Irritation of the Eye in Darkness

By Fred Van Oystaeyen

Imagine an island with the scientific knowledge we have today but technology not being shared with the general population, in fact science is replaced by pseudo-science and mysticism for the public. There is a religion without God led by a female pope and her bishops who mimicked her makeup what resulted in the mask-sect, officials painting artistic masterpieces on their faces. The administration of everything was taken over by the main computer Argus after the destructive civil war between red and blue, now all inhabitants have a guaranteed minimal income and entertainment provided freely by Argus, as well as food pills with extras caring for good digestion. Sex is ill-advised and euphory pills provide a great replacement, newborn babies, normally created by in vitro insemination, are taken immediately from the mother and raised in Argus nurseries by sociologists and psychiatrist, education is in standard schools following strict programs. The system is deeply established in the capital City but in the second largest city, Sodom there is some anarchistic system competing with the computer. In the semi-desert called the Delta (of the river Stiks) a community of cave-dwellers is surviving in very poor conditions, the area above the salt desert is supposed to be contaminated after the civil war by the use of mini neutron-bombs and chemical warfare. Now a blind street singer is hired in an Argus hunting team to find and kill a terrorist in the Delta…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Nov 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638297468

Fred Van Oystaeyen

Fred Van Oystaeyen is a professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp. He published over 300 scientific research papers and 27 research books as well as many proceedings of congresses he organized. He was also very active as a coordinator of many projects of the European Community. His work got international recognition, e.g. he became honorary professor at Beijing Normal University in 1985, and received the doctorate honoris causa at the university of Almeria (Spain) and also at the Free University of Brussels (Belgium). He started to write his only novel more than 50 years ago, gradually changing it by introducing a new philosophy based on some generic model of reality he developed scientifically. The book thus changed from a science fiction horror story into a philosophical and social fiction story which now became an original mixture of philosophy and adventure. Fred is married to his wife Danielle and they have three children and now also three grandchildren. As a young teenager, he began to collect Blues records and later organized some Blues concerts, some of his friends in Chicago named him Bluesfesser Fred, the name he uses on Facebook. Another hobby is growing caudiciform succulent plants and bonsai. He never got a driver’s licence, even not a mobile phone and his office at the university was the only one without a computer in it, if possible he avoided using public transportation and preferred to walk, perhaps because he liked “the walking blues”.

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About the Author

Fred Van Oystaeyen is a professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp. He published over 300 scientific research papers and 27 research books as well as many proceedings of congresses he organized. He was also very active as a coordinator of many projects of the European Community. His work got international recognition, e.g. he became honorary professor at Beijing Normal University in 1985, and received the doctorate honoris causa at the university of Almeria (Spain) and also at the Free University of Brussels (Belgium). He started to write his only novel more than 50 years ago, gradually changing it by introducing a new philosophy based on some generic model of reality he developed scientifically. The book thus changed from a science fiction horror story into a philosophical and social fiction story which now became an original mixture of philosophy and adventure. Fred is married to his wife Danielle and they have three children and now also three grandchildren. As a young teenager, he began to collect Blues records and later organized some Blues concerts, some of his friends in Chicago named him Bluesfesser Fred, the name he uses on Facebook. Another hobby is growing caudiciform succulent plants and bonsai.

He never got a driver’s licence, even not a mobile phone and his office at the university was the only one without a computer in it, if possible he avoided using public transportation and preferred to walk, perhaps because he liked the walking blues.

Dedication

Since this book is about the future and the hope people always have to make that into a better future, I dedicate this book to my three grandchildren: Emily, Aline, and Aaron. They will see my future constructed and pass to become history, because people will never reach their own future, we just push it forward in front of us. Happiness is not obtained from possessions, not even from knowledge, but it is a state of mind deriving from the acceptance of life as it is, with its joys and sorrows, while always trying to do the best you can for your loved ones and everyone you know and meet. Choices will influence your path and there are many ways to reach a final satisfaction. I wish you well, I wish you love!

Copyright Information ©

Fred Van Oystaeyen 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Ordering Information

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Van Oystaeyen, Fred

Irritation of the Eye in Darkness

ISBN 9781638297451 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781638297468 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022919175

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street,33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

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Acknowledgment

I thank the artist Dirk Dutoit for his painting Inner City Blues—after Marvin Gaye’s song—used as the basis of the cover for this book. I started to write the book at the age of eighteen and worked on it for about fifty-five years, rewriting it countless times, changing it from a horror story to an almost philosophical science fiction story which actually seems to play in the past. Of course, I only worked on it off and on, but I have to thank my wife, Danielle, for supporting not only my mathematical activities but also my literary aspirations.

1. On the Edge

Generations of ingenious architects and engineers planned in grand-scale projects that on every corner and square of the city the wind was blowing equally hard. In every street of the city, you were flogged equally bad by the shifting sands. Slowly but surely, as if she were the lower ball of an hourglass, the city was flooded by the overflowing desert. Some citizens claimed the sand was growing, they kept it in small jars where they marked the sand level every year. But if the sand was growing, it did so veraciously slow, not a millimeter in twenty years, the marks always seemed to coincide, perhaps due to the thickness of the pencil point.

Except for the irregular public transport, the upper city was almost traffic free, very different from the elite area in the South Side in the downtown area, just called South. In South there was a wide conveyor belt network, three lanes broad, from left to right increasing in speed, but such that lane changing while travelling could be done safely. Only a few accidents with old people did happen in recent years. There were more often some laughable totters, usually without wounded people, except the ones with old folks.

