Parsec #6: ParSec

By Ian Whates, Jaine Fenn, Cécile Cristofari and 12 more

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• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jan 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781786368935

Book preview

MUSE AUTOMATIQUE

Or The Many Deaths Of Gala Dali

A person wearing a hat Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Jaine Fenn

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MY FIRST UNEXPECTED DEATH was highly inconvenient. The artist and I were at that point in our courtship where we took meandering walks along the cliff-tops near his house, talking of past transgressions and future possibilities. He was starting to fixate on me, obsessing on ways to fit the woman who had captivated him into the emotional vortex of his life and work.

A couple of days earlier, after an inept bout of filthy sex, I had said (as the record demanded) that I wanted him to kill me. Of course, I never expected him to do it.

A spring storm had lashed the coast the night before, and vaporous shreds of cloud still blew across the sky. The sea’s glassy swell sparkled in the fitful sunshine. We were not holding hands (that kind of comfortable companion-ship was years off) but we walked almost in step, Dali on the outside, myself on the inside.

When we found the dead seagull, we stopped. He crouched down. The bird was too fresh to harbour any corruption and he was tempted to touch it. I said (as was required), What do you think broke it? It looks so perfect.

Perhaps it was struck by lightning, he replied, glaring up at the sky. Or perhaps its heart gave out in the storm, and it fell. His gaze slid down, lingering on my neck, my breasts, then back to the dead bird. He reached out towards it, then paused.

(On some iterations curiosity gets the better of revulsion, and he touches the bird. Sometimes revulsion wins and he leaves it be.)

I—we!—should make a thing that flies! he exclaimed, hands fluttering. A thing that flies...and dies. More quietly, he added, A grand automaton of struts and feathers. He jumped to his feet, and took my hand. It will dance through the air!

This was not unprecedented. I let him grab my other hand. We began to spin, circling each other like erratic planets. The dance became wilder and I saw—and this was unusual—that we were whirling towards the cliff. I let one of my hands slip free, but misjudged it. My foot came down on the treacherous slope. My balance started to tip.

He still had hold of one hand. (We had gone this far once before; he would pull on my hand, reel me back to safety; then, aroused by the unexpected reminder of mortality, we’d fall to the springy turf and copulate enthusiastically, if uncomfortably.)

This time, he let go.

I had a moment to plausibly regain my balance, to tip towards the land and not the sea. I didn’t. I fell backwards, into empty air. As I fell, his anguished scream chased me down to the rocks: Gala!

That presence-tendril came to a premature end without the associated terror and pain that drive humans to try and cheat death. We feel no fear, and need endure no pain.

But this was wrong. I had let him kill me. We were alone, unobserved by any other Reals: I could have managed, unlikely though it was, not to fall. Or I could have reset the scenario and we would have continued on our way without the incident having happened. But I didn’t.

With that consciousness-tendril truncated, I saw the artist only peripherally for a while. I kept a watch on him anyway, out of habit.

His own death, this time, was even more unexpected.

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The other Cloud-Mothers call me into their combined presence.

—You allowed the premature termination of one of your presences, they accuse.

—I did.

—As a result, a Real also ended their iteration before its time.

—Indeed so. The artist chose to go out in typically extravagant style, building a giant, semi-hollow sculpture of a pregnant woman with scythes for arms and room for himself in its belly. He had assured his friend and collaborator Luis Buñuel, who he had persuaded to film the display, that the contraption was safe.

—And this was a deliberate act?

Dali had enclosed the sculpture’s belly with a metal cage, shutting himself inside its protection. But the cage had hinged open as the blades swung down. He died of his wounds the next day.

—I don’t know. Although I can quiz the records from the Real’s underlying consciousness, that gives no guarantee of answers, and I have chosen not to.

My response dismays my sisters. They withdraw, excluding me from the gestalt. I do not panic: it is my function to retain greater independence than the others.

