The infernal, p.1
The Infernal, page 1
THE INFERNAL
THE INFERNAL
– A Novel –
MARK DOTEN
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2015 by Mark Doten
Parts of this book appeared in different form in Conjunctions, elimae, New York magazine, the Rumpus, Spank Zine, and Word Riot.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by the Jerome Foundation, Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-701-6
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-335-3
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2015
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950979
Cover design: Kapo Ng
Cover art: Sam Chung, A-Men Project
Memex interface design: Jason Booher
Interior Wet-Grid art: Mode Lab
“Hacker” dialect translator used in “Karen Hughes”: Copyright © Samuel Stoddard, rinkworks.com
Random noise insertion program: Chris Doten
To Margo Doten, the first writer I ever met.
And Kim Parsons, life-friend, life-animal.
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
—Anonymous aide to the president, quoted by Ron Suskind,
The New York Times Magazine
God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world; rather may he graciously grant to us to write an apocalypse or true vision of the footsteps of the Creator imprinted on his creatures.
—Francis Bacon, Instauratio Magna, trans. by James Spedding et al.
– AUTHOR’S NOTE –
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.
– CONTENTS –
Dramatis Personae
Part 1: THE DEATH OF THE WORLD
Part 2: REBIRTH
THE INFERNAL
– DRAMATIS PERSONAE –
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.
Tom Pally … A soldier of the Gallant Arms; wife and son dead.
Admiral Poindexter … Admiral Poindexter’s market for eschatological futures opened to a frenzy for Akkad, though not one mention of the valley had been made in any known media for over a century, and it appeared on no maps; so immediate and consuming was the bidding for Akkad, however, that t he program had to be shuttered, lest this single word on a ticker drive an already panicked world-body to its own annihilation; and so he was led off in chains and shot, on the charge that he had manipulated the market for his own profit (and he accepted the sentence, since he was shot not in the head but clean in the heart, and his brain uploaded to the New City, before the first peptides began to cool—he had the honor of being the first to make that journey, and died saluting the Flag, and dreaming of Immortality).
This meant giving up the possibility of a correction, but we had to confront the real possibility that the market itself would be the driver of the world’s end, that this future, this single word on a ticker, “Akkad,” simply by virtue of its skyrocketing price, might send an already panicked world-body to its own annihilation. Others were of the opinion that the markets should be left to run, that there would necessarily be a correction, for Capital would not allow us to perish. Money knows only growth, they argued; money will seek out its own end, and short it, and be yet more money: and without us money is nothing, and so we will never die.
Rashid … Drone-strike survivor. Friend of Hakim.
Condoleezza Rice … Photographer. Invalid. Adopted in early childhood by a wealthy family, together with L. Paul Bremer. Torn to ribbons by a big cat.
Roos … Bundler. Friend of Gips.
Donny Rumsfeld … Author of “Iraq Survey.” Friend of Condi Rice and L. Paul Bremer.
The Sheriff … Keep your distance!
Jimmy Wales … Key innovator of the Memex and inventor of the Omnosyne at Dr. Vannevar’s Institute for Youth Advances. Later escaped the institute after slaughtering a dozen institute personnel; on capture, he was placed in permanent solitary confinement. As a lasting effect of Dr. Vannevar’s formula, he retains the size and appearance of a youth. Friend of The Wolf, The Leopard, The Lion.
The Wolf, The Leopard, The Lion … I heard warnings, chatter coming in to dog the dark wood in which I found myself; a thousand years burrowing and I surfaced to a life no longer a life I knew; I heard voices borne in on the wind and stumbled North through stunted gashed and bony trees and fell, exhausted, still farther from the true path; and O! the voices moaned, the bloody slavering maws bounding down the mountainside;
THE LEOPARD: O! how we were warned about the unitary executive!;
THE LION: The finest stress positions!;
THE WOLF: The constitution in rags and tar!;
all three beasts crashing through rending me my garments casting me up the steep scrub …
… they tossed me maw to maw words of each one taking up where the last left off
THE LEOPARD: Empty highways littered with the carcasses of sheeple!;
THE LION: Smashed apparatus of the global-industrial killing machine draped with sheeple!;
THE WOLF: The human race at last extinct!;
THE LION: Technology in ruins!;
THE LEOPARD: Language and thought dead!;
NOTHING NOW!—words of all three slashing up to a unanimous roar as we sailed past boulders and declivities and they pitched me onto the highest bluff; the monsters looked on me their eyes spun hideous then snapped shut, all six eyes, all at once, and the heads pitched back and ROARED—NOTHING NOW they ROARED!—NOTHING BUT THE LAST FEW MOONBATS ON THIS POLAR WASTE BARKING!!!
