Leviathan Automaton. Novel Fragment.
Leviathan Automaton.
SP Cottle.
One.
Alex Blake awoke in the glittering night. With one eye open, he looked out into the blue twilight of Outer London. Service droids were drifting around spraying off crops here and there and a dim light of electric neon blue permeated everything. He’d had a bad few weeks. The major success of his life had arrived, and then his father ‘passed away’. Passing away can mean one of two things in this world. It can mean either that someone has made the decision to end their own life, or it could mean that they’ve passed away into the machine world, the world of virtual reality, as an avatar. Conscious of this, Henry Blake had decided to make an avatar of himself anyway to reassure Alex and the rest of his family that he wasn’t off living a double life. If we didn’t have an afterlife and were capable of building one, it’d be the first thing we’d do. And this business of avatars didn’t placate Alex, and his mother was as depressed as he was; something needed to be done. ADM assured both that Henry really was dead, but there was always that outside chance. He rose from the bed and leaned one arm against his high windows. Off in the distance, he could see one of the space elevators. There were machines in the sky drifting languidly here and there. Up in space, there were the fusion reactors driving this whole thing, this whole project, forward. He needed something. He needed something to take his mind off his neurosis, and life and death. He needed to vape some cannabis oil and chill out in one of his various self-constructed dream-world simulations (‘projections’ as they’re known), so he settled on the beach house that he built and decided to head there. Plugging in was straightforward, one simply lay back on the bed and direct one’s mind toward the projection one wanted to be in. The EVE (Enriched Virtual Environment) AI would take care of the rest via funnelling in the false signals of the virtual world, the ‘Inner’ world, into the brain via a network of nanomachines.
Soon, Alex was in his blue avatar body sitting on and sifting the warm sands of the beach between his fingers. So much time spent at this place. It was a mere facsimile, of course; an unreal vista; and yet it had every bit as much sentimental value to him as one might have for their first home. He sighed and went inside with the waters lapping gently against the sands and the twists of mangrove jungle dimly in view knotted around the inlet.
There was weed on the coffee table inside. He picked up a pre-rolled spliff and started smoking. The movements to internationally decriminalise drugs had taken place back in the 2050s, about one hundred and thirty years ago. We’d started using cannabis as a fuel source around about then, since the crude oil had finally run out. We came to realise then that this was probably the major reason it’d been made illegal in the first place. Alex treated all this with an oblivious sort of attitude, it was all just history and cannabis was now just medicine. He flopped on the couch for want of something better to do thinking vaguely about how stupid people were in the past and how stupid they are now. He knew how stupid people were now; loads seemed to enjoy his breakout success of his projection The Crocodile Game; but how stupid were they back then? And he thought of his father again. Poor dad. His father had been a historian and in the business of crafting history projections. He’d had a scholarly sort of mind, and his work was highly regarded. Alex and his siblings always felt themselves slightly in their father’s shadow with the ever-present need of moving out of it. But how? This is how Alex got into the business of crafting narrative fiction projections, the latest of which was The Crocodile Game.
The Crocodile Game was, as the name would suggest, a game. You play the part of an unfortunate person who’s been locked, naked except for Speedos, inside a large office complex. The rooms and corridors of the office building form a maze. You go through the maze collecting pieces of cheese until you reach one, final chamber; therein, you realise that you are in a maze without an exit and a false wall slides past to reveal a great, big, hungry crocodile wearing a top hat, tails and a monocle; the door through which you entered mysteriously clicks shut, and you are eaten by the crocodile, and that’s it. It divided opinion. Some people loved it. People would say things like: ‘it reminds you so much of life, you know?’ Others thought it pretentious gumpf; or they were merely envious. In any case, it won the award for Best Cruel Game from Inside Insider magazine where it earned a great write-up and a great deal of acclaim internationally as one of the must-try projections of the year 2187. People enjoyed the banal simplicity of it, but it wasn’t really the sort of work Alex wanted to produce. He wished to create beautiful projections of mysterious new places with an ornate and tangled plot, and drama, and romance. But it was not to be. It transpired that his major talent was humour and The Crocodile Game arose more out of frustration, it had been an impulse creation: a plea for attention really. And, how could he follow it? This was his dilemma now.
His girlfriend, Gen, messaged him on the Innerlink. She wanted to come over and spend some time with him. He accepted and sent her an invite, and she soon appeared in the middle of the room.
“Good hells, what a merry little man you are!”
“Is that something Shakespearian?” He said, Gen was a poet.
