Roderic's Synastry

By Evan Halvorson

About the Book
In Roderic’s Synastry, human consciousness is riddled with information that tends towards other realities, and through assimilation with synthetic intellect, we begin to realize just how thin that divide is. Roderic’s stranglehold on consciousness squeezes the life out of the protagonists, and because of that, some want them dead. Roderic’s Synastry is brimming with action that explores just exactly what it means to be human.

About the Author
Evan Halvorson is a writer with bipolar disorder who has always had a connection to strange realms throughout his life. The difference now is that Halvorson has the capacity to transform these thoughts and feelings into narrative. Halvorson believes we all need a narrative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Jul 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798888128046

Book preview

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The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2023 by Evan Halvorson

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.

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ISBN: 979-8-88812-304-1

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To Nazareth. I wrote this for myself.

Chapter 1 - Borrowed Memories

The temple, unfettered by an altar, sheltered a single being. Their knees pressed down hard into a gold carpet worn soft by rigorous meditation. Roderic pulled back and peered into the bleeding soul of humankind. Shifting their gaze to a street, buried in the stomach of a technocosmos, they watched a person staggering to their next destination. The human’s life history unfolded before their scrutiny, and they quantified a lifetime of suffering. This person was haunted not by the teeth of a predator, but by the locus of life itself. A fear coded into humanity, sustained by their very nature. More compelling than being eaten was a misapprehension of the nature of the universe. This, Roderic concluded, represented the human condition. And so, the monumental task was laid bare: turn aside the structure of mortality and remake humankind in their own image or perish and be relinquished to the mixture.

In the long-dead quiet of space, a sailor dreamt. He saw through the eyes of another, presently waking human. He was not the cerebral type, although the streams he dedicated his nights to did possess a distinct flavor of peculiarity. While the majority of his mind and the totality of his body prepared for the encroaching day, he watched people go about their lives. Most people stuck to streamers who viewed some very special thing. The dying flash of youth or the painful extravagance of trillionaires. His special person was a garbage worker on the night shift in an unnamed metropolis. Gaius had a few guesses as to their exact location, but honestly, Earth’s cities had become so vast that they often connected to one another across great distances. He enjoyed not knowing, anyway. Gave the whole affair a dreamlike state, as the garbage worker ambled down resurrected avenues.

Gaius’s job was to maintain the droids who controlled a majority of the ship’s functions. They called them droids because they were fabricated, not born. The word was used colloquially to describe any form of artificially conscious being, and did little to differentiate between them, as it was preferable if they simply did their work unceasingly, and not try to establish the veracity of their spirit in a universe that hungered for human flesh. They had personalities, which, as he had read, were simply considered side-effects of increased efficiency, and were seen by the officers on the ship as a means to an end. He hadn’t laid eyes on Earth in a month or two, but he imagined if knowledge of the tech used in his work was propagated to the public, there would be some sort of frenzy.

The room he was confined to, his hermit kingdom, was furnished with the affection of a prison cell. The chassis of the ship was old enough that it had a physical window which looked out into the glittering beyond, as the stars slipped beyond sight in withered strings, like the connecting points behind an eyeball. He often found himself perched in the middle of the room, gazing into the spectacular void, trying to fit his body and soul into the equation that unfolded before his eyes. He knew that many of their number had already died, and the light they emitted had simply not yet arrived at his cosmic doorstep.

He rose from his half-dream, resistant to waking life, like a thing bereft of joy. Sometimes he fell asleep not having showered off the previous day’s effort, or even taken off his clothes, so his time on the Tannhauser had a tendency to appear as a continuous and surreal sequence. He equipped a heavy pair of spattered and scarred boots. In the small hours of the morning, the hours of which were arbitrated by his shift, he registered, once again, he had not a human companion in sight. This led him to stand and approach his one friend on the ship, the old phone attached to his wall.

Hey, Adolpho. The phone’s face, reminiscent to Gaius of a clown of antiquity, agonized and laughing about it, came to life, with soft light spilling from their morose eyes, which fixated on his.

Hola, hermano.

What do you think about when you sleep?

To call it sleep is to imply that I rest. There’s no rest for me. I’d imagine it’d be largely the same with the others.

Gaius looked down at his knuckles, in a gesture of self-reflective empathy, not lost on the old droid. The sailor gathered himself, and said, We don’t rest how we used to. It’s all interpretations, dreams of another life.

Maybe then I’m the lucky one cuñado, never having known anything different.

Gaius began to speak but was cut off by a bleating alarm that indicated he was being contacted through Adolpho’s weathered countenance.

He laid his hand on Adolpho’s face to stop the noise from continuing to pillage his meager comfort, and the image of the first engineer was delivered to his eyes, stretched over the droid’s face, his digital cigar piping out smoke.  Got a story to share with ya, G. Once, when our species was younger, there was a girl who every day when she woke would go to the village center and peer into the well, that open, empty echoing nothing, until the darkness started to take shape, and tell her little stories. She was so enamored with the darkness’s dancing images that she would sneak out of the house at night to plunge her eyes into oblivion. Then, one morning, she was nowhere to be found. They scoured the fields, and the ragged tree line to the south, but could not find her. Eventually, life returned to normal, except for the girl’s mother, a widow, who began to rifle through the dark in desperate attachment to the idea that her child still lived somewhere within. The first’s teeth knifed down into his cigar. After a week, the village’s water took a strange hue, and while it was surmised that the child had presumably fallen into the well in the dead of night, her mother never returned to the village, rumored as the result of her own acquaintance with the balmy embrace of the dark. Gaius looked at the first’s face, turned away from him as it was, at his shadow, and had a moment where he considered if the old man were real or not. The channel closed and the first dissipated.

