Mark Doten: The Infernal

THE OMNOSYNE

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Some fifty years ago, as the Omnosyne experiments progressed at DR. VANNEVAR’S INSTITUTE FOR YOUTH ADVANCES, the MEMEXbecame sick — very sick.

The Memex began to burn up from within, to lose connections, to make new ones arbitrarily, cancerously. Terminals went dark, or spewed only noise. Still we fed in the Omnosyne confessions, and they were subdivided, probed, subjected to the most rigorous possible analysis, at least by the standards of the time.

Once we understood it for sabotage, we scrubbed all traces of the Omnosyne’s workings from the Memex. We were sincere in our desire to destroy both the Omnosyne and its creator, Jimmy Wales. Yet: we have always allowed ourselves certain hedges against sincerity. The interrogator himself, you see — the only one capable of operating the apparatus, the only one who understood its gears and keys and almost silken wires, to say nothing of the science of SPINAL TISSUESand the science of HYOID BONE, and the relationship between them — he was not eliminated, as some among us had wished. Rather, he was placed in solitary confinement, in our most secure facility. And for five decades we’ve held him to one side (and he still looks a youth, his skin grown thicker, somehow waxy, but from a distance, if you squint: a youth still , unchanged from his days at the institute), held him for just such a contingency, just such an impossible moment.

THEORY OF THE OMNOSYNE

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In nerve and bone (so goes the theory), truth lives — in each individual, these nerve and bone cells holding his deepest kernel of belief: and this belief is information. The information — this deep story of the self — is replicated endlessly, each copy continually changing, perpetually communicating its information to all the other cells — every cell, all at once, and how is that possible?

THE OMNOSYNE AS DEATH SENTENCE

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Once given over to the Omnosyne, a body with even the faintest flicker of life will remain animate — will begin to confess; the pages are spat from the apparatus, dense with blocks of Omnotic Code; the body does not relinquish its hold on life until the confession is at an end. Then the body dies, as all given over to the Omnosyne die. Yes, the subject is preserved this long and no longer — the procedure is invariably fatal.

IN THE CLOUD

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And now the Cloud roils with new energy, it grows and changes, and we roil and grow with it — we, the world-body of Commissioners, drawn forth, all at once, and as never before, each to his own terminal — we spin and dip through the Cloud, even as, with some piece of our minds, we attend to these reports — writing and editing and reediting and reverting these words almost as sleepwalkers.

COMMISSION RESPONSE TO THE AKKAD BOY

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We need the information.

He is part of what is happening and we need — now, today —the information that is inside him.

Things are happening — some change is at hand, as though the Wet-Grid and the Cloud are entwining, and reaching not down, for the earth, but up — thrusting up to the plane of fixed stars, and beyond; and it seems perhaps that great birds of light are calling back to us — and we want to understand — we want to know what next.

We must know.

Before the boy’s dead!

And so we ask: Shall we, after all these years, make use of the Omnosyne?

And so it is decided: Yes, the Omnosyne, one last time.

Shall we free the traitor Jimmy Wales?

And so it is decided: after these decades of solitary confinement, we shall free the traitor Jimmy Wales and send him to the Akkad Valley to make use once again of the Omnosyne, his great and terrible apparatus of extraction.

The Jewboy picked his way through the boulders near the cave system. He smashed a lizard with a rock, scuttled up to the next boulder, and smashed another lizard. The Jewboy smiled vaguely, head lolling, as he pounded out a third lizard’s guts, my lieutenants tell me.

“The heat! Who smiles in such heat?” they ask.

Through the long afternoon the burning sun blasts our mountain, fiery air jams itself into the farthest recesses of the cave system, or as deep as we’ve yet managed to venture. There may be deeper passages, cooler passages. For this I have no evidence, only suspicions and the occasional chill.

“We thought of killing him,” the first lieutenant says. He hurls the smiling Jew to the floor.

“But we brought him to you instead,” says the second lieutenant.

“Pig!” “Little satanist!”—these the words of the third and fourth lieutenants as they disassemble and wipe down their rifles.

I recline on the floor on an array of pillows. I raise the creature by the hair and gaze into his liquid eyes. No reflection there, just black oil.

“Whenever you look at a Jew, you look at a smiling Jew,” I say. “These Hebrew grins have been known to penetrate and at times becloud the senses, such that he is brought even here, to the central chamber, this pipsqueak Yid who should have been dispatched on sight.”

The first and fourth lieutenant: “But Teacher—”

“Does iron mix with wood?” I ask. “Or blood with bone?”

The second and third lieutenant: “Teacher, we thought—”

“You should have slaughtered our little pig well away from our cave system. But he is here now, so we will slaughter him here.”

I say these words, and ease the boy across my lap.

The notion that we can remake the world-body. Waziristan the guts of the world, not the head or heart, but the guts. Then yank out the guts, the world bowing its head in horror, seeing with its eyes what its head knows: guts spilling from an open torso, pink and purple coils of warm innards spilling out from a world-body falling in slow motion.

I work my fingers into the Yid’s hair. I say, “Even this mistake — a serious, perhaps a grave mistake — can be an opportunity for learning. Every moment, I tell you, is a peg we can pull ourselves up on, lifting ourselves clear of the world of flesh and toil. Take, for instance, the body across my lap: so light one entertains the fantasy that he’s just husks, no blood inside. But the circulatory elements at his throat pound grotesquely, as you see.”

All four lieutenants grunt their satisfaction.

“What does this teach us? What can we learn from this phenomenon? And when I slice open his throat — how much greater will our learning be?”

Knife raised overhead, I roll Jewboy in my lap so he’s fully exposed to the lieutenants. And I bring down the blade.

It is then that I meet with a curious and quite powerful resistance.

A piece of Yid conjuring to stop the arm? The lieutenants cease their grunting, and their eyes go wide — all four pairs, all at once. What is holding my arm is holding it with great determination. But I do not give in to the force that counters me — for I am the stronger.