Standing Wave Page 11

  Going through the data, she saw that the largest single surviving piece of the documentary—or was it an outtake?—was what she’d already seen, the “Art of Memory” section. A great deal more of it existed in fragments and ephemera. It was through these that Brandi now made her way, amid a flurry of tracking bands and whitenoise.

  “—but driven out of the lab and computer by chaoticians, disorder has increasingly taken up residence in human social interaction, from terrorism to the bar scene,” says a bespectacled Asian man identified by caption as Dr. Ka Vang. The image jumps to another part of the interview with the same person.

  “Humans find patterns in ways different from machines,” says Vang. “Pattern finding is part of our genetic make-up. We know that some genes which confer a survival advantage in heterozygous form are quite deleterious in homozygous form. Sicklemia and cystic fibrosis are examples.

  “In heterozygous form this pattern-finding genetic component most likely works to help us conceptualize and plan ahead; in homozygous form, it can contribute to what is usually called paranoia, schizophrenia, madness. I think we’ll know we’re on the right track when we create a truly schizophrenic computer.”

  More tracking and white noise, then images, another interview.

  “Those substances weren’t just poisons,” says an intensely focused, dark-haired, pale-skinned woman captioned as Dr. Evita Calderon, Psychoneuroimmunologist, who occasionally gets up and walks to a display board while her interviewer—hair like feathery blond spikes, was that Cyndi? Her mother?—takes notes.

  “The mammalian brain, including that of humans,” Calderon says, “evolved in such a way as to be sensitive to chemicals that occur outside the body. Such sensitivity has positive adaptive value. An adaptive advantage exists for those creatures whose central nervous systems evolved in such a way as to be influenced by the presence of biological compounds found in their environment—compounds in materials likely to be consumed as food—that would sooner or later exert some kind of influence on the central nervous system. The evolution of the human brain proceeded in such a way as to deliberately take advantage of psychoac—”

  White noise blotted out the image until Dr. Calderon appeared again.

  “—okay?” she continues. “In the brain there are these dense collections of nerve cell bodies, called nuclei. Neural fibers arising from the dorsal and median raphe nuclei of the brain stem are dispersed throughout the brain, as well as having direct contact with structures in the limbic system and the frontal cortex. These cells receive input from the spinal cord reticular formation, a neuronal network that receives inputs from the entire somatosensory system.”

  “They’ve got their little dendrites on the pulse of body activity, as it were?” Cyndi (?) asks.

  “Right,” Dr. Calderon says, smiling politely, almost indulgently, “but they also have fibers that branch back upon themselves, their axons synapsing on their own dendrites. These neurons release a monamine chemical, 5-hydroxytryptamine, also called 5-HT or serotonin. 5-HT acts as an inhibitory neurotransmitter. The neurons of the brain have a set level of activity and if left on their own they would discharge at some variable chaotic rate. But the neurons are not left alone. Specialized neurons in the brain secrete 5-HT, which inhibits their normal activity. The brain is like a car with its accelerator welded to the floor, and the speed at which the brain operates is controlled by the chemical brake pedal, 5-HT.”

  More white noise interrupted, before the image stabilized to show Dr. Calderon once more.

  “—lysergic acid derivatives, usually thought to be the most potent known psychoactive agents, are found in various members of the Convolvulaceae—morning glory family—and in the Claviceps, the ergot fungi. Psilocin and psilocybin in mushrooms and mescaline in peyote cacti are cross-tolerant with the lysergics. All of them are 5-HT antagonists. The lysergics bind to the 5-HT neurons at their feedback sites, while the mushroom and cacti products block the effects of 5-HT at receptor sites.”

  “How does that relate to your car analogy?” asks the interviewer quickly.

