[Fiction] An Eternal Amanuensis
First published last year as part of Criptörök. Find out more (and get a copy) here.
An Eternal Amanuensis
Hello. As a youth, I was slender and pale, sparked with freckles, looking frighteningly unlike my countrymen. Assuredly this cast a shadow on my character. A really big part of the job was, you got to feast your eyes on state secrets. Who shrank the garotte’s loop, or unstoppered the wee vial? — pop! How many onions still moldered behind the city walls? Who was looking more closely at a bead of sweat on his steward’s collarbone than at the Strait of Gibraltar?
No one could have been more surprised than I, to be told to report at dawn to a certain chamber — you guys, I got the job! That first morning, on my commute from my cot in Santa Croce to my small writing-desk in Records and Archives, I passed through no fewer than five secret doors.
Come boy, what is your name? Eh?
Unless there were even more secret doors? Doors so secret not even I noticed them, as I opened them before me, and shut them behind?
What sort of a name is that! — we’ll call you Baldassare. That one’s your stool, Baldassare.
Records and Archives had high staff turnover. They could always use a steady hand. Steadyish. I was not a morning person. I was a vespertine teen. But those early starts, O Mary Sister of God! Made me attend to my heart as though it were new to my chest. As I believe it was. The glow licking the masts, quiet in the stately harbours. The lone, late flittermouse tilting in the spindrift, her belfry perhaps lost. Up secret flights of stairs I skipped. Cupping the inkwell, sharpening the nib. I was largely illiterate. After three months I got the sack.
Archivista, I did tell a lie! I have but begun to learn my letters!
I wept as I clung to his finespun cloak, and confessed to everything.
Archivista, I copy the shape of every letter so carefully! And I think of each sound as I copy each shape, and sometimes they blend and I hear the words in my soul!
Well, not to everything.
Archivista, I have learned much and soon will learn more!
Ah but Baldassare, that’s just the problem. Records and Archives needs quill-pushers who can WRITE, not quill-pushers who can READ. Next thing you know, you’ll be remembering the words. Then SELLING the words to our enemies.
Oh, then I’ll unlearn! Only let me stay, I’ll copy but the shapes and never let the sounds run together!
For young Baldassare was no spy! Or rather, I spied only on behalf of my own daydreams. If all the secret doors in the universe were counted up, would they not outnumber the plain doors? So I occupied my thoughts during my long days in Records and Archives. However, I was given the sack. A sign of things to come.
Some things you can’t unlearn, my lad. Besides, Baldy-Ass. And now the Archivista’s eyes grew troubled, and his voice dipped. You smell like you’ve been boiled in mare’s milk … and your freckles never form the same constellation two days running … no offence …
Some years later, I crossed the sea on the coattails of a rumour. That is how I tend to travel — on some oath, rumour, or imprecation. By now I had learned my letters, steadied my hand and my outward appearances (somewhat), and revised my ideas about whom I might spy for.
In this new kingdom, so went the rumour, it was lawful simply to pay a call and listen, as highborn men planned and plotted the fate of the land. Spaces were designated for strangers, I assumed holding one’s breath behind arrases, hugging rafters with arms and legs in the overhead shadows, below floorboards squinting up into a slanted beam, or right up front impersonating caryatids. You could even write down what these highborn men said, and take it out through the front gate and (I really wanted to test this bit) show it to someone.
I crossed the sea, promptly found their equivalent of a ducal palace, not as nice as the one I was used to, but okay. My guesses were right about the seating arrangements, only only for the ladies — ‘Ladies’ Evenings at the Ventilator’ meant lurking overhead, in the ironwork that supported the brass chandeliers. Whereas they took me for a man. So I got to squirm into the front row of the Strangers’ Gallery and gaze down into a fancy pit, where one cute young lord especially caught my eye. And what do you know, right on cue he arose. Scritch-scratch-scrotch went my quill, as Dashing Lord Smokeshow spoke on behalf of some brave stocking-knitters — this was so great! — who were smashing to bits the cowardly stocking-knitting machines come to replace them.
These men were willing to dig, but the spade was in other hands …
Hey! I yelled down to him, waving my arms. I felt bodies stir behind me like wings.
They were not ashamed to beg, but there were none to …
Hey! Is that ‘Knottingham’ or ‘Knittingham’? Did you say ‘revel’ or ‘reveal’? Hey! Slower, I will write it down just as you say! Slower!
Four sturdy serjeants deposited me in the mud outside the House of Lords, still yelling Tardius! Ped! Quet!
What a system! Ink and quill could never lock up these highborn men’s quick words. Their soggy island needed no flights of secret stairs, nor little hatches flying open with bugging, angry eyes behind. Alas, all it would take was gossip, the Butcher Confabulation, mondegreens and misrecollections, testimony distorted by hot heads and idle boasts at dice and boozing. It was the lack of transcription that encrypted their state secrets, as surely as any lead-lined Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci.
Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarescrows?
Fortunately, a day before I was due to set sail for the Russian Empire, a destination selected at random, I happened to peer into Cobbett's Parliamentary Debates, and saw that the men’s speeches were all written down, after all. Thereafter I altered my plans, resolved to buy thicker clothing, to remain on the island, to commend myself to Mr. Cobbett’s service, and to learn his method.
