Big Dead Elephant wrote a short story, which you can read if you like. It is called Program~
Silently from above, the lavender curtain slowly withdrew behind the fog, behind the city's tectonic silhouette. With its endless western arc, the earth-shadow surrendered to daybreak, the trail of its retreat glinting peach-red through the haze against the pinnacles. I watched through closed eyes from the rooftop, the warmth on my back stirring the memory, our memory, in my mind. The slow pump of morning traffic into New York's waking heart; the rising columns of vapor billowing from three-quarters of a million hydro-units; the endless city lights and stars snuffed out by the softy lit, warming air.
In stillness I moved through the sounds pouring through my ears, percussion rising to roar like fire, tones arcing and spinning off, the gurgling of voices like old warped samples. I could feel a young woman in Harlem, her soft morning song moving through the eyes of her newborn son. I could feel teenagers dreaming in a berth in Brooklyn, their bright chases through mischief and laughter. Drummers and boppers drew song and thunder on balconies. I could feel the hymn of a hundred thousand waking minds in Manhattan, their soft mantra blurring and folding the light of the new day.
In this way, every morning, through speakers sewn into a hood, sweet Maya would sing to me.
“Its time to go D.”
I stood up and stepped down off the ledge to make my way back to shelter. Home today was the rooftop of a gutted-out brick high-rise ant colony in Queens overlooking the Cypress Hill cemeteries to the East River. Some of the guys were already awake, sitting silently in a small circle catching up on last night's highlights on vidgear. The invisible rolling hum of radio waves poured into their dense black goggles projecting translucent images before their eyes; surveillance footage of street fights, car-jackings, suits in boardroom meetings and teams of spooks cutting their way into warehouses. Some of the night-shift gargoyles were still asleep, curled in little huddles like puppies in berms of crushed stone beneath suspended paraboloids of solar mesh. The morning mist collected on the rolling folds of their long black cloaks, slowly undulating, each with a long plastic cord winding out of their upper back and snaking its way to a heater unit. The heater pumped warm water into a vest to maintain body temperature; even if it was minus 30 centigrade with windchill, your core temperature stayed up at around 96, keeping even exposed appendages warm to the touch.
Farther back lay a pair of interlocking boxes of rusted corten steel, fifteen feet high and forty feet wide forming our only enclosed shelter. Many years ago we scrounged the plates from a salvage yard and started welding. Corten is perfect because the chemistry of its outermost layer is tuned to rust only so far, so that the layer of rust itself forms its own protection. The mainroom, an enclosed kitchen and lounge, had single surface glass wall facing west that could rotate up and out of the way in nice weather or fade to opaque for projections during gatherings. Out of the side and rear of the boxes crawled piles of eight foot tube-shells of sprayed concrete emerging from the mainrooms like a giant wasp nest to enclose washrooms, reading and sleeping alcoves.
As the morning light crept in, the fluorescent glow from long staggered steps of glass-cased hydroponic beds began to flicker off leaving the dayshift to the sun. They snaked like wet spaghetti terraces, a foot and a half tall and stacked twice as high as man to a cluster of tall aluminum cylinders beside the shelter. The cylinders formed an automated processor, separating grain, fruit and leaf from root and chaff to help supplement some of the staples. Other cylinders processed rainwater, waste and sewage into drinking water and fertilizing compounds for the hydroponics. During the day the broad curving scales of solar mesh suspended across the roof and southern façade collected energy and fed a hydrogen storage tank through electrolysis. This energy could then be fed back into heaters, lights, pumps, cook tops, electronics, anything we needed, whenever we need it.
All of this used to please me greatly; living off the grid, off the reservation, dropping a dime on the system. But even that was gone from me now.
This is my long descent.
* * *
My life, or at least the life of the body I've now come to occupy, began out in Jersey on the edge of the world, where the late-great-civilization of industrialized man found its inglorious edge bleeding out into the Pine Barrens. The gang and I raised ourselves on broken glass and cigarettes in forests and railyards, lost progeny of the last generation.
I have memories of fireside concerts in wreckyards, aerosol cannons over stripmalls, and narcotics brewing under banks of growlights in abandoned pigbarns. We turned our schools upside down. We turned our towns upside down. And when we climbed the groaning towers to revel in the fires we turned to feast our eyes on the city lights.
The Deadtech Lotus Society, or just “The Lotus”, as we became known to the talking heads of the fading central airwaves. We said goodbye to our mothers and fathers and encrusted ourselves with graffiti and salvaged trash in the basements of old factories along the docks in Staten Island. When the war and music started bringing money we poured onto the city streets. Chaos was our art and civilization was our medium.
And so, like the involuntary reflex of a virile young silverback crushing the infant offspring of a competitor, ours was the macro-economic Oedipus complex 3 billion years in the making. We drew the fatal masks of tragic characters from the temple walls at birth, and in a feverish, drug induced trance, we trampled old gods to favor the new.
May our children have mercy on our souls.
* * *
“
“You smell like a goddamn sewer rat.” chuckled a pale face emerging from a chemical diving-suit with a miners lamp in a long London accent.
“Go fuck yourself Twat.” laughed Helmet.
“Give us a kiss my sweet..” Twat leaned over toward Alice as she squealed and pulled away. Everyone looked up from their tasks, checking valves and zipping electronics into bodybags, to chuckle for a minute and revel in our triumph.
This was the last grand hoorah we had thought, before the big door finally slammed shut. A week earlier we had flooded every tabloid news company headquarters in the country with 100,000 gallons of raw sewage by welding bypasses from the sprinkler mains to the trunk sewage lines and then setting off all the sprinklers. That's almost two million square feet of soaked-in biohazard nationwide. You cant just clean that up and be back in business in a few days. It took them better than a week just to figure out that it would be cheaper to gut and raze each building. Within a month people stopped missing them.
Operation Shitstorm had gone quite well.
I made eye contact with Rainsey on the other side of the sewer junction, a sort of tall vertical cylinder where the corporate Midtown detritus met that of Chelsea and the Village.
”˜You're my stormdrain love', I mouthed gently.
She smiled and shyly turned her head.
Above us and a slight to the northeast in Times Square the Feds were about to cut through 6 layers of 4 inch steel packed with concrete to find an empty 30' by 30' by 30' cube with four big speakers and a nice hole in the middle of the floor. We had surreptitiously encased ourselves in it three days earlier under the guise of “Public Art”. By the time the local flatfeet figured out our permits were forgeries the walls and ceiling were up and a nice brewing crowd of rowdy fans were rolling in for our defense.
Just as the first media images of swat vans being overturned by kids in football-pads and gas-masks were rolling into the collective suburban living room, our punk-rock-DJ-vigil webcasts were pouring into the bedrooms and dormitories of 6 million frothing teenagers worldwide. The Media put together our connection to the little sprinkler stunt right on cue.
Its not every day someone steals the most lucrative real-estate in the world, let alone three strait days of uninterrupted media coverage. No company in the world could afford what we had stolen.
Weeks later Interpol finally caught up with us holed-up in a mineshaft west of Rio de Janeiro, and spent another day and a half trying to cut us out as we fended them off with 12,000 gallons of quick-setting industrial spray foam.
Why Interpol?
Somehow they put two and two together that a little stunt at a riot in Kiev involving armored vehicles filled with silly-slime and mounted with fire hoses was probably us too, after they tracked a forged passport to surveillance of my man Helmet passing out gas-masks and crampons to the rioters.
