Chapter 10: The Revolution

10

In his peripheral vision to the left, Norman can see Wayne playing air drums along to the music in his headphones. He looks over at Wayne for a few moments, taking a break from the data and leaning back in his chair. Wayne has his eyes closed and his whole body bounces in his office chair as he plays his invisible drum kit. The performance is so unashamed and genuine that Norman can’t help but smile.
the Revolution

Wayne opens his eyes and notices Norman watching him. Wayne grins sheepishly but keeps on drumming, and begins to sing along, “’and isolation is the oxygen mask you’re making children breathe in to survive … I’m not a slave to a god that doesn’t exist! I’m not a slave to a world that doesn’t give a shit! And when we were good, you just closed your eyes…’” He hums the next line and then starts chanting, grinning, “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” He slips his headphones down around his neck, revealing the heavy pulse of the music playing through them, and says, “What’s up, bub?”
“Hey man,” Norman laughs. “I love that song. I haven’t heard that song in a grip.”
“Fuck yeah, dude. Marilyn Manson.”
“Word.”
Wayne laughs. “What’s a grip?”
Norman laughs in response. “A while. Long or short, either way. In this instance, long. Say, man, why do they call you Revolution?”
Wayne chuckles under his breath and shouts over his shoulder, “Hey Harvey, why do they call me Revolution?”
“Because you’re the fucking Revolution incarnate, dude,” Harvey shouts over the divider, then scoots his chair around the edge to join Norman and Wayne. He looks at Norman, grinning his comedian’s grin, and says, “Who the fuck’s asking?”
“I just find it really interesting, this sort of Zeitgeist idea of the Revolution that we all understand, and we use the same words and we’re probably talking about the same kind of thing…”
“Bringing down the Man,” Wayne says, nodding.
“Creating a sustainable society,” Harvey adds, shrugging, “yeah.”
“Yeah. Post-capitalism, I call it,” Norman says, “or post-humanism. The way I see it, all this shit that’s going on right now, all this awful vengeance and war and terror and misinformation and everything, is just basically the last throes of the Old Guard, of those human assholes who are just working by the old human hierarchies of leadership and oppression-based economies. We’ve got the technology and the communication abilities now, with the Internet and everything, to totally take care of everyone on Earth, to take care of everyone, but there’s no way that would happen in the current context, because if there weren’t fucking third world Africa and shit, the Big Eight or whatever would have no one to feel better than.
“So post-humanism is my idea of a philosophy that accepts the responsibility of freewill, of actually being a being of volition, of choice, that can supersede its biological instincts and be righteous by practicing true reason. You know what I mean?”
“Right on,” Harvey nods. “Have you heard of Bill Hicks?”
“Bill Hicks? No. You mentioned him once before, my first day.”
Wayne laughs. Harvey pats Norman on the shoulder and says, “Oh, man, Bill Hicks is the shit. He talks all about this kind of stuff – about enlightenment and post-humanism and politics and everything. He’s a comic. He’s dead now.”
“Bill Hicks is great,” Walt agrees from across the divider.
“Yeah, man,” Wayne agrees. “Bill Hicks is fucking brilliant, man. He talks all about this kind of shit, and he’s a comedian, but it’s hilarious because all he’s really doing is raging out about the bullshit illusions of America and all that shit, and fuckin’ talking about shrooming out and experiencing spiritual bliss and all this shit, and it’s hilarious because it’s all fuckin’ true, you know? And he just – he’s awesome.”
“Word.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a CD of his,” Harvey says, turning to his computer and looking through his Windows Media Player songlist. “I should burn it for you. Wayne, next time you get some free CD-R’s from the office supply room, grab me a few.”
“Yount, amigo,” Wayne chuckles.
“It’s awesome, because this is all the kind of shit the book I’m working on is about,” Norman says, hoping to start a conversation about the book, realizing now that it will have to include scenes from this data entry room, as many synchronicities as seem to have accrued here.
“Oh yeah, you’re writing a novel, right?” Elliot asks.
“Yeah, man,” Norman says, turning to Elliot. “It’s my second…”
The door to the hallway opens and everyone in the room turns to look, many deftly minimizing games of Solitaire and removing headphones. Two young men – one skinny and bespectacled, the other tall and gangly with something reminiscent of a flat top hairdo – enter the room cautiously, looking around with shy smiles, followed by Kendra who sings, “Hello, gentlemen!”
“Hey, Kendra,” Harvey replies, scooting his chair back over to his station.
“Everybody, this is Colin,” she says, gesturing to Glasses, “and this is Marcus,” gesturing to Flat Top. “I believe that makes ten of you, officially. Where do you guys think they could sit? Are there any open computers left?”