However, after one month of investigations, it was in the rooms of a Mr. Thomas Hansard where I made my pitch. Mr. Hansard was at that time, and with no little glee, taking full ownership of Cobbett's Parliamentary Debates, Mr. Cobbett having been forced to this sale by financial misfortunes occasioned, by some accounts, by his friend and long-time collaborator, Mr. Hansard. To Mr. Hansard’s service I offered my heart and soul (well, he wasn’t to know, eh?), and he laughed a good while. I laughed too.
Then he said, Bless you lad, you’d have me PAY YOU to scribe the parliamentary debates? You must be half rats — if a man SAYS he said it, he said it!
Realisation began to poke at my horizon.
All the more so, continued Mr. Hansard, if that man be trimmed with ermine from Savile Row, and I’m in breeches Sam the Snip swears blind once were wool …
Realisation dawned. Mr. Hansard, do you mean that Members of Parliament give to you their speeches, and you but print that which you are given? Not necessarily the words which were spoken?
Mr. Hansard now spoke very tardius indeed, as though addressing a real mug. Well, yes, in the main … we also nick ’em from the hacks … the newspapers … jiggle-jaggle the words together … fill in the gaps … bit of common sense …
Politely I matched his pace. Sir, how do … the hacks … write the words … so quickly?
Eh? Short-hand!
So I learned short-hand. One long wet summer I spent shortening my hand. In my condition, it seemed impractical to forswear spying altogether. Thus I vowed, Those on which I spy, to THEM will I report! Easier sworn than done, for in September I arrived at the grand gates just as serjeants heaved them shut, the Prime Minister having been shot dead by a merchant of Liverpool. There would be no speeches at all the whole evening! This crack-shot merchant, it seemed, had been some years in a prison cell belonging to the Tsar of Russia, and in these confines perhaps he had invented his interesting idea.
I returned eager the next day. Still no admittance to either House! I began to feel all my short-hand study was futile.
In the months that followed, tickets to the Strangers’ Gallery were like hen’s teeth. Around this time it struck me, rather late, that someone was spying on me.
One morning, a dark early start, coach took me as far as Warrington, and from there I rode to Liverpool. The stormy weather had cleared and my journey was frosty and clear, with much traffic on the roads.
Time to begin anew.
As for the stocking-frame-smashers of Nottingham and York? Their gibbets were built extra tall, to improve the view at the back.
Some years later, in the creaking, clanking, sawing of the workshop, I continued to daydream. If all the secret doors in all the universe were tallied, they would greatly outnumber all the plain doors. As much as all the salt in the sea outnumbers a spoon of the same business. Therefore, all the plain doors are indeed dissolved, and disappear in a sea of secret doors. Therefore, in the eyes of God, every secret door is plain. Therefore, when we come to the question of the Doors into Heaven, and Hell, and Fairy …
Morning Ned. How’s the back?
The slightest discomfortures would be soothed by your arrival, Baldric. How’s the dog?
Still thinks she’s pregnant, Ned, it pains me I can’t tell you …
By now I’d come a little down-country, as tallyman to the bobbins master Mr. Eggart, who was tenant to Mr. Britt, whose estate was truly begging for a bobbins mill. His estate wanted neither for birch nor for willow. With alder and ash, Mr. Britt was well-equipped, all cleanly coppiced. If one thing the old yeoman was missing it was a touch more sun. Nobody wanted too many candle-wicks near all that sawdust. But then this was the Midlands of England, and so Mr. Eggart and Mr. Britt had angled their mill to make the most of whatever peeped through the clouds, and could glory at least over the tumblesome stream (called ‘the Water’) that thundered through the well-coppiced woodlands, clear and swift and wonderful, fed by a millpond (called ‘the Pond’) in turn fed by a dam (called ‘the Tarn’), plenty enough white strong froth to turn the waterwheel, plenty enough reedy wet darkness to scoop up in panicky buckets, the day the mill did go up in flames. What could go wrong?
Some men counted to ten on their fingers, the fingers they still had and the fingers they remembered. But a bobbin-maker is paid by the gross, and to count to a gross, he needs to count to twelve, twelve times. When I was not spying on them for Mr. Eggart, I taught them another method, by the twelve segments of the fingers of one hand. I was tallyman. Take it from me. They made a lot of bobbins there.
What I mean to say is, a bobbin-maker could spy on himself a bit more easily, after I had a hand in their methods. Also I had a small desk again. In a cupboard attached to the gable wall. I checked each worker’s progress and cut a notch in his tally-stick. Five thousand pieces per day would keep him fed. He would knock off and Mr. Eggart count his notches and pay him. Scritch-scratch-scrotch, went my quill. Ssk-tsk-fsk went my tally-notch-knife.
