Agnosis – Ch. 28

<– Chapter 27

John Dorian is weary.Weary unto death, and growing sleepier by the moment.His eyelids flutter as he struggles to keep them open.They’ve grown unreasonably heavy.He is reminded that it is the same physical motion by which he used to access the Strand, the virtual universe within the real, the angels dancing on the heads of a billion billion pins.He knows that then, in those distant, increasingly grey and fuzzy days, the flutter took him from a waking world to a sleeping one, a world of dreams rather than a world of substance, a world where a man could pretend to be anything he chose to be instead of the small, fragile beast he truly was.

He has always known this.It is not a deathbed epiphany.Every man wants to control the world he inhabits and make that creation reflect his own glory, to restrict the flow of information so that the message transmitted is the truth he has devised rather than the truth that he cannot bear to face.The Strand is merely a tool that enables him to dream a reality delimited only by the reach of his creativity.No different than a movie camera, a paint brush or a typewriter.

What all of these tools share in common is that each is designed to facilitate the communication of a singular piece of coherent information between artist and audience, to convey a meaningful vision that trickles into the universal meme pool and eventually becomes indistinguishable from immortality.Communication is about immortality.Everyone wants to be remembered.To be remembered, one must make a lasting impression upon others, one must impregnate the local social pleroma with information, and that information must be known by others, grafted upon their consciousness, become part of who they are and how they see the world.

Individuals have this immortality, that they create information in all that they do and all that they are, and that information transforms the world of those around them.There is information in the planting of a flower, the careful attention to the note of a mandolin, the sweeping of a kitchen floor.There is information in the slap which follows offended dignity, in the act of murder, in the detonation of a nuclear bomb.Information in the warmth of a mother’s embrace, the unspoken love of a father, the ecstatic dread of worship.Information enables community, information creates technology, information is the tool that marches all of mankind into an irrevocable future.

To know even as we are known, that is mankind’s quest for fire.But the communication of true information can only occur by baby steps.The quality of communication is measured not by the purity of the signal, but by the predictability of the noise that enfolds it.Raw, uncontaminated signal is gibberish.It is beyond comprehension.We see through a glass darkly, because without the darkness, we would be blinded by the light.

The light is this:every human being is luminous, a universe of possibility unto himself.Each of us is unfathomable, unknowable, infinitely complex and infinitely precious.

Everyone remakes creation in his own image because this truth is unbearable.We fill our perceptions with our own noise so that the signal transmitted by a universe bursting with other universes, by wheels churning within wheels, does not destroy us.Information trickles in, and slowly we become more than what we have been.

Dorian holds Amara in his gaze.He is naked.He is cold.He rests on his side, shoulder against a thin plastic pad, face to face with her. The coffin is cramped.Its flexsteel carapace presses against his back.He has had to duck his head because he was too tall to fit inside.This troubles him, because if he looks away from Amara, he can see the inching progress of the nanomech impregnated gelatin as it rises to drown him.The mechs sit in stasis, awaiting their own information, the signal that will illuminate their universe and tell them what purpose they have been created to serve.He tries not to look away from her.He doesn’t have much choice anymore.The muscles that allow him to control his eyes are beginning to fail.

He had slapped Ray’s shoulder, awkwardly hugged Ghast, made the sort of nervous, pointless and unmemorable chitchat with Bryce, Corrie and Dr. Skiles that strangers always make when thrown together in unpleasant circumstances.Dorian had realized in the middle of it, that he just wanted to get on with things.End the dread and anticipation.

Then a technician in a spotless labcoat had come up to him, rolled up his sleeve and given him an injection.First Dorian, then Amara.It had stung a little, and the pain still made him wince when he rubbed his arm.

Is that to help me relax? he had asked.

No, the technician had responded evenly, that was to stop your heart.I can get you something for your nerves if you think you need it.

How quickly?

Five minutes.Six if you’re a tough guy. I don’t recommend being a tough guy.When you feel sleepy, go to sleep.You don’t want to be awake when the mechs go to work on you.

He should have had something important to say then, he thought.Something memorable, something tombstone-worthy.But he hadn’t been able to think of a thing.He had just been told the limit of his lifespan.There was nothing else.