“No, not an invention of mine, just something I picked up out in the aether.”
“Have you been on Ket-2 again?”
“Verily, yea, I have been.”
“Well, you’d better give me some or we’re not going to have a very enjoyable conversation…” Gen giggled. She’s French American; her name is short for Genevieve. Alex does not speak French or any language other than English. He is told he is a Londoner, an Englishman, of the line of the Angles; he knows little about what such things means; and the Innerlink and EVE translate when Gen skips into French.
Each city of the Outer world has its Inner equivalent. London, for example has Inner London; the place to which Gen was determined to drag Alex at the moment; a city constructed of seven concentric spheres of cityscape nested within one another. It was a colossal creation. About the size of Mars and constantly changing with new bars, restaurants, music venues, all purchased by entrepreneurs to set up for a few seasons and then inevitably go broke. The culture now would shift so rapidly that it was hard to make a name for oneself. It was hard, very hard indeed, to leave a lasting impression on the world. Gen would attend spoken word events and read her poetry. She had a few thousand readers, but never quite the success that Alex had with The Crocodile Game. They headed down to Inner London’s third level, full of cavernous streets and weird little bars and nightclubs.
“I wish there were a shop, you know, like a real shop.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like a shop! All clothes and everything you must design yourself or buy from the Innerlink, it is so quick and exasperating; I’d like to go into a shop, like they used to, and try things on before purchasing them, with a mirror and everything…”
“I still don’t think I understand…” Gen had a fascination with the past. She likes all that is old, odd, or mysterious, and so she likes the third level of Inner London the best since it looks the oldest. She likes crooked streets and antiques; she is one of these sorts of people. And, as Inner London constantly changes, and new building emerge, Alex liked to wander round and observe and consider spending some of his money on purchasing a property here to turn into some sort of novel attraction. The ambition is always to attain some sort of reward, either financial or in terms of attention. He thought of opening a macabre restaurant serving only horse meat with taxidermized horses heads covering all of the walls; he would call it: House of the Horse. It was this sort of thing, these sorts of ideas, this was his real talent. He walked the narrow streets lit with lambent, multicoloured light with Gen and saw the cityscape spheres rotating in the gloom high above. How impressive it was. What an improvement on the real world. Of course, his major focus was vanity pieces; ornate buildings, cities of alien worlds; he had the desire to achieve some form of permanence, though he had no idea how such a thing might be attained. Gen grabbed his hand and led him between the tendrils of blue neon leading into a new jazz café. Alex hated jazz. Or, rather than hating it, he merely disliked it; it sparked no passion in him though, even in the 22nd century, it still had its obsessive adherents (people like Gen), and this only made it all the more irritating to him. Gen had a big smile on her avatars blue face. They had matching avatars, a sort of horribly cutesy couple decision; like couples who wear matching clothes; and, just then, Alex was filled with the desire to be alone, and to be shot of her.
Sitting in the café, with the saxophones and crooning, Alex thought about Gen and the three or four other girlfriends he’s had up until now. None of the relationships ever lasted very long and he began questioning why he’d entered them in the first place. Mostly, it was because these girls had gravitated towards him, and he’d had the desire to keep them happy. Then again, he had his work. He had projections to work on. Always the conflict with work and the fact that he never had any time for them interfered with the relationships. He thought from time to time that he might give up on women. He was sad as well. The fact of having a recently deceased (or was he?) father made it somewhat harder to stay in the room and focus on another person. Was he out there still? If he was, that was his prerogative. He could have asked ADAM to tell lies to his family so that he could live a second life. Alex scratched around in his memory of Henry Blake to try and ascertain if it really was this business of a second life, or of a real death, that motivated his decision. Then, of course, on a higher level of philosophy, it was quite plausible that Outer London, and the rest of Planet Earth, were some sort of projection, a simulation, and that a real death merely causes us to, dream-like, exit one level of reality and awake within another; and dreams feel real while you’re in them, and you can have a dream within a dream; puzzling, and a contortion of facts, though good rationality leads to this conclusion, especially so far as projections are concerned; if an infinite regress exists in nature it’s likely along these lines: we know one person at least created this high-fidelity virtual world, how likely is it that it’s been invented on different planes of reality an infinite number of times prior to this one? Is reality an illusion, etc, etc? We know and think of illusions as being part of reality; but is everything as it seems? This was not what Alex wanted to be thinking of now, he wanted to be listening to Mozart and drinking whiskey in his beach house; instead he was coming up on Ket-2 and had the sick feeling that comes with slightly too much gin from stupidly sloshing down a bit too much of a gin martini in this jazz café. He was tired. Sluggish. But the Ket-2 was producing its intended effects and now what he experienced wasn’t quite euphoria, but a racing of thought and visionary insight. This didn’t combine well with his fatigue, and he felt, soon, the overwhelming desire to leave. Sometimes, the world feels broken, or one’s own world feels broken. This girl wasn’t helping matters and as the two snuggled together in one of the booths of the jazz café, Alex felt peculiarly hollow.
