The Pains

By John Damien Sundman

Volume Black of the Mind Over Matter Trilogy, A Metafictional Fugue on Minds and Machines
Say you're the Savior, Fred Christ. Would you want your frozen head to be reaninmated in 1984?

The world is going all to hell. War looms. Earthquakes happen with increasing regularity; weather patterns are awry; birds are in the water, fish in the air. Old ways wither; old languages are lost as the memories of their last surviving speakers disolve like cobwebs. Something rotten this way comes.

Governments collapse around the globe, leaving only The Party to rule over all.

In a prison cell, a madman spins theories of the mind, conjuring his own freedom. In cars and bars and shopping malls, proles obediently obey the jaded dictates of Big Brother, Ronald Reagan and Oliver North that emanate from the irony machine they call the telescreen. In a subzero laboratory, a scientist stares at an imprisoned god. And in a lonely bare room in a vast and nearly empty monastery, a young novice studies and prays and contemplates the idea of simple goodness, trying to comprehend chaos. For which his only reward will be the pure torment of The Pains.

In a world that's part Orwell, part Cheney, and part who knows what, a holy man tries to find a way to give meaning to his suffering, and perhaps thereby save us all.

Cheeseburger Brown, the creator of Simon of Space brings, brings this universe to life with twelve vivid illustrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Sundman
• Release date: Sep 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370259267

Book preview

Foreword

As a child, like many children, I wanted to be a fireman, construction worker or paperback-writer when I grew up.  John Sundman has done all that and much more. He lived for four years with subsistence farmers in Senegal and wrote world-class technical manuals for Sun Microsystems. He modestly claims to have done the latter without understanding the underlying ware (a refreshing alternative to manuals lacking knowledge of any human language).  Like Clemens, Rowling, Clark Kent, and other greats, Sundman uses pseudonyms (changing his middle names) to protect his secret identity. He is a master of machines—computing, biological and political—and his books include details that will convince an expert, and yet enchant a distant outsider with a compelling page-turner plot. Not just plot and mechanisms, but unforgettable personalities that haunt us long after the pages stop. 

John’s Mind Over Matter trilogy began with his first novel, Acts of the Apostles, in 1999, (significantly reworked as Biodigital in 2014).  His second was Cheap Complex Devices and his third, The Pains. These books get the reader amazingly quickly into a jarringly jamais vu/deja vu world — especially for aficionados of Orwell’s 1984 and Christian doctrine.  While refreshing style changes occur among them, you can find a consistent meta component that adds to the puzzles in each one.  We must now suffer the pain of waiting for his next books Creation Science and Meekman Rising.

Long before synthetic biologists were quoting the bongo physicist, Sundman’s 1999 novel Acts of the Apostles was about The Feynman Nine a programmable nanoscopic machine described as a device for finding a DNA sequence and converting it into another sequence. Sounds a lot like the CRISPR craze of genome editing. As Joe Davis, a ‘hybrid’ artist at Harvard and MIT, might remind us, the best conceptual art (including novels) prods us to visualize vital issues that are lurking at, or far beneath, the surface of our science and cutting edge engineering. My lab specializes in the subset of topics pejoratively classified as sci-fi/impossible, which, sometimes, turn out to be relatively easy.  For this we need a constant stream of challenges and inspirations. A very rich source of such challenges lies at the interface between bio and digital–the realm of synthetic genomics, virus-resistant recoded organisms and Obama’s BRAIN initiative. It is precisely this biodigital interface that lies at the heart John Sundman’s novels. Read them and you may find yourself challenged as well.

George Church,

Harvard & MIT, 2015

Thank you to Helen Michaud for invaluable editorial assistance.

Big ups to Kuro5hin diarist Farq Q. Fenderson, who provided the brain seed.

Text copyright © 2008 John Sundman

Illustrations copyright © 2008 Cheeseburger Brown

Released under the Creative Commons, attribution, non-commercial, no-derivatives license. Some rights reserved. This basically means that you are free to copy, distribute, and transmit this book, but: You have to give Sundman & Brown credit for it; you can’t use the work for commercial purposes; and you can’t make other things (such as movies or TV shows) based on it without what you check with us first.

According to most canonical scripture, this is a work of fiction. Some of the apocrypha are emphatic that it is all true. We ourselves are agnostic.

Rosalita Associates — Post Office Box 2641, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts 02568 www.johnsundman.com

Book design by Marcia Gray, Gary Gray, and John Sundman

Cover Design by Mark Gibbs

Johnsundman.com site design & maintenance by Gary Gray

This book borrows ideas and some occasional text from 1984 by George Orwell. Starting with chapter 3, attentive readers may notice some allusions to, and borrowing from, the work of the late Chris McKinstry, creator of the Mindpixel project. As far as I’ve been able to determine, there is no copyright holder.

