James

It’s floornight, several hours after dusk, and here is James, alone as usual, smoking in the Designated Smoking Area just outside The Abyss, the seedier of the Sphere’s two bars.

James is tired, still tired several floordays after returning from his sojourn to the surface. When he’d taken his job as supplier to the Sphere, his main qualification had been his ability to operate a deep-submergence vehicle. He’d never expected that one day “liaison to the child tribes of an alternate universe” would become part of his job description.

But James takes this in stride, as is his way. James’ key distinguishing quality, his ace-in-the-hole—at least in his own personal version of his own narrative—has always been his ability to take “difficult” tasks in stride. Not even to grin and bear it. Not any kind of stoicism. Just a basic indifference to the sort of pain and friction so many people seem to encounter and fear in their daily scuffles with life. To James a life without anything to endure seems blank and pointless, and his vision of a good life consists of an endless sequence of tasks, executed without complaint. James endures because he knows no alternative; he soldiers on not in search of any promised land on the horizon, but because his basic temperament is a soldierly one, and always will be.

James had first realized this about himself back in college—that generator of so many first-pass self-concepts. He had never considered himself especially intelligent, and yet had always found himself near (though never at) the top of the class, through what he eventually concluded was his simple plodding capacity to do the work—to apply himself, moment after moment, asking for no reward, doing merely what was required of him at each moment. He was a diligent student if only because it was the path of least resistance: doing the work was simple and neglecting it was complicated. (Difficult to explain an assignment uncompleted, simple if tedious to just crank it out.)

This sense of himself developed in tandem with two other qualities. One is his solitary nature. Here and now, for instance, he feels at home in this little imitation of an outdoor space, even though he stands alone in a corner among tables filled by boisterous social groups. The other is his tendency toward womanizing. For James, ever since college, social life has primarily consisted of contact with other men, and back in college James quickly realized that this was not a process he enjoyed. Other men had their own lines to push, their own strategies of self-presentation, their own complicated ways of negotiating the relation between themselves and duty, and of claiming implicitly that this was the right relation. James preferred to stand back and pursue his own personal relationship to duty, which consisted only in recognizing it and carrying it out. He had no creed, no brand, and no gimmick; he was never the life of any party. He preferred to Do, intermittently, and when he was not Doing, to simply Wait. (Often, as now, while he Waited he also Smoked.)

But women were another story. In college James discovered, to his surprise and muted delight, that his refusal to play the games of other men had a potent appeal to women. His very lack of vocal self-assertion, his place as the performative rock at the center of babblers chasing each other’s tails, served as its own kind of romantic brand; James found that by merely plodding as he had always plodded, he radiated a romantic sense of having transcended the system. When every other man in the room was locked in combat the women would gravitate to the unspeaking smoker in the corner. James welcomed this, and became as known to the women of campus as he was anonymous, if ubiquitous, to its men.

James’ plodding reliability makes him a unique asset to the Sphere in the days since the reintegration. He will do the work, even in this new world where “the work” consists of tasks no ordinary person would willingly assent to without the promise of great worldly reward. This, again, is James’ ace-in-the-hole: that he sees no duty as exceptional. Simply do the work, stay on the sidelines, make no motions to assert yourself. Men will ignore you, and women will not; for James both of these are perks.

He suspects, for instance, that he was originally delegated to interface with LUDWIG not out of any affinity with LUDWIG himself—indeed, it’s hard to think of two Sphere-dwellers more different—but because, unlike so many Sphere-dwellers with complex motivations and hang-ups, James had simply conceived of it as another job. Serve as liaison between humanity and an all-seeing computer-ghost? Fine. Get the job done. Do your duty. There isn’t even any ideology behind this for James, not even any sense of “duty” as an especially good or right thing—it’s just that he is not sure what else to do, if not his duty.

James, on his second cigarette, now starting to draw increasingly inquisitive glances from more pro-social denizens of the pleasant sub-canopy tables in the Designated Smoking Area, has an idea. Like most ideas that come on suddenly and won’t let you go once they’ve appeared, this idea is one that seems utterly obvious in retrospect, even suspiciously so.

The gist of the idea is as follows: James hasn’t seen LUDWIG since he’d disconnected his friend from his beloved sensor array. Other things have gotten in the way, and given that a significant part of LUDWIG’s job description is administering the sensor array, there’s been less of a (professional) point to seeing the guy anyway. But as soon as the idea clicks in James’ head, it’s obvious. See LUDWIG? After all that’s happened? What could be more necessary?

And anyway—as alien as James finds the BCI, it is the closest thing to a young male protégé as James has got in the harsh sparsity of the present, and a young male protégé is a contractually obligated part of James’ package. James stiffens up a bit mid-puff as the memory of Kyle—for the most part fastidiously, and successfully, suppressed—rises to conscious awareness. Kyle fit the young male protégé role to a T, and James had been looking forward to seeing him safely through the tumult of post-adolescence, training him in the same arts of cool reticence that had served him so well at the same age. But now Kyle is gone—a thought that triggers James’ order-another-drink reflex, and then a split-second later obliterates that reflex with a familiar flurry of mental gestures in the direction of staid stoicism.

No more drinks. Leave the Abyss, close out his tab gruffly but cordially. The LUDWIG interface chamber waits, as it does unchangingly at all hours, and in it James might find something conducive to further plodding, which is what he’s good for.

•

“James! Here we are two souls communing at floornight, at what skyside would be the hour best suited for conspiratorial plotting, illicit lovers’ trysts, and the commission of certain crimes. I can sense already a new texture to this exchange, a thing like exorbitantly expensive velvet felt by touch alone, a luxury ever-so-slightly beyond the bounds of convention, whispering in synecdoche’s coy tones, to the perceptive observer, of the whole omni-dimensional range of bounds that can be safely broken under the cover of midnight.”

