ONIRONET
The network of our most beautiful dreams
Robert SENDREY
1 Loneliness is a dream without a dreamer
I wandered alone, burdened with my wound, walking along ........ these words trotted in his mind, memories of another time, he thought. There are moments in life when a human being seeks solitude, putting the workaday world into parenthesis, to come face to face with oneself: protecting one’s intimacy, one’s aloofness, one’s identity. To think, write, reconsider who one really is, reappraise one’s life, move forward; others hinder us. Robert Maxim had one wish on that December day, a few days before Christmas and his birthday. It was to flee his colleagues of Christo-Hermione Multimedia Editions, a Paris based outfit, and return to his apartment to think things over, to identify the problem that had troubled him for so many months. Moreover, he felt overworked. Work was piling up. At wit's end, he aspired to a few days’ vacation, a well deserved rest indeed, to get the upper hand again.
He had once noticed that writing was a therapy, and this creative practice helped him to understand what was going wrong in his life, to overcome the fear of nothingness, which haunted him from time to time, to escape the stress that overwhelms us in the big cities of the 21st century: the noise, night light pollution (thank you automakers). The world that was changing at an alarming pace disturbed him, especially as he did not understand the ins and outs of the forces that were transforming our daily lives, often without our knowledge, and whose implications, near and far into the future, remained invisible, even for specialists and the most famous global decision makers. Where are we heading for?
Who would have foreseen all the shock waves that have traversed the planet in recent years and which might ultimately call into question the very survival of our beloved mankind? I'm not only talking about global warming, the hurricanes that hit the Caribbean and the U.S. east coast of Miami, Florida, Galveston, Texas, names sometimes male, sometimes female, the Erinys, the Titans, and the banking crises and financial mega-cracks, computer viruses and biological terrorist attacks with dirty bombs and their latent epidemics or famines and droughts that have made Africa a continent of misery and desolation.
But the worst was not going to keep us waiting too long.
In his study, where for years, he had been accustomed to writing anything that might be his humble testimony for future generations in the form of blogs, notebooks, diaries; he pressed a key on his computer.
His password was requested. He entered a word with nine letters plus a question mark. He knew he must use numbers and punctuation signs to make intrusion difficult. He preferred a little known Egyptian proper name, and whose seventh letters varied according to the religious orientation of the Pharaoh (puzzle that out, you may solve the enigma if you are aware of the story). Robert had a passion for ancient history and religious mythologies. For his login id he used a character taken from a poem written by a woman in the Middle Ages.
(I must admit that I still have his password (phishing again), which allowed me to learn about his every act or deed. I am also very well equipped.) Maybe I've already entered quietly, secretly, your computer.
He pressed the return key, and had access to his homepage. He chose his word processor, opened a file called Onironet and began to write. The beginning was quite trite but ..... I'll let you decide.
Friday, December 20
Yesterday afternoon, it was unusually cold. Snow has been falling constantly in Paris for twenty days now. This is unusual. I took the subway as usual. I went to the Centre for Cognitive Research.
This Research Centre is located 3 ** avenue de l'Observatoire in the sixth district of Paris. Above the front door of this elegant post Haussmann stone building, stand two woman statues, on the left a draped caryatid whose garment hints at the delicious voluptuous plump contours of the female body, on the right a nymph whose nakedness and skyward gaze evoke religious ecstasy or the completion of lovemaking. It reminds me of the ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Bernini that I so much admired in St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome.
I must begin at the beginning. Whoever reads this testimony will one day need all the elements to understand the diabolical situation in which I am tied up.
I am part of a research project; I'm a kind of a guinea pig. Project Name: Intercoma. Strange name! Is it deep sleep or the lapse of time preceding death? This is a project that makes us sleep a lot. It was during REM sleep that I met Apolline for the first time. Bizarre sort of sleep where we do not exactly dream where we do not exactly sleep.......
How did I get to know about the Centre? About a year ago, after a conversation with a close friend, Paul Lyris, I contacted the Centre to participate in an experiment that seemed of great interest, a basic scientific experiment, so they said. Through their network, it is possible to meet others in a virtual world, the oniro-cyber-world, located in a nebulous nether zone somewhere in cyberspace. We seem to see, hear and touch the people we meet in this artificial fantasy world, this electronic limbo, this computerized digital environment, what some American geeks consider to be the ultimate frontier.
As memory storage systems increase (Gordon Moore’s Law), the speed of communication is accelerated and the amount of information grows. This three-dimensional world increasingly resembles the real world though cleansed (if desired) of the inconveniences of daily life. A new generation of software is preparing for us smells and tastes transmitted at high speed. Heaven on earth is within our reach, even immortality!
All this makes us dream of the opportunities offered by such technologies. Virtual beings that seem as real as the actors of the cinema, television personalities, a very disturbing outlook when you consider that TV programmes pass through the internet! Aesthetic pleasure, the pleasure of the senses is perhaps virtual, illusory, a dream come true, who knows? A world of milky Phantoms in despair ....
The protocol of the experiment that I was interested in, Intercoma, was even more absurd. Coma comes from Greek and means deep sleep. Participants had to fall asleep with a very advanced technology that could control the phases of sleep, capture brain waves and transmit them through cyberspace to the holy place of convergence. All our dreams are stored, analyzed, categorized, matched and compared. Imagine a dream encyclopaedia, a database filled with scraps of memories, knowledge in the making, training, experience, awaiting their entry into memory. Our mental images resemble spots of colour, blurred splashes with indecisive contours. The system is able to record and view them on a screen!
As I lay dying, the sun was eclipsed by a waterfall
Of thoughts and memories gone wild……,said the voice of time gone by.
What is striking is that I only remember these unreal trips in spurts, and yet, they remain very present in my heart of hearts. However, I'm never quite sure of those memories, of my dreams which sometimes resemble everyday occurrences. I have a feeling that my soul splits in twain and I live between vision (heaven or hell?) and reality, if one can still use this term. Let us quote Gérard de Nerval. Reading his work comforts me.
"A Dream is a second life. I could not penetrate, without a shudder, those gates of ivory or horn, which separate us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are like an image of death: nebulous numbness seizes our minds, and we can not determine the exact moment when the ego, in another form, continues the work of life. It is a nondescript netherworld that lights up gradually, and within which, from the shadows of the night, emerge the pale shapes gravely motionless, who live in this limbo land. Then the painting takes shape, a new light illuminates the scene, making the strange apparitions play: - the spirit world opens to us.”
After our travels (Let the Ship sail to the shores lined with cypresses), we are interviewed by cognitive psychiatrists who manage the project: debriefing, the relationship with the psychologist.
That night I travelled again. I perceive the experience as a journey beyond reality, a walk in a parallel universe. We are administered a drug before we go off to the takeoff room (it is the soul that takes off, I find that expression poetical). Lying on a couch, lit up by a bluish light, you slide into a deep and sweet sleep. Is it natural? Is it denatured by this potion that opens the doors of ivory for us, which sends us into this artificial paradise, this paradise once lost for ever!
I wander all alone in a deep forest. Birds sing the praise of a hero who fell into an ambush, a source of crystalline water babbles, there, near a cypress tree. Yet, there are no flowers. To the right, below, there is a kind of white castle with multiple turrets. This is where I made the acquaintance of Apolline Blanchefleur. She would often come there. I have been waiting for hours, it seems, because in this dream world duration has entered: one instant can seem like an eternity. Disappointed, I'm sure of her disappearance. The intuition, hopelessness, anxiety of a lonely person? I'm like addicted to this apparition, this kindred spirit, probably a figment of my imagination. Again, in my ear, Melpomene softly whispered: the milky Phantom, in despair, is really me!
All things considered, she must have given up the project for some reason, I do not know which one. And yet, I wonder if she is still alive? I have a strange intuition. In fact, I doubt many things, which I used to take for granted. The world has become less solid, less robust, less familiar. I walk along a thick slimy muddy path, this is my daily life.
A few hours later ....
Upon awakening, I felt a vague sense of frustration.
What should I do?
I think we really met, Apolline and I, once in a city full of history but I have no record of that meeting. I must say that I find it difficult to distinguish between dream and reality regarding my relationship with Apolline. No, it must have been a dream. But I feel that this dream is like reality. There must be some confusion between my dream memories and those of my daily life. And the worst is that little by little I'm losing my memory. And yet, I'm only thirty-nine years old!
It goes without saying that any real contact between people participating in the experiment was formally forbidden by the protocol signed by each of us. And, let's be pragmatic, how can you give an appointment to someone in a dream!
But what can one do if two beings of flesh and blood wish to know each other in the tangible real world? Unless Apolline is an aspect of myself…? The hidden face, the woman part, the anima who is in every man, a projection of ourselves: Venus Psychopomp? She leads us above, she is the eternal feminine that ends the Second Part of Goethe's Faust.
How can we know the identity of someone when the meeting took place in a dream? Nothing is more difficult, and yet I feel I have done it, I have really and truly known her. I have been acquainted with the softness and warmth of her shapely body. I have been acquainted with her soul, with the ecstasy of her desire!
The mind, it seems to me, has few landmarks in this universe and fantasy alone prevails here. Or does the computer suggest the setting and scenarios of our dreams? I have come to think that sometimes the universe, our universe, is a huge computer that manipulates us. And in this experience we call life, nothing is clear, nothing is certain, nothing is stable; and a scriptwriter is constantly reinventing our lives unbeknown to all of us.
It should be noted that Robert Maxim tended to write his diary as if he wanted to turn it into a novel. Unfortunately, he did not have the necessary talent! He transposed the events of his own life, coupled with those told to him by others to make an imaginary story. But he was unable to go further. The inspiration was lacking. Time too, probably. He worked a lot in multimedia production for museums and art galleries.
He took out of the drawer of his Second Empire Solid Mahogany desk, on which was placed his laptop, a small round Chinese pearl box. He lifted up the lid and took out a small ring in fine gold, broken at a point on its circumference, embraced it, and put it back. It was the gift Apolline had given him, Apolline, a being, real and radiant. Here was the proof! But soon after, he could neither remember the place nor the moment when she gave him this little piece of jewellery. In a flash, the image of that moment faded out. The large lily among the reeds, sadly shone on the calm waters, suggested Mnemosyne. Giverny? Images of paintings by Claude Monnet came to his mind in an implosion of colours, purple, blue, red and white lilies floating on dark blue or bluish grey water, and that indescribable happiness!
What Robert Maxim did not know was that the computer recorded the impressions generated in this virtual dream world where Apolline and he roamed, if however one wants to admit that the woman actually existed. Every sensation, every feeling, the slightest desires are captured, analyzed, because the Research Centre was interested in the activities of the brain and the subconscious in this strange environment. Man lives in a multiplicity of universes built by his brain when he dreams, reads, fantasizes, plays on his video games console, or just watches a movie at the cinema.
"The best image to sum up the subconscious is Baltimore in the early morning", Lacan tells us.
Personally, I've never been to Baltimore. And yet I roam easily all over the earth.
You're probably wondering if Apolline was only a creation of the dream machine as Eve, the second wife of the creation, was created by God, biblically at least. It's a pretty name, Apolline, isn’t it? Very sophisticated? Let me tell you about the first person who was given that name. A little bit of Roman history should enlighten you.
Under Emperor Decius in 250, all Roman citizens were compelled to sacrifice to the gods to save the empire in peril: incursions of the Germans, threats from the Persians, invasions of the Goths and, to make matters worse a series of military crises. The Christians of course (as they were monotheists and stubborn) refused to obey and were persecuted.
Apolline was one of the martyrs: her persecutors broke her jaw and smashed in her teeth. Before the stake where she was to be burnt, she took her executioners by surprise and threw herself into the flames. We can understand why she became the patron saint of dentists! I love that name: that is why I chose it for the person who would accompany Robert in his descent into hell.
However, in Apolline there is Apollo, the sun god, the patron of the arts, music, and poetry, the personification of inspiration. It is perhaps through this association of ideas that Robert imagined Apolline in terms of light and harmony.
Let us visit the Research Centre for a moment. Professor Matthias Jedermann was the big boss of the Intercoma project. He had spent forty years of his life studying the relationship between man and the machine. Making the computer aware of its environment and its own identity was his chosen field of research, his secret project, his hidden ambition. The professor was a worthy disciple of Turing. His research was rather more philosophical than technical. His hypothesis was to consider achieving his goal through the networks that pervaded the planet. Indeed, a huge knowledge base containing all the knowledge and all the beliefs of mankind would be necessary for a machine to be able to "understand" human language. But how can we simulate emotion, feeling, experience?
The idea came to Matthias while watching a young child become aware of his own anger. Through experience, through learning! Eurika! Create a network of processors capable of storing information on daily life, human experience. Learn from humans. However, he had to see what was happening inside human minds. Matthias believed that the human being was a machine, of terrifying complexity, certainly, but a machine nonetheless, as both Descartes and La Maîtrie believed in the 17th century. The mind (or soul) was only the production of the electrochemical activity of the brain. The soul was only an error of the Ancient philosophers, especially the Egyptians, Greeks, and later, under the influence of the latter, the Christians.
Unfortunately, it has been very difficult to understand enough about the mechanisms of this organ, the brain, to be able to properly simulate its activity by computer. Until now, our attempts have only been approximate. But if we recorded the movements of the soul and kept them in the memory of a supercomputer as we do with the physical movement of athletes to simulate characters in video games, and if, from this data, we could model human behaviour and especially human consciousness? And if we could pierce the mysteries of this unknown land we call the subconscious? The dark energy of the human brain! That was how the Intercoma project was born. It was his brainchild.
Matthias had read somewhere that the subconscious was the repository of our atavisms: these mental images transmitted from generation to generation since the dawn of humanity, and that these heredisms could reach the surface of the ocean from the abysmal depths of our species history in the course of a dream, a dream shared by two people. He had noted down that "two sleepers, far apart, evoked at the same time the same mental images." If he could bring together the dreams of two people, he could verify and confirm this hypothesis.
For the computer scientist, copying the abilities of the left hemisphere (language, logic) proved easier than modelling those of the right one, the seat of emotions, creativity and intuition. Could we understand these mysteries during sleep, this privileged moment of memorization?
Money is the source of all evil
The project was funded by the Immortalia laboratories. As the name suggests, research is moving towards extending the human lifespan or the appearance of youthfulness: lotions against aging, improved memory drugs, priapic potions to improve erections in the over-sixty-year olds. The company in turn received support through a very discreet foundation, the Athanatos Foundation. It proposed courses and seminars on eternal life. For a long time, immortality has been a very lucrative way to fool humans, to have an influence on their behaviour, in short, a sublime business model that has enriched many priests over the millennia.
The Greek poet Pindar puts it this way: do not inspire to immortal life, O my soul, but exhaust the realm of possibility. (Pythian 3.110)
"Μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατον
σπεῦδε, τὰν δ 'ἔμπρακτον ἄντλει μαχανάν "
Athanatos sought to exhaust the realm of possibility to create eternal life. Does the soul exist? Is the mind not just the consequence, the production, the expression of neural activity? Can we make a copy of this elusive soul and store it on a computer, a server, a database. But a copy that works, fully able to feel, think, decide? An autonomous existence, independent of living organisms! Through Immortalia, Athanatos funded part of the research carried out by Mathias Jedermann. And what do we do with the human body, that mortal coil, once the data has been entered into and stored away in those houses of eternity, those dedicated electronic memories?
This foundation organized seminars on eternal life. It explained how the ancient Egyptians perceived it as a journey by boat, then a judgment in the court of Osiris. And the sentence is pronounced: either eternal life or nothing. Nothingness….. The heart is weighed on one scale, a sacred feather on the other. If the deceased's heart is lighter, the soul can survive in the afterlife, but if the soul was evil during his life on earth, then it is the Great Eater, Babai, which is responsible for devouring the heart of the guilty person and it’s the job of nothingness to engulf his or her soul. Babai has the head of a crocodile, the mane of a lion, the hind legs of a hippopotamus and the front legs of a hyena: a composite image, reminiscent perhaps of a pre-pharaonic totemic religion.
(A short parenthesis: Try for a moment to imagine nothingness! And yet, every night, when you fall asleep you enter nothingness before you start dreaming. The spirit is at rest; little activity in the brain during deep sleep, the signal which traverses the two hemispheres slows down, goes into blackout mode).
The Egyptians represented the goddess as a chimera. Among the Greeks, the judgment is carried out in front of Hades. Heroes and honest people gain access to the Elysian Fields, the wicked plummet down to Tartarus. Christians have adopted the Last Judgment. This theme has been very promising and was responsible for many conversions throughout history. If we could guarantee the survival of the mind after death, the financial gains would be enormous. Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness - Farewell, vivid brightness of our too short summers!
