Don DeLillo - Zero K

“What we have here is small, painstaking and private. One by one, now and then, people enter the chamber. In an average day, how many? There is no average day. And there is no posturing here. No warping of the body in remorse, submission, obedience, worship. We do not kiss rings or slippers. There are no prayer rugs.”

She sat crouched, one hand grasping the other, each considered phrase an emblem of her dedication, so I chose to think.

“But is there a link to older beliefs and practices? Are we a radical technology that simply renews and extends those swarming traditions of everlasting life?”

Someone on the benches turned and looked my way. It was my father, giving me a slow and knowing nod. Here they are, he seemed to be saying, two of the people whose ideas and theories determine the shape of this endeavor. The vital minds, as he’d described them earlier. And the others, they had to be benefactors, as Ross was, the support mechanism, the money people, seated in this stone room, on backless benches, here to learn something about the philosophical heart of the Convergence.

The man began to speak. There was a tone, a ripple somewhere nearby, and his words, in one of the languages of Central Europe, became a smooth digital genderless English.

“This is the future, this remoteness, this sunken dimension. Solid but also elusive in a way. A set of coordinates mapped from space. And one of our objectives is to establish a consciousness that blends with the environment.”

He was short and round, high forehead, frizzed hair. He was a blinker, he kept blinking. Talking was an effort and he cranked his hand in rotary motions as he spoke.

“Do we see ourselves living outside time, outside history?”

The woman brought us back to earth.

“Hopes and dreams of the future often fail to account for the complexity, the reality of life as it exists on this planet. We understand that. The hungry, the homeless, the besieged, the warring factions and religions and sects and nations. The crushed economies. The wild surges of weather. Can we be impervious to terrorism? Can we ward off threats of cyberattack? Will we be able to remain truly self-sufficient here?”

The speakers seemed to be directing their remarks somewhere beyond the assembled group. I assumed that there were recording devices, sound and image, outside my range of vision, and that this discussion was intended primarily for the archives.

I also assumed that my presence was meant to be known only to father and son and to the escort with the swirled hair.

They were talking about the end, everybody’s end. The woman was looking down now, speaking into the rough wood of the table. I imagined that she was a person who fasted periodically, days without food, sips of water only. I imagined that she’d spent early time in Britain and the U.S., enveloped in her studies, learning how to withdraw, how to conceal herself.

“We are at the mercy of our star,” she said.

The sun is an unknown entity. They spoke of solar storms, flares and superflares, coronal mass ejections. The man tried to find adequate metaphors. He cranked his hand in odd synchrony with his references to earth orbit. I watched the woman, bowed down, silent for a time in the setting of billions of years, our vulnerable earth, the comets, asteroids, random strikes, the past extinctions, the current loss of species.

“Catastrophe is our bedtime story.”

Blinking man beginning to enjoy himself, I thought.

“To some extent we are here in this location to design a response to whatever eventual calamity may strike the planet. Are we simulating the end in order to study it, possibly to survive it? Are we adjusting the future, moving it into our immediate time frame? At some point in the future, death will become unacceptable even as the life of the planet becomes more fragile.”

I saw him at home, head of the table, family dinner, overfurnished room in an old movie. He was a professor, I thought, who’d abandoned the university to pursue the challenge of ideas in this sunken dimension as he’d called it.

“Catastrophe is built into the early brain.”

I decided to give him a name. I would give them names, both of them, just for the hell of it, and to stay involved, expand the tenuous role of the concealed man, the surreptitious witness.

“It’s an escape from our personal mortality. Catastrophe. It overwhelms what is weak and fearful in our bodies and minds. We face the end but not alone. We lose ourselves in the core of the storm.”

I listened carefully to what he was saying. Nicely translated but I didn’t believe a word of it. It was a kind of wishful poetry. It didn’t apply to real people, real fear. Or was I being small-minded, too limited in perspective?

“We are here to learn the power of solitude. We are here to reconsider everything about life’s end. And we will emerge in cyberhuman form into a universe that will speak to us in a very different way.”

I thought of several names and rejected them. Then I came up with Szabo. I didn’t know if this name was a product of his country of origin but it didn’t matter. There were no countries of origin here. I liked the name. It suited his bulging body. Miklos Szabo. It had an earthy savor that contrasted nicely with the programmed voice in translation.

I studied the woman as she spoke. She spoke to no one. She spoke into free space. She needed one name only. No family name, no family, no strong involvements, no hobbies, no particular place she was obliged to return to, no reason not to be here.

The headscarf was her flag of independence.

“Solitude, yes. Think of being alone and frozen in the crypt, the capsule. Will new technologies allow the brain to function at the level of identity? This is what you may have to confront. The conscious mind. Solitude in extremis. Alone. Think of the word itself. Middle English. All one . You cast off the person. The person is the mask, the created character in the medley of dramas that constitute your life. The mask drops away and the person becomes you in its truest meaning. All one. The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?”

Artis has spoken about being artificially herself. Was this the character, the half fiction who would soon be transformed, or reduced, or intensified, becoming pure self, suspended in ice? I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to think about a name for the woman.

She spoke, with pauses, about the nature of time. What happens to the idea of continuum — past, present, future — in the cryonic chamber? Will you understand days, years and minutes? Will this faculty diminish and die? How human are you without your sense of time? More human than ever? Or do you become fetal, an unborn thing?

She looked at Miklos Szabo, the Old World professor, and I imagined him in a three-piece suit, someone from the 1930s, a renowned philosopher having an illicit romance with a woman named Magda.

“Time is too difficult,” he said.

This made me smile. I stood hunched at the viewing slot, which was situated just below eye level, and found myself looking again at the skull across the room, an artifact of the region and possible object of plunder and the last thing I might have expected to find in this environment of scientific approaches to life’s end. It was about five times the size of an ordinary human skull and it wore a headpiece, which I hadn’t fully registered earlier. This was an imposing skullcap in the shape of many tiny birds, set flat to the skull, a golden flock, wingtips connected.

It looked real, the cranium of a giant, blunt in its deathliness, disconcerting in its craftwork, its silvery grin, a folk art too sardonic to be affecting. I imagined the room empty of people and furniture, rock-walled, stone-cold, and maybe the skull seemed right at home.