(For Peter)
The angels do not reside on a planet like this earth; But … in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.
Joseph Smith, The Doctrine and Covenants, Section 130, Verses 4 through 7
In my “novelist” days (1984 to 1992) I spent my spare writing time wrestling to the ground an overwrought tale about time and eternity. My never-ended story turned on the idea that a person could change her life in the same manner a theater director blocks a stage play—moving characters about the chessboard of life at will. Or the way a film editor snips and discards entire scenes on the cutting room floor. Central to the novel was a question I still ponder: if tomorrow was made yesterday, how can I, today, change a predicated future?
Twice Light begins with a holographic projection of the City of Lights dropped onto a Kansan plain from a great digital height. Intended as a reality-adventure park—no arcades or roller coasters here, just the city itself–Paris, Kansas would soon be open for business. Behind the scenes, the technology required to maintain the no-VR-headset-required, FX-juiced illusion of a tactile French capital was resource intensive to say the least. To crunch the trillion-trillion computer instructions per second it took to fire the real-time city, a fleet of tachyon-beamed spacecraft encircled the earth at faster-than-light speeds to inch backward in time far enough to build up a week-long head of computational steam. The object of the massless energy was to produce not just full-motion holograms but to convert light itself into a kind of texture.
(On a family trip to the actual City of Lights, I found myself scouring the streets below through binoculars while standing on the roof of the Arc de Triomphe. I was looking for my son who couldn’t be bothered to pull his nose out of Ender’s Game to make the hike. After some adjustments to the eyepiece, there he was, book-in-face, strolling down the Champs–Élysées, trading his summer vacation for a voyage to the Formic homeworld. In Paris, Kansas, his walking straight into a lamppost at that moment would have produced a very real bonk on the head. to say nothing of the storage requirements for on- and off-loading the massive image libraries up bearing the inch-for-inch model of the 100-square-kilometer attraction. And did I mention you could buy a ticket to visit “Paris” on any day going back to the Renaissance?)
The preposterous setup was meant, in the vernacular of story and structure, to ignite an inciting incident leading to the novel’s first complication. With all the computers crammed into all the vehicles swirling in low earth orbit, the deep fake city a vaporous illusion on the ground, where would the engineers find, house, and manipulate all that crunchable data?
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In college, I worked at a printing and graphic shop where I learned the art of transferring a single eight-and-a-half by eleven image onto thousands of eight-and-half by eleven sheets of paper. Sounds like straightforward photocopying. But every two-dimensional printing machine since Gutenberg worked the same, not-very-straightforward way. A flat object—say a picture of the Eiffel Tower—is converted to its mirror image on specially treated paper, a metal plate, or a computer chip, which then picks up ink or directs toner to all the right places corresponding to every detail of the original. The mirror image, or “negative” is then rolled, sprayed, or baked onto each sheet of paper it encounters, rendering a negative of the negative, i.e., a positive doppelgänger of the two-dimensional Eiffel Tower. 3D printers work the same way, their “ink” no more than dimensioned particles repetitively adhering to each other like so many layers of fine cement until a clone of the 3D model, a plastic toy in the shape of the Eiffel Tower I picked up on a visit to Microsoft headquarters a few years back, is realized. For such objects, their intermediate “negative” is a series of computerized instructions applied to spatial data about where to “print” each particle. As a fully cloned metropolis, Paris, Kansas was conceptualized as a four-dimensional place, printed not with ink or cement but with particulate-bearing waves of light that behaved in time according to a negative, of a negative, of the six-hundred-year history of Paris, France.
All effort to bring order into disorder is disorder.
David Bohm
If we accept that one of the theoretical side effects of entropy—the tendency of all things to break down and eventually fall apart—is that for every act of order in our universe there is an equal and opposite “non-act” of disorder recorded in the corner of some “non-universe” inaccessible to us, we might imagine the unimaginable: the stored existence of an exact mirror, or negative imprint of every action ever taken by anyone or anything in the history of everything. And if the Technico-industrial complex bent on creating a full-scale illusion the size of Paris (i.e., my novel’s group antagonist) could somehow tap into whatever cosmic systems governing the management of such a storage facility, those mirror imprints could be strip-mined to recreate a double-negative of any event from the deep past. Think of the possibilities! And how someone might horribly misuse them.
Twice Light was to be narrated from the point of vantage of a systems architect—call him Scott—who tracks down the inevitable industrial spillage from what he comes to know as Entropy Storage Tank 909 at one remove from the antipodes of the universe he inhabits. He doesn’t question how it got there. He’s only curious about one thing. Instead of exploiting the negatively stored data for fame and wealth—reverse imaging a holographic reproduction of, say, the first nanosecond of the Big Bang—Scott’s private appropriation of Tank 909 targets a single, self-centered, and short-lived incident: the moment he first met, and then lost forever, his one true love.
The central question of the novel and the point of this three-part post is this: if, as Hippocrates asserts, declaring the patient’s history sharpens a diagnosis of her present condition, and facilitates from that present the foretelling of its future state, can even the slightest edit to a completely restorable negative image of the past literally ripple-effect its way onto the positively laid down “ink” of the future? And if so, would you make that edit?
In Twice Light, instead of immediately tinkering with his potentially restorable past, Scott uses his history-fueled influence over the future to speed up, recursively, his skill development in working the clay of entropy itself. Making tiny experimental impressions on his immediate past–think five minutes ago–he can advance his editing skills at exponential rates. Too many Russian dolls to remember later, Scott perfects by and by not just the ability to cut and paste his past like a film editor, but to walk into a life-size holograph of it and tweak an action here, a conversation there, a thought that might one day trans-mutate into a thoroughly altered worldview, and a single scene he will change everything in his life to redirect.
Give me where to stand and I will move the earth.
Archimedes
What I’m describing, hypothesizing—I made the whole thing up; don’t try any of it at home—is on its surface a work of fiction. But after first imagining, then envisioning, then putting down on paper principles and processes that, if carefully applied, could at a minimum enhance the clarity of one’s past, reveal the precise manner in which that clarity might lead to an altered present, and suggest how the knock-on effect of both literally fuels the making of the future, it got to me really thinking. And the more I mulled the causality inherent in the temporal chain of events, the more Scott the Novelist deferred to Scott the Alchemist. After all, what would it profit a man to write a convoluted story about love in exchange for the time and work it would take to transform his soul?
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When Archimedes boasted, “Give me where to stand and I will move the earth,” he was referring to a concept engineers and physicians today call Moment. Moment is the synergy of mass and energy that occurs when a long-enough lever is placed on just the right, scale-tipping spot where, theoretically at least—Archimedes’ boast has yet to be tested—all things can be changed with di minimis effort. He imagined near-infinite forces converging on that spot, not at random intervals but concentrated into a single burst of pressure. In my long-abandoned story, and my here-and-now nonfiction life whose most noble desire is to become infinitely changeful, “where to stand”—my Moment—is the crux of the real-time editing I strut and fret my hour to produce until I will be heard no more. Like Scott the Thief of Time, who Groundhog Day’d his life-editing process until he mastered the art of rolling his past, present, and future into a moment “continually before the Lord,” Scott the Mortal accepts that even a lifetime of practiced recursion will not be enough.
In the next two posts, I will share some earth-moving moments from my own stage that, like any good story, keep me turning the page.
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This three-part post continues in Falling Objects.