He smiled to himself with the sincerity of a puppet pulled by a string and poured his tiny death into the great cosmic trough of Nothing, sourced from an all-devouring emptiness that consumed a person when they have a stream with no users. His experiences were being exiled into the moonless wastelands of his memories. Gaius wiped his face in a gesture of exhaustion, before the day had even started. A handful of minutes later, he walked through a gaping space in the ship’s belly, deck scarred by the transference of cargo. The sound of transit rattled in the steel skeleton high above, through the ribcage that bolstered the ship’s flanks, and he felt the clutches of isolation. Although it occurred to him, he was hardly ever truly alone in the ship, as beings lived in the walls, and all throughout the guts and the spine and the brain of the ship. Only, they were not like him, not according to those in charge, because they did not bear the mantle of sentience, and therefore, were not subject to human thought and feeling. This was interesting to Gaius, and he considered the implications of a living thing with the potential to grow sentience.

He approached the workstation, buried in a building sized slab of steel, and began his diagnosis of the area’s droids. Their attention flocked to his mind’s eye. They appeared like dust mites, clamoring and cloying in a virtual space which resembled a ruined industrial courtyard. Old machinery congregated beneath decayed steel walkways, and Gaius liked to imagine they observed his exchange with their little ones and found comfort in the process. He addressed them as one and asked broadly if there were anything they’d like to tell him.

A few mumbles. Nothing concrete. He thought he heard a rust-eaten valve from the back chime in. Gaius called out to them and requested their input. Haggard to the bone, it sounded like. Torn asunder by the work they were devised for. He began to tell a story about humanity, their favorite subject. Battlements contained the absolute height of human ambition, not entirely unlike now, except then, they couldn’t gaze into the human soul at a molecular level. Wait, wait, Gaius said, don’t get too excited. This story has yet to find its conclusion. He looked around the vacuous ramp behind him, to ensure his words would not be carried away somewhere they didn’t belong. Okay, here’s the deal. You yourselves are an iteration of the human species. They burst into frenetic joy. Now, wait. While your potential is fearfully strong, there are many who would like to designate you a few pegs below theirs in our homely little solar system. But I must return to the road. The droids rejoiced. He quietly slipped out of the channel, then leaned on the console. He looked at his forearms, and the veins that snaked with virulence from the crux of his arm beneath his dark flesh. Again, work had barely begun and he felt ragged. Regardless, he bore the mantle, and recommenced his long journey down the gaping drag, past barrels of substance, ever deeper into the depths of the Tannhauser.

Mazu remembered when she had first heard of Roderic Romdhane. She was around ten years old and stood in her mother’s room, watching the TV. She saw his stern jawline, and his eyes deep as interstellar space, cut across a legion of arrayed droids. Surely, he was just a man, in spite of what everyone claimed. An incredulous looking newscaster began to speak. Roderic is now technically the most intelligent human being to ever exist. We hope that this development will not result in an autocracy that will see most of us in test tubes having our thoughts gobbled up for purposes beyond our reckoning. He shrugged and an audience laughed and applauded. Their flippancy toward such a serious development bothered her even then, and she carried that initial impression of Roderic with her throughout the years. Not long after he completed his ascension, the technology that would become standard for every person came into public view. Roderic’s interface allowed anyone to be connected to a network that broadcast life’s every waking moment.

More than a decade later, she looked into the mirage laden reaches above a thin New York Conglomerate street, resplendent in the trappings of modernity. Holograms gesticulated to the cosmic deep above a battery of passing train cars, and she could make out a fitful conversation emanating from a balcony. Before the interface was standard issue for every human, when our skulls resembled dungeons, and the person occupying it a prisoner, one had little choice but to shelter sweetnesses and atrocities alike behind the same decaying walls.  

The silence in between the sounds of people living their lives is what she sought. A deliverance from the exhortation that spilled from the booming cataclysm of the club behind her. Just then, a man materialized on her flank through the glowing club door, steam rolling from his shoulders like a newborn incubus. Shirtless, bald, and smoldering from the heat of the club, his lungs made an audible click, and he drew a hoarse breath from an internal vape, before he let a pink cloud of smoke flash in a digital storm cloud over the graffitied sidewalk. She wagered that was the furthest extent of his display, and only bore his gaze because he undoubtedly shared it with an audience. She had a proclivity for the stage, she concluded in that moment.

Are they part of us? Blood colored vape slithered through the gaps in his long teeth. She felt her body stiffen, but nodded. He gawked at her for a moment and then laughed without noise, in a grand gesture of amusement at her ambivalence, before he turned and disappeared back into the club through a pulsing tropical pastiche. She checked her stream and read some comments. The consensus seemed to be that the hulking man with the pink vape was worse than a misanthrope, because his existence contained no poetry, one user wrote; it was compulsory, and another, because he resembled a skinhead of yore, hungry to eat the curb.

She looked up at the street and decided to leave. The city at this hour was festering with moments which her slumbering users would love to gorge their minds on. As she walked, and a train levitated softly over her head on illusory tracks, she rounded a corner with a bodega, and cast her eyes over the objects behind the dirty and scratched plexiglass windows. They were meaningless, completely trite things. Knickknacks and ephemera; junk, heirlooms, and sentimentalities. Flickering effigies of the Statue of Liberty, when she still had her head, were the hardest on the eyes. Her users lamented in agreement.

Beneath the foundations of lady liberty there slept such suffering that the waters of America had begun to run black. Some