They threw the book at us, but evidence was scant and there weren't even laws against most of the stuff wed done. Vandalism, Disturbing the Peace, Resisting Arrest. Most of us never did time.
“
* * *
I have no parents; I make the earth and heaven my parents.
I have no home; I make the Tan T'ien my home.
I have no divine power; I make honesty my Divine Power.
I have neither life nor death; I make the Um my Life and Death.
I have no body; I make Stoicism my Body.
I have no eyes; I make The Flash of Lightning my eyes.
I have no ears; I make Sensibility my Ears.
I have no limbs; I make Promptitude my Limbs.
I have no designs; I make Seizing the Opportunity by the Forelock my Designs.
I have no ways; I make Righteous Laws my ways.
I have no principles; I make Adaptability to all circumstances my Principle.
I have no tactics; I make Emptiness and Fullness my Tactics.
I have no enemy; I make Incautiousness my Enemy.
I have no sword; I make No Mind my Sword.
I have no armour; I make Benevolence my Armour.
I have no castle; I make the Immovable Mind my Castle.
“Okay, here's the status.” Wiggles chewed nervously at his cuticles as he poured through the relays on his tablet. “Falung-Tsu is down, Kromwell is on its way. Beta core is still bogged down in the UK with Glaxo Smith Klein, they've shifted their personnel into Res-Blocks and completely sealed off their networks inside the design core, we cant get anybody on the inside higher than middle-management, ... really a nasty little nut to crack...”
“Hey, are you even listening?” asked Wiggles.
I didn't say anything.
There was a bit of a frustrated silence. I stared out at the indecipherable blur of the I.D.D. passing by the pod through the clear silicate canopy.
“You're going to see her today aren't you?” he asked.
* * *
It was nine years ago, crouching in a concrete hex-cell apartment seven stories up, looking out over the undulating garden of black polycarbonate warming pads and aquaculture mesh bleeding off toward the violet-green horizon. They called it an OTEC atoll; Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. We were on a floating microcity three thousand miles east of New Guinea in deep Pacific. Several thousand feet below our feet an insulated tube was drawing up several hundred million gallons of cold seawater per hour, funneled into stacks of exchange grids and pressure vessels and turbines that convert the temperature differential between the pacific surface and the deep sea into enough hydrogen to power a large city. On the surface, the dark polycarbonate pads were lowering the surface albedo and increasing the efficiency of absorption, leaving soft wafting lines of vapor rising from the seams for a mile out in any direction.
“How many people have we killed?” Rainsey asked out of the silence.
A tri-turbine megalift silently raised its hulk from the engineering yard and powered off toward the hazy grey mists to the east. With a mathematical choreography,
a clockwork army of six-legged robotic spiders merged on the pile of containers left behind.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The grey light reflected her skin a pale green. “In the Petrol-wars in Russia. The battle of New York. How many kids threw themselves away for this. For us. Old men suffocated by the pain of obsolescence. Backwater families in Armenia and Cambodia torn by the chaos of the life we've made?”
A young couple had strolled out onto the catwalk below, laughing and grasping the collars of each other's long coats to kiss. The woman gave a flick of the head, using the wind to free the bright blond hair from her face. The man gently pulled it behind with fingers emerging from a cuff, wiping the mist and seaspray from her brow.
“I don't know.” I said, after a pause.
I looked down, ran my fingernail through a seam in the soft beige curves of cloth monofurn that undulated from the walls and floor. The thick hexagonal window pattered with the sound of raindrops bound in a passing gust.
* * *
Stepping out of the pod we made our way up the mainstair at the I.D.D., straitened our hoods and merged with the sea of freaks on their way to work. Our dark echelon broke a teardrop space in the crowd before us as we marched the four stories to the Crest. We stood at the rail and peered into the great chasm of the Matria. For sixty stories above, forty stories below, and almost six hundred feet across, a great hollow ovoid of space opened before us, pocked with dense clusters of fifteen story concave bulges and hollows. The morning light streamed in from a great oculus and from three splintered canyons piercing the space to shear and twist off into the distance. In an eight hundred foot trunk of transparent netting branching and funneling up toward the oculus, a group of Jumpers had cordoned off a space to test personal flight apparati, their bounding and gliding forms pouring through the volume. Behind and wrapping around, great sails billowed up in rolling wafting forms, their layers awash in a folding psychedelia of art-film and advertisements. The whole of whole of every surface seemed carved and molded with broad strokes of abutting honeycombs and jewelboxes of heterogeneous addlabs. Everywhere in between, and spewing into the atria in great disjointed arms and ribbons, wound gnarled entanglements of podtracks, circulatory vessels, and a buzzing sea of robotic life. After a moment, the others raised and secured their vidgear from about their necks, giving a brief nod before departing to their duties.
The Industrial Design District had begun less than twenty years ago as a small campus of retrofit enclosures and installations into the decaying urban infrastructure in east Brooklyn. The Fabrication Laboratories, or “Fab-Labs” as they used to call them, were a series of projects set up by my friends Alice Berretta, Trevor and Asimov after they got tired of getting arrested. It was a beautiful idea really. Basically, it was just a free R&D lab. Free to use. Free to All. Anyone, from seasoned inventors to kids after school, homeless people to trust-fund art students could come in for a day, a week, a month, a year, and work on ideas using the latest design software and rapid-prototyping hardware to realize an idea. No bosses. No royalties. No experience necessary.
As time went on the district exploded with rebellious young professionals looking for a new way of life. It spilled into the neighboring buildings and old subway tunnels. It built itself up and over the city blocks like a great flood of glass and steel and fiberglass.
By now it was one of the great mega-structures of the world, hundreds of millions of square feet suspended in great cragging sheets and folds, thirty stories up and seventy stories tall, blotting out the sky through most of Brooklyn, the outsides all draped in great black shimmering sheets of semi-transparent photovoltaics. Inside, the sprawling floors, stacks of honeycombs, addlabs and atria teamed with music and markets, gadgets and mobiles, screens and projections; the zoo of zoos for the freaks of freaks. Each day fifteen million of them soaked through coils and bundles of podtracks to their lair of choice. The inner cores of design-culture that had naturally emerged of selective labor, the Audiozone, The Biolab, the Autodeck, Molecular Hill, the Ratsnest, poured and mixed and bled together as they grew. If there wasn't a ski hill or an arboreta or a simlab or a jetski racing tank somewhere today, there would be tomorrow.
And somewhere, sprawled out in the outskirts, there was a tumor like this festering in most every city in the world. Homoludenic bliss metastasized. Rome born anew.
How proud Foucault would be to see us now,
From a long, black, outstretched pinnacle over the bay, I starred through the twelve inches of one-way poly-carbonate glass, out across the Rockaway Boardwalk toward the Atlantic horizon. Fifteen miles out, past the three skeletal sores of the docking nodes spidered out on the surface, the long sleek form of an Ekranotanker was powering up its twelve immense engine nacelles, slowly driving up to lift speed, utilizing the extra ground-effect lift to float its mile-long, 6-million-ton deadweight up to fifteen feet above the surface.
