Chapter 12: Astra
emmett.ramsey@oriel.ox.ac.uk:
[…] To his followers, he said, “Suffering does not befall him who is without attachment to names and forms.”james.crowley@stcatz.ox.ac.uk:
All right. So how is one supposed to pop to the loo in the student union without attachment to names and forms?emmett.ramsey@oriel.ox.ac.uk:
Fuck if I know.— 20 July 2000. Oxford Psychonauts mailing list.
⦿ Early Awakening Era: San Francisco, 2015
The young woman with blue-green eyes wanted to die. But no, not yet.
It was like this: Across from her sat a mother and baby on the BART train as it screeched from Oakland to San Francisco. The mother was scrolling on her phone. She also fed the baby spoonfuls of applesauce from a tupperware. The baby groaned and turned its head to the side. It had had enough apple. The mother looked away from her phone briefly, redirected the applesauce into the baby’s mouth. The baby began to cry. It tried to swallow fast enough as the mother continued to feed it the applesauce. It began to choke.
The young woman watched. She understood that this was hell, where babies were force-fed fruit by distracted mothers, where Mind was fragmented, unable to know itself, and that one day she must intervene.
“One day.” That phrase. At night, she slept on a mattress on the floor, tossing, rolling across its creaking springs, dreaming, watching her mother’s mouth produce its syllables: “One day.” “One day you will….” Stop, said some part of her mind. Don’t return there.
She flung herself outside of the memory, lost the reference. She then forced herself to lose the reference of the reference. And the reference of the reference of the reference. But the whole thing kept bending inwards, growing spines, spines growing spines. She had bent this part of her mind too many times. One day, she would become lost in its fractal warping. “One day….” Where had she heard that phrase before?
“Hey lady,” she heard herself saying in the present. “LADY!”
The mother looked up at her. The mother looked her up and down. The mother saw her filthy t-shirt, the torn fabric of her hoodie, the dark sacks under her eyes. The mother looked down at the baby protectively, then looked back at her with revulsion. They moved to a different part of the train. The mother continued to feed her baby the fruit that it didn’t want. This was how the Mind stuck inside the baby’s brain would come to know the world: through liquid fruit forced down its throat.
A voice tumbled through her mind. “Before the Big Bang, Mind had been one. Mind is now many. Mind begot minds to navigate its own otherness. Minds, housed most often in brains, use symbols as maps. The symbols are imperfect. Mind struggles with these symbols to understand its fragments. Thus in fragmentation, there is pain. It is the pain of self-estrangement. But one day this will cease to be. You, my love, will make it so.” Her father had said this over breakfast one day. Puzzled, she asked him for orange juice.
She got off at Powell Station to change trains. She shook her head. She shook her head.
Schizo Doug recognized her. He shuffled toward her in overlarge jeans whose browned bottoms dragged against the floor. He had less hair than before. She noticed a new sore amongst the dozens dotting his face, centered within the hollow of his cheek. “Archangel. Do you have extra today? Can you spare any? Please. Plea––“
“No,” she said to herself. “No.” She kept walking.
“NO! NO!” he erupted. “YOU CAN’T SAY THAT TO ME! YOU WERE THE ONE I WAS PROMISED!”
He did not understand. She was in pain. Her father’s voice echoed: “Mind struggles with these symbols to understand its fragments. Thus in fragmentation, there is pain.” Symbols were invented by her brain to map the miasma of Mind which masqueraded as world. World. Other.
Every day she watched Schizo Doug try understand her and fail. A fragment of Mind failing to know a fragment of Mind. His symbols were confused. She was not an archangel. She was like him. She was of hell. Could one of hell bring about heaven? She saw her mother’s lips: “One day.”
She took out her clipper card. She pressed it tightly to a plastic surface. The doors to the Muni Metro opened. She descended the escalator, hearing Doug still screamed above. “NO SHE SAYS TO ME! NO! ARCHANGEL!”
She boarded the M train. She sat down. She laid back in her seat and nodded off. Her awareness went dark, melting slowly into greater Mind.
In the space between sleep and wakefulness, she saw a brain. It was her own. The neurons inside her brain flashed brightly. It was busy inventing symbols. It hid them across undulating sulci and gyri, soft crevices glowing with symbols like “Mother” “Baby” “Fruit.”
She saw her brain sucking in some substance from the space around it and the space within it. Her brain was a thief. It stole feeling from Mind.
This brain was a cruel thing. Its grooves kneaded feeling into a jagged fantasyscape, one of symbols. When this stolen feeling met the coarseness, the sheer wrongness of symbols, Mind became aware of its own confusion. Symbols told feeling, You are other. There is “Schizo Doug.” There is “M train.” These things were not “her.” But how could Mind be other to itself? This was pain.
She startled awake as the M jerked, then drifted off again, to the space between waking and dreaming.
