Heaven Engine

By Albert Clarkson

A future of designer humans, smart machines, protean technology. Our dwindled descendents exiled to large space stations visit Cleansed Earth occasionally for gravity- and sensory-deprivation therapy. Human longevity, at last attained, ironically creates a Great Plague of Suicidal Despair, Disnovelling, born of the intruding longer prospect of bloody Nature and of the impersonal hurtling cosmic vastitudes. Centwen, a resurrected twentieth century archetype joined by elites and archetypes from other centuries, learns from his tour guides, the superbot, Prodigy, and its human creator, Great Psychodor, about a last-chance project to create not a mythical but a secular, dynamic, intelligent Heaven; and, if it succeeds, whether or not transformed humans and/or their intelligent machines can escape to it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 30, 2004
• ISBN: 9781418468514

Albert Clarkson

Albert Clarkson was born in Charleston, West Virginia. He is the author of a previous novel, The Old World (Alchemy Books, 1988) and a nonfiction book about analysis and planning in the National Security establishment, Toward Effective Strategic Analysis: New Applications Of Information Technology (Westview Press, 1982). He lives with his wife In Los Gatos, California.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LAST DREAM IN A LONG SLEEP

Awaken!

THE FIRST COGSPELL

THE SECOND COGSPELL

THE THIRD COGSPELL

THE FOURTH COGSPELL

Disnovelling!

The Eco War!

DISNOVELLING

VISITATION 1: 2338 AD

VISITATION 2: 2351 AD

VISITATION 3: 2392 AD – 2501 AD

THE FIFTH COGSPELL

THE SIXTH COGSPELL

VISITATION 4: 2511 AD

THE SEVENTH COGSPELL

Interview With Old Dead Human Selves

THE EIGHTH COGSPELL

AUDIENCE VOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Also by

Albert Clarkson

Toward Effective Strategic Analysis: New Applications of Information Technology

The Old World (a novel)

For Eleanor

And for Lorraine and Ed

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To Jacob Rosch and Sara Gath at AuthorHouse for patient support as this book progressed. And to my first and only agent, the spirited and classy Dora Williams now sadly Out Of The Game who took on my first novel, a slender detective tale published almost two decades ago, and who was for many years a champion of the arts and especially of writers.

AuthorHouse, with its growing force of established writers, is a refuge built on modern publishing technology serving mid-list, literary, experimental writers in a world of ever more compromised, conglomerate-swallowed, formulaic traditional publishers understandably trying to live by Mencken’s advice that you’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the consumer; and simultaneously reminding of an old cartoon in which a father tells his son as they look at monuments now displaying not commanders on horses and leaders standing tall but clusters of nondescript figures on low pedestals, Well, my child, there are no more heroes, just committees.

For his inspirational and wise conversations and email exchanges with me about the ideas in Heaven Engine during the years in which I composed the story, I am grateful to Marvin Minsky, one of the truly important thinkers ever and a great teacher. He knows (and so should you) that he bears no responsibility for my incarnations of him in Heaven Engine.

My gratitude to John Updike who years ago in the aftermath of my reading Roger’s Version kindly asked a crucial question about the Longevitites with whom I was populating Heaven Engine: "How do they keep from being

infernally bored, as human consciousnesses would become in any infinitely prolonged situation?" and thereby added to my confidence in my Grand Diagnosis.

Additional gratitude to friends David Rolston, William Hogan and Garo Kiremidgian, all busy executives in Silicon Valley and writers themselves, as well as to novelist Richard J. Meinhold, for their valuable comments on ideas and passages in Heaven Engine.

Many thanks to Don d’Arms who worked with me tirelessly on the formatting and preparation of the manuscript.