“Oh yeah,” Timothy says, scooting over to one of the empty stations on Wayne and Norman’s side of the room, “just let me clear these off. We’ve been using this one as sort of a reference library.” He picks up America: the Book, a book on Native American medicine cards and a stack of science and culture magazines, moves them over to the little table with the phone at the far corner of the room.
Colin and Marcus are introduced with handshakes all around. Norman notes that Colin, who looks early-twenties but is probably more like late-twenties, looks him in the eye when he is introduced and instantly seems to take note of the false eye, whereas Marcus, who must be no older than twenty, looks modestly down into space when he shakes Norman’s hand. Kendra shows them which icon to open on their computers and briefly explains the data entry process in an expedited manner that seems to imply that she has already explained much of it. After a few minutes, she says, “Okay?” and heads for the door. She clings to it while she adds, “If you have any questions, you can ask these guys or give me a call, okay? Okay. Or shoot me an email, or whatever works best for you. Okay, you guys, thanks! Keep up the good work! I’ll see you later.” She is laughing at some face Harvey is making that Norman can’t see as she leaves the room and shuts the door behind her.
“Well,” Elliot says, “welcome to the data entry room.”
“Thanks,” says Colin.
“How long have you guys been working here?” Marcus asks the group collectively.
Harvey, Elliot and Timothy all look at each other, waiting for one of the others to reply, then Harvey says, “April. I’ve been here since April. And it was only supposed to go through June back then.”
“Ha!” Norman laughs. “Awesome. They told me it would only go through the end of September.”
“Yeah, that’s unlikely,” Timothy says with a little laugh. “We’ve got how many documents left to go through, just for Pittsfield?”
“About twenty-five thousand,” Elliot says.
“Yeah, I bet we’ll be here through Christmas at least,” Wayne says. “I certainly hope we are, that is. Make your own hours? No supervision? It doesn’t get any better than this shit.”
Colin laughs.
“Make your own hours?” Marcus asks with interest. “What do you mean?”
“We can come in and do this shit whenever we want,” Wayne says, turning around in his chair to face Marcus and Colin. “We can make our own hours. They gave you guys keys, right?”
“Not keys,” Marcus says, pulling out his keychain, “just this little magnetic thing.”
“Right. That’s a key. It lets you in the building. It’s a key.”
“I suppose it is. It functions like a key,” Marcus muses, rubbing the little gray plastic wand attached to his keychain.
“That’s what makes a thing a key,” Wayne laughs.
“Do I take it we don’t get frequent visits from Kendra, then?” Colin asks.
“Oh not at all,” Harvey says. “She’s come in here twice in the past month, and it was to bring Norman by two weeks ago, and then to bring you two by.”
“Yeah, we hardly ever see her,” Timothy agrees. “She just calls sometimes, or emails us more often. Just checking in.” He snickers, “It’s pretty great.”
“So we just come in and enter the information from these documents into this database, and that’s pretty much it?” Colin asks.
“Pretty much,” Elliot says.
“Yeah,” says Harvey. “Every few weeks we’ll have a group download with Kendra to tell her what we’re seeing on the invoices. But other than that it’s just hanging out in here and talking about philosophy and metaphysics and shit, right Norman?”
Norman smiles to himself. “So it would seem,” he says. “In fact, right before you guys arrived we were in the middle of such a conversation.”
“Oh yeah,” Harvey remembers, “what were we talking about? You were talking about Wayne and asking why I call him the Revolution.”
“And then we were talking about how all that, all this, ties into the book I’m writing.”
“You’re writing a book?” Marcus asks.
“What kind of book?” Colin asks.
Norman frowns and purses his lips, trying to think how to describe it. “It’s a novel,” he says, unsure if even that is accurate. “Sort of. It’s a fictionalization of a memoir of my life right now, interspersed with the story of my past few years, through which I’ve had a series of enlightenment experiences slash epiphanies, and also I think it might end up sort of functioning as a philosophical treatise on certain subtle physics of spirituality, as it were, of the interface of existence and the nature of awareness and being and choice.”
“Bo-ring,” Elliot jokes. Timothy laughs softly. Norman bites his lip, instantly feeling the dizziness of insecurity and having to momentarily reach inside and retrieve his confidence. “Sounds pretty heady,” Elliot adds after a moment.