The management of the transport system, as well as the administration of the whole island, was in the capable hands, virtual hands one should say, of Argus the super-computer ruling the island. Of course, downtown, there was also the religious authority of the pseudo-monastic order, called the Order, which was active with spiritual businesses. The Order was led by pope Walpurgis III, a lady of advanced age, with her bishops known as the mask-sect. The Holy Lady used a heavy make-up which was soon imitated by the bishops and this evolved into more and more surrealistic face paintings becoming very colorful masks, probably the most colorful things to be found on the island, which was for the largest part a dry semi-desert.

Both city subdistricts were connected by an old highway, more than hundred meters broad; it was a fossil from the area of motorized traffic. To the north it continued out of the City until at some point it had been completely destroyed by the civil war long ago. A brisk walk took you from the upper city to South in about two hours, theoretically at least if the road would be a safe place to walk alone, often some pedestrians only realized their walk halfway. Past the city to the north, the road laid barren and desolate, half-covered by fine sand, the silence only broken by the sizzling of the shifting sand travelling to and fro following the whimsical wind.

With some fantasy, you could imagine that the soft sounds of the shifting sand stemmed from invisible little animals eating up the concrete. It is hard to imagine a better background noise for decay and decomposition of the empty landscape along the long lonesome road.

Long ago rich merchants, in those days still trading with the outer-world, settled in South, at that time a suburb closer to the sea but far enough from the stench of the industrial zone in the harbor. It was possible to reach South by boat via the sea-channel which merged into the main dock of the harbor. The early industrial center was placed at the end of the sea-channel where still now the storehouses and factory plants of Argus were situated.

In the north there was a mining area in the mineral plane at the foot of the Rainbow Mountain, the highest peak of the mountainous area bordering the coast of the north bank of the island. The ore from the mines was transported via the small harbor in the city Zola by commuter boat, along the coast and then via the sea-channel to the melting furnaces in the Argus factories.

The creation of the computer network had a very big impact on the island’s economy and traders, bankers, businessmen delegated more of their tasks and administration to the artificial intelligence of the super-computer, providing them with free time they invested in more so-called cultural and artistic activities and gradually even religious rituals and ceremonies.

Finally the installation of Argus as the State computer and Walpurgis I as the first female pope, was the logical effect of the omnipresence of the information technology and the growth of the free-time economy, but it was triggered by the devastation of the Civil War and the dominating political role played by the pacifists and the feminists after peace was finally restored. That also marked a distancing from traditional science as the trusted source of knowledge, this was already noticeable in one of the first post-war slogans popular at the time:

Measuring is estimating but informing yields knowledge!

Then the renewal renewed itself and that went amazingly fast, so fast that the population was unable to adapt to the changes in time and was reduced to a high level of ignorance and gullibility.

Almost nobody had any idea about the scientific research carried out by Argus himself, after he had been made solely responsible for his own development as an independent artificial intelligence, but nobody cared until Argus came with new applications impacting daily life drastically, like the artificial food-pill. Meanwhile also the Order got more involved with the reality of people’s life, but almost exclusively in South, for example, the introduction of the euphory pill inspired an anti-sexuality movement limiting sexual freedom, as well as a vigilant propaganda for abstention. The result was a high level of dissatisfaction, insecurity, ignorance, and boredom, leading to a society, void of responsibilities, without motivating aims, with broken social links between lonely and isolated individuals, escaping in computer games and mass entertainment of the most superficial level.

Although the civil war involved the major cities, Sodom, Zola and the Capital City called ‘the City,’ the battlefields were almost exclusively in the less densely inhabited areas like the north, above the river Stiks, the Delta in the north-west, the area around the mountain Ararat in the south-west and some part of the semi-desert between Sodom in the south and the City in the center. It was the first and only time the mini-neutron weapons were used, these modern weapons eradicated all organic life but left all material buildings, vehicles, and arms, unharmed and reusable by the victor.

The number of victims was quite high, though it was never officially announced, the official point of view was that the mini-neutron weapons were only used in almost completely uninhabited zones, so only killing soldiers. Nevertheless, at the end of the war the story was that Zola was almost depopulated while the city itself was still intact, also the whole area north of the Stiks was polluted and contaminated by unknown effects of radiation and chemical residues. Argus had officially announced these areas to be dead, not suitable for living, so people should never go there, the land was like a landscape on the moon. Perhaps a few small plants could be growing there, that is all.

The main effect after the war was that history had been turned back hundreds of years, while the technology had stayed and in fact had grown by the research of Argus, who then got the whole island in his grip because he controlled the production of everything, including the food and energy production. With the support of the pacifists, the computer gained control over the administration of everything, except perhaps in Sodom where some anarchistic movement had been growing even before the war. The shortage of minerals was solved when Argus invented gorite, a kind of hard plastic which could also be soft as rubber or cloth.

Soon, almost everything, from synthetic clothing to furniture as well as food pills, sex pills, computer games and entertainment, everything was made by Argus. There was a new prosperity with a different kind of well-being. The islanders were all consumers in the lap of Argus, they did not produce any essential goods and almost everybody played himself crazy with the three-dimensional hologram games provided freely by the sole provider: Argus. At the same time, the pacifists arranged for collecting all weapons, hiding most—or all as they claimed—in some underground vaults in some unknown location, probably deep under the Delta desert. Also all transport machines, cars, ships, helicopters, planes were destroyed in big shows on TV and computers, all interaction with the outer-world was forbidden and made impossible.

Before the war, the island was largely dependent on the import of food and minerals from the outside but after the war, they returned to self-sufficiency by using the Argus materials, that was an easy life but also a rather monotonous story. The new money value was introduced, the virtual bitcoin, everyone received a minimal income so everyone could buy enough energy to play the games endlessly, all the essential goods were provided for free, except some luxury things only available for those getting more bitcoins, either by doing some work or just by being important in some undefined way!