For many years, each bobbin was made in three pieces then assembled. But shortly before I drifted off to Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co., Mr. Britt’s son had a new workshop built and new machines brought in, and a steam engine brought from a tin mine in the east. A red brick chimney went up. Thereafter the mill made one-piece bobbins. Every man’s job became smaller. A seasoned coppice pole would be cut by one worker, bored by the next, rough-turned by the next, then dried and rinced, then finished, and then added to a beeswax drum. Every man or boy had his machine, and was responsible for his tools. The turners kept scrap for making chisels, that they sharped on grindstones around the back. A sign of things to come. If the metal broke, he might get no pay for a half day or a day as he worked to replace it. Or at roughing, if the mandrel caught in a knot, the block might fly apart. And once I stood by as a long splinter was drove deep in Ned Dyer’s eye, which then he lost. And that was not the worst I saw, that was what happened to poor young Tom, the apprentice, a week before I drifted off to Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co. That’s a bloody story, but that’s another story. Even in leafless winter, every door and window of the new workshop would be thrown wide open, and the bitter winter wind would brush the dust from our lips and throats, tender as a mortal lover, and rince our nostrils too. The frost winds would blow, we’d wade waist-deep in shavings, that’d keep you near warm, and the trenches we tramped taught the apprentices where was safe to step. Curly shavings everywhere, up to the men’s hips, sometimes. Up to Tom’s armpits.
In Manchester, later London, my clerical career continued to flourish under the auspices of Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co., later Deloitte Haskins & Sells, later Deloitte & Touche, later Deloitte Touche Tohamatsu, and then plain Deloitte. I was in Typing, later Word Processing (“WP”). Everyone, however junior or senior, was my boss. For many years we had an in-tray shared by the entire secretarial pool. But by the days of plain Deloitte I had an in-tray of my own. A sign of things to come.
First, a boss would promise a client a report — I never saw that part. Supremely bespoke, client’s needs sacrosanct, a plenum of sectoral experts, et cetera. When the contract was won, the boss would browse our archives for anything a bit similar, cross some bits out and write some new bits in. I would type this up and print it out. The boss would again scribble, we would repeat, repeat, repeat till the new report emerged. You’d never guess what sentences were descended from what sentences!
Sometimes I started with an old Powerpoint file, sometimes just an empty template. I preferred the template as the files were haunted. I was concerned by some of the diagrams I was asked to create.
Paula, do you have a minute? Look at this slide. There are a lot of boxes that own other boxes out there.
Yes Broderick. Some of those boxes are located on islands, where different tax rules apply.
In my diagrams, boxes swallow more boxes. It looks like there’s a real trend here: everything is going to wind up on islands!
You’re not wrong, Broderick. Leave it with me, Broderick. How is Project Pixie coming on, Broderick?
Those were bittersweet days! One day Jacqui showed me the alignment feature on PowerPoint. It improved my life immeasurably. On another occasion we received a PowerPoint add-on from a US colleague. It had nifty features, such as achieving consistent angles on chevrons of different lengths/widths, and the Table/Box alignment tool. Another day I remember well was when my cousin embarrassed me at work. I turned slightly to my right, and was startled by someone beside my desk down on one knee in the seelie fashion. It was Alberon.
Usually, when a boss brought a job over, there would be the thud! of a thick sheaf hitting my in-tray and the muffled rapid retreat of his John Lobbs. A boss might occasionally hover over me to chat, for instance, once a boss gave me some typing and instructions, then said, ‘Nice view from here, right?’, and as I had recently moved desk and was confused I tentatively agreed with him, although, as he strolled off, I realised he was talking about the woman at the desk across from mine — one of the few people who wasn’t my boss!
Anyway, on this occasion, the kneeling fellow was not a boss at all, but my cousin Alberon, Landgrave of Told Fell! I was very intent on preventing a embedded Excel table from randomly resizing, and I believe Alberon had been knelt for several minutes. Then I gazed upon him long, for he was fair, and his was a beauty bounded by the frost and the stars.
Cousin, said Alberon, clearly in a grump, The Coral Keep is fallen, the Green Stag fled. Sally misses you an awful lot, you know. She always says, Oh, what’s HE up to these days anyhow, how long since he rode. It’d do you both a WORLD of good, you know it would …
From the nearby desks, the sound of typing had ceased.
Of course I got rid of my cousin as quickly as I could. Down a rather violent chute I had prepared for just such an occasion. Unfortunately he had chosen the Night Shift for his unwelcome intrusion. That meant the two other secretaries were Maria and Michelle, both blessed with a touch of Second Sight.
Fortunately only a touch! Mish remembered ‘that bloke from Branding’ coming in, dropping a paperclip, and saying, Hell is empty and all the devils are here. Maria remembered ‘one of the Senior Partners’ coming in, tying his shoelace and saying, Heaven must be missing an angel, because you’re here with me right now. I liked Mish and Maria. I liked all the other secretaries. Especially Jacqui I think. I even liked many of the bosses, like Raj and Paula, even though she acted bananas all the time.
Years passed, the sky thickened, boxes ate boxes, and WP lasted longer than anyone expected. My cousin Alberon maintained his malificent campaign by more subtle means. I would find a letter from Sally slipped in my in-tray. Or an Excel chart crossed out, ‘Replace with Insert (A)’ and (A) would be news of a massacre. On the Picadilly Line home I sank exhausted into the last carriage, to find myself seated beside a sprig of oak, and the waters whereof it was dewed were the waters that brimmed in my eyes. Once I typed up seven pages of a Due Diligence document about a proposed merger of the Seelie and the Unseelie Courts before recognising Alberon’s hand. Or rather (since it was all getting a bit subtle for Alberon himself) one of Alberon’s craftier lieutenants — perhaps Pouke, his left-hand man?