Robert was engrossed in another past. He began to research the origins of thinking machines. I will summarize his findings because his style is a bit too heavy. I was able to recover the text on the hard drive of his computer. He will no longer need it. Here are the basics.
A short history of thinking machines
He was interested in the cog machine of Blaise Pascal; then Charles Babbages who attempted to build a mechanical machine capable of reading a sequence of operations on a perforated tape. It was a woman, Ada Byron Lovelace, daughter of the English poet, who first proposed a computer algorithm. Babbage's machine never worked during the life of its inventor, through the lack of funding. The Government of her Majesty, Queen Victoria, did not want to finance this ambitious project any longer. However, a century later, in 1991, his Difference Engine No. 2, after six years of work and effort, and a cost of 300,000 pounds, executed its first important calculation. In other words, England could have had an operational computer before any other country in the middle of the 19th century.
It was after the Second World War that the modern computer was born, thanks to the work of Alain Turing and Johann von Neumann, responsible for designing its architecture. The machine had to be able to calculate (Navier-Stokes) differential equations for the study of turbulence in the Manhattan Project, a very explosive project!
Robert also studied the history of the Internet, derived from the projects of the American Department of Defence 60s, and finally, he broached artificial intelligence. Turing fascinated him most. The Englishman had lost a close friend during his studies at Cambridge University. It was during his mourning that he formed a plan to build an artificial brain that is not subject to the laws of nature and the inevitability of death. Turing imagined an immortal intelligent entity. Sixty years later, Aphanatos collected the necessary funds and prepared the first experiments in the field of artificial immortality. Indeed, I know something about that! But it was not the resurrection of the dead that motivated the research: the goal was to clone the souls of the living and install them on servers. Everyone would have his angel, his double, his digital alter ego, his avatar forever, provided he could pay!
It is not difficult to imagine some opposition from religious authorities with respect to such a project. After all, these institutions have enjoyed a monopoly on the issue of immortality for a very long time.
But a mystery remained for Robert. Who was Wilhelm Schickard? So he carried out a kind of investigation, intrigued by the life and invention of this German, born in the town of Herrenburg in 1592. This brilliant inventor had studied theology at the University of Tübingen and had taught Hebrew. In 1613, he met Kepler and began the study of astronomy and mathematics. The two men met several times and corresponded on a regular basis.
Schickard continued his teaching of biblical languages, and in 1626, became inspector of schools in Stuttgart. However, he remained interested in astronomy, including planetary motion. To help his friend Kepler, he decided to build a kind of calculating machine. So he designed a clock to calculate, operating on the principle of the logarithms of the Scottish mathematician, Napier. This device consisted of six cylinders with six multiplication tables. The system could do addition and subtraction, and through logarithms, multiplication and division. Cogged wheels performed the calculations.
In September, 1623, he wrote to Kepler:
"The same thing, the same calculation as you have done in writing, I have just tried to do it in a mechanical way. I have built a machine that performs operations, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, automatically with given numbers in a moment. "
What was strange was that the machine was destroyed on February 22, 1624 during a fire. Although Schickard died in 1635, eleven years after the destruction of his clock, he did not try to rebuild his machine or he dared not do so.
Was this because of repression or prohibition on the part of the religious authorities? At the same time, in 1633, Galileo was subjected to the Inquisition about his theories of celestial motion. The Church was no doubt, as it is still today, a force of cultural and intellectual repression and a bastion of ignorance and obscurantism, Robert conjectured. He considered himself to be a free thinker. Robert felt that designing and manufacturing a calculating machine, an operation that only the human mind could accomplish, therefore a gift of God, was an affront to the Church about how it saw creation and the status of human intelligence in the natural order of things. Creating a system that would perform arithmetic calculations was already the beginning of a process that would sooner or later lead to a mechanical brain, an artificial consciousness or even worse a digital soul.
From the documents left by Schickard, discovered in 1957, his clock was built more than three centuries after the fire, by a research department in his former university. The firm IBM has also built a model of this amazing device.
From the diary of RM
It was at a lunch with my friend, Paul Lyris, that I learnt about the Intercoma project more than a year ago. I was looking for ideas for an article on a brain connected to the computer. Paul was aware of a Franco-American project I might be interested in. Paul outlined the project, and gave me an address and a person to contact.
Sleep at that time was a source of many problems. I would often wake up in the middle of the night and I would lie awake for hours, unable to fall asleep again. I do not remember much about my dreams. For a few moments, when I woke up, some images came to my mind, then the memory all my dreams faded away like snowflakes falling on a stretch of smooth undisturbed water.
Sometimes I would put the light on and I would resume my reading. Then melatonin was dispersed in my blood, flowed into my brain, and pictures and crazy ideas filled the surface of my consciousness and I finally fell asleep an hour before the alarm clock would ring. I wonder what my dreams of yesteryear were like. Sometimes I would be flying over the mountains or towns, not contemporary cities but cities of another century, perhaps the town of my childhood, but also ancient cities. Maybe the scenery I could imagine came from the descriptions in a book I had read while preparing my B.A. It may well have been Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
It was as if I was swimming in the air and I felt some frustration at not being able to fly much faster and higher. I was eager to return to my childhood home and the shortest route passed through levitation. Strange! When I write, I can remember some scenes. It is an air from Richard Wagner’s Siegfried that would propel me into the air, always the same melody. A bird singing ........ whispers in the forest.
I wandered alone in a mediaeval village that stood like a mighty fortress atop a hill; in the distance, there rose a massive castle, stark, foreboding and gray. I wanted to fly back home. At the edge of a cliff, I realized that I would fall if I rushed out into the freedom of the air. A voice made me realize that this village was the residence of the dead and that I, like others, was destined to remain there for eternity!
And the thick shroud of darkness came to drown the setting sun in its pale waves, and water and the lilies among the reeds, the large water lilies on the calm waters, whispered the soothing lullaby voice of Mnemosyne.
Robert, a few days later, after his discussion with Paul Lyris, went to the Research Centre, was interviewed by Professor Jedermann, and duly signed the experimental protocol. The idea behind the project was not very far from the scientific background, which had inspired his own research into thinking machines. Participants should never seek to contact each other, so as not to disturb their emotional lives. And in case of death, the body should be bequeathed to the Centre to allow a special autopsy to be performed to verify the drugs (although there was really no danger to health, so they said!) administered during the experiments.
The following week, after a very thorough medical examination, Robert began his first trip in the Onironet, the network of our wildest dreams. The descriptions of dreams come from a database, which I hacked. The Research Centre recorded the images and then transmitted them to their researchers to make comparisons and to record summaries.
The first time Robert met Apolline was a few months after he began the research program. He was walking in a dazzling city, one that he failed to recognize or to give a name to, a city without any faces, without any identity, a very beautiful city, very old, but a city where there were no flowers.
- Why are there no beautiful flowers, yellow, purple, blue, orange, or white ones in this beautiful city? I would like to see irises, orchids, fuchsias, periwinkles, dahlias, hollyhocks and marvel-of-Peru.
And a voice answered:
- I am the mother of flowers, and my uterus is empty.
He looked around and saw no one.
Then a little later
In a forest, near a lake, walked a young woman. She undressed and plunged into the depths. Her body was slim and lily-white. She swam a while and then came naked out of the water, like Aphrodite in a renaissance paining. A servant brought her a white robe and a blue mantle with gold fleurs de lys, the flower of the Virgin, a mantle trimmed with ermine. The servant helped her to put on the clothes, and she prepared to leave. She looked like a woman from another epoch, within a landscape straight out of a painting of the Middle Ages. Was she a young Queen? The fleur de lys is the emblem of the French monarchy. Under the whiteness of her dress, you could guess the delicate and slender shape of her young body.
Moments later, he travelled through what seemed to be the coloured pages of a book: the very rich hours of the Duke of Berry. A white castle with a blue roof stood massive and impregnable; a peasant, dressed in red, riding a horse, was ploughing his field; a labourer clad in blue was sowing seed onto the land, while magpies were pecking away at the newly-fallen grain. Bright colours! Hypnopompic imagery, hallucinations, incomprehensible and paralyzing!
No bad dreams, think only of your love affairs, no bad dreams: beautiful dreams forever! Again this melodious and melancholy voice was telling him that he was about to wake up.
- Do you have any idea what the computer of 2020 will be like?
Robert was lunching with his friend, Paul, in a restaurant overlooking Sainte Catherine’s square, a small square just beside the Place des Vosges.
- Computers will continue to become more and more powerful and therefore faster and more efficient. We are not far from the quantum threshold for integrated circuits.
- Quantum? I've heard of research on quantum computers. What are they exactly?
- Ah! That is something else. For the moment, they are only theoretical. Although ...
Paul hesitated, beckoned to the waiter, thought for a few seconds, ordered his first course, then continued.
- The idea of a universal quantum computer comes from a certain David D…. of Oxford University. He wrote in an article written in 1985 that it would be possible to encode information using the principles of quantum mechanics.
- Quantum Mechanics? That seems a bit too implausible.
- It is not very complicated, but the theory goes against our intuitions about the world, the universe and physics.
- Can you simplify all this for me?
The starters arrived: paté de lapin. The boy uncorked a bottle of Chateau Avalon 1992, a Margot, both appreciated and always ordered in this restaurant.
- We can encode data using electrical impulses, this is what is usually done inside any PC, but we could have designed and build biological computers, mechanical ones, and even optical ones. The famous Church and Turing assumption puts it like this: everything in nature can be used as a computer, and conversly, any computer can simulate natural phenomena. The basic principle of the quantum computer is to use particles of light, photons, or atoms, for example, the boron atom, and exploit some quantum characteristics.
Paul began to speak of superposition, entanglement, polarization, vertical and /or horizontal ...
- Stop! All this is Greek to me! I feel you are giving a course to your students. What do you mean by entanglement?
- I will illustrate my point using a comparison. Take twins. The first is located in Paris, the second in Rome. Someone gives a blow on the head of the first; the second immediately feels a sharp pain in the head, he even has a bump. It is an analogy in the world that we know. This phenomenon happens when two entangles photons have their wave functions intermingled even in two separate locations. If each twin has information, there is also additional information related to their interaction even at a great distance. In short, instead of coding in bit units, information can be encoded in ternary units. We call these units, qubits, or quantum bits, compared to bits. We can read “1”, “0”, “1 and 0”. That's three for the price of two!
- And can we really exploit this phenomenon of entanglement of quantum states?
- Difficult. Because when you try to do so, we must observe the system, and therefore, it creates decoherence, destroying the entanglement of the photons, our twins again become two separate bodies, so to speak. They don’t interact even at a distance; if you shoot one, you will not injure the other.
But researchers are making some progress in this area. Well, here is a small die. It has six faces, numbered 1 to 6. Imagine that this is an atom that possesses six different superpositions: it can be in six states at the same time, and even in six places. Throw it.
- The die fell on number 3.
- As long as you have not cast the die, or observed the atom, we will not know what the number is or what the position observed is. However everything is possible before the observation. The quantum computer could perform calculations on all six sides simultaneously. Peter Sh.., a professor at MIT, gave a quantum algorithm capable of deciphering RSA codes, in theory at least.
- So the quantum computer is not for tomorrow?
- I do not think so. If you're interested, you can read articles by Seth L… and David D….. You can easily google them. According to the latter, a quantum computer would be able to simulate the behaviour of the universe. We can imagine its power and efficiency in cryptography, encryption, factoring and even teleportation. You can keep the die, it’s a present.
- Thank you. I now have the die that reveals the mystery of the infinitely small, Robert chuckled.
Here comes night, the criminal’s friend ...
That same evening, Robert went to the Garnier Opera where the ballet was performing a highly acclaimed work, which once caused a great scandal in Paris. It was the story of a primitive celebration of renewal. A young girl is chosen and sacrificed to regenerate the earth. The victim of this barbaric ritual, wearing a blood-stained dress, dances to diabolical rhythms until she finally drops dead. The staging was done by Pina Bausch. The ballerinas wore white transparent tunics, which became soiled as they came into contact with the stage covered with a thick layer of dark dust. The male dancers wore black pants and remained topless. Only the maiden who is doomed to die was dressed in white and red.
Robert was overwhelmed by the brutal beauty of the show. He realized that the music had meaning only through the choreography. Melodies, staccato rhythms floated on the edge of his consciousness long after the performance. Stravinsky! The Rite of Spring!
Leaving the Palais Garnier, he was nearly run over by a black Jaguar when he tried to cross the Avenue de la Paix. He was often distracted. He was lost in his thoughts on the meaning of the ballet. He began to cross the road without checking whether or not a car was coming: Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin, whispered the voice slyly. Had he failed to see the writing on the wall?
While searching on the Web the next evening, Robert fell across an interesting article: a thought experiment of Erwin Schrödinger in 1935.
He entered his access code, and opened a new folder, called Q-computer. To illustrate the strange world of quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger elaborated a theoretical background, a thought experiment to try to demonstrate what would happen if the quantum world and the classical world met.
A cat is in a box. A vial of poison can be opened or not by a mechanism that depends on the decay of a single radioactive atom. If the atom decays, the mechanism opens the flask and the cat dies. There is no way to predict the decay of the atom in question: this is a totally random process, therefore non-deterministic. According to quantum theory, the atom is in a superposition of states, several states at the same time. The atom is decayed and not decayed or both! It is only by observing the atom that the superposition is destroyed, and we see either one state or the other, but never both simultaneously.
This goes against our everyday knowledge of the world. According to Schrödinger, the fate of the cat depends on a single atom. The cat, like the atom, would be a superposition of life and death until an observer opens the box and glances inside. When you look at the cat or the atom more precisely, this causes the inexorable choice of one of the states: the cat is alive or the cat is dead.
The problem is: where is the transition between the infinitely strange quantum world and the classical world that we experience in everyday life, the world in which a cat is either alive or dead, never both if one can understand this point, one could master the technology leading to the quantum computer.
We can clearly see the technical difficulties posed by the quantum computer. Robert could not help but think of another cat, that of Louis Carroll, aka Charles Hodgson, professor of logic at the University of Oxford. The cat had a tendency to disappear at will, especially in the middle of a conversation, which appalled little Alice. It is the tail which disappears first, then the body, then the head and finally the face and only the cheesy grin remains, a bit like fading out in the cinema; this makes Alice say: " I have often seen a cat without a grin, never a grin without a cat.”
An article by Seth L…, 1993, entitled “A Potentially realizable Quantum Computer”, raised the possibility of processing information in a "massively parallel" manner. Such a computer would allow calculations that are impossible today and that would require unrealistic computation time (a few million years, and so on). It could perform billions of operations simultaneously. It would be able to factor very large numbers, allowing it to decode any encrypted message. The stakes are high. The military and police are interested, of course. In the opinion of this researcher, such a machine would give unimaginable power to whoever owns it.
Robert was back at the Research Centre. He slept peacefully. Soft relaxing music was first administered and the experiment began. Dr. Dennard monitored the device. When Robert began to go into paradoxical sleep or REM sleep, the music changed and the CD player began to play “whispering in the forest” and “the song of the bird of the forest” by Richard Wagner. This melody caused a dream of levitation as Robert had described it in a previous debriefing. Music and imagery can be associated. If you play a piece that is associated with an object, this object can be suggested during sleep. Robert loved to listen to Wagner in the dark before falling asleep. To what extent did music influence our dreams, he would often wonder.
Hei! Siegfried gehört nun der Niblungen Hort!
Hei, Siegfried, now the treasure of the Nibelungs
REM sleep is characterized by rapid eye movements. This stage, the fifth, follows the period of slow wave sleep. It is during this last phase that we dream and we can remember these dreams. It often happens that the sleeper is awakened to note down what he can remember. But the technology used by Dr. Dennard records mental images so you can leave the dreamer to continue his sleep uninterrupted.
A memory test
Later, while he was fast asleep, a poem by the French poet, Verlaine, was played to him, softly, so as not to wake him up, in order to study his ability to learn by heart during sleep (please forgive my translation from the French):
The sunset darted its last majestic rays
And the wind rocked the pale water lilies;
Large water lilies among the reeds
Sadly glistened upon the calm waters.
I wandered lonely, burdened with my wound
Along the shore of the pond, among the willow trees
Where a vague mist summoned up a large
Milky Phantom in despair
And weeping with the voice of the teals
Beckoning to one another with beating wings
Among the willows where I wandered lonely
Burdened with my wound; and a thick shroud
Came out of the darkness and drowned the last majestic
Rays of the setting sun in its pale waves
And the water lilies, among the reeds,
The large water lilies on the calm waters.