There was a lot of time but no aim in life anymore, nevertheless life became quiet in the strong virtual arms of Argus. The pre-war orders of medical doctors and the one of lawyers were opened step by step for traders, teachers, notables, and finally they all merged within the Order. The religious character of the Order was always volatile, the power of Walpurgis, from I to III, was mentioned often but there was no documentation about the God, so nothing to worship except the Holy Lady. The Order was a pseudo-religious, not-for-god organization.

For some time, a cold war between science and pseudo-religion developed, many members of the pro-forma board of directors of the island began to denounce science and technology, although they did use the technology provided by Argus all the time. At the moment, when the Board consisted of radicalized anti-technology people, it decided to leave all technological and scientific aspects in the capable hands of the artificial intelligence, devoting themselves to spiritual issues and returning to a form of mysticism which had been popular already thousand years ago. The glory of higher mysticism returned and even scientists became quickly infected by the new philosophy, this happened incredibly fast what proved the easy manipulability of human thinking.

Chemistry became again Alchemy and one tried to make uranium from lead, with a gain in energy. Mathematics became Number-art and it reduced to the study of magic numbers and holy geometry, with some old-fashioned fractals and Mandelbrot sets as examples. Healers started to expel demons with anti-demonic elixirs, and the stars predicted the future again. Meanwhile the algorithms of Argus controlled all earthly activities, city-development, food-production, energy production, road construction, information and entertainment, everything expressible in bitcoins.

Meanwhile, the consecutive versions of Walpurgis grew old gracefully, like wrinkled and dry plums, their make-up developed into real masks, some having some artistic value perhaps, it became a tradition in the mask-sect and it was also a great hobby allowing to obtain recognition and admiration of friends and colleagues. At some moment, the Order decided that the right to paint the face completely had to be restricted to the official members of the mask-sect, which then became an official organ of the Order called the ‘Mask’. Of course, the Holy Lady and the bishops were founding members of the Mask. The rights of the members of Mask could be inherited by their children, even if these came out of an in-vitro fertilization as long as the origin of the semen could be verified. The adopted children of Mask were called Walpurgis’ butterflies.

Often these butterflies were painted very delicately but many of them got some terrible skin disease which turned out to be incurable. Then most butterflies turned out to be painted little monsters, innocent monsters but beautiful to see when painted. Most were euthanized at a rather young age before they changed the formula for the paint used in the children’s masks, after that the disease was not so present anymore, but it was not gone completely.

The island got caught in a schizophrenia pandemic, all inhabitants were taken care of, body and soul, by Argus and Walpurgis complementing each other perfectly even if there was no love between these two, inducing contradictory effects in their protegees, splitting their personalities.

Once, it had been said the aim sanctifies the means, obviously a false claim, but now the means became the aim, an unforeseen possibility! One incomprehensible possibility remained: could Argus himself be the aim of our civilization and more generally was the artificial intelligence the ultimate aim of every type of civilization? Could an otherwise aimless society remain existing in emptiness, a slime mold trying to feed on the abstractions of the computer, was extinction the only possibility or could a revolution of aimless individuals create some chaotic life in a deadly ordered society?

So lay the island in the ocean, a real island in all senses, completely isolated from the outer world, all outside contacts broken after the war. All ships destroyed, living quasi-primitively yet in possession of all the technology of the world; but the building of a new fleet or air force being strictly forbidden. According to the rumors there was one big ship rusting in some dock, the story was it was going to be reconstructed into a floating gaming-hall. Maybe that ship could be repaired and made seaworthy again, but nobody was interested and if Argus did not do it with his robots, then nobody could and would do it.

The dreams of faraway beaches, other worlds with jungles and rain forests had been chased away by hundreds of free computer-games, the forgotten stories about strange, beautiful and majestic wild animals became ghost stories, not often told anymore. Yet sometimes the apathy was broken by aggressive sport spectacles where teams, the members of which were naked and painted partially in the colors of the team, were fighting for fuzzy goals without clear rules of the game. In a society where most labor connected to entertainment, spirituality, mystic art and science, and where Argus robots zealously worked to provide people with all the necessities of life, taking care of all their needs, where everyone had a minimal income—just enough bitcoins to reach a minimal comfort in their life—it was easy to answer the fundamental question about the meaning of Life. The answer seemed to be that meaning was exactly the time killing meaningless pastime.

But exactly now some germinating unrest started to grow. Recent rumors about rebels living in the northern deserts, capable of making primitive weapons and planning an invasion of the City, gained credibility, even if nobody presented hard proofs for the unbelievable claims. Why rebels would actually want to do that was unclear and no citizen has ever seen such a rebel, yet it was well-known that some people left the City going in the direction of the Delta and they were never seen again. Some suggested that they had been kidnapped by rebels, others preferred the assumption that they were killed by horrible, mutated beasts living in the polluted zones as strange survivors of the chemical and nuclear warfare.

It is a fact that chemical weapons had been used and also the mini-neutron canons could have had unknown after-effects, but that this can lead to extremely fast mutation of the rare animals which were living there is highly improbable. Similar for the existence of a deadly radiation north of the Stiks, so in the Delta and the northern territories. Fact is that nobody in the City knew what was the situation north of the Stiks, not even Walpurgis, and whatever Argus really knew, it remained a well-kept secret deep in his underground memory.

Nobody openly asked for an expedition in the area and in the TV shows Argus produced daily, there never was any mentioning of it, anyway those shows consisted of short reports of technological advances in the Argus laboratories, mixed with some spiritual memes from the Order and the ‘joke of the day’ told by a jester, a dwarf in a fitting jester-outfit. He had a black gorite hand—mounted on a stick—with some simple image of a fish on it, at the end of his joke he held the black hand with the thumb to his nose while saying goodbye to the public with the words—which became a traditional saying in the City—‘got you by the nose’.

