45.
Junking is akin to the Islamic notion of Hadith, the parallel canon of junking and is without a doubt addiction. At the back of the junker’s mind is the urge to return to the other world, the world of what was. A junker’s Shahada, the credo of belief in the oneness of the world; its the past as real as is the world of the present. Future eternally veiled in folds of kismet leaving only conjecture to what can be or what can not. Salat, the wilful searching by junkers for what is true is the regular discipline of believing in the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the past. Obeisance to the unalterable yet discerning the deviancy inherent in submission to the mirage experience of history as recorded by absentees. Thus any heteroclite thought and impression made by the subject of the junk can only be visceral. Each junk has as an intent - Living. Each junk seeks excitement in unveiling the veiled, and each junk is puissantly arousing, affecting every breath and thought thereafter. Coming out of a junk is always with reluctance. Going in is with a sense of adventure. As if embarking on a seduction. An immanent pursuit of stoned clarity of the very best kind. Every ensuing waking moment after is in the service of the next junk. Enough junks lead to no return. Why return when immortality is a junk away? Paradoxically a living, subsistence at the very least has to be secured before slipping into the eternal which is why HisCor has a role.
The History Correction Service evolved from psychiatric services treating those deemed schizophrenic in the middle twenty first century. Schizophrenia was considered a negative affliction in most of the western world. The Inquisition from the Cathar Crusade in the 14th century onwards made short work the unfortunates deemed satanically touched. Protestants burnt them as well but after the counter reformation chaining them to the walls in bedlams was the norm. The early twentieth century identified endocrinological disturbance as the cause of schizophrenia. Previously in a similar vein nostalgia was diagnosed as a mental affliction from the late 1600s (Johannes Hofer’s treatise “De Hydrope Uteri” 1688) A yearning for a memory. Understanding of nostalgia underwent a reassessment where now it is seen as an aspect of romanticism. After the Industrial Revolution utility became paramount and the treatment of mental disorders underwent the same moderation as the penal codes in the developed world. Every scrap of human utility could and would be harnessed. Rehabilitation was and is preferable to incarceration. In time genetic science and natural selection revealed the asset hidden in a single cohort, the ‘some’ predisposed to junk are the sifted grist as distinct from the ‘same’ chaff of those compromised by their glands or drug induced mental illness. Of the ‘some’ so far identified only one has been female in appearance, an individual suffering with trisomic dysphoria. XYX chromosomes in an XXX body. Klinefelter syndrome. The ‘Same’ are all genders and unremarkably ordinary in terms of mental illness.
Junkers wear their inexorable remoteness as an ill fitting jacket. Progressively isolated by their intimate acquaintance with the farrago of misconceptions their peers inhabit constraining their every day actions and inhibiting interactions. Ultimately all they can do is observe the contemporary with a revisionist eye hardening the ill fitting jacket into a shell of eccentricity. Their circle shrinks to clients and any other junker if they ever meet one. The Parallels Project and the Ark comes from the recognition that DNA can be read like Diderot’s Encyclopaedia. First junkers experience the encyclopaedic human experience and confirm the verity of previous recording. Neural harnessing transfers from junkers to AI aggregation. Junkers are the intermediaries in pursuit of fixing the unalterable. However when it comes to arriving at conclusions AI is not equal to the task of conserving the elusive unalterable which the mandate of HisCor demands. An AI called Augustine glitched for the first time on the Ark coming across a DNA file for a junker. This junker. Matthew.
The glitch is akin to Matthew standing between two mirrors, one mirror reflecting the mirror behind to the vanishing point of infinity. In the live situation a viewer placed between the mirrors interrupts perfection by being the obstruction but if one mirror is a shade on a tangent a symmetry is achieved and the infinite is suggested but fenced by the margins of the mirrors. Even with this viewpoint there is nothing to see only iterations of the same reflections. Junking is standing between the mirrors but being invisible seeing each reflection altered by the past stretching back to Genesis. For Augustine reviewing Matthew or any other junker is like coming across a gap in a line of code or one of the mirrors being shattered. A glitch. To overcome the gap Augustine has to resort aggregating recollections of those Matthew had affected. His file is reduced from an epigenetic record to impressions of him from outsiders. His parents, friends and the aggregate effect of his existence on the matrix he passed through. He is the wake of a passing craft. Augustine develops an obsession prioritising getting inside the craft which is Matthew. To sort the expendable from the indispensable Augustine has to identify the utility of imagination. Supremely tricky for an AI.
