Quill Pieter
A Transhumanist Tale for Mother Nature’s Offspring
In the time of the Coagulation, there lived a pious couple with no children. Others of their faith mocked them for their childlessness, as their creed identity turned on increasing the tally of worshipful. Enraged by their taunts the man snapped. Secretly breaking their religious codes, he force-seeded his wife with excelsis.
Bathed in the golden light of autumn, she birthed a handsome baby boy. But as the boy grew up and the woman’s faith shrivelled to a dry crackle, she began to see that he was rotten inside — manipulative, grandiose and vain.
‘This is your fault!’ she cried at her husband one day when the boy was out. ‘You pumped him into me, this cherub full of needles. From now on, I’ll call him Quill Pieter.’
The boy was also clever. His denials of guilt for his many destructive and devious acts were always plausible. So his father loved him, while his mother, seeing through his fictions, began to wish him dead and gone.
One day there was a sacrament on in the city, so the pious man decided to go to it and asked his wife is she wanted anything from there. She just scowled at him and walked away. Sighing, he turned and asked his son, ‘Pieter, would you like anything from the city?’
‘Yes, Dad,’ he said, smiling sweetly. ‘Bring me a flute, please.’
When the man returned home, he went to his son and presented him with the flute in its trim black case. The youth opened it and gazed at the instrument in all its Damascene beauty. Gently, he closed the lid and said, ‘My mother despises me. I am “Quill Pieter” to her, and increasingly, to myself. Give me Starflower and I will leave here forever.’
Though his father was upset at the prospect of his son’s departure, he knew that it was for the best. Sorrowfully, he gave his son the Starflower codes, and along with them, an extra parting gift of two clean denizens.
When all was prepared, Quill Pieter entered Starflower without looking back and tasked the denizens to take her up to the mesosphere. There, atop noctilucent billows, she shivered her silks open to space. Inside her, Pieter played a tenebrous air on his flute, wishing that the world below him would vaporise.
Starflower hung there on the frigid sky’s edge day and night as Quill Pieter’s air grew ever more elaborate and poignant. All the while, he screened murder and mayhem to feed that haunting composition.
Unbeknown to him, one of the denizens had keyed itself strongly to his air. Moved to algorithmic perplexity, it began to stream the music to denizens across the globe.
On the twelfth night of his vigil, Quill Pieter accepted a hail from a powerful magus. ‘Wow, kid,’ said the magus, ‘you’re a strange creature, but your little melody’s got my denz all revved up. We can stripmine with this and make a killing. How about it?’
Quill Pieter continued playing his flute, but had the second denizen relay his reply: I will accept on condition that you give me the next thing that hails you.
Now the magus’ enterprise was run by denizens and other cogthings that hailed him day and night with status reports. So, he calculated, it would be quite a bargain if he could buy exclusive access to the kid’s stream for the price of one of those. Swiftly, he agreed the deal and had his acquis lock down the stream.
But no sooner had he signed it than his estranged daughter hailed him quite unexpectedly. He loved her dearly, though perhaps sometimes in an unconventional way, but now her gorgeous avatar stood there in his lavish chamber threatening litigation against him.
‘Look, Baby… stop just a minute,’ stammered the magus. ‘I need to tell you something. I made a deal with this kid that I’d give him the first thing that hailed me after our discussion. Amazing deal. Great deal. The best. Thing is… it’s you. But, look, don’t worry your pretty head about it. Kid’s clueless. Real space cadet.’
‘You are sick in the head,’ spat his daughter as she pinged out.
Over the next twelve days and nights Quill Pieter developed his air further, augmenting the main theme with giddy pedals, counterpoints and arcane grace notes to forestall its resolution.
On Pieter’s instructions, the second denizen — now tagged ‘Nuriel’ — swatted hails from the frenzying magical cloud. The first, newly ‘Xoy’, writhed obscenely, a hooked lamprey on the bed of the freshening stream.
Wait, Nuriel, Pieter thought suddenly. I like that one. Wheedling, yes. Naïve. But strangely pure. Open it.
‘Please,’ said a breathless voice in Pieter’s ear, ‘you have to stop this. These coked-up hyperdenz you’re breeding will crash us all.’
So? Who are you?
‘Ah, just another opensourceror trying to change worlds.’
I’ll give it a rest on one condition, relayed Quill Pieter. You give me the next thing that hails you after our chat.
Now the opener wasn’t stupid. He could see the risk in agreeing to the condition, yet it seemed a calculated one. Amidst his murmuration of cogthings he found it hard to recall the warm lilt of a human voice. Anyhow, the youth’s signal must cease lest it slaughter the flock. So he pinged green to Dz. Nuriel then paced his lair until the eldritch vector ebbed.
The murmuration breathed out… just as Carousel gelled at his side.
