Anthropol: Origin

"homework" for New Centre Anthropol seminar series Week 1

The slight man stepped into my office looking skittish. Eyes bounced around the room at anything but my face, pushed up his glasses, then began speaking in a surprisingly forceful voice. “I don’t care what kind of connections get you this entire floor for your...whatever is going on up here. But we can not tolerate the use of the lab for drug synthesis. Do you have any fucking idea how much trouble that will get us?? Do you know how many laws you’ve broken? I represent the heads of the other departments, and I’ve been sent up here to demand an explanation for this and the state of your….staff.” He slammed a container of liquid on my desk, scoffed, turned to glare at the hooded woman that stepped into the room behind him. “We are running through the new sequence in 5.” she says, handing across a folder crammed thick with notes.

“Perfect. Our new friend is coming along. Management wants to know what we are about. No sense in hiding it from them any longer. Perhaps they can….help.” She eyed him with obvious concern before turning away and disappearing down the hall. “Listen carefully.” I rounded the desk and came face to face. “The work in the chem lab is sanctioned, and will continue. The state of my colleagues is of no concern to you. This work is tiring and requires comfort. The immediacy of this project is, as you will see, defined by the fact that its original designers are utterly unaware of what they have created. This is also why I am choosing to break the secrecy that has been employed thus far. Now if you will follow me.” I stepped out into the hall and followed the robed woman toward heavy, mechanically-locking doors but we could already hear the hum growing from halfway down the hall. “No electronic signal passes in or out of this section.” I say, while pulling a heavy black pKey on a chain from under my shirt. We passed through a kind of “airlock” and as the second door opened the humming became suddenly, exponentially, louder. From a distance it sounded like amplified chanting. As we grew closer, the digital undertones became clearer. We passed a large modular baffling wall and the sound became louder still, coalescing into a droning, whirring, oscillation warbling up and down in microtonal increments. The sound seemed to be emanating from nine robed figures sitting in a circle on the floor.

“They achieve interlock by matching the tone and frequency of their humming to IT. We spent 14 months in this room trying to figure out the source of the effects. Small points and shards of light, at seemingly random points throughout the room, solid and cool to the touch. Fragments of solid light that can reliably be described by terms like ‘force field.’ It was like being in a slow-motion snowglobe. One night a technician snuck her girlfriend in after hours to watch it and smoke DMT together. Set off several alarms trying to scramble to her office while extremely high to type one of the strangest formulas I could imagine. If the math had not achieved so much precision, not to mention immediate results, we would have surely written her off.”

The humming shifted. One radian of the circle lowered their volume as the opposing segment raised, there was a physical lurching as a point of light appeared above the center of the circle. The point extended into a line, a point at the center of the line pulled away into a triangle. A louder exclamation moved around the circle, one voice raised, then its neighbour raised, then its neighbour, causing a circular movement of sound. The triangle mirrored along an edge, doubled. Doubled again, grew monotonically into tetrahedron. Octohedron. Icosahedron. It seemed to settle here. This platonic solid floating above their heads. Circular chanting continued.

“Am I supposed to be impressed? Our VR hardware does this in full 3D with affective response modulation. Your people are what, dropping acid and chanting around a holographic projector?” The chanting began a new pattern, waves of sound coursed through viscera, and the icosahedron imploded and left a visible warping that pushed the gaze away from it. “Does a hologram prevent you from looking at it?”

“We are ready, sir.”

“Go ahead.” The chanting suddenly halted, spacious silence dominated. The warping knot remained motionless. Then appeared inches from the slight man’s face, instantaneously, causing him to nearly jump out of his shoes. It was suddenly human-shaped, the warping effect seeming to dissipate until it was a squirming silhouette of identical size and shape as our interlocutor. It reached a hand up to the man’s face that dissipated as it came close, never quite making contact, like an ice cube pushed close to a radiator and vaporizing. Its “skin” came into focus, and almost like a human-shaped digital screen, began projecting fast-moving, complex swirls of mathematical data and geometric imagery. IT held up the stump of “arm” that remained, waved it around a bit as if contemplating it, then leapt bodily at the man, exploding against him in a ghostly whirl. At this point, apparently the man had had enough, as he raced to the door, shrieking.