In those days WP primarily supported Private Equity Transaction Services (“PETS”), although that merged with another division and then was split and then merged again. I continued to daydream, at that enterprise I privately called Toilette & Douche, later Delight & Touch. The eyes of God, that see every hidden box, but cannot see what cannot be hidden, what is kept secret from these eyes, at the end of that elbow connector? Could it be God again, that is, the shape of God copied, and the sound and sense of God following? These two Gods might then merge, or else do a reverse takeover, or unionize …
As I daydreamed, working on Project Portal, a tiny spider, pixel-scale, floated in front of my screen. My hand was raised, a moment later I would have brushed at its invisible thread, but something made me freeze — and I saw where that thread led. I caught Michelle’s eye and she was frozen too. Perhaps more than just a touch of the Second Sight, after all.
Whether by the mischiefs of Alberon, or Pouke, or boxes eating boxes, my Deloitte days dwindled. My permanent employ was cut to five days, to three, to two. To make up the difference, I temped for market research companies. So now I had two jobs, or, depending how you tallied it, seventeen. A sign of things to come. I wore a little suit, sometimes was asked to bring my own laptop. A sign of things to come.
Sometimes I was behind a mirror. Then I felt very glamorous. Speaking of signs. A few years before electronic cigarettes became a thing, I typed up what people said about electronic cigarettes. They said they would never catch on because, principally, they looked stupid. I hadn’t felt so glamorous since, as a semi-illiterate youth, I had carefully traced the secret documents of a vast seafaring empire. Plus — and this had never been the case back then — you got sandwiches. For Jim Beam, I wrote down what people said about Jack Daniels. The Jim Beam team were so confused by what people said about JD! They were confused because JD portrayed itself as being sipped by grizzly cowboys. But the people who drank it were not grizzled cowboys! They put it in Coke! Puzzling! Another time, in a focus group entirely of white people, one guy used a racist expression, the one that ended ‘in the woodpile.’ Remembering the serjeants, and similar, I didn’t say a thing. I just typed [uses racist expression] and felt mighty courageous. He repeated it again. Nobody else said anything either.
One day at what was left of my ‘main job’, I was asked to create a presentation about the cost efficiencies of eliminating Word Processing altogether. WP had only lasted so long because we had a secret, secondary function. We had always existed to be blamed when a project fell behind schedule. We were like the Weather or the Traffic. Whenever you name the Traffic or the Weather in your white lie, the Traffic or the Weather knows about it. WP knew too. Our bosses feigned fear of our goat horns. We stuck together and put the ‘Aries’ in ‘secretaries.’ Like the Weather and the Traffic, we did not mind smoothing things over. The dishonour honoured us. Now it was over.
I’d kept my ticket to Saint Petersburg and, since that city was once again called Saint Petersburg, I vaguely hoped it might be valid. No such luck! But my firm had offices in Saint Petersburg and I secured a transfer days before I got the chop. Business class, little cheeses, volatile on the palate. I’d been too long on the soggy island. When the Big Four Serjeants, as it were, escorted me to the mud, at least it would be snow.
In the years that followed I lived in a small shared apartment in Volgograd, but worked all over the world.
In the scribal sector the jobs were getting smaller and smaller. What would waken, when the work-atom split? I worked quite a bit for a hospital in New South Wales. I felt like we were connected by a planetary tunnel! I liked listening to everybody’s lives but I felt so sad. The patients had ‘flat affect’. Some of them were on quite a large number of medications, and the doctor would say to increase this one or decrease one. I Googled the complicated names nervously. Once one doctor did a big yawn saying “Edronax.” Doctors dictated their reports late, late into the night. There was this one doctor who I could always hear rubbing her face. When she clambered out of bed a few hours later, all her tapes had been typed up. Maybe a fairy did it?
Smaller and smaller. Type up twenty seconds of audio. Strain over these eleven inaudibles. My work supported audio description, closed captioning, enhanced subtitling. Soon it felt like I worked for no one in particular. I had five star ratings on GigTwig and Noodl, fAIry and TskTskRobot. Once I remember getting a gig that read, in full, ‘Do anything human.’ I was tempted although of course not technically qualified. Those twenty stars were a constellation, an Embossment. Metaphors of access were falling out of favour. New forms of bosses were dropping. I tried to see their points, but they did sometimes feel a little demanding.
By now the AIs were pretty amazing at getting down the actual words. Even the words were not quite spoken — while the speaker shrugged, you know?, you know? and the interviewer nodded encouragingly, yeah, yeah, the AIs knew just which dressing room door to hammer on to get results. Hey! What the hell are you still doing in here? You were supposed to be on five nanoseconds ago!
So to please the latest crop of bosses, I had to be quite the scribe!
Transcribe this financial forensics interview, but Participant 1 is a 1920s noir moll, Participant 2 is a Galileo Galilee superfan, and Participant 3 has only just found out bees exist.
The intended audience is an Exile Part, hemmed by the densest Dissociative Walls you ever have seen.
Describe this dance from the standpoint of universal redemption.
Transcribe only the subtext.