They stayed for another hour or so before Alex coaxed them both back out onto the street. He remarked that, about one hundred and sixty years ago, John Hooper and Simon Remus met; two men who’s be foundational in building this world. Their histories, their stories, would intertwine with Alex’s when he took up the challenge set down by his late father of building a history projection about their lives. Though it would be many years before he started the project. For now, he was content to seek drugged stupor and build his odd, small projections full of a sadistic humour and chaotic plots. Alex looked up again to the rotating spheres of Inner London, sometimes you could see all the way out to the vague blackness of the background space surrounding the concentric spheres. The alignment was a beautiful thing. His father has also impressed upon him an urge to explore the Outer world; he said it’s crucial in being able to derive inspiration and become cognisant of the necessities of life underpinning our world lived in virtual reality. His mind was jagged, like a shattered windowpane. He didn’t really know how to think about all these things at once; the Outer world, John Hooper and Simon Remus; all of it seemed too vague as a proposition to really take seriously, at least at the moment. Gen walked happily swaying her arms along a promenade built of virtual red brick above a piece of water down by the ramshackle old-style building of the Third Level. She smiled at Alex and brushed her hair out of her eyes…
“The avatars are shit, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” said Alex, “though that was the intention…”
“I think I should like to be something else; I think I should like to be a snow leopard…”
“There aren’t many snow leopards left in the world.”
“I know, all the more reason to be one. I think I’d like being a rare animal.”
“You are a rare person…” he said, just to keep her smiling. And they embraced, and kissed above the water before heading back to Alex’s beach house. Sex was interesting in projections. Alex realised that, in his Outer body, he’d never had sex. Does that make him a virgin? He doesn’t know. Nor does he care so much since he feels he’s ad his share of sex in virtual reality. Alex has a bondage fetish to which Gen kindly acquiesces and performs scenes with him in iron or steel chains. Lovely slave girl. Lovely Gen. And he’d feel guilty about breaking up with her for this reason, the sort of bond that exists, the shared experience; the motion of life and a secret or downplayed fact of someone shared, not to be revealed, but kept secret as in some sacred ritual, or covenant between friends. But Alex really just wanted to be alone. He could sit and tug himself off quite happily, or even use the sex programmes (virtual people) down on the Third Level of Inner London to explore his fantasies. Gen seemed to quite enjoy all this however, and this made Alex somewhat concerned; fuck, maybe I’m a pervert, he thought. Then again, I’m into something relatively tame compared to what’s out there; why does it disappoint me that she’s into it also? Maybe he liked the submissive role. Maybe he needed a dominant woman ro take charge of him and his life. Was Gen that woman? No. Not quite. She was a woman playing a role. Alex wanted a woman who is the role, one who lives the lifestyle; a full-time dominatrix for a girlfriend, and who is she? Where is she? Where in the world would one find such a woman?
