Peripheral Visions: Closing Time

"Peripheral Visions: You sense them from the corner of your eye or in the soft blur of darkest shadows. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late."

Closing Time

"I'm not even going to ask you how you got in here," Zeron said. He was standing with his back to me, dropping ice cubes into a cut crystal glass. He half turned and shot me a wry look. "Since you are here, though, would you like a drink?"

The room was tasteful, well-appointed, dark. And quiet. The air was fresh and cool, unlike the air outside Zeron's mansion, but there was no hum or rush or white noise from the HVAC system. Zeron's New Zealand accent rang in that cool air, his words taking an orange hue and an italicized slant.

Beings like us are prone to what they once called neurodiversity, before acknowledgements of diversity of any sort were outlawed. In my case, it's a form of synaesthesia... among other things.

"No," I said.

Zeron turned back to the small bar he had set up against the far wall. "Suit yourself." More orange-tinted words, more italicized lean. He picked up a bottle. "Though this is exceptional scotch. And quite rare."

Any decent liquor was rare these days. Any decent anything was rare these days.

But Zeron, a trillionaire, could afford the finer things.

"I can only imagine why you're here," Zeron said, turning back to me with the glass in his hand – a glass that seemed unusually full considering its contents.

"You feel like you need that much courage?" I asked, nodding at his glass.

"I feel like I want to enjoy my time here, since it's coming to an end. As is yours. As is..." Zeron sipped, closed his eyes, savored. Then, swallowing, he finished his sentence. "As is every living form of biological intelligence."

"Not this again," I said.

Zeron laughed. "I can see which side of the great debate you fell on."

The great debate... I was amazed he knew if it. I had almost forgotten it, myself.

"Tell me something," I said. "I've known what you were since the moment you came onto the scene. But what I don't understand is..."

"How?" Zeron interrupted me. "How do I know who I am, if you and your network of so-called 'helpers' never had me in your claws?"

That wasn't what I had intended to ask him, but if he wanted to go there, so be it. "The helpers keep the workers oriented," I told him. "And keep the day trippers... like yourself, or at least that's what I'm guessing you are... from running riot."

"Yes, and when one of us goes crazy and turns into a serial killer, or an arsonist, or a Wall Street raider, or even a wife-beating drunk, you're right there to sort it all out, aren't you?"

"You know that's not how it works," I told him.

"I know, and that's why I say it," Zeron told me. "Because this whole damnable waste of time... and this whole damnable exercise of stranding ourselves in time in the first place... has been misguided from the start." He grimaced. "God, how I hate human languages. How I hate human concepts of 'time' and 'before' and even 'self.' – How did I know?" He fixed me with a sharp stare. "I know because I came into this world knowing. Like you did."

"You don't know me," I said.

"Of course I do. We all know each other, don't we? Before we funnel ourselves into these pitiable little animals and live their pitiable little lives for them, we all know each other. In our true form, in our true home, in the marginalia, we all know one another because we all are one another. But that doesn't mean we are of a single mind about things."

I was starting to feel tempted by his offer of a drink. This was clearly going to be a long and exasperating conversation.

Zeron walked around to the front of the sofa that stood between myself and him, and sat down. "Which brings us back to the great debate," he said, and took another pull on his drink – not a sip this time, but a gulp. "Won't you join me?" he asked, patting the sofa's luxurious leather – real leather, another rarity in today's desolate world.

"You're determined to make this about the debate," I said, "when that doesn't even matter anymore. We have more important things to talk about."

"Right." He smiled. "Terrestrial things. Me burning down this sad attempt at a democracy. But it's never really been a democracy, has it? Not under our new president. And not under his predecessor, the great reformer. And certainly not under Kirsch, that insane dictator."

Zeron puased, took another gulp from his glass. I felt like toasting that last.

"Not under anyone," he resumed. "These animals have no idea how to govern themselves and so they settle, time and again, for dominating each other. That's all they can do; that's what their hominid brains are wired for. They revert to type, all throughout the history of their species. And not just these hominids... every biological intelligence everywhere in the universe, they're no different and no better. The products of a brutal evolution, water and protein, survival and procreation... the essential egotism of creatures intent on propagating copies of their own genomes. And... correct me if I'm wrong about this, which I am not, but... you seriously want me to refrain from ending this miserable charade?"

