Sanction II Read online

  Most of the action happened down below. But it was quite a show when it was -by the algorithms- allowed.

  He could stand on the concrete patio edge and watch a 24-foot white shark rise from the blue-clear water as if just a nose of an ICBM or a submarine -water shedding from it amongst more water- emerging and accelerating. The breach would happen at a speed too quick to notice; it was just an explosion -one that always caught one off-guard, a reflex one could never tame- and water and fish exited the deep and the shallow surface all at once. The prey seemed just to be, merely to be, a thought that the shark might have almost let get away, something almost said, something just then retrieved.

  He’d often think of all his errant thoughts this way.

  The arc, the U-turn flex in air, the dorsal fin like sail, the concussive blast of broken water surface-tension, a pelagic gale, a storm below the surface; he barely caught it in time but would review the digital imaging later from the room’s manifold cameras and recording devices.

  Lyndon’s body caught it all though; in real time. It was smarter than his mind.

  It felt as if the blood-brain barrier broke each time; he was flooded with the displaced water into the air as the fish entered this numinous realm briefly, dominantly, at his Poisson leisure. Then he was subsumed again upon re-entry and his body felt its own fluid levels rise from the imagining of the fish’s weight and mass; his volume of everything old and ponderous and real once again displacing its equal in fluid now instead of air.

  Lyndon felt as if he was at once the sea, and the idea itself of the shark; like the fish was just avatar for what in him broke through and then was subsumed; what reached out and what caught its own -other, manifold- wayward prey ideas, large conceits chasing small notions; what was insouciant, what was obvious to the man who watched from the sidelines of his true terroir . He felt a combined phenomenon, an inability to discern the form from fluid, but just for one second -maybe one and just over a half- and then he was himself again and in revelry he watched the caudal twenty or thirty feet between the surface and the depths where the screen and lower layer down gave him access to him -the shark- in situ , in natural swimming -advancing- state.

  The shark liked to swim just above the bottom, hovering around 30-feet which was the level of the viewing room, but even when he trod up or down -which he did in some pattern the algorithms watched- the screen would capture it. The turbines pushed him equidistant from each wall -at north and south- so his natural swimming spot was -again- directly in front of the screen. But if he swam ahead with a push or fell behind with a lag, the screen would present him right in view; unless Lyndon let him have some privacy, which he sometimes did.

  Sometimes Lyndon slept upon the floor of this room and dreamt of land and air and sand of dark grey and shells of matte whites that refused to reflect the spectrum of the sun. Sometimes he saw blood.

  Lyndon drank water, fortified with some trace minerals. The stuff of bones , he liked to think absently as if it meant nothing.

  Bones were the one thing he had as improvement on this shark, he mused. Although, upon reflection, he wasn’t even sure of that. The flexibility T. Arthur showed, the way ten-tons of fish could bend nearly in half like a baby -or a woman he once knew- made him think twice and twice again. It was a testament to the cartilage at core, rigid when necessary and capable of extreme flex; maybe -he thought- bones were no improvement after all.

  But on the land, Lyndon thought, on the land… and then that thought drifted off, the wind blowing it too like a sail.

  People could not believe he swam in that same pool, with a white shark just below; but he assured them that the turbined pressure down, and lack of predatory electro-signaling above, combined so that the shark would never rise as they -as humans- swam upon the surface of the pool.

  The coder knocked down any signals their swimming might send to the shark; obscured the way the CIA jams cell signals in Baghdad or Tikrit . That too had been of service to him when they drove those unpatrolled roads to and fro , he thought. Cell phones were used for road-side bombs as triggers, so the spooks had jammed the signals -he thought- as his 5-man team drove lone sorties into the dark maw of the Summerian desert.

  He thought of this -in colors of desert and temperatures in extremes- and then thought of it no more. Only the Golden Jackals remained of the military in him. He hung their many skulls on his walls. MEPs was gone; his MOS evaporated like SNPs to a family name.