“I suppose it will be,” Norman admits. “But at the same time it’s also going to be a very real story of a man living in today’s world – an intelligent man who pays attention and thinks rationally above all and actually has compassion and progress as personal goals for both himself in the micro or personal sense and for humanity in general in the macro sense. And it will be a love story, the story of my new romance with this lovely woman named Laura, I hope, and the story of my love of self, of the innate love of self that I think is lacking in most people these days, and, on a certain level, love for that great Reader entity which, in terms of the metaphor of the book, could be anybody in the future who could ever possibly read the book. But in abstract terms in this world, where the story isn’t just words in a book but is in fact a real world where we are all interacting and living our lives, what could the Reader be in this real context? And I realize that it’s still the same thing – nebulous, potential other people, it’s everyone in the future I work for, and it’s myself, and it’s nothing, and that everything sort of falls into a charybdis of meta, et cetera, et cetera.” Norman sits quietly for a moment, thinking about anything else that might be pertinent to explain to sufficiently describe the book. “I haven’t actually started writing it yet, per se,” he admits, “but I’ve been writing it in my head (since it is a memoir, ish), with my deeds and thoughts, for some time now. Ever since I finished my first book, really.”
“So this is your second book?” Colin asks. He continues, with a wry grin, “…that we’re taking part in right now?”
“Exactly,” Norman smiles.
“You know Norman has a glass eye?” Wayne remarks, pointing to Norman’s eye. Norman laughs, startled, and leans away from Wayne’s finger.
“I was actually wondering about that,” Colin says with a nod. “What’s your first book about?”
“Well, it’s basically about this guy and his daughter who are sort of fleeing status quo society in similar ways at the same time, and they go through these corresponding odysseys and … it’s philosophical fiction, as well. The characters slowly make these same sorts of realizations that I have, and it makes them realize the nature of their own artificiality, their own fictional natures, and they make contact briefly with me the author in the form of a giant, glowing, winged serpent…”
“A coatl?” Elliot asks with a toothy grin, leaning around the central divider.
“Exactly,” Norman says, pointing. “A coatl. Which, of course, besides being a D&D monster, is also an ancient mystical symbol for the dual nature, the in-between-stage, much like the Hanging Man, and also of the invasive Logos, the sort of messianic returned sacred information, supposedly.”
“Quetzalcoatl is coming back, you know,” Wayne says eagerly. “Twenty-twelve, baby; end of this phase of the Mayan calendar.”
“That’s right,” Norman says with a smile, his heart filled with the ecstasy of a sudden powerful awareness of and appreciation for the current scene, where it is dawning on him that he is suddenly not the only person talking about this sort of thing. It’s almost beginning to feel to him as if he is more and more becoming truly the author of the world that surrounds him, beyond just himself. As if somehow a larger version of himself which he is only a part of is dipping its fingers into the world and pushing people, moments, closer to him as he wanders.
“That’s very cool,” Marcus says.
“Totally,” Norman agrees, then adds, “thanks.”
“Is the Mayan calendar thing part of your story, too?” Marcus asked, suddenly confused. “I thought that was real.”
“That is real,” Norman explains. “I thought you were saying my book sounded cool.” He laughs. “Sorry about that.”
“Oh, no problem,” Marcus says with a friendly smile.
“So, what’s the central conflict, then, in the book that’s taking place now?” Colin asks. “Or is that a personal question somehow?” Some of the other guys laugh. “Because I guess that would be the same as asking what the big drama in your life is, and I just met you.”
Norman laughs. “Yeah, no, it’s cool. I guess the central conflict in the book is on the large scale. It occurs on the level of the zeitgeist, I imagine, sort of between gods and corporations and asuras and Norman. Like: he enlightens, which is to say, he forms concrete, lasting understandings of the existence of the expanse of dimensions that rises out around us, the more that there is to all of this, and how all of that is actually just also here, it’s just hidden from us in its complexity – things like the zeitgeist, and sort-of spirits of believed-in things, if that makes any sense. The realm of the collective unconscious. And he learns to leave his body, and to astrally travel between dimensions, up along them and such, to expand his mind to a point where he can actually make sense of the tiny bits of random information in the nothingness that end up actually…”
Norman slows to a stop as Colin starts to shake his head and furrow his brow, but when he stops speaking, Colin switches in a circular motion from head-shaking to head-nodding and assures him, “I’m with you, I think,” while furrowing his brow even more. “He starts to exist at that level, and he explores the various dimensions, and the conflict is at that level?”
“Right,” Norman nods. “And so, the conflict is at that level, and Norman kind of forces himself into that conflict because he thinks he’s so fucking wise and he knows the meaning of life and everything, and maybe it complicates things up there, and in the waking-life part of the book, he begins to notice little effects of his mind activities on the real world, or so it seems, and through all of this of course he’s writing this book, the book I’m writing, and it starts to make him think about how he’s becoming the author of his world more and more it seems, more and more outside of his direct body interactions and such. Like his thoughts are seeping into the water system or something, and synchronicities start popping up everywhere he looks, which they have been for me lately.”
“Me too, man,” Harvey notes with a serious look in his eyes. “Fucking everywhere I look lately, there are weird synchronicities. I’ll be thinking about something, then there it will be in the street or whatever.”