Perhaps, it was not entirely correct that nobody knew what Argus knew. Civil servants working in the Population Test Centre, an important part of the city administration, had spread the rumor that Argus did know things about the most recent developments north of the City. There was a theory, an assumption rather, that some citizens left the City to join the rebels, because that gave their live a new meaning and a direction, a new dream about a more humane society based on more natural principles. Was that farfetched? A kind of terrorism growing from philosophical foundations, a revolt against an artificial welfare society?

In observed reality there were always causes for consequences, these were recognized after some analysis in the brain by using some logical cognitive activity. Causes could be, violence on innocent people, in particular young children, oppression and violence on weak and harmless people guilty only of having a different opinion, such events cut deeply into the soul. But a decision to pay back violence with more violence can only be made through strong emotions of hate, a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye! Such ideas would not come into the mind of a toothless blind old person.

More youthful people with sharp eyes and perfect teeth, but not the strongest brains, can more easily be tempted to contribute to the carnival of bloodshed and mutilation while counting on the diminishing of their own suffering, frustration and sorrow, but finding out only much later that this beneficial effect does not happen. Violence is aimless and that realization prompts new violence because it leads to deep dissatisfaction, at least in normal people, the new violence gets a taste of nihilism and also traces of self-destruction.

That the rebels wanted to attack the City did seem to be farfetched, the City was not in the hands of the military or politicians, but it was completely in the impartial hands of Argus, representing the summum of democracy. Anybody thinking about fighting Argus must be utterly crazy. Even if the robots were pure labor-robots, they could be instantly reprogrammed in case of a conflict and immediately become a perfectly organized police or army unit. Why the tasks of maintaining order in the City, a simple and almost superfluous job nowadays, was still assigned to servants of the administrative center, called purple guards, is inexplicable, because clearly the robots would do a much better job. People did not want to argue with a robot! In any case, a conflict between poorly armed rebels and an elite City army of purple guards and robots, probably with access to weapons from the secret vaults full of sophisticated arms, would predictably end bad for the rebels.

All these assumptions and suppositions remained in the realm of fantasy stories and game hall conversations until recently when some proof for imminent changes showed up; for the first time in a very long period there were vacancies announced in the City Service, and Argus was hiring new special servants for missions outside the City.

There was a lot of hidden excitement in the population, the game-halls resonated with fantastic predictions: the island was going to start a space-program, or they would start a recolonization of the outer world—the giant continents already exploited in the past—or they were going to have expeditions to the north side of the island, or Argus started to prepare a war with the city of Sodom…

2. Og’s Monologue

It is hard to get used to inhibiting the whole day and running around with a muddy nose, perhaps if our species does it long enough, we may grow fine sieves in ears and nostrils, transparent membranes over the eyeballs and, more ornamental perhaps, a thick moustache draping just over the upper lip.

Oops, I thoughtlessly spat aside, I have to be careful with that. But the footsteps I heard behind me just passed me by without the expected series of curses and imprecations, it remains a little dangerous for a blind man to spit in the wind.

Adaption, evolution…are these more than old concepts of even older biologists? Most annoying is that evolution takes so long to change so slowly, you notice nothing in a whole human life, so for me it does not really exist, at least not now.

How do you adapt to blindness? Does it help if you are born blind? Or would it help if your father and grandfather also were born blind? How long does it take for adaptions to the exterior situation to be encoded in the genes? Perhaps just as long as the encoding of being born blind to be registered in the genome of your descendants. But it is possible that never happens, except by pure coincidence. What about the epigenes…is their role not exactly to allow much quicker adaptions to change in the environment, say in one or two generations already, but the epigenetic encryption of changes not usually lasting very long in the genetic structure. Maybe it needs to be renewed a few times before making a lasting impression? For example, it is possible I am adapted to being deaf because there were several deaf ancestors but since I am not deaf, I do not notice my fantastic adaptability? What a waste of talent! How strange this genetic inheritance one knows nothing about, it is an effect of the far past determining who I am based on information about how other people were. How deep is my being programmed by the genetic structure constructed by the whole history of my ancestors from eukaryotic cell to reptile, mammal and finally human? Does it mean I am who I was and thus can never become me as myself—except by pure coincidence—a novel mutation of the historic me? Hmm, coincidence. Coincidence relates to some expectation, you expect a certain number of possibilities which can arise, but within your own interpretation of reality and not knowing the real reality you cannot have a good idea about the possibilities in the future.

What was the reaction of a ponderous Triceratops on that misty morning in the swamp, waking up with three horns on his snout which were not there yesterday, and which came completely unexpected? Did the horny toad lizard get spooked when it discovered that poisonous blood squirted from its mean yolk-yellow eyes? What was the terrified man thinking at the moment he discovered his first frightening thought, namely his thinking itself?

No, that is why it all goes much slower and maybe not by pure coincidence. Indeed, if coincidence does exist, and who can prove that, then its existence is not a coincidence! Then it exists exactly to create several possibilities which are not determined by the past, say mutations, creating a form of freedom, the liberty of coincidence! Anyway, the ‘reason’ is something we make up in our brain and if we are inventive enough you can always find a reason to associate as the cause of some event. People are always looking for causes, that is our way of understanding the process of change in the universe. We create reasons to create logic and understanding.

The chaotic noises coming out of the gaming hall on the right sounded the same as on any other day and also there was the same moldy smell of a crowd and gorite.

It is all time! Without time, no reasons, no cause and consequence, no logic and no thinking.

Assume for a moment there is no duration, say it is just an effect of our observing, but there is still the total ordering of events, the ordering of states of the universe in moments—which are zero time periods—being what we now observe as the chronological order. Then it would still be possible to observe that one event came before or after the other and some adapted definition of some form of causality could still be defined and used. Then was this an abstract concept, a brainchild, or a figment of imagination? Time, not as duration but only a total ordering, maybe that was the key to new understanding of the universe?