This was the IPSOlopht. Behind me, in the long curls and folds of corridors and datacells, there was a buzz of discussion and review; Intelligence, Process, Strategy, Operations. Under the strictest definition, or rather, under the slowly desiccating American legal framework, the Lotus Agency was now a private security company under the employment of Section One's composite ownership. Your average run-of-the-mill Freak, as we have come to be known, generally invests whatever capital he or she has accumulated in a lifetime of creative-labor into a diversified network, between lucrative big-name projects, ones own projects, and the projects of friends and family, with a hefty savings fund in the Program's Composite Account. Section One, or more fully, Program Branch Section One: New York, hires Lotus to maintain basic order within the I.D.D. and amongst Program members within our generous jurisdiction. Because the I.D.D. is technically private property, the Feds need a warrant just to enter most of Brooklyn. Fortunately for us, this became less and less frequent after we won a re-districting several years back, allowing our local legal structure to fall within a generous coincidence with Program-owned space. Of course, there are locally elected figures for civil legal proceedings, whose rulings and regulations we must follow, but the general code of conduct for a member of Lotus, and the fact that our activities are generally more preoccupied with global corporate industrial warfare at this point, makes guidelines like these somewhat unconcerning.
The real control, if you could call it that, comes from the Cell. Every Program Section has its own communally-owned set of infrastructure, from the load-bearing structure of the I.D.D. to the pod network to the engineering decks below. Now generally, each one of these processes, from the maintenance of the Docks to the amorphous additive growth of the I.D.D. is guided by a broad spectrum of self-modifying algorithms designed to meet the maximum number of Section residents' needs with the maximum level of efficiency. But every machine needs monitoring, every script needs writing, and so also under Program employment lies a small circle of programmers and researchers, bound to every contributing Program member by the simple knowledge that the health of their Section, and the extent of their power, is directly connected to the health and strength of every Section resident. If their engineering decks operate less efficiently than those of another section, then orders will no longer be processed under them, and the market advantage elsewhere will quickly sap their members to greener pastures.
I grinned, and swiveled my glass a bit. To most of this speech I had already enjoyed privy.
“Heh, well that's an interesting theory. Where did you read that?”
“Oh just in some quirky books by conspiracy nuts.”
“Like Milner's Kindergarten and all that?” asked Asimov.
“Didn't he divorce his first wife because he didn't know chicks were supposed to have pubes?” Helmet asked, dumping a little pile of tobacco out onto the table.
"Yea I think that was him," Asimov nodded.
Alice rolled her eyes and continued.
We were in the Waterbar at the time, a 4 story scar carved into the side of the Hiroshi Building in downtown Tokyo. I lost myself in the glitter of lights and adscreens beyond the window in the square below. Curved shapes of hanging nylon mesh dipped into the space of the bar behind and below us from the ceiling. The room was flooded with projected images, grainy orange and blue figures of children playing in a pool, a girl surfing, street thugs shooting at police in the rain, mirrored and looped in the mesh, moving slowly and silently, gently wafting in the draft.
Three stories down in the pit a band was playing. A lead singer screeched and thrashed as he drew long strokes and sharp chirps on a two story organ built of old gasoline engines; from a tractor motor to weedwacker engines, throttles roared and waned with exhaust reverberating in tall stacks of pipes of all sizes and materials. Several girls drew cacophonic rushes and pirouettes on harps and on long stacks of glass armonicas. Percussionists were beating sledgehammers against steel plates filled with ball bearings and detonating blasting caps in tall lit plexiglass cylinders of liquid for snaps and penetrating thuds.
I scanned the crowds, splitting my focus between the blur of barlife and Alice's giddy discussion.
“Read his later work man. Look don't get me wrong, I think the conspiracy geeks are nuts. What interests me is not weather there is literally some secret society silently pulling the strings from shadowy boardrooms, but weather perhaps the theorists correctly identified Ruskin as the modern translator of Masonic ideals into an actual economic ideology, one that has served as the founding script of the power-elite social structure we inhabit today. That a ruling few, simply by controlling loans, could effectively control all material production worldwide.”
Believe it or not. She always spoke like that.
“Look at it man. Life has become a drag. Some will struggle through classes, find a job, placate stuffy old men and massage egos for the better part of their existence to pay off student loans, a house, a family, a divorce, before waiting to die in some living cemetery in Florida. Countless millions more around the world will die in an agonizing and tireless bondage wishing their fates were so lucky. Freedom, even in its metaphysical sense, will become tantalizingly distant from daily life. It will draw away from ones eyes and hands in idle beta-thought in supermarkets, it will drain away from their arms and legs working mines in Africa and assembly lines in Asia. Even the great heads of nations and corporations will loose the sensation in their mouths and fingertips as they pass their assets to number-crunchers and market models. Life will be an act of spectation, humanity as a trauma victim, leaving their body.”
“Of this, I am aware.” I said to myself with a bit of a devilish grin.
“ Now add that to all that stuff Ive been saying about open-source economics. These burgeoning meta-projects like linux and wikimedia that seem to be outright defying the generally accepted laws of capitalist economics; that a loose, unhierarchical network of individual writers and programmers, without direct financial motivation, from the cost of development to outright usability of product, could generously out-perform even vast, tenacious corporate armies of hired programmers.
Ive been thinking the reason the open-source works on the internet, is that the cost of copying a design construct is so low that the base unit of human work is the design construct itself.
Imagine if there was a place, some kind of design-school, company, whatever, where design tools were shared, where freely organized and unhierarchical design teams could come together over mutual interest to develop constructs of everything from oceanographic models to education programs to building and structural systems, and send those constructs directly to automated production and implementation at rates no fixed corporate structure could match. How quickly could we slash through product design markets? or the fossil fuel monolith? or space exploration?
“Kind of like communism?” asked Helmet in a stupid goading kind of way, licking the seam of a third cigarette and passing it to Asimov.
“Its not communism wiseass, its anti-communism.” continued Alice, unflustered and smirking a bit. “ Its actually far less communistic than what we live in today, because ownership is always retained by the individual instead of by banks or a small board of investors. It is communistic only in respect to the use of time and space, and not in respect to ownership or enforced will.”
“Vive le Situationisme!” exploded Helmet, raising his glass.
“Yea, but kiddo, you cant get rid of hierarchy. Its as fundamental to the human animal as eating or speaking. No culture avoids it.” Trevor pursued.
“We do it all the time! Think of any good group of friends.” She motioned. “ There's no ”˜chief'. Sure, one may make a lot of decisions or talk a lot,” she said turning an eye to Helmet, who promptly rolled his eyes, blowing smoke out his nose and giving a subtle what-the-fuck face. “...Another may form a the philosophical backbone,” she nodded to Rainsey, who smiled and winked back through her glass “ but everyone in the group is there and contributes something different, and everyone is free to go, free to lead, free to do anything. That's not because there's no work, its because there's no labor.
My prediction is, that the days of corporate empires, as we know them, are numbered. The basis of hierarchy is repetition. Its 1000 people working the lines at a factory, 5 running the books and 1 person making decisions. As time goes on, however, the process of automation, exponentially, will begin to eliminate the repetitive task from human life. Theres no need for people to work fields, to run assembly lines, to do taxes if machines can do those tasks more efficiently. So why do we need people at all then? What will we do with our 'free time'? Simply, for likely many centuries to come, we will still need humans to carry out creative tasks. Only our living, feeling, dreaming, analog wetware can make the kinds of irrational leaps necessary for real invention.
Think of it, a design coordinator could bring together whatever kind of help he or she needed, and then they would all go to work, temporarily renting a shared space and shared design resources. That initial prototype or design construct could then be sent to automated production in facilities that are also time-shared, marketed and sold on the web, and the designers themselves would reap the per-unit profits. Since the initial investment is minimized to the man-hours spent by the designers themselves, just as is so in the open-source programming world, there is no need for a vast, clunky, wasteful investment structure. Furthermore, there is no need for a static corporate hierarchy and an endless chain of redundant supervisors to coordinate labor, because all risk is assumed by the designers themselves. You can show up and work on your own to make a painting for one day, or join up with a team and invest several months or years into making a movie or a solar cell. Every day you are fired, and everyday you are hired again, so you always get out what you put in, and you have total freedom to do whatever you like from one day to the next.