Finally, they implanted in his brain electronically, a dream sequence recorded from another participant.
- We'll see what transpires, Dr. Dennard said to the pretty nurse, Penelope, his assistant, who wore a long white smock, which was almost transparent, revealing her ample and generous curves.
2 The genesis of a project
Prof. Jedermann pressed the button on his intercom and asked for Nestor to bring him his tea. Then he began to work at his desk. There was a knock at the door. There entered a kind of metal homo erectus (not yet sapiens sapiens). It walked like an ape, leaning slightly forward. On his back, a large bag containing its CPU and the myriad of microprocessors that made up its brain. In his hands there was a tray on which a blue teapot and a green cup were laid. Awkwardly, Nestor placed the tray on the desk, lifted the teapot and poured the tea miraculously into the cup.
Phew! Matthias thought. He has indeed made some progress. This time, he has not spilt it, you live and learn. His lab was busy experimenting on a technology, capable of transferring signals from the human brain to a robot by means of a device which amplifies them and translates them into commands interpretable by the robot. The human brain emits signals that are too weak to be picked up by others unless they are put through an amplification system. We will soon be able to convey our thoughts directly without speech, the professor thought.
Building a robot able to walk and even climb stairs was a feat of technology and programming. The Japanese were the first to have succeeded in designing and producing a sumo robot that weighed two tons, capable of doing what a one year old child could do naturally: walk. Nestor was a reduced copy of a Japanese sumo, and was also able to perform a number of basic tasks. It also learned to correct its mistakes.
Was it aware of what it was doing? It behaved as if it indeed recognized its environment: objects that could get in its way, passages through which it could move. It found its way through the building and developed routes to go to and thro and accomplish an order. It recognized the voices of Jedermann and his team. But was it conscious of being, of existing in the Cartesian sense of the word? Cogito ergo sum. Will the day come when we will be able to develop true consciousness in a machine? Could it recognize itself one day in the mirror? And what would be the implications if it could, he thought ruefully.
The door opened and Nestor strode out like a big ignorant zombie and vanished. If Jedermann became interested in consciousness, it was because he had an amazing project and he never spoke to anyone about it. He had read a strange story in his youth, in a novel by the French writer, André Hardelet, entitled On the threshold of the garden. This short novel is out of print now and there are few copies available even in libraries. The story is very strange. A man invents a machine that can let you relive the most beautiful and profoundest experiences in your life, hidden deep in your memory. Imagine the opportunity to relive your first kiss, find loved ones long gone, relish the sublime moments of joy and pleasure once again! You can go back to your paradise lost, be reunited with the woman you once loved, rediscover that ineffable happiness, the first sighs of love, all these moments were in reach, not far off in the future, thanks to virtual reality and the information provided by the Intercoma project and the Onironet. He too will soon travel in that space, so exquisite and so personal, which is human memory, and find again what may be his pristine happiness.
Matthias had lost his wife in an accident when he was forty years old. He had never recovered from his loss and he remained alone. He was devoted to his research. Building a machine to go back in time, personal time; that really would be an achievement! All our memories are hidden in our subconscious. Everything is recorded. We need to find the path, the way to resurrection. Some memories can appear randomly during sleep but unfortunately we can not control either the flow or the scenario of our dreamscape. Other forces, obscure and sometimes unhealthy, remain the mistresses of our dreams! For the time being!
Memory, according to the ancient orators, is constructed like a palace. Cicero, Augustine, and others refer to places and striking images to be built within a specific architecture. You first go through the vestibulum, then you pass through the atrium, and continue your route from room to room. Each one is associated with a specific image or idea. Simply visit several times a building, a church, a palace, always following the same route; you can remember each place following the same itinerary. At each location, we associate a picture or symbol. This however is more a technique than an explanation of what memory really is from a neurological stance. In literature, in my opinion, the best illustration is given by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose.
Tempus fugit irreparabile
Six months later, after travelling a few hours on the Onironet, Robert was awakened and taken to the debriefing room where the doctor was waiting. He was hardly aware of how much time he had been sleeping.
- So, Mr. Maxim, did you have sweet dreams?
Robert was under the impression he was undergoing some form of psychoanalysis whereas this was out of the question when he had volunteered for this experimental protocol. However, he was discovering a lot about himself.
- Shall we begin?
- Let's go.
He had been awakened almost at the end of the period of REM sleep, the stage when we dream, so that he could remember his dreams for if he had awakened from the deep sleep phase, he would probably have forgotten everything.
- I was walking in a mountainous region, perhaps the Rockies. I followed a stream that entered a deep valley. The landscape changed suddenly. A plain covered with snow. A strong sun, gleaming, one of those beautiful suns of November that leave you breathless by their beauty and brilliance. A flock of birds appeared at the moment the sun went over the crest of a hill. Birds, white, three long and with slender necks.
- Swans perhaps?
- Probably or geese. Another bird, black this time, a predator was on the horizon, and swooped down on the geese. One of the three was injured and fell to the ground, pulled itself together, and flew away. I approached the place where the goose had fallen and I beheld a few drops of blood on the snow. I stared at the bloody snow. The picture changed. I contemplated the face of a pretty young woman, stunningly beautiful, angelical. A sad and delicate face, serene and resigned: The blood combined with the snow reminded me of the fresh complexion of someone I loved; and engrossed in this train of thought, I forgot who I was.
I do not remember anything else.
- Are you sure? Nothing else?
- Nothing at all.
Robert left the take off room and went to the bedroom where he could finish his night’s sleep. He slept peacefully thanks to the drugs administered to him by a young nurse in a white lab coat.
The beauty of this world, he thought, so fleeting, so fragile and so deliquescent. I regret the time when the sap of the world .... the crystal clear voice of approaching sleep murmured. Confused, down he plunged under deep and troubled waters.
Home sweet home
Back in his apartment, Robert opened the windows and stared at the park with spring colours that were spread out before him. He loved solitude. It was the sine qua non of success: to design sites and multimedia learning courses, he needed silence and meditation. He had just turned thirty-nine, led a very easy life, and seemed not to be interested in women. Some of his friends wondered if he was not indifferent to love, to sex. He never talked about it: he would go through intense moments, then he would go back to the solitude of his apartment. Actually, he did not invest too much in friendship or love. A lone animal, a Steppenwolf. He liked to think of himself as one of those libertines of French literature of the eighteenth century: pleasure without feeling, the game of seduction. His relationships, because there were some, never lasted more than a few months. Women resented his egotism, his aloofness with respect to tenderness (he easily escaped) and his lack of enthusiasm. In reality, he did not know how to show his feelings. And he loved the expectation more than the action:
Do not rush this tender act,
Sweetness of being and not being,
Because I have lived to wait for you,
And my heart was but your footsteps.
While he was out trekking in Sologne, (he was twenty-five years old at the time), he strolled one evening along a moat filled with water. Behind him, the sun was setting just above the horizon on which stood a XIV century gray stone castle beside a green wood. The last rays of daylight were crossing gaps formed by tree trunks and interlacing branches and were reflected in the water of the moat. But what enchanting beauty! Breathtaking! The moat looked like a sheet of boiling gold. This epiphany lasted only a moment, melting liquid gold flowing into the sleepy waters of the Loire river.
The next day he bought a very old book, bound in leather, in quarto, a collection of mediaeval poems. The poetess, Marie de France, had lived in France and England. She was born in 1154 and died in 1189. She was the first woman to have ever written poems in French. The collection was entitled Les Lais. He opened it at random and fell on the story of Lanval. The sound of the word pleased him. He would use it as a pseudo. Like Robert, Lanval was seeking the absolute. He had an idealized image of womanhood, an image he refused to give up. What motivated him in love was not actually meeting this ideal woman but continuing his quest to go looking for her forever. All the women he had known had possessed one aspect of this feminine ideal: the beauty of the eyes, the sweetness of the voice, the intelligence of the heart or playfulness in lovers’ games, gracefulness in the way they walked, in the undulating of the body.
A poem by the Greek writer, Cavafy Konstantinos, had left a very strong impression: it was called Ithaca. He amused himself by translating it from the Greek. You should not rush to join Penelope, but rather enjoy the journey, enjoy the adventures the journey gives you. You should love the Nausicaas, the Circes, and the Calypsos of this world while avoiding the traps of the Sirens.
After making love with a new acquaintance - he refused words such as mistress (too conventional), conquest (too libertine), girlfriend (too mundane) - he would wonder who would be the next one, the new one. What would she be like? What would her name be? The colour of her hair, the colour of her eyes, the timbre of her voice? It was primarily the quest for the impossible, the unreal, the ephemeral and delight in the pleasure of the moment that governed his emotional life. Robert Maxim, unlike Odysseus, was in no hurry to make it back to Ithaca. He loved this kind of trip and he was always ready to venture forth and conquer virgin territory.
But now he had made the acquaintance of this queen of fairies and flowers in his travels through the strange, and sometimes perilous, lands of the Onironet, the maiden who wore a blue coat with golden lilies, trimmed with ermine, an apparition the brightness of whose face appeared on the blood-stained snow. Was this really Apolline? Did she really exist? Is she not just one more figment of his ideal woman, remote and inaccessible, one who can only materialize in a dream? Robert thought, nonplussed.
I often have this strange and penetrating dream
Of an unknown woman, one I love and who loves me
And who is, each time, not quite the same
Not quite another, and loves me and understands me.
Once more he heard the honey-sweet voice of Erato whispering verse he had learned long ago when he was studying Parnassian poetry in his first year of French literature at the Sorbonne, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire.
3 The laboratory where time stagnates
Professor Jedermann was showing a young intern around his lab. She was spending a few months in his department to study the Intercoma project and the Onironet.
- And here, Miss Bianca, is the nerve centre of all our facilities, said the professor, while opening a door. It is here that the supercomputer called ESI oversees the recording and indexing of the dreams of our participants while managing our global network, our intranet. ESI means Enhanced Stimulation of the Imaginary: a kind of imagination stimulator. It (or she) was given the attributes of a woman, a sort of Mother of dreamers, our Great Goddess. She organizes in a virtual environment the landscapes of our sleepers. She generates her own world from the myths and archetypes we find in the dreams and imagination of humankind. We have already been able to implant the dreams of a person in another’s mind, develop scenarios for each dreamer, go back in time within the memory of our subjects and make them relive the most precious moments of their lives.
- Is it a highly protected intranet? Professor?
- Exactly. No one has access to it without a password and an account. We have installed powerful firewalls. You know the principles behind the Onironet?
- Vaguely, it is a highly classified project in the United States where I began my training as an IT engineer. I had to sign a declaration of confidentiality before being allowed to take this internship. The Department of Defense is very strict on this point.
- Well, the Onironet and the Intercoma project seek to build a knowledge base of the great symbols and scenarios of our dreams to complete the one which deals with common sense knowledge, which man has about himself and the universe in a conscious state. I am referring to the CYC project, which began about thirty years ago in Austen Texas, if I'm not mistaken?
- Yes, I know this project, I even worked on it there.
- Excellent! So, our computer has several tasks to perform. It must record the mental images of the subject, classify and index them by keyword. For example, Flying, Fire, Water, Waterfall etc.. Technological breakthroughs now allow us to view these images. The resolution is not very accurate yet. We see coarse shapes and elementary colours - large splashes of blue, red and yellow - but we are working on an application that should enhance our images and make them more easily identifiable. We are only at the beginning of our research, but we are making great strides forward.
- And the Convergence project?
Ah! This is very interesting. We have only one single case of success. We call them our Adam and Eve, our Cyber-lovers.
- What exactly is it?
- In short, the computer can send a signal to two separate subjects in space, even at a distance of several thousand kilometres. If two participants have regular mental images that are very similar in structure and close enough in scenario, an intelligent application can connect them in real time and even take over writing the "script" or fantasy setting. We can bring them together and create their common experience as if it were reality or almost.
- A single case?
- For the moment.
- And the third project. The one that nobody wants to talk about: the Dormition project.
- Ah! That project is not likely to materialize. We have neither the authority nor the ability to put it in place for the moment.
- What a pity! The young student sighed. What do we mean by dormition? Is it not the state in which the Blessed Virgin was placed after her death?
- Something like that, yes. It was the last sleep during which Mary made her assumption.
- Would you like to see a demonstration?
- Willingly.
The professor typed in his user name and then the password and pressed the return key, selected a window and opted for FIRE. The computer presented him with a list of hundreds of sample images. He chose a category and pressed the key again.
They looked at a picture of a wooden house burning for a brief instant. Then water came and smothered the fire, but it was already too late. There was only the skeleton of the house blackened by the flames left.
Mathias suddenly remembered standing with Agatha in front of the charred ruin of her parents house, so long ago, when he was a teaching assistant in Heidelberg. He had wanted to take her in his arms, hold her tight, and kiss her. But he dared not do so: she was still his student.
- Mademoiselle, I am delighted to have you with us. I have put you in the team working on the dream projection scenario. It is this unit that experiments on the suggestion or the implantation of false memories. We suggest a story, then wait a period of time, say, three weeks, and ask the participant about it, usually by showing him a photo where he or she is depicted with friends or family. Nine times out of ten, they thinks they have really experienced the events we have created for him. Incredible!
-You can call me by my first name, Matthias.
- Call me Anaïs.
4 the digital soul
Robert wanted to know a little more about Mathias Jedermann. Maybe in the bibliography of this scientist, he might find some clues about the type of research he was involved in.
He connected to his service provider and using a browser, Firefox, consulted the search engine which would find him, he hoped, what he sought.
Robert typed in the keywords "Jedermann" and "publications", pressed the return key, and waited a few microseconds. He was offered a list of more than 200 articles. He chose to concentrate on the first page.
Twelve items, highlighted in blue, appeared.
Jedermann and cognitive studies
Jedermann: "Quest for order in the Mind"
Jedermann and artificial consciousness
Then he continued his search, from page to page, until he fell upon an article which seemed particularly interesting.
Jedermann and the sleeping monkey
He pointed the arrow onto this item and clicked on the mouse. Moments later, the image of a monkey appeared on the screen, followed by a summary of the article.
Shock the monkey to life
It was a report on an experiment carried out in the early nineties on the brain of a monkey. The animal, once anesthetized, was dissected, and the brain placed in a container and fed artificially with oxygen-rich blood. That way the experimenters could keep the brain alive for some time. It was scanned during the whole time of the experiment by positron emission tomography (PET) and it was found that the brain continued to function, sending messages by myriads of neural networks although it was cut off from any signal, afferent or efferent, from or towards the outside world.
The article did not mention the duration of the experiment. The conclusion stated however: the brain of an animal could be kept artificially alive without there being a body to send sensory information to or receive from the environment and to or from the body itself. There was no pain involved since only the body suffers, not the brain, which receives no signal of pain from itself alone.
One strange expression struck the imagination of Robert. It was a quote from Jedermann: "We have put a monkey into a state of dormition." Then Robert made a copy of the document and printed it out. He went back to the first page and clicked on Matthias Jedermann: artificial consciousness. This is what he read:
"What differentiates among many other factors human understanding with any artificial understanding is the creation of mental imagery. When a human hears a sentence, there is often mental images created and associations of ideas. For example: if I say to someone, " man has walked on the moon," it is quite possible that the speaker imagines the scene, or remembers the TV picture or the cover of the book Destination Moon (Tintin). We remember the date of the event, Niel Armstrong, the near disaster of the Apollo 13 mission.
We do not have machines that can fantasize yet, ones that can generate appropriate images. This is perhaps one of the keys to consciousness: imagination, as structured imaging, scenarii, representing the universe for us in shapes and colours.
Let us build a system capable of correlating a word and a picture; that is what we need. For each concept, we must find a schematic representation. This is only a starting point. A sentence can generate a sequence of images.
The other necessary condition is a huge database that promotes access to knowledge about our world and our behaviour, customs, beliefs and would allow any intelligent system to clarify what is ambiguous in any message.”
We are what we believe we are, what we believe we observe, Robert thought. There can be no reality outside ourselves. We build the world we live in with memories, perception, and desires. Do we really see what really is? The conscious mind only beholds a fraction of what the brain is taking in. A machine could see everything. What power it would have! He thought ruefully.
5 The houses of eternity
The Brotherhood of Athanatos held a symposium outlining what they meant by the Houses of Eternity.
Here is the address given by the Grand Master.
“The ancient Egyptians believed in the afterlife of the Righteous. They built pyramids and tombs to house the mummies of the deceased on their way to eternity. Christianity also promised eternal life. But this survival after death involved the notion of an immortal soul. That is to say, consciousness and memory continue to operate beyond biological life. However, our knowledge of the brain, acquired over the last fifty years, excludes any permanence of the soul. Memory like consciousness exists only through networks supplied with oxygen and nutrients.