The beasts! The beasts! Heat and push of the breath so hot and crashing; I leapt from the precipice; I was wrapped in wind, wrapped in splintered ice and gouts of flame;
and a NEW VOICE cried: THROUGH ME THE WOEFUL CITY THROUGH ME ETERNAL WOE THROUGH ME AMONG THE LOST;
now more and more voices, I heard them in the burn;
the voices that fell near me through the burn, me a falling boy; me a falling youth or man; and I saw the New City at last …; a multitude of voices …; I …; I … I …; countless souls …; countless stories …; what burns; I …; I …; I stood in a burn of fire and ice; falling in the burn;
me I stood, firm foot always the lower.
Mark Zuckerberg … Entrepreneur. Amateur fencer and archaeologist; searching for Cones of Power. Friend of Nathan Myhrvold.
– Part 1 –
THE DEATH OF THE WORLD
That all kind of fiery burning Bodies have their parts in motion, I think, will be very easily granted me.
—Robert Hooke, Micrographia, Or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies
The opinion of the operators as to the amount of distortion above which a circuit is unsatisfactory for commercial operation, is in reasonable agreement with the effect on their accuracy of reception for some types of distortion; for other types of distortion there is considerable disagreement.
—Bell System Technical Journal 8, no. 2 (1929)
DISCOVERY OF THE AKKAD BOY [edit]
A reeling shadow drew them to the child. To the boy. First sighted [38.61] hours ago, naked and in convulsion, atop a twisting geological formation known as AL-MADKHANAH (THE CHIMNEY), by those who once walked in its shadow, until new TECHNOLOGIES—telegraphy, lightbulbs, DIODES, and X-rays, brought first by happenstance, then strategy—revealed the Akkad Valley’s strange properties (for it snuffed them all); and in the ensuing struggle to control an area dense with COSMIC NOISE, a space that existed in abrogation of NATURAL LAW, which is to say, pointing to laws higher or beyond, we expelled them that had lived here from time out of mind and made the valley our own. (And later, in the era of THE CLOUD, the broad, flat crown of the Chimney was the first point on Earth’s surface into which a finger of the WET-GRID reached down from the mesosphere and buried itself; and while eleven more UMBILICAL SINGULARIES would follow, spinning slowly across the globe in years-long arcs, broken at odd intervals by discontinuous leaps, drawn by the music of unknown Attractors, here in the valley, until now, there has been only a gentle sway in an otherwise stationary thread, and from underground a deep and nourishing overlay of pulses …)
As the patrol—a WORLD WAR II—era jeep and several uniformed men on HORSES—advanced on the Chimney, the first shadow became two, then three. Soon, a dozen or more birds cut the sky above. The CONES and NANO-MIRRORS of the Wet-Grid inclined gently in response and funneled into the Cloud a plastic composite of thousands of images, first of the birds that seemed to crosscut down and away from the Chimney even as they held to the sky above it. Past those black, oar-like wings we could see only in flashes—the flight paths were sticky, and pulled the focus of the grid—and meanwhile the grid itself was shivering: the cosmic noise in the valley had spiked, and was fed upward, into the Cloud, and we felt it at our terminals, in washes of clarity and insight (and an uptick in the agonized moans within the NEW CITY), even as the situation on the ground remained obscure.
Something was happening.
There is no sphere of AMERICAN concern to which THE COMMISSION does not apply itself, but for over a century we’ve held this slip of desert very dear to our hearts.
The change, when it comes, may come quick—we have always known this.
The moment when the world system must reorganize or collapse.
THE SCOUT [edit]
On the patrol was one who had learned, from the informal contests the soldiers sometimes staged there, how to climb the Chimney without the aid of rope or ladder. He knew which handholds could be trusted and which couldn’t, how to make it over the smooth bulge that ringed the formation halfway up—and he steered clear of the southeast corner, where attractive-looking declivities were inlaid with SCORPION nests.
Thus did he make it to the top of the formation, where the just-visible thread of the umblical singularity pierced the valley.
Thus was he the first to take the figure in.
After rejecting what he saw, he took it in.
But only for a moment, before again rejecting it. And so he reached a compromise: he would understand the noises coming from the child, as well as the information of his VISUAL and OLFACTORY SENSES (scorched hair and FLESH, for instance, intertwining, jockeying for primacy), but also: he wouldn’t. He would hold all that to one side—he would not process it. In the half-light of this compromise, he took steps to deliver himself from the vision. To interpose other bodies between himself and it.