Now of course there are additional costs. The development costs for some products, even with time-shared resources, will often exceed an individual designers ability to pay up-front and they will have to make offers to investors. But given the huge reductions in superfluous infrastructure, and the huge increases in individual design ownership and control, the total investment composite would still lay solidly in the hands of a decentralized group of individuals rather than a controlling few.”
Imagine a world where a young girl can design a new toaster or beach-chair, mass produce the product in fully automated factories and sell them by-demand on the web? Can you imagine what such a thing would do to the global economy? Its like going from smoke signals to the internet. Imagine if families were untied to the place of a parent's place of work? If classrooms were untied to a physical school? That nomadic tribes of designers and friends could be free to move and fraction through a global network of design labs, from Peking to Prague to Anchorage, year to year or day to day?
Marx said of human labor, that the worker, as he increases the efficiency of his work, he only cheapens his own value as a commodity. In this paradigm however, it is not the efficiency of labor which is increased, only the potency of the creative act. One person designing, one person running financing, one person running legality, etc. and no one more or less critical to the process. In this century, increasingly, we will see an end to static hierarchies of men and women in suits. Everyone will be their own inventor, their own boss, and their own provider...”
Ten stories down, my eyes were lost in the silent image of President Minotauri pounding a lectern and regurgitating political gangrene on one of the giant adscreens facing the square.
“Don't those idiots know no one watches TV anymore?”
And like that, their time was up.
* * *
Entering the Gate, I withdrew my hood and nodded to the guard through mirrored wall. I approached a glistening black circular door 8 feet in diameter, set beveled into a pure white wall. I stepped solemnly into the red circle on the floor, and staring strait ahead, placed my hands within the two red circles on the protruding center of the door. A small white light pulsated for a moment, and with a satisfying chirp the red transferred to green. As I removed my hands the console retracted and the apparently solid material of the door relaxed and flattened, leaving an even, supple, concentric ripple. I closed my eyes and held my breath as I stepped forward into the metallic liquid, enduring the familiar warmth and pressure for several paces before emerging into the bright cylinder of the elevator beyond. As I turned, the black door silently returned to its beveled resolidified form before the elevator door concealed its view.
Below the lowest basements and foundations, sewers and subways, the engineering and biodecks extended for some for some 40 stories deeper yet into the crust of the earth. There are few who see these spaces anymore, trade secrets all hermetically sealed under the strictest of industrial contracts. As I passed down the long, glistening white cylindrical corridor I closed my eyes and swept my fingers along the wall, taking a moment to bathe in the soft hum and vibrations echoing even through the yards of stone and steel and carbon-fiber between my fingertips and the mazes of engineering shafts riddled beyond. Each space was its own whirring clockwork of precision fabrication, raw materials and components and subunits within subunits grown, wrought, cast, processed, milled, manufactured, assembled and then piped to distribution. With fifteen years exponential expansion of algorithmic efficiency, each task was processed, transferred, and executed by an endless cascade of self-rearranging machinery, disassembling and reassembling itself with every altered task like Swiss-watch ships in bottles.
* * *
In a 12' drainpipe at the foot of the Adirondacks, the two of us had made our home one summer. In this primordial cave of the postmodern, we laid down a bed of crushed stone, a layer of gravel, and a layer of soft sand. We hung a ring of solar panels and a transmitter at the mouth of the pipe, chords running to a terminal and a bank of batteries. We built an enclosed bunk of cabinet plywood deep inside, and made a gas hearth near the mouth. Where a downspout shed a dim circle of light from above, we siphoned water from a nearby well to make a shower and hung a ring of teal plastic for privacy.
In the damp grey morning, I lay a brown woolen blanket around her shoulders as she sat at the edge of the pipe, absorbed in her tablet, and handed her a mug of warm tea. As I sat, she grabbed my chin to place her lips on my cheek, and marveled at me with the rays of sun in the deep sea. I shyly turned toward the forest, and smiled.
“When I touch your hand,” she said, after a moment, “ I cant help but feel like my fingers are not my own, any longer. That this sensation we feel is not me, or you, but some new person that has us both.”
I closed my eyes.
“The trembling of the sea before the rocks, the trembling of the rocks before the sea.”
* * *
I entered a dim room in the shape of a distorted toroid with deeply ribbed walls of pure white. Before me, in an elaborate symmetry, the ribbing folded and exaggerated, thick bundles of chords emerging in black and deep blue, toward a bulging chrysalis deeply buried in the wall. The whole of the surface of the room glistened as a soft transparent film of violet coolant ran down its surface and into a deep pool. As I stepped forward into the space, the floor deformed and raised before me a round peninsula perhaps fifteen feet in diameter. Once in the center, I knelt.
Silently, soft curved elements in the wall began to brightly glow, and the chrysalis began to unfold and push forward, the soft plates pealing back, changing shape and folding upon themselves. By an armature, the unfolding orchid arched forward and lay gently down before me, the petals folding and retracting gracefully into the wall behind, revealing Rainsey's deeply crouched, kneeling form. Four piercing arms emerged, like the legs of a spider, to spin, delicately, a gown of lace strands around her naked form.
After a long pause, her hands slowly trembled as they moved forward from her chest. She let out a soft choke before bracing herself upon the floor. Her frail arms rippled at the weight, the long flowing mane of thin, cyan fiber-optics shimmering and rattling in delicately tied bundles, running from her head and spine all the way back into the wall behind.
For a moment her chest slowly grew and waned, her movements becoming more smooth, less labored with each passing breath. Before her eyes opened, she raised her hand to wipe her face.
“Good morning Dante.”
“Good morning Rainsey.” I returned.
“It has been a while, hasn't it?” She asked.
“It has.” I returned, with regret.
We stared at each other for a moment, kneeling in that dim light.
“So.” She finally offered. “I hear that you are leaving the Program.”
“I haven't told anyone that.” I said after a moment, looking down.
“Maya told me.” She smiled and nodded over her shoulder.
“Weve each paid the price, for our sins, haven't we?”
I didn't answer.
“Why has it taken you so long, to leave all this?” She probed.
“Well,” I sighed, reaching up to rub my neck. “ It isn't very easy for civilians to see the queen of Section One is it?” I joked and nodded toward the deep sealed door behind.
She laughed.
“Well then.” She smiled. “You'd best come give me a hug.”
I smiled, and slowly we rose to step forward. There in the dim light, we huddled together, hands clasped, arms around waists, chins upon shoulders, until at last we relaxed and withdrew.
“In the next life.” She smiled.
“In the next life.” I returned.
She placed her hands upon my cheeks, and bestowed upon me, one last kiss.
With our foreheads together, our tears mixed upon eye lashes, and for a moment, we shared one sorrowful, relieved laughed.
“Seven times down. Eight times up.” She whispered.
My hand fell lifelessly from her cheek, and I turned toward the door. The convex black surface withdrew, and as I walked I swam in her warped reflection.
I closed my eyes, held my breath, and stepped forward.