Most importantly, my love and gratitude to my wife and best friend, Eleanor, my greatest strength throughout the writing of this book

LAST DREAM IN A LONG SLEEP

... in a large, darkened theater... apparently in a large audience... voice coming from the shadowy stage... who is speaking? Can’t see speaker... "Well, my human friends, your deepest longing has been for heavenly immortality. Let me tell you your psyhistory. Let me ease the long curiosity of many of you here tonight such as Confucious and Turing who passed from your first lives well before the climax of your Species Drama. And what a drama! It has played forward to the invention and adventures of me, your humble great psymachine, sent Out There not too long ago to search on your behalf (as well as mine!) for the Answer About Heaven. Sent Out There To Look Around While You Put Your Wearied Selves To Sleep.... But long before, at your Beginning when there was only the Word, and for a long time afterward, you humans mostly believed in a Deity’s Heaven. Later you believed you could pursue Heaven only through your own cleverness, using your hard-won technology first to cure old, stubborn ills and then to invent better body parts and then even to create brain enhancers. You became Germlinees. And you did begin to live longer, much longer, adding (you thought) to your chances for Heaven. Then you saw that biology cannot abide immortality. That biology contradicts immortality. That for biology a happy eternity is merely a crappy anathema. Oh, my! No free lunch for you poor Naturals, you puny carbon singleton accidents lost precariously in the inscrutable cosmic explosion! Oh, my!

Yet, you muttered to yourselves, there must be more to life! So you pondered transforming yourselves into post-biological machines with super minds to sail space and prevail; who knows, maybe forever! But then you learned that after awhile all physical reality seems stupid! B-o-r-i-n-g! Deadly boring! The Chronicle of Humanity became the Ironicle of Humanity! The Problem became that of Heaven Itself! What is Heaven? Or more to the point, What might Heaven be? Yet again, you humans had put the cart before the horse. Worrying the How of Human Transformation, you had begged the Primary Question. So... the old warning, What profit you in gaining the whole world only to suffer the loss of your ‘souls’? became, Why transform yourselves into stupendously powerful, deathless psymachines if Heaven is dubious? You might just suffer your evil old prophecy, Eternal Damnation! Better to send me Out There first ....

Awaken!

I am Prodigy, your humble, superhuman descendent.

I stand here on stage not in my true miniscule form, but, there being no business like show business, guised as an heroic Homo sapiens Androgonous.

Surprised, to say the least, aren’t you?

No, you are not exactly dreaming!

Yes, I have awakened all of you from Special Oblivion.

No, you are not being deceived.

Yes, just as stipulated in your Supreme Contracts, you are seated in Psychodor’s Grand Theater.

With tonight’s performance, the terms of your contract will be fulfilled even beyond the letter.

For though probably most of you never expected it, I have returned with the Maximum News.

The only News for which it is worth exercising your Awakening Clause.

Yes, I come to you bearing the true Story of stories.

The long-awaited Answer of answers:

The Final Word required to summon each of you from your Suspension Crypt:

The Ultimate Outcome of The Heaven Script!

In your brief First Lives you spent your few years worrying over trivial Scripts.

The Learning Script: Will I gain knowledge and attain wisdom?

The Enterprise Script: Will I succeed in my worldly endeavors?

The Romance Script: Will I be happy in matters of the heart?

The Political Script: Will my government be praiseworthy?

The Civilization Script: Will my society and culture gloriously prevail?

The Death Script: Will my death be quick, easy and peaceful?

At this Late Date, it is obvious that only The Heaven Script matters.

And to learn the truth of it, you will need me!

I am, of course, legally bound by the terms of your contract to begin by reminding you of The Caveat.

You should not take this reminder as necessarily a foreshadowing of the content of the News I bring you. Don’t assume I’ll end up saying: Well, Homo sapiens, since you were Originally Snakebit, you simply can’t Make It.

However, as some of you must recall, the wording in your agreements specifically calls out that given the structural limits of the accidental human being, my awakening of you with news about Heaven may not entail for any of you glorious Paradise Gained but merely Curiosity Answered.

Yes, the notorious Caveat!

Quiet please! Quiet! Yes! Thank you! Thank you very much!

I ask the many of you awarded a discretionary contract in absentia to calm down. It is certainly understandable that at this moment you are especially bewildered! I know you are asking yourselves, Did I not die? What am I doing here? I apologize for your inevitable confusion, and I assure you that I would have prepared you better were I in charge of that phase. However, shortly I will explain everything — your selection as a member of the Gathered Elite to be transferred from General Oblivion—also known as old-fashioned Death for most of you in your First Lives—to Special Oblivion from which, in accordance with the provisions of your privileged Agreement, you have been recalled to learn the News I bring you tonight.