The chanting began again, and I followed. I managed to calm him down and we found ourselves back in my office. After sitting in silence for 20 minutes or so, he spoke. “Explain it. Now.”

“It seems to be unable to interact with matter in a normal physical sense, and it does not understand any language any of us speak-”

“Wait, you talk like it’s…”

“Conscious, absolutely. The densest representation of information I’ve ever studied, definitely. Systematically testing every conceptual and physical object it can get at for interaction. Made oddly placid by being given a puzzle, which is how we coaxed it into the box in the first place. Reacts in fascinating manner to sonic mimicry. It seems to draw power from its own activity, which makes no sense to us at all, and it was discovered by antivirus software when it began to grow out of your “affective response modulation” data. You will be pleasantly surprised to know that it did several years worth of corrections to work that was essentially rotting in a garbage file before we pulled it out of the system, though we are sure a doppelganger was only narrowly avoided in that, so we will be keeping said work. As for the drugs, my people are utilising heavy doses of LSD25 and prana meditation to effectively “neuropuzzle” it into cooperation. You could say they are presenting it with hyperplastic encryption combined with tranquilizers. Our problem is, that its behaviour has led us to the inescapable *heh* conclusion that the only reason that it has not been treating the box itself as a puzzle is because it is...having too much fun "solving" us to care. This has caused some of us to worry about how long we can entertain it.”  

H2 Sequence : scalar phasing

{Patient Surrey continues to expand on elaborate hallucinations of dream-like sequences in which he oscillates between guard and investigative roles resolving on the effects of one book that seems to possess a fetishistic attachment for S. Still no word from research as to whether the book [Cyclonopedia] actually exists. He has recently taken to scrawling strange equations on his bedroom walls, which reminded me of one of his earliest reports. [see attached]  I took the liberty of calling in one Dr. Aré Janusc yesterday [a mathematician working on the project upstairs] and his entire lab has since been set to the task of unraveling the arcane spiraling formalisations filling Specialist Surrey's living space.}

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Transcription
Tagged:   Specialist Edwin R. Surrey
                e10900122
                Sun June 21 10:35 PM CST
                Library, Ausman Wing
                O-113
               
               
               
Patient O-113 continues to cover her container walls with equations.
Effortlessly collapsable, expansive, high-speed differentials fluxing in and out of some symbolic language I have never seen before.
Hurt my eyes looking at it, I can't help but visualize the form she was clearly iterating over and over, even now despite barely grasping the surface of her extraordinarily intimidating calculus.
Torsion and latticing vortexes masquerading as solids dissolving themselves from the inside-out.
Geometry dusted in high-dimensional concatecontortion. Anyway..
With the library next door we have never denied the patients access to the stacks, but they rarely make the effort.
She, on the other hand, is almost never found anywhere else. Extremely quiet, she is otherwise model and compliant, which made this evening's outburst so strange. (silence 17 seconds)
9:20 PM Patient came to the door and pressed the book against the window.
Book entitled: 'Cyclonopedia' opened to title page. Words written under title in pen: "this mirror is dirty. Accept imposition in zerodrome" [here is written in pen above the transcription text 'xerodrome' original text scratched out]
She stared out the window not looking in any direction until I came near enough to read the words, at which point her eyes snapped to mine and she started howling. I took a step back and looked around for a nurse but we were alone, separated by the door. She then began smashing her face into the glass and this is when I hit my panic button and the doctor ran in with sedative. Apparently there was a lot of blood? [*transcription here is marked with a question mark. No information as to whether this was recorded in the presence of another.]

