Authors: Christopher John Chater
They had rented a four-door sedan and were currently heading east. It was now dark and Kurt felt some relief being just another set of headlights on the highway.
Ursula said, “If you had actually read my book, you would know that I presented a hypothesis for the direction of evolution. Most scientists don’t actually believe we’re evolving into anything specific, but a Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard had a theory that evolution has a goal. He called it the Omega Point.”
“Jesuit priest? Interesting. I didn’t think priests believed in evolution.”
“Politics. Initially, I was inclined to debunk his theory, but . . . ”
“But what?”
“I’ll be honest. I don’t really believe there’s a God, but the Law of Complexity has validity with regards to how our noosphere operates.”
“You’re throwing around a lot of terms. Noosphere. What the hell is noosphere? You hungry? Mind if I pull over to get a burger or something?”
“Sure.”
Kurt looked for an exit. “I’ll find a drive-through.”
“Sounds good. Anyway, noosphere. First, the geosphere represents all matter, including the Earth. Then there’s the biosphere: living things, people, plants, et cetera. Sentient beings with cognitive abilities then created the noosphere, our collective thoughts, ideas, and intellectual abilities. Teilhard believed the next step would be created by the collective consciousness of society, that our noosphere would reach such complexity that it would rupture space-time, taking us to a transcendental place from which we could never return.”
“Burger King ok?” Kurt asked.
“Whopper sounds good.”
Kurt pulled into the drive-through.
“I have to say, I feel like that’s sort of what’s happening to me. It feels like there are millions of ideas buzzing around inside my head, and they’re coalescing . . . they’re forming into one cohesive idea . . . an idea that’s leveling everything I’ve ever thought about life. Does that make sense?”
Stunned, she said emphatically, “Yes.”
Kurt pulled up to the menu board. He leaned out the window and said, “I’d like two Whopper Combo meals, please.”
“What would you like to drink with that?” a voice blurted out through a three-by-five speaker.
“Surprise us,” Kurt said.
He pulled up to the drive-through window.
“Shit,” Kurt said. “I just realized I don’t have any money.”
“I got it,” Ursula said, reaching for the duffel bag in the back seat.
“I’d like you to know, I don’t usually let a woman pay for dinner. I’m not that kind of a guy.”
“I would hope you usually don’t take your dates to Burger King either, but I think we both understand the uniqueness of the situation.”
“Agreed.”
Ursula gave Kurt a twenty-dollar bill. Kurt handed it to the cashier in exchange for a paper bag and two sodas.
“You know, Kurt, it might conflict with your plans, but you may want to consider limiting your contact with the public.”
“How come?”
“A mind virus can be destructive. You could say something radical to someone, something they’re not ready to hear. It’d be like telling ancient Egyptians that the sun is just hydrogen and helium. Something like that back then could have gotten you killed. You’re much too smart, Kurt. The amount of intelligence available to you is unnatural.”
He pulled the car into a parking spot and took out the Whoppers, handing one to Ursula.
“Like I’ve mentioned before, the human race has evolved partly because of memes,” she said. “When knowledge is passed from person to person, it becomes more complex. In essence, the exchange of information causes us to become smarter. Now imagine someone has found a way to accelerate our evolution, to administer ideas into society so that the rate of our evolution is doubled, even tripled. One idea, placed surgically in the noosphere, could have a powerful impact on the direction of society. It could cause serious repercussions.”
“How exactly would they administer it?” Kurt asked.
“They’d create it on a computer, and then release it on any number of social networks. They could also backmask it in a song or use subliminal images on TV.”
Kurt took a bite of the hamburger.
“Computers, specifically the Internet, have already sped up our evolution. Twenty years ago kids had to go to the library to get maybe half the information you can now get online in an instant. People think that evolution has stopped, but it’s actually moving faster than ever.”
Kurt searched the bag for his french fries.
“Take Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. A monumental breakthrough in science. An equation smaller than an inch has made us all smarter, whether we realize it or not. Because of the equation, years later a ten-year-old has access to more information than Einstein did. That’s memetic evolution. In your case, imagine you were given an idea without even being aware of it. Suddenly you’re smarter. You have a greater understanding of life, of the universe; it even causes your brain to grow physically, affecting you biologically.”
“So someone tells me an idea that blows my mind and makes me smarter?”
“Maybe. There’s another possibility. The government may have nothing to do with this. It could be happening naturally in our noosphere, like a pandemic disease. It could be a product of the information age—what happens to a society when it’s under constant media duress. Writers like you are sensitive observers, thinkers—you could easily be the first to be affected by the memetic storm caused by our media. You could be patient zero.”