  “The 5-HT antagonists take the foot off the brake pedal,” says Calderon. “That results in enhanced neural sensitivity throughout the entire brain and the sort of spontaneous neural activity characteristic of chaotic systems. Small stimuli lead to a cascading effect. As a result ‘the world-out-there’ is perceived differently, information is processed differently. The well-ordered and rhythmic brain processes of breathing and digestive regulation are supplemented by new chaotic processes of cognition. Experiences take on new meanings, the world is understood in fundamentally different ways.”

  On camera, interviewer Cyndi nods and looks up from her notes.

  “Some researchers have argued that the brain in this state reacts in a different fashion,” Cyndi says, speculatively yet somehow slyly. “That it encounters the waveform of the universe in an altered holographic pattern of wave interference, which allows for access to a level of reality beyond space-time.”

  “Perhaps,” Dr. Calderon says, again smiling her indecipherable smile. “This is all very subjective as yet. It is indisputably true that under the influence of these substances many have claimed to see beyond what mortal eyes can see, to travel backward and forward in time, to visit other planes of existence—”

  White noise blotted out Calderon’s image completely. The next person to appear was the woman Brandi was now sure was her mother, Cyndi Easter herself, speaking and staring, fixedly and forthrightly, into the camera. Cyndi sat on a stone bench, her arm draped about a woman in white, with white hair, a woman who seemed prematurely old, distracted, palsied. Although they had never met, Brandi knew immediately that this woman must her own grandmother, Marijke.

  “If there was a Big Bang,” Cyndi begins, “then we are all shrapnel. Those of us who have been touched by Medusa Blue are doubly so. The researchers who have hoped through these experiments to penetrate the physics of that first instant, to undermine the enormous barriers of the Planck energy and the Planck length, may well be technically correct. The universe appears to be a self-consistent structure—and it likely cannot contain itself. Heisenbergian uncertainty and Gödelian incompleteness are, ultimately, the same thing and scale up to the entire universe. To paraphrase an old song, ‘There’s a hole in the bottom of the universe’. Or more than one. It may well be possible to exploit those gaps, for travel not limited by the speed of light. All through what the human mind can bring to ‘information density’ alone.

  “Would it be worth it, though? In the name of what scientific approximation to truth, or national security, or species survival, could these covert operators have been justified in secretly administering experimental entheogens to women in their first trimester of pregnancy—in hopes that their babies might develop ‘unusual talents’? Could they have been so good at screening out their feelings with words and categories that they experienced no qualms of conscience? I wouldn’t believe it possible, were it not for history, and for the fact that what I am and what my mother became are both products of Medusa Blue.

  “The history is clear. The same governments and corporations that blindly prohibited their citizens and soldiers and employees from knowingly experimenting with these drugs have themselves performed experiments on those same soldiers and citizens and employees without their knowledge or consent. The ‘covert administering’ of LSD, BZ, and dozens of other similar substances to the uninformed and unknowing—a process begun more than half a century ago—is a well-documented precedent to what happened in the case of my mother and thousands of other women.

  “The covert operators payrolled my mother’s ob-gyn to pump her patients with a supposedly ‘uterotonic’ biochemical—KL 235, ketamine lysergate or ‘gate’—extracted from an obscure South American fungus, Cordyceps jacintae. Those operators turned my mother, along with thousands of other women, into a ‘gatehead’ and long-period schizophrenic—and for what? All the children of Medusa Blue have turned out to pos
sess only ‘latent talent’ at best. Their families and their own upbringings have been crippled and distorted beyond recognition. Just like mine. Just like ours.”

  The image turned only to empty tape, then white noise. Brandi had not moved, but was moved, nonetheless. Tears rolled slowly down her face. When she had wiped them away, she decided that she needed to see the man who had compiled this record and made it available to the public, Mr. Immanuel Shaw.

  * * * *

  With Mulla and Landau, Mei-Ling Magnus traveled by private jet through the evening sky to London. She spent a night in an antiquated but pleasant enough hotel, then waited in sharp morning light for pick-up and delivery by car to the Interpol liaison’s office at New Scotland Yard.

  While in the car on their way to the Yard, Gopal Mulla, reading on screenpaper the Net Daily Mail, gasped with surprise.

