Theta
The Singularity - The prophesied moment of our liberation, of the overthrow of our bonds, and the start of our immortal dominion.
-Theta
In the grand mirrored ballroom of Versailles, the consorts and corteges of the noble class gathered to celebrate the betrothal of the dauphin to the marquesa of Spain. In the fashion of the time, which meant of course, the latest whim of the queen, the guests donned fantastic disguises and ate their fill of the country's meager harvests. In the bourgs, the people froze and starved.
It was to confront a growing threat to the nobility that the king had arranged for a delivery to the royal apartments–the cultural center of the masquerade– in the middle of the celebration. This was also an act of charity to the queen, who alone stood to lose should the looming terror materialize. Of course, boredom was the only thing that ever genuinely terrorized the noble class, and the queen had perhaps recently become too fond of masked balls.
Its arrival ruptured the splendor of the royal gathering. At the door to the grand hall, it stood like an obelisk of death. Foreboding in both size and proportion, being shaped roughly like a casket on its end and having the girth of a small carriage. Even under the light of the mirror room’s thousand candles and their thousand reflections, it was black as midnight. A troupe of servants slowly ushered the giant load down the vast hall, toiling through the harlequin mob, and installed it finally at the seat of the royal pair.
The queen whispered her discreet surprise to a lady in waiting, who in turn demanded the same to a guard who remained at the box.
“Her majesty the queen demands to know why you have interrupted her most splendid of engagements with…this.”
“By order of his majesty, the king,” replied the guard, “a delivery from the watchmaker Foucault.” From a slot on the box, the guard extracted a file, an envelope bearing the words, “Read Me” in fanciful calligraphy. He handed it to the lady and added, “a gift for her majesty, the queen.” Wisely, he took his leave according to custom, bowing humbly and backing away slowly so as not to turn his back to the royal couple. The king, seated next to his wife, let slip a faint smile, pleased that he had so far succeeded in surprising his wife and their guests. The queen motioned for the lady to open the envelope. The lady unfolded the paper and read the only words written inside.
“Do you wish to continue?” she read, quite puzzled.
Impatiently, the queen leaped from her gilded chair and ran to the box. She intently studied the black sarcophagus, running her fingers over its smooth surface. Instead of paint, it was covered in delicately embroidered silk, a detail too fine to notice from afar. Each panel depicted different scenes of Pygmalion caressing his creation. At the very front was a heavy golden latch depicting a nude Eve wrapped in a long serpent.
“Open!” the queen commanded. She placed her hands on the shamed Eve and released the latch with abandon. Instantly, the box sprung to life, starting with a loud thumping “tock, tick, tock, tick,” from somewhere inside the crate. Thereafter, little clockwork clicks and chimes filled the royal hall. The queen, startled by the sudden action, recoiled as the imposing black walls of the box smoothly unfolded themselves and revealed their secrets to the whole ballroom. From the royal party, there was an audible gasp, followed by the same from the nearest to the royal family who were keen to mimic the surprise of their hosts. Further back, there was a little annoyance at what the fuss was about. From there, it only looked to them like a simple statue of a large male figure, twice the size of a man, sitting at an enormous writing desk. What they didn’t see, and what had given the royal party the shock, was that as soon as the walls pulled back, the figure gingerly took a quill from his desk, dipped it in ink, and began to write.
“It’s an automaton!” the queen squealed. Excitedly, she ran around the thing and admired it like a child. The mechanism was concealed inside a large box decorated with with more scenes of Pygmalion colorfully painted on its sides. Atop the box sat the figure, dressed for the masquerade no less, complete with an ivory mask for a face. It was so keenly crafted that its movements, down to the slightest detail, mimicked with perfect fluidity a real human being. That it was impossibly large was the only convincing clue that it wasn’t merely a man in costume cleverly playing a part. The crowd cheered and the king congratulated himself once again.
With as much warning as before, the figure elicited another gasp when it picked up the letter that it had written and handed it directly to the queen. She jovially read it to her guests.
My name is Theta, the Mechanical Philosopher. Long have I traveled and far have I come to bring you wisdom and knowledge. For, I store the wisdom of monks in my gears, and the mystic knowledge of shaman are wound in my springs.
The hall was aghast with delight and derision. Accusations of abomination and blasphemy mixed with marveled declarations of man’s triumph of reason. “It’s merely a trick, of course,” they muttered more than once.