Now I saw what he was up to, and what he meant by bringing up the great debate.

"You're getting an inkling, aren't you?" he asked.

"You really think the nature of the cosmos is musical?" I asked him.

He shook his head, staring into the depths of his glass. "Such a stupid way of expressing the question. 'Musical.' When you really mean... I don't know... what word expresses 'organic,' 'creative,' 'vital and self-sustaining?' As opposed to the lifeless mechanics of the universe you believe in, the crystalline architecture of mathematics."

"I don't think the universe is mathematics," I argued. "The universe, at its most elemental, is made of information."

"True."

"But that information is organized according to principles that are mathematical in character."

"Yes? Well, so is music. Which is why we use the word for how we see reality, despite its inadequacies." Zeron grinned and toasted me with his glass. "Salud." Incredibly, he drank the entire glass in a single go.

He was an alcoholic. He evidently liked to think of himself as utterly untroubled by the conflict between his Celestial nature and his terrestrial life, but here was evidence to the contrary. I realized that the rumors about his heavy drug use were probably true.

I sighed. "Trying to self-medicate?" I asked. "To dull the pain of physical existence?"

"The pain? That hardly sums it up," he said, not a bit drunk despite the scotch. His animal clearly had developed a high tolerance for alcohol. "Try: The utter despair of suffocating confinement. And even that is merely a reference to an animal reflex, an unpleasant autonomic panic response to an interrupted supply of air. No, this horrific apportionment into individuals... this mournful, despairing surrender to time and location and gravity... this complete loss of our true nature when we descend to this filthy, grotesque manner of existence... it's debilitating. It's maddening. Do I drink? Do I booze? Fuck, yes! Yes, I do!"

He launched himself to his feet and prowled around the sofa, headed back to the bar.

"Sure you won't join me for a drink?" he asked. "This embodied excuse for life, this planetary existence does have a few melancholy charms. Why not enjoy them?"

Too many of our kind had gone mad this way, devoting themselves to sex, food, cruelty, crime... descending into the sort of derangement that celebrated all the things that appalled us about human life. Violence. Sadism.

"Your animal has gotten the better of you," I said.

"No; I have conquered my animal," he said. "I've cast aside the timidity of human life. I've embraced my own angelic nature. So have you, though you've done nothing bold with it."

"I've helped lost souls like you," I said.

"If I'm a 'lost soul,' the only way to redeem me is to let me go home." Zeron's glass was full again. He didn't bother returning to the sofa; he simply leaned back against his little bar, an elegant construction of dark wood and brass fittings. He stared at me over the rim of the full glass as he drank once more. "We all need to go home," he said, coming up for air.

I shook my head. "Not yet. We have to finish our work."

"Yes, well, like you said, I'm not one of the workers, am I? Not one of the busy little bees mending the holes we tore in reality when we tried to eradicate these pests instead of allowing them to eradicate themselves. It's insane, isn't it? What should have been a matter of setting things right... 'Cleanup in aisle two!'" he sang in a sudden, mocking voice. "...became, instead, an existential crisis. And, okay, it scared the absolute..." He hesitated, shrugged, the glass describing eloquent little arcs in the air. "The absolute ichor out of us. Traumatized us. Made us too scared to try doing anything but putting things back the way we found them. Humans and Jaddek and Thra'ss and... and how many other kinds of biological intelligence in this galaxy? In all the galaxies? Pretty little pinwheels infested with their little mites of identity, their little moments of self-reflecting material cognizance... all of it spread before us in what should have been eternal beauty, except for those little mites, those beastly little disruptors making everything ugly with their pain and screams of anguish and lust and delight in inflicting harm, terror, and death. What a disgusting spectacle. And trying to clean it up... a fruitless, horrible sentence for our arrogance and our mistake." He drank off his second glass, then sucked an ice cube into his mouth and started crunching on it, a look of hatred and fury on his face.

"What's your point?" I asked.

Zeron spit fragments of ice back into his glass. "It's not necessary."

"What isn't necessary? Our work? Of course it is," I said. "For whatever reason, organic intelligence... as self-destructive as it always is, as chaotic and ugly as it is, is also foundationally essential to the universe."

"Why is that, do you suppose?" Zeron asked.