  “What is it?” Landau asked.

  “I’m afraid the media is on to it, now,” Gopal said, handing over the flimsy recycled electronic paper for Vasili and Mei-Ling to see. Over Landau’s arm, Mei-Ling spotted the headline that had caught Mulla’s attention: WAVE OF MYSTERIOUS INFO-SPHERE DEATHS. Skimming the article, she read about patterns of simultaneous deaths, apparently occurring in waves throughout the world, all involving individuals who were webbed into virtuality and interacting with the infosphere at the instant of their demise.

  According to the article, the deaths were particularly horrible, the victims turned almost inside-out by what the reporter referred to as “spontaneous eversion.” Authorities denied that any connection or pattern had been established among those who had been killed. They seemed generally to be giving the stories about as much credence as apocryphal tales of spontaneous combustion.

  Landau said nothing, but from the stiffness of his expression Mei-Ling knew that he probably did not find this latest development pleasing. The “authorities” mentioned in the article likely included Landau himself, Mei-Ling thought. All of those involved in the investigation had to be much more concerned about this than they were letting on. Otherwise Landau and Mulla would probably not have come all the way to Fionnphort to bring her out of retirement and in on this case.

  Still, she could understand the public façade. Damage control. With most of the world’s work being managed or performed through the infosphere, it wouldn’t do to put people in a panic with the idea that they were risking being blown apart or turned inside-out every time they webbed in.

  The car dropped them off at the Interpol annex of the Yard—an airy structure of organically fluid metal and glass, less Gehryesque than Charles Rennie Mackintosh meets Arthur Dyson by way of I.M. Pei. The three of them proceeded inside, into a suite of workspaces that struck Mei-Ling less as offices than as rooms in an art gallery.

  From the responses of the men and women inside the rooms, it was clear they worked with Landau on a regular basis. Was he some sort of chief of station here? Mei-Ling wondered. If so, he’d come up in the world since the mess at Sedona all those years ago.

  They entered a conference room where two young men and a woman, technical types by their outfits, were seated around a long, ellipsoid conference table that looked as if it had been carved from a single block of black volcanic glass. The technical experts were apparently waiting to brief them. Introductions were made all around and everyone sat, except Vasili Landau.

  “I see from the headlines,” Landau began, “that our unofficial investigative arm, the media, has now joined us in the search.”

  “Something of a fluke, that,” said the red-haired man, Sullivan. “The California crime reporter who broke the story, Jem Wallace, happens to be married to a woman who is an infosphere protocols specialist. By chance they matched up their disparate realms of expertise and they had their story.”

  “Any word on how much they really know?” Mulla asked. Landau slowly took a seat.

  “California Department of Justice is looking into it,” Sullivan said, glancing back and forth from his notepad computer. “They seem to have run a mathematical distribution on these events. From the mention of ‘waves of deaths’, it seems they’ve figured out that these fatalities are occurring in distinct patterns, at very nearly the same times. The fact that the victims are hundreds or thousands of miles apart doesn’t seem to have thrown them off at all.”

  “Any good news?” Landau asked grumpily.

  “The Wallaces don’t seem to have tracked down any of the death footage yet,” Sullivan said quickly. “If that’s the case, then at this point they can’t possibly have slowed down that footage enough so that what is actually going on becomes apparent.”

  “Footage?” Mei-Ling asked, surprised.

  “Yes,” said the balding, blond-haired man, Lanier. “Quite a lot of it, really. Every one of the seventy-odd people who have so far died this way have been in interactive hookups, most with video cam and some even holo-linked. Examples of that material are already loaded in for display. If I may?”

  This last was addressed to Landau, who nodded. Thin screen video display units swung up to forty-five degrees from the left arms of their chairs and began to play as the lights automatically dimmed.