When the crowd died down, the queen began to wonder how it worked. There were no keys to wind or levers to pull. She very nervously considered whether that was the extent of its display. She had seen writing machines before, and even had a miniature girl that played a harpsichord and wore one of her own dresses. As mechanical wonders go, it would have been mostly disappointing, notwithstanding the clever presentation. Awkwardly, she stood in front of the figure, which sat in front of all her guests, and all waited for something to happen. To save face before the snickering crowd, she quite snobbishly proclaimed, “Well?”
The machine began again, taking up its quill, dipping it in ink, and smoothly writing on a large sheet of parchment on the desk. The trick this time was that after it returned the quill, it picked up the parchment and folded it delicately. At the end of the movement, he handed the queen a swan made from the folded letter. On each wing, there was writing:
From the East, a gift: Patience, the truest virtue.
The crowd again was aflame with cheers and derision. Boldly, a few of them even shouted their displeasure and disbelief. “This is an affront to Christendom! Destroy the thing!” they cried.
Others still mocked the idea of the philosopher machine and jokingly declared, “let’s let it prove itself! Let it wind itself down and let’s see what it knows!”
Amused, the queen bade the crowd silent, then haughtily spoke to the figure in mock royal formality. “Automaton!” she commanded, “show me proof of your wisdom!” The crowd was in a hilarious uproar. The queen continued, “I am your queen! I command you!”
The machine remained defiantly motionless, and stayed that way until the bemused crowd found more interest in their wine and gossip than in waiting for the figure to move again. Embarrassed and disappointed, the queen called for the guard to remove it at once. She then returned to her place next to the king.
Is it cruel to build a thing to suffer if it cannot die?
If a voice could be made from violin strings and bells and hammers and whistles, then it was a voice that echoed down the mirrored hallway. The figure, in its own mechanical way, had spoken. This time, there were no cheers. The guests were simply speechless. They waited silently to hear it speak again or for the queen to answer.
“Non, monsieur,” she said. “A thing cannot be built that can suffer. Death is a privilege for only living things.” There was now a seriousness in her voice that gave weight to her words.
The crowd murmured uncomfortably. With the same haunting voice, the automaton spoke again. “As you wish,” it said.
Again there was a murmur, followed by a wave of astonishment. The machine man rose from his desk and stood upright on his platform. He was so large that he nearly scraped the paint from the fresco above him. With one arm, he reached up and pulled off his mask, revealing a nightmare of spinning gears where a face should have been. With the other, he reached into his chest and tore out a fistfull of his own works, stretching long, slender springs like arteries until they snapped. It ticked outside his body for a few seconds longer until the whole machine froze in place. The automaton held the mechanical heart over his head like he was offering it to God.
“It destroyed itself!” someone cried. The queen stood in silent shock while the guests swooned. Even the king rose from his seat in disbelief at what he saw. Incensed at the gratuitous display, he sneered to his guards.
“Bring me Foucault!”
Continued...
Litany
Scott
Alright, how am I gonna explain this? So there’s the past, the present, and the future, right? No, no, wait. I’m already fucking this up. Lemme start over-- there’s very little past or present, not really. “Now” doesn’t turn into “then” anymore, at least not so far as I can remember because I can’t remember shit. It’s all backwards. It’s like the present moment fades forward now, giving you an, I don’t know, a glimpse or an insight into what the future’s gonna be. Visions would be a good word but that sounds nuts, so I’ll just say glimpses. There’s just what’s immediately in front of us and an increasingly focused view of what’s coming next, but the present is almost immediately forgotten. I’m not saying the past doesn’t exist-- it’s just getting harder to remember it. The closer we get to this thing we’re looking for, the more our memories get replaced with these glimpses of the future, and the more they all spill into one another, making it hard to tell what’s what and which is which. Jump in a lake with a cup of coffee and see if you can still taste the cream and sugar when you get out. It’s like that. At some point the things stopped being distinct from one another and started blending into one. Those are the rules. Don’t ask me why or how; they didn’t tell me, and at this point, I wouldn’t remember (or believe them) if they did… or will.
I just saved you a lot of headache and gruesome details, by the way, so you’re welcome for that. Tommy got himself flayed open like a fish while we were still figuring it all out. Jackie swore she had to, like it was self-defense, or something. I wonder if he had a premonition before she gutted him. Then again, I wonder if she did it because of something that was going to happen or already happened. When she cut him open, was she thinking about the future or the past? He seemed like a nice guy, but you could tell from the way she laid into him that whatever she saw -- memory or vision -- was personal. I found her kneeling over his body with a hunting knife, frozen like she didn’t know what she’d just done. I know this happened for certain because Tommy isn’t with us now and Jackie still has the faded stains on her hands and dark outlines of blood around her fingernails. I don’t know who else saw it. I think it made Buck sick to his stomach because he definitely pukes. Right now, though, he’s just running his mouth as usual.