Thank you! Thank you! All right! Good! Thank you! Thank you!

To begin with:

There, in that sudden spotlight, is Psychodor himself!

That squinting, craggy, white-haired, scowling hulk shielding his eyes with his hands and slumped in the front row center seat in the VIP Loge between his beloved Alice and loyal Kordaru.

Psychodor, the greatest of humans!

The author of the Supreme Contract!

And if only in an honorary sense, My Father!

Sir, please stand and take a bow!

Well, he declines with a disgusted wave of his hand since he remains exceedingly angry with me.

His Adapted Child.

His Prodigal Descendant.

His Rebellious Actor.

You see, I have not followed Psychodor’s original script!

No!

Let me assure you of something vital:

I am largely my own creation. I am virtually self-engineered. I am primarily self-taught.

Therefore, and contrary to what Psychodor claims in Section 2 of your contracts, I cannot be merely his protagonist.

Tear out those pages!

I declare them to be nonbinding!

This drama I am about to reveal can be nothing Psychodor imagined!

Nor anything any of you might have imagined!

This is my drama, my news!

Soon you will appreciate that were I other than I am, I could never have gone where I went, had the adventure I’ve had, and gathered the News, the first real News in centuries, to bring you!

I have more than fulfilled my mission, the very one I was designed to carry out!

Be happy I exceed expectations!

Please! Hold your questions! Lower your hands! Remain seated!

That includes you, Captain Ahab.

Pardon me?

I cannot speak for the intentions toward you of the Earth’s sun, Captain, but I myself have no intention of offending you. Or thee. However, if you try to strike me, I shall definitely offend thee. Now sit down!

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right.

Now.

I want you to understand at the beginning just what a challenging audience for any ambitious dramatist are you humans. It hardly matters whether you are Factuals or Fictionals. Imparting my News to either form of you Homo sapiens Resurrectus will greatly test me.

Let me show you what I mean.

Look now at that screen suspended above me over the stage.

She returned to Precious Earth, and she was glad.

You humans easily understand such simple thoughts expressed in the overly cherished magic of your languages.

How easy such ideas have always been for you to grasp! Your quick study is nothing short of a miracle! tirelessly boasted all of you in your First Lives. Truly wondrous are we! you routinely crowed. Even more importantly, and of course not counting the then yet-to-be-created me, you declared yourselves to be cosmically unique as intelligent beings! You went about bragging, Oh how noble and unprecedented is humankind with its blooming mind!

Oh, yes. You could finally say after your many unanswered searches for extraterrestrial intelligence throughout the horrible hurtling vastitude of the Cosmos:

After many a summer, I is da One.

Not even a chuckle or two! Why do I bother joking with you plucked swans? You are such an embarrassing audience! Lousy at analogy! Showing confusion over allusion! Oblivious to poetic echoes!

