“I’m touched by your optimism,” Paul said.
“Please don’t be that way. What do I have to do—to convince you to tell me the truth?”
“Consider that object,” Paul told her very politely. “It destroys the quotidian swindle. It confronts us with a tactile violation of conventional cognition.”
“Yes?”
“The destruction of the human condition offers us an avalanche of novel creative approaches. Those possibilities must be assimilated and systematically deployed by the heirs of humanity. Artifice is not Art. Although it deploys the imagination of the preconscious, it recognizes that the imagination of the unconscious is impoverished. We honor the irrationality of the creative impulse, but we deny the primacy or even the relevancy of hallucination. We harness the full power of conscious rationality and the scientific method in pursuit of the voluntary destruction and supercession of human culture.”
They walked down the stairs of the tubestation. Paul discreetly produced a laminated travel pass from an inner jacket pocket. “The human condition is over. Nature is over. Art is over. Consciousness is ductile. Science is an infinite powder keg. We confront a new reality formerly obscured by the inbuilt limits of mammalian primates. We must create work which brings this new reality to the surface, a sequence of seemingly gratuitous gestures which will form in their aggregate the consciousness of posthumanity.” Paul’s limpid gaze grew more intense. “At the same time, politically, we must not shatter the fragile surface tension of an aging human civilization which pretends to Utopian tranquillity but is secretly traumatized beyond all possibility of healing. Beneath the repellent husk of the dying humanist agenda, we must systematically alter the physiological basis of cognition and the state of culture, and bear an honest, objective, and unpretentious witness to the results. That is the basic nature of our program as artificers.”
“I see. Can you buy me a ticket?”
“A ticket to the train station, or a ticket all the way to Stuttgart?”
“Actually, could you buy me both of those tickets? Including a round-trip ticket.”
“Why don’t you just take my Europass? It lasts till May.”
“Could I do that, Paul? That’s too generous.”
He handed her the laminated pass. “No no, I can get another smartcard from the university. Europe is full of situational perquisites.” He approached a machine and did business with it.
They boarded the Praha tube and clung to the hand straps. She looked at him. She loved the way he swept his hair back behind his ears. She admired the fine sweep of his dark mobile eyebrows, the line of his hooded eyelids. It was a comfort to be in his physical presence. He was so young.
“Tell me something else, Paul. Go on.”
“We must prepare to take creative possession of the coming epoch. An epoch so poetically rich, so boundlessly victorious, so charged with meaning, that only those prepared to bathe in cataclysm will transcend the singularity. Someday, we will render powerless all hatred of the marvelous. The admirable thing about the fantastic is that the contained is becoming the container; the fantastic irresistibly infiltrates the quotidian. It is only a matter of time, and time is our one inexhaustible resource. There is no more strength left in normality; there are only routines.”
“What you just said. It’s so beautiful.”
He smiled. “I like to think so, too.”
“I wish I were that beautiful.”
“I think you’re making a category error, my dear.”
“All right—then I wish I could do something that beautiful.”
“Perhaps you already have.” He paused. “It’s a truly interesting concept, ‘beauty.’ An intersection of three worlds …”
The tubetrain pulled into a stop in the Muzeum station and an absolute horde of tourists piled in, a jostling mess of backpacks and bags and alien chatter. They stood amid the crowd, swaying on their hand straps. He’d tried to convince her that he could disturb the universe and the two of them were standing packed amid a horde of indifferent strangers like animals in a cattle car.
It began to get very hot within the train. A muted series of cramps gnawed away deep inside her and when she had come sweating out of the far side of the pain she realized that this was a day when she could do something truly crazy. Something mad and spontaneous and psychically automatic. Levitate. Leap off a building. Throw herself on her aching belly and kiss the feet of a policeman. Fly to the moon and dig into its white chalky soil and absolutely grope for Luna … Paul looked at her with undisguised concern. She gave him her brightest smile.
At the central train station she limped off to the ladies’. She did business with hygienic machines, drank two cups of water, and departed in better order. The pretty face in the mirror, with its dilated eyes and a little dotting of sweat beneath its layered treatments, seemed to blaze with the holy fire.
Paul was being very considerate. He got them beanbags in first class with a nice fold-down table. The Stuttgart express was a very rapid train.
“I love European trains,” she babbled, her scalp glowing beneath her beret. “Even the really fast ones that spend most of their time underground.”
“Maybe you should wanderjahr to Vladivostok,” Paul said.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“It’s a tradition in our group. Vladivostok, the far edge of the Eurasian continent. You have a Eurocard now, and you said that you wanted to drift. Why not drift to Vladivostok? You’ll be alone quite a while. You can relax and marshal your thoughts. You can reach the far rim of Asia and return in about four days.”
“What do you do once you reach the Pacific Rim?”
“Well, if you’re one of us, then you go to a certain obscure Vladivostok ptydepe—sorry, I mean Public Telepresence Point—and you perform a gratuitous act. Our group maintains a constant scan on this particular Vladivostok PTP through a conceptual sieve. Any gesture sufficiently remarkable to attract the attention of the scanner will be automatically mailed to everyone in our netlist.”
“How will I know if my gesture is sufficiently gratuitous?”
“By intuition, Maya. It helps if you’ve seen other performances. It’s not a matter of merely human judgment—our sieve program has its own evolving standards. That’s the beauty of the beauty in it.” Paul smiled. “How does anyone truly know how anything is out of the ordinary? What is ordinariness? What makes the quotidian so seemingly frail and yet so totipresent? The membrane between the bizarre and the tedious is inherently ductile.”
“I guess I’m missing a lot, not being in your network.”
“Without a doubt.”
“Why does your group even meet physically at that bar in Praha, if you’re so thoroughly netted?”
Paul considered this. “Do you have your translator? Is it working?”
“Yes. Benedetta gave me a translator at the Tête.” She showed Paul her diamond necklace.
“How very good of my valued colleague Benedetta. Any machine of Benedetta’s would translate Français, I imagine. Put it on.” Paul clipped a sleek little pad to his own ear.
Maya worked her diamond beads and tucked the golden bird’s nest in her ear. Paul began speaking Français. “[You can still understand me, I presume.]”
“Yes, my machine is working fine.”
“[There are millions of earpiece translators in circulation. They’re a modern commonplace. You speak English, I speak Français as I am doing now, and the machines interpret for us. And if the background noise is low … and our speech is not too infested with jargon or argot … and if not too many people are speaking all at once … and if we are not referring to some context beyond the comprehension of small-scale machine processing … and if we don’t complicate our exchange with too many nonverbal interactions such as human gestures and expressions—well then, we understand one another.]” He gestured broadly. “[That is to say, despite all the odds, we force some modicum of human meaning through this terribly intimate ear-mounted membrane of computation.] ”