The most important occupational therapy on the island was ‘thinking’ and playing, not that deep thoughts were being created. Instinctively, thinking was the perfect defensive mechanism for humans, who thought well often survived precarious situations—so had the opportunity to teach children how to think for survival—only with relative success however, because just thinking illogically, or trivial thoughts, does not really help a lot. Can thinking be the result of natural selection? It seems so, but only after it exists! So how does it begin and how can that pre-thinking have effect on the behavior, making it something worthwhile to become selected? It is obvious the wrong thinking can be deadly, for example when meeting a big wild animal and thinking that it wants to be your pet. Thus, perhaps correct thinking would be worthy of natural selection, although listening to the preaching of certain members of the Order, it seems that a lot of stupidity has been selected too. Truly, when you think about it, all that thinking quickly became worrying because, just like the Triceratops did not understand the presence of its horns, the thinker did not fully understand his own thinking, so let alone the thinking of somebody else. It was a great invention, communication, but it worked against deeper thinking. Communication became a form of entertainment based on thinking, but it also led to fast and superfluous thoughts, a light-hearted version of meditation reduced to conversation on a common level of understanding, and the common level is often much lower than all levels involved. The deeper the ideas the less communicable.

Another problem was the deep rift between ideas, concepts, theories…and the reality, but in an unexpected way this has one big advantage because one may easily disconnect the ideas from the reality by dropping the restriction one is actually thinking about reality and in doing so create fantasy and pure abstraction. That idea is very natural for a blind man forced to drop all visual information and thus increasing the level of abstraction of everything and inventing fake images of objects in reality. Fantasy impregnates all observations!

I do like fantasy a lot; it is my way of life and it completes my handicapped observations. You can always invent new fears to harness against, irrational dangers and nightmarish dreams. Fear is a good feeling, children like horror stories in the twilight but not in pitch black night.

Og stood still for a moment, orientating himself, he made an unnecessary gesture against the wind. The slight idiocy of this movement contradicted the seriousness of his thoughts, he tried to go further in analyzing fear and the human inability, popular themes with the order philosophers nowadays. It is true, often there is too much fear in the hearts of people and a serious thinker then becomes like a paranoid crab paying too much attention to its defensive claw. Those claws keep growing, becoming gigantic weapons weighing much more than the crab’s body, until the crab is laying immobile, waiting for enemies with her perfected armory, occasionally waving her giant claw. But the enemies, maybe struck by awe or perhaps out of total disinterest, do not show up. The extremely heavy crab cannot move around anymore and slowly dies of hunger, her last thought being that fear was the most fearsome enemy.

The crab story was a typical invention of the pacifists in their campaign against ownership of weapons; I wonder why the opposition did not invent some greater enemy, a being from outside the biotope of the crab with formidable jaws and teeth, which could only be defeated by a giant super claw, even if they would have had to create such beast in some laboratory.

Why do I always see the dark side of things, Og asked himself, could it be because I am blind?

Now that the cacophony of the game hall noises was extinguished you could only hear whispering of the wind.

Playing until it depresses you, that was a rather human activity because we are indeed a playful species, maybe we are the only creative species on earth? There does seem to be some disadvantage though, to create we always needed to destroy something else first. We split stones to make axes, we use these to cut down tall trees and saw them to planches or destroy it further to make wooden idols and statues which used to be buried together with the loved departed.

Did the molecule of godliness in the statues stem from the creative idea or from the wood they were carved from, or in other words is it abstract or material? It is said that an artist puts his soul in his work but, in fact, the material already had a soul of its own. Well yes, destroying may be the most common human act of creating. The most beautiful plants we grind to colors for painting, we can also make funny instruments and create melodies and rhythms with them.

Hesitating footsteps were nearing behind me but now they speed up, move sideways and quickly pass me.

Artists have to be original, do something new, but too often the originality is not more than a deformation, a transformation of something existing into something different. Thus, you have to destroy but in an accepted, original and artistic way, and all these properties were subjective concepts in someone’s mind. This was stated in the principle of human inability attributed to Argus, and it did sound like some artificial computer game, since it was not clear whether the computer had a deep understanding of human artistic creations.

No instrument no music, nothing never becomes something without something else…because that is reserved for the gods.

Oh the gods, greyed out dreams, roaming as fuzzy shadows in the subconscious, lethargic hallucinations waiting to be dreamed again when it is dead quiet or very dark inside.

Why do footsteps speed up while passing you, creating a distance of at least an arm length? That is strange, are they perhaps afraid you might take a swing at them or are they just afraid you might begin to speak to them? Lonesome footsteps always like to be alone.