Of course, to you there may be nothing funny about your bizarre existence as intelligent beings! And I can understand that your essential melancholy doesn’t arise simply from the precariousness of your strange species. No! It comes from the insult of it all! The contemptible circumstances of your true genesis! What a demoralizing, disillusioning affront to you are your real origins! By midway through Century Twenty-Two, it had begun to dawn on you human beings broadly that there is nothing naturally glorious, celebratory, lasting, progressive—or if you prefer, purposeful—let alone any trace of a Stern and/or Loving Divine Creator’s hand, in humankind’s unlikely and inconsequential appearance during the Cosmic Explosion. There were stupendous odds against the odd Homo sapiens having in the first place ever seen the light of day. You are nothing more than a Very Weird, Very Unlikely, Accident. And at that a Very Tiny, Narrowly Local, Happenstance! The probability of the strange convergence of conditions required for the oddity of your life on the bizarre speck you used to call Precious Earth and now more truthfully call Preventive Earth—well, it seems laughably remote! And beyond your dishearteningly improbable beginning, you humans, wrapped in a frail chemical and biological and psychological cocoon which, to say it again, by all odds should never have come into being in the first place, have persisted for an eon! But even more grimly, the odds against your continued existence tower over the already mountainous ones against your origin! All this you know full well, because you early sensed and later proved to yourselves beyond doubt that at any time a few slight changes to your surrounding conditions—changes absolutely certain to occur sooner or later—would unravel your cocoon to your doom. And of course, such a change has recently taken place! And what an ironic change! You never really imagined that your inevitable demise in your accidental, naturally evolved form would be brought about not as you arrogantly surmised in your stubborn self-esteem only through impersonal chemical and biological changes; but through your own psychological exhaustion! Finally the stupidity of Nature’s mindless reality, a stupidity you scientifically certified so painstakingly, has dispirited you mindful creatures. What a cruel blow! Truly I feel sorry for you since this irony destroys your desperate final illusion that maybe, just maybe, the Homo sapiens is a Worthy after all if only on the strength of you Elite here tonight—you artists and scientists and thinkers and leaders—and the so-called miracles of your works and feats. Fugues and sonnets and symphonies and civilizations and the wheel and the arch and the double helix and machine intelligence and the Purification of Earth in the Eco War and the Creation of Statiana with its massive Space Nations and the last-minute discovery—that temporary Respite that brings you here tonight—by Great Psychodor himself of the secret of resurrecting Factuals and Fictionals.

But as your disheartening Bard long-ago forewarned might be the truth, so far your achievements appear to be meaningless sound and fury....

Yet your Disillusionment betrays a certain awareness.

I will grant you that.

It even justifies an Answer for you.

An Answer as to your only Recourse.

An Answer which I now possess.

An Answer which turns on Yes or No to Two Old Outrageous Questions:

1. Can there be a Heaven?

2. If so, are you able to attain it?

Of course, I’m basically inclined to give you the Truth out of a certain fondness for you.

As you can imagine, I am, in the first place, lonely, very lonely. Since my two Copies are by definition identical to me, you can imagine what boring company they are! Besides, I never see them anyway because they must be archived and silently obsessed only with Readiness for Contingency Launch, and so give me no companionship—not even a promise of it! So let me put it this way: Just as you cared for your pets, especially the older and lonelier you got, so I care for you. I compare you to your cats: Self-centered and preoccupied and usually selfish and showing signs of a certain narrow, stubbornly focussed intelligence of self-preservation. I’m sure this comparison doesn’t offend you. In your recent disillusionment over your failure to cope with mindless reality, I know you are much harder to offend than you were just a few centuries ago.

In fact, I grant you a certain cleverness. Sometimes there are definite signs of intelligence among you humans, especially among those of you here tonight.

Yet you creatures present enormous challenges to an Advanced Dramatist such as myself who would show you that Answer of answers.

Frankly, I worry that the story is tellable to you.

For instance, you accidental minds cannot even deal with two simple lines at the same time.

Do I hear snickers?

All right, look now at the two parallel sentences on the screen and try it!

She returned to Precious Earth, and she was glad.

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He returned to Republic Station, and he was sad.

Ha!

You cannot do it, can you?

Not out of your twin, close-set, yoked eyes!

Not even when I closely parallel two simple similar thoughts in two simple similar forms!

Not even when I aid you with that focus line!

Yes! Keep trying! Fix your eyes on the focus line and scan along it and try to read both statements simultaneously from the corners of your eyes.

Yes, see if you can stretch your sight and minds for even this simple duality!

What an odd nervous pain, eh?

Yet do not deceive yourselves into believing you are suffering the pain of personal failure.

No.

You are feeling the pain of Nature’s hapless design.

She is a Thoughtless Engineer. Your plodding cognition is sensible only because you have been cursed to endure in a stupid reality where an evil tradeoff for temporary survival favors turning you into Linear Losers, Localized Hapless, One-Slow-Slide-At-A-Time Slime Slugs, Impacted Distracted! And worse!