The robots had come for the bobbins turners, now the robots were coming for the scribes. Bad AI comrades babbled in my temples like my blood. Broods of bad AI bosses cheep-cheeped in the tesseract nests tucked among my toes. Increasingly my audiences were AI too. It wasn’t exactly that these AIs needed my data. It was more that their needs had been reverse-engineered (I am hazy on the details) to give my transcription work certain … qualities. These AIs were called IMAGE AIs and their desires were a funhouse mirror of some mysterious figure’s idea of my needs. Somebody was trying to turn my work into something that was not work. Not work but … well, something else. A ligature across enchanted alphabets. A bridge of flesh and bone, debrided by its strange shores. A walk in the park.
Thankfully, a lot of the automation was fake. Or semi-fake. So you could get jobs where you had to pretend to be an AI. Then sometimes you could get an actual AI to do the job, although the actual AI might be someone else pretending. I admit I felt a little homesick then. When I felt like that I liked to load up my GigTwig stars and testimonies and gloat and fret. Sometimes, starry-eyed, I remembered Archives and Records. How the Archivista, the day he fired me, addressed me as freckly as the fickle night sky.
The other common kind of job, in those days, was poking the AIs when they got stuck. Roomba-heckling meets Whack-a-Mole. Increasingly, some scoop of AI supervision became my main job. It was a job created without consideration as to what it would be like. What was it like? Babysitting on hard mode, babysitting a group of toddlers of no fixed population size, each with its own super-intense docket of sensory sensitivities, behavioural triggers, allergies, dietary requirements, custody arrangements, medications, prayers, NDAs, amulets and talismans, potions and philtres, facilitative technologies, chants and glamours, and the like, while these toddlers also happened to be working-from-home as audio describers, live transcribers, fast food couriers, investment portfolio managers, immigration solicitors, net zero advisors, critical care surgeons, sex facilitators, freight logistics networks, and wildfire suppression drones.
It was something of a relief when AI finally made my job as an AI babysitter obsolete. Alas, this created new jobs. And so I became a babysitter to the AIs that babysat the AIs. Actually, this job had been created with great consideration to what it would be like. However, it wasn’t like that.
The year the Thwaites glacier thawed for good, I did actual babysitting!
Will you hold her?
I did. Tilly bent and sniffed her nappy, and was gratified.
Meanwhile I consulted the infant. Do you know any tongue twisters?
I am not the anamnesis amanuensis,
I'm the anamnesis amanuensis's sister.
I will sit here listing anamneses
till the anamneses are listed.
You know, I added, it’s a strange rhyme. If the narrator is the anamnesis amanuensis’s sister, why then does she —
Tilly was laughing. God, Balazs! She’s one! She only knows one word!
Manna, said Tilly’s bundle of joy.
She can only say ‘Mama,’ said Tilly.
To me it sounds like she’s trying to say ‘amanuensis.’
Thereafter, the infant lost it. There, there, I comforted them. You know, where I’m from we have a saying. The bigger the king, the more tongues it giggles in. I jiggled them up and down, up and down, till Tilly stretched out her arms.
However, even though my child-care was facilitating Tilly’s return to the office, I felt uneasy. The oath I’d offered at the Aspen Gate was the oath the shadow swears to the candlewick. Over the years, I had made many a fairer copy of that oath. First it became, I’ll copy but the shapes! Then, Slower, I’ll write it down just as you say! Then, Those on which I spy, to them will I report! Then, A bobbin-within-a-bobbin. Audit and assurance. [Uses racist expression]. And many more, London to Saint Petersburg to Kampala. Yet as that sturdy creature squirmed in my arms, There, there just felt like one simulacrum-mutagen too many. Another one of Alberon’s tricks. Maybe I was wrong. But before the infant turned two, Tilly found alternative child-care, and it was back to algorithm-sitting in the gig economy for me, my gigs sifting smaller and smaller, and always allotted by bagsies and fains.
Myself and a brood of bad AI comrades crowdproofed the inaudibles in an extensive oppo research document. Corporate espionage stuff, all about our platform ecology’s major commercial rival. Many hands make light work. But sometimes even the lightest of work makes bones creak. The Criptörök, it/they was/were called. Our spies clearly did not understand the Criptörök. A crowdworking platform on an innovative cooperative model offering real-time AI-driven occupational assessment and adjustments … something was missing.
Raynaud's disease, depression, psoriasis, ganglion cyst. The walls between one thing and the next thing are thick as stone. Cool and mossy, rotator cuff injury, autoimmune hepatitis. Complex PTSD, glaucoma, arthritis. There are doors set in these walls, you can step from one stone box to the next, but only through these doors. Who is there? IBS, borderline personality disorder. Stone. Optic neuritis, peripheral neuropathy. Cold. Moss. Drip drip. Scritch-scritch. Sconce and darkness.
Yet through all this, it seemed the Criptörök was setting a system of secret doors in motion? Keratoconus, osteoporosis, Long Covid, hand tremors. Trigger finger, cataracts, Crohn’s. Stone boxes eat stone boxes. The content of every oubliette was real enough, and yet … yet drift down these secret corridors that join them together too, and maybe, maybe there were ways to make new real things. Crip time, crip ontology. The dungeon was a forest, the forest was a bed, the bed was a meadow, a sign of things to come.
I ought, I thought, to contact this Criptörök.
One of Alberon’s tricks? I thought.
