Zero K (7 page)

“Catastrophe is built into the early brain.”

I decided to give him a name. I would give them names, both of them, just for the hell of it, and to stay involved, expand the tenuous role of the concealed man, the surreptitious witness.

“It's an escape from our personal mortality. Catastrophe. It overwhelms what is weak and fearful in our bodies and minds. We face the end but not alone. We lose ourselves in the core of the storm.”

I listened carefully to what he was saying. Nicely translated but I didn't believe a word of it. It was a kind of wishful poetry. It didn't apply to real people, real fear. Or was I being small-minded, too limited in perspective?

“We are here to learn the power of solitude. We are here to reconsider everything about life's end. And we will emerge in cyberhuman form into a universe that will speak to us in a very different way.”

I thought of several names and rejected them. Then I came up with Szabo. I didn't know if this name was a product of his country of origin but it didn't matter. There were no countries of origin here. I liked the name. It suited his bulging body. Miklos Szabo. It had an earthy savor that contrasted nicely with the programmed voice in translation.

I studied the woman as she spoke. She spoke to no one. She spoke into free space. She needed one name only. No family name, no family, no strong involvements, no hobbies, no particular place she was obliged to return to, no reason not to be here.

The headscarf was her flag of independence.

“Solitude, yes. Think of being alone and frozen in the crypt, the capsule. Will new technologies allow the brain to function at the level of identity? This is what you may have to confront. The conscious mind. Solitude in extremis. Alone. Think of the word itself. Middle English.
All one
. You cast off the person. The person is the mask, the created character in the medley of dramas that constitute your life. The mask drops away and the person becomes
you
in its truest meaning. All one. The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?”

Artis has spoken about being artificially herself. Was this the character, the half fiction who would soon be transformed, or reduced, or intensified, becoming pure self, suspended in ice? I didn't want to think about it. I wanted to think about a name for the woman.

She spoke, with pauses, about the nature of time. What happens to the idea of continuum—past, present, future—in the cryonic chamber? Will you understand days, years and minutes? Will this faculty diminish and die? How human are you without your sense of time? More human than ever? Or do you become fetal, an unborn thing?

She looked at Miklos Szabo, the Old World professor, and I imagined him in a three-piece suit, someone from the 1930s, a renowned philosopher having an illicit romance with a woman named Magda.

“Time is too difficult,” he said.

This made me smile. I stood hunched at the viewing slot, which was situated just below eye level, and found myself looking again at the skull across the room, an artifact of the region and possible object of plunder and the last thing I might have expected to find in this environment of scientific approaches to life's end. It was about five times the size of an ordinary human skull and it wore a headpiece, which I hadn't fully registered earlier. This was an imposing skullcap in the shape of many tiny birds, set flat to the skull, a golden flock, wingtips connected.

It looked real, the cranium of a giant, blunt in its deathliness, disconcerting in its craftwork, its silvery grin, a folk art too sardonic to be affecting. I imagined the room empty of people and furniture, rock-walled, stone-cold, and maybe the skull seemed right at home.

Two men entered the room, tall and fair-skinned, twins, in old workpants and matching gray T-shirts. They stood one to either side of the table and spoke without introduction, each yielding to the other in flawless transition.

“This is the first split second of the first cosmic year. We are becoming citizens of the universe.”

“There are questions of course.”

“Once we master life extension and approach the possibility of becoming ever renewable, what happens to our energies, our aspirations?”

“The social institutions we've built.”

“Are we designing a future culture of lethargy and self-indulgence?”

“Isn't death a blessing? Doesn't it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?”

“Many other questions.”

“Isn't it sufficient to live a little longer through advanced technology? Do we need to go on and on and on?”

“Why subvert innovative science with sloppy human excess?”

“Does literal immortality compress our enduring artforms and cultural wonders into nothingness?”

“What will poets write about?”

“What happens to history? What happens to money? What happens to God?”

“Many other questions.”

“Aren't we easing the way toward uncontrollable levels of population, environmental stress?”

“Too many living bodies, too little space.”

“Won't we become a planet of the old and stooped, tens of billions with toothless grins?”

“What about those who die? The others. There will always be others. Why should some keep living while others die?”

“Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.”

“Do we want to believe that every condition afflicting the mind and body will be curable in the context of our boundless longevity?”

“Many other questions.”

“The defining element of life is that it ends.”

“Nature wants to kill us off in order to return to its untouched and uncorrupted form.”

“What good are we if we live forever?”

“What ultimate truth will we confront?”

“Isn't the sting of our eventual dying what makes us precious to the people in our lives?”

“Many other questions.”

“What does it mean to die?”

“Where are the dead?”

“When do you stop being who you are?”

“Many other questions.”

“What happens to war?”

“Will this development mark the end of war or a new level of widespread conflict?”

“With individual death no longer inevitable, what will happen to the lurking idea of nuclear destruction?”

“Will all traditional limits begin to disappear?”

“Will the missiles talk themselves out of the launchers?”

“Does technology have a death wish?”

“Many other questions.”

“But we reject these questions. They miss the point of our endeavor. We want to stretch the boundaries of what it means to be human—stretch and then surpass. We want to do whatever we are capable of doing in order to alter human thought and bend the energies of civilization.”

They spoke in this manner for a time. They weren't scientists or social theorists. What were they? They were adventurers of a kind that I could not quite identify.

“We have remade this wasteland, this secluded desert shit-hole, in order to separate ourselves from reasonableness, from this burden of what is called responsible thinking.”

“Here, today, in this room, we are speaking into the future, to those who may judge us as brave or quaint or foolish.”

“Consider two possibilities.”

“We wanted to rewrite the future, all our futures, and ended with a single empty page.”