If youre bored:
Big Dead Elephant wrote a short story, which you can read if you like. It is called Program~
Silently from above, the lavender curtain slowly withdrew behind the fog, behind the city's tectonic silhouette. With its endless western arc, the earth-shadow surrendered to daybreak, the trail of its retreat glinting peach-red through the haze against the pinnacles. I watched through closed eyes from the rooftop, the warmth on my back stirring the memory, our memory, in my mind. The slow pump of morning traffic into New York's waking heart; the rising columns of vapor billowing from three-quarters of a million hydro-units; the endless city lights and stars snuffed out by the softy lit, warming air.
In stillness I moved through the sounds pouring through my ears, percussion rising to roar like fire, tones arcing and spinning off, the gurgling of voices like old warped samples. I could feel a young woman in Harlem, her soft morning song moving through the eyes of her newborn son. I could feel teenagers dreaming in a berth in Brooklyn, their bright chases through mischief and laughter. Drummers and boppers drew song and thunder on balconies. I could feel the hymn of a hundred thousand waking minds in Manhattan, their soft mantra blurring and folding the light of the new day.
In this way, every morning, through speakers sewn into a hood, sweet Maya would sing to me.
“Its time to go D.”
I stood up and stepped down off the ledge to make my way back to shelter. Home today was the rooftop of a gutted-out brick high-rise ant colony in Queens overlooking the Cypress Hill cemeteries to the East River. Some of the guys were already awake, sitting silently in a small circle catching up on last night's highlights on vidgear. The invisible rolling hum of radio waves poured into their dense black goggles projecting translucent images before their eyes; surveillance footage of street fights, car-jackings, suits in boardroom meetings and teams of spooks cutting their way into warehouses. Some of the night-shift gargoyles were still asleep, curled in little huddles like puppies in berms of crushed stone beneath suspended paraboloids of solar mesh. The morning mist collected on the rolling folds of their long black cloaks, slowly undulating, each with a long plastic cord winding out of their upper back and snaking its way to a heater unit. The heater pumped warm water into a vest to maintain body temperature; even if it was minus 30 centigrade with windchill, your core temperature stayed up at around 96, keeping even exposed appendages warm to the touch.
Farther back lay a pair of interlocking boxes of rusted corten steel, fifteen feet high and forty feet wide forming our only enclosed shelter. Many years ago we scrounged the plates from a salvage yard and started welding. Corten is perfect because the chemistry of its outermost layer is tuned to rust only so far, so that the layer of rust itself forms its own protection. The mainroom, an enclosed kitchen and lounge, had single surface glass wall facing west that could rotate up and out of the way in nice weather or fade to opaque for projections during gatherings. Out of the side and rear of the boxes crawled piles of eight foot tube-shells of sprayed concrete emerging from the mainrooms like a giant wasp nest to enclose washrooms, reading and sleeping alcoves.
As the morning light crept in, the fluorescent glow from long staggered steps of glass-cased hydroponic beds began to flicker off leaving the dayshift to the sun. They snaked like wet spaghetti terraces, a foot and a half tall and stacked twice as high as man to a cluster of tall aluminum cylinders beside the shelter. The cylinders formed an automated processor, separating grain, fruit and leaf from root and chaff to help supplement some of the staples. Other cylinders processed rainwater, waste and sewage into drinking water and fertilizing compounds for the hydroponics. During the day the broad curving scales of solar mesh suspended across the roof and southern façade collected energy and fed a hydrogen storage tank through electrolysis. This energy could then be fed back into heaters, lights, pumps, cook tops, electronics, anything we needed, whenever we need it.
All of this used to please me greatly; living off the grid, off the reservation, dropping a dime on the system. But even that was gone from me now.
This is my long descent.
* * *
My life, or at least the life of the body I've now come to occupy, began out in Jersey on the edge of the world, where the late-great-civilization of industrialized man found its inglorious edge bleeding out into the Pine Barrens. The gang and I raised ourselves on broken glass and cigarettes in forests and railyards, lost progeny of the last generation.
I have memories of fireside concerts in wreckyards, aerosol cannons over stripmalls, and narcotics brewing under banks of growlights in abandoned pigbarns. We turned our schools upside down. We turned our towns upside down. And when we climbed the groaning towers to revel in the fires we turned to feast our eyes on the city lights.
The Deadtech Lotus Society, or just “The Lotus”, as we became known to the talking heads of the fading central airwaves. We said goodbye to our mothers and fathers and encrusted ourselves with graffiti and salvaged trash in the basements of old factories along the docks in Staten Island. When the war and music started bringing money we poured onto the city streets. Chaos was our art and civilization was our medium.
And so, like the involuntary reflex of a virile young silverback crushing the infant offspring of a competitor, ours was the macro-economic Oedipus complex 3 billion years in the making. We drew the fatal masks of tragic characters from the temple walls at birth, and in a feverish, drug induced trance, we trampled old gods to favor the new.
May our children have mercy on our souls.
* * *
“
“You smell like a goddamn sewer rat.” chuckled a pale face emerging from a chemical diving-suit with a miners lamp in a long London accent.
“Go fuck yourself Twat.” laughed Helmet.
“Give us a kiss my sweet..” Twat leaned over toward Alice as she squealed and pulled away. Everyone looked up from their tasks, checking valves and zipping electronics into bodybags, to chuckle for a minute and revel in our triumph.
This was the last grand hoorah we had thought, before the big door finally slammed shut. A week earlier we had flooded every tabloid news company headquarters in the country with 100,000 gallons of raw sewage by welding bypasses from the sprinkler mains to the trunk sewage lines and then setting off all the sprinklers. That's almost two million square feet of soaked-in biohazard nationwide. You cant just clean that up and be back in business in a few days. It took them better than a week just to figure out that it would be cheaper to gut and raze each building. Within a month people stopped missing them.
Operation Shitstorm had gone quite well.
I made eye contact with Rainsey on the other side of the sewer junction, a sort of tall vertical cylinder where the corporate Midtown detritus met that of Chelsea and the Village.
”˜You're my stormdrain love', I mouthed gently.
She smiled and shyly turned her head.
Above us and a slight to the northeast in Times Square the Feds were about to cut through 6 layers of 4 inch steel packed with concrete to find an empty 30' by 30' by 30' cube with four big speakers and a nice hole in the middle of the floor. We had surreptitiously encased ourselves in it three days earlier under the guise of “Public Art”. By the time the local flatfeet figured out our permits were forgeries the walls and ceiling were up and a nice brewing crowd of rowdy fans were rolling in for our defense.
Just as the first media images of swat vans being overturned by kids in football-pads and gas-masks were rolling into the collective suburban living room, our punk-rock-DJ-vigil webcasts were pouring into the bedrooms and dormitories of 6 million frothing teenagers worldwide. The Media put together our connection to the little sprinkler stunt right on cue.
Its not every day someone steals the most lucrative real-estate in the world, let alone three strait days of uninterrupted media coverage. No company in the world could afford what we had stolen.
Weeks later Interpol finally caught up with us holed-up in a mineshaft west of Rio de Janeiro, and spent another day and a half trying to cut us out as we fended them off with 12,000 gallons of quick-setting industrial spray foam.
Why Interpol?
Somehow they put two and two together that a little stunt at a riot in Kiev involving armored vehicles filled with silly-slime and mounted with fire hoses was probably us too, after they tracked a forged passport to surveillance of my man Helmet passing out gas-masks and crampons to the rioters.
They threw the book at us, but evidence was scant and there weren't even laws against most of the stuff wed done. Vandalism, Disturbing the Peace, Resisting Arrest. Most of us never did time.