“I tend to take synchronicity to mean that I’m generally heading in the right direction. Because what is synchronicity, or just little well-written parts of a scene I’m in, but … you know, they’re the well-written scenes.”
“Or the unbelievable ones,” Wayne adds.
“But, honestly, one of the things I’ve been kind of struggling with in my mind is the whole concept of conflict in narrative in general – supposedly it’s the core of every good story, and that seems true in some fundamental existential way, but at the same time, as an advocate of peace both in the macrocosmic sense of Peace On Earth and in the personal sense of temperance and moderation and peace of mind within one’s inner person, and in terms of compassion and non-violence and all of that, I feel like conflict is not necessarily something we need to keep promoting in fiction. And anyway, the reality is often peace – much of my life is very peaceful. I mean, I think there absolutely can be stories worth telling in which it’s just ideas and beauty, you know what I mean? And yet, at the same time, the world at large is obviously swamped with various conflicts of ideology and firearm at the moment, and so in terms of that saturating the zeitgeist right now, there’s almost no way I can escape conflict. I fucking hate humans sometimes, when they’re assholes.”
Wayne nods energetically and laughs. “They are assholes.”
“Well, they can be, is the thing,” Norman adds. “I mean – they also can be reasonable and cool, you know? Like us, here, talking. Being rational and compassionate and understanding that each of the others of us is just like us, at the essential core of being.”
“Exactly.”
“And so, I guess the real point of my book is supposed to involve the fact that human beings can rise above the bestial bullshit of instinct and ignorant tradition, and to a certain extent I feel like part of the reason I’m here on Earth is to be not so much a teacher as just an example, to show people that you really can live an enlightened life of awesomeness.”
“Arrogance!” Elliot scoffs, laughing.
Norman shrugs, just a tad embarrassed. “Perhaps,” he admits. He softly bites the inside of his mouth, staring into space in the direction of the middle of the room. “But it’s also me speaking genuinely, which in my judgment trumps most other concerns when deciding what to say or not to say that I’m thinking.” He sniffs to himself. “And now,” he says, “I think I’ll stop talking for a moment and enter some data.”
He turns back to his screen and starts inputting data (an action which has already become second nature to his fingers in the past week, and which he thusly doesn’t have to really pay attention to anymore while doing it; his mind roams).


After a short period of silent data entry, Colin turns in his chair and addresses Norman. “So, Norman, were you a Philosophy major or an English major?”
“Neither, actually. Art; painting.”
“Oh, you’re a painter too?” Colin says with a smile. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“I’m a painter,” Marcus adds, looking up suddenly from his data.
“Cool. Yeah. I haven’t painted in years, though, since I realized that no one really cares about new paintings or painters anymore, at least no one outside of the insular art world.”
“Not entirely true, but I see your point,” Harvey says from the other side of the room.
“Which is why now what I focus on is film, music and literature.”
“You do film, too?” Colin asks.
“Well, I’ve written several screenplays, and I made a couple of shorts in college. Film is the goal, because to a certain extent I’d say it’s the most proliferated and noted-on-a-large-scale of the modern art forms – it’s just so likable – but obviously film is kind of a hard medium to just jump into. As far as direct translation from mind to product, it and pencil drawing are pretty much like diametrically opposed, you know what I mean?”
Colin nods, sort of smiling.
“I had funding set up for my first film over the summer, but I was involved with the woman who was funding it and that sort of led to it falling apart. Or maybe the reverse is true. I don’t know. I’ve been far more focused on the literature side of things lately, since I moved back out here. Are you from around here?”
“No, I’m from Ohio,” Colin replies. “I live with my girlfriend at her parents’ house.” He nods slowly as he says it, ending in a taut mouth of dissatisfaction.
“Hey man,” Norman says, commiserating, “I live in my sister’s basement, so I feel you.”
Colin laughs. “Nice.”
“I don’t know anybody in our generation who didn’t have to go back and live with family after college for at least a little while,” Elliot adds, leaning around the divider.
“That’s because capitalism is failing,” Wayne spits venomously, yet somehow still with a touch of lightheartedness. “The system is fucked up and doesn’t work.”
“Let’s not blame the system,” Elliot says slowly.
“No, man, I’m sorry, but fuck the system. We need to bring it all down. Just nuke it all. Just wipe out the human-settled areas and pray the Earth can heal.”
“Damn, Wayne,” Norman laughs.
“Rage it up, Kris,” Harvey calls out.
“I’m about to,” Wayne responds. “I’m talking about absolute destruction of this whole capitalist system, killing all these fucking douches who have perpetrated their wars against us and against the Earth itself.”
“And then, what, live in anarchy?” Elliot asks sarcastically, sounding a bit annoyed.