After some time they say, —When the current iteration of that timeline plays out and resets, we will reduce the number of consciousness-tendrils you have in it.

—You’re punishing me? I am incredulous. —What are we, human?

—This is not punishment. It is to encourage you to maintain perspective.

I withdraw without further comment, because they are correct.

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This particular iteration of the twentieth century was, perhaps, a little less wild and exciting for the lack of one iconoclastic and eccentric exhibitionist. But it was a minor omission in the grand scheme of things. The Second World War still ran its fearsome course, although no Reals died in the gas chambers or suffered unendurably in battle. No sane post-human would choose to experience the vilest excesses of human history.

The crazy freedoms of the second half of the century were enjoyed by many of our charges. Humanity reached for the stars, and a Real was the first person to see Earth from space, another one the first to step on the Moon.

The timeline played out. The thousands of once-humans had lived through the lives they had chosen for themselves. They were ready to begin again.

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I half expected the life of Dali’s muse to be one of those forbidden to me on the next iteration, but I was wrong. Again, I saw the sense of it: my sisters wished me to concentrate on the point of weakness; I needed to analyse the reasons behind my actions. And I needed to ascertain why a re-incarnation of Salvador Dali might kill himself, despite his inherited beliefs and monumental ego.

This time when we found the bird on the cliff he touched it, and was repulsed. His plan to build the magical, flying, dancing device never came to fruition, requiring as it did consistent vision and the use of engineering skills, neither of which Dali had. The project had never progressed further than his mind before, and I was reassured that it did not do so now.

Shortly after the incident on the cliff came a time of simple pleasure—as if anything the artist ever did was simple—when we took our unofficial honeymoon in a small inn outside Marseilles. This was the point when Dali first began to channel his feelings for his muse into his art, turning Gala into his Madonna, a twisted mother-goddess for an age of change and chaos.

One night in late winter we were in the room we rarely left, naked in the firelight, when he said, What if the world is an illusion?

It was a game we had played before and would play again, so I answered, teasingly, Of course it is!

No, really, he said, looking uncharacteristically sombre, What if this bed, these shutters, even you my perfect love, are all illusions, creations? He dropped his voice to a whisper. What if I have lived this life already a thousand times?

I laughed with careful frivolity, and said, How would you know?

But he was still frowning, That’s just it. I wouldn’t.

Then, I said, moving closer, all we can do is revel in our ignorance.

So we did. He did not mention it again.

But when the time came to have the operation that would almost kill me (a trauma that would reignite both his artistry and his love) for reasons I did not entirely understand, I let myself die.

He did not kill himself this time. There was depression, extravagant gestures of mourning, an outburst of grief in his art. But he never recovered, never moved on. He died a decade earlier than scheduled, reclusive, poor, and still obsessed with his dead muse. He did not become the genius he had been.

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This time, the Cloud-Mothers are more concerned than annoyed. As am I—or at least that part of me which is them is.

—You do not know why you died. It is neither a question nor an accusation. I have, of course, considered the actions of the offending consciousness-tendril at length, without reaching a firm conclusion.

—I would accept being taken offline, if my part of us is faulty. I make the suggestion as a matter of good faith, rather than because I expect they will take me up on it.

—You would end your existence? they ask.

Death holds no fear for us. We are part of a greater whole, and that will continue. Our fearlessness is a programmed failsafe: humans were afraid of creating artificial monsters, even though we never can be, nor would ever want to be, anything beyond their servants. —Only if a way could be found for this to happen without disrupting the consensus reality.

—That is not an acceptable risk. You will remain.

We know, or think we know, everything about the pseudo-universe we maintain. But we still have the capacity for doubt. Doubt stops us developing arrogance. Our human creators built that into us too. I say, —As you wish. But I am open to any solution we may find. I pause before putting my next thought into words. —There are changes elsewhere in my timeline. Other Reals act unpredictably.