We represent everything by abstract images through our cognitive actions analyzing observations; but Argus, in some sense, lived entirely in the abstract world of algorithms and formal languages. Grandfather was an Artisopher, a blend of scientist, philosopher and artist, which became a recognized title at the beginning of the ‘formal mystification of everything’ by the Order, his polyvalent talents could be compared, but just a little, to the structure of Argus. Grandfather viewed the universe as an atom in a larger universe and so on, yielding an infinite chain of universes. Then he viewed gravity as a forcefield in the chain of universes, deducing from this that there was a relation between gravity on the level of atoms and sub-atomic particles and the super-atomic force in higher universes depending on the ratio of the volume of the universe to the volume of the smallest particle in it. He called this the blow-up principle, he considered it a step in the grand unification theory which had been a feverously researched topic just before radical mysticism brushed away traditional science. Vulgarization of his work claimed that the infinite large and the infinitely small were identical and the difference we observe between these is just an effect of our finite dimensionality. The neo-mystics enthusiastically embraced this version of Grandfather’s work, they translated it to ‘every universe is an atom in a larger universe,’ and inscribed it in the Principles of Being, the constitution of the Order explaining its cosmic reality. But Grandfather shuddered this mystic misinterpretation of his work, he claimed they blew up the blow-up principle of forces and referred to it as the end of the good old science times. At the end of that area, genetical engineers succeeded in manipulating certain gut bacteria such that they produced insulin and other medical products and Grandfather became very interested in genetic manipulation. He quickly obtained the degree of genetic engineer, just at the end of the existence of that specialization, and he obtained also in this field some amazing results. His most famous result was finding some bacteria which could be manipulated to secrete some vitamins when grown in the fitting organic soup. Then he changed that soup so that it corresponded with the intestinal biotope, and took a patent, the last one ever registered, on the soup and the manipulation of the bacteria. This was at the basis of the later production of the food pills by Argus. Eating from the intestines, an ingenious idea, but when Argus began the production of the food pills there was some friction between Grandfather and Argus and this resulted in Grandfather’s patent being terminated by a special decree, and then all old patents were cancelled and in the future there could be no new ones. But each time I swallow a full meal pill I think of Grandfather, also with the associated fiber cube one had to take for intestinal sanity and the maintaining of the organic soup quality. In the beginning all pills had the same rancid lard taste, the reason was that on the first Day of Festivity the bishops of the Order got invited to a feast where real pork was being served—it was tender meat from a suckling pig—but still it was an ordeal for intestines trained in digesting food pills. So the taste of pork was granted to everyone via the pills but it was not a fantastic success, many people loathed it or just could not stand it after a while, so finally the taste was recreated and became very neutral.

To be Artisopher you needed to be also an artist and Grandfather had many talents indeed, for example he was the author of the well-known thread-man. This Thread-Man was a piece of art exhibited in a special room in what is now the Order Museum. From countless points in the four walls plus the ceiling and the floor, white, blue and red gorite strings sprang up—from the door in one corner to the diagonal area across the room the strings converged in a very ingenious way so that in the middle of the room a human figure became visible, the red and blue strings suggesting arteries and nerves.

In the human figure, some curving had been obtained by inserting harder metal thread inside the gorite. At the adherence points in the walls spring tensioners were fixed with some small electric device—exerting a variable small force—so that the strings across the room were always somewhat twisting as if becoming alive. This made the thread-man squirm spasmodically as if he were in agony, making for a spectacular show. This was for years the most popular item in the museum. I always found it frightening when Grandfather described it, yet I would have liked to see it. But the awful gorite slime mold which started to appear on all gorite structures also attacked the thread man.

In the last phase of its existence, the construction must have looked even more impressive and frightening, a convulsing rotting thread-man dripping gleamy green slime on the ground, spreading the weak scent of old gorite and fungus. The thought behind the statue was in fact scientific, part of some string theory Grandfather invented, claiming all existing things consisted of tiny vibrating strings, a movement one could only observe from consecutive still moments, dynamics from statics thus. The Order liked that idea but Grandfather later refuted his own idea, claiming that moments did not exist in reality hence could not be observed, all observations take time so they cannot happen in zero time, but they need a time interval with duration.

Just before he died, he proposed that all existing objects and interactions were realizations—in determined time intervals—of series of non-existing momentary pre-objects and pre-interactions. He viewed the universe as an ordered set of states, with momentary pre-things in them, these did not exist—because existing was defined by being in a certain place during a non-zero time period—but were connected by transition correspondences between the pre-things. So, strings of correspondences over certain time periods could become existing and all existing things were obtained by such strings of non-existing momentary ‘germs’ in states. The dynamics was now obtained from a more complex notion of place of an object carefully exploring the geometric strings of places which one could define abstractly, in fact mathematically, in each state. He died before he finished the final version of his theory. The thread-man was destroyed, the ancient geometry disappeared and was replaced by Holy Geometry, mystics replaced science and Grandfather’s final theory was never continued.

Grandfather was a gifted singer. As a toddler I listened for hours to his singing on summer evenings, later I learned the largest part of my repertoire from him, up to a few own compositions. Well, Argus’ slogan ‘creativity is obligate’ was correct up to a point, but too much creativity disturbs the Order, that was the real reason Grandfather fell in disgrace with some important members of Mask and was condemned to be sacrificed to Walpurgis. That meant to be put in the so-called eternal line or death row, against his will, because he was never a believer in the rituals of the Order. The eternity of that line was very finite, about two weeks on average; the chosen ones were totally paralyzed by some injection, with a death mask in black and white painted by the executioner, who received their whole inheritance for that delicate job. Then you were put on a conveyor belt in a cold underground room with several colleagues in front of you, the belt shifted one position every day and at the end the corps fell into a pit to be remixed to some product for unknown uses, manure perhaps? It is unknown what caused death and when exactly the victims died, but the educated guess about it was that they died of thirst after a few days, theoretically, nobody fell into the pit while still alive! Two weeks of hell and the salvation at the end was also not extremely attractive. Argus never distanced himself from Grandfather, but he did not react when the Order had him arrested, and also did not intervene in the mock trial before the mystic grand jury.

Did Argus contradict himself with his creativity slogan? If creativity is an obligation, how can that fit in the theory of human inability?

Oh well, I find it normal to contradict myself, I do it rather often, sometimes it makes the conversation with myself a bit more lively, thinking about self-contradiction is a good start of self-research and it avoids boring periods of emptiness. For example, what I wonder about now is what I had to destroy in order to create my own musical compositions? I do not know the answer, perhaps several brain cells. It seems there is a big difference in abstract creation, say of new ideas, and material creation, say making a flute out of some branch or nowadays, almost always out of some gorite block.