“I have to imagine that humanity really can live together in harmony,” Norman interjects. “I mean, we all at least have the capability to understand certain unifying characteristics of all people and to understand that everyone is at the heart of it all mostly the same, that we’re all the same connected net of awarenesses.”
“It’ll never work that way on a macroscopic level,” Elliot retorts. “There will always be fuck-ups and ignorant assholes. You can’t just leave them behind, and you’re not going to create anything righteous by killing them.”
“That’s too bad, isn’t it?” Wayne jokes. “It would be a lot easier. But I suppose you’re right.”
“I think what anyone calls evil is really just ignorance or neglectedness, and I’m going to go so far in this moment as to say that I think maybe other people’s ignorance is our fault,” Norman declares.
“How so?” Colin asks.
“Well, because it seems like everyone who is a thinking, decision-making person has the capability of understanding any number of things that they just may not have been exposed to. Don’t we, the enlightened, the blessedly idle, have some sort of obligation to educate the ignorant?”
“No, because most of them are making the specific choice to remain ignorant,” Harvey notes with a raised eyebrow.
“Jesus,” Norman says, shocked. “You’re probably right, aren’t you? How sad.”
“Hey, it’s their choice.”
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. But largely I don’t think that’s true. Like, in America maybe that’s often true, but elsewhere … well, no, I guess it’s not like we have a better education system than pretty much anyone else. We’re not the only ones who culturally validate willful ignorance. Scratch that.
“But anymore, it seems to me, all you need to do is look at history and sociology and all these things – just look at the facts, just seek out the truth and it is out there. But any real truth must be all-encompassing, always true, and so the truth is everything, and every perspective, and is untrue without such. And so everything real, everything distinct is untrue.
“You put together all the evidence out there and it becomes clear, it seems to me, completely clear that the current system is not really fundamentally any different than the earliest human societies, insomuch as elite groups hold control over the masses by means of arbitrary, or rather strategic, I should say, strategic oppression, but at the macro-level of nations. If we gave medicine to Africa and fed all the starving people in the world and actually let everyone live equally, nothing would be the same. And yet, we could feed everyone and take care of everyone, definitely, with the current resources and everything, but we keep it here for Americans. I don’t know. I’m rambling.”
He turns and enters the date from an invoice into the date field in the database beside it, then turns back around.
“If people could just study existence rationally and … it’s like I can’t understand how anyone could not understand these things I’ve come to see, anymore.” He shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s like…” His speech trails off.
“No, I hear you, man,” Harvey assures him, reinvigorating Norman’s conversational passion.
“Here’s the way I see it,” Norman says, leaning forward in his chair and gesturally addressing the other guys, who have all turned around by this point to be part of the conversation. “Step one, I think, is the fundamental realization of self. Going, ‘Oh, okay, there’s this me-thing, and that’s what I am. I’m this observing/judging entity that gets information through this body and other sources and is able to make very simple choices within the context of that body, but then also on this other plane, this place that isn’t really part of the world around us, this inner place where we have abstract thoughts and memories and such.’”
“Inside our brains,” Walt says.
“Well, yes,” Norman replies, leaning his head toward his shoulder in a gesture of that’s-partially-right, “but whatever’s happening in our brains – the chemical shit with memory and sensory input and everything – is clearly observed and acted upon by some external entity … a soul, to use the parlance of our times.” Wayne chuckles; Norman nods in recognition of Wayne’s recognition of Norman’s use of a line from The Big Lebowski. “And whatever it is that is observing and judging – that awareness engine that is my unique perspective – that above all things must be me.”
“Sure,” Harvey nods.
“Okay, so step two, then,” Norman continues, “takes us to the World – the Other. That which is not the self, that which is distinct from the self, that which I’m reacting against and within. Because, of course, the only thing that makes a thing a thing is its distinction from everything else, its unique characteristics. In order for it to mean anything that I am me, there must also be something else. Eternity is void; ubiquity, true homogeneity is informationless, is inert. Anyway. So there’s this other stuff, this world that we exist within. And within this outside world, there are other beings, other selves all with different characteristics, but all choice-making, perceiving entities like me. Or so it seems.
“Step three comes through the process of maturation, with age, and thereafter, the process of becoming aware of the nature of one’s own maturation as a progression of understanding and knowledge, of wisdom, of really building something of yourself, and then you look around and you see different people in the human race acting at different levels of wisdom … there are some who are behind you, who have not come as far, at the very least among children. And yet when does one become an adult? And is that the end? And how many children do I know that are worlds wiser than a lot of the adults I know? All adults are is children who have been around long enough to know how to get the younger people to do what they tell them and think they know it all. No one alive today invented the wheel or made agriculture out of nothing. It’s just fifth graders thinking they’re better than the third graders. Mostly they’re just bullshitting children whose bodies have changed. And you can keep going down along through evolution, then, and you see that biologically the same process of maturation has been occurring, and it’s called Evolution, right, and now everybody I know has a copy either of The Bible or The Origin of Species whether or not they’ve ever actually read it.”