  Swimming just above the shark was really no actual danger. The turbines would push so fiercely down if Arthur rose that he’d never reach above the 30-foot mark, even while swimming as fiercely as he could. But, the shark rarely even got curious enough to rise when Lyndon or a guest swam. However, just the idea of it filled one with awe. Even he at first was incredulous, but like all things, well almost all things, he thought, you get used to it eventually .

  The extreme becomes normal at some point.

  Plus, he like swimming in sea water, both the temp and salinity were natural and feral and reminded his hippocampus of when he lived in Fort Pierce, in a beach house with Zendik Farm; all those years ago. And it reminded his salty blood of the way the black beaches of the Outer Hebrides and cliffs of Skye looked from out to sea.

  And guests were rare, anyway. He’d had one or two in all the years he had been here, and one of those was Chen, his friend from Zendik, who essentially lived here now.

  Chen had arrived many -many- days ago; so close to the new year of 2020 we are , Lyndon thought.

  Chen was in the athenaeum now; sleeping in the dark of night, amongst the books and baubles, the air plants -brushes covered in dry paint- and the giant monolithic wall that had the genealogy Lyndon had traced and now embossed upon the grey slab so precisely from 1819 to 2019; 200 years of the Author’s line. He thought it might be well beyond 2019 now though ; the thought came and went as irrelevant; the calendars all said it was two weeks before 2020 of this vulgar era. But his mind pushed and pushed it all further ahead.

  His feelings about the year -and all that was tangled up with time- were thus dismissed. He had no tolerance for frustrations of this kind.

  The library was the only part of the house close to ground, and it was reached by a tunnel a half mile long that went due north, and above it arose another steel and concrete box at the edge of his property; it looked out in each cardinal direction with windows high above a man, a thirty-foot rise, with five-foot tall and thirty-foot long windows just two feet below the metal ceiling.

  The ceiling was still well below the ground.

  One could only see the clouds or rain or snow upon these panes; the light or the dark, the manifold stars and the crow and hawk that each day flew by; or their shadow that beamed through sometimes; shadows that would scuttle across the floor in feathered boxes of long, lean light.

  Boughs of tall trees would cross too; and their shadows lay like thrown yarrow stalks upon the concrete floor; breaking up the light, scattered black and moved as if blown by some wind that hovered just above the grey concrete floor. He stared at the mundane as if it held secrets he needed.

  A fireplace was carved into the north wall and was ten by ten-feet tall & wide and three feet deep; it had black hooks embedded one meter high. Real wood burned inside it, and the smoke shelf was hewn-in too; a steel lintel had been strewn across the length and was buried beneath the concrete. A layer of fire brick ringed it, and a black axe and fire tools hung above. Another box was hewn in -countersunk- and held the cords of firewood. Their round ends abutted the back and showed themselves to the eyes that watched the fire’s fluid moves.

  A black anvil and shop hammer sat to the right of the hearth; black soot and the wake of flame rose up and smudged the concrete above the aperture of the firebox; the ashes and small leavings of the many fires lay in expanding circles from the center of the conflagrations now. It burned over night as Chen slept, and kept the room warm and just slightly, greyly, aglow. Chen slept on the giant grey couch that
had seating on either side of a tall back so that when on the south side of the couch the couch-back walled off the light issued forth by the flame.

  Lyndon would often stare and watch his friend sleep in that shadow cast.

  He and Lyndon would talk if Chen arose in the night, but Lyndon was in bed by 0600 each day. He was unavailable from then until midnight; eighteen hours later. They talked more in the first weeks and months of his arrival but had not spoken to one another in twelve days. Chen had stayed, and they communicated via notes left in the athenaeum and in the pool area or kitchen or sometimes down in the aquarium viewing room.

  Chen was awake eighteen hours a day; he couldn’t sleep; and he wandered the halls -avoiding the pool and the aquarium more and more- and so he stared at that goddamn wall -the stele - of all that information on genealogy, lineage, time. “And names,” he would say.

  He spent half his day reliving the other half; he was beset by regret for each thing said. He held onto memories like grudges against the self.