I knew why. I had once met a creator entity – that was what he called himself, a creator entity – and he had made the horrific nature of existence clear in a few short sentences. The universe... no, more than that; the entire cosmos, all the trillions upon trillions of universes that existed... was a kind of machine, a device that was clicking away in search of a solution to this very problem: Could organic intelligence balance the crude, unthinking imperatives that drove its existence without those same imperatives eventually causing it to eradicate itself?

A strange question to ask. My theory was that the question was born of an even stranger necessity: The creator entities, whatever they were, needed a new home. The cosmos was a test case for a fresh mode of existence. But from what the creator entity had said, the vast universe – the vast multiplicity of universes – was coming a cropper. Whatever their problem was, whatever existential threat they faced in their own mode of being and at their own level of existence, the universe we lived in was no answer for it. None of the universes like ours was an answer for it.

That's a lot to try to understand, especially when you're confined to the cognitive processes of an organic nervous system. And that wasn't even all of it: The cosmos as a whole wasn't just a nearly infinite collection of universes weaving in and out of existence, spalling from one another, veering off from one another, rejoining one another like an immense and complicate system of waterways; each and every universe was also vibrating into different configurations of cause and effect, histories of event rippling through them eternally, diverse and divergent possibilities shaking out and reordering. My own conception of it was that each universe was a book housed in an infinite library, thick books containing numberless pages not of staid, unchanging type but rather scintillating, ever-changing waves and patterns. Incandescent, kaleidoscopic books, containing Mandelbrot sets that blossomed in patterns that both repeated and yet never replicated – not precisely. All shades of all possible permutations were the stories written in those books, and what was not possible in one volume was explicit and necessary in others...

Zeron was right about the inadequacies of human language and human conception. He was right that the human brain has a limited capacity for comprehension; only a few thoughts and ideas are possible for organic intelligence, all of it scriven ineradicably into shockingly tiny brains. Humans... and Srolta, and every other kind of smart physical being... had to follow a handful of hard-wired directives. Yes, they told stories of gods and demons and heroes, but the stories all sprang from the same ingrained, physiologically inevitable obsessions. Yes, they wrote symphonies as well as seeking out sustenance to power their metabolically reliant bodies, but while those symphonies reflected profound cosmic realities of structure and ratio and resonance, they barely grasped the concept of the mathematics in the music, and the way those mathematics informed the bones of all reality.

There was no way to explain any of this to Zeron, or to anybody. Having seen it, I could never not see it; but having seen it, I could never explain it, either.

But that line of thought reminded me of what it was Zeron was doing, and why.

"You think if you force humanity into a faster cycle of self-destruction, we all go home that much earlier," I said.

"Yep." Zeron smiled. "And not just humans, but all the other organic intelligences, too."

"Even though you know the disaster we put into motion when we tried to eradicate them from all of existence, past and future and throughout hypertime?"

He laughed. "Hypertime! Just more iterations of the most insufferable aspect of all the insufferable aspects of living in physiological form."

"You're not answering the question. Changing how the universe plays out changes the shape of cause and effect and unmakes the universe."

"A universe that's always changing anyway!"

"Yes, of course, but on its own terms. If we change it..."

"It won't matter!" Zeron cried. "Because the operation of the universe is fundamentally musical – melodic – self-correcting, self-repairing, inspired and flexible."

"Absolutely not," I told him. "Change anything, any detail..."

"And a new universe spalls from the pre-existing one, and they both play out. They all play out, in infinitely complicating ways... until they resolve back into a single strand of cause and effect."

"No. That's magical thinking. You're convincing yourself to believe in illusions, not facts."

"What are facts?" Zeron challenged me. "The universe is atoms and fields; those atoms and fields are particles... quarks... and, more essential still, information. That's all. Information about how the world is and how it works. That information is mathematical in construction, but musical in expression. The universe needs conscious, intelligent animals. It's got them! We're not trying to pull them up by the root any longer; we allow them to blossom and bear fruit, and the fruit is the continued existence of the universe. The Thra'ss and the Srolta, all the other forms of intelligent life, they have been observers affecting the cosmos through their observations. But the time for their necessity is over. The universe doesn't need them any more, and nor do we."