“I have a copy of The Origin of Species,” Walt notes with a smile.
“Me too,” Harvey nods. He looks over at Timothy, who is smiling and nodding as well.
“I have both,” says Elliot.
“This is why That Great Fearmonger, the Heisenburglar, is my book’s villain. It is the fear in uncertainty, the illusion of lack, that has us in this black iron prison of suffering that the world does not need to be.”
“The Heisenburglar?” Elliot asks, laughing. “That’s awesome. What is that from?”
“It’s from my book, my brain. The book I’m planning on writing, my next book, after the romance novels that is, but … well, maybe I’ll work on it at the same time. I should be working on it. It’s fucking filling my veins. Anyway. In the book – the book is about this me character, this fictionalized Norman who is going through similar things, and it will be about his sort-of process of enlightenment, and him then interacting with the entities at that zeitgeist level and becoming a player at that level – right, like I said – and so his enemy is this character called the Heisenburglar, who obviously is the one who steals all those unperceived things, moments, thoughts, et cetera. And so his whole thing is that he’s sort of unperceivable, alien and yet somehow omnipresent, although, really almost, like, apresent. And I’m thinking at this point, maybe, that the Heisenburglar sort of becomes real because the Norman character creates him for his book, in this very meta sort of way. But he has to confront him then, nevertheless. I don’t know. It’s a bit hard to describe outside of the narrative and the character’s thought processes.”
Elliot just nods, smiling, his brow furrowed and his head cocked a bit to the side. “Hmm,” he says. Then he adds, “Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”
Norman’s fingers suddenly feel painfully cold. He crosses his arms tight against himself and says, “Damn, it’s cold in here.” Norman shivers and turns back around to his screen. He begins to worry about the fact that he doesn’t have his own villain entirely figured out yet, and wonders, once he does understand him, how long he will have been lurking.
Also, his hands being cold makes him think about Sylvia. She remains on the periphery of his thoughts, smoking, legs crossed.
“Yeah man, it’s cold today,” Wayne agrees. “You guys ever wonder if, like, if everything that people believe in, like you know, like gods and spirits of things and all that shit, if like there’s some dimension where, like, all that stuff actually exists and all those imagined planes where different gods dwell and shit, like the Outer Planes in D&D…”
“Planescape,” Elliot laughs.
“…if they, like, are real places, like, at least as real as this, or differently real or whatever, and like, you can go there in your mind, but all this is in your mind too, so, like, what’s the difference, you know? And, like, maybe if you had the right kind of spiritual/mental strength, if you were, like, wizard-level, you know, you could actually, like project there or whatever?”
“Totally,” Norman says, pointing at Wayne, excited to hear such words coming from another.
“When I was in Kazakhstan we met this guy who could actually levitate his body.” Wayne shrugs, grinning. “I saw it, man. It was like…” and he holds his finger and thumb very close together, “…like that far, but still, dude, I saw it happen. Sufi dude. He could levitate, and sort of move around just above the ground. Changed my shit forever.”
“Awesome,” Harvey says slowly, grinning at Wayne, his brow furrowed.
“You were in Kazakhstan?” Norman asks.
“Yeah, man. I was in Afghanistan and Kazakhstan.”
“Were you in the Army?”
“Oh, yeah. You didn’t know that? Special forces. Biggest fucking mistake I ever made.”
Norman smiles with relief. “I’m glad you think it was a mistake.”
“Oh fuck yeah, man,” Wayne coughs. “Fuck that shit. I’m absolutely against all that shit. Especially having been there, inside it.”
“Why did you go?”
He shrugs, appearing momentarily embarrassed and remorseful. “I was fucking stupid,” he says, dispelling the feelings with a laugh.
“Right on,” Norman laughs.
“Yeah. All we did most of the time was hang out on base and play Call of Duty, or – what was that one game, Elliot?”
“Medal of Honor?”
“No, that wasn’t it.”
“Were you in the Army, too?” Norman asks Elliot.
Elliot smiles and shakes his head quickly with closed eyes. “Just played the game with him once.”
“But, yeah. You know I could be called back anytime?”
“I thought you were out for good,” Harvey says.
“Doesn’t matter,” Wayne says, raising an eyebrow. “They can call me back anytime. And they’re doing that shit, too. Calling people back two, three times.”
“That’s fucked up,” Norman declares, and all nod in agreement.
“Yeah, so whatever you do, don’t fucking join the military,” Wayne laughs. “There’s the lesson for today.”