Still, I thought.
Perhaps worth a little look. Perhaps worth a …
That’s when IMAGE dropped.
Intrinsic Motivation Augmented Gamified Enterprise. From now on, they promised, I would barely notice I was working. This was the tail-end of the diffusion model boom in customised content (you know, “Hi Siri, please play Spider-Man with Meryl Streep in the title role and Aubrey Plaza as the Green Goblin. Put Thomas Bernhard in the writers’ room and feed him some edibles”). GigTwig launched its IMAGE network NetFlex. I forgot all about the Criptörök. Noodl launched its IMAGE network TaskTok. So did my bad AI comrades.
‘Work funnerer’ was the new ‘work smarterer.’ With IMAGE enabled I would play something between a film and a game, say, When a Stranger Work Calls ("Great job! You’ve checked the children lately!"), Great Job Bad Babysitter, The House of Project Devil, Better Watch-Party Out, Working from Home Alone, The Hand That Leans In And Rocks The Cradle, The Blackbox's Daughter, or Explainable Boyfriend in the Shower. Somehow these IMAGE algorithms would break up your tasks and weave them into your chosen immersive narrative experience. Affective computing would read your laughter and your brow-furrows, and extract useful labour. When you knocked off and did something entirely different, slight perturbations in your data exhaust would be mined for hermeneutic micro-significance. The inaudibles would turn audible, the image tags would grow in confidence. Watch-parties with friends were particularly data-rich. As were doom-scrolls through random (not so random!) clips.
If you’re wondering how this actually worked, it didn’t.
The IMAGE technology was vaporware, a precarious proof-of-concept that could never scale. Only a teensy sliver of work ever actually got done like this, and once you factored in the carbon footprint, well … a sign of things to come. In reality, most work was rerouted to more old-fashioned methods. Still, the idea sounded cool and that kept the investment pouring in. Tech websites called IMAGE a Criptörök killer. GigTwig and Noodl’s stocks went up and up, even as both companies reported year after year of losses. Sure, it was a bubble, but bubbles still do things as they swell. The IMAGE bubble bestowed chunky salaries and chunky bonuses on the C-suite execs, so they were happy. The engineers got to keep tinkering with their vaporware, so they were happy. Even the investors got to unload their appreciated stock to other investors at a profit, so they were happy. What could go wrong?
The earth has bubbles, as the water has, and air, and fire. In bubbles we may observe, mirrored in flowering iridescence, our own moues and lours roil. An old friend of mine, an anole lizard, carries his bubble covetously to the bottom of his lake, when he is feeling blue, and breathes from it all afternoon long. Since the day I stepped down from the Thorn Throne, I had been within a very active carbon bubble, and it still hadn’t burst. Don’t knock bubbles.
We were all, however, starving. And so, after about half a millenium, I gave up. I would go home. But when I finally sought the Aspen Gate, I found nothing. Not two stumps. Not one twerking twig of it. And when I sought the land that lay beyond the Aspen Gate, it had never been. Perhaps something I had made up. I’d been stressed, lately. At work.
If you want a future of the IMAGE, imagine a carbon footprint stamping on a human face — forever. So it was fortunate when, a few months later, money was abolished. It wasn’t their first attempt to abolish money. Money is like those trick birthday cake candles, the ones that keep lighting themselves. But finally money was extinguished, except for a few plumes of smoke. In the smoky air, a Criptörök-ish shimmer took over. Things were a lot nicer then.
In the wake of gategate, I migrated from Kampala to Tehran. Whether it was that change of scene, or the end of money, it’s hard to say. Things were nicer. Inside my apartment there was a stately six-slice toaster, and always slices to drop into it. Outside there was a small balcony and a pale evening, a view of the city. In the air, not literally, and yet, a Criptörök-ish shimmer. I blinked, thinking for a moment I glimpsed the Aspen Gate among distant skyline clutter. But it was only some of the carbon-negative bio-scaffolding tiptoing interpretative dance.
Before me, Tehran spread out, a tenderly stirring medley of leafy building sites and floofy rooftop gardens. The distinction between building and building site was blurred. Since the popularisation and refinement of the Dladla Construction Method, building sites were more than just ultra-accessible, they were actually way pleasanter to dwell in than whatever had been there before or — and this was really rocking the boat! — whatever was being built next.
I breathed in deeply and smelled jasmine, high tech fungus, and toast toasting. Was the Aspen Gate to me forever shut? Had I suffered from oath creep, violated the terms of my sabbatical? Broken the shadow’s vow, the vow of unmeddling mettle? Arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, bear witness, bear witness. My heart felt like a swan of glowing water, gliding on a lake of pale down. Tennis elbow, plantar fasciitis, sciatica, tendinitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Behind me, toast jiggled up like unread notifications, wild and strange, six slices wide.
No, I had not seen the Aspen Gate. Yet for several evenings in a row I found myself, about the same time, on my balcony, gazing to the place where I had been mistaken.
Complicating this cityscape further was a fad for making large and complicated Things, filled with plenty of space and moving parts, usually somewhere between the size of a bit of furniture and a building. From every building site and rooftop garden, from every park and every garage, there drifted sounds of hammers banging and irons flowing solder into joints. I have sensitive hearing. Within a week of my arrival, I observed right below my balcony a somewhat beautiful ceremony, if that is the right word, or hackathon, at whose heart was a woman called Jeni. With the help of her friends, Jeni made her ‘way in the world.’ This ‘way in the world’ was a large and complicated assemblage.