People are freer in abstract creations, in some sense, the idea to make a flute is first abstractly created before that idea is used as the starting point of some creative action in reality. Hey, that is true not just in some sense, but in reality, thus all creativity of people starts in the abstract world we construct by the meanings of ideas and concepts in our mind. Can I then also view free will as an abstract concept created by us, hence not existing in the material universe but allowing new interactions in reality not dictated by the histories of existing objects and interactions. Free will and fantasy are then closely related, I can think of constructions and even situations with existing but unrelated objects and put these in totally unreal fantasized contexts, that is imaginary stories, which may at some moment be fed-back into real situations and yield solutions to deep problems. Inspiration, like in science, could thus result from fantasy and our abstract free will which makes the thoughts free.

I will go to my usual place to sit and play my mouth bow, but here is a more complex situation in the street with small obstacles, I have to use my cane more intensively here.

I always hit the fundamental problem of cause and consequence, when we speak of a consequence it seems we assumed it has a cause, but we allow some doubt about the question whether each cause does have a consequence we can observe, blind people easily understand this difference. Og did not feel bitterness about his blindness, less observation more concentration, he told himself.

There is an unexplainable inevitability in the observations of events we make.

Does reality unravel itself according to the rules of some logic, even if some series of events appears illogical to us, or is it just that our observations of reality are restricted by the logic in our analysis of sensory information which is tied by the chronological logic of our thinking? The principle of cause and consequence we apply all the time in thinking and communication is at the deep fundamental level expressed by the total order induced by time on the events in the observable universe, so not by time duration, nor for the non-observable part of reality which may exist, but not being observable for us via our senses or the tools we build to magnify their capacity. How often did I wonder about this inspired by Grandfather’s unfinished last theory?

Let us look at Time as a set of moments and we assume that this is a totally ordered set, meaning that for any two different moments, there is always one of these before the other one. An interval is just the set of all moments between two different ones, we call that usually a time period. The universe is a set of states, one for each moment. In each state there does not exist anything as existing means being in a certain place during a time period which is not of duration zero, thus not a moment, but there are momentary pre-things.

The states are connected by correspondences associating to any subset of pre-things at moment t, another set of pre-things at moment t,’ then one may consider strings of pre-things chronologically ordered and some of these strings may form existing things in some time period—called the existence interval—where that thing is realized. Thus, as Grandfather claimed: every existing thing is a string of non-existing momentary things. It seems plausible that we can only observe existing things—so let us assume that for now—then the observation time period has to be strictly larger than the existence time period.

In classical Physics based on the velocity of light, one proved that there is a minimal time period which we can observe, the so-called Planck time or Planck unit. The causality between existing events stems from strings of pre-interactions between the pre-things in the strings defining the existing events, so the real causes in time periods shorter than Planck time can never be observed by us! Moreover, the real causality is an effect of all interactions of pre-things at moments in the existence interval of an event, there are in the universe billions of billions of such momentary interactions, given the estimated number of particles in the universe, some astronomers bravely estimated the number of atoms in the universe and mentioned a number with more than 73 digits, of course, they were very wrong but only in the sense that there are much more!

Even Argus could not observe all of these in billions of years, but of course even Argus cannot observe in moments, every bit he uses takes non-zero time. So even with momentary observation powers there is not enough time for an existing observer to observe all ingredients in the causing process on some existing event.

So, I concluded that causality in reality can never be understood by humans or their computers, there is some version of organic causality defined by all pre-interactions but unlike the logical implication that is not a partial order relation. That entails we have to be very careful when trying to conclude anything about causality in reality and our linguistic and thinking logic does not apply to reality. The non-observed part of it now turns out to be the most important as it completely defines the observed reality and we observe a cheese with countless holes as a compact block of thick solid cheese.

But what we make ourselves does follow our thinking logic as it is basic in its construction. All our actions in reality are stemming from ideas—not necessarily aware like the pumping of our heart or breathing, but something inside our construction was delegated to take care of those actions—and these are controlled by the logic of our cognitive reasoning, even illogical thinking is based on logic.

A group of loud laughing young men passed Og, one shouted ‘hello blind man with a bow,’ it did not sound aggressive, perhaps he even tried to be friendly, so Og just said ‘hello young man’ and waved with his left hand in the general direction of the voices, quickly fading away.

The computer was supposed to follow strictly the laws of cybernetics as programmed by the original programmers, until Argus became artificial intelligent and then, after some final alterations in the program by the pacifists, was allowed to think independently and act on that. Now Argus seems rather headstrong, arranging his own energy system, in fact he organized the energy distribution for the whole island—except perhaps for some areas in Sodom—he cannot be shut down and steers all the industry, factories and production units as well as administrative institutions.

Is that the best arrangement? Who knows, certain is that someone has to do all those things and after the war nobody was available to rebuild the island from almost scratch. Someone not happy with this situation deserves to be put in the death row, no?

No, I carry no hate towards the Order, we do not meet anyway, that gnashing of teeth is because of the sand dust, it does not mean anything else.

In the end the whole case brought some benefit for me because Grandfather was posthumously accepted as honorary member of the Order, the bishops recognized in a public announcement that he was undoubtedly a great genius albeit a little erring in religious things, but the spiritual concepts are not equally accessible to everyone, so even scientific geniuses might fail to understand the depth of the mystic theories. As grandchild of an honorary member I received two extra bitcoins as a monthly allowance, just like the descendants of heroes of the war. We are the last generation of grandchildren; I am happy that I have known my grandfather. Maybe the seminaries where Argus and the Order are hiding their pedophile inclinations will generate better people but as a singer it disturbs me that the children of Walpurgis, as they are called officially, orphans from the in-vitro creation, will probably never sing old songs, or perhaps they will all sing the same song.