“Actually, you know,” Norman says, trying to get back to Wayne’s original thought, “I think you might be more right than you realize about the Outer Planes and different dimensions and all that shit. String theory demands a plethora of dimensions, and quantum physics plus choice seems to demand a multidimensional matrix of realities in which everything that can happen does happen in different quantum realities, at least hypothetically. But then all of this is hypothetical effectively, insomuch as it’s just in our minds.”
Wayne nods, grinning. “Word,” he says.
“So, wait,” Norman says, suddenly struck by a previous comment of Wayne’s, “they can call you back at any time? Is there no way that you can just, like, quit from the military?”
“Never, dude,” Wayne says with gravity in his face. “They’re calling back retired people in their sixties. They can bring you back at any time.”
“How can that be legal?” Norman asks. “How can there be a job you can’t just quit?”
“Well if you could quit, everyone would be quitting as soon as combat started,” Elliot notes with a chuckle that inexplicably irritates Norman. “You’d have a million guys all going, ‘You know what? Nevermind. This clearly isn’t worth it.’”
“Exactly,” Norman agrees, “but that should just go to show how reprehensible the work is, not that people should be forced to do it. Jesus, that’s insane. So, you’re effectively the government’s slave.”
“We all are, bub,” Wayne remarks with a laugh. “Citizen-slaves. But, yeah, more literally I am, yes, the military-industrial complex’s slave, and they could call me back anytime to kill or die for them. I’m a bit surprised they haven’t yet, really.”
“When were you overseas with the Army?”
“Special forces,” Wayne notes, raising an eyebrow, then looks to his mind’s eye for a moment, rubbing his chin. “I left for Basic in, what was it, Harvey, June of Two-thousand-one? Would it be Two-thousand-one? Yeah, it was.”
“Yeah,” Harvey agrees. “It was before everything.”
“Yeah,” Wayne continues, “and so we were shipped out to Germany for a while first for, like, that VR training shit and such. We were in Kazakhstan for a few of months, and Afghanistan just for a short time. I was only in Afghanistan for five weeks. Most of my tour was in Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan and then back here in the states. And anyway, mostly we just played fuckin’ FPS computer games on the LAN.”
“Did you ever see combat?” Norman asks.
“No, man. Good thing, too. I wouldn’t want to kill anyone for this country, not the way it works right now, where I’d actually just be killing for Halliburton executives and shit. I would only kill for personal reasons.”
Norman nods, thinking about corporations.
“We do need a revolution,” Timothy remarks with a laugh.
“I think we need to outlaw, or, rather, obsolete the corporation as an institution, for one,” Norman says. “I mean, do you guys realize that, in legal terms, corporations are sovereign entities? Our legal system does account for macro meta-entities, in terms of corporations and nation states and such. But these entities are judged legally as if they were individual humans, which they distinctly are not. They’re functioning at a much more complex level, with various new emergent dimensions depending on how big the entity is. It’s like trying to punish a god by putting him in the stockade. But imagine if at that level, at a level that we can’t witness through our eyes any more than a single blood cell in your capillaries can see the bigger picture of what your body is doing, at that level these meta-entities like nations and corporations are actually self-aware, and desire their own survival and propagation. Know what I mean?”
“So you want to outlaw the large-scale organization of human labor?”
“No,” Norman says with a laugh. “I think we just need to realize what these things are, and what’s going on. We need to be able to understand events at this level. We need to open our eyes to the things we share the world with. Like the pantheon of corporations that pay America and Poland and Paul Bunyon and Abraham Lincoln and Smoky the Bear and Jesus to do little street-corner one acts together to help sell the new placebo. I suppose I’m not necessarily against the existence of these things – that’s kind of absurd to be against the existence of something that exists, because it’s all connected, it’s all part of the same thing. Everyone’s just trying to do good. But I think we ought to be perhaps more keenly aware of the fact that they have potentially total control over our minds, our thoughts, our dispositions, our emotions, our opinions, what we do with each moment of our lives, et cetera, all of which are genuinely under attack almost every minute of our lives by I-don’t-know-what-yet, and that we’re far smarter than we’re allowed to think we are, and that even though these nations and corporations and leaders and teachers and priests and celebrities expect certain things of us, we can still rock our role any way we want; that we are innately and inoppressibly free. We need to realize that they really must follow our commands, and that right now we are getting what we fucking asked for.”
“Wow,” Wayne remarks.