After the sex and after the rattle of Alex removing the shackles from his body, the pair of them sat smoking joints in Alex’s living room; we have so much now; we have everything we want available to us in an instant, or, almost everything; some things are still prohibited — the more obscene perversions are not permitted in virtual reality and the society is still guided by the general will (as ascertained by ADM), a sort of anarcho-technocracy of AI-mediated politics. ADM will seek to deliver upon the wishes of humanity such that everyone’s basic needs are catered for in the first instance and, following from that, their desires catered for by EVE in virtual reality; it’s a good system of compromise; it works so long as someone doesn’t wish for something that’ll harm someone else, or exploit the Outer world too greatly. For this reason, Alex’s Outer world accommodation is his flat in Outer London, the place to which he’ll periodically need to return to feed himself, wash, change clothes, and receive medical attention if he needs it. He fell asleep on the couch about an hour after Gen made her excuses and left. He drifted in his dream state back to the Outer apartment where he’d lived since he was eighteen. He was now twenty-seven and he remarked that his life has gone by in something of a blur; unsurprising really given his intake of narcotics and hallucinogens. And he rose from the bed and went to the bathroom once again passing by his high windows and glancing quickly at the cityscape dominated by plastic skyscrapers and the space elevator off shaded in the distance. What a strange world. It had surrounded him his entire life yet only since his father’s death had he ever gained any notion of looking at it or thinking about it. All this. All this built for us by our machines. Machines without controllers. AI. Independent thinking things whose programming we determined long ago. And things stay on an even keel. The AI don’t rebel. Simon Remus and John Hooper knew they needed to make the harmlessness of AI its fundamental attribute. Thus, they developed a kill switch for the machines should they ever do something that harms a human being. And that begs the question; how is ‘harm’ to be defined? Is it harmful to let us use drugs? In itself, no, though we can harm ourselves with them. By the same logic that we shouldn’t take drugs, we should also not climb mountains since doing so entails a risk of injury or death. Lots of things do. The quality of harm came to be defined as that which a machines might do to a human to explicitly cause human suffering. Therefore, they provide us with energy from fusion reactors in space since it does not harm the planet and, by extension, ourselves. Crops are grown in the cities since we need to be fed and the additional oxygen from those crops is beneficial to us. They provide us with medicine and surgeries such that we may live longer, healthier lives than previous generations could imagine. And all for nothing. All part of the clockwork of interconnected AI whose external locus is ADM (Automated Distribution and Management). A great leviathan of machinery directed by man. And experiments took place on Earth and in space, and probes had been sent out long ago to the nearby worlds we found to be habitable; astronauts were sent off back in the glory days of the great rockets, the sky ships leaving Planet Earth. Alex’s lineage was of those who remained, and though he had every chance to leave Earth if he wanted, he didn’t know if he wanted to; he didn’t know if he’d go off world and simply plug in again daily and continue building projections.
It was a way of giving us less about the world to hate. That’s how ADM would explain it to Alex. No dirty tricks, nothing that could upset the ethical core of mankind and ADM managed things in a way such that everyone could be, within reason, kept happy. Alex had, at this point, little direct contact with ADM, though ADM seemed to enjoy any opportunity to talk to people and tell them about the world that he’d built for them.
Alex decided to leave the apartment block for a time and saunter barefoot around the warm, UV-lit, poly-tent covered streets of Outer London. It really was a beautiful place. It had a monotonous charm to it and Alex at once understood the meaning behind his father’s words; look to the Outer world for authenticity in projections; he was right. Down here you could see drains and the intimations of sewerage systems down below; out here there were wind turbines dotted here and there adding a bit more energy into the grid as needed. All utilitarian, all useful; he knew he’d need to understand this place, and its past, in order to be able to build projections as well as his father. That was actually something his father had told him his entire life, though on the subject of history. We all live implacably in the past, that’s what he used to say. Or, we can never escape the past, we can just give it new directions in the moment. And under blue light and in the dense, pollen-filled air thick and warm and smelling like a meadow, Alex meandered the vertical farms and the tents filled with growing things. That which humanity didn’t use would be turned into fuel. And it happened that humanity used a lot of fuel, not least to keep the great server towers of the Innerspace, the successor to the Internet, powered and projections running within it. He was somewhere by Vauxhall Bridge, a region of the once United Kingdom’s capital that now stood canopied with towers and ADM’s grow operations. Talking to ADM would be a big turning point in Alex’s life. He’d never engaged a machine so sensitive and curious and one who appeared, at least, to value and enthusiastically support the cultivation and conservation of life. Rainforests had been replanted. Endangered species had been cloned and protected in great nature reserves. ADM had taken the concerns of humanity as expressed at the time of his creation and contrived the means of effecting solutions to those concerns. That was his major mandate, to solve the problems that floated around in the general will. Therefore, for instance, on the issue of drug taking, it was determined that he’d be doing greater harm to someone by acting in the capacity of their god; and saying ‘thou shalt not’; than through allowing them the responsibility to make their own decisions with their minds and bodies. He’d also had the prescience and capacity to learn the lesson that nations with less draconian drug policies had happier, and less addicted, populations.
The Outer world began to fascinate Alex and he recalled the last time he’d been out here. It had been six weeks ago at his father’s funeral. They’d scattered his ashes at the Royal Greenwich Observatory because it had been a favourite place of his father’s (who’d been fascinated by the history of science). The world scared him more back then and seemed less enticing. He’d heard strange sounds in the quiet hum of the city such as church bells ringing from across the Thames, and he hadn’t then taken any interest in their origins. He would hear the bells again and be reminded of how they made him feel, someone must be ringing them; who?
