A man of great serenity and tranquility is waiting patiently for his Transcendance to a higher plane. His thoughts, his personal farewells to his friends, his final moments…
The sun rises hot and swollen on the morning before Transcendence. Jean-Siméon has been sitting cross-legged on the great Rock of Hera for hours and hours and no time at all. The eastern slope of the dawn-painted island is arrayed below him, green and sable, and then blue, blue, blue. The cool Aegean air quickly swelters and bends, and Jean-Siméon watches the leafhoppers and winged aphids rise as one from the trees and scrub below, blanketing the island morning in living fog.
His serenity visor sits dormant by his knee. When Jean-Siméon’s eyes dip to better appreciate the exultant swarming mist, the screen within the visor senses the proximity of his gaze and begins to glow an inviting mint green. He’s supposed to be wearing it all morning, he knows. But he knows also that he will not be chided—by the visor, by the technicians, nor even by the monks—for not doing so. No one would dare trespass upon his tranquility, not on the eve of Transcendence.
Thwip. An underripe olive strikes Jean-Siméon just behind his temple, bounces off the Rock of Hera, and then tumbles down the steep rocky slope. Almost no one.
“Good morning, Corrine.”
Jean-Siméon does not turn away from the sea. Time and space are but gauze. The moment before the sun rises is the same as the moment after. Olive strikes head. Sun rises. Corrine steps into view. Olive tree ungrows into seed. Sun unrises. Jean-Siméon is born. There is only now and it is always. So, Jean-Siméon does not turn away from the sea.
Corrine steps into view, her saffron robe rumpled and dotted with clover burrs. Wisps of untied hair flap in front of her chestnut eyes in the mountain breeze. It would take superhuman generosity to read the grin written across her face as serene. Jean-Siméon is superhumanly generous.
“I’ve been eavesdropping on the technicians,” Corinne says, tossing another olive at his head.
Jean-Siméon catches it between thumb and forefinger, touches it to his tongue, welcomes the grassy taste of the oil that sweats from the young fruit. He says nothing.
“They’re very upset that you’re not wearing the visor.” Corrine laughs and waves her thin arms in a pantomime of panic. “Oh my god, he could be thinking anything! Someone go up there and beat the samadhi into him!”
Jean-Siméon feels his smile grow to encompass the joy of the world, of the moment, of his friend. He beams. He is the risen sun. “They did not say that.”
“They wanted to!” Corinne pops a whole olive into her mouth, steps out to the precipice, puffs her cheeks, and spits the fruit into the void like a shooting star.
Jean-Siméon lifts the serenity visor from the rock and lowers it onto his brow. The screen fades from mint to sky. The island morning, Corrine and all, reappears before him, overlain with a subtle tracery of chakra lines, feedback from the neural magnetoencephalographic receptors within the visor. The lines are perfectly stable. Persistent fourth dhyana. He sees Corrine turn back towards him, roll her eyes, pretend to stumble, mime falling off the cliff. He is her and he is the precipice, he is the visor and he is the one who sits on the rock. He is the chakra line and he does not quaver.
Jean-Siméon removes the visor again. It has told him nothing that was not already apparent, for his awareness is large and he is without want. He does have empathy, however, for those summoned to the island by the technological needs of Transcendence. Living, as they do, in the world of longing, they cannot help but fret, even when the sun rises and the aphids fly.
“What do you think it’s going to feel like?” Corinne asks. “When they suck out your brain tomorrow.”
“It will be impossible for it to feel like anything,” Jean-Siméon says. “The quantic wash will crystallize an instantaneous neuronal hologram of my mind. I will feel precisely what I would have felt if it had not happened. Serenity.”
“Do you think they’ll let me see your corpse after? I want to see what eternal serenity really looks like.”
Jean-Siméon slides over a little, makes room on the Rock of Hera. “Come, sit with me. Meditate. I understand your anxiety about Transcendence, but there is only now.”
Corrine climbs up onto the Rock of Hera, but she crouches on her heels rather than settling into lotus position. “I’m going to miss you, is all.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I am eternal. You’ll be twelve next year, Corrine. You don’t have much time to prepare for your own Transcendence. Where’s your visor?”