“That’s the Revolution. The Evolution, really, is more appropriate. Because it has to be something that will still include all of this. We don’t want to tear down and build again. We don’t want to have to do any of this over. We just want to build the next level upon this. Humans aren’t going away, and not everyone is going to grow and change. We’re these intelligent beasts who seem to be at the top of the wisdom pyramid here on Earth, but there are still lower animals, still insects and fish and paramecia and amino acids. Indeed, we are composed of millions of these earlier creatures, these previous iterations of life. And so the post-humans will be composed of us – just more also. We will build on the foundation of Humanity a great new thing.” He shrugs. “That’s what we’re doing right now. This is our time of heroes. This is our mythic battlefield. And the scores are instantly recorded and posted for all to see. And I’ll tell you what…” He pauses briefly for dramatic timing. “We, the wise, the temperate, the tolerant, the inclusive, I fear, are losing. But even this, anyway, is just the last big acceleration right before the sweet jump.”
When Norman looks to his left, near the end of his ranting, he notices that Kendra has been casually standing in the open doorway, listening to him, politely smiling. He smiles back quickly.
“The leap to robot bodies and immortality, you mean,” Wayne continues.
“Well, yes, but I would say that the potential physical immortality of the machine body is insignificant compared to the expansion of awareness available with the machine brain. Immortality itself will be an obsolete concept when time itself is transcended by mind.”
“I don’t want my soul to be captured in a machine,” Kendra says with a cute frown. “I will keep my body, thank you.”
“Well, that’s fair,” Norman says, “but you won’t keep it for long. You need to keep in mind that the human brain is no less a machine than anything else. The change wouldn’t be sudden – it wouldn’t be, like, Man With Two Brains-style identity transfer or whatever through two popping Tesla coils. It would be a gradual process, presumably, of upgrading and synthesizing the two together at the nano-level – the brain and the computer. I mean, they already have microchips in people’s brains and artificial limbs that can be controlled from the brain and things like that. Are those people not human, or somehow subverting their humanity?”
Kendra half-smiles, trying desperately to communicate her uncertainty.
“Anyway,” Norman says, shaking his head. “Sorry. What’s up, Kendra?”
“Well, I just wanted to stop in to see how Colin and Marcus were doing. How are you guys?”
Colin and Marcus both smile and nod to Kendra.
“I’m doing just fine,” Colin says, gesturing to his computer screen and then to Marcus. “I don’t want to speak for you, necessarily, Marcus…”
Marcus shrugs and then gives a thumbs up. “Doin’ fine,” he says. “Got it figured out, I think. How are you?”
“I’m doing great,” Kendra laughs. “Okay, well, you know, ask questions if you have questions, and, you know, take breaks when you need to. I know Timothy and Elliot do pushups and stuff sometimes. That’s a good idea. I’ve seen Norman out smoking – that works too. You know, make yourselves comfortable, take your time, stretch your fingers if you need to. This stuff can get pretty dull, I imagine. But it looks like you guys know how to keep your minds occupied. Which is great. So alright, have fun, guys!” She clicks the door shut behind herself.
“See you, Kendra.”
Wayne raises an eyebrow, holding back a wide grin that exposes itself as soon as he thinks Kendra is out of range. He leans forward in his chair, close to Norman, and says with a comically manic tone of voice, “We need to start a fucking revolution, man…”
“Fuckin’ right on,” Norman agrees. “At the end of my first book, it’s about these young intellectuals like us sitting down together and discussing what actually needs to be done, what actually might work as far as a model for interrelating with each other, which fundamentally is what we’re talking about, right? I mean, what is society but our complex web of unspoken and/or spoken rituals and taboos and protocols, extrapolated to the large scale? But the problem is – see, yeah, here’s the problem: on that large scale, on that sort of abstracted, Zeitgeist-level scale of things, where these societal concepts and governmental associations with acronym names are whole entities instead of networks of different people, on that level the rules all begin to change. The entities, still barely self-aware, nevertheless desire their own survival and stuff like that. They begin to interact at that level independently of any of their component parts’ individual desires.”
“Wait, what?” Colin asks, leaning into the conversation.
“We need to develop some sort of real understanding, a physics or a chemistry of the Upper World, of the level of metaphors and concepts and corporations, or, as the blood vessels and brains of such entities, guide them toward self-awareness so that they, which is to say, we, can actually make rational, perhaps even moral decisions.”
Norman is more talking to himself at this point than actually conversing with anyone else in the room. His gaze is cast slightly downward, into his own mind. He is thinking about the book. As he speaks, in his mind’s eye he can also see the words as if on a white page.
He reads: “We need to keep awareness with us at all times; and doubt; and keep rebellion in our hearts. We need to cross-reference everything we hear and see with everything we have already seen and heard, to understand that everything is related to everything else, everything is connected, and everything is true somewhere (which is the same as saying ‘from a certain perspective’).”
“Who said that?” Colin asks, apparently assuming from the way Norman said the words that they are some famous quote.
“I did,” Norman replies with a silly smile, “just now.”