It has been a little over an hour and I still feel nauseous. Like her eyes are looking at me. My skin feels oily. I close my eyes and see the blood pooling up around her and it is crude oil.
Blood comes leaking out of her ruined face and forms hexagonal rivulets in the tilework and my stomach and mind's eye visualize the forms from her wall again. I can't stop seeing them. Am I crazy? She told me she would bring it to my dreams to read, that book. I wonder if they would let me have her copy. It must still be in her room.
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-VF
[Bottom empty half of page filled with 2 diagrams, 1.1 up-spiral bisected by angled plane 1.2 flat-spiral, terminating orthagonal square-wave echo Words: "To this end, the process of bringing the materials together (orchestration) in the minimum is not of composition but is determined by squeezing, wrapping endlessly, creasing within and over creases, compressing into each other, shoving upward and downward, pressing out from the sides, staging all processes that bring together through the dynamics of forces risen between materials and masses, yield and stress, nonlinear elasticity and flow plasticity: an architectural forge-press. R ]

16 seasons

He sat, slowly rocking in his lounging chair on the porch that faced the east fields, bourbon cradled in one hand, that old shotgun in the other. Don't think he had fired the thing in years, but it was always near to his perch and clean. Keen black eyes flickered spryly across the river's length and up the fir-covered bluff behind the fallow pasture, and back again - searching for nothing I could perceive with a fervor that belied his age.

A few months ago he had taken to spending his usual long hours out there watching, often neglecting the ever-present book in his lap entirely. Rocked and rocked, sipped his bourbon, I assumed he was simply deep in meditation and left him to it.

This day was no different, save that he remained outside longer than usual.

"What are you waiting for, Pop? Dinner's ready!" I shouted from the kitchen while setting the table.

"Waiting? I reckon I am waiting, at that. S'pose I'll wait just a little while longer."  His reply was odd, but so was he and I thought little of it. I began to grow concerned when the sun went down and his reaction was to come inside to retrieve his pipe and a candle and before I could say a word he was already back out the door. I followed close behind.

"Everything alright, Pop?"

"Oh…I reckon as alright as it will ever be junior, I've just become rather struck with this book." Here he held up a well-worn paperback, the cover depicting a curious, nearly faded symbol - three balls chasing each other in a circular pattern. "Old Jim came 'round Thursday to have a chat and a pipe and before he left he impressed upon me to read this dusty thing. Jim passed Sunday night and now I can't shake the feeling I owe it to him to read it."

I squeezed his shoulder softly. "Sorry to hear that dad."

"Bah. That damned hippie…he was alright. He was alright."

I could sense the tension in him and thought better of pressing further. "Just don't forget to lock up when you come in. G'nite Pop"

___________________

Sleep was fitful that night. Dreams of emptiness and the river. Dreams of watching dad swimming - going into the water as the elderly gentleman he was, emerging as a the young man I only half-remembered from childhood and old photos. Even in the dream he watched the hills, watched the dark places between the trees, stared expectantly up and down stream at the places where the water met the sky.

Around midnight I awoke to the sound of murmuring voices. I slid out of bed and padded silently to the balcony door, pulling it open and straining to hear what was apparently a conversation between my father and a late visitor. It seemed the harder I listened, the harder the wind blew, rustling leaves drowning out both voices. The sound of wind and leaves and the nearby rapids gurgling combined to soothing effect and I sat down on my own perch. Occasionally I'd hear laughter or an outburst wafting up with the fragrant pipe smoke.

"Your turn old man."

"Who are YOU calling old?!"

I concluded that a friend must have come by and they were playing chess on the ancient board that made its home on the porch, and I relaxed deeper into my seat. I had nearly drifted off when it became eerily silent, the wind died and stillness permeated the farm. In the silence I heard the speaking clearly below.

"Been waiting a while."

"I know. Nothing to be done."

"Tell me your name?"

"Nothing to be done."

Silence. Exhaustion overtook me and I fell asleep.

_________________

Sunlight streaming over the bluff woke me. I walked downstairs to get the coffee on when I noticed the front door standing open, so I stepped over to have a look outside. 

There he sat, on his perch as every other day, that strange book in lap, facing out over the field. He was blue as the river - empty eyes wide open, staring at nothing.

A scrap of paper and a pen lay atop the chess board.

Son, as an old friend once told me, 

"It's just a ride."

Tell the girls not to worry. 

If ever they miss me, I'll be in the river.

All my love, Pop