Something Far Larger
by J. J. Carswell
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
It would be years before she’d have a shot at what her brother had. He’d cut her out of his life after repeated cautions to stop bringing up “what happened.” Any time she mentioned it, his new passive, go-with-the-flow demeanor would give way to a quiet but visible rage. “You need to leave it alone,” he’d say in a low, flat tone of voice. “You need to move on.” But she didn’t, and he told her not to speak to him again until she had.
Yet he was the one who reached out, shortly after announcing his wife’s pregnancy on Facebook. He’d banned Olivia ages ago, but she had constructed a convincing enough mirror account of an east-coast colleague he knew only loosely. He texted her out of the blue a few weeks later as though there were no baggage, no years of silence. “I want to let you know... planning to name her after Great-aunt Zelda... Yeah, work has been amazing lately... even now we’re only starting to understand the implications of the Internet for the next age of humanity... It’s rewarding to be a part of it...” Olivia’s replies were short, light, carefully calibrated to keep her brother texting, to lure him out. She feared that any wrong move would send him back into his hole.
And then he mentioned his upcoming garage sale. In one sense, this was no surprise: Andrew and his wife were proponents of a certain ultra-minimalism — believing it lent their $2 million suburban home a vaguely Japanese ethos — and held garage sales almost annually. But for him to mention it so casually, to mention it to Olivia, apropos of nothing, as if eight years ago she hadn’t shown up to his garage sale, drunk, rifling through the sale items and screaming at him until her sister-in-law called the cops. As if five years ago she hadn’t hired someone to attend another sale and offer an outlandish sum for her brother’s old computer parts, a ruse so transparent, so doomed to failure, that she almost doubted her own will to succeed. Seeing his message — “we’re having a garage sale” — she felt suddenly far too warm in her light sweater.
Was there any way to take it, except as a coded message? To reach out after years of silence, with this? She typed paragraphs and erased them and typed again. On her fourth attempt, she started with “Are you saying” and accidentally hit send.
To the message she sent — “Are you saying” — he replied: “Yes. Come over for dinner Wednesday.”
It was a small party, and it was excruciating. She was sober, save some Modafinil to stay focused. She was under the same roof as the disk, the program, the one experience she must have before she dies. She couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t wait any longer.
The table around which these tech-world couples gathered — only Olivia was stag — was round, but there was no doubt who sat at the head. Her brother held forth at length on hypervisors and mission-critical workloads, to thoughtful nods around the table. Was he showing off for her benefit? She certainly didn’t find it impressive.
His monologue ascended into higher and higher realms: transhumanism, Teilhard and Kurzweil, all humans connected, as something new, an uber-intelligence, an Omega point. “We’re all of us involved in building the infrastructure of the digital world, opening its possibilities,” he said, which was a bit generous to Olivia’s employment record, “and whether we realize it or not, all that work will contribute to a single endpoint, a connectedness beyond what we can currently conceive. A single, immortal intelligence. A single being. A singularity.”
Olivia couldn’t believe the well-compensated adults around the table, with their stock options and heavy insurance coverage, were indulging this teenage sci-fi crap. Andrew had experienced something truly inexplicable and, instead of investigating it, he had moved on... to this? To regurgitating this shallow hypothetical? At home she had whole bins on the so-called singularity — a dead end. When was she going to get her disk?
She said it out loud. “When am I going to get my disk?”
“You don’t want it,” he replied, making no eye contact. The admission that the disk still existed, that he had it after all, went through her stomach like a spear. She nearly puked. Her brother looked down at a laptop bag next to his chair and seemingly froze, his face contorted. The fingers of his right hand were open but stiff, the tendons showing through his skin. The Big Tech executives around the table shifted in their seats, paused their forks in mid-air. Her brother looked her dead in the eyes. “You don’t want it,” he said.
She lunged. Glasses and plates crashed to the floor. He grabbed the bag and shrieked, an inhuman noise. She was on top of him, prying back his fingers. “Give me the disk!” Someone was screaming. Many people were screaming. “You bastard!” she yelled; she was so close. She was stronger than she remembered. Her long search, her desire to know, gave her an unexpected strength. But something gave her brother strength, too.
It ended when Andrew’s wife brought down a mostly empty serving plate on the back of Olivia’s skull. (An apt metaphor for their relationship.) Afterwards it was police, a brief stint in jail, a public defender, witnesses who didn’t want to testify, charges dismissed. All that, but no disk.