“
* * *
I have no parents; I make the earth and heaven my parents.
I have no home; I make the Tan T'ien my home.
I have no divine power; I make honesty my Divine Power.
I have neither life nor death; I make the Um my Life and Death.
I have no body; I make Stoicism my Body.
I have no eyes; I make The Flash of Lightning my eyes.
I have no ears; I make Sensibility my Ears.
I have no limbs; I make Promptitude my Limbs.
I have no designs; I make Seizing the Opportunity by the Forelock my Designs.
I have no ways; I make Righteous Laws my ways.
I have no principles; I make Adaptability to all circumstances my Principle.
I have no tactics; I make Emptiness and Fullness my Tactics.
I have no enemy; I make Incautiousness my Enemy.
I have no sword; I make No Mind my Sword.
I have no armour; I make Benevolence my Armour.
I have no castle; I make the Immovable Mind my Castle.
“Okay, here's the status.” Wiggles chewed nervously at his cuticles as he poured through the relays on his tablet. “Falung-Tsu is down, Kromwell is on its way. Beta core is still bogged down in the UK with Glaxo Smith Klein, they've shifted their personnel into Res-Blocks and completely sealed off their networks inside the design core, we cant get anybody on the inside higher than middle-management, ... really a nasty little nut to crack...”
“Hey, are you even listening?” asked Wiggles.
I didn't say anything.
There was a bit of a frustrated silence. I stared out at the indecipherable blur of the I.D.D. passing by the pod through the clear silicate canopy.
“You're going to see her today aren't you?” he asked.
* * *
It was nine years ago, crouching in a concrete hex-cell apartment seven stories up, looking out over the undulating garden of black polycarbonate warming pads and aquaculture mesh bleeding off toward the violet-green horizon. They called it an OTEC atoll; Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. We were on a floating microcity three thousand miles east of New Guinea in deep Pacific. Several thousand feet below our feet an insulated tube was drawing up several hundred million gallons of cold seawater per hour, funneled into stacks of exchange grids and pressure vessels and turbines that convert the temperature differential between the pacific surface and the deep sea into enough hydrogen to power a large city. On the surface, the dark polycarbonate pads were lowering the surface albedo and increasing the efficiency of absorption, leaving soft wafting lines of vapor rising from the seams for a mile out in any direction.
“How many people have we killed?” Rainsey asked out of the silence.
A tri-turbine megalift silently raised its hulk from the engineering yard and powered off toward the hazy grey mists to the east. With a mathematical choreography,
a clockwork army of six-legged robotic spiders merged on the pile of containers left behind.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The grey light reflected her skin a pale green. “In the Petrol-wars in Russia. The battle of New York. How many kids threw themselves away for this. For us. Old men suffocated by the pain of obsolescence. Backwater families in Armenia and Cambodia torn by the chaos of the life we've made?”
A young couple had strolled out onto the catwalk below, laughing and grasping the collars of each other's long coats to kiss. The woman gave a flick of the head, using the wind to free the bright blond hair from her face. The man gently pulled it behind with fingers emerging from a cuff, wiping the mist and seaspray from her brow.
“I don't know.” I said, after a pause.
I looked down, ran my fingernail through a seam in the soft beige curves of cloth monofurn that undulated from the walls and floor. The thick hexagonal window pattered with the sound of raindrops bound in a passing gust.
* * *
Stepping out of the pod we made our way up the mainstair at the I.D.D., straitened our hoods and merged with the sea of freaks on their way to work. Our dark echelon broke a teardrop space in the crowd before us as we marched the four stories to the Crest. We stood at the rail and peered into the great chasm of the Matria. For sixty stories above, forty stories below, and almost six hundred feet across, a great hollow ovoid of space opened before us, pocked with dense clusters of fifteen story concave bulges and hollows. The morning light streamed in from a great oculus and from three splintered canyons piercing the space to shear and twist off into the distance. In an eight hundred foot trunk of transparent netting branching and funneling up toward the oculus, a group of Jumpers had cordoned off a space to test personal flight apparati, their bounding and gliding forms pouring through the volume. Behind and wrapping around, great sails billowed up in rolling wafting forms, their layers awash in a folding psychedelia of art-film and advertisements. The whole of whole of every surface seemed carved and molded with broad strokes of abutting honeycombs and jewelboxes of heterogeneous addlabs. Everywhere in between, and spewing into the atria in great disjointed arms and ribbons, wound gnarled entanglements of podtracks, circulatory vessels, and a buzzing sea of robotic life. After a moment, the others raised and secured their vidgear from about their necks, giving a brief nod before departing to their duties.
The Industrial Design District had begun less than twenty years ago as a small campus of retrofit enclosures and installations into the decaying urban infrastructure in east Brooklyn. The Fabrication Laboratories, or “Fab-Labs” as they used to call them, were a series of projects set up by my friends Alice Berretta, Trevor and Asimov after they got tired of getting arrested. It was a beautiful idea really. Basically, it was just a free R&D lab. Free to use. Free to All. Anyone, from seasoned inventors to kids after school, homeless people to trust-fund art students could come in for a day, a week, a month, a year, and work on ideas using the latest design software and rapid-prototyping hardware to realize an idea. No bosses. No royalties. No experience necessary.
As time went on the district exploded with rebellious young professionals looking for a new way of life. It spilled into the neighboring buildings and old subway tunnels. It built itself up and over the city blocks like a great flood of glass and steel and fiberglass.
By now it was one of the great mega-structures of the world, hundreds of millions of square feet suspended in great cragging sheets and folds, thirty stories up and seventy stories tall, blotting out the sky through most of Brooklyn, the outsides all draped in great black shimmering sheets of semi-transparent photovoltaics. Inside, the sprawling floors, stacks of honeycombs, addlabs and atria teamed with music and markets, gadgets and mobiles, screens and projections; the zoo of zoos for the freaks of freaks. Each day fifteen million of them soaked through coils and bundles of podtracks to their lair of choice. The inner cores of design-culture that had naturally emerged of selective labor, the Audiozone, The Biolab, the Autodeck, Molecular Hill, the Ratsnest, poured and mixed and bled together as they grew. If there wasn't a ski hill or an arboreta or a simlab or a jetski racing tank somewhere today, there would be tomorrow.
And somewhere, sprawled out in the outskirts, there was a tumor like this festering in most every city in the world. Homoludenic bliss metastasized. Rome born anew.
How proud Foucault would be to see us now,
From a long, black, outstretched pinnacle over the bay, I starred through the twelve inches of one-way poly-carbonate glass, out across the Rockaway Boardwalk toward the Atlantic horizon. Fifteen miles out, past the three skeletal sores of the docking nodes spidered out on the surface, the long sleek form of an Ekranotanker was powering up its twelve immense engine nacelles, slowly driving up to lift speed, utilizing the extra ground-effect lift to float its mile-long, 6-million-ton deadweight up to fifteen feet above the surface.