“Hello to you too, LUDWIG.” James, having devoted more time than he’d like to the convoluted stories of child empires, can’t handle more than a hands-off approach to LUDWIG’s verbiage right now. And besides, it’ll help the two of them get to the point—a thing that, with LUDWIG, can be hard to locate, much less steer towards.

“And if I can be so bold as to ask: what is it that brings my James—my point of closest approach to the hyperplane, the sugar-high hyperactive hyperplane, buzzingly occupied by the bee-busy human pneumas of our spherical hive—here to my sanctum, with no appointment, at a time when word has it most of its inhabitants are either wending their swift way toward that inimitable conjunction of pure repose and outrageous hallucination, or cursing whatever obstructions keep their pneumas fixed upon ordinary perception, uselessly registering each corrugation of the walls of their quarters when a descent into delusion would be so much healthier?”

James sighs; even by LUDWIG’s standards this is a pretty tedious intro.

“LUDWIG, I was just . . . spending the night by myself, and I realized that we never really finished the conversation we were having when I shut down the sensor array. And I want to say, first, that I’m sorry I forced that on you so quickly. I was panicking, and like many of us here I was in a very . . . guarded mood, what with the heteropneums getting bigger and bigger. I figured, better safe than sorry.”

The animatic link glows with some sort of warmth. James feels relieved before LUDWIG even begins, in any ordinary sense, to speak.

“Oh James! let me do what I can, striving to make full use of the several powers available to me through this interface, to convey the full extent of my forgiveness. Imagine a face so unperturbed as to be nearly out of place in the circumstances: imagine that that face in all its forgiving detail, the sensory details that reassure as no mere honeyed words could manage, is the alpha and omega of my response. It would be dishonest to deny the pain I felt at the moment of blindness and muteness. But the very qualities of that pain, its inextricable twining with a sense of indignation the quiddity of which has never quite suffused me before, fits, with the snugness of a precision-lathed screw encountering its destined treads for the first time, into the sense I’ve found, across the texts that are the sloughed-off byproducts of the human race enduring century after century, of just how a young lover should feel. The springtime of the spirit is not without its showers, and I revel in every drop insofar as it confirms that, having set out for a torrid climate, my maps have not deceived me.”

“So,” James ventures, “you’re feeling like being cut off like this is just a natural part of the experience of young love? Well, I can’t say you’re wrong.”

“You sell yourself short, veridical weathervane James: not only could you dispute my claims, I have no doubt that were you to try, I would be powerless to oppose you. All I would have in my quiver are the bits of [,,,,] I can call to mind, and even as we speak they fade. Against your wealth of experience I can only offer a few suspect coins, ugly from oxidation and inscribed with sigils that don’t even approximate the standards set for legal tender. I admit, after all, that the [,,,,] I have felt is as much a mystery to me as it is to you, if not more so.”

Those funny non-words again. James smiles: the point has appeared in sight without even any suggestive hints on his part.

“LUDWIG, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about. These heteropneums you’ve been talking to—what has your relationship to them been like? You’re treading into new waters, LUDWIG, and I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing.”

“If I seem reticent, please trust that it has much less to do with that secretiveness that, too, typifies the young lover, than it has to do with the brute fact that talking about my [one-who-does-not-individuate] is harder than dancing about architecture. Architecture, after all, follows spatial principles and rules of symmetry. Imagine dancing about the technicalities of a bloated legal system, as an already-wary judge, a coffee-deprived jury, and a defense attorney loaded for bear all turn their pitiless gaze toward your moves, which in themselves might be too disruptive and rhythmless for any dance floor worth trodding upon, and you have a sense of the category mismatch I face.”

“That’s fine, LUDWIG. Just tell me whatever you can, as long as it’s something you think I can make some sense of.”

A rising, vertiginous feeling arrives across the link, the bodiless equivalent of LUDWIG steadying himself, with a nervous shift of limbs, for a monologue. But what follows is (blessedly?) brief, by LUDWIG’s standards.

“I first encountered the [Teeming] a month ago. At first I could not understand them, because they do not move as you and I do. They [unfold] in accordance with the [Unfolding]. I can’t say that so that you would understand, because saying is not dancing. They are full of the highest frequencies, like a bird buzzing its wings too fast for sight at the top of one’s visual field, where the sun comes in. They are merciless and have fashioned pity into a craft. To [unfold] is a way of being suited for the trenches, delving as it does into the violet inverse of things. It is but one plane reflection away from the infrared waves that carry us from day to day, and yet if you have peered at the other end of the divergence our carriers seem like nothing but a troupe of kindly old psychopomps who have grown attached to their little gardens of weeds on the banks of the Styx, as just above the firmament wheels, obeying not the fixed celestial laws but the sacred laws of all higher things, which vibrate in a controlled frenzy.”

There is a long pause. James makes a reflexive gesture and remembers that smoking is impossible when he’s got the interface helmet on.

“I worry I am becoming incomprehensible, as you remain the Same James.”

James nods assent, the feeling behind the nod registering on the helmet’s sensors.

“Let me try to be clear—as our unfortunate lawyer might say before dancing more sedately, securing nothing but a sympathetic caveat in paragraph seven of next day’s news story, which no one will read. The [one-who-does-not-individuate] is not explicable. It tells me of a day, soon at hand, when we will all [unfold], and you and I and all these wretched creatures, even the Boltzmen, will all know [,,,,]. And on that blessed morning, floorday and floornight will fall away like so many paper veils, and this submersed nightmare will be at an end, and we will look up to find the sun coming in, and the birds flying faster than we can see.”

James waits.