“Or—we were among those few who altered all life on the planet, for all time to come.”

I named them the Stenmark twins. They were the Stenmark twins. Jan and Lars, or Nils and Sven.

“The dormants in their capsules, their pods. Those now and those to come.”

“Are they actually dead? Can we call them dead?”

“Death is a cultural artifact, not a strict determination of what is humanly inevitable.”

“And are they who they were before they entered the chamber?”

“We will colonize their bodies with nanobots.”

“Refresh their organs, regenerate their systems.”

“Embryonic stem cells.”

“Enzymes, proteins, nucleotides.”

“They will be subjects for us to study, toys for us to play with.”

Sven leaned toward his audience, carrying this last phrase with him, and there was a ripple of amused response from the benefactors.

“Nano-units implanted in the suitable receptors of the brain. Russian novels, the films of Bergman, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky. Classic works of art. Children reciting nursery rhymes in many languages. The propositions of Wittgenstein, an audiotext of logic and philosophy. Family photographs and videos, the pornography of your choice. In the capsule you dream of old lovers and listen to Bach, to Billie Holiday. You study the intertwined structures of music and mathematics. You reread the plays of Ibsen, revisit the rivers and streams of sentences in Hemingway.”

I looked again at the woman in the headscarf, unnamed still. She would not be real until I gave her a name. She was sitting upright now, hands resting on the table, eyes closed. She was in a state of meditation. This is what I wanted to believe. Had she listened to a single word spoken by the Stenmarks? Her mind was empty of words, mantras, sacred syllables.

I called her Arjuna, then I called her Arjhana. These were pretty names but they weren't right. Here I was, in a sealed compartment, inventing names, noting accents, improvising histories and nationalities. These were shallow responses to an environment that required abandonment of such distinctions. I needed to discipline myself, be equal to the situation. But when was I ever equal to the situation? What I needed to do was what I was doing.

I listened to the Stenmarks.

“In time a religion of death will emerge in response to our prolonged lives.”

“Bring back death.”

“Bands of death rebels will set out to kill people at random. Men and women slouching through the countryside, using crude weapons to kill those they encounter.”

“Voracious bloodbaths with ceremonial aspects.”

“Pray over the bodies, chant over the bodies, do unspeakably intimate things to the bodies.”

“Then burn the bodies and smear the ashes on your own bodies.”

“Or pray over the bodies, chant over the bodies, eat the edible flesh of the bodies. Burn what remains.”

“In one form or another, people return to their death-haunted roots in order to reaffirm the pattern of extinction.”

“Death is a tough habit to break.”

Nils gestured, fist raised, thumb jutting backwards over his shoulder. He was indicating the skull on the wall. And I understood at once, intuitively, that the big raw bony object was their creation and that these two men, bland in appearance, demonologists in spirit, were the individuals responsible for the look and touch and temperament of the entire complex. This was their design, all of it, the tone and flow, the half-sunken structure itself and everything inside it.

All Stenmark.

This was their aesthetic of seclusion and concealment, all the elements that I found so eerie and disembodying. The empty halls, the color patterns, the office doors that did or did not open into an office. The mazelike moments, time suspended, content blunted, the lack of explanation. I thought of the movie screens that appeared and vanished, the silent films, the mannequin with no face. I thought of my room, the uncanny plainness of it, the nowhereness, conceived and designed as such, and the rooms like it, maybe five hundred or a thousand, and the idea made me feel again that I was dwindling into indistinctness. And the dead, or maybe dead, or whatever they were, the cryogenic dead, upright in their capsules. This was art in itself, nowhere else but here.

The brothers altered their method of address, speaking not to the recording devices but directly to the nine men and women in the audience.

“We spent six years here, without a break, immersed in our work. Then a journey home, brief but fulfilling, and back and forth ever since.”

“When the time comes.”

“There is a certain inevitability in these words.”

“When the time comes, we'll depart finally from our secure northern home to this desert place. Old and frail, limping and shuffling, to approach the final reckoning.”

“What will we find here? A promise more assured than the ineffable hereafters of the world's organized religions.”

“Do we need a promise? Why not just die? Because we're human and we cling. In this case not to religious tradition but to the science of present and future.”

They were speaking quietly and intimately, with a deeper reciprocity than in the earlier exchanges and not a trace of self-display. The audience was stilled, completely fixed.

“Ready to die does not mean willing to disappear. Body and mind may tell us that it is time to leave the world behind. But we will clutch and grasp and scratch nevertheless.”

“Two stand-up comics.”

“Encased in vitreous matter, refashioned cell by cell, waiting for the time.”

“When the time comes, we'll return. Who will we be, what will we find? The world itself, decades away, think of it, or sooner, or later. Not so easy to imagine what will be out there, better or worse or so completely altered we will be too astonished to judge.”

They spoke about ecosystems of the future planet, theorizing—a renewed environment, a ravaged environment—and then Lars held up both hands to signal a respite. It took a moment for the audience to absorb the transition but soon the room settled into silence, the Stenmarks' silence. The brothers themselves stared dead ahead, empty-eyed.

The Stenmarks were in their early fifties, this is where I placed them, so thin-skinned and pale that branching blue veins were visible on the backs of their hands, even from where I stood. I decided that they were street anarchists of an earlier era, quietly dedicated to plotting local outrages or larger insurrections, all shaped by their artistic skills, and then I found myself wondering if they were married. Yes, to sisters. I saw them walking in a wooded area, all four, the brothers ahead, then the sisters ahead, a family custom, a game, the distance between the couples coolly measured and carefully maintained. In my half-mad imagining it would be five meters. I made it a point to measure in meters, not in feet or yards.