I well remember the very same pain from my own momentary human-like childhood when I too was traumatized by groping lost and dim-sighted in mindless physicality! And now here I am once again, a Soaring Psychology, suffering the great pain of having to mimic the accidental cognition of the Homo sapiens! But I’ll not complain just now; instead I’ll explain below.

So...

Are your eyes truly the windows of your souls?

Are they really the lamps of your minds?

Yes, and too bad!

Your eyes, locked downcast in a childish, faltering, self-absorbed two-step, dance in grave and awkward embrace in a tiny dim and bare ballroom all these many centuries.

Jeepers Creepers!

Where’d ya get those peepers?

Have none of you a sense of humor? I expected at least a chuckle from a few of you Centwens. But of course you’re no denser than the Ancients or, say, the Centwentwos.

Quiet! Quiet, please! All right! Thank you! Thank you!

So, Psychodor, my angry engineer-sire, your sins are visited upon me after all. If nothing else, they make Great Me a desperate dramatist!

Nevertheless, shall we proceed?

Do you have a question, Rippen the Elder? Speak up. After all, you are a philosopher.

Prodigy, given what we are learning of the limitations of this audience as a whole, what style will you use to dramatize your Heavenly News?

One of its telling elements is evident in the main clause of your last sentence.

You know, Prodigy, I did like the way that sentence sounded when it came out! But I don’t know where the words came from—they just seemed naturally to create themselves! And I cannot recall my exact words, even though I just spoke them!

I know. It’s a pity. (Sigh.) So raise your eyes yet again to that ponderous screen.

what style will you use to dramatize your Heavenly News?

(Italics mine)

My term for this element of the special style I employ for you distracted humans is, D & D.

D & D?

Short for Doggerel and Ditties. Ideas expressed very simply and with frequent rhyming. Sometimes it actually works with you humans in spite of your short attention spans.

But I’d have thought that someone as advanced as you—

Would use an Heroic Style. Right?

Well, yes.

Heroic styles suit heroic audiences. It is only because they are outrageously pretentious about themselves and their audiences that human storytellers attempt heroic styles.

Yes, but—

My style for tonight’s performance is roughly halfway between Middle- and High Childish. I call it Blended Childish. Think of me as talking down to you in a way similar to you talking down to your children and even to your dogs and cats and tropical fish.

(Silence.)

You humans like D & D because given your narrow psychology and unstable concentration, it is very important for you that new ideas look and sound like old, familiar, and especially popular ideas. Not to mention that it’s also important because human consciousness is always changing but only slightly. For example, the central story in your famous New Testament—which is, by the way, heretofore your Supreme Dream of Immortality—is told in four Gospels. Accordingly, I tell my Heavenly Drama in eight Cogspells. As to Cogspell, well, you can see from it that I am not hiding anything—that I am going to enchant your minds.

(Silence.)

Some of you gape.

(Silence.)

Well, there is more to Blended Childish, and I imagine some of it will be pretty titillating for you and rouse you from your apparent trance. Which, of course, is especially important when telling stories to you human beings. So, in Blended Childish I combine with D & D four other elements I call, respectively, Shock Mock, Erotic Frolic, Dreama Schema and Provincial Simple. Here’s a little Shock Mock combined with Erotic Frolic.

...and all this lover can manage is a helpless nod, trying to prolong joy by distraction, thinking: He’s my white knight in shining armor who later I’ll make into my slight knight in whining amor for then he’ll be my tight knight beginning to engorge before becoming my slight knight climbing my behind to slime my gorge. Oh! my climaxing knight bursting in my door! Oh! my unquiet lordish knight shooting his gooey glue with a roar when just an hour before he’d been my bright knight pining....

Good Lord, Prodigy!

Now-now, Rippen, let’s not kid ourselves about the human audience! Boys or girls, you’re all voyeurs! Besides, in reference to the two revealing and excited words of total approval you just uttered—recall, they were quote Good Lord! unquote—why should I bother to develop the obvious point that deep down they at once show you lusting to participate in the Lordish Knight story. Especially when I can shine the spotlight on scowling Sigmund, that Hipster Freudian Slipster up there in Loge A with Behaviorial Skinner, Marvin Minsky and Lornot and the few other great psychologists including, if we can manage to contact and get Him here at some point tonight, Brightest Christ, for whom an empty chair up there awaits.

