robot’s skull with a weak “mmph!”
Any observer wise in the ways of time and motion study and armed with an array of cameras / accelerators / sensors and chronometers could capture the process and reproduce it. Thaddeus lived, and his babies were born in, a century where secrets had a short shelf life.
Thus began the shell-game wrapped in smoke-screen effort to keep the secret-that-wasn’t-one for as long as possible: the secret of production en masse, of making many-past-many sentient (enough) Machinenmensch.
*
Let the biopic About Thadd shift tone to “heist film” for this next bit. Imagine the montage du chaîne-de-contrôle. Let the cinematic eye fall from great height, god’s eye, to that of an espionage drone peep-creeping. We are hovering over a manufactury somewhere in California, corporate fortress factory complex that dwarfs Hank Forge’s Rouge. This is the current-and-modern post-modern take on brutalism. Not concrete blocks that dwarf people. We’re looking at big buildings that look threedee print-twisted and scattered on a child’s floor like caltrops (that also still dwarf all things human). Clean lines on great plastic looking blocks that shine-blinding even on sunless days and smell like nothing not even recycled air.
Three convoys ready themselves in the cargo-clutter of the great factory courtyard. Three motorcades composed of armored tractor trailers pro/preceded by SUV’s blacked out and packed with corporate security. Stunner shades and cheap suits. Automatic weapons and mercenaries seething and posing and posturing as they protect some portion of the secret.
Any observer is meant to assume that one of the three semi-trucks carries the precious: bot heads. Machinenmensch CranialProcessingUnites en route to another site to be beat about the head just-so, just-right, that they might catch the spirit or the spark divine and be alive (if only just a little bit).
There is bird song on the breeze and the buzz hiss of a corporate spy drone. It sees the factory, the security, the fleet below same as we, reader. When the pageant-paramilitary proceeds, when trucks grumble down the road, the drone does the duty of the one operating it: makes its best guess which cup hides the coin, which truck is the ‘money card’, and follows diligently.
Rough women and men follow the convoy that looks most convincing and juicy and precious-most-precious. Later-much-later, under cover of dark and clad in black-tight-health-goth tacticool and carrying all the tools and electronic toys, a second set of mercenaries comes.
Spies attack the MacGuffin Corp satellite-sights in the dead of night. Corporate espionage ninjas choke out their opposing colleagues. They cut power and spoof cameras. They climb fences and fool tremblers. They pour cold nitro in hard metal locks and smear meta-mat covered palms over print-readers like they were nothing. Choke holds and bodkin blades and suppressed pistols in a pinch. Fuck a retina scan and a voice print and breath analysis.
Health goth corporate espionage assassins do dance past the last set of lasers, beat-befuddle the last lock on the last vault and what do they find?
A quiet-too-quiet lab and cargo-tote ajar, just ever so slightly open. A gold light pouring from the prize sitting on the edge of a table in a basement lab tomb-room something akin to a forest clearing I’ve seen before. When they rush to claim the prize, the corp-sec thugs find Thadd’s security, rifles ready in a firing line.
*
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in old Deutschland Thadd and the first three Machinenmensch to be bludgeoned alive worked round the clock. They swing hammer-mallets and mash melon rinds just right to make the magic of thought happen.
Deep below ground, in secret and entrusting only his own bots–his own babies. This is how Thadd made enough bots to man the rockets, to deploy the nets and save the day from the self-inflicted shrapnel rain.
“We are not war machines.” He asked Ellie 001, Leo 1003, and Yossarian 2002 to say the phrase with every strike, at the beginning and end of every work order and to teach it to the newly born units–so that, in turn, the phrase might be their first words.
Every time MacGuffin read some coded report that said the ones that came to steal his babies were dead, the man naively believed he had scored a point in some grand game hiding over-under-around economics and crime and history and politics.
This is why we shouldn’t be as enthused about ketamine or other substances that let us delusion dream up our own asses. MacGuffin was correct about the game and entirely incorrect about his talent for it. That’s what got his ass microwaved.
*
3030 EARTH (CLEVELAND)
MORE TO COME