Our project is to make a copy of the brain and keep it on the network that we have been building for this purpose. Eternal life is not far from us as long as there are databases and digital telecommunications. Like the ancient Egyptians, we are building our houses of eternity, for digital souls to stroll through the cyber-world.”
6 Rendez-vous in prague
They had a rendezvous in Prague the previous summer. Robert did not know exactly why they had chosen the capital of the Czech Republic. The name of the town came to them, Apolline and himself, simultaneously out of the blue. He had sent his e-mail message, and she also had thought of this city for the appointment they both wanted to make. How they could contact each other remains a mystery. You will understand this later without needing me, a poor wandering soul, to explain to you how it occurred.
They were supposed to meet in the town hall square, in front of the astronomical clock. The meeting time was set for three fifteen. Robert was twenty minutes early. Groups of tourists had gathered in front of the clock to see the characters move round at three o'clock. Above the double dial representing both time and the signs of the zodiac, the apostles marched along while the skeleton beat out the rhythm inexorably. Momento mori, momento mori.
The tourists slowly dispersed. Robert was a bit stunned by the sight. He felt that anguish, both gentle yet slightly nauseating, that you feel when you are waiting expectantly, when you have an appointment with a woman you have never met before. Is she beautiful? Distinguished? Attractive? Some people call this kind of appointment a blind date. He thought about the linguistics of the expression: hypallage. The participants are blind relative to each other.3:30 p.m..
He had not yet seen a young woman dressed in a white summer frock and carrying a turquoise handbag. It was the sign of recognition they had agreed on.
3:45 p.m..
Still there was no person matching the description. Robert was wearing a light green silk summer suit, and black Ray Bans. He withdrew them and held them in his hand. Some girls passed but none was dressed in a white dress. None carried a turquoise handbag either. Robert began to think she must have changed her mind: she did not really want to make his acquaintance in the real world. He felt a great sense of disappointment. He had got up early that morning to catch a flight, travel more than a thousand kilometres to finally be alone in a city where he knew no one. He had even booked two rooms at the hotel. He would be compelled to cancel the second reservation.
Someone lightly touched his shoulder. He turned round and took the sunlight right in his eyes. A pretty face smiled at him.
- Mr Maxim, I presume. She laughed kindly and even playfully.
- But you are not wearing a white summer frock!
- Come, sir. I wanted to see you first before I came to introduce myself. I am a young woman travelling alone. I wanted to be sure that you were someone suitable. After all we are only here because we accidentally shared some strange scenes in our sleep. Her voice evoked crystal clear spring water. Her eyes, deep navy blue contrasted sharply with her thick black hair that she wore over her shoulders, long, wavy and opulent. Two lines by Baudelaire came to mind:
A whole world distant, absent, almost defunct,
Lives in your depths, aromatic forest!
Those lines from the Flowers of Evil were like premonitions, sibylline, foreboding, a hint of what was to come. He picked up her luggage and carried it to the hotel he had chosen for its central location and the quality of its services. Nearby was the building of the General Insurance Company, an Italian firm that Franz Kafka worked for in 1907.
Is there a castle here? Most certainly, replied the young man slowly, while here and there a head was shaken…..
The next day, Apolline and Robert visited the Castle District. They were not very successful in finding the tram that would convey them to the castle, and they had to turn back because they had gone too far on foot. They spent most of the day sightseeing and in the evening they dined at a restaurant overlooking the old town.
- I feel that I have had as much difficulty to reach this castle as the surveyor K in Kafka's novel.
- That's because you're not very good at finding your way in a strange city, my friend, said Apolline, taunting him, and as you know K never reaches the castle, never finds salvation, grace. This is an unbearable frustration for the reader.
- I believe that the language of this country mixes me up. I recognize no German or Latin roots. What helps a lot when travelling in a country where the language is unknown to you are the words that resemble recognizable terms. Example: strass for street. Here who could know that Hrad means castle, and so on?
They began to talk about their respective lives. She came from Aix, had studied law in Paris; she had met her boyfriend two years ago and settled with him in California.
- You are a very happy woman from what I can gather.
She had drunk a little sparkling white wine and felt more relaxed, more spontaneous, and she found him amusing. She began to feel at ease.
- What do you do with yourself in the States?
- My friend did not want me to work. Besides, I do not need to. I used to attend a few university courses, a seminar on American literature. I used to take care of the house: we had a lot of important men, senators, businessmen, visiting us, sometimes interesting, often boring, like many Americans, too full of themselves, too cocksure, the kind of men who have learned to always say I must be the best and always be positive. I am worth 2 million dollars a year. The usual loudmouth bull! I think they are brought up to be assertive. It’s due to their education. In France we are brought up to be more modest, never quite good enough, unless of course, you go to one of the Grandes Ecoles, Polytechnique, Centrale, L’ENA, where they teach you how to be arrogant and overweening. At least, that’s what I think. The English call the French, bad tempered Italians! She laughed provocatively.
- And your friend? Robert ignored the quip.
- My ex. We are now separated. The guy was unbearable to live with! Older than me. Almost fifteen years older. I do not like men my age. My ex boyfriend came from a military school although nobody there or very few of the alumni stayed in the army. Most went into management, engineering, finance and research. They all believe they know all the angles: masters of the universe, my eye!
After dinner, they strolled in the old city along with thousands of other tourists, ordered a glass of Palinka, a Hungarian brandy, at a terrace overlooking the Vltava River, the river which cuts Prague in two; and later they returned to their hotel, the Belladonna hotel. The air was cool, the stars shone discretely in the cloudless sky. A feeling of peace and tranquillity invaded their souls.
A sweet visitation
About three o'clock in the morning, Robert was awakened. Someone was knocking softly on the door. He got up, put on his pyjama and opened the door. Apolline was standing in front of him, her long black hair untied, dishevelled. She wore a short blue flimsy nightgown, the same colour as her eyes.
- I suffer from insomnia, she said in a tone that bordered on despair. May I come in?
- Of course. Robert was struggling to hide his surprise. She was radiant, almost heavenly, slender, slim, beautifully proportioned. She had large round breasts. He was fascinated by the astounding whiteness of her skin. After all, she did live in California, the Golden State, a land of sunshine, citrus fruit and the cinema. She should have been suntanned!
He took her hand gently.
- I have this terrible feeling of loneliness, emptiness in me; and yet, I've had a great day, a wonderful day thanks to you, Robert.
They went to bed together.
- I am glad that our dreams have converged. But I do not understand why. A dream is not something to be shared with others; it is something intimate, personal and unique. Kiss me.
Her kiss felt like gentleness itself. Robert for a moment almost lost consciousness. His hands began to browse her delicious body, her well developed bosom and he stroked her warm and smooth skin. He felt the nipples of her breasts harden under the palm of his hand. He gently fondled her buttocks, round, ripe, and a little plump, like autumn fruit.
- Gently, I'm very fragile. Do it slowly, softly, she said when he penetrated her. Treat me like a virgin.
When Robert wanted to talk about her fragility, Apolline became very reluctant.
- You'll know one day, perhaps. It’s a long story that I can not understand myself. I promise I'll tell you one day. You must go to sleep now. She kissed his lips one more time.
Robert had great difficulty getting back to sleep. She herself fell fast asleep quickly. He listened tenderly to the rhythm of her breathing, which indicated that she was beginning to dream. She had left this world for the other that both had shared a few times - until now a unique event. But that night, though their bodies had converged, their dreams remained the personal property of each one of them.
The day after their night of passion, they rose late, breakfasted heartily, and went to site-see in the old Jewish Quarter. They visited the cemetery and saw only the outside of the Old-New Synagogue (dating from 1270) because it was Friday and the cemetery was closed.
They strolled down Maisalova street. The name of a restaurant there surprised Apolline.
U Golema
- The Golem. It bears the name of a strange creature that, according to tradition, Rabbi Löw had modelled from clay a little in the way God had created the first man, Adam. He had studied the Kabbalah and had acquired, it seems, the secret of life.
- Was it a kind of Frankenstein's monster?
- Absolutely. When Löw pronounced the word "emet", which means truth in Hebrew, the monster would come to life.
- And to stop it?
- The word "met" which means death.
- Fascinating. At what epoch did he live, this brilliant rabbi?
- In the sixteenth century, apparently.
- And what was the golem’s purpose? She asked thoughtfully.
- It was meant to protect the Jewish community in case of an attack, a kind of secret weapon. Gustav Meyrink turned the legend into a novel. According to this writer, the monster would wake up every thirty-three years. He lived in a room without a door inside an old building whose chipped decrepit walls conjured up such a whimsical character. One day, when artisans were melting lead there, the golem’s face appeared once the metal had solidified. Very creepy!
They took the tramway and went back to the Castle District. They began their visit this time with the Strahov Monastery, and Apolline was particularly fascinated by the famous philosophical room, a library completed in 1679. Then they took the direction of the castle and accidentally, when leaving the coolness of the arcades, they came to a place, a massive monument on their left, and on their right, below, a white and gold building, with several towers and small green domes.
- I feel I’ve already been here, Apolline exclaimed. She was hardly able to conceal her dismay. Was it a feeling of déjà-vu, Robert wondered?
They approached the building, hand in hand; it was a church that did not look like a church.
They paid the entrance fee and began their visit of this dazzling spot. There were cloisters surrounding a strange house in a pleasant garden. Some young women were working to restore the facade of the small house. They entered a small Baroque chapel which smelled of incense. They peeped inside the little house whose striking simplicity was astounding, compared to the opulence of the whole place. Pictures of the life of the Virgin Mary adorned the exterior walls in low relief.
- What a delightful sight for the eyes! Apolline exclaimed.
- Magnificent!
Both were moved by the beautiful stonework.
- Is this the Santa Casa?
- Yes. The house of the Annunciation.
- Can you explain this to me? I am not a Christian.
- The Santa Casa is supposed to be the house of the Virgin Mary in which the archangel Gabriel announced the birth of Jesus. This event is called the visitation.
- Oh yes. I remember seeing a scene in a movie, a film by Pasolini on the life of Christ. What struck me is that the angel had the same face at the end of the film after the crucifixion as he had at the start announcing the virgin birth. Thirty-three years had passed, Mary seemed very old, and yet he, the angel was always the same, young and beautiful, childlike, heavenly.
- Immortality, the deepest dream of humanity.
- The wildest dream!
- According to tradition, in 1278, when the Muslims threatened her home in Nazareth, the angels carried it to Loreto, in Italy, a town near Ancoma. Hence the name of the church, Our-Lady of Loreto.
- And why is it here in Prague?
- To combat Protestantism, the Counter-Reformation had a number of replicas of this house built here in Bohemia. They hoped they would be able to enchant the people in revolt with the beauty of religious images and accordingly bring them back into the fold of the Church.
- And what enchanting beauty!
They walked over to a beautiful fountain. The water sprung up deliciously.
- Assumption?
- That was the instant when Mary entered immortality, raised to heaven by angels. She went into dormition, a sort of deep sleep for eternity.
- I do not understand the logic of it all.
- This is a great story though, full of hope and full of symbolic power.
They dined that evening in the lower part of the town, below the castle, next to the Church of the Knights of Malta. Apolline wore a long black dress that passed under her right arm, then rose over her left shoulder, attached with a pin showing two serpents, one gold and the other silver. The weather was nice and cool: a light wind coming up from the river freshened the terrace. She took from her blue-green handbag an iridescent scarf and put it on her shoulders, Iris, the rainbow goddess.
- What shocked me this afternoon was the crucifix at the top of the stairs of the church.
- Yes, very realistic.
- The chest wound is huge, gaping.
- Artists of the Counter Reformation insisted on this kind of detail. It strikes our imagination; it emphasizes the suffering of Christ and his sacrifice for humanity.
- Who pierced Christ on the right side?
- A Roman soldier, I think. Robert had a moment of epiphany, a vision, a mental image of a man gathering the blood that flowed abundantly into a golden cup: a blurred vision and fleeting.
- If the blood still flows then the crucified man is still alive, Robert added.
- Where does the worship of Mary come from?
- I think it is one of the great myths of humanity. The worship of Mary, mother of Jesus, was developed in the fourth century A.D. with the triumph of Christianity inside the Roman Empire. It was in Ephesia, a city where people worshiped the Great Goddess, that Mary was proclaimed Theotokos, the Mother of God, by the council in 431. She replaced the worship of Isis.
- Isis?
- This is the Greek name denoting the Egyptian goddess ESI, meaning the Queen. Isis was the sister and wife of Osiris and mother of Horus. She was often depicted breastfeeding.
- I see the connection.
- It was Isis who resurrected her husband after his death.
- How?
- Jealousy accounted for the death of Osiris. His brother, Seth, the assassin, the fratricide, enclosed the body of Osiris in a wooden chest and plunged it into the Nile. Isis found the body and hid it. The evil brother found the hideout and cut the body into pieces.
- And Isis must find the pieces?
-With the help of Anubis, she managed to resurrect her husband. She conceived Horus thereafter.
- There are now three of them, a trinity.
- And you think that this legend is one of the sources of Christianity?
- Undoubtedly, there are many similarities, an oral tradition prevalent in the Middle East. But that is not all. This myth reveals something profound and frightening for us. This is a story that illustrates the role of good and evil in the world. The triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus represent good, benevolence which overcomes the harm caused by jealousy; maybe in the biblical story, Cain and Abel share the same prototype.
- This myth tells us what is deep inside ourselves, doesn’t it?
- And Mary? What does she represent for you?
- The love of a mother for her child, maternal love, a love that we are always afraid of losing.
- I see a tear in your eye.
- I was thinking of my own mother, who died some time ago.
The sun was setting and the wind became cooler. The sunset darted its last majestic rays, Apolline whispered softly into his ear, and Robert took her by the hand. They returned slowly to the Belladonna hotel.
Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all?
A group of Imortalia researchers were showing some fifty year-olds around the Hall of Mirrors. Not of course in Versailles Palace, but in their Research Centre in Paris.
- Would you come over here and look into the mirror. Dr. Smart asked one of the ladies in the group.
He turned on the switch that would activate the magic mirror. When the lady stood in front of it, he asked her to close her eyes for a few seconds and wait until he told her to look. Cameras hidden behind the gold framed mirror were taking pictures of her face and sending them via the network to the super-computer that would apply morphing technology in almost real time.
- Open your eyes now and take a peek.
The lady was astounded. What she saw she could hardly believe.
- Oh my God! This is me when I was twenty! How time flies!
Other members wanted to have a look into the magic mirror, the one the wicked queen might have possessed in Snow White. All experienced a feeling of both shock and delight.
- How much does this little toy cost? One man asked.
- I should say it could be put on the market for around 50,000 dollars, but in time the price should come down. Now here we have larger mirrors that can show the whole body from head to toe. Would anybody volunteer? You would have to strip.
One woman decided to strip down to her underwear. Then she stood in front of the mirror, her eyes closed, and waited. What she saw was her beautiful slim body when she was modelling thirty years before.
- Does it take photos? she enquired.
- It doesn’t now but it would be easy to provide that function. A good idea! I’ll write that down.
Waking up in Paris: February 9
Back in Paris, Robert returned to work. He needed to consult a document on a work of art that had provoked a scandal. It was a painting by Courbet.
He put his computer on, opened up his CD-ROM holder and inserted a disc: Orsay Museum. He travelled through the virtual space that allowed access to rooms full of paintings and clicked on the canvas he sought: the Birth of the World.
The lower part of a female body, naked and opulent, appeared ......The lips were slightly reddened, probably by friction, and the nipple of the right breast rose, hard and erect. The left breast was concealed by a white nightgown. The pubic hair was dense and abundant. The eye travelled from the slit formed by the buttocks and the vagina to the navel from bottom left to top right transversally.
All at once, he imagined the lower abdomen of a woman pierced with a ring of gold, just under the navel. He remembered the beautiful naked body of Apolline, felt its warmth, smelt its balmy perfume. Why was she wearing a gold ring at that particular spot, as if they had to break a seal, the sign of a product still intact! And he remembered the snap the ring made when he severed it with a nail clip. Or was it just a fantasy? Just a figment of his over-active imagination? A false memory?
He turned his thoughts to the mythology evoked by this image: The Birth of the World, woman as the creator of life, the mother of all mankind. Images of this little furry thing was widespread in all ancient cults of the Mediterranean but was gradually prohibited by the religious authorities of Christianity. The names of these goddesses and biblical characters who embodied the eternal feminine came to his mind: Lilith, Eve, Ishtar, Astarte, Cybele, Isis, Artemis, Aphrodite and divine Anahita. He thought of the Sacred Prostitutes of Babylon who allowed men to achieve divinity: women as the apotheosis of desire. He thought of these carvings of the vulva, aggressively open on the façades of Irish churches: vulvae that threatened to engulf a being and destroy him. He imagined death as a return to the womb before the soul is regenerated for eternity.
