An Excerpt

“Your dad is dead.”

The voice on the other end of the device was hollow and strained.

Crates heard Shannon’s words while in the middle of a second-year lecture entitled “The Concept of Suggestion in Advertising: Using Cognitive Biases to Sell.” His device was pressed hard against his ear, crushing his black hair into his skin and flattening one side of his beard. His entire body had gone cold as stone. His sense of being-there faded, not in a distracted or bored way, more like an essence vanishing, a sucking out of the soul. He was shocked that it was possible to feel that sort of void at all, discovering true emptiness for the first time.

· · ·

“Well, Jason, the hard truth is I just don’t trust you, not as much as I’d trust a cat around raw meat.”

“If you’re going to compare me to a quadruped mammalian, at least show me the courtesy of making it the king of the jungle and not a vermin-killing domesticated pet.”

George laughed.

“You’re actually seriously telling me whatever it is you’re working on is stored, in toto, hard copy?” Jason put his face into his hands momentarily. “George please do not tell me your secret project is language. I know you have this obsession with paperbound books for some reason,” he gestured to the shelves of books that surrounded George’s circular office, “a monu-fucking-mental waste of money. Where are you keeping the hard copy? Hard copy as in paper, right? Fucking paper?”

George laughed. “It’s a bit of a trek.”

“So what the hell are you working on in this office then?”

“Like I said, I’ve had to bring in a bit of extra help for some things.”

“Help is right. The office is a who’s who of homeless and psych inpatients out there.”

“I hesitate to say too much here, Jason. Also, your characterization of the folks out there isn’t what I’d call compassionate, or even accurate.”

Jason rolled his eyes. “Compassion? George, you’re going soft. Should we all hold hands? Well, what the hell is this thing?”

George shrugged. “What I’m doing is a kind of translation to preserve certain linguistic patterns. Some beautiful things are falling out. Insights into the hardest of problems. Tentacles and such. I don’t want to say too much. Did you know that tentacles each have their own sort of brain?”

“I hate octopi.”

“That’s ironic.”

“Are you calling me an octopus? First a cat, now an octopus?”

“It’s a compliment. Look, Jason, I really don’t think that my work is going to do for your research what you think it is. It’s meant to be consumed directly. By the user, uninhibited and analog. It’s an experiential thing that I’m thinking, at this point, that simply can’t be reduced despite what’s falling out of it, the patterns I’m seeing, the math is beautiful, but the math is not the thing. The analog bit turns out to be very important.” George gestured to all his books. “I don’t want to say too much, and it’s not the central or even tertiary thrust of this meeting, in any case.”

Jason shook his head. “Analog? Paper? Thrust? Georgie boy, if you’re getting legitimately valuable and novel patterning from whatever the hell it is, book or whatever, that you’re working on, can you honestly tell me those are not put to their best use in the form True Vision programs? Into the headset? You may even benefit from seeing how the research reacts with some new input data.”

“I don’t believe they are, no. I thought I made that clear?”

“Clear that you what, disagree?”

“Yes.”

“We’re still iterating our research methods and developing these new headsets for more direct and robust data collection. I’m not in any rush.”

“My guess is you’re too focused on functional states. The deepest and most valuable thing is non-extractable, irreducible, experiential.”

“Until it isn’t. Just let me take a peek at this thing. What are you calling it?”

“If I haven’t been clear already, Jason, I’m going in another direction that’s essentially anti-headset and doesn’t have anything to do with you or True Vision.”

Jason mumbled something and then, “You making a new cult, George?”

“You’re asking me that? Jason Sun?”

“What’s it called? I’ll find out on my own eventually.”

“I can’t stop you from trying.”

“You won’t just tell me what the damn thing is called? Just the name?”

“The name is important.”