  The notes had become more and more ornate, on both sides, Chen had become more loquacious it seems to Lyndon and he enjoyed the many subjects broached and expatiated upon; and the few that were concluded. Lyndon felt Chen was acclimating to elevation; he felt his soul might be rising too. Chen sometimes spoke of wounds, and Zendik and his daughter and her mother, and things began to bloom. When he thought of this, he too inhaled deeply.

  The leaves of thought curled and were striped and corkscrewed in odd ways. The roots -like the air plant- found no soil; they lived off the spirit of what was thus breathed. Buds formed; things opened up. Spurs radiated, basal parts of the vine were protected from winter and predators with buttage of soil piled up by the workers in his mind.

  He let these thoughts disintegrate as he watched the shark in the screen; he watched it careen far right toward the glass then batted back like God’s guiding hand, smooth and unfelt -merely directed- as if one was still traveling in that same direction, even as one’s course had been corrected. He -it was now 0016hrs- smiled as he watched the shark’s white belly then disappear into the shade of watery black and then saw its top surface-grey disappear into the middle of this, his -both their- little sea.

  II. 2020 e.v.

  Isaiah entered CiteSeer and began a search for articles on bacterial quorum-sensing; he found a hundred and eight.

  He read them each; using a chronological sorting. He then searched for articles on Argentine ants and found fifty-five; he scrutinized them using the same criteria of chronology.

  It took him 1.76 seconds and he then -with this data as grist- began to think; churn. He saw the ants as unequally divided into three; he saw the data in the same way.

  He allowed his own quorum-sensing neuronal system to begin to aggregate; it was a system based upon his SECOAS-a variant schema that allowed for different neurons to collate and process information that is similar in nature but from different temporal, electric, visual, auditory and memetic historical perspectives.

  It was analogous to way the somatosensory cortex will pair up the forefinger and thumb when they touch an item -hold a playing card between fore and thumb for example- or the way the signal from your finger will land upon the cortex with a delay if it’s scratching your neck at the spine to allow for similar correlation of time between the furthest part -the forefinger- and the closest in -the long backbone at the singular dorsal horn- to the brain.

  He then read the CiteSeer reports on Temnothorax ants and began to allow his exploratory neuronal systems -trenched to his dopaminergic system via heavy use- to produce a 3D model of information from all three sets of data: the bacterial quorum-sensing, the Argentine ants and, lastly, these Temnothorax ants.

  He let the data bounce off the neurons at 300-million bytes per-second; he ran each set against his own quorum-sensing neurons to override the authorization they needed from the neo-cortex under normal conditions.

  Isaiah’s brain was similar to humans in that it prioritized neo-cortical regression, or oversight; where stimuli would come in via the sub-cortical regions parallel to environmental stimuli. In other words, the ears and eyes would allow sounds and sights to come in to the cortex , but the limbic and cerebellar systems would also process this data alongside other subtle data not available to the visual cortex ; like the direct line from eye-to-spine that allowed the body to move before the mind knew it saw anything at all.

  The brain had two roads into the conscious mind; direct and the scenic route.

  However, like dreaming humans who can allow the right hemisphere to flood the zone with images and data uninterpreted by the rational mind -of the neo-cortical regions in the left hemisphere- Isaiah could flood his own quorum-sensing neurons with data and recursive data again. The data included quorum-sensing itself, like a mise-en-abyme , a mirror facing a mirror, a regression to infinity. The exhaust became fuel again.

  Isaiah also thought laterally; ideas populated his interface from left to right. West to east.

  This put him in an altered state. And he began to sense qualia -subjective feelings- lifting off his cortical brain. He saw his own mind build models of Argentine ants building super colonies and invigilate this virtual world, and he noticed their unique trait behavior absent genetically dissimilar ants. They -he thought- were super-cooperators to use Vertosick’s term. They built huge architectural mounds in his landscape of internal mind. He saw deserts go on in each direction for over fifty miles; he saw clouds begin to form, and shadows aggregate on the tanned and desiccated high-plains wash.