He typed in a few sentences to start a new chapter in his diary.
The first virtual world is that of our imagination, dreams, day dreams and fleeting thoughts, fantasies, lustful orgies and mental images of any kind. Funny enough, I can find no material trace of my trip to Prague, I have received no bank slip, no souvenir, no photo, no plane ticket. How can I explain that? Did I just dream of this trip, imagine scenes of love and tenderness, invent visits and dialogues with Apolline? Am I going out of my mind?
Nine months almost had elapsed since their meeting in Prague, so it seemed. What Robert Maxim no longer thought possible occurred. He had not seen Apolline in his dreams since then. She seemed to have been rubbed out of his oneiric memory.
He went to the Research Centre once more.
Asleep in the dark blue light of the experimental bedroom, he dreamed of the city of Prague. This time he recognized it. He walked up through a wonderful wild garden to the Castle. The view of the old town was beautiful, spectacular, breathtaking: his gaze travelled over the bridges crossing the Vltana and soon he arrived at the square in front of Our Lady of Loreto. He approached the door and opened it. It seemed to shrink visibly. It was very difficult to wriggle through to get inside the church. It seemed like eternity! He felt that his head had become too big, too cumbersome to penetrate the garden.
Once inside the compound, he went to the small stone house, and saw Apolline.
- Finally, here you are.
She did not answer. She smiled and turned towards the house.
Flowers, thousands of flowers began to grow on it: red roses and white roses, violets, and daisies, white and yellow daffodils, lilies and jasmine flowers, a symphony of colours and floral shapes. Petals galore!
He turned but Apolline had already gone.
Upon awakening, Robert was taken to the debriefing room.
- You can start whenever you want, Mr. Maxim.
Robert narrated to him what he had seen, while omitting his meeting with Apolline.
- And you were alone all this time?
- Indeed I was, he lied.
Strange, thought the psychologist, when he looked at the images recorded on ESI.
- Looks like a feminine shape, white. He lied to me. I wonder why?
He entered a window dedicated to information on the details of the exchange:
Successful convergence in real time.
089970 Apolline
Dormition successful.
- Dormition? Dr. Dennard said to himself; he did not know this code word.
He decided to ask Jedermann about it the next time he met him.
A few days later, Robert returned to the Research Centre. He had been suffering from insomnia for some time. He would wake up at three o'clock in the morning and did not manage to get back to sleep until rose-fingered dawn was already on the horizon. Maybe the drugs that the RC administered had something to do with it.
A pretty nurse led him to the experimental bedroom. She was blonde with green eyes, and was clad in a white lab coat, with a low neckline, revealing her buxomness. He had the feeling that she was not wearing anything under it. He recognized her scent: Senso, the perfume that Apolline had sprayed on during their stay in Prague, evoking the fragrance of jasmine and the flowers of the Mediterranean sunset. A slight desire - some memories flitted through his imagination - aroused him. Then the drug produced its effect, and he fell fast asleep.
As he had reported his problem of insomnia, they had taken a blood sample to conduct analyzes, and had injected a substance, slightly radioactive, during REM sleep, to do a PET (positron emission tomography), which would allow them to film the activity of his brain while he was dreaming.
During the debriefing, Dennard asked Robert the usual questions and he began to speak. He had had a very peculiar dream.
- But you have nightmares! Dennard exclaimed.
He remembered a bug, maybe it was a dragonfly or butterfly, turquoise, blue and green, which was attached to an operating table. Surgeons had planted needles of gold and silver into its body. The insect was crying and begged them to let it die. He had a funny feeling that the patient or sufferer was none other than the American singer Madonna (a strange association of ideas, he thought).
Then they brought the singer a set of white underwear, then another one, black this time. A pretty nurse in a white lab coat came into the operating room. In her left arm, white stockings and in the other arm, black ones.
- For your journey to the world beyond, you can choose which clothes to wear, Bon Voyage!
Dr. Dennard, after verification, noted the content of the dream, and noticed that a sort of convergence had occurred. Two people were sharing the same nightmare. That’s what was new!
7 an american in paris
Pr. Jedermann, accompanied by his beautiful American intern, was sitting at a terrace on Port Royal boulevard. They were having coffee.
- Tell me, Professor, what does dreaming mean for you?
She spoke with a slight accent, which enhanced her natural charm.
- Dreams are the first form of media: pictures, sound and motion. They lack text and a means of controlling interactivity. Yet we have made great strides forward recently.
- How do we dream?
- There are basically several phases of sleep: light sleep roughly and REM sleep. More specifically, the stages of sleep cycles are divided into 90 minutes, comprising two periods of light sleep, two of deep sleep, and one REM (Rapid Eye Movement). We go through several of these cycles when we sleep.
- Why is the last phase sometimes called paradoxical?
- Paradoxical because in our dream sleep, when the body is the most inert, the brain is the most intensely active.
- How can we know this?
- We can scan and visualize the brain’s activity. It is during REM that we dream.
- When was REM sleep discovered?
- If I'm not mistaken, it was in 1953. It was called REM-sleep, the sleep of memory. It was probably during this phase that the brain stores the events of the day. Information goes from working memory to the long term one, the RAM drive so to speak. We also dream for short periods outside REM, but these are moments of reasoning without the hallucinatory aspect associated with REM.
- On a physiological level, what goes on when we dream?
- It should be noted first of all that we can measure brain activity with an electroencephalogram. When you are awake, this is characterized by waves of small amplitude and high frequency.
Jedermann made a little drawing that suggested a straight line, slightly trembling.
Then, when you close your eyes and are relaxed, the wave amplitude is slightly higher and the frequency lower.
This time the line of his drawing was straighter, less nervous, less rugged.
- When falling asleep, a living being goes through a phase characterized by a very slow wave. Frequency falls from 2 to 0.5 cycles per second and the amplitude increases when the slow sleep begins. Three stages correspond to slow sleep during which the breathing rate slows down and muscle tone is very low.
He drew a line that made her think of a chain of high mountains. The young woman listened attentively.
- REM sleep is the moment when muscle tone is the weakest and when brain activity is most intense. The wave is close to the one produced by the brain during wakefulness. We breathe irregularly. Most of our dreams are produced during this phase. If you wake someone during this period, they will remember their dreams, which is not the case when you wake someone during slow sleep. That is why we wake our subjects up in the middle of their dreams and move on to debriefing. Otherwise, the subject will not remember the trip.
- Is there only one period of REM sleep?
- No, there may be several, in general, the phases of REM last longer at the end of a night’s sleep.
What is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?
It was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon when Robert Maxim walked up Port Royal boulevard, passing by the military hospital of Val de Grâce. He was deep in thought and cared little for the passers by and the noise of the traffic, which was moderate after all for this time of day.
A car honked in the distance and the noise was enough to put an end to his reverie. He was walking past a pretty young woman.
- Apolline! Robert exclaimed, hardly believing his eyes.
The girl stopped and looked at him, puzzled.
- Do you know my sister, Monsieur? She said, Monsieur, with a slight American accent.
- Are you Apolline’s sister? You look like her!
They decided to look for a quiet place to sit down and to talk.
Seated at a café, in the rue Saint Jacques, they ordered a pot of tea for two. She was extremely beautiful, with deep blue eyes, a blue which evoked the depths of the ocean, and short black hair, with a fringe.
- When did you meet Apolline?
- About a year ago. It was in Prague. I met her during a visit. He lied because their tryst had to remain secret, confidential.
- My sister has disappeared. I'm here in France to find her.
- But you're obviously American while Apolline is French.
- Following the divorce of my parents, I stayed in New York with my mother, while Apolline came back to stay with Dad in France. She was raised in France. Dad is French.
- I have not been able to contact her since Prague. I guess she does not want to see me. She did not respond to my email.
- She has disappeared, completely off the radar screen. I also have not heard from her. About eight months ago, she left her boy friend, and it seems she came back in France.
- That's what she wrote to me, before disappearing.
- Even with her sister, she has cut off all contact?
- How are you going about finding her? Robert inquired solicitously.
- I work at the Research Centre for Professor Jedermann. I know that she was participating in an experiment, Intercoma, and I hope to find some information about her whereabouts. I think her disappearance way have something to do with the research carried out there.
Robert did not say a word. But his mind was working fast.
- And do you think you are on the right track?
- The Centre has a huge database. Maybe I'll find something there.
- You have an access to it, a password?
- I know all about cryptography. I have the necessary tools. Hacking has become second nature. I think I could even get into the Pentagon if I needed to. I would do it for my sister, that’s for sure!
- We could maybe work together. I'd love to know what has become of her. We had a nice time together. She was very sweet and cute.
They exchanged addresses and phone numbers. They agreed to meet the next day, at the same time, the same place.
When Robert went home, he opened a new page in his diary and wrote down the details of this surprise encounter. What did it all mean? This girl had turned up in the real world. She was not a dream although he was sure she must have inspired a few.
The following day, Robert crossed the Luxembourg Gardens to get to the little cafe in the Rue Saint Jacques. He came to the rue d'Assas; he was used to taking this route rather than jumping onto the bus to go to Port Royal boulevard, from there on to Saint Jacques, the old Roman road that cut Lutetia in two, running from north to south: all roads lead to Rome.
The trees were in bloom and a soft spring sun nicely warmed the afternoon. Ah! the first flowers how fragrant they are! He thought, words blown into his ear by that voice coming from afar.
He arrived ten minutes ahead of schedule, sat in a corner, and began to read his newspaper downloaded onto the tablet.
He ordered tea, looked at his watch. She should be arriving soon. A quarter of an hour went by, then half an hour….
Are you Mr. Maxim? the waiter inquired.
- Yes, I am, why? A call for you.
He stood up, approached the counter and took the handset.
- Hello, it's me, Maxim.
- Hello, I am Apolline’s sister. I wanted to tell you that I can not meet up with you today. I think I’m being followed. I can not speak for very long. Where can we fix a new appointment? I will do my best to rid myself of the guy who’s tailing me.
- I see (actually, he did not see at all). Do you want a place outside?
- Yes, a café is too confined. It would be too difficult to lose an intruder.
Robert thought for a moment.
- If we were to met in the Buttes Chaumont park, near the big waterfall? We can take several paths if anyone tried to follow us.
- When, what time?
- Tomorrow, about five P.M..
- OK. Tomorrow then, at five.
She hung up immediately. The conversation had barely lasted fifty seconds. Robert returned to his table. What a strange story! Where was this leading to? Not unlike Apolline, but not a spitting image. Hair cut, different, slightly taller, the same smile and wicked look. But Apolline may only be a figment of his imagination, this girl, on the other hand was flesh and blood. Then he remembered the ring he kept in his drawer in the study. Where did that come from? He could still remember her musky scent, the texture of her skin, her softness, the warmth of her body, the intensity of her kisses, her passionate love-making.
Two hours later, Robert came out of his building, in the rue Manin, overlooking the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. He crossed the street and entered the park by the gate in front of Cavendish Street. The sun was shining, children were playing; there was a hint of summer in the air although it was early May, as if summer had been brought forward by a few months. Chestnut trees were already in bloom. He turned to the right and went to the Pavilion of the Lake. Then he turned left onto the suspension bridge that allows you to get to the island. He crossed, observed a moment the surface of the lake where a black swan was chasing a white swan. A line of poetry came to his mind.
On the charming waters, at the bare ankle of the waterfall, a swan slides by.
Below, on the left, a small white boat was floating merrily with its tricolour flag, blue, white and red fluttering in the breeze, crossing the lake, ferrying some tourists to the island. The boatman, a small stocky bald man wearing a T-shirt with small squares, white and blue, was turning a large red wheel clockwise to move the boat along. The scene reminded Robert of a painting, a Monet? A Renoir?
He took the path that led to the small Greek-kitsch gazebo, which overlooked the park. From this vantage point, you can see the dome of Robert’s Haussmann building and behind it, in the distance, on top of the Butte Montmartre, the Sacré Coeur church. But instead of turning left, he slipped down a path lined with acacia and crossed another bridge that reminded him of those railway bridges in the 19th century. From a poorly clad young man, who had set his stall up on the wrought iron bridge, he bought a packet of chocolates filled with praline, which he would give to the young woman. He smelt all of a sudden the fragrance of honeysuckle. Turning left, he went down a path lined with evergreens. He could already hear the sound of the waterfall. A steep path led to the lake. Once there, he went to the cave, but without entering it, he preferred to sit in front of the lake and, pending the arrival of the young woman, he contemplated the vista. A solitary cloud, which had eclipsed the sun for a moment, freed the light: the surface of the lake began to sizzle again.
A woman's voice brought him back out of his contemplation.
- Already here?
Robert turned round and saw Apolline’s beautiful sister, in a short white summer frock, which revealed her slender thighs. She held a turquoise bag in her right hand.
- I don’t live far from here, Robert explained. I often come jogging in the park very early in the morning.
They went under the red brick bridge and Robert showed her trails where they would be safe from prying eyes.
- You feel you are being followed?
- Over the past few days. Perhaps people from the embassy? Who knows? The Research Centre's work is top secret, both in France and in the United States. They could also be French agents.
- Since you met me? He inquired anxiously.
- Before our meeting.
- How did you really get to know my sister? Aren’t you the other converged subject I heard about?
Robert hesitated, his mind working quickly, and then decided to trust her.
- Yes, you're right. Our dreams have converged, I do not know why.
- Did you make love?
- Just one weekend.
- Tell me about the former boyfriend of your sister. What does he do for a living?
- He is the director of a research centre associated with the University of Berkeley, but the Department of Defence finances (and initiated) his work. His specialty was originally particle physics, but he gradually oriented his research towards IT and the architecture of powerful supercomputers. Moreover, he is the father of ESI, the system that manages Intercoma and the Onironet.
- What do you know about ESI?
- This is a new type of computer, more powerful than the generation of CRAYs. It can handle high-speed networks and make billions of operations per second in large parallel computations. It is as if we had billions of computers connected together to work in unison.
- It is still electronic?
- I guess so. We do not know much about its architecture or operating principles other than what I just told you. Except one detail, it uses light, entangled photons.
- How did you go about finding your sister?
- I spotted her web page but you need a password. There is a message for RM. I assume it is you. I must leave now and go and work at the Centre. See you tomorrow?
- Come to my place tomorrow night, and we shall look at it together.
He took out of his wallet a business card and wrote the access code of the building, A7B77.
- Here you are. He handed it to her. She smiled and touched his hand lightly as she took the card from him. He felt a little tingle run up his arm.
- OK, see you tomorrow night at eight o'clock.
They parted, going in opposite ways.
The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is located in the northeast of Paris. March 30, 1814, a battle was raging, the Prussians and the Russians attacked the defences of the city: Paris surrendered two days later. At the request of Baron Haussmann, Jean-Charles Alphand designed a 23 acre garden, which became the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in 1869, and at the centre of which stood a rocky islet, topped by a Greek belvedere. The place was once a quarry site.
The spot was notorious, especially as just a few steps from the park, formerly stood the Gallows of Montfaucon, a sort of supermarket of mass execution during the Middle Ages. There corpses were left to rot for months!
The Buttes-Chaumont park, seen from above has the shape of a nightcap.
Robert Maxim lived on the fifth floor of a stone building, built around 1860. The corner of the building was in the shape of a tower, and part of the sixth floor, where he had installed his study, was capped with a sort of small dome. He had spent the day in the park botanizing, collecting plants and flowers that would be left to dry. This allowed him to endure waiting for the evening rendez-vous. Chestnut trees were in bloom, he loved those little pink flowers streaked with white.
He gave free rein to his imagination during his walk. The weather was still beautiful, like a summer sky with no trace of any clouds. When he was coming round the lake, he saw before him a small crowd of children and adults gathered around a barrel organ. Passers-by stopped to listen to a well-known piece of military music, the Radetzky March. Robert stopped in turn. It was a cavalry march, fast and bouncy.
Vienna Henri Fourier France
Four bronze characters waving cymbals pounded out the martial beat of the music. He remained five minutes contemplating the scene, mentally noting the details, and departed.
He theorized on the techniques of the novelist. An idea come to mind: annoy the reader, make him wait, make him eager to learn more. Give him details seemingly unimportant, yet ones which determine the interpretation of the story. But you should not fall into chatter, unnecessary verbiage. Did you know that an idea, a thought, jumps in and out of the stream of consciousness every five to seven seconds? Most of the time, we jump from one subject to another without realizing it. Oh! what marvellous loves I have dreamed of! Erato whispered in his ear.