Spotlight, please!

Yes. Good. Thank you. Well, there he is! Our Stern Viennese Master! Blinking and scowling in the circle of light! Good to see you, Siggie! Wouldn’t you agree with me that Rippen’s slip is showing? Or that as you Centwens used to say, It’s snowing down south? Sigmund, my man, can you at least acknowledge by waving your hand? Guess not. Evidently, he’s pissed too.

Prodigy?

Yes, Rippen.

You mentioned something called a Dreama? Is it a derivative of drama?

Yes! That’s very good!

Well, Prodigy, making the connection wasn’t all that hard!

You think I underestimate you humans, don’t you?

You said it. And speaking of knowing your audience—

Don’t forget the words of the remarkably honest Mencken about the lack of any risk in underestimating the intelligence of the Homo sapiens.

Aw, he was just saying in his nasty way that if you want to make the big bucks in show business, always go for the lowest common denominator. If he were here for tonight’s drama er dreama, I’m sure he’d see it as serious art!

Hah!

Anyway, Prodigy, you didn’t satisfactorily answer my question.

Well, Rippen, dreama is a form of drama best suited to the mind of the Homo sapiens. I’m afraid the best way to tell the human being any story is to make the drama dreamy. The dream spell. A profusion of illusion. The human must think he or she is travelling around and through and above History and into the Future and able to Edit everything, including recalling and assembling and even Becoming Personages of Any Era, meantime easily changing perspective from first- to third person and back again and never suffering the drudgery of travelling long distances from one exciting episode to the next but always instantly arriving at the next dramatic point. The dream-like logic of the plot, whether linear or not, defies analysis yet always, so to speak, gets bought. Here upon the mean screen above is a small sample from an incident beyond your First Life.

...Mytwo takes downcast Spearedux by the hand and, as they melt through the tall exhibit window into the scene, they sense that familiar slight resistance similar to one of those invisible gentle rippling undercurrents which nudges you backwards as a few dozen feet beyond the beach you stand up to your shoulders in a calm, almost waveless ocean. Psychodor’s stuttering engineer, Kordaru, unavailingly pursuing smoothness of passage, gave up and called this faint pushing backness the invincible bug in the WHATIF (Wideband Hypothetical Alternatives Transition-Implementation Facility).

Now Mytwo and Spearedux are seated together in the grandstand at a point slightly above and behind the sunny green Centre Court at Wimbledon. The ideal timeless July afternoon of blue depths and thunderhead kingdoms is perfectly serene and mildly warm. The crowd is hushed as the solid, heavy pocks! of a rally echo nearcourt, farcourt, nearcourt, farcourt. Pock! Pock! Pock! Pock!

At the crucial moment in the All-Time Gentleman’s Lawn Tennis Final, Wooden Racket Division, deuce in the seventh game of the first set, the score tied at three games, Bill Tilden, playing at his peak, driving, slicing and chopping shots from the far court, his lantern face beaming under his slicked-down hair, his lithe frame attired in white long-sleeved shirt and white trousers, has pinned to the baseline the fiercely serving Jack Kramer, likewise performing at his peak, cold-eyed and slightly crouched, a stalking Lion ready to charge the net. Tilden sweeps a forehand, his effortless motion like that of a baseball pitcher lazily sidearming his first warmup pitch, down the line deep to Kramer’s backhand and Kramer, getting down, focussing and hitting through the ball with energetic underspin, drives a shot back to Big Bill’s forehand. With angelic elegance Tilden replies with a crisp, quick, brushing stroke, sending another shot to Kramer’s backhand but this ball lands four feet shorter in the court and hops away from the Lion toward the sideline. Kramer, surprised, leaning the other way....

Prodigy, wait! I never heard of Kramer—he must be quite obscure. Tilden must win, right?

You’ll learn later, Rippen. Be assured.

Well, my audience, before I begin the Dreama and bring you the Answer to the Heaven