Music and lyrics to Mommy’s Little Monster by Social Distortion

Music and lyrics to Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) by Kate Bush

Music and lyrics to Story of Isaac by Leonard Cohen

Music to Good Morning Starshine by Galt MacDermot. Lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni.

The Pains

by

John Damien Sundman

illustrations by

Cheeseburger Brown

Rosalita Associates

In Memory of

Paul Damian Sundman

1962−2008

Maureen Sundman Angevine

1953−2008

Their light is all around us.

I hope some of it shines upon you.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God • The same was in the beginning with God • All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made • In him was life; and the life was the light of men • And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

John 1:1-5

When I thought about this I realized that any dynamically shared resource is a channel. If a process sees any different result due to another process’s operation, there is a channel between them. If a resource is shared between two processes, such that one process might wait or not depending on the other’s action, then the wait can be observed and there is a timing channel.

Tom Van Vleck

poster session, IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy conference, Oakland CA, May 1990

www.multicians.org/timing-chn.html

SIGINT (POSIX)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Description: Terminal interrupt signal

Default action: Abnormal termination of the process

On POSIX-compliant platforms, SIGINT is the signal sent to a process when a user wishes to interrupt it. In source code, SIGINT is a symbolic constant defined in the header file signal.h. Symbolic signal names are used because a signal’s numeric value can vary across platforms; on the vast majority of systems, it is signal #2

chapter 1

r. Norman Lux, nSF, woke up with a pain in his body that felt as if it might have been a soul gone bad.

He first perceived the pain as a toothache in the general area of the upper right quadrant of his mouth. But as he fixed on it and tried to determine which tooth it might be that was hurting, he experienced a swift vague transfer of pain from the upper portion of his mouth—by way of the right side of his neck, down the right side of his body, traversing his torso near his belt line—to a region just north and to the left of his scrotum, where it briefly ceased. Two seconds later he felt the sharp ingrowing of the pinky toenail on his right foot. That pain stopped after about five seconds and was almost immediately replaced by the crushing weight of the white linen sheet under which, exhausted from prayer, Mr. Lux had drifted to sleep only a few hours ago. By faint dawn light, the sheet, where it pressed upon the bad toenail, showed a small bloodstain.

Mr. Lux’s breath was forced from him. The sheet, which still looked as if it were made of white linen, seemingly changed its substance from flax to steel to lead, and now to uranium or even, perhaps, some condensate of neutrons. It weighed tons. Mr. Lux could feel the pressure building in his eyeballs and wondered if they would explode.

There was a burning constriction around his throat. It was as if the Savior’s own noose were tightening, pulling his head up—even as the weight of the sins of the world, transubstantiated into bedclothes, pulled his body down. Fred, have mercy on me, Mr. Lux managed to whisper.

The sheet became heavier still. It was pointless for Mr. Lux to try to throw it off: he could no more get free of it than he would have been able to shake himself free of the rubble of an earthquake-collapsed cathedral. And now the toothache was back, and the L-shaped line of fire from his neck to his groin, and the toenail intent on mayhem. His entire body felt crushed, yet each pain was distinct—as if it were an illustration in an anatomy chart, or a highlighted neural pathway in a clear plastic doll.

Mr. Lux knew he should pray, but somehow the pains made prayer impossible. He thought, I am twenty-four years old. I am going to die with my body crushed to liquid and my head neatly garroted off by a thin layer of woven fabric that weighs less than eight ounces. He sensed his mouth moving as if to laugh at the thought, but the laugh was frozen in his immobile torso. Can’t laugh. Can’t breathe. I guess I can’t call for help either. But he could still move his head, which he now did, deliberately, casting his eyes around the sparse cell, nine feet wide by twelve feet long, that had been his home for the last three years.

The ancient whitewashed fieldstone walls did not lend themselves to decoration. Centered on one wall, above him and to his left, there was a simple noosifix precariously hanging from an irregularity in a rock. On the opposite wall, to his right, hanging from a nail driven into a chink in the cement, there was a kitschy airbrushed painting of a thatched cottage surrounded by flowers and with a pair of bluebirds sitting at the apex of the roof. In the short wall beyond his feet there was a narrow casement window with diamond-shaped leaded-glass panes through which he could see blurry hints of trees green with tiny leaves of early spring. Below the window were a desk and chair. On the desk: a Holy Tibble; a Fredian missal; copies of Byte Datamation, and Electrical Engineering Times; a textbook on nonlinear circuits; and one Alfred the Drinking Duck perpetual motion toy.

cell

A monastery cell was an odd place for a young man to live in