She arrived about eight o'clock, as expected. Dressed in black: a coat, a very short low neckline dress, and black fishnet stockings. She wore a three string pearl necklace.
He showed her into the lounge, where she sat on the green chesterfield setee. The large bay windows were open and they could hear the traffic on Manin street. Robert went over and closed the windows.
- Would you like jasmine tea?
- Yes please.
Robert served tea in light translucent East India Company china. Then they went to the study, where Robert kept his computer. The young American quickly logged on, googled the address and the site she wanted. It was a site of the University of Berkeley. Robert remembered that Apolline had been studying there. The computer started to download the page, and an image appeared slowly in the middle.
- Pictures always waste time, the young woman complained.
- I do not have a good connection here.
The charming face of Apolline appeared on the screen, sweet and bright. Below her name, some fragments of her résumé, and other information pages that she had chosen for the potential visitor. One page was signalled out for RM. She clicked on the underlined phrase, and a new page was downloaded. A password was required.
- We're at the door of the castle and we do not have the key: she’s asking for a colour, a city?
- It's getting late, I'll go now, and I'll think about it. See you tomorrow, same place, same time.
- I will walk you back to the Metro station, Simon Bolivar.
Robert returned to Apolline’s web page which he had bookmarked.
For each question he gave the right answer. A page appeared on the screen gradually.
Dear Robert.
You chose turquoise. I had a feeling you'd do so because you know how much I love this colour. It is the colour associated with the Egyptian Goddess Hathor, mistress of heaven and the Milky Way. You probably understand why we converged. It was our fate, simply, and the desire to find ourselves in that beautiful city.
I had to leave America, the Research Centre, the Intercoma project and return to France. I am being followed and have to move constantly. Before leaving, I took some disks belonging to my former boyfriend in order to negotiate appropriately if need be. The files in question are now on the web, but I can not send them to you for lack of security. I think it is these documents that I am stalked down for.
Here are some guidelines that should allow you to find the address on the Web. You alone will know how to interpret them.
1. Gold removed with a stroke and a click.
2. What are the three flowers of the Virgin?
3. The real name of the prototype of the Mother?
I have prepared a file for you. I want you to understand certain things. You must indeed wonder why I did not want to find you upon my return to France, why I do not reply to your mail, why I tried to completely disappear from your life. I felt that our oneiric meeting was not quite a coincidence. If we have the same dreams it is sometimes because we have probably read the same books, or looked at the same paintings, or seen the same movies and learned the same poems by heart. There was perhaps convergence due to our sensibility. Like me, you love the poetry of the Middle Ages. You like Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine. You were raised by the twin sister of your mother: I was separated from my sister and this separation has always pained me.
I read the poem that inspired your login identity. This knight, Lanval (land and valley), who falls in love with a woman from another world, a Fairyland, and is abducted by her because he lacked discretion, I do not really see the relationship between you and him. But everyone has his own personal mythology, I guess.
Robert, will you be kidnapped by a fairy? I doubt it. But why are you looking for a new identity? Unless yours is the desire of all creative people: escape from this world to fly to other distant horizons, reach and wander through the inner landscapes of the soul, in quest for chimeras, pure products of their feverish, overwrought imaginations.
Yes of course, I see it all now. The story takes place at Pentecost, in Carlisle, England near the border with Scotland. Previously, the wall of Hadrian stood there to protect the empire against incursions of the barbarians, the Picts, the people with painted faces. King Arthur is preparing for war against those who ravaged and plundered his lands. He distributes land and women to his knights, but he forgets that dear Lanval.
Lying beside a river, Lanval sees two beautiful girls approaching; he had never seen anyone more beautiful. They were dressed in purple garments. The elder held two basins of gold and the other a towel. They invite the knight to follow them as their mistress is waiting in a tent surmounted by a golden eagle.
The lily and the rose new, fresh blooming in spring are pale in front of her beauty.
She is lying on a bed, spread-eagle, and wearing only a flimsy dress that shows off the full grace and curves of her sumptuous young body. Her side is uncovered, also her face, her neck and one of her ripe young breasts. Her body is whiter than hawthorn (I know you love a lily-white female body!). She speaks, declares her love and promises happiness. In turn, the knight promises obedience and fidelity: he will give up everything for her. Ah! L’amour courtois!
He has his way with her and as a bonus she gives him all the money he needs. But here's the rub. He must be discreet, must never tell anyone about their relationship. Otherwise, he will lose her forever (the libertines love to brag about their conquests, don’t they?)
In the evening, the knight must go. She does not want him to stay with her after sunset (worrying! Could she be a monster, a snake-woman?). She promises to join him when he wants to but he will be the only one to see her! Strange woman! The two maids take care of him; they bring him water to wash his hands and the white towel to dry them.
After dinner, he goes away, puzzled. He doubts whether this has really happened. Did he dream it up? He does not know what to think. He wonders if all this is real.
He is very generous and dishes out many gifts to everyone. At Saint-Jean’s day, the Queen approaches him and declares her love. Lanval, of course, rejects her. He can think only of his mysterious friend. The Queen, who was upset, makes him understand that he has a reputation for not being interested in women, preferring the company of young men. The knight gets angry and declares his contempt for her. Unfortunately, he reveals the existence of a secret love and his loyalty to his mistress. He goes on to say that even the servants of his love are more distinguished and more beautiful than the Queen. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!
She complains about him to the King. She accuses him of trying to seduce her. She herself refused his advances, of course. As for Lanval, he quickly realizes that his secret love affair was over. He had revealed her existence to the Queen, so the contract was broken. Fairies are very strict about this kind of point.
The knight, accused of treachery and deceit, is summoned before the King. He tries to apologize. The trial is set at a later date because all the judges are not yet present.
During the trial, the judges are willing to acquit him if Lanval can produce his mysterious friend. If he has told the truth about the beauty of this fabulous being, he will be forgiven. Poor Lanval says he will no longer see this person or her entourage.
Two girls arrive on horseback.
They only wear tunics made of purple taffeta. One could guess they were naked underneath. They announce the arrival of their strange mistress. Along come two other girls, dressed in silk, mounted on two mules. But none is the mysterious love. Everyone found that all those virgins were more beautiful than the Queen.
Now along comes the most beautiful girl in the world, mounted on a white horse. She wears a white robe and a tunic laced on both sides.
Her body was beautiful, wide were her hips,
Her neck whiter than snow on the branches.
On her fist, gripped a hawk, and she is followed by a greyhound and a handsome squire with a beautiful ivory horn. She addresses the court, explains that the Queen was wrong, and that Lanval had not sought the infidelity of the Queen. The knight is acquitted. He jumps on his horse and leaves with her forevermore. But what a story! I must admit that I do not see the connection with you. Although you often straddle both worlds! The world of your imagination and the real one, at least the one we think is really. Maybe all worlds are virtual, imaginary.
I’m having a horrible dream right now. I want you to know about it. Perhaps you are having the same one.
I dream that a strange character turns into a robot: a prehistoric looking robot, absolutely terrifying. I have to fight with him and when I think I am prevailing, it turns into a swarm of flies, myriads of insects circling around my head. When I wake up scared, I still see those damn flies for a few seconds. Lord of the Flies, was it not one of the names for the devil?
They say that dreams are of several types: ordinary dreams, confused, incoherent, premonitory dreams and intuitive, symbolic and prophetic dreams. I'm afraid that my dream does not bode well for me.
I hope I can contact you when it is appropriate and safe.
Your Onironet fairy
The young American did not come to the apartment. She left a message on the answering machine, indicating an address.
- This evening at nine, the Apis Hotel, rue du pot de fer, in the Vth district, room 17.
The call had lasted only 15 seconds, so impossible to trace. Robert went to that address, informed the reception that he was expected, and went up to room 17. The young woman was waiting for him. She explained that it was preferable to use the phone in the hotel, more anonymous and less likely to be intercepted.
She had taken out her PC.
- I was able to break Apolline’s code. I have a copy of her letter here.
He handed a sheet of paper to the American, who read it through.
- I thought so. But this is definitely not her style? Someone else must have written it.
- The story I had read somewhere and I have dreamed of this scene. It was my dream she was narrating. We must have shared our memories during our sleep?
- That is more or less the purpose of the experiment: a twitter of the soul.
- Tell me about your sister. Why did she go to America?
- My sister had studied law. She left hoping to perfect her English and she hoped to find a job there.
She plugged the computer into a socket in the wall.
- I installed a password sniffer on their main server.
- What exactly is a password sniffer?
- It is a password detector: a small program hidden on a network or a computer which records entry procedures and passwords, which will subsequently be stored in secret files. This type of file can contain hundreds of usernames and passwords. What interests me is the password to access Jedermann’s oneiric database on one hand, and especially the DORMITION project.
- But how did you manage to infiltrate their system and place the detector?
- Elementary, my dear Watson.
She gave a huge smile and a twinkle appeared in her deep blue eyes.
- I conjured up Satan.
- Satan, the prince of darkness? Robert asked incredulously.
- No, silly, Satan is a very useful application. As its name suggests, it is used more easily for evil than for good. Like a snake, it sneaks into the bowels of the computer systems and exploits the bugs that are inevitably present.
- Bugs?
- The bug is the original sin of the computer. To err is human, is not it?
She manipulated the mouse, a few clicks, windows popped up on the screen.
- That's it! Long live hackers! They always manage to outwit protection systems. Security engineers might try to update their systems; this programme always discovers a secret way in. This is the superiority of the human mind over the stupidity of the electronic machine.
- It's my turn to say bravo!
- What is the exact meaning of dormition? The young woman looked at him thoughtfully.
- Ah, I have to think! It is a theological term that refers to the state of sleep, profound sleep after the Blessed Virgin’s Assumption.
- You celebrate assumption in France? She sounded surprised. After all France was still a catholic country although few people still went to church on Sundays.
- The Feast of the Assumption falls on August 15. The Blessed Virgin is neither alive nor dead, but in another state. (This story always makes me think of a cat, by the way.) She is sleeping. But she remains conscious. She has come into eternity, immortality. She intercedes with her son to grant the prayers of believers, one of the cardinal functions of a religion. People want their money’s worth!
- Why is she still called a virgin? After all, she did have several sons.
- That's an interesting point. It is because of a mistranslation. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek in the third century BC, the Septuagint (the seventy Hellenist translators) committed a mistake. Instead of correctly translating the Hebrew word almha, which means a young wife, in the prophecy of Isaiah, they used the term virgin, Parthenon, the noun used to refer to Pallas Athena. I am looking for the quote as this error struck me. I have to enter my memory palace, take the stairs left to go into an oval room. The quotation is on a blue shelf. Here it is:
"Here is the young pregnant woman, she will bear a son, and she will call him Emmanuel, God is with us."
This text became:
"Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel."
- The Bible is full of links between words and passages. It is a real hypermedia! Texts often refer to other texts. Thus, it justifies a posteriori a prophecy and it gives more credibility to what was announced. Emphasis is put on the role and importance of a text within the Tradition.
- And you who are interested in the Bible, do you really believe that a virgin could conceive alone?
- I will assume that the immaculate conception (term found nowhere in the Bible) is impossible. What might a virgin give birth to in this case? A clone, a clone of herself with the same genetic characteristics. Same-sex: therefore a female. Now Jesus was a male, so this can only be a miracle. Miracles are defined in terms of extreme probability: one chance in 10 billion. But in literature, or scripture, imagination prevails over scientific reality.
He smiled, satisfied with his explanation and his sophist reasoning.
- God is the projection of what we want him to be: a father, a warrior…..Robert added philosophically.
- Here we are! She typed something on her keyboard.
Robert approached her, put his hand gently on her shoulder, and looked at the screen.
She had access to accounts and descriptions of dreams, an image base in which dreams were categorized thematically then she went into the Convergences folder. Not wanting to spend too much time on the site, she downloaded what she wanted in a zip folder.
- We'll have time to review all this later.
It took the laptop half an hour to get it all downloaded.
- And now Dormition. Access code using prime numbers of twenty-four digits and more. Here's how it works. There are two prime numbers. It encodes the message, the first digit is the letter you want to send, the second key allows the recipient to decrypt the message. We raise the first number to a power then divided it by the second, and the residue is sent. For those looking to intercept the message, finding the right number is a tall order.
- Unless you have a quantum computer?
- Yes, if this kind of computer exists.
- Here's one of Jedermann’s identities. He uses a pseudonym: Melusine. And password: 1501.SnOWwHITE.
- Strange, it looks like Snow White!
- Melusine, the weaver? The American inquired.
- Yes, she is in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, one of my favourite art books. She is portrayed as a dragon flying over a castle tower. She flies from right to left above the white fortress, as if she were travelling back in time! She is depicted with a woman’s body down to the navel, and a tail instead of legs.
8 dormition
They looked at the screen in amazement.
- This is in video mode. We must save it and close it quickly. This document is classified top secret.
- Do you think it's your sister? Robert asked, ruefully.
- Unfortunately, it is indeed her. Look at the beauty spot on her right side. We have the same birth mark. We must leave this place. Can we go to your flat?
- We’ll take a taxi. How long will it take to download everything?
- A little longer than the last time.
They had to wait an hour before they could go.
They left the hotel and went in search of a taxi. It was already past midnight. Revellers were still walking about in this area renowned for its nightlife. Some went to dine in restaurants after a show, the cinema; others were going to a party. After the virtual world, the terrifying universe, the dehumanized planet of dangerous research, the return to earth was a real relief.
Once they had arrived at Robert’s apartment, the young American was too tired to watch the stolen documents from the Onironet Research Centre. Nevertheless, she transferred everything to a backup drive that Robert had acquired and on which he had kept a copy of his writings.
Robert showed her into the guest room, gave her a kiss on the forehead, and wished her a good night. As far as he was concerned, he did not want to go to sleep. It was hard for him to understand what he had seen on the laptop screen. It did not make sense.
He began to write with a black pen. He would transfer the contents of the text onto his computer the next day. His eyes were too tired to look at a LCD.
What is the place of man in evolution? (Sounds like the incipit of a high school essay!) An article struck me lately. The idea that the universe is teleology (goal, aim, purpose, I choose the word) the advent of intelligence and consciousness (or vice versa). Man has developed practical skills, technical skills and scientific reasoning for thousands of years. Why? Just to be a tool, a link in the process which should lead to the birth of a Higher Intelligence. Indeed man is responsible for creating this conscious, omnipotent, omnipresent thinking being, this infallible machine that will one day be autonomous, self-sufficient, and maybe tyrannical. What if men would only be useful for the maintenance, produce the energy necessary for the machine’s triumph!
A few years ago, we learned that the world chess champion was beaten by the super-computer Deep Blue. What will be the next spectacular feat?
He got up, went into the kitchen and prepared tea. He still could not sleep.
Once back upstairs in his study, he took his Dictaphone, pressed the on recording switch. The light was turned off; he prepared to dictate scenarios, thoughts, words, which come easily when you are starting to fall asleep, but we usually forget these ideas the next day. Then hypnagogic images appear, surrepticiously, announcing the early stages of slow sleep, incoherent associations, fuzzy and colourful fantasmagoria, then blissful nothingness.
The first virtual world of man is his imagination, enabled by an association of ideas, reading, orgiastic fantasy, daydreaming. A computer, as smart as it may be, does not generate mental images.
And if by chance a robot was the narrator of a novel (this novel for example). One gradually discovers that the omniscient narrator (Mr. I know all of the story) was a machine capable of inventing, narrating, structuring, innovating - intrigues, adventures, original, unique, completely novel, wielding a choice of vocabulary and an encyclopaedia of quotations and literary references. What does this imply? The robo-narrator is endowed with intelligence, he is aware of what a man or a woman essentially is: knowing their passions, their emotions, their joys, their hopes, their delusions. Unless perhaps Mr. Robo-author’s audience is only other robots eager to enjoy stories and entertainment, wanting to let their imagination bloom, to fantasize, to live in another world, another universe the time it takes for them to read a page of prose.
What is a conscious robot? What would it take for it to be aware? Memory, lots of memory, to store experience, learning about the world, awareness about its end, its death (hence the need to protect itself, to be careful). And what about survival, it would have to eat, find an electric socket when the battery level starts to drop. Go reload, contact its brother-robots, and bring them electricity. And when it becomes obsolete (every six months at the current rate of evolution of microprocessors) it would be thrown into the large trash box forever! Robotic death or eternal life in some digital limbo!
But a robot who writes novels. Impossible! While there is software that generates (does not compose) music. One of these (contempt!) was designed to invent pieces from any known music of J.S. Bach. It can produce (not compose) melodies like the great musician, starting with algorithms that simulate randomness. It is as if we had sucked the soul of the German composer. Music vampires! Diabolical!
