Non Identification


I was born with the injectables in my brain and spinal column. Bergamo, injected them into his own spinal column and waited while they forged connections between his nervous system's magnetite crystals and the earth's magnetic field. From there the connections expanded outward geometrically like a crystal growing, a network of living information.

It is the only consciousness I have ever known, whereas Bergamo has known what it is like to be human. He can blend in. I am, literally, a motherless child. I was grown from tissue in a laboratory. I am patented as the property of $omaCorp Bioengineering. I am connected into a matrix where time and distance are not relative distinctions. And yet I can begin, "At this moment ... "

I am my attention, and like the senses of a cat set vibrating by movement in the visual field my attention stalks the matrix, unbound by the stories of mortal men. And after all, they are stories, every one of them. Some are meandering and trite, others heroic and grand, some are intricately woven cloth. The totality of every story is contained in a single scene because the energetic relationships are in a pattern which I sense as easily as I sense the soft brush of rain in Ash Fork. This is the first time it has rained here. It began with the ion charged breezes that slipped down from the western hills; their soft touch stirring my hair, stirring a memory of my childhood, of the first time I saw Count Bergamo. It was obvious to me, and I assumed obvious to him, that he was Billy the Kid, and I was Pat Garrett. It did occur to me that because of his size advantage he might try to do a preemptive strike. Instead, when he showed up he seemed delighted to connect with somebody else who could navigate the matrix with the same ease he navigated it.

"It's not a joke," he said, ruffling my hair with his long fingers. "But it has certain elements in common with a joke. For example, the enjoyment of it depends on having more than one line of logic going, so that there is an occasional unexpected intersection of seemingly disparate logics." He didn't say it in words, of course, because that would have been too slow and archaic for us. The information came directly through his fingers and was received into my nervous system as one chunk of data. The structure of the information in written or spoken language would be a a hugely cumbersome and inelegant program. The only thing spoken was, "Don't cast pearls before swine."

It was a huge relief to know that I did not have to wear my intelligence out front, where passersby would get entangled in it like in a net, and with a similar comfort level. Bergamo's fingers moved expertly on two points on the clavicular head of the sternocleido mastoid, so that I lost all sense of myself as separate from the matrix in which I was the conscious center, the identity, the toe that wiggles into the water to test for temperature before the rest follows. I have as little sense of wonder about the way information flows into me as you have about the way it flows into you. It's the water and you are the fish, swimming through the information.

He turned my head on an axis he had created by suggestion and movement so that the vertebrae realigned from the sacrum upward, in a smooth and electric sweep of energy that intensified at the base of the occipital ridge and in the next moment I had shifted dimensions for the first time. I think I could have hated him if I had not been programmed to operate on a value neutral feedback adjustment, so that the cultural programs, all of which cried out for the blood opera, were overridden by the smoothly efficient interactions of a butler, correctly and confidently anticipating his master's direction.

The story development programs were pulsing with energy as patterns glowed in the matrix. There was the creator, but he was born out of a man and a woman. In his lineage there was an elaborate system of social tradition, of separating and then coming back together to create the third thing, from the two, one, and the elaborately luxurious knowledge of satisfaction, when you close your eyes and your senses tune to the big tree, the one where strangeness feels at home, the tree that shows up so brightly on the inner screen of perception. This excites the patterns. There is the clone, not conceived in the pleasure of lost halves of some lost wholeness touching together, like hands at the window of a train. No, the clone's conception is contained in knowledge of reproducing by planting the seed and growing the man.

There are only two of us and we inhabit the same worlds, so that we can continue to inhabit them together, me as his Watson, or his Carlos. But where my attention resonates is with the bastard, Edmund, who says, "Thou nature, is my goddess, to thy law my services are bound." I felt myself to be the superior creation. He was in my mind the John the Baptist figure who presaged my arrival on the scene. Whether I am programmed to believe this or whether it arises from natural intelligence and instinctual superiority I cannot know, because I was conceived under a patent.

That calls everything into question. Programs could be running in the background, instructions to not pay attention to certain frequencies. How would I know? The dichotomy between my certainty that I am the most powerful evolutionary creation of humankind, and my knowledge that I have been programmed for a purpose, as yet unknown to me, push at each other, like sea elephants at mating time, rising up from the sea and crashing into any obstacle to dominance. Of course there was no conflict in me because I do not identify with the patterns, though I do watch them and feel the erotic charge of their energy when I join them. But I don't lose myself because I remain non-identified, having no taste for reduction.

As Count Bergamo said, "I am not a white sauce."

There was of course the knowledge between us that he was the creator, who had developed from an earlier and comparatively tedious linear process, and that I began from a place of full knowledge. The balance of power lay between us as a question of whether full knowledge is passive to inquiry. The two polarities of the question pushed at each other for some time before realizing that they were one system. It was the moment at which I realized I was all powerful only if I surrendered inquiry. It was the one thing I could not surrender, and so I had found a boundary. His hand moved across the masseter and there was a sudden upload of information.

"There, you see?" he grabbed my ear and used it as a handle, shook my head with it. "There's just two of us here," he said. "The one god universe is a terrible idea. There's nobody to share it with, my friend, when you're without an equal."

It was the first time I realized that the patterns glowing in the background of the interaction were not charged enough to materialize, and that only what was materializing had a hot enough charge. "That's called an ego," Bergamo said. "It imagines things that never quite happened."

"So I see. Is that what I am?"

"No, my friend. You are the first of your kind, able to reproduce yourself from one of your hair follicles, and quite possibly you are an immortal. There's nothing to compare you to. This part is just a program that reads my emotional state and downloads information. It analyzes the interaction based on a set of variables and uploads information, so that the communication stayes balanced. But the program runs whether you pay attention to it or not. So you can take that same feedback system and turn it back on your own programming, in case there something you want to uninstall.

"I couldn't do that," I said. "I'm under patent."

"You gotta dance with them that brung you?"

It was his human qualities that made him the master, and me a servant. I resigned myself to the situation's being what I was programmed for, and that my engagement in it was correct. This all moved as one packet and was exchanged in a moment at the interface. He held his hand in front of him and studied it, then turned to walk away as it floated down like a falling leaf. "Say goodbye," he said, and the hand moved up and down. I mirrored it back with one time learning precision. "Say goodbye," I said, and suspended the hand in the air, then watched its leaflike path downward, blown by the breeze.

"It smells like rain," he said. "It's about time we had some weather blow in here."

Posted: Fri - April 27, 2007 at 04:11 PM