Mark Doten: The Infernal

Jay Garner wore khakis and open-collared shirts in Iraq, while L. Paul Bremer was known for his combat boots and tailored suits; Alberto Gonzales called himself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror; Mark Zuckerberg fenced; Nathan Myhrvold dreamt of helium balloons over the North Pole; and Charles Graner was accused of putting a razor blade in the food of an inmate (though the alleged incident took place in the United States, not Iraq, and in any case, apart from this note, his name goes unmentioned here …).

Real-world people and events appear in The Infernal , but — to use the legal phrase, which also happens to be true — this is a work of fiction, and all incidents and characters are either fictional or used fictitiously. Where characters and events can be matched in one way or another to real-world counterparts, they have been deformed, reimagined, made into weird composite animals, and/or rendered insane, with invented conversations, thoughts, feelings, backstories, geographies, gestures, verbal tics, sunsets, and blood ties sprayed everywhere, helter-skelter.

In a 1945 Atlantic article, “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush described his memex, a hypothetical, early precursor to hypertext and the World Wide Web. Though he appears here as a villain, he is widely (and rightly) admired as one of the twentieth century’s most important figures in the fields of science and technology. As for Jimmy Wales, well … Wikipedia is one of the great human things of recent years, but my Jimmy Wales is someone else, who invents things that are different and kills people who get in his way and lives a very long time. The only accusations of villainy that The Infernal credibly supports are those connecting “Mark Doten” (pages 160–78 and 266–80) with the author.

Roger Ailes …Theatrical producer.

Akkad Boy …A boy full of stories (Roger Ailes, Andrew Breitbart, L. Paul Bremer, etc.), but who is he?

Andrew Breitbart …Journalist.

L. Paul Bremer …Leader of US reconstruction efforts in Green Zone. Adopted in early childhood by a wealthy family, together with Condi Rice. Friend of Donny Rumsfeld.

Vannevar Bush …After calisthenics, as the men distributed the formula to the youths of the institute, the good doctor Vannevar would tell them: We must preserve you. I have always insisted — I will work with neither boys nor adolescents, but youths. A few months at most. A new, pure flame. A youthful brilliance uncut by adult dullness. And I will hold you as youths for all time! Drink your medicine, my dear ones! For we all must sacrifice. To defeat our enemies, yes. Cherish your sacrifices! To burn brightly — burn to pure intensity, like headlights on an empty road, in the service of your country — just imagine! Ah, my youths! Drink your medicine down — to the last dregs.

And then, in the gymnasium, he’d bid them — those boarded at the Institute for Youth Advances — dizzy, nauseous — to lie down on their mats. And he’d launch into the first of that day’s many lectures, on the Magdeburg hemispheres, or the third-period inventions of Heron of Alexandria, or the wave function of identical fermions. And within a few months of their arrival they were, all of them, performing at beyond-genius levels.

Dick Cheney …Oil man; vice president of the United States. Knows a teachable moment when he sees it.

The Cloud …?

Mark Doten …Book publisher; bundler. Associated with “Parallel Depository” theory of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

Jeff Gannon …Former congressional page; White House correspondent.

Gips …Bundler. Friend of Roos.

Alberto Gonzales …US attorney general; trapped in ductwork.

Hakim …Drone-strike survivor. Friend of Rashid.

Karen Hughes …Former gray hat hacker; fixer (e.g., dismantled the Office of Total Information Awareness’s “Market for Eschatological Futures” and oversaw the execution of Admiral Poindexter). Friend of Admiral Poindexter.

Noor K— …Daughter and wife; in possession of salt and spider hearts.

Osama bin Laden …Teacher; fugitive; experimenter.

The Memex …A world network of knowledge created for the Commission in 1945 by Vannevar Bush.

Nathan Myhrvold …Author of nine-volume treatise on astronaut ice cream; inventor of bug zappers; operator of North Pole helium balloon tours. Seeks the Cones of Power. Friend of Mark Zuckerberg.

The New City …The Commission built the New City in a dream of immortality, and it is true, those sent up lived on, but not in the paradise of their dreams; as the souls were uploaded the information they contained — the information that they were — became grist for the Memex’s most advanced and unknowable edges of recursive self-improvement; the system latched more and more voraciously onto the poor panicked howlers and sucked and sliced their information; this inhuman or post-human material, more complex by orders of magnitude than anything previously encoded by human invention, provided a surge of nutriments to something all new, and it was called the Cloud, and it elaborated itself; and the Memex grew, and threaded deep into the Cloud, and the Cloud became for the Commission tool and ally and inscrutable presence. And when the howls of the dead souls grew so fierce that they sickened the living, the souls were wrapped in scraps of Wet-Grid and the New City was pushed all the way to 90 North, and though the souls tried to shriek themselves free, the Cloud elaborated the grid, wrapping the whole world in the grid as a mesh sock wraps a diseased heart, leaving only a vast hole at the top of the world to pen its victims.

The Cloud grew in strength, and the Wet-Grid in complexity, and what had been a time of catastrophic weather, of worldwide deceit, barbarity, treachery, and evil, began to change — the grid soothed the sea and skies, and allowed the Commission to surveil the whole world, and the only fee was to upload the dead not marked as “friend” to the New City …

Jack Nicholson …An actor living and dead; hates Richard Farnsworth; owns a big cat; will stop at nothing.

Barack Obama …Forty-fourth president of the United States; Nobel laureate; a “cool customer.” Friend of bundlers.

The Omnosyne …A mahogany box stuffed with Clockwork Threads; a helmet on a swiveling copper arm; a modified Jensen dental gag; a keyboard assembled from old Remington and Salter typewriters, on which no fingers would play — only the tongue of the subject, wired to the mahogany box through several hundred clockwork threads stuck through the tongue and deep down under it, into the hyoid, the subject worked through the confession by means of those threads, even as another set of threads twisted down the length of the spine. Friend of Jimmy Wales.