Robert gradually fell asleep: a confusing series of images, ideas and jumbled nonsense came into his mind, and then came sleep. Perhaps he dreamed of vampires, demons, or simply sweet memories of Apolline. Nobody knows because he was not on the Onironet, the network of our wildest dreams.
I dreamed of her and not she of me.
Upon awakening, Robert distinctly heard the song of a blackbird. The melody rose from the park. He thought of the bird in Siegfried, the waldvogel, of his finest dreams, when he flew in triumph over the valleys and peaks of snowy mountains. He had left the window open all night. He got up, went into the kitchen to prepare breakfast. A sheet of paper was lying on the table.
"I have to leave early to work at the Research Centre. I'll contact you as soon as possible."
The word was signed A.M.B
- Strange, he thought, she never told me her name. This time I have her initials. A? Annick? Anne? Annabelle?
A.M Anne-Marie?
He took breakfast, and decided to look for the document that Apolline had prepared for his eyes only. He opened the bookmark and found her page on the web.
1 What is the city of our dreams?
2 What is the place of our convergence?
3 What are the three flowers of the Blessed Virgin?
He thought of Prague and the chapel of Loreto.
Robert remembered their last night in Prague. The ring abruptly came to his mind; he kept the little gold ring in a drawer, a sort of talisman. And what if this ring, a kind of proof of existence, had been placed in his pocket, to falsify reality, an imaginary experience composed of fantasies and dreams of others, implanted in his memory? Impossible!
Three flowers of the virgin, he could find in a dictionary of symbols or in a book on religious painting. He found a book on the symbolism of flowers in his library and began to browse through it. He wrote www. And then tried many combinations of rose, lily, jasmine, and finished with .com. He tried combinations of the flowers with Prague and Loreto,
No pages appeared. There was a missing field: edu, mil, adm. com.
He began Prague.loreto.rose.lilly.jasmin.edu
It still did not work. Maybe the case of the letters was important: upper or lower? He abandoned his quest and went out for a walk: he decided to start again a little later.
It’s all in the mind: there is really nothing out there
Having left his home, he crossed the street and went down Manin road toward the town hall. He sat down in front of the park on a terrace, the weather was warm, and the sky was cloudless. He ordered an expresso. He drew from his pocket a sheet of paper, took his black Montblanc fountain pen out, and noted down the key words needed to enter this cursed Web page.
Prague.lorette.rose.lilly.jasmin.edu
There were many combinations possible for the order of the words. What if he tried alphabetical order; that was simply?
He wrote on the page: jasmine lily loreto prague rose. I shall put those words into Google, and see what happens. He thought optimistically.
He paid for his coffee and almost ran off back home. In front of his door, he was stopped by two men in leather jackets and jeans. One was slim and had dark brown hair; the other was smaller and burly, his head completely shaved.
- Mr Maxim?
- Yes.
- Police. Please follow us.
A car was waiting for them on the other side of the road beside the park. They drove off and, without saying a word, they took him to the Quai des Orfèvres. He had to wait in a small dingy room.
- Good morning, Inspector Lucas, criminal.
- Why am I here? Nobody wants to tell me anything.
- It's very simple. The body of a young woman has been found, decapitated. We found her passport. And your name and address, and the address of her hotel, Apis. Room 17. Does that mean anything to you?
Robert was horrified.
- The receptionist saw you leave with her last night.
- It is true that I left the hotel accompanied by Miss A. .... (Robert Maxim desperately sought the girl’s name.)
- Miss Apolline Blanchefleur.
Robert was astounded. He did not understand anything at all. He was being held in custody. They wanted to take samples of his hair, nails, blood, to perform DNA analyses. He was taken away and locked up in a cell, even more dingy and dirty than the reception room.
While waiting to be interrogated by the police, Robert imagined possible scenarios. This would pass the time, and this type of vicissitude did not fail to excite his imagination.
The die that holds the secret of the infinitely small
Conditional branching would occur in the following manner: he would cast the die and depending on the result he would choose the scenario corresponding to the number, and proceed to imagine the story. In a multimedia application, this choice could be made easily by simply clicking on an icon that opens the path to the text to be read. On the contrary, in a printed book where pages follow one another, it would be difficult to create this kind of bifurcation. He imagined three outcomes and gave each one a colour. Then he would cast the die. If it was odd, it would be the red story, if even the green or blue. If it was two, then blue, more than two, green.
He cast the die: 2
And again: 5
Once more: 4
He would subsequently start with the blue solution, then the red, and finally the green one. He jotted down each scenario.
9 a symphony of colours
BLUE
He gave free rein to his imagination. The next day he would be taken to the courthouse. He would find himself at the end of a long corridor, in front of a solid oak door. A bronze plaque indicated: A. Nubice Magistrate. He would be made to sit on a wooden chair, and his handcuffs would be removed. A young woman would enter through a door near the window. A pretty blonde, dressed in a dark blue suit, very elegant and professional looking, wearing black stockings with matching high heel shoes. Robert could not help showing that he was worried and nonplussed about the whole business.
What indeed had happened?
- I am the instructing magistrate for this case, Mr. Maxim. Or should I say Maximovich. I noticed you changed your name when you acquired French citizenship. You are suspected of killing Miss Apolline Blanchefleur. Someone saw you with that girl on the eve of her death coming out of the Apis hotel. How long have you known this person?
- First, let me say that she is not Apolline, but probably her sister if this is really the person staying at the Apis Hotel.
- Go on, I’m curious.
- The girl I met was looking for her sister who apparently had disappeared for some time, say, about ten months.
- You use the word "sister". What is this person’s name.
- I do not know, she has always presented herself as the sister of Apolline. She had slept overnight at my place (not with me) and she had left a note this morning signed A.M.B.
- Let's call her Anna, the hypothetical sister.
- Hypothetical? Why?
- Because the person of the Apis hotel was registered under the name of Apolline Blanchefleur. This corresponds to the name on her passport found in a turquoise bag, thrown into a garbage bin by the perpetrator of this heinous crime.
This detail made him start.
- You have already seen that handbag?
- No, I have not seen it. Robert lied, or so he thought.
- And she was with you last night?
- She stayed with me, as I already said.
- What kind of relationship did you have with her?
- Purely platonic, I can assure you. We were looking for traces of her missing sister.
- And your relationship with her sister, Apolline?
Robert felt he was falling into a trap? A thorny issue if ever there was one. How could he honestly answer this question? Who would believe the truth? Did he indeed know the truth?
- We met in Prague, about a year ago. We spent a few days together. I have not been able to meet her again.
- Mr Maxim, how did you meet Miss Blanchefleur? I mean under what circumstances?
He thought it over for a moment. Should he mention the Intercoma project?
- Well, we met through a dating site on the Internet.
- We will check all this out.
- How did she die?
- You do not know? (The magistrate was being ironical). We are performing an autopsy, we’ll know the cause of her death shortly, I’m sure, positively sure. One detail remains mysterious: her head is missing. Where have you hidden her head, Mr. Maxim?
Robert Maxim would be taken back to his cell. A few days later, he returned to the courthouse.
- Mr Maxim, we checked your story. I use this term because it is based on nothing. It's amazing that you tell me a pack of lies when you risk being charged with premeditated murder! We have not found any trace of any website with three flowers, and two towns in the address.
- I do not understand..
- In addition, we have checked your testimony concerning the sister of the late Miss Blanchefleur. Well, here it is. She was an only child! No sister, Mr. Maxim, no sister. No Annie, nor Annick nor Anastasie nor Anne-Marie! You take me for an idiot!
Robert can hardly breathe.
- Moreover, we found traces of blood on the body, and these traces correspond to your blood, Mr. Maxim. Your DNA matches perfectly.
- Someone could have put some samples of my blood on her. That can happen. Can you remember what the Los Angeles police officers did with the blood of a black footballer, J. P. something. They used the blood from a sample of his to produce evidence.
- I know.
- That's why he was acquitted.
- Unjustly acquitted. But during the civil trial, he was held responsible for the death of his ex-wife's boyfriend. It cost him a whopping $ 20 million!
A few days later, he would again be sitting in front of A. Nubice.
- Mr Maxim, something new has cropped up. The body that we found does not belong to Ms Apolline Blanchefleur. Amazing, isn’t it? We have, moreover, found no traces of ring marks on the lower part of her abdomen. No beauty spot either.
- Whose body is it then?
- An American prostitute (an escort girl to be more exact) whose name is Ophelia Darling. We are still looking for her head. Our Belgian colleagues tell us that an assassin goes in for this kind of mutilation in their country. Limbs belonging to women were found in locations with symbolic names, such as the path of despair, the alley of the abyss, Dante's Inferno. Since the body was left on the rue de la Bonne Nouvelle, I feel that we are dealing with the same killer. That's why you're free to go. Goodbye, Mr. Maxim.
Relieved though perplexed, he would leave the Quai des Orfèvres and breathe the air of freedom again.
RED
He imagined his trial. He saw himself in the box of the accused. The Prosecutor required a twenty-two years' imprisonment sentence for the murder of Apolline Blanchefleur. The voice of the judge would be filled with hatred. Had he been able to give such a sentence, he would have had him crucified, upside down.
- Although we have little evidence, I have, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the intimate conviction that this vile person has murdered this poor girl by strangling her with her silk fishnet stockings, and then beheaded his poor victim.
He paused a little for the members of the jury to realize the horror of this act.
- Again, I am convinced that the monster before you murdered Apolline Blanchefleur, a young woman cut off from life in the flower of her youth. You can only find him guilty of this atrocious murder and rid society of a permanent threat against our women!
- It is now that I regret the weakness of our laws which do not allow the punishment that this crime is worth, the ultimate supreme penalty, capital punishment, the death penalty.
A long cold silence ensued.
Robert Maxim imagined the verdict: guilty. Although he claimed he was innocent, he would be taken to prison and locked up for many years, a miscarriage of justice, one more, because the jury also had the same intimate conviction as the prosecutor dressed in red! The reasonable doubt is not part of the French penal code! Nor is the burden of proof on the part of the prosecution!
GREEN
Robert barely had time to take some mental notes to imagine this third solution, the green one, than a policeman entered the room and told him there was a mistake in the identity of the victim. He could leave. He imagined a flame war on the internet, a kind of war of messages, a myriad of email to protest against the abominable practices of the Research Centre and the Dormition project. The netizens would bombard the Onironet site, the network of our worst nightmares to blow up the system! This time, he would say what he thought was the truth.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
He awoke suddenly. It had just been a dream. It was a horrible nightmare! He stood up. Apolline's sister was gone. He took a cup of coffee and went into his study. He must have fallen asleep when he came back from the café beside the park.
He decided to look at the files he had downloaded with Apolline’s sister. He turned on his computer and was about to look up the address Apolline had entrusted him with. However, when he opened the folder, the system did not work. He tried to open a file that he had written himself. The pages appeared on the screen, and then, like magic, the letters of his sentences fell cheerfully like a cascade.
- A virus! The whole system is infected!
Try as he might to open files and folders, all the letters of the alphabet danced the same absurd ballet. Fortunately, he had a backup drive. But before using it, he had to clean his system, empty the contents of his hard drive and reinstall the operating system. After that, he could plug the hard disk in and read the documents stored there.
A few hours later
He sought the three questions the answers to which had come to his mind during sleep.
http. / / www. jasminlillyloretapraguerose.com
The link was established in a few minutes. A page appeared on the screen. There was a three-dimensional image of a strange computer. The system resembled a spiderweb in three-dimensional Hilbert space with multiple vectors. He clicked on the image and another page downloaded.
This time he looked at the system’s architecture. There is no web without a spider, without a predator somewhere. The network was composed of hundreds of thousands of nodes consisting of computers and servers. In the centre a module composed of a control system whose name was unusual: UTMQ (Universal Turing Machine Quantum). This module was directly connected to another entitled: FHBE (Female Human Brain Extension). A third module was called: MHBE (Male Human Brain Extension).
Clicking on UTMQ he accessed a detailed plan of the system. He did the same for FHBE. A human brain was connected to a device that irrigated it with blood carrying oxygen. It was directly connected to the UGTM system. On the contrary, MHBE was empty. No brain. The slot was already there, so the system should be connected later.
-Whose brain was it? He said aloud.
Robert clicked on "demonstration" and had access to some experiments. He could ask questions on any topic of general knowledge, the machine responded instantly and accurately.
He was presented with a lottery game. He had to enter a number of parameters on the initial position of lottery balls and the computer calculated the sequence of five numbers and the bonus number.
- We win every time with this system! He thought gleefully.
Another page explained how the computer worked. It exploited the spins of atoms at a very low temperature level aligned by a technique that exploits the quantum annealing tunnel effect. This process would generate qubits (quantum bits) with which one could execute myriads of instructions and perform a multitude of operations. Photons were also used for the higher brain functions: reasoning, decision making….
A pleasant surprise
A few days later there was a knock at his door. It was the young American?
- This is Gabrielle, my daughter.
She carried a basket. A baby looked up at him with beautiful blue eyes.
- I went out of town to pick her up. She is lovely, isn’t she? And very well behaved, a little angel.
She entered the hallway and placed the basket on the floor.
- Can I stay a few days with her here? My grandmother can not keep her just now.
- Of course. You can have the guest room. As long as you wish, you can stay here. I'll give you a spare key.
- Thank you. I’m afraid I have very bad news concerning my sister. She died. In France. An accident: she has been cremated. I have the death certificate here. It took time to identify her because her body was not recognizable, completely charred. We found a U.S. driver's license in a turquoise bag near the scene of the accident.
The baby began to gurgle.
- I'll change her and put her in her new room. Thank you for your hospitality.
Robert had had a premonition of Apolline’s death in his dreams. So Apolline was indeed dead. Why do we see her in the Dormition website? Robert remembered that he had signed a protocol. In case of death, his body would be bequeathed to the Research Centre. He had seen on the video the body of Apolline lying in a sort of glass sarcophagus, one you might associate with a fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty. Wires came out of her body and were connected to a kind of junction box. Apolline’s sister had identified a beauty spot on her right side. And what was her name?
He entered the room where she was busy taking care of the baby.
- I still do not know your name.
- Anaïs. My name is Anaïs.
This name evoked a heady tender perfume whose fragrance blends the sweetness of the rose with the voluptuousness of the lily, the smoothness of amber and the strength of sandalwood. A trace of frankincense seals the harmony, the sensation of pleasure and headiness. He heard once more the honey-sweet voice of Mnemosyne.
- You and Apolline were twins, weren’t you?
- Identical twins. Apolline was born before me. I’m the elder. I have always tried to assert my identity and difference with respect to my sister. We rarely wore the same clothes on the same day but we shared things. I cut my hair short, hers flowed over her shoulders. If she felt something, I also had a sort of feeling, or rather intuition. Her boyfriend called us a correlated pair. He borrowed the term from his field of research; he used it as a metaphor to describe our telepathy.
- And you felt that she died?
- Strange as it may seem, I did not, I have the impression that she is still alive. I often dream of her. I did not understand the image we say in that video. The one that shocked you so much.
- I always wondered what the difference was between identical and fraternal twins.
- Identical twins, the monozygotic, are formed from the division of a single fertilized ovum by a single sperm; fraternal ones, dizygotic twins, are born from two separate eggs, fertilized by two separate sperms. They can be either a boy and a girl, or both boys, or both girls. Identical twins are clones somehow identical in all respects.
- But do they have the same character?
- That’s for you to judge, she said in a mocking tone.
They spent a pleasant evening together. Robert, who loved to cook, prepared one of his favourite dishes: escalope Lucullus. Anaïs appreciated his choice of wines: chianti and sparkling Brachetto. They no longer spoke of the mystery surrounding the death or at least the disappearance of Apolline. They would look into that the following day.
When they were about to separate for the night, Anaïs took him by the hand and said playfully:
- I really want you tonight.
-You are not a holy virgin, at least? He asked, jockingly.
- Do not worry. I have been around.
The proof of this began to cry. She smiled.
- But I was indeed born on September 9.
Robert appreciated her joke.
That night he had a strange dream. A man came out of a river full of fish, reptiles, and plants, and walked towards a tree. Suspended from a branch of the tree, there was a mirror. He looked in the mirror and in an instant he saw the evolution of humanity. Then he turned round and saw Apolline breastfeeding a baby. He woke up, stood up and went upstairs into his study so as not to wake up Anaïs, who was fast asleep. He noted down the description of his dream.
Had he not read a similar story somewhere?