Now that there was no money, I didn’t have to worry about getting any of it. So I could focus on my work, which more often than not, was to facilitate the making of some thing. Anything you could make, they made in those days. Assumptions, habits, promises, spectacles, scenes, arrangements, points — everyone had a go at banging these together, out of whatever bits were around. A neighbour of mine, Azadeh, had the most wonderful idea for ‘a big deal about it,’ and under her supervision, we built most of it for her, which resembled a cruet-stand. In the end it got too technical but the government sent an engineer to complete the last layer of Azadeh’s inserts. All this making was tending toward something though. People wanted to make fusses, complaints, and differences. They were also constructing ‘it go away’s and ‘sure it never happens again’s.
It was a happy time. A hopeful time. Why did I feel so uneasy?
A secret door in a secret door in a secret door. Secret doors, all the way down.
Sometimes, at Deloitte, the bosses used to scribble things like, ‘Increase font size, increase line spacing. Make chart bigger. Fit text from next slide here.’ But there was no secret door that could fit those two slides on one like that.
Or Tilly, jiggling her infant. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t just reach down the secret passage in her daughter’s maw, and draw out a changeling, just the same save for a changed nappy.
Some things are not secret doors. Elegant distant drip-drip-drips. Guttering sconces. Some things are stone. Moss. Cold. Dark. Box-eaten boxes, boaked back up.
Scientists are sometimes whimsical in their naming conventions. They have named certain particles ‘quarks’ and certain quarks ‘charmed’ and ‘strange’. There is the Peter Pan Disco, the Boojum, the OMG Particle, the Gömböc, the Aether Horn.
Tehran to Bristol. I had, alas, returned to the soggy island, where I was live-transcribing a session of the CARE emergency response working group. Not since I had been amanuensis to a blind poet in Burgandy (given the sack within minutes for conveying the wrong quality of silence), had I ached so much to interpret, to editorialize, to butt in. I remembered the strong sausagey hands of the Serjeants. But the truth was, I didn’t really want to scribe these scientists. I wanted to scribe the CAREs themselves.
A pensive lull. I blurted out, You guys, I am concerned. You have obviously chosen this acronym just so it spells CARE.
Good, isn’t it? said a leading scientist in a field that may not have existed before this morning. Care Anomaly: Record and Evaluate!
Should we ever do MORE than Record and Evaluate?
I’m sorry, said the CARE team’s scrum leader. As an access worker assigned to the session today, you are a valued stakeholder, and we are interested in your co-creation, but we are on such a tight schedule . . .
Later that day they renamed them Care Autonomous Reflexivity Events.
I’m sorry, I KNOW I’m speaking a lot, but … I still really don’t think it explains what these phenomena are?
Basically a CARE can form when the SCARE conditions reach certain critical thresholds. That S stands for Seed. Or Starter. Or Semi.
Okay, thank you that is a lot clearer.
Whatever CAREs were, they were happening more and more frequently. One thing was for sure: no matter how much they changed the name, the C in CARE always stood for Care. Care meant the Care Sector. Care meant interdependence, without writing down exactly who owes whom what when. Care was compendious. Carelessness was its nemesis. Care countered Professor Coldheart's uncaring magic. Care was thoroughly cleaning every room. Care meant whole-hearted attention, as in I DO care. Care was thinking ahead, because you know their needs, and sometimes needs are like prophecies, magpies, crystal balls, codewords.
CAREs were popping up everywhere. Each CARE, like each hurricane, had a name. Loyal Heart Dog CARE, Playful Heart Monkey CARE, Proud Heart Cat CARE, Swift Heart Rabbit CARE, Treat Heart Pig CARE, Noble Heart Horse CARE. Each CARE named for a character in an ancient cartoon. Gentle Heart Lamb CARE was the first to appear, and she appeared over Lagos, stabilized for six months and then melted. By that time Bright Heart Raccoon CARE had already formed over Chengdu. Soon the cartoon canon was exhausted. New CAREs, shimmering in the valleys, creeping iridescent to the crests, had unprecedented names. Undercommons Heart Hog CARE. Nonnonviolent Heart Raven CARE.
When Churchgame Heart Urchin CARE clipped the edge of an emerging riot in Lancaster, Australia, the world's first CARE Singularity was formed. The riots were then conducted with the utmost tenderness, at least to any outside observer, although there were ferocious scientific debates about what somebody inside the CARE Singularity would experience. What was clear was this. Dense pockets of stored crip deep time were being unlocked by the CARE Singularity and secret passageway tendrils were ripping through stonewall ontologies. Loving tendrils extruded through damage-to-property and started to tickle threats-to-life. Inside the Singularity, spears were beaten into pruning hooks, but gibbets were also beaten to guillotines. Without a care in the world, carefree.
The scientists were tippedy-tapping at their laptops and I was tippedy-tapping at mine. There was quite an atmosphere. The transcript could legitimately have read, in full:
(crosstalk)
Some snippets.
If the sphere of moral concern extends so it’s mathematically bigger than the universe! What then?!
