Nick Land - Chasm

Chasm

Eighty-Nine

Manifesto for an Abstract Literature

Nick Land

Time Spiral Press, 2015

www.timespiralpress.net

Nothing was to have taken place. Less, even, than usual, or than standard procedure recommended. That was clear.

The way Qasm put it was clean.

It has to be perfectly clean. You get that? She didnt really need to ask, and knew it.

Of course.

She waited, offering me an opportunity to contaminate the moment of pure understanding.

I took a sip of water. Studied her professionally. Said nothing.

Any questions? she asked, knowing I hadnt.

I hadnt.

No, I said.

Nothing more, then.

No, nothing. Its all clear. No threads of personal identification. No electronic records. No guns.

As she watched, I skimmed through the contract one more time, just to show that I cared. The money transfer was complete. The mission profile was simple. There was a one-time-use hard-delete application to scramble all associated data into noise before setting out.

You wont need to contact us when its done.

Understood.

Good luck then, she concluded meaninglessly.

The empty shell of a smile, then I left. She didnt look up.

As Qasm had snuggled ever deeper into the bed of government security contracting, it had begun to give its activities military-style names. This one was Pits-Drop. The mangled pun was far more informative than any sound protocol would have permitted it to be. It was an information-preserving compression, rather than code in any cryptographic sense. Still, no one was listening, so I guessed it didnt matter.

The final syllable of the name abbreviated operation or seemed to. There had been Floor-Mop, then Full-Stop, and now this.

Floor-Mop had been tidy, and only marginally illegal. Full-Stop was a bloody fiasco. It astounded (and seriously impressed) me that no one had been arrested after it. The descent path so far had been precipitous, and it led with some ominousness to Pits-Drop. Fortunately, there werent enough data-points to plot a convincing trend.

I hiked the last few miles to the dock, along the cliff-road in pre-dawn darkness. It was still not yet five when I arrived.

Our vessel, The Pythoness, was moored to a private pier at the edge of the dock. Even at a distance, she looked small, neat, and expensive. Two bored, cold security guards kept watch at the check-point. Another two stood by the boat. All four were heavily armed.

There was a fifth figure, standing perfectly immobile apart from the rest, staring out to sea. From his bearing alone which, despite being pulled into itself against the cold, radiated indomitable purpose I knew with complete confidence that this had to be our man.

I watched him for a while, before approaching.

James Frazer?

Yup, he replied, scanning me efficiently with icy gray eyes. You have to be the company guy.

Tom Symns. I extended my hand, and he shook it readily emough. Good to meet you at last, captain.

So what is this all about? he asked immediately.

The mission?

He said nothing, silenced, perhaps, by an intolerance for recursive or superfluous questions. His eyes narrowed and perceptibly hardened, searching my face for signs of evasion.

You know what I do, I told him. The company runs everything on a need-to-know basis. Like you, Im an outside contractor. Theres a piece of cargo to dispose of. Thats the mission.

Cargo. The repetition was derisive, but undemanding. He didnt like the obscurity, but I could tell that hed already given up on me as a source of information. The speed and clarity of that call was impressive.

Pre-sealed. Confidential. Thats all Ive got.

Yeah, I figured, he sighed. You want to see the boat?

Sure.

The Pythoness had been provided by the company. No one else had been allowed to touch her. Due to her unusual functional specifications, the construction process had required close oversight.

The boat wasnt large, but the usage of space approached optimality. There were no rough edges. Some millions of pieces were fused into the single entity that was The Pythoness, with a seamless perfection owing less to mechanical combination than organic integrity. Her shape emerged from a confluence of ungraspably intricate but unbroken curves. It looked as if she had been printed as a coherent unit, like a droplet of pure design extracted directly from the immaculate realm of ideas, still glistening from a sudden condensation into actuality. Perhaps she had been.

I whistled in admiration.

Quite something, isnt she? Frazer concurred. Still, there was an unmistakable ambiguity in his tone.

Worried that she wont leave you anything to do? I guessed.

His silence was confirmation enough.

On the positive side, it will mean theres time to think, I added.

Thats positive how?

The predictive insight packed into that surly response would later come to astound me.

The Pythoness was a boat-shaped intelligent machine. Insofar as we could trust what wed been told, this vessel bobbing gently in the water beside the quay was an elaborate trash-disposal system. She existed solely for this mission, assembled especially for it, less than a month before. No one had ever sailed in her. She was unlived in. Her usage was untested. She was pure except for the single dark secret she had been built around.

A crew of five would fit a little too neatly for comfort. Exploring the Pythoness was an undertaking so limited in scope that it dramatized our impending confinement. It took no more than twenty minutes to complete the inspection with reasonable thoroughness. A casual tour would have required less than ten. These few moments would define the boundaries of our world.

Excluding the two compact toilet and shower units, there were only four enclosed spaces in total. Two below deck, and two above. Beside the workshop / storage compartment where the cargo was confined, at the rear, the lower area consisted of a single cabin lined with bunks and attached lockers. A minature galley occupied the aft section, while a horseshoe curve of comfortable seating wrapped itself neatly around a large table at the bow-end. It didnt add-up to much diverting complexity.

Above deck, the bridge was divided vertically. The lower section was larger and served as an electronic control hub. Five different computer screens gave it the appearance of a media room, as if taunting us with our structural passivity. Input devices were devoted almost entirely to navigating through dimensions of information. The smaller, upper section, was nominally the center of command. More realistically, it was a look-out post. Nothing would happen there.

James Frazer was to be my key companion for almost a month, so it was important to get a sense of him. Too much command entitlement in a small space spelt trouble, and the formalization of authority in this case had been left concerningly ragged. Yet the initial impression was encouraging. He appeared to be taciturn, wry, capable they were all traits that would help us to get along, or at least off each others throats. Hed been a saturation diver for five years, which already said a lot. Silence, darkness, pressure he had been immersed in all of them, to depths normally judged unfathomable.

There were to be three other members of the crew. All were in their mid- to late-twenties younger than both of us by roughly a decade but otherwise they seemed to have little in common.

Youve worked with these three guys before? I asked. The documentation had been vague about it.

Some.

Nothing to worry about?

They all do what theyre told. No complex stuff. He clearly saw both points as obvious virtues.

Robert Bolton and Joseph Scruggs composed a study in contrasts. They epitomized the two sides of the tracks.