“Could there be symbolic messages in the book we wrote?”
“Definitely.”
Although Kurt felt an idea growing inside his mind, he could not communicate it as one particular thought. It was much too complex.
“But how did we all get the same idea? Where did the idea come from?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out. I’m just worried that you’re changing too quickly. You could destabilize our noosphere. There are people who aren’t ready for certain ideas.”
“What if everyone is changing like me?”
“That’s a scary thought,” she said. “What you’re suggesting is that you’re the first in a new genetic line. A scientist named C. Lloyd Morgan theorized that evolution was not necessarily gradual, but that it experienced jumps in complexity. You could be the leap he was talking about. The problem is that people like me will be left behind, probably enslaved or made extinct.”
Kurt reached over to her and gently put a hand on her shoulder. With a mouth full of food, he said, “I would never let you become extinct.”
“That’s very sweet, Kurt. Thank you.”
Kurt chewed, sucked up some soda, and said, “I’m not sure I believe the government is behind my condition.”
“You think it’s spontaneous?”
“No. I think it was designed.”
“By who?”
Kurt shrugged.
“Who else would have the type of organization needed to pull off something like this? Keep in mind, when I say government, I don’t mean just elected officials—I mean the shadow government that’s been secretly controlling elections for the last hundred years: the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical companies, the Federal Reserve Bank, they’re all in on it.”
“Yup.”
“Like I’ve already told you, the government has a department for memetic game theory. Putting ideas into certain cultures can have radical results. Ideas that could cause sexual revolutions, religious upheaval, political rebellion. My guess is that they’re using you as a guinea pig for a new weapon. Why would they wage war against a country if all they had to do was influence its citizenry to revolt?”
“But if they had the ability to make me this smart, why wouldn’t they do it to themselves? Make themselves an army of smart people to come after me?”
“That’s a good question. They may have created you accidentally. An experiment gone awry.”
Kurt stopped eating, suddenly not hungry. “Or . . . they don’t want to infect themselves.”
“Try not to think that, Kurt. Let’s try to—”
“Who knows how this is affecting me biologically. At the rate I’m going, I’ll be lucky if I don’t have a mental breakdown.”
“Try to stay positive. We don’t know what’s happening to you. Give us time to figure it out.”
She affectionately put a hand on his shoulder, but then shyly pulled it away.
“Thank you, Ursula. I know this isn’t easy for you. I understand why you don’t trust people—why you’ve shut yourself away in that apartment building. I understand how the trauma of your parents dying crushed you emotionally, made you distrustful of people. It’s why you study society rather than take part in it.”
Her face went beet red and her eyes began to water. She turned away from him, quietly sobbing.
Kurt quickly went to embrace her. “What’s wrong?”
“You can’t say things like that to people, Kurt. That degree of truth is painful.”
Kurt embraced her. “I’m sorry.”
Kurt was tossing and turning in bed. A cold sweat was beading up on his forehead. He was dreaming that the world around him was dissolving, reality was washing away, and he was left to float in a sea of darkness while millions of eyes were watching. A horrific cry began to boom inside his mind and he jolted awake to discover it was the sound of his own screaming.
He sat up . . . head pounding, skin wet with perspiration.
His vision was blurred and he was foggy mentally, but it looked like there was someone at the end of the bed. A figure. A tall bipedal image bathed in amber-colored light. The head was spade-shaped . . . the eyes, large and black, were reflecting his image back at him. The figure just stood watching him, passively—its slender arms dangling at its side.
Someone knocked on the door.
When he tried to move, he got dizzy. The room was spinning.
Where am I?
The bed he lay in was unfamiliar to him; these starchy sheets weren’t his. Thick polyester drapes with paisley designs covered the windows, but in his apartment there were blinds.
Hotel room, he remembered.
But who was that at the end of the bed?
For that matter, who was pounding on the door?
He put his feet to the floor. He considered crawling, but somehow he managed to stand. It was mostly momentum that got him to the door, and once there he had to lean against the wall to stay vertical. He opened the door. It was Ursula.
“You look terrible,” she said.
Ursula shouldered his weight, leading him back to the bed. He fell onto the comforter with a raspy sigh. She sat on the bed next to him and put a hand to his forehead. “You’re burning up. We should get you to a hospital.”
“Do you see it?” Kurt asked.
“See what?” His eyes were closed, what was he talking about? “I’m going to get you some water.”
