Blueprints of the Afterlife

eyes upon a world boldly asserting its beauty. We ask, now that the planet is reawakening from its convalescence, what responsibility do we have to LIFE itself? Our responsibility has never been more clear. We are responsible for spreading LIFE throughout the universe.

33. Christian gospel celebrates the transformative power of God’s love. We invert this gift. It is our love that transforms the new life. It is our love that makes gods.

That’s it.

What did you make of it?

Well, first, we were high on marijuana. Second, we’d just watched 2001. So you could have read us a receipt from the grocery store and our minds would have been blown. That night we treated the document as a form of entertainment more than anything. Erika was shaken by the experience but we weren’t really all that receptive to the gravity of what she was feeling. We sat around the kitchen table trying to figure out whether this was simply a product of Erika’s imagination or whether it was something else.

What did Erika think?

She believed it was a transmission of some sort. She definitely believed she hadn’t brought it into being via her normal creative channels. She said she’d felt like a human fax machine. Was it possible it was just her imagination at work while she was under hypnosis? Maybe. Or was it really something sent through her from another source? That it was in the form of a numbered document suggested it was a kind of philosophical argument, something along the lines of Leibniz’s The Monadology. And the actual substance of the argument, that humanity was intended to promulgate life throughout physical and virtual space… that sure sounded like speculative fiction to us. Not to mention these other technologies the document referred to —qputers, the Bionet, Wikipedia.

The next morning I went out and bought us coffee and scones. When I got back, Erika took her food upstairs while Wyatt and I messed around on a couple of his computers doing who knows what. I sensed that something was wrong but couldn’t figure it out. An hour or so went by and I realized I hadn’t heard Erika’s typing all morning. Wyatt observed this around the same time. We went upstairs to peek in at her to make sure everything was all right. She was in her study, sitting at her desk in front of her computer, her back to the door. A blank Word doc was open in front of her. Quietly, we went back downstairs and got on with our day. Then the next day, the same thing. And the day after that. Erika couldn’t write. Completely blocked. She’d go to her study at the usual time and sit there for eight hours. She was under contract to produce X number of novels a year, so this was a problem. She withdrew, and the more Wyatt and I tried to talk to her about it, the less she spoke. It was like her well of words had instantly evaporated as soon as she channeled that message. A couple weeks went by. She returned to Wendell Hoffman to see if he could help her figure out what had happened. She arrived at his office in the Castro to find the place overrun by cops. A couple hours before, a patient of Hoffman’s had shot him three times then turned the gun on himself.

Just like the cafe owner who hanged herself before you could talk to her.

That’s exactly what I thought. It felt too neatly tied up. The whole thing scared the shit out of us. We holed up in the house for several days, flushed all the dope down the toilet, and tried to get a handle on the situation. We’d taken this detour into the dot-com world, lost the trail to Nick, but now the case had caught up to us and was pulling us back in. And now we had the money to devote ourselves to it for the long haul. We needed to find the building on the brochure. We needed to find Squid. We needed to figure out whether this strange document that had come through Erika had anything to do with Nick and whether the Bionet or qputers really existed.

I had a couple friends, a couple hard-core geeks named Chi-Ming and Saltzman at Intel, whom I’d met in the trenches at eBread. I emailed them to ask if they’d ever heard of a qputer. Neither of them had, though Chi-Ming asked if I was talking about a quantum computer. What was that? He filled me in a bit. While a digital computer stores data in bits, which can exist only in a one or zero position, a quantum computer uses qubits, which can exist in a one, zero, or a superposition. This makes for a hellishly fast computer, a machine that can defeat any sort of digitally based cryptography. Even though the research goes back to the seventies, quantum computers still, you know, exist entirely within the realm of the theoretical. Quantum computers haven’t been developed yet, unless some group of scientists somewhere is keeping one secret. As for the Bionet, no one we talked to had ever heard of such a thing.

A couple months passed. Erika still hadn’t written a word. Every morning she’d go up to her room, and every afternoon she’d come downstairs defeated. She started getting these cramps in her hands, her fingers would get all claw-like, and Wyatt had to massage them so she could use them. We asked her if she might be willing to go to another hypnotherapist but she kept saying no; the experience with Hoffman had so rattled her that she was afraid of hypnotherapy altogether. Wyatt and I pored over the document for clues. He’d read about Haeckel’s Theory in some freaky alternative medicine book. I was familiar with McLuhan because of my dad, and read Understanding Media again, finding a lot to think about in light of the explosion of the Web.

What about the Bionet?

We had nothing to go on but our imaginations. We ended up concocting a science fiction explanation. This was a lot of fun, actually. Wyatt brought his knowledge of various medical modalities, I supplied the tech knowledge. We decided the Bionet would be a biological version of the Internet, a monitoring system in which individual bodies would transmit information to other bodies or groups of bodies. The initial stages of the Bionet would involve already existing technology, like pacemakers. When a pacemaker detected a cardiac event, it could transmit a distress signal with GPS coordinates to 911, triggering a response from paramedics. Then we thought, what if the Bionet could also accept signals from a remote source, and say, dispense certain things into the bloodstream? For instance, what if instead of swallowing a pill, there was a nanotechnology pharmaceutical factory installed under your skin? What if the Bionet was an extension of the immune system? And what if it could respond to a pandemic by releasing the proper cocktail of antigens into an entire populace, effectively putting up a wall against a particular outbreak? Then we started thinking about the neural ramifications of such a technology. Remember all those movies in the early nineties where people had bulky cable jacks in the backs of their necks? What if you could accomplish the same sorts of virtual immersions without the wires? What if your thoughts could transmit data about your body to an external server? Or what if you just got over a cold, and your friend got the same cold—could you send a thought into his brain that could provoke his artificially enhanced immune system to produce the appropriate antibodies? We pitched this stuff back and forth, eventually writing our book, Foundations and Principles of Bionet Technology. We had little ambition for our manuscript beyond our own entertainment. We wrote it with a sort of formal, academic tone, taking after Borges. It was just as sci-fi as anything Erika had ever written. While we were working out the early draft at the kitchen table, she was still upstairs not writing. After a few months we had a complete manuscript, which we uploaded to a print-on-demand Web site. We did no marketing, no promotion, just put it up there and kind of forgot about it. It sold three copies in the first week, which we found more funny than anything.

Erika didn’t meet her deadline for her next book and had to pay back her advance. This was our wake-up call that we really had to get her to a counselor. She felt like the part of her brain that wrote had been wiped entirely clean, like a magnet on a disk drive. Part of her still wanted to write, but she didn’t know how anymore. And she started wondering if she wanted to write only because that had been her routine for so long. Maybe she needed to do something entirely different now. Maybe her time as a writer was up. I doubted that, because when the hypnotherapy transmission had come through she’d been a hundred pages into the third book of a trilogy. She still had this stillborn manuscript on her computer, paused midsentence.

Summer came and went. The three of us had become something of a family. I loved them, I truly did. Our Bionet book sold a hundred or so copies. Then one day, a week before Halloween, I received an email. The person said he had read our book and understood we probably had a “mental block” problem on our hands. The sender promised to reverse the process and cautioned us to practice extreme secrecy. We were to meet him at Golden Gate Park at 10 a.m. on Halloween. He would appear dressed in a Chewbacca costume and provide more information at that time. I called Wyatt over to the computer before I even got to the end of the message. But there it was, in the signature and in the “from” line. The email was from Squid.