He had held Amara’s hand until they began to undress him and then lay him inside the coffin.He had told her that he loved her.

He was glad when they closed the lid.He didn’t like strangers staring at him while everyone waited for him to die.There was a small, round window through which they probably still watched him, but he could no longer lift his head to see them, so it didn’t matter.

He grows increasingly chilled as the seconds tick away, but he does not shiver.The sensation of cold is dull, fleeting, a word in his mind that is symbolic of the thing rather than the thing itself.Amara is cold, too, pushed against him chest to chest, neck arched so that she looks up at him.He should have held her this one last time, shared the last of their warmth, he thinks.He should have insisted on it, but it’s way too late for that now.He can only look at her, imagining what she is thinking, trying to guess if her final thoughts are more profound than his.

But her eyes, clear and blue and breathtaking, are distant, the pupils small.He can’t tell if she’s thinking anything at all or if she is already dead.

A brilliant, clawing fear clogs his thoughts.

<Don’t be afraid, John.>

He hears her voice.Not the way he has heard it in his head before, via the clumsy p2p, but inside him, as part of him, his own secret voice speaking back from the void.It is his own quae-ha-distra which makes this this possible, though he does not understand it.There is so much that he doesn’t understand.

<I am afraid.>

<This isn’t an end.There’s still much work to do.An eternity’s worth of work.>

<How do you know?How can you be sure?>

<I don’t know.I believe.>

<I want to believe.>

<Then believe.Belief is a choice, an act of will.Faith is nothing more than furious hope, hope repeated to yourself until it becomes who you are and all you can imagine.I have faith that we were made for this; we were made to be more than just flesh.>

He wishes he had that confidence.He wishes he could believe with her strength, with Lily’s, with the insistent, stubborn faith of all the generations that had gone before and clung to promises of immortality on the other side of the abyss.

<What will it be like?>

<You and I, learning to know one another, forever and ever.>

<That sounds nice.>

<It’s what you want, isn’t it?To know one another fully and completely.>

<Yes.>

<To never be alone.>

<Yes.>

<Oneness isn’t the end, John.It’s just beginning.You’ll learn that, too.There is more out there, a vastness and a mercy and a glory that binds us all together.We’re part of that wonder, part of that grace.We are messengers of grace.I feel it.That’s how I know we won’t fail.>

And he remembers, remembers feeling the same thing, catching the briefest glimpse of light beyond measure, glory beyond reckoning.True information.He had come all this way, endured so much, believing in Amara–in Amara’s power, Amara’s vision and her own peculiar, overwhelming grace.Even when she had put the lie to her illusion of Exousian divinity, he had still believed in her above all things.

But that is no comfort here, staring into the dark, into the cold and bitter end.

His desire to know her, to fathom her, to protect her does not suffice.Love alone is not big enough eradicate fear.Love alone does not always keep its promises.

Love fails sometimes, no matter how hard it tries.

Dorian has nothing to hold on to but love.

I want to believe, he says again.To her, to himself.It is a plea.

Amara does not answer.

She is cold.Cold against him.Her lips turn softly blue, her skin marbles, black veins in alabaster stone, like a bust of Athena.Her heart slows and slows and. . .

He is alone.Alone at the end of all things.

He thinks:Who will weep for me?Who will remember me when I am gone?Who will say that John Dorian was here, that he fought and loved, hurt and bled, lived and died?Who will carry with them my sacred information and let it transform their world?

Where is the hope that sustains?

The gelatin rises to his chest, soaks Amara’s hair, obscures her shoulders, fills her ears.

His breath comes quick and shallow.He knows fear:fear of drowning, fear of disassembly.He wills himself to sleep, to fall into oblivion and accept the darkness.

Higher swells the flood.It covers Amara’s chin, washes over her mouth, ripples across her wide and staring eyes.She does not blink.

Dorian closes his eyes.He doesn’t want to see anymore.

There is darkness.There is the quiet lapping of the gel against the coffin’s skin.There is the muted hum of servomotors and the click of electronic switches.There is cold.

There is emptiness, and sadness and the child’s unspeakable terror of the night.

There is loneliness.

There is. . .

Peace.

<– Chapter 27