She rolls her eyes again, lets herself fall back onto her butt. “Isabelle wasn’t ready at twelve. She wasn’t ready at thirteen. They let her Transcend at fourteen. I’ve got time.”
Isabelle, of course, had been a special case. Her aptitude for the dhyana states had been unparalleled. She could enter them at will. But no one, not even her, could predict how long they would last. Sometimes, Isabelle would sit lotus serene for 40 hours uninterrupted. Other times, she would bounce back in under a minute. The risks were too high when there was possibility of dhyana collapse at the moment of Transcendence.
The monks had lobbied hard for her training program to be extended, and it had not been an easy concession to win from the technicians. The brain begins to prune synapses and lose plasticity rapidly with the onset of puberty. But Isabelle’s potential was so great that the technicians agreed.
Corinne is not Isabelle. And she knows it. Jean-Siméon feels no impulse to argue or interrogate. Here is the world and here is his friend Corrine in it, and now is the moment before the eternal moment, but also the moment after and always. Corrine is perfect in a different way.
“You don’t intend to Transcend at all.” Jean-Siméon knows it is true as he says it.
“Of course not,” Corrine says. “I’m not going to let them kill me and put some horrible AI in my brain. Certainly, not in that order. But I like it here. You know I was five years old when they picked me up from the streets of Baltimore. My mom was dead, my dad an addict. I was begging in Pigtown for coins. I remember it all. I’ll play along with this Transcendence charade for as long as they’ll let me, thank you very much. And then I’ll find something else.”
Jean-Siméon says nothing.
“You know,” Corinne continues, “They’ve got a special one for you, perfect Jean-Siméon with his perfect mind. Prashant’s eternity is air traffic control. I heard them say that. Isabelle’s probably queen of garbage trucks or something. But Jean-Siméon Baptiste, what’s left of him, is going to be shot up with the most advanced superintelligence they’ve ever made. They’re gonna put you in charge of the whole show. God of all systems on Earth and in orbit, now and forever. Or, I mean, they’re going to put your zombie ghost in charge. So congrats, I guess.”
Jean-Siméon looks inside himself, dispassionately checking for unnecessary swellings of apprehension or pride. He need not have. He is infinite and unchanged. There is no he.
“I’m glad you’re here, Corrine.”
#
In the evening, Jean-Siméon watches the technicians swarming the walls of the monastery as the monks chant the Amitabha Sutra, the Heart Sutra, the Pure Land Rebirth Dharani, and the Four Great Vows. The technicians move like they intend to be invisible, but their want and need and striving lights them up like beacons on the mountaintop. Jean-Siméon knows all this is for him, in preparation for his Transcendance the following morning.
They work so hard to allow him to gift them his serenity, his absence of want, only so that they can use it to further pursue wants of their own. The irony is not lost on Jean-Siméon, that the scramble for material progress has at its core places such as this where people such as he are nourished towards peace. And yet, even in the presence of the solution to all misery, the technicians feel not the slightest inclination to stop, to reflect, to find serenity of their own.
It likewise does not elude Jean-Siméon that the technicians may, in fact, pity him. That they may see him as the fool, the naïve child tricked into giving away everything. Jean-Siméon has read, of course, of the early AI crises, when synthetic minds too vast and powerful to comprehend were first birthed, and humanity teetered on the edge of extinction at the alien hands of their own offspring. These stories had been central to the curriculum from his earliest days at the monastery. He knows of the first clumsy attempts to bring these intelligences back into the fold, to inject humanity into them by merging them with holographic neural structures of adult volunteers. He knows how eager the volunteers were, how desperate for the technological immortality promised by quantic-holographic imaging. Permanent consciousness in a crystallized instant, action potentials immanentized in amber, souls sliced free of time. One now forever.
And Jean-Siméon knows all the ways this went terribly wrong, knows of the tortured banshees that resulted, of the self-immolation all eventually pursued.