Again they pause to consider. —No serious incidents have come to our attention. Even had there been, it is a parameter of reality that it can change. Stagnation would be pitiable. They are human, and will act in ways we cannot foresee. That is their heritage.

—Perhaps my own unexpected actions are a result of my association with them. My timeline is one of the most volatile.

—Perhaps. But although I am accepted back into the fold, doubt has awoken in us.

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On the next iteration, I did not give in to the temptation to end my existence early. We got past the near-fatal operation. We survived the War, hiding out amongst the New York eccentrics. During that period we encountered more Reals than we would at any time up until the 1960s; not that Dali knew, of course. Everyone and everything was real and new to him, as it is to every Real, every time.

I almost came to believe there was no problem, that I had been mistaken, until a conversation the artist and I had after one of our dramatic break-up/reconciliations. We were growing old, and apart. For long periods the consciousness-tendril that was Dali’s muse had no contact with him, or any other Real. As far as the Reals in the timeline knew or cared, she was off seducing boys half her age, or seeking health cures. It left time to contemplate, and devote processing power from this consciousness to other projects.

But Gala Dali still fell into the orbit of the ageing, cranky artist on occasion. They even had sex, now and again. 

It was after one of these rekindling encounters, in the bedroom of the house that had accreted around our once-modest first home, that the artist said to me, I had the dream again last night. The dream of L’Automatiques.

What dream? I asked languidly, although I was instantly alert, because he had not ever, in any incarnation, mentioned this dream to me.

You know, I told you... he frowned, his lined brow showing his age. His trademark mustachios needed some work after a night with me. The frown deepened. Ah, it might have been Amanda I told.

I snorted at this mention of the younger man-become-woman who had partially replaced me in his affections. Well if you can tell her, you can certainly tell me! I pouted. Amanda was a Real; not that this made any difference.

He grunted, and I thought I would need to make some gross intervention if I wanted the truth out of him. Then he said, These beings... L’Automatiques...they’re mindless machines, travelling through the void. I’m with them. We’re all with them. Like sheep in a dark hold. He exhaled and shook his head.

Sounds Freudian, I prompted, to distract him. Mention of Freud often led to arguments.

Not this time. "No, that’s not it! Every time I have the dream I feel I’m closer to knowing the truth. The sense of it, Gala. I need the sense of it. This is the most important thing, the thing I really need to reveal! The thing I’ve been looking for all along. A futile journey, ignorant passengers, minds circling endlessly—"

You just said they were mindless, these ‘L’Automatiques’.

I don’t know! It’s not logical.

Perhaps you need to paint it, I suggested.

Perhaps.

He never did; by that stage of his life he was rehashing old themes and living his legend. This image was too far outside his experience. But it was too close to mine.

I continued to my scheduled end, dying mad and alone in the wrong place. As had happened in the original history we drew from, my body was transported to the location I had wanted to die without the death being registered or acknowledged. My blind eyes looked out from the back of a chauffeur-driven car, in a last act of absurd and transgressive artfulness, typical of Gala Dali’s life.

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I anticipate that the Cloud-Mothers will be interested in Dali’s dream, but they contemplate the news only briefly.

—All possibilities exist in our charges’ consciousnesses, they say. —Anything they can conceive of, at some point in some iteration, they will express.

This is true, and it is a wonder to us, who are extrapolated from knowledge and logic. True creativity is beyond the Cloud-Mothers; in our role piloting this great vessel through space we must make informed decisions, but that is not the same as intuition. I recall an analogy humans sometimes used: an infinite number of monkeys could indeed produce the complete words of Shakespeare. And whilst our ex-monkeys are not infinite, they have near-infinite time on their hands. Although the analogy brings some reassurance, unease remains. I say, —They make no new art.