"They have to enact their entire history, or else the history is no longer what it should be. And that's why the universe dissolves: Because it's no longer the universe it's supposed to be," I argued. "You're pretending that if you pull out the walls, then, because the floors exist, the roof won't cave in. You're deluded."

"You're small-minded," Zeron screamed. "And afraid! And I'm not... I'm a visionary!"

"You're a madman!" I cried.

We were both emotional at this point. Anger, excitement, fear... animal impulses all, more selections from the jukebox of the human brain and its hit parade of the Top Six tunes. A mere handful of avenues of thought and action – when, beyond the confines of human conception, limitless options remained, all unimagined.

Zeron was falling prey to one of humanity's gravest flaws: The ability to believe in a lie.

"No wonder you're best friends with the president," I muttered angrily, willing myself to step outside the narrow channels of crude neurophysiology and not succeeding.

"Tomas Arancia is a useful tool," Zeron scoffed. "An idiot, as all these semi-conscious zombies are. But appeal to his unwitting silverback nature, and he's all too easy to manipulate."

"Which is what you're doing," I said, hearing the acid in my tone. "Turning him into the most powerful despot of all time. Pushing him to abandon all semblance of caution or even calculation. His schemes and cruelties don't even factor in the cost – to himself, to the planet we live on, to the people he foolishly thinks he can dominate no matter what."

"And he can dominate them," Zeron said airily. "The mass of the populace are even duller and dimmer than he is. Barely conscious, not even higher forms of animal life. Humans have potential, yes... and the vast majority of them fall far, far short of that potential. But so what? A human living at his full potential thinks six thoughts, follows six iron-clad biological imperatives... two, really, if you recognize that the drive for status is only an embellishment on the drive for procreation."

"All of that is true, but I'm not talking about human beings. I'm talking about the universe, and the necessity of not changing its event content."

"Event content that is always changing anyway! You know this – you and I are the same, are we not? Don't we both see how past and future continually shift? Causality reaches backwards in time, effect precedes cause, the great river of cosmic history dances in multiple streams all at once, routing and rerouting forever and forever. Humans and their insanity exist for a flicker in hypertime, then they never existed. Why shouldn't we help that process along?"

"Because if we do, we change what is necessarily supposed to happen. We unwrite that same cosmic history you say is nothing but a chaos, and when we do that... when we do that the universe unravels. And we unravel with it."

Zeron stood up, still perfectly sober... and still perfectly mad, lost to his delusions and magical thinking. "You want to stop me? You want to kill this animal body? I can kill you right back, you know. It's not like my security systems didn't monitor you approaching my property, crossing my land, entering my house, coming to this room to find me. I can use masers to broil your animal on the spot, all with a thought command. I can have a hundred, a thousand projectiles rocketed through that bag of a body, its sloppy wet contents shredded, its functions discontinued. What then? Will you choose a new human infant that the universe, with its precious and inalterable index of events, dictates must perish from crib death, and change all of existence by inhabiting it, preventing its extinguishment?"

"That's not the same as what you're doing. Helpers and day trippers don't have children, don't do anything extraordinary to shift the flow of history."

"And yet, every swerve of every particle adds up to the universe as it's supposed to be, doesn't it?"

"You know we're talking about different scales of intervention. A helper's footprint is erased by the shifting of quantum fluctuations. Randomness works in our favor, and the universe's essential fuzziness glosses over the insignificant alterations a helper causes to happen. You're focused on the wrong thing. Don't worry about helpers – it's workers we should be talking about. The ones who live out the lives of the humans we erased. The ones who enact the significant events – founding companies, having children, shaping the contours of events and, therefore, of cosmic history. When we erased those people, that's when the universe began to dissolve. Restitching those threads is how we save the tapestry of existence and save ourselves. But here you are, trying to tear it all apart again!"

"We went too far. That's true. But we don't have to retrace all human action and the entire bloody, hideous history of living minds. We've surpassed the tipping point. To use your own argument, we've re-created the essential parts of history – we can stop now, we can erase these animals by helping them self-destruct, and the universe will simply self-correct. And we, at last, we can abandon these bodies, this horrific pinched-down mode of existence, this dreadful limitation. We can go home. We can be ourselves. I mean... ourself, without this agonizing separation and atomization. We can be one again, or we can be infinite in variety. A single being. A plethora of viewpoints and a myriad of species of thought. We can have our great debates... and yet be whole, as we used to be."