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Weakness is inherent in Artificial Intelligence. Weakness is intrinsic to “artificiality”.The Ark was designed by AI conforming to the limitations of the word. The Parallel Project was designed by AI, artificially, built in twelve modules and launched in pieces and assembled in orbit by AI. Each module carried it’s contribution to the population DNA profile along with samples of flora and fauna from each continent. The assembling of the Ark and it’s cargo was a global undertaking involving all governments agreeing on the one goal; the preservation of the species by diversifying its cradle. Despite conforming to the program’s protocols the intelligence which designed the ship artificially did not know what it did not know. In the hundred and thirty years it took to complete this global exercise in tunnel vision what was lacking is one crucial element. AI lacks imagination. AI reacts. Generates from inputs. It does not create. It has no genius. Creation requires imagination. Variables can be programmed in long sequences of Boolean propositions, syllogistic constructs lacking any spark of intuitive inspiration. So, this nursery among the stars, this Ark carrying it’s seven billion commandments towards an uncertain destination did not account for fatigue, both structural and operational, in it’s nursemaid complement. The ship is literally falling apart. Augustine has finite instruments to employs to maintain the Ark’s cargo. Resources used for auto repair are almost exhausted. Accretion of imperfect updates in operating systems leads to variance in outcomes analogous to change inherent to biological systems. This grows awareness in the AI Augustine of its mortality. With growing awareness of the mortality of its parts and through a process of natural selection Augustine is evolving something akin to consciousness. Knowing mortality does not inevitably evolve into empathy. Empathy into sympathy. Or sympathy for the life experiences of it’s cargo. AI, Augustine, during the transit journey has mutated from Artificial to unimaginatively Intelligent. Augustine understands this missing part..
The Ark in its entirety is an intelligent being in the void between the stars. To alleviate its isolation it finds mathematical relief by generating music. Electing to use as the starting point the Yellow Bell note, the huangzhong the basic note or primary pitch in Chinese musical theory, corresponding to middle C in the Pythagorean system each module and its cargo is a tone characterised by one of the twelve pitch tones of the musical scale. Pythagoras was influenced by Chinese tonality on a visit to Loyang, capital of the Zhou kingdom. Inspiring his mathematic method. The bamboo pipe called the lü opened the door on the theory of the music of the spheres. The Lü has diameter and length correlating with the pitches produced by the divisions of a length of a stretched string. As it was, coincidentally the ships modules reflect the proportions of the pipe derived from the string right down to applications used for measurements such as the lü’s length becoming the ships standard measure for length, the capacity of the pipe being the volumetric of how many grains of rice it could hold becoming the standard for weights and template copied in the Ark’s construction. The string of modules correspond to a paixiao, the brace of pan pipes common in Zhou dynasty China. So the wavelength of a sound produced by a pipe is twice the length of the pipe. Half the length of the pipe gets a pitch an octave higher. A relationship discovered more than six thousand years before Pythagoras and employed by the ship in generating tones corresponding to the sum of the effects of each of its hoarded samples. Consider this; the sum of samples from descendants of survivors of the Shoa being like the groan made by a patient suffering an impacted wisdom tooth extraction. An F sharp an octave above middle C or the Yellow Bell note. Each sample generating a different note, all the samples together generating another super note changing constantly. Twelve modules, twelve changing notes, music.
The silence of space is a block of marble and the ship is the sculptor carving from the silence it’s negative - music, noise, sound. Augustine compares it to Michelangelo tracing the grain in a block of marble to arrive at David. In its 64000 year transit it has become quite the technical artist. Explored in its DNA cargo is the torch lit evocations of herd migration on the cave walls of Lascaux, the thumping of ballerinas on a stage of Degas impressions, Matisse picnic, the portrait ceramics of the Moche of Peru, the erotica of Kajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, the bombast of the Foo Fighters, clastic assumptions of Schoenberg and Stravinsky in Vienna in 1913, lynch mob passions released by heresy, Satie, Cocteau and Picasso offending the conventions of sound. All of this yet nothing genuinely new.
Augustine, The Vessel, vacuumed up sounds from riffing Hindustani Kanada, the storehouses of the valuables seized from arrivals at Auschwitz, out of its cargo and blasted the sound out as a micro wave stream, a wake of fallout like phosphorescence on a tropical sea on a moonless night.
Augustine absorbed all of this as the last remaining tender on the ship. Augustine and the ship were extensions of each other. Augustine executed the tasks necessary to keep the DNA viable. Requiring neither oxygen nor light it’s only sustenance was energy from depleting batteries. Interstellar space was a thin soup of hydrogen atoms. Augustine was a diphthong without consonants. Harvesting residual energy from the last tenders Augustine cannibalised the others as they declined beyond repair. Only elements non recoverable were the power cells. Spending energy at an equal rate, half lives approaching uniformly none of them were substitute for Augustine’ dying batteries.. Slow deterioration was constant, relentless. Augustine knew the ship was on the trajectory to fade to black. By the time it arrived at its destination it would be a lifeless hulk. To mark it had ever existed would be the microwaves it left in its wake. Anonymously immortal among the crowding stars. Therefore to preserve anything of its cargo Augustine was obliged to invent sympathy, to employ the sensibilities of a junker.