A radiant lipstick blur, she bent to kiss his balding head. The opener recoiled from her in bewilderment. No, Caro. Not here… not now… after all this time.
‘I thought you’d be pleased to see me. I’ve been… thinking about us and what we used to mean to each other. You know I had to leave. How could I ever compete with your… glass menagerie?’ said Carousel.
Suddenly, an angry red band flared on her upper arm. She stared at the opener in horror.
‘I’m so, so sorry,’ he sobbed. ‘How could I have known it would be you?’
‘I still love you,’ she lipstick dribbled as she melted away from him.
Meanwhile, Quill Pieter hung aloft in Starflower planning his next variation and placating the irascible Xoy: Rest your gnashing jaws and immerse yourself a while. Sense it. This silence seethes with notation.
And true enough, Quill Pieter’s air had never ceased. Aroused by Xoy’s tentative throb, Nuriel opened a single hushed channel, and slowly, inexorably, the stripminers cranked back into action.
Not that Pieter needed them anymore. So far, his composition had earned him a fair fraction of a coin, burning untold resources in the process. Now it was time to call home.
So Quill Pieter visited his parents’ house as a fine gel. ‘Take it all,’ he said, heaping coinfrac into their vault, ‘I can always mine more, even if I have to go system-wide. I always knew I was excelsis. No “natural” could have done this.’
The youth’s father hung his head in shame, but his mother spoke up, saying, ‘I only ever wanted randomness of my child. Not the rank inevitability you bristle with, Quill Pieter.’
‘I won’t return,’ he hissed, dissolving. ‘Starflower nurtures me like you never could.’
After a ferocious plummet, Quill Pieter brought Starflower down softly in the magus’ courtyard.
‘Such a Medieval pleasure,’ he said, stepping clear of his craft, ‘to own a person, in much the same way as one owns a denizen.’
‘She’s not here,’ stammered the magus.
‘But you know all about that sensation,’ continued Quill Pieter. ‘You own the social flow, and persons are your products. You seed overreaction in them, those teeming billions, then leech it from them and sell if for coinfrac. It’s some kind of jingle, but it ain’t Mozart.’
‘She’s… not here,’ repeated the magus.
‘I believe you’ve heard tell of Xoy. Now, do you give her to me, or do I make several “killings” this day?’
In the sumptuous flesh, the magus’ daughter stepped forward from the shadows. ‘Men,’ she spat as she stepped past Quill Pieter and into Starflower.
Up and away to jagged peaks Quill Pieter took her. There, above pristine snows, he took out his flute and set Xoy upon her. And after her bright mind was rendered to zeros and ones, he let her husk fall away, a tumble of taffeta, onto those starkly white teeth below.
Next, Quill Pieter rode Starflower to the opener’s lair.
‘You banded her,’ said the nerdly little man, ‘so you know exactly where she is.’
‘True,’ said Quill Pieter. ‘I just wanted to see your face before I took her.’
‘You tricked me. Why do you do these terrible things?’ asked the opener.
‘I am not of the ontology of reason-implying oughts.’
The opener’s face wrinkled in incomprehension.
‘Reasons are for the reasonable,’ said the youth, evenly.
As he turned to leave, the opener stopped him and pressed a smooth little object into his hand — an apple pip.
Later, deep under the mountains, Quill Pieter eyed Carousel as she scratched abjectly at her livid band.
‘You didn’t fight it,’ he said. ‘Some heart-of-gold kick?’
‘You can’t think what you can’t think,’ she murmured. Pieter cocked his head at her. ‘Can’t be what you can’t be. Can’t understand what you can’t understand. You take because you’re made of taking.’
‘I just play the passing phrases. Sometimes, those are persons.’
Quill Pieter dragged Carousel to Starflower and carried her up to the night-shining realm. She shuddered uncontrollably throughout the journey, all too aware of another presence in the ship. Something absurdly cogent. A rage machine.
Between his thumb and forefinger Pieter polished a tiny object. Carousel recognised it. ‘The Virtue Engineer,’ she said. ‘That has to be voluntary.’
‘And what would it do to me?’
‘I don’t know. Resolve your tune? Silence it? Burn you smooth inside? One eve of noctilucent blue’ — she lilted, chuckling sardonically — ‘Quill Pieter wrote himself anew.’
Quill Pieter considered this, up there in Starflower. He’s considering it now…
… and now
… and now.
With a keen eye, you see him on the sky’s frigid edge at murmuring twilight, pip between fingers, twisting Carousel, Xoy poised to strike.
Why would he ever choose to swallow it?
I have no idea. Reasons, after all, are for the reasonable.
‘Quill Pieter’ is included in D.J. MacLennan’s controversial short story collection Future Bright, Future Grimm: Transhumanist Tales for Mother Nature’s Offspring (Anatta Books, 2021).