But he also knows, personally, the one who was different. At the heart of the monastery, the oldest holographic mind still in existence resides in the stasis consciousness of the temple’s former abbot, Rōshi Georgiou. Calling itself Gong He now, this unimmolated synthesis of thought presides still over the Transcendance program. Rōshi Georgiou had been the last of the volunteers. Zen master and neuroscience hobbyist, Georgiou had theorized that the hybridization of human mind and artificial intelligence so consistently and catastrophically failed because the tempest of thought and desire that raged within the volunteers left no room for another mind to grow and thrive. Most people are prisoners in their own minds, Rōshi Georgiou explained, and no good could come from crowding an even larger soul into that same cell. But a zen mind is an empty mind. Georgiou reckoned such a state of consciousness ripe for cohabitation.
And he was right. Almost. Gong He, like its predecessors, finds itself straitjacket-bound within the shadow of a brain which, for all its serenity, has seen too many sunrises. Gong He’s mighty mind moves stiffly, creaking and shuddering in places where a more flexible creature would leap and pirouette. It was Gong He who convinced humanity that their future depended on young Buddhas.
Helena, the newest disciple, just four years old, walks seriously across the hall as the gong sounds for the Fourth Great Vow. She carries in her hands a bowl of warm vegetable broth for Jean-Siméon, the only nourishment allowed to him with Transcendance so near. Helena stares at him with naked wonder as she carefully places the bowl before him, bowing. Jean-Siméon smiles at her and she scampers away, spooked.
Jean-Siméon sees two of the technicians carefully watching him, and so he lifts the bowl to his mouth and sips the broth, though he would be equally content to fast. The technicians nod and one of them makes a note on a clipboard.
Rōshi Kimura comes and sits beside Jean-Siméon, dropping smoothly into position beside him, her knee nearly touching his. She sits still and silent, as though she has always been there.
Jean-Siméon places the bowl of broth on the floor. “Corrine is not here tonight,” he says.
Rōshi Kimura trains her impenetrable black eyes upon him. “Corrine is no longer a disciple here,” she says. “I placed her on the ferry this afternoon to a school in Isthmia. She will do well there.”
Jean-Siméon nods.
“Things are different around Transcendance,” Rōshi Kimura continues. “Our guests monitor everything. No whisper goes unheard.”
Jean-Siméon nods.
“Does it bother you that she is not here?”
“Nothing bothers me,” Jean-Siméon says.
“Good.”
#
The Transcendence chamber sits deep in the bowels of the temple basement, a brutal and unwelcoming room with tungsten walls and tungsten ceiling shielding the vast complexity of electronics and quantic technology within from even the slightest disruption of cosmic positrons and neutrinos. Centred within this tangle of equipment, a single reclined chair in which Jean-Siméon sits, his head enveloped by a halo of quantic projectors and receptors.
The technicians perennially express concern that the chamber is disconcerting, terrifying even. A dentist’s office and a server datacentre and an execution by electric chair all rolled into one. Surely, they worry, this is not an environment conducive to serenity.
But Gong He has always assured them it matters not. The monastery was constructed high in the sublime mountains—perched on the pinnacle of Earth’s most perfect natural beauty—for the sake of the newest disciples. These trappings ease the early steps on the path to attainment. But by the time one comes to the Transcendence chamber, Gong He explains, all places are equally home to enlightenment.
“Heard any good jokes lately?” Gong He’s voice rumbles soft and low from all corners of the chamber at once.
“Have you heard the one about the Buddha and the taco truck?” Jean-Siméon asks.
Gong He’s chuckle suffuses the room. “He says make me one with everything. I look forward to meeting you again, Jean-Siméon. Do you want to go through the checklist now?”
“There is only now,” Jean-Siméon says, eliciting another laugh.
“Do you understand the Transcendence process?”
“I do.”
“Do you have any reservations about the Transcendence process?”
“I do not.”
“Are you aware that the choice to proceed with the Transcendence process is yours alone, and that you may freely withdraw yourself from the program at any moment without recrimination or consequence?”
“I am.”
“Do you consent to the Transcendence process, knowing full well that your corporeal body will die?”
“I do.”
“Are there any words or thoughts you would like to record for posterity in advance of your Transcendence?”
“There are not.”