“We need to get the truth out.”
“What truth?” she asked, making her way to the bathroom. There was a plastic cup on the sink. She pulled off the plastic sheath and began filling it with water.
“They’re here.” He struggled to open his eyes. It took all his strength, but he managed to lift his head. There it was, the figure: a gray-skinned biped, its lanky frame bathed in amber light. Ursula nearly ran right into it on her way back to him.
“Who?” she asked, sitting on the bed beside him.
She was gently trying to get him to drink and he had no choice but to oblige her, sipping quickly at the cup of water. “They want us to share the one true idea.”
“I need to get you to a hospital. You’re hallucinating. I’m calling am ambulance.”
“No! I’ll be fine,” he said. Why wasn’t the figure speaking up? All it had to do was say something.
“You’re sick, Kurt.”
“Too many thoughts,” he said with his eyes shut, his head shifting back and forth.
“Are you sure you don’t want to see a doctor?”
“No hospitals.” He curled into her like a child, pulling her into him.
The next morning, as Kurt was taking his shift behind the wheel and driving them east towards Massachusetts, he was thinking about the figure he had seen at the end of the bed the night before. Was it real? For him, the experience was best described as a memory that wasn’t his. It was as if someone had implanted it in his mind. The first clue was when Ursula hadn’t seen it—obviously it wasn’t corporeal. For now, he decided to keep the whole thing to himself. In the feverish and mentally muddled state he had been in, Ursula would say that it had been a delusion. Something he knew it hadn’t been.
“Where are we going?” Ursula asked, waking up from her nap in the passenger seat. She peered out onto a highway that was surrounded by miles of farmland. After staying up all night nursing Kurt’s fever, she had planned on sleeping during most of the day’s drive. Mysteriously, Kurt now looked fine.
“Boston,” Kurt said.
“What’s in Boston?”
“William Snow.”
“Who is William Snow?” She sighed impatiently and said, “Maybe you could just fill me in on all the details so I don’t have to keep asking.”
“William Snow is one of the men who wrote the same book I did. He’s thirty-five years old and he lives in a home for the mentally disabled.”
“Mentally disabled?”
“Until a few weeks ago, he was autistic.”
“That statement worries me,” she said.
“It shouldn’t.”
She leaned forward to get a better look at him and asked, “How do you feel? Is the fever gone?”
“The fever was a result of my mind’s increased activity. All the thinking. Feel fine now,” he said with a cheerful shrug. “There’s one thing I think you got wrong, though. You’ve been saying that this thing is like a virus. It’s not. It’s more like an impregnation. Ideas are like children, some bad, some good, but all capable of growing, changing, becoming something beautiful, even the worst of them. Ideas are living breathing things . . . energy systems.”
The neighborhood they arrived in was the poorest in Boston and one of the worst black ghettos in Massachusetts. Their destination was a government subsidized home used to house and care for the mentally handicapped. When Kurt pulled up to the driveway, Ursula glared at him.
“You want me to go in there?” she asked.
“We should be okay. Just try not to look too Caucasian.”
After they knocked on the door, a young black man answered.
“Hello,” Kurt said. “We’re from Lor Publishing. We’re here about a manuscript William Snow submitted to us.”
“Will don’t live here no more,” he said.
“Do you know where we can find him?” Kurt asked.
The young man opened the screen door. “Some people came and got ’em. Will’s real popular these days.”
“People? What people?” Ursula asked.
“They said they was Homeland Security. They told me Will was a national threat or some shit. They didn’t exactly give details.”
“Did they show ID?” Kurt asked.
“Yeah, one of them had ID. They axed me if I knew Will was an idiot savant, and I was like, ‘savant, my ass.’ Until a few weeks ago, he couldn’t tie his own shoes. I’ve worked here two years and he’s always been low functioning. He got the I.Q. of an eight-year-old, and the man’s thirty-five.”
“Do you know where they took him?” Kurt asked.
“Nah. He don’t have family, so they could ’a taken him anywhere. It’s a shame, too.”
“How so?” Ursula asked.
“The boy had skills. He even said he was gonna fix his retardation.”
“How would he do that?” Kurt asked.
“Gene therapy,” he said, laughing. “He said he was gonna mutate his genes through radiation. It was pure entertainment. It was like, one day he woke up and he was all smart ’n shit. If you ask me, I think the government did something to him, but I ain’t saying nothing.”
“What about the book? Did he say why he wrote the novel?” Kurt asked.
“How should I know? I didn’t even think the boy could read.”