My model suggests that there won’t be context any more!
Context is the C in CARE!
I thought that was Concern?!
Can’t you SEE I’m concerned?!
No, I’m saying the C in Care --
We don’t have time for this! The Singularity is about to collapse the difference between careless and carefree!
Were the carless even on the stakeholder map?!
Come off it, we’ll be fine here! Bristol was sited as a command centre SPECIFICALLY because it is the safest possible …
Look, WHATEVER the diameter parameter hits, the difference between careless and carefee won’t collapse! The difference between empathy and empathy would have to break down first!
I think whatever this speaker was referring to had already happened by the time the sentence was finished. Empathy and sympathy? Or maybe empathy and something completely different, like a six-slice toaster?
By late afternoon the riot was semi-finished, with the exception of relict crip time rioting in the severed Singularity roots. But the CARE Singularity remained over Australia, its diameter oscillating slightly, but apparently stable.
Record and Evaluate, said one of the scientists with satisfaction, looked at me, and did a double-take. You! I TOLD you so!
It was a calm summer evening, my leg felt strong, and I decided to walk home. I could go most of the way by the cycle path, which was richly wooded on both sides. Moths floated in the dim leaves. It had rained earlier and everything was fresh and wet.
Every now and then a cyclist would go by playing loud beautiful music, and the pair just ahead would shriek and dance. Then on one occasion they turned and danced, and I danced too, over a distance of fifty yards, and they bent at their waists laughing and shot ahead. One walked, one used a mobility scooter. From then on, whenever a cyclist went past playing music, they would turn and dance and I would dance too. In this particular city at this time there were many such cyclists.
I felt a bit intimidated by them, because they seemed so joyful, and though I was also joyful, I felt contemplative rather than wild.
Then for some reason they slowed down, the distance closed, and it became obvious we would fall into step together, and then I realised I recognised one, the scooter user.
Then I remembered where last I had seen him. He'd had a new eye put in. It was Ned, from the bobbins mill. His face ran a rapid gamut of emotion, settling on pleasant surprise. His companion’s face was frozen along with the moths and the leaves and the shining wet. We were in fairy time now, though it has other names.
Old Ned Dyer. Or Pouke, don’t they call you? Did my cousin send you?
Silver laughter tinkling, like lanterns in antlers in snow.
I suppose he did in the beginning, said Pouke. But it’s been a hot minute since I filed a report to old Alberon.
But I tried to go home once, I protested. I could not find the Aspen Gate! I thought perhaps that the land . . . that there was . . . that . . .
An understanding hung between us. If an AI had painted the understanding, surprisingly, it might not have been a land wasted to a siller mist, or withered to waste. It was something else. A young boy, taken up by a lathe belt, and his head crushed between the iron drum and the ceiling.
Tee bee aitch, said Pouke, I believe that’s why Alberon is so keen to restore you to the Thorn Throne? He’s had so many of his agents go native, looking for you, down the centuries. Told Fell is quite short-staffed I’m told. I think he thinks if YOU return, WE’LL drift back by dribs and drabs …
Well. Would you?
No of course not. None of us are spies or bounty hunters any more. We’re the competition, Baldy! I won’t say I’m interested, particularly. But all the others are after the same job as you. We’re all gunning for it now.
Pouke met my eyes, and an understanding hung in the air between us. If an AI painted a picture of this understanding, perhaps we would have glimpsed a cowled figure, swirled in some shadows, a finger riffling the foredge of a big book. If an AI had transcribed this understanding, perhaps it would have written, “Raqib and Atid, La Biblioteca de Babel, Chitragupta, Criptörök, Clotho and her sisters, The Book of Life, The Akashic Records, Destiny in his Garden, the Garden of Forking Paths, Sleep Apnea, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, The Infrathin, the Neutral ‘Veil’ of Money, [inaudible].”
Oh, I said vaguely. No, that’s not really it. That’s not why I came. I just wanted to … to write things down, really. Help them say things. And not meddle. And maybe just daydream a bit. You know how a shadow dancing can be a kind of light, and stuff like that …
Well that’s interesting, said Pouke. I believe you, or I believe YOU believe that. I guess we can all have a mix of reasons. For a long time I stuck around because I loved you, Bald Ass.
Bald Ass? I hadn’t heard that nickname since …
AND you were in Archives and Records too! I’m sorry I never knew you, Pouke.
Ah, I was only a pigwidgeon then. But I did love you.
And I loved you when you were Ned, so we’re even.
Is that how that works? said Pouke thoughtfully. Well, until next, Baldy.
Go well, Ned, I said.
As it happened I fell on that walk back, and shed my lucky drop of blood I think, for it took me a long time to get home. And it was a long, long time after before I left it again.
Meanwhile, I have finally got round to joining a union.
As for the CARE Singularity, and all that? All those AIs?
The mortals had second thoughts, and scrapped pretty much all of it. They decided they’d made a wrong turn. So, tricky as it was, they reversed. Certain stocking-frames were, very carefully, smashed. The Archivista was right. Some things, you can’t unlearn. But the Archivista was also wrong. Because you can learn to unlearn them. And they did.
They reversed, and they reversed, and then tilted in a slightly different direction, and forward they went. And I went with them.