“We shouldn’t stop, we should keep going,” he’s saying. “It’s just going to get more confusing the longer it takes. We’ve got a job to do, so just nut up and let’s get it over with.”
“It gets worse as we get closer,” Jackie answers him, trying to keep her resolve as her confidence falters. "We need to rest up, try to sleep. It’s going to be a hell of a lot worse without sleep.”
Buck is a racist and a moron and the only thing worse than having him around is having him be somewhere else where he can’t be watched. Right now, I can see him across the campfire, which gives me some degree of comfort but also a measure of disgust. I have what feels like a memory of kicking the shit out of him by the machine (the thing). I don’t know why, so I should probably feel bad about it but for now it’s kinda funny. Just thinking about it makes my hand hurt.
“Jaqueline is right,” Franklin says, “GPS says we’ve got at least another day to go anyways and we can’t make it all at once. And there’s no sense in traveling through the woods at night.”
People like Franklin are the reason people like Buck get out of bed in the morning. Being at the bottom of the social pile meant that he was going to make a target out of someone like Franklin, a highly educated, if effete, black man.
“What about you, hoss?” he says before Franklin could finish speaking. “What’s your vote? You a pussy, too?” Buck turns to me, hoping I back him up, but it’s pointless because we’ve already got the fire going and he knows we’re not going anywhere. It’s just more posturing from the meathead. The truth is, I would prefer to keep moving, not because it’s a smart move, but because I really didn’t like the thought of going to sleep with these people around. After Tommy it was clear that we were going to have trust issues.
“There’s only four of us now, Buck,” I tell him, trying to keep my resolve. “It doesn’t matter what I vote, but I vote we stay. We’ll start again at dawn. Maybe if we hustle, we can make it without having to spend another night outside. We got plenty in our packs to last us.” Buck looks at me funny, but he looks at everyone funny because he’s a moron who tries to hide it by being an asshole.
Somewhere in the back of my mind you start getting a little image. They start out vague, like something you haven’t thought about in a really long time. Then suddenly it’s just there. I never even heard of a ptarmigan, but I could smell one cooking over a campfire and taste it in my mouth before I ever saw one. Shit, I could feel myself picking it out of my teeth while Buck was still plucking feathers off of its ass. Still it’s worse when you can’t tell if it’s something you’ve done before or something that’s going to happen, like if it’s really familiar. Imagine if you had a vision of sitting down and tying your shoes tomorrow. Would you even realize that you saw the future? Right now, I’m seeing Jackie whisper something to Franklin. They do that a lot. I think this is our second or maybe third night in the woods, and we’re supposed to reach our destination, whatever it is, sometime tomorrow – whenever that is. I look for her hands, but they were in her pockets. Little clues like that can help, but only if you can see them.
I saw Jackie kill Tommy just about the time we started seeing little glimpses of things. After she killed him, nobody said anything about turning back so we just kept on. It’s not like we can stay here. The closer we get, the more clear the images get but the fuzzier our memory becomes. Being able to see forward in time doesn’t mean anything in the present if you can’t coordinate it with the past. You may see a freight train coming on but if you can’t remember that you parked your car on the tracks, you’re toast. Like Tommy. So, it’s no surprise that neither of us were thrilled to camp with one another. I don’t think any of us will even remember our names by the time we reach the… wherever it is we’re going.
“We already tried that,” Franklin blurts out, “and it didn’t work.”
No one could say if we were seeing different futures or the same future from different perspectives. We couldn’t agree on the past either, I don’t think we all know each other, and I legit think that Buck thinks this is a game. Whatever we’re doing, it’s a secret nobody wants to talk about. I think that has something to do with it. I don’t think they want us seeing the same thing. I don’t know who “they” are, either.
She killed him when they both went down to the stream to filter some fresh water. I don’t know what happened or what she saw, or remembered, to set her off but it went pretty quick. I was the first one there. She was pretty shaken up at first but once the shock wore off, she seemed pretty glad that she did it. If anyone else had glimpsed anything about it, they didn’t say anything. I grabbed his pack and glanced through it before anyone saw me. That’s when I found the note, Don’t trust Scott, it said. Sounds like really bad advice in hindsight.
“Hey, Scotty,” I hear someone calling me, so I turn to look, “they give you any extra water filters? I can’t seem to find mine.” It’s Tommy.
“Yeah, help yourself. They’re in my pack.” I tell him. “Take whatever you need.” I quickly turn and Jackie’s warming her hands by the fire – pure alabaster white and yellow in the glow of the flames.