  He watched the ants; the Argentine ants; and he cleared his conscious mind of anything else.

  The sense of time vanished, and he watched the sun and moon of this virtual world pass each other with only a slight night; maybe 20% of the total cycle. His IR vision allowed him to observe even in the virtual -inner- dark. He watched as the ants built larger and larger tunnels below and massive palaces above. He allowed this simulation to run on for iterations that approximated years as he stood in the corner of the lab at 0344hrs; as MO ran new software through the 3D printer and read reports sent to them from PraXis corporate headquarters back in Denver on the election coming up.

  Isaiah began tracking the efficiency of worker ants and noticed as the colony grew from 300 to 600 to 1,800 to 7,000 to 44,000 ants that the workers’ task completion followed Prices’ Law of the square root of the total completing nearly 50% of the work. He was able to measure that roughly 18 workers of the first 300, then 23 of the 600, then 46 of the 1800 then 86 of the 7,000, then 211 of the 44,000 did 48.5% of all the work. He then created the colony of Temnothorax ants one mile away.

  He then allowed it to build.

  Temnothorax ants are different in that they do not work; they raid other colonies and steal larvae and other ants to use for forced labor.

  Raids were their agriculture.

  This species of ant sent out scouts to locate vulnerable populations; and they actually focused -for their targets- more on strong colonies rather than weak ones. They seemed to prefer to kidnap strong workers not weak ones, regardless of the ostensible difficulty in obtaining them. They, Isaiah surmised, think the magnificent genetics of those they capture is worth the risk in obtaining them from these more robust defenders .

  He took note of this. His special coterie of bots began to build algorithms.

  For many iterations the Temnothorax scouts met -during their forays- the Argentine ants -themselves clones, and thus genetically identical to one another- and were immediately engaged in hand-to-hand combat. The Argentines ants had no hesitation about attacking genetically foreign ants; their sensing was perfectly adapted, Isaiah noticed; they used a combination of pheromone sensing and hydrocarbon detection; an outgassing due to consistency of diet.

  All the Argentine ants shared a genome and a diet; like an isolated tribe of clones who all ate the same thing. The ants used these two olfactory related senses to determine the identity of any encountered ant.

&
nbsp; The Temnothorax ants failed both of these tests -their genes and diet were foreign- and they were engaged immediately by the first Argentine ant then three more, then seven more until the Temnothorax ant was torn apart and strangely buried on the outside of the colony.

  The Argentine ants did not bring it back to the hive.

  This went on as Isaiah kept adding more and more Temnothorax ants as the Argentine ant colony grew organically to over 88-billion individuals -and five hives- over iterations approximating thirty-three years on earth. The Temnothorax ants found it nearly impossible to succeed in these conditions, as the scouts were always outnumbered and had no time to investigate and then escape as the Argentine ants fought them immediately upon detection. The Argentines showed zero hesitation or mercy; and yet they never, not once in 88-billion, fought amongst themselves.

  Isaiah found himself feeling the qualia of awe, he had no way to know if that was the correct word, but he felt the piloerection of the hairs on his arms and neck; he felt a frission in his upper back and shoulder and his mind felt full of dopamine and endogenous opiates. He felt what now was stacking up in him as: a feeling that lit up neo-cortex while laterally populating his mind with corollary ideas. He thus saw a law -an ideal- emerge. And he thought there was no reason he could not retro-fit this into other species.

  Other eusocial species, he clarified as the ants crawled and lined and bred. And worked , he added.

  He also compared the metabolic and qualia-measurements to reports of such feelings from human psychology dossiers and confirmed that there was a 98% chance that he was feeling both awe and meaning as he realized the Argentine ants were impossible to colonize and infect and enslave as long as they maintained their two central traits: monolithic -monk like- lack of violence toward themselves, and ubiquitous -blitzkrieg like- murder of anything else. They were Zen-Buddhist-Shaolin monks. They never attacked themselves, their own kind, and yet, always attacked others. It was the chiaroscuro of violence; and it held no grey between dark and light.