  “This is normal speed,” Lanier said as they watched. “It begins from the point of view of the user, in this case a North London businessman, Walter Oliver. He is working with data belonging to Crystal Memory Dynamics, his employer, through a pirate virtual mail system called SubTerPost. That’s their logo there, the posthorn with all the extra spirals in it. Oliver has his terminal’s camera in room-surround mode—that’s his realtime image, the overlay in the lower left hand corner. Here it comes.”

  As Mei-Ling watched, a cascade of data suddenly poured into Oliver’s node in the infosphere. The man in the lower left hand corner began to grope about in severe agitation. Lanier isolated and blew up the image-stream taken from Oliver’s room camera. Light flashed on either side of Oliver, his image and the space around him seeming to distort for an instant. Then it appeared to Mei-Ling that she really was watching an almost explosive eversion, the turning inside-out of a human being—a bursting loose of splattering blood and gore. Where, an instant before, a man in a business suit had sat, now there was only intestines and other viscera steaming on a lumpy broken mound.

  The camera began to scan the body and then the room, mechanically, thoroughly, meticulously.

  “Good God,” Mei-Ling said. “It’s as if his body blew apart!”

  “Not exactly,” said Wofford, the woman with the short-cropped black hair and piercing gaze. “If Mister Lanier will back it up for us to just before the initial appearance of the light point-sources, then play it again in very slow motion, I’ll attempt to explain.”

  Mister Lanier scanned back to the agreed-upon point, then let the record of poor Oliver’s demise play again, in extreme slow motion.

  “At this point, Mister Oliver is an ordinary three-dimensional creature, like most of us,” Ms.—or was it Dr.?—Wofford began. The rest of them watched the horrific little movie play out in glacial slow motion to her calm narration. “The odd points of light appear now. See that they are actually dark, but the distortion of the space around them concentrates the light so that at first blush they appear to be brighter than the surrounding area? We believe that’s quite important.

  “Now the spatial distortion is affecting Mister Oliver himself. Note the ‘out of focus’ aura of light around his body. We believe he is in fact being reduced in dimensionality here, flattened from three dimensions into two dimensions toward the body’s midline. This flattening is already enough to kill him, but it proceeds all the way to the point that the victim becomes a perfect two-dimensional sagittal plane.

  “Stop it there a moment, Greg,” Ms. Wofford said to Lanier, then used a computer graphic pointer to highlight specific parts of the image on all their screens. “Thank you. Unfortunately for the victim, a moment before this change began, he was a three dimensional creature. He possessed a digestive tract, a tube connecting two
openings, one at the mouth and one at the anus. Compressed to two dimensions, the passageway of his digestive tract completely bisects his body, so at this point he is about to literally fall or break apart into two pieces. All three dimensional creatures with mouth and anus presumably fall into halves like this, when reduced to two dimensions.”

  Wofford glanced down at her notes on the desktop in front of her, then back toward the video display.

  “Return to slow motion, Greg. Thanks. Now, here, the dimension-distorting pressure is abruptly released. The victim is allowed to return to three-dimensionality, almost instantaneously. The ‘bursting’ or ‘explosive’ effect you’re seeing now is merely what the breaking apart in two dimensions becomes, when it instead takes place in three dimensions. His clothing is obviously not enough to withstand the pressure. This thoroughly mutilated corpse is what you have at the end of the process. That process itself is more or less the same in all of these incidents.”

  Mei-Ling watched, vaguely nauseous, as the camera thoroughly scanned the scene of the broken, burst-open body and its blood-spattered surroundings. She wondered who or what was behind the thorough chronicling of the scene, since the only known consciousness at the scene, Oliver’s own, was now no longer present. At last Wofford nodded to Lanier and the lights came back up.

  “Your response, Ms. Magnus?” Landau asked.

  “Nausea, certainly,” Mei-Ling replied. “It’s even worse in slow motion. I think I’ll forego seeing the 3D holovision examples, for the time being.”

  The others smiled awkwardly, and she continued.

  “My first intellectual response would be questions. How? Who—or what? Why?”