This was the IPSOlopht. Behind me, in the long curls and folds of corridors and datacells, there was a buzz of discussion and review; Intelligence, Process, Strategy, Operations. Under the strictest definition, or rather, under the slowly desiccating American legal framework, the Lotus Agency was now a private security company under the employment of Section One's composite ownership. Your average run-of-the-mill Freak, as we have come to be known, generally invests whatever capital he or she has accumulated in a lifetime of creative-labor into a diversified network, between lucrative big-name projects, ones own projects, and the projects of friends and family, with a hefty savings fund in the Program's Composite Account. Section One, or more fully, Program Branch Section One: New York, hires Lotus to maintain basic order within the I.D.D. and amongst Program members within our generous jurisdiction. Because the I.D.D. is technically private property, the Feds need a warrant just to enter most of Brooklyn. Fortunately for us, this became less and less frequent after we won a re-districting several years back, allowing our local legal structure to fall within a generous coincidence with Program-owned space. Of course, there are locally elected figures for civil legal proceedings, whose rulings and regulations we must follow, but the general code of conduct for a member of Lotus, and the fact that our activities are generally more preoccupied with global corporate industrial warfare at this point, makes guidelines like these somewhat unconcerning.
The real control, if you could call it that, comes from the Cell. Every Program Section has its own communally-owned set of infrastructure, from the load-bearing structure of the I.D.D. to the pod network to the engineering decks below. Now generally, each one of these processes, from the maintenance of the Docks to the amorphous additive growth of the I.D.D. is guided by a broad spectrum of self-modifying algorithms designed to meet the maximum number of Section residents' needs with the maximum level of efficiency. But every machine needs monitoring, every script needs writing, and so also under Program employment lies a small circle of programmers and researchers, bound to every contributing Program member by the simple knowledge that the health of their Section, and the extent of their power, is directly connected to the health and strength of every Section resident. If their engineering decks operate less efficiently than those of another section, then orders will no longer be processed under them, and the market advantage elsewhere will quickly sap their members to greener pastures.
* * *
“John Ruskin?” Trevor asked, somewhat incredulously.
“John Ruskin.” repeated Alice and smiled.
I grinned, and swiveled my glass a bit. To most of this speech I had already enjoyed privy.
“Heh, well that's an interesting theory. Where did you read that?”
“Oh just in some quirky books by conspiracy nuts.”
“Like Milner's Kindergarten and all that?” asked Asimov.
“Didn't he divorce his first wife because he didn't know chicks were supposed to have pubes?” Helmet asked, dumping a little pile of tobacco out onto the table.
"Yea I think that was him," Asimov nodded.
Alice rolled her eyes and continued.
We were in the Waterbar at the time, a 4 story scar carved into the side of the Hiroshi Building in downtown Tokyo. I lost myself in the glitter of lights and adscreens beyond the window in the square below. Curved shapes of hanging nylon mesh dipped into the space of the bar behind and below us from the ceiling. The room was flooded with projected images, grainy orange and blue figures of children playing in a pool, a girl surfing, street thugs shooting at police in the rain, mirrored and looped in the mesh, moving slowly and silently, gently wafting in the draft.
Three stories down in the pit a band was playing. A lead singer screeched and thrashed as he drew long strokes and sharp chirps on a two story organ built of old gasoline engines; from a tractor motor to weedwacker engines, throttles roared and waned with exhaust reverberating in tall stacks of pipes of all sizes and materials. Several girls drew cacophonic rushes and pirouettes on harps and on long stacks of glass armonicas. Percussionists were beating sledgehammers against steel plates filled with ball bearings and detonating blasting caps in tall lit plexiglass cylinders of liquid for snaps and penetrating thuds.
I scanned the crowds, splitting my focus between the blur of barlife and Alice's giddy discussion.
“Read his later work man. Look don't get me wrong, I think the conspiracy geeks are nuts. What interests me is not weather there is literally some secret society silently pulling the strings from shadowy boardrooms, but weather perhaps the theorists correctly identified Ruskin as the modern translator of Masonic ideals into an actual economic ideology, one that has served as the founding script of the power-elite social structure we inhabit today. That a ruling few, simply by controlling loans, could effectively control all material production worldwide.”
Believe it or not. She always spoke like that.
“Look at it man. Life has become a drag. Some will struggle through classes, find a job, placate stuffy old men and massage egos for the better part of their existence to pay off student loans, a house, a family, a divorce, before waiting to die in some living cemetery in Florida. Countless millions more around the world will die in an agonizing and tireless bondage wishing their fates were so lucky. Freedom, even in its metaphysical sense, will become tantalizingly distant from daily life. It will draw away from ones eyes and hands in idle beta-thought in supermarkets, it will drain away from their arms and legs working mines in Africa and assembly lines in Asia. Even the great heads of nations and corporations will loose the sensation in their mouths and fingertips as they pass their assets to number-crunchers and market models. Life will be an act of spectation, humanity as a trauma victim, leaving their body.”
“Of this, I am aware.” I said to myself with a bit of a devilish grin.
“ Now add that to all that stuff Ive been saying about open-source economics. These burgeoning meta-projects like linux and wikimedia that seem to be outright defying the generally accepted laws of capitalist economics; that a loose, unhierarchical network of individual writers and programmers, without direct financial motivation, from the cost of development to outright usability of product, could generously out-perform even vast, tenacious corporate armies of hired programmers.
Ive been thinking the reason the open-source works on the internet, is that the cost of copying a design construct is so low that the base unit of human work is the design construct itself.
Imagine if there was a place, some kind of design-school, company, whatever, where design tools were shared, where freely organized and unhierarchical design teams could come together over mutual interest to develop constructs of everything from oceanographic models to education programs to building and structural systems, and send those constructs directly to automated production and implementation at rates no fixed corporate structure could match. How quickly could we slash through product design markets? or the fossil fuel monolith? or space exploration?
“Kind of like communism?” asked Helmet in a stupid goading kind of way, licking the seam of a third cigarette and passing it to Asimov.
“Its not communism wiseass, its anti-communism.” continued Alice, unflustered and smirking a bit. “ Its actually far less communistic than what we live in today, because ownership is always retained by the individual instead of by banks or a small board of investors. It is communistic only in respect to the use of time and space, and not in respect to ownership or enforced will.”
“Vive le Situationisme!” exploded Helmet, raising his glass.
“Yea, but kiddo, you cant get rid of hierarchy. Its as fundamental to the human animal as eating or speaking. No culture avoids it.” Trevor pursued.
“We do it all the time! Think of any good group of friends.” She motioned. “ There's no ”˜chief'. Sure, one may make a lot of decisions or talk a lot,” she said turning an eye to Helmet, who promptly rolled his eyes, blowing smoke out his nose and giving a subtle what-the-fuck face. “...Another may form a the philosophical backbone,” she nodded to Rainsey, who smiled and winked back through her glass “ but everyone in the group is there and contributes something different, and everyone is free to go, free to lead, free to do anything. That's not because there's no work, its because there's no labor.
My prediction is, that the days of corporate empires, as we know them, are numbered. The basis of hierarchy is repetition. Its 1000 people working the lines at a factory, 5 running the books and 1 person making decisions. As time goes on, however, the process of automation, exponentially, will begin to eliminate the repetitive task from human life. Theres no need for people to work fields, to run assembly lines, to do taxes if machines can do those tasks more efficiently. So why do we need people at all then? What will we do with our 'free time'? Simply, for likely many centuries to come, we will still need humans to carry out creative tasks. Only our living, feeling, dreaming, analog wetware can make the kinds of irrational leaps necessary for real invention.
Think of it, a design coordinator could bring together whatever kind of help he or she needed, and then they would all go to work, temporarily renting a shared space and shared design resources. That initial prototype or design construct could then be sent to automated production in facilities that are also time-shared, marketed and sold on the web, and the designers themselves would reap the per-unit profits. Since the initial investment is minimized to the man-hours spent by the designers themselves, just as is so in the open-source programming world, there is no need for a vast, clunky, wasteful investment structure. Furthermore, there is no need for a static corporate hierarchy and an endless chain of redundant supervisors to coordinate labor, because all risk is assumed by the designers themselves. You can show up and work on your own to make a painting for one day, or join up with a team and invest several months or years into making a movie or a solar cell. Every day you are fired, and everyday you are hired again, so you always get out what you put in, and you have total freedom to do whatever you like from one day to the next.