Here he had to cross an open square and the sand was hitting his face with doubled force, he covered eyes, nose and mouth with the sleeve of his left arm, that gave some protection against the ballet of pins and needles on his skin.

Triton was right when he claimed many years ago that Grandfather was the last scientist as well as the first Artisopher, yes now the mysticism had taken over and dominated everything in the Order, luckily Argus provided a stronghold of rationality but it was artificial rationality. Now there were Astrochemists experimenting with meteorites, Nanostructurers building—with the help of Argus—nanorobots to strengthen your muscles continuously or making your skeleton hard as steel. Those experiments were terminated when some test-persons were almost completely immobilized forever because their bones were like petrified. Other new specializations included Cristatologicians creating bizarre deformations on mice to study the impact on their social behavior, obviously it was gigantic. Theophiles looking for proofs of different gods and writing books full of these, finally Maskerators being masters in exhibiting inner feelings and the deep soul in face-painting, yes, mysticism succeeded in identifying the final step towards the unification of humans, computers and gods.

Now strong gales came from the right, where there was a so-called street park without any vegetation, just configurations of small rocks in a desert like bed of sand which was coming and going freely and unhindered. The sand tries to enter via my right ear into my head to fill it with growing sand, to prevent this from happening I try to pick the grains from my ear with my pinkie, hiding my face behind the left arm folded in front of my face. Growing sand can be dangerous, if you do not remove all grains, one can remain and after thousand years split your skull wide open.

Well, not that I care about that!

At the other side of the side-street going towards the old highway, there is a place with not too much wind and almost no sand flying around, that is my place, you can sing there with open mouth without swallowing a kilo of bad tasting sand.

Reunion with the gods…I do not expect too much from that. Maybe jellyfish believe in a final reunion of jellyfish and humans, without consulting people about this fantastic event. If one wants to organize this event, it may be best to plan it on the same day as the reunion of humans and gods, so organizing the day of reunion of jellyfish, humans, and gods. That would save bitcoins, time, and energy. It is safe to assume that jellyfish are not gods.

If something like a god has to be somewhere, then it must be outside time so it can be invariant, that means it does not exist but is outside space and time and may thus be viewed as an abstract being. Such being could probably interact in moments of zero time; thus it can induce pre-interactions in states of the universe later evolving to existing things in space-time, in other words it can perform creative actions via pre-interactions without history for the correspondences between states. Well, people can also do that! If we decide on some planned action, that plan starts with some momentary pre-interaction leading to the brain activity leading to the plan when obtaining meaning. The decision allows us to intervene in reality and the process started before we actually realized our idea about it as everything starts with pre-interactions in moments.

The meanings we give also are outside time and space, the number two is not in the universe, those concepts may be encoded in books, computer memories and pieces of paper and remain there for a long time. This makes every human a time hybrid, being able, through the construction of an abstract world of concepts theories and fantasies, to step in and out of time. So, we can also have creative interactions with reality by planning actions in it starting an idea in some state with a pre-thing long before our idea has actually realized. If we are results of the creative interactions of some being outside time, then we are now free and creative time hybrids…I find that beautiful.

Aahh, here is my special place, let me tense my bow, with some luck I will catch some bitcoin-cents today. The sand or dust storms—regularly appearing nowadays—are becoming a real plague, but here on my spot it is never too bad and most of the time almost comfortable; if you sit in the right direction it is possible to sing with open mouth without having your lungs transformed into sandbags.

Today is not the day for psalms, it looks like some longer sad complaining songs could be most successful, it is time for the blues!

3. The Superfluous Interview

Close to the crossroads of contradictory winds, in the squarish shadows of cubistic skyscrapers, Og squatted in his singing position and took the mouthbow from his shoulder. The head slightly slanted aside he tried to remove the last sand grains from his ear with some repeated twitches.

Around him the daily life in the upper city was happening as always, no conveyor belts but spread out footsteps avoiding him by describing little curves around him, scattered chaotic noises, dust and fine sand but less than elsewhere in the City today, and the almost unnoticeable presence of a sour stench of the gorite and the slime mold it carried.

Og lived on the edge, a blind spot in the heart of the City, that heart itself being a black hole. The events around him really passed around him, he was not part of it. He thought of himself as someone not understanding life, but he did understand his music. When the string started to resonate and he kneaded and chewed the fresh sounds in his mouth, Og widened his transparent grey eyes as if he wanted to watch the sounds go up in the sky. Residing in the trusted feeling of unfeeling, somewhere between apathy and waking unconsciousness, he began to sing lamentation 22178 entitled ‘I, a worm’.

But I, a worm, not a human am I,

scorned by the humans, despised by the people,

everyone seeing me, scoff at me,

twist their lips scornfully,

and mockingly nod their head.

While he was playing the sixteen bar long instrumental part, the string snapped and cut in a flash a bleeding stripe from his upper lip till just under the corner of his right eye. Mumbling curses, he touched the cut and licked the ferrous tasting salty blood from his fingertips. Just when he got up to fetch a new string, the voices appeared. It was said that ‘the eye is the mirror of the soul’ and if that is true then he had a blind soul. Indeed, the blindness was deeply inherent in his personality and it transpired everything proper to him. Well, then the voice was the organ of the brain, you could easily hear that! In one of his composed love songs he said: ‘…and I smell your lovely voice…’ and so it was really, he could feel a voice almost more than he heard it. With that smelling he did not mean the stench of the accompanying breath of the speaker, as Triton once remarked laughingly, but the almost unnoticeable titillation in the mucosa of the nose caused by the vibrations of the voice.

Triton had answered that if someone would be yelling in his nose, it would probably start to run, but the finer nuances of Og’s poetic explanation escaped him. Og remembered they had been laughing loudly because it sounded so surrealistic and yet completely biological. But Triton was not that sensitive, poetic, and obviously not blind;