Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

It all became academic when victimless crimes were redefined in the Code Hubbard.

Do not go gentle into that good night: Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

–dylan thomas

GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

President Hubbard's way of encouraging the Longevity Revolution was characteristic. She established a yearly reward of $100,000 for the nonscientist who made the most important contribution to the fight against aging. Since the scientists engaged in life-extension research were already one of the two most heavily funded groups in Unistat (the other was the space engineers), scientists were amused, but not offended, by this wild idea.

The first year there were 5,237 entries submitted. A spot check by the Beast showed that 4,023 came from the new leisure class-ex-workers who had invented themselves out of several jobs and had $50,000 to $80,000 annual incomes. The others came from people who had been unemployed by these inventions. Evidently, many of them were getting bored with a life that consisted mostly of fucking, TV, and vacations, even though that had been what most primates imagined they would do if they didn't have to work for a living.

The second year there were over 30,000 entries-much as Hubbard had expected.

The Longevity Revolution was having its inevitable effect. People who were expecting to live for centuries instead of decades were spontaneously taking the Next Step in their thinking. The hominids of Terra were becoming reoriented to the search for Immortality.

And a second trend was becoming obvious. The majority of practical, testable hyper-longevity proposals were coming in from the colonists in the L5 space-cities.

The domesticated primates of Terra were beginning to consciously guide their own evolution toward becoming Cosmic Immortals.

To Justin Case it appeared that the administration was the first government in history to take Beethoven seriously. To him, Hubbard's whole philosophy was obviously derived from the last movement of the Ninth.

Since a cat has the Buddha mind, even Marvin Gardens had had his own experience of the First Noble Truth. He had made the mistake, once, in 1981, of eating a heavy slice of hash-candy from Afghanistan instead of his after-dinner snort of coke and somehow there was an eruption of activity in the grief circuits of the thalamus. The tramp did not move. He saw the skull beneath the skin, like Eliot; the tears poured and he sat there, weeping for allflesh, for alltormented flesh, for alltormentedfuckingflesh, howling in anguish at the withdrawal of the nipple of self-absorption. He was in Belsen. He stood in the white light as Hiroshima was incinerated. He watched the Grand Army retreat in the snow from Moscow. The tramp fell eternally toward the sidewalk and he saw the wolves close in on the terrified caribou, the smirk of Caligula and all sadists everywhere, the parents of a thousand wars weeping with him over murdered children ("We should be gentle with children," a Voice said reproachfully from a window in space), and for a minute he had a crazy religious vision that WE HAVE TO STOP THE KILLING there is no other way and it is too late for another alternative it is exactly that simple and you can even repeat it in italics we have to stop the killing and he was so excited at the sudden clarity of it that he could see his whole future as nonstop witnessing to the truth of this vision. He would invent his own TV show and become a supersalesman and sell it to the top network and it would be the Corporal Works of Mercy Hour. It would have no acts of violence or hurting. It would just be decent people doing decent things, as enumerated in the famous passage from Aquinas: visiting the sick and imprisoned, feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless, aiding the oppressed, comforting the afflicted, and praying for us all.

It was that simple, beyond all the irony and agony of his tortured humor, and you could even say it in one word: ahimsa.

Yea-a-a-ay, God! Glory, glory, glory.

He staggered to his desk to record this revelation, but when he got there microamnesia had already set in and he couldn't remember what it was that had seemed so clear and important, but another Voice was coming through and he scrawled rapidly:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

At that very moment, in Los Angeles, Eve Hubbard decided she was going to run for President.

"So that," Justin Case concludes triumphantly (he is dreaming about giving a lecture to an audience of trans-vestites), "the elements in the montage may be of any number-five, fifteen, fifty, whatever-and there be any emotions you can imagine implicit in each one of them separately. Nonetheless, the total emotional effect emerges from the montage, not from the elements. Film is the visual demonstration of Fuller's synergetic geometry."

"You're fuller shit!" one of the transvestites yelled.

Who shit? Justin shit. Bullshit! Who shit? He was being carried around by the time-dwarfs in a jeweled chair wearing the Crown of Thorns. It was Mardi Gras. He was having a swell time. He decided to go on lecturing them.

"The montage of Chinatown or Chapel Perilous takes us to the Lair of Fu Manchu-the center of Power-the occult Nine Unknown Illuminated Ones who rule the world-the secret of capitalism and ownership-the cruel Cross that separates inside from outside, without windows."

But then he wet his pants and they were all laughing at him, laughing mockingly and childishly, as they closed in with the tar and feathers. They had found out he was a no-good shit.

"In other words," Blake Williams lectures, "what collapses the state vector and er um determines or ah least ways brings it about that a new quantum state appears can only be a Hidden Variable implicate in the whole system- the biggest whole system."

"You mean when Ignatz throws the brick-"

"If Ignatz is a quantum physicist and is throwing a photon, Krazy or Schrodinger's Cat can be in any of several eigenstates, um, yes, so that in effect the whole universe participates in the ah decision as to whether the Kat will be hit by the brick um ah or the photon ah as the case may be."

"Professor," Natalie asked finally, driven to the Edge, "are you putting me on?"

"My dear I am um merely giving you the most consis-tent and literal interpretation of Bell's Theorem as devel-oped by Dr. Jeffrey Chew at U.C.-Berkeley and Dr. Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics."

"The whole universe decides?"

"Well there is um a certain degree of metaphor in-volved…"

"You know, Professor"-Natalie sits up and gives him a level glance-"I met a midget once, a nasty little son-of-a-bitch, but he told me something I never forgot. All that exists is metaphor, he said, and whoever controls our metaphors controls us."

"As an anthropologist," Blake Williams said, "I must agree. Are we living in an occult thriller, a porn movie, a philosophical treatise, a sci-fi novel? It depends on which parts of our experience we choose to highlight. That brings

us to the question: Are we writing our life-scripts, or is there a Hidden Variable, as the new quantum theories suggest?"

"You mean the whole universe will decide what we're gonna do next?" Natalie wanted a straight answer.

"Well um that's the alternative to saying there are multiple universes where anything that can happen does happen ah and it's quite democratic, really, since every lesser system within the whole system gets its vote."

Natalie's semantic circuit was working on overload. "You're telling me that each of us and the chair over there and each atom in us and in the chair and in Marvin's cocaine-we all get one vote?"