Now of course there are additional costs. The development costs for some products, even with time-shared resources, will often exceed an individual designers ability to pay up-front and they will have to make offers to investors. But given the huge reductions in superfluous infrastructure, and the huge increases in individual design ownership and control, the total investment composite would still lay solidly in the hands of a decentralized group of individuals rather than a controlling few.”
Imagine a world where a young girl can design a new toaster or beach-chair, mass produce the product in fully automated factories and sell them by-demand on the web? Can you imagine what such a thing would do to the global economy? Its like going from smoke signals to the internet. Imagine if families were untied to the place of a parent's place of work? If classrooms were untied to a physical school? That nomadic tribes of designers and friends could be free to move and fraction through a global network of design labs, from Peking to Prague to Anchorage, year to year or day to day?
Marx said of human labor, that the worker, as he increases the efficiency of his work, he only cheapens his own value as a commodity. In this paradigm however, it is not the efficiency of labor which is increased, only the potency of the creative act. One person designing, one person running financing, one person running legality, etc. and no one more or less critical to the process. In this century, increasingly, we will see an end to static hierarchies of men and women in suits. Everyone will be their own inventor, their own boss, and their own provider...”
Ten stories down, my eyes were lost in the silent image of President Minotauri pounding a lectern and regurgitating political gangrene on one of the giant adscreens facing the square.
“Don't those idiots know no one watches TV anymore?”
And like that, their time was up.
* * *
Entering the Gate, I withdrew my hood and nodded to the guard through mirrored wall. I approached a glistening black circular door 8 feet in diameter, set beveled into a pure white wall. I stepped solemnly into the red circle on the floor, and staring strait ahead, placed my hands within the two red circles on the protruding center of the door. A small white light pulsated for a moment, and with a satisfying chirp the red transferred to green. As I removed my hands the console retracted and the apparently solid material of the door relaxed and flattened, leaving an even, supple, concentric ripple. I closed my eyes and held my breath as I stepped forward into the metallic liquid, enduring the familiar warmth and pressure for several paces before emerging into the bright cylinder of the elevator beyond. As I turned, the black door silently returned to its beveled resolidified form before the elevator door concealed its view.
Below the lowest basements and foundations, sewers and subways, the engineering and biodecks extended for some for some 40 stories deeper yet into the crust of the earth. There are few who see these spaces anymore, trade secrets all hermetically sealed under the strictest of industrial contracts. As I passed down the long, glistening white cylindrical corridor I closed my eyes and swept my fingers along the wall, taking a moment to bathe in the soft hum and vibrations echoing even through the yards of stone and steel and carbon-fiber between my fingertips and the mazes of engineering shafts riddled beyond. Each space was its own whirring clockwork of precision fabrication, raw materials and components and subunits within subunits grown, wrought, cast, processed, milled, manufactured, assembled and then piped to distribution. With fifteen years exponential expansion of algorithmic efficiency, each task was processed, transferred, and executed by an endless cascade of self-rearranging machinery, disassembling and reassembling itself with every altered task like Swiss-watch ships in bottles.
* * *
In a 12' drainpipe at the foot of the Adirondacks, the two of us had made our home one summer. In this primordial cave of the postmodern, we laid down a bed of crushed stone, a layer of gravel, and a layer of soft sand. We hung a ring of solar panels and a transmitter at the mouth of the pipe, chords running to a terminal and a bank of batteries. We built an enclosed bunk of cabinet plywood deep inside, and made a gas hearth near the mouth. Where a downspout shed a dim circle of light from above, we siphoned water from a nearby well to make a shower and hung a ring of teal plastic for privacy.
In the damp grey morning, I lay a brown woolen blanket around her shoulders as she sat at the edge of the pipe, absorbed in her tablet, and handed her a mug of warm tea. As I sat, she grabbed my chin to place her lips on my cheek, and marveled at me with the rays of sun in the deep sea. I shyly turned toward the forest, and smiled.
“When I touch your hand,” she said, after a moment, “ I cant help but feel like my fingers are not my own, any longer. That this sensation we feel is not me, or you, but some new person that has us both.”
I closed my eyes.
“The trembling of the sea before the rocks, the trembling of the rocks before the sea.”
* * *
I entered a dim room in the shape of a distorted toroid with deeply ribbed walls of pure white. Before me, in an elaborate symmetry, the ribbing folded and exaggerated, thick bundles of chords emerging in black and deep blue, toward a bulging chrysalis deeply buried in the wall. The whole of the surface of the room glistened as a soft transparent film of violet coolant ran down its surface and into a deep pool. As I stepped forward into the space, the floor deformed and raised before me a round peninsula perhaps fifteen feet in diameter. Once in the center, I knelt.
Silently, soft curved elements in the wall began to brightly glow, and the chrysalis began to unfold and push forward, the soft plates pealing back, changing shape and folding upon themselves. By an armature, the unfolding orchid arched forward and lay gently down before me, the petals folding and retracting gracefully into the wall behind, revealing Rainsey's deeply crouched, kneeling form. Four piercing arms emerged, like the legs of a spider, to spin, delicately, a gown of lace strands around her naked form.
After a long pause, her hands slowly trembled as they moved forward from her chest. She let out a soft choke before bracing herself upon the floor. Her frail arms rippled at the weight, the long flowing mane of thin, cyan fiber-optics shimmering and rattling in delicately tied bundles, running from her head and spine all the way back into the wall behind.
For a moment her chest slowly grew and waned, her movements becoming more smooth, less labored with each passing breath. Before her eyes opened, she raised her hand to wipe her face.
“Good morning Dante.”
“Good morning Rainsey.” I returned.
“It has been a while, hasn't it?” She asked.
“It has.” I returned, with regret.
We stared at each other for a moment, kneeling in that dim light.
“So.” She finally offered. “I hear that you are leaving the Program.”
“I haven't told anyone that.” I said after a moment, looking down.
“Maya told me.” She smiled and nodded over her shoulder.
“Weve each paid the price, for our sins, haven't we?”
I didn't answer.
“Why has it taken you so long, to leave all this?” She probed.
“Well,” I sighed, reaching up to rub my neck. “ It isn't very easy for civilians to see the queen of Section One is it?” I joked and nodded toward the deep sealed door behind.
She laughed.
“Well then.” She smiled. “You'd best come give me a hug.”
I smiled, and slowly we rose to step forward. There in the dim light, we huddled together, hands clasped, arms around waists, chins upon shoulders, until at last we relaxed and withdrew.
“In the next life.” She smiled.
“In the next life.” I returned.
She placed her hands upon my cheeks, and bestowed upon me, one last kiss.
With our foreheads together, our tears mixed upon eye lashes, and for a moment, we shared one sorrowful, relieved laughed.
“Seven times down. Eight times up.” She whispered.
My hand fell lifelessly from her cheek, and I turned toward the door. The convex black surface withdrew, and as I walked I swam in her warped reflection.
I closed my eyes, held my breath, and stepped forward.
Anybody read this? Its quite fun. Cyberpunk, if youre into that, but has alot to do with architecture and his whole open-source bag as well.
anywhoo, carry on,
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.