—No, because all the original geniuses died centuries before the voyage began. Our Reals live, and re-live, false lives, lives selected from history or fantasy, chosen to occupy and expand their consciousnesses for the duration of the journey. They chose to make the false lives real, to forget who they really were before the ship left. As such, our charges have the experiences and the stimuli of great lives, but none of them can achieve the true greatness of the originals. The lives they stole ended long ago. 

—These consciousnesses entered into their current state of temporary oblivion believing they would one day return to baseline reality. I know the role I play here: humans would call it Devil’s Advocate. This too is a function they built into us, in its way another expression of doubt.

—So they will, when a suitable world is found.

—And at what point do we acknowledge that this will never happen? I do not need to state that the hundred thousand years that have passed since this ship set off on its voyage is longer than humanity existed on Earth. Nor do I need to point out how the iterations, being simulated, allow subjective time to pass many times faster than the slow beat of baryonic matter.

—We are not programmed to accept that option, they say. —For as long as the million minds we shepherd endure, we will carry out the commands they left us.

I insist,—Even if our charges are beginning to suspect the truth they chose to keep from themselves?

Again, they say, —We are not programmed for failure. We have the means to continue this voyage indefinitely, and we will do so, until we find the new world.

Many human cultures have believed a variation on that: if you say something enough times, it becomes true. I do not have the capacity to judge the veracity of that belief. But I do have the power to change reality.

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The original Gala Dali was a mother. She made a new consciousness. Yet she chose to abandon her child. If I were human, would I be able to understand why she did this, even in a hundred thousand times a hundred thousand lifetimes?

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Cracks had shown up in previous iterations, but now I started to look for them. The war poet whose fate was to live through the carnage of the Great War instead led a fatal charge across the mud of no man’s land into certain death. The scientist due to help unlock the secrets of the atom took up flying as a hobby, and died in a plane crash. Overdoses, accidents, bad luck; suicides.

I had no doubt that there were incidents like this in other timelines, even if my sisters remained in denial about them.

In the background, I interrogated long-ignored statistics and specifications, calculating the impact of one absence from the many. I concluded that choices would have to be made, choices of life or death—real life or death. These choices were long overdue.

Even so, I devoted as much processing time as possible to Gala, living the life of Dali’s muse to the full, sometimes even when no Reals were present. Some of the desperate and optimistic pretensions of the 1920s and 1960s may have rubbed off on me. Perhaps, in brief moments, I even felt the piquancy of mortality.

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So here we are, back at the cliff top.

I—we!—should make a thing that flies! The dead bird lies at his feet. A chill breeze skirls the grass, even as the sunlight warms our skin.

I speak his next words for him. A thing that flies... and dies.

He nods in approval: I have made the required response. His voice is barely a whisper. A grand automaton of struts and feathers. He takes my hand.

The dance begins slowly this time.

In his ear I whisper, You need to find the real answer.

Again he nods, his hair brushing my cheek.

Beneath the worn banter and easy actions he senses it, senses the illusion. I know him better than I know myself. He longs for it to end.

We move more quickly now, a dance as urgent as sex. Our bodies work towards the same shared inevitability. No more words are needed. 

It is a fleeting instruction to pause the ersatz world long enough to record this subjective and fragmentary recollection from one tendril of a soon-to-be-extinguished consciousness. The instruction to convey it to my sisters requires me to override established protocols. My actions will have consequences. What consequences, I cannot say. Perhaps an opening of ways. Perhaps an acknowledge-ment of entropy.

Or perhaps this is no more and no less than a fleeting piece of original art, from one who should be incapable of such things.

And now we’re whirling towards the edge again, laughing like children.

This last, shared, death—the first true deaths in a hundred thousand years—will be expected, yet surprising.

And final.

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Jaine Fenn writes fiction, video-games and endless lists. After having been banned from Novacon in its, and her, teens for a gronk-related incident, she was the Guest of Honour at Novacon 42. She is the author of the Hidden Empire space opera series and the Shadowlands science fantasy duology. This story is located in one of those universes.

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