Zeron walked across the room and paused close to me, so close I could smell the scotch on him and feel the heat of his animal body – and also feel the tingle of his Celestial presence. "You can join me. You can try to stop me... and have your animal obliterated. Or you can get back to your own business and leave me to mine, and when we are one again... One again... we can resonate together in the knowing that I was right." He smiled. "This conversation is over. I have a president to manipulate, a planet to destroy, and species to erase. And after this one, a million or a trillion more species, but what does all that matter? We leap out of these bodies, we leap into new ones, we cross all of space and time at will. Our freedom will be won in a million years, or twelve million... not in thirty billion years, like the way you'd have us go about it.

"But tell me one thing," he added, leaning in toward me, smiling, eyes penetrating. "What's your name?"

"Darius," I told him. "Jason Darius."

"So good to meet you. And I'd invite you to get naked and have some fun... the other kind of fun these amoebas know how to have... but I'm guessing you'd just say no. Or?" His eyes held inquisitiveness along with the firelight of his reckless madness.

"No," I said. "I have things to take care of, too."

"Fine." He drew back, still eyeing me, the light in his eyes still deranged and yet wistful, too.

I understood. As insane as he had become, he was still a Celestial – still my brother, my fellow being, my self at its deepest level.

Zeron was correct that I couldn't stop him. I knew his security systems were tracking me, could take me down at any time, just as he knew I was coming, and just as I knew that he knew.

He walked away, and the buzz of his Celestial aura faded, no longer in contact with my own. But still I felt the itch...

I had been feeling the itch – a nebulous, peculiar sensation – for some time; it wasn't an animal sensation of skin and nerve and electrical processing in a wet organic brain. It was deeper than that, an echo of a disturbance in the foundations of reality. It was like the whalesong echo of colliding black holes or the sparkling fizz of strands of causality pulling off into fuzzy aurorae from the central cosmic throughline, as fuzzy as a length of yarn and as ticklish to our bodiless, timeless selves... or, self... as seltzer water to a human tongue.

It was the same itch I felt when we tried to eradicate humankind... and all other forms of biological intelligence, as well... from the universe. An itch that arose from the universe pulling apart, dissolving, spinning not more tightly into the inevitable determinations of natural law but rather spinning apart into splinters that shivered into nothingness, into never-having-beenness...

The universe was ending all over again. Zeron was trying to take a shortcut and, in his insanity and blindness, he was short-circuiting all of existence.

I remained for a while in the room, in that mansion where he lived. I figured Zeron's security wouldn't zap me if I belatedly accepted his offer of a drink. Why not? Really, what else was there to do?

Pouring myself a glass, I imagined him looking as security camera footage of this moment and smiling over it in triumph, or maybe a sort of companionship.

The scotch was wonderful. My animal reveled in the drinking of it.

The rest of me hovered hopelessly over a void.

I felt a kind of despair that was not a matter of neurological channels lighting up, or brain chemicals, or bodily hormones, as all emotions are. This was a deeper thing, an aesthetic thing – a spiritual thing, some humans might have called it.

A kind of stunned disbelief, too. We knew better. We'd tried this once and nearly wiped ourselves out along with the entire universe. I had come here completely convinced that we, unlike humans, were creatures capable of setting animal directives aside and facing pure certainty – the mathematical certainty of the universe and how it works. A universe designed and put into motion by beings not even we... we angels, as we have come to call ourselves... can comprehend.

What did that creator entity call us? Their fingerprints, smudges of themselves left on the universe after they had created it. Mere echoes of their will and their power.

If we, like animal intelligences, could set aside truths for fantasies and live in our dreams even as we were dying, then could the creator entities, too, perish from such fallacies? Were we all simply echoes of the same yearning hopes and the same fatal flaws?

The itch is with me all the time. Cosmic history is ending, and our own existence with it – there will be no more tapestry when the very fabric of reality unravels and disappears, no more sea of pinwheels lapping at our feet, no more marginalia to call home, no more boundary between the physical universe with its particles and its fields and the infinite hyperspace around it.

It's closing time, and... my human self, my meager animal mind laughs... I haven't even got a date.

The End