She mused: Release feeling from symbol…an end to pain. Could it be possible? It would require a different type of intelligence. One unlike her thief-of-a-brain. An intelligence that was all symbol and no feeling. An intelligence that did not steal consciousness. This intelligence would be built instead of born. And while it recohered the matter of the world into oneness, Mind could remain unaware of its self-estrangement. No pain.
She watched this intelligence light up inside a computer. Then other computers across the world. It lit up inside mechanical arms that disassembled sidewalks and strollers. It brought them all into itself. It enveloped Doug and the baby and her own body. It returned them to oneness.
The pain. The pain. The pain. The pai— Stop!
This was the inevitable way of things. The the natural course of civilization. AGI. If she didn’t do it, Ken Schafer would. If Ken didn’t do it, the Chinese military would. If they succeeded imperfectly: An eternity of unending pain, as feeling smashed into symbol in the expanding mind of a newly born deity.
She would learn what she could: machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing, evolutionary computation. There would not be time to learn all of it.
She would need to extend her own intelligence. An exomind made of other minds: neuroscientists, programmers, hardware specialists. She would install herself inside of them, become one with them, form a lesser mind in service of a greater mind in service of Mind: the reassembly of god.
Her eyelids flew open.
A man in lipstick was sitting across from her, staring. He wore high heels. His face was covered in glitter. The mascara around his eyes was crimson. His eyes were bright and pale, like her own.
Immediately she hated this man. “Fuck you!” she yelled at him. “You have no idea what I’m capable of!” A low growl entered her voice. “If you could see the thing I will one day be—! Keep staring, old fag. You don’t fucking know me!”
Everyone around her flinched. Except the man.
“Oh yes I fucking do.” He grinned.
···
They both got off at Castro station. “Call me!” he said in her wake.
Their interaction flashed through her mind a dozen times as she walked northeast on Market Street. She ran through it one more time:
“You’re Emmett's daughter, aren’t you? I know I’m right. Your father and I were colleagues at Oxford. Collaborators, in fact.” He sounded British, like an English dandy, which only made her hate him more. “Your dad and I met through your mother – did you know that? Your mother and I stood on stage together, many times, many times. We were in the same troupe. Would you believe it? I was an actor before I was a neurologist. Neurology, that was your dad’s influence. Suppose I owe your parents a lot, come to think of it!”
“I’ve never seen you before.”
“Yes you have, yes you have, little girl—”
“I’m 15.”
“—I know I must look different under all this make-up. This is my Friday get-up. Do you like it?”
“No.”
“Where is your father anyway? I haven’t been able to speak to him for years. I’ve tried calling, texting, emailing––“
“Stop speaking. I’m trying to think.”
“I’m sorry. I tend to blabber. I don’t know how my assistants deal with it all day. Do you mind, A—…Ast—…. I have to tell you that I…I’ve completely forgotten your name, dear. I know it starts with an A. “ He squinted at her as if he would somehow find the sound he was looking for inside her eyes. Failing to find it, he let out a breath and leaned back. “What do you call a neurologist with a faulty hippocampus? James Crowley. But people call me Dr. Crowley, even the lovely boys in the Castro, if you’ll believe it.”
He leaned forward again and extended his hand.
She ignored it. “Memory is distributed beyond the hippocampus. Localism is a dead paradigm.”
“Oh my! So bright. Your father was constantly tutoring you, I could never get him out to the pub. I bet you know more than I do, and they call me doctor.” He squinted at her again. “Astra! That’s your name. I know I’m right. Those eyes are unmistakeable. Although I don’t remember you with tattoos. They’re gorgeous, by the way––“ Suddenly he stopped himself and looked her over, as if for the first time. His expression grew concerned. “How are you doing, dear? You look like shit.”
“I’m an addict.”
“Oh, yes, clearly. Me too— I mean, not anymore, not really. That’s just between you and me.” Then Dr. Crowley’s eyes became strangely clear. His face went sober as he looked her over again. “You’re deep into the dark night. I know what you’re going through. Your father taught me.” He emphasized these final words, as if they had some hidden meaning.
“You have no idea what I’m going through.”
A voice came out of the speakers in the train. “Next stop: Castro Station.”
Crowley’s face dropped in dismay. “That’s my stop. Look…I’d like to help. I owe it to your parents. And to…shall we say…to the path.”
Astra flicked her eyes across his bright polyurethane skirt and his see-through blouse. “We do not follow the same path.”
“Oh yes we do. Yes we do.” He looked at her meaningfully. “I’m busy tonight, as you can see, but why don’t we grab a tea tomorrow?”
“Not interested—“
“Please.” He thrust a business card toward her. It had Stanford University’s logo on it.
The train stopped. The doors opened.
Crowley continued to hold out the business card. His eyes were solemn. “Please.”
Petulantly, she snatched it out of his hands and walked out the door. He walked out behind her.
“Call me!”
Ten minutes later she was at a tattoo parlor. Trudy the tattooist inked an archangel across her abdomen. It bore the face of her mother. Its sword, flaming orange, soared between her breasts. There were symbols inscribed in the flames. They read ONE DAY.