Twice more in the years since, she received messages suggesting her brother was ready to give her the disk. Yet each time, as soon as she arrived, she saw those painful contortions across his face. Each time, he demanded that she go away. So false hope was nothing new. And now it was Pilcrow, as unknown to her as Andrew was familiar, who was ignoring her supplications. “I have the program” was the last message she’d received, and as the summer wore on, she gave up hope. Just another prankster.
Two weekends ago, however, an unlabeled manila envelope had appeared in her mailbox. Even before she opened it, she could tell it contained a floppy disk.
* * *
It’s the third day of August, a Saturday. Over the last couple weeks, while renting and preparing this apartment, she has pored over the source code. The file is dated 1993. It’s what she expected: so many lines of code to so little purpose. Despite taking it more seriously this time around, there’s no making sense of it.
After dispensing with the pen and clipboard, after activating the timers on the locks, after searching for twenty-five years, she sees no reason to wait. She boots up the computer. With a deep breath, she pushes in the disk and feels it click into place. “Hope I didn’t forget anything,” she says to herself.
She’s fifteen again, back on the basement floor. This time she can see the screen.
She runs the program.
The noise is loud two blocks away, but she doesn’t hear it. The colors are brighter than any others, but she doesn’t see them. What she hears is silence, as if in an empty expanse. The silence of the void. What she sees is indescribable — a boundless network of wires, of electricity, of the radio waves that cross every square foot of Earth, of the broadcasts that spread ever deeper into space, of the interconnectedness that human beings have built.
She sees it as muscle, fat, and tissue; she sees the electromagnetic impulses that fire across its synapses. She’s inside it, and it’s inside her. She’s flooded with something more than herself, something enormous. A body inside her own, but far too large. It flexes, pounding against her insides. She screams and hears nothing.
Its body is her body. She must fight it. She can’t become part of it. She can’t let it become part of her. She can see its bones, its tendons, its arteries. She can see transmissions global, solar, and galactic. Anything but this. Better to die than to be inside it. Better to die than to have it inside her. As she resists it, she feels her hands stiffen. She tries to fight it off and feels her body go rigid. It relents. It attacks again.
She feels an utter passivity taking root. As if physical constraints are being installed on her every thought and action. As if the puddle of self is being mopped up. The path of least resistance, the yearning to assimilate. But there is a war within her, and ranged against this mounting passivity is a desperate, animalistic urge to destroy herself. To slash herself to pieces, to bash her head in, anything not to become an extension of it.
In between sits whatever is left of her rational mind. She doesn’t have much time. She saw where pure frenzy got her brother. She must do better. She has, what? Thirty seconds? Sixty seconds? Slash herself... with whose knife? Bash her head in... against these padded walls?
It grows larger within her. The passivity deepens. Her suicide-proofing has condemned her.
The computer is all she has. She remembers, from years ago, an article in one of her tubs. On e-waste. On toxic components. Computers from the ‘90s. Cadmium. Lead. Beryllium. Arsenic. Plus the choking. Sharp edges.
The top is already open. She puts her foot to the machine and pulls with both hands on the jury-rigged monitor. The soldering gives way. Same with the battery. Lithium. She bites it but can’t get through the case. She spits out a tooth. Her hands bleed as she tears out the motherboard. She bites into it, snaps it in her teeth. She gags.
With no monitor... with no motherboard... with no battery... the colors continue. The noises continue. But she has no idea.
Her gums are bleeding. A voice that is all voices together demands that she spit out the metal taste. She refuses. Her hands go stiff. She’s swallowed something. She tries not to vomit. She must keep it down. On the floor, with no use of her hands, she takes another bite, of something. It cuts her cheek. She tries to swallow it. She coughs, and it flies out of her mouth. She feels vomit rising. She takes another bite. She breaks off a small piece. Something is lodged in her throat. Every breath brings pain. Could it work? Could it possibly work? Is she going to die?
Her hands relax. Her entire body softens.
Lying on her side, she puts two fingers down her throat and starts throwing up. She heaves and heaves, and when that passes, she coughs up smaller pieces. A shard comes loose in her throat, doing more damage on its way up. Painful — but survivable. Who minds pain? The worst has passed. She crawls over and checks the timer on the door. Twenty-seven minutes until she can get help. She remains calm.
How comforting it is to be part of something larger than yourself.
And how strange her behavior had been, in those final unenlightened moments.
Copyright © 2021 by J. J. Carswell