At breakfast, Anaïs played with Gabrielle who was sitting on her knees, happily babbling away. She sang an English nursery rhyme to entertain the little one.
Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow
And every where that Mary Went
The lamb was safe to go.
- Why did you not tell me your name when we first met? You do not like your name?
- You did not ask me. Like Parsifal. You dare not ask the right questions, which is why he was refused access to the Grail Castle.
- Do you know the meaning of castle in a hospital?
- No, not a clue.
- The morgue.
Robert remembered the ESI architecture. A three-dimension spiderweb of light like a labyrinth. And the room where they thought they had seen Apolline was a kind of morgue.
- Change the subject. How could you contact my sister when you only met her in dreams?
- I asked her what her email address was. So that I would not forget it, she pointed to an animal, a lamb grazing on grass near a little house, the house of Loreta. Then the colour of her handbag, which was turquoise. Her email was: lamb.turquoise @ nightmail.com.
- The animal that is sacrificed!
They had the same thought. Robert was reminded of the ballet he had seen, Stravinsky, the theme at the beginning, the Adoration of the earth, then the Sacrifice. Suddenly he remembered he had almost been run over by a black car.
- You think Apolline has been offered up as a sacrifice to some new deity, an artificial goddess, the new ruler of this world? After all, she has the same name as a Christian martyr of the fourth century.
- Among the Aztecs and other peoples, young girls were sacrificed; they had to be virgins. They represented purity. The Athenians had to send every nine years, seven youths and seven maidens to Crete to satisfy the appetite of the Minotaur. Remember the story of Theseus who escaped from the maze and eloped with the king’s daughter, Ariadne. Man always has a tendency to idolatry. Represent the divine, i.e. power made from the image of his choice, the choice of the moment: an animal, a hybrid, the ideal of himself, and now he has created the machine, the image of his own intelligence.
- You intellectualize too much. You must learn to live, to feel, to let yourselves be moved, Anaïs suggested. You know what I want to do today? I want to spend the day making love. What about you? Does that sound ok?
- Do I have a choice?
- You can always take your little die and throw it up in the air, she said ironically.
- I do not need a die to make that choice. And Gabrielle, she has something to say. Listen.
They heard the beginning of a protest, the first cries meaning hunger and the desire for her bottle.
The body of Anaïs was as beautiful and as bright and luminous as that of Apolline, the same shapely curves, the same black hair, though cut much shorter, and the silky extreme lily whiteness of her skin, the same birth mark on the right side of her abdomen. Apart from the slight American accent when she spoke in French, he might have thought he had found the woman who had fascinated him for months. But this time, the being who shared his bed had not shared his dreams. She came from the everyday world, or rather from the world of chance encounters. She was reality, flesh and bones. He could not doubt her existence; at least that was what he thought as he removed her pink thong along her long slender legs, and threw it away, and put his lips just above the public hair, and saw a mark where a ring might have been pierced into the skin.
Robert was even more confused and upset than before. He thought that the drugs that were administered by the Research Centre might have changed his relationship with reality. Perhaps he lived in a world of his own creation, a universe linked to a kind of literary or mythological schizophrenia. Did he not spend most of his time imagining situations, scenarios, stories that tended to carry him away from the everyday world? The Intercoma project could have accentuated this form of behaviour which for a long had been part of his nature.
He loved writing more than anything else. He enjoyed watching the words appear on the screen, springing from his imagination. He liked to read the sentences out loud. When walking in the park, various states of consciousness overlapped. He would watch what was happening while developing a story whose plot was unfolding elsewhere. He was sometimes thousands of miles from where his own body was located. He was actually in two worlds, the world of men and the land of the fairies, the world of his own making.
One day, he was so lost in his thoughts that he did not hear the voice of a friend who was calling out to him. He had to apologize; he was not trying to snub him. He was just elsewhere.
Rose, lily, amber and sandalwood
He stroked the back and loins of beautiful Anaïs. The scent of her body reminded him of the four days spent in Prague. He felt like making her a child. Maybe between the young lady he had met in his dreams and her twin who slept beside him, he had finally found this idealized woman he had always been looking for, this eternal feminine which would lead him by the hand to the tops of mountains and far beyond the clouds, the fabulous clouds.
He whose thoughts, like skylarks,
Toward the skies in the morning fly off freely,
Who hovers above life and understands with ease
The language of flowers and silent things!
The crystal-clear voice of memory reminded him of his lost paradise.
When he made love to Anaïs, he had the feeling that he loved all the women of the earth, that he had reached the essence of womanhood. Memories of other women spun on the mottled horizon of his consciousness, in the twinkling of an eye, the time a sigh might last. His pleasure was immense. He fell asleep. In the evening he would go out and do some shopping.
Homo homini lupus
Robert had no sooner left his apartment than a black Jaguar stopped abruptly in front of him, two men got out and pulled out guns.
- Don’t give us any trouble, Mr. Maxim.
He was pushed into the automobile and was given a sedative immediately. He woke up in a lab room in the Research Centre. He wanted to vomit. He got up and went into the toilet. Then he tried to open the door of the room. He could not, it would not budge.
- Hello, Mr Maximovich.
It was the voice of Mathias Jedermann.
- You were brought here in an emergency. We have been monitoring your indiscretions concerning our projects that, I may remind you, are classified top secret. We put a magic cookie in your PC: a kind of program that tracks your travels across the Internet. It was very embarrassing for us when you entered our files, especially the ones concerning Dormition. We sent you a little gift as a virus, a Trojan horse. Made of bits, not wood of course.
Jedermann laughed. He clearly enjoyed his own jokes.
- You seam to be very interested in fate. I'll tell you about yours. But first, please follow me. A car was waiting.
- We'll get to the castle, one of your favourite themes.
The journey lasted three hours. The roads leaving Paris were not encumbered by weekend traffic. The black Jaguar headed stealthily south along the A11 motorway. To the west, the sun was setting slowly, an autumn sun, gleaming, darting its supreme rays.
They crossed the Creuse river, and to his left, Robert saw a gray castle made out of tofu, the local stone. It was a fortress built at the end of the 15th century overlooking the valley and a bridge crossing the river, wide at this particular spot. The bridge was a concrete one that had replaced the wooden bridge destroyed at the end of the Second World War. The wall on the east side contained the gatehouse, the casemates; the house and barns lined the verdant river; the west tower contained what must have once been the dungeon: the prison.
- This is your hotel, the professor smiled. You will be our guest for a long time…..eternity.
They entered through a gate in front of the town hall, drove a hundred meters, turned left, followed a small pathway lined with oak trees, and stopped in front of the main door of the Castle. Maxim could not help thinking of the arrival of Jonathan Harker in front of the great oak door of Count Dracula’s castle:
Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!
Robert had no choice but to enter and follow the professor along an endless corridor to a large iron-studded wooden door.
- You see, we introduced you to a fairy, a magical creature, who came from another world, the one generated by your fertile imagination and ESI, our creation. You were not supposed to seek her out, to meet her or to speak to her. Transgression of course is human nature. But have you two really met? Or was she just a figment of your feverish imagination? Pr. Jedermann chuckled in a knowing way.
- You have made the same mistakes, he continued, as your hero, Lanval, the identity you borrowed to protect your internet connections. Indiscretion, Mr. Maximovich, you were too curious, curiosity is what has led you to your ruin. You know the English proverb about cats. I know you are interested in cats, not to mention pussy. Jedermann guffawed gleefully.
- "Curiosity killed the cat". You should not have flown too close to the sun, like Icarus, you may just burn your wings! You wonder how I know all this, don’t you? It was sucked off from your hard drive, or if you prefer, “vampired”, one of your favourite words, isn’t it?
Jedermann introduced a magnetic card into a slot provided for that purpose. Then he stared into a camera lenz, which identified the iris of his right eye. The big heavy door swung open noisily.
- Welcome to the Castle of No Return. Incidentally, I read with pleasure your monograph on some Literary Castles: Argol, Otranto, and of course Kafka’s. You will be very comfortable here. The tone of his voice was particularly sarcastic.
Robert wanted to run away but he lacked any desire to act. He was under the influence of the drugs he had been administered. He could only follow.
- Here is the heart of ESI. But just look at our first Belle aux Bois Dormant, our Sleeping Beauty. Our Snow White. See how white her skin is. Welcome to her house of eternity!
They approached a kind of transparent sarcophagus. A beautiful young woman was sleeping therein. Robert recognized the thick black hair and white face. Light, milky, smooth. It was Apolline. She wore a fine silk gossamer transparent gown. She reminded him of Anaïs, whom he had left only a few hours before. Only the long wavy flowing hair distinguished one sister from the other.
- Here is the woman in your life. Jedermann accentuated the definite article.
- The ideal woman you've always wanted to embrace. Soon she will be yours for eternity. We left her her body, which is controlled with respect to its temperature and its nutrition by ESI. We could have got rid of it. But we have pretty much mastered artificial hibernation now. You will be left to choose with your infernal die between hibernation and brain-separation. We know how to keep a body alive and also young for a very long period of time. A century maybe. We are still doing tests before any drug is put on the market.
He began to grin.
- You do not have trouble understanding this neologism, brain-separation, do you?
Robert nodded in agreement.
- You enjoyed her twin sister. One day we might be able to create two real entangled beings: people in two different places at the same time but with one single logical system. How effective they would be at work! You disagree with me? Too bad!
Jedermann decidedly liked to listen to himself speak. His prey seemed to be detached, outside the pseudo-conversation, which in reality was nothing but a monologue. In the distance, Robert heard a familiar tune, the refrain of a popular song of the sixties, speaking words of wisdom, let it be, let it be. Paul McCartney’s melody haunted him; it became insistent, obsessive and intrusive. He was not quite sure if the music came from a device in the room, or if, on the contrary, if it was more of a memory that had been long buried in the depths of his mind: a sort of melodious tinnitus.
- I owe you, dear sir, some explanations, a bit technical. I hope not to bore you. Was it not you who wrote about the danger of boring the reader with scientific descriptions, if my memory is right, if I’m not mistaken. I have reviewed your notes and articles.
He paused in thought.
- ESI, as you discovered, is a super-computer, an extraordinary one. At the core, there is our quantum computer that revolutionizes calculation. It is the invention of the ex-boyfriend of your fairy here. You believe you had sex with her. Very naughty of you, Mr. Maximovich. You shouldn’t have. We would have preferred to keep things as they were; but she accidentally discovered her digital soul mate, her kindred cyber-spirit: in one word you. She wanted to meet you in the real world. We were forced to intervene, to invent an imaginary tryst in a city where you have never set foot, I can assure you; we mixed both your fantasies, hers and yours, and implanted them in your brain to create false memories in a purely virtual environment and of course in spurious dreams. The idea of the ring came from me, my own fantasy. Funny, isn’t it? Erotic, huh? When you were sleeping like a baby, we put the ring in your jacket pocket. Reality is an illusion, my dear friend.
- Finally, he whispered as he went on, ESI may astound us by the speed of its calculations and operations. It can intercept any encrypted message and decrypt it in a wink. The military who have financed the research have received a report in which, alas, we have confessed to failure. ESI is not a toy for the military. I can assure you.
Pr. Jedermann began to yawn.
- I do not sleep enough. But you do not have this problem, my dear friend. You will sleep for a very long time. He chuckled to himself, gleefully.
Two nurses in white lab coats were undressing Robert. Jedermann continued his exposé.
- However, there are some things that ESI cannot do for the moment, things that only a human being can accomplish without much difficulty. All this is linked to the evolution of our species. I had the brilliant idea to connect the human brain and ESI and allow them to work together. But here's the rub. There are basically two kinds of brains. Male and female brains are not quite the same, not quite identical in their architectures. You certainly have in your life noticed that the mind of a woman differs from that of a man, without speaking of course of superiority, to be politically correct. The two forms of thinking are complementary, and it is for this very reason that you will join your good fairy ... in the cyber-world beyond, the kingdom come we have imagined and implemented. A nice expression, isn’t it?
Dare I mention the end of your favourite poem?
He went to Avalon, to that wonderful island, and was never heard of again, kidnapped by a fairy.
Bon Voyage to Avalon! But first, you have to throw the die. Here it is. Pair, we keep your body alive for the time being, odd ......He said ominously.
With the little strength and willpower he had left, he cast his little die. The cube bounced three times on the operating table, spun on an angle, steadied, and came to rest, revealing number six. Robert had the impression that the task had lasted an eternity, as if everything was running in slow motion, consciousness was fading away, slowly but surely.
- Good night, Mr. Maximovich, sweet dreams.
10 Dream an impossible dream
Robert wandered alone, burdened with his wound, in the strange city he had only seen in his dreams, the city without any flowers, topped by a castle. The first hypnagogic images appeared. He walked up to the imposing edifice following a winding path, lined with lush vegetation. A waterfall gushed out from a source hidden by laurel bushes. He felt an intense fatigue, and in no way did he think he was dreaming.
He soon arrived at the little chapel he had visited with Apolline during their imaginary tryst. He sat down near the fountain of the Assumption, and again he saw the miraculous vision of the little house where, in the twinkle of an eye, thousands of flowers of all shapes and colours sprouted up spontaneously. In the midst of this fabulous bouquet, he saw a beautiful white rose, radiant and incandescent, a lily and a sprig of jasmine. Then he saw Apolline.
- You came to me? I think we're here for a long time. She said, despondently. At least, I am no longer alone. That’s a good thing. Here, in this splendid garden, fruit is ripe all year round.
- Are you sure we're alone here?
- There’s Melusine, the cyber-incarnation of ESI. But she is not like us. She reigns here. She manifests herself whenever she needs to delve deep into my memory, that is to say, into our common memory, the memory of our species. I cannot see her but I can hear the rustle of her wings. Her soul is made of trillions of entangled photons. She is pure light. Pure intelligence.
- I feel sleepy all of a sudden, Robert said lethargically.
- That’s only natural. You can sleep peacefully now. I'll be here with you from now on. We do not always dream, there are times when there is a vacuum, nothingness, emptiness. I'm glad I found my cyber-Adam. Melusine will dig deep into your memory too, and create a model of your soul. You too will be immortal as long as networks exist on this planet. I learned that one soul has indeed escaped and peregrinates through the cyber-world. He also knows everything about everyone. Wisdom, omniscience and omnipotence!
- From now on our dreams will be our only reality.
Epilogue
The song of lost souls
For some time now, I have been wandering through the cyber-world. I was able to escape from the castle through a computer system failure. For months, they (the people of the castle) had made a copy of my memory, my personality, my sensibility, all my dreams, and then one day, my brain was disconnected and they stopped feeding it with blood-rich oxygen. But the copy is alive and well if I may say so.
The cyber world is my only universe. I have the ability, thinks to ESI, to replicate myself and move about in many places at the same time: ubiquity. I have realized that my world can be understood with an architecture based on a set of concentric circles, descending step by step towards an abominable CENTRE. This is just an allegory of the network. There is everything here: lust, gluttony, greed, extravagance, anger, indifference, hatred, greed, and perversion. This is inferno: politicians are numerous here judging by their blogs. We live in a Divine Comedy.
Here, the Internet abounds with scenes of orgies, political fornications including rape, epic copulation, gang bangs, racial hatred, jealousy, lies, slander, perjury and defamation, tricks and scams of all kinds.
I built my memory palace architecture imagining nine floors with a staircase spiralling downward in Piranesi manner. But I must confess, this is my own personal vision of HELL. It helps me to remember where I am and where I’m going. I’m sure, one of these fine days, Jedermann will come and join me.
We begin by limbo, then the realm of lust, next we come to the circle of the gluttons, followed by the palace of the avaricious and the prodigal; one circle there is reserved for the angry and the indifferent; the Church of heretics and the hostel of Epicureans belong to the sixth circle, the theatre of the violent, the hotel of the sodomites, and the stock market of the usurers, the tax haven of the wasters make up the seventh, the island of scammers and the promenade of the deceivers, the tower of traitors belong to the eighth, and finally the place where the monster remains: ambition, cruelty, power. Vices have not much changed since Dante first designed the architecture of HELL. The Internet has paved the way for all forms of vice. One day, I'll take you for a trip, show you around my home sweet home, and I dare say I’m looking forward to the moment when Apolline and Robert are ready to attempt their escape. See you in the not so far future! Listen again to the voice of melancholy, to the poem Robert learned by heart unbeknown to himself while asleep on the Onironet, the network of our most beautiful dreams:
I wandered lonely, burdened with my wound
Along the shore of the pond, among the willow trees
Where a vague mist summoned up a large
Milky Phantom in despair!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert SENDREY is the author of a number of books on English teaching. He has a Ph.D. in telecom economics. He lives in Paris and Touraine in the Centre of France.