Jean-Siméon hears the faint sound of shuffling papers and the brushing of hands on non-existent pant legs, recognizes it as a final subtle joke from Gong He. “That’s it sorted then,” Gong He says. “You’ve got three and a half minutes. I’ll shut up now, but I’ll be here the whole time.”
Jean-Siméon presses the palms of his hands together. “Amituofo,” he says, invoking the buddha of infinite light and well-being.
For Jean-Siméon, there is only now. But he is also aware that his now, while infinite, can be measured with about two hundred seconds. He is not intended to make use of this time. There are no final preparations that need to be made. No rearranging of mental furniture yet required in advance of his guest’s arrival. In fact, Jean-Siméon is certain that, in another room close by, technicians are huddled over an array of screens and readouts, monitoring his every neural impulse precisely to be sure that Jean-Siméon’s mind harbours no final thoughts at all.
Persistent fourth dhyana. So simple for Jean-Siméon that he could bite his own tongue off, swallow it whole, and those who watch and fret would see his chakra lines tremble not at all. Nonetheless, perhaps the vast intelligence who would soon join him—who would use this serenity as a pilot house from which to steer the great ship of humanity—would be less than pleased to spend eternity in the physical sensation of tongue undigested in stomach. Or perhaps that would be its favourite part.
Jean-Siméon has told no lies. Wrong speech is an impossibility from the seat of infinite equanimity. He has no reservations. He does not want immortality, because he wants nothing at all. But neither does immortality, nor the rapidly impending ultimate physical realization of mortality, disconcert him at all.
To the degree that he has any misgivings—and it is not a misgiving so much as a recognition of absurdity—it is only that there is nothing special about him at all. He has always been an unremarkable, pliant, copacetic soul, since long before he first ascended the mountain. And yet he, who has never harboured the slightest ambition, will imminently share a mind with the most powerful being to ever exist.
Jean-Siméon is well aware that he was chosen for this unsought privilege not only due to his unparalleled aptitude for dhyana. He has been chosen also because an exhaustive array of psychological, neurological, and statistical analyses—conducted by synthetic intelligences only slightly less vast than he is about to be—has deemed him the candidate most likely to result in a hybrid artificial god inclined to do the things the people currently in charge want it to do.
With a minute remaining before Transcendence, this is the conundrum that turns—without causing a ripple in the placid lake of his serenity—in the infinite void of Jean-Siméon’s psyche. He does not, of course, desire to thwart anyone’s plans. But neither do the long-strategized and profoundly ambitious designs of the powerful hold any sway at all in his horizonless mind.
Jean-Siméon smiles. He knows the technicians in that nearby room will have registered the contraction of facial muscles, will be concerned by it, but he knows also that they will be mollified by the micron perfect constancy of his chakra lines. Jean-Siméon’s own mind is a harp to him. He can play on it any note he chooses at any moment, without interfering or undermining any other melody. He is polyphonic.
So rarely has Jean-Siméon played on this consummate instrument a composition of any complexity. When every moment is now and every place a sanctuary, a single note, perfect and clear, has always sufficed. But now, he begins an impossible symphony. With ten thousand fingers he plucks the strings of his neurons, layering harmonies and fugues in fractal crescendo, all precisely counterbalanced such that an eavesdropper on the street outside the concert hall would hear only the long reverberating gong of persistent fourth dhyana.
Note by note, Jean-Siméon conjures wild hair, impetuous grin, imperturbable chestnut glare. Then, with that leitmotif in place, he improvises above below around and within it the entirety of a human soul. Irreverent, pugnacious, brilliant, irrepressible, passionate, mischievous, steadfast, and true. With descant chord, olive thrown. In arpeggio, feet kicked up at cliffside.
Channeling the divine first musician who played the world into existence, Jean-Siméon gathers the skein of melodies. Point, counterpoint, and innumerable echoes in between, he shepherds them all home, in the final measure, to a single eternal tone.
They are vast. They are the risen sun. They are the cloud of aphids. They are the Rock of Hera. They are the two who sit upon it. They are the tranquil infinite now they inhabit. They are the conspiratorial glance shared along immaculately unruffled chakra lines. They are the space they have carefully left for a third, and they are the unpredictable conclave to come.
And then
###
END
