In the Shadow of Her Majesty, Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen: Of Plunder and Planning

The awkward moment passed, as they are wont to do, and it was then with a shared and singular purpose that I found myself in common cause with Diego and his people. Having considered the information before us, and following a period of intense discussion amongst all parties present, it was decided that a small group should sally forth to reconnoitre the nearest Caddiganite encampment, a forward base established only recently ten miles from our current position.

Getting to that decision, however, was rather more complicated than one might have expected, or perhaps precisely as complicated as one might have expected, depending on how well one understood the People’s Front and their processes for determining to do anything.

“We got a couple of images from one of the four drones, right before they brought it down,” the fierce dark-haired woman had said. Her name, or so she shared before our planning began in earnest, was Lucretia, and she was evidently Acting Chair of the Intelligence Subcommittee. “Not sure what to make of this, exactly, but they’ve recovered a couple of large objects and are trucking them back to their firebase. Rebecca? Any thoughts?”

I peered at her ancient screen, upon which an image was evident, showing a truck bearing an item of cargo; I recognized it immediately, even though the picture of it was blurred.

“This is, by design and profile, what remains of the Firedrake’s primary railgun, which I know in basic form from a schematic Father once showed me. It appears so damaged as to be inoperable, although it is likely to have some parts that can be cannibalised.”

“Great,” said Diego, sarcastically.

Lucretia swiped to the left, and another image appeared. “What about this one?”

The next object had been captured perfectly, although that was of rather less help than I would have hoped. It was a large rectangular solid, perhaps ten by ten by fifteen feet in volume, or so I quickly estimated given its size relative to the truck that bore it. It was wrought of a gloss black alloy, upon which were cast intricate and ornamental patterns in gold and silver, decorative flourishes that highlighted Her Majesty’s Crest, which was proudly emblazoned in the centre of each face of the prism. It was utterly undamaged, having survived the plummet and the fire with nary a scratch, and bore about it a fierce dignity, yet also a sense of menace; what first leapt to my mind was that it had about it the form of a great sarcophagus.

“I do not know what that might be,” I said, honestly. “But I suspect, given that it is of our most sophisticated construction, such that it could survive the crash undamaged, that within that dark object must be the cargo the Firedrake was charged with carrying to Williamsburg. I cannot speak to the nature of it any further, for such information is not known to me, but I fear from what I do know that this is a terrible turn of events for both your people and my own.”

Diego leaned in, carefully regarding the dark image on the screen. “Do we know where this is now, ‘Cretia? Like, it’s for sure in that firebase?”

Lucretia shook her head. “We don’t. Can’t get close enough with standard drones to confirm. Could have been moved deeper into the territory they control.”

“In which case we’d be pretty xxxxed,” Diego rumbled. “We have to know. I propose a quick light recon, get us close enough to overfly them with a Sounder, get the hell out. If it’s there, then we get the word out to the RCC, try to take it down. I ask approval.”

This, evidently, was how the group signified that a conversation and decision point was necessary, and in order to reach the point of action (which did eventually occur), there needed to be a process that established consensus. I had witnessed some of their decisionmaking upon my arrival at the compound, and what ensued was a convoluted ritual that made the proceedings of the Ladies Aid Society feel like a pleasant afternoon frolic.

This is, of course, precisely the blight that so inevitably imperils the earnest efforts of utopian anarchists, for while consensus and procedure are perfectly acceptable in when one is debating the colour of the table linens, times of existential crisis require considerably more expeditious choices. I am convinced, from my studies of the Spanish Civil War of the early twentieth century, that this is why the brutish fascists of that era had overwhelmed the passionate, inchoate republicans.

I would describe what came to pass in all of its peculiar detail, if only as a matter of giving insight into the idiosyncrasies of their society, but if I am to be absolutely honest, I was unable to follow their byzantine and seemingly arbitrary logics. Motions and amendments to the motion, I grasp, and like most members of the Ladies Aid Society, I have more than a passing understanding of Robert’s Rules of Order; what played out before me felt like a non-Euclidian parliament, or perhaps one of those mythic Babylonian debates in which every participant was required to imbibe to the point of drunkenness.

Why was Diego waggling his fingers in the air? Why was Lucretia mimicking his action, but with her fingers pointing downwards? Why were they moving about the room, grouping and ungrouping, rising and sitting? Was this farcical dance intentionally or inadvertently comic? I could not begin to tell you the answer to any of these questions, and therefore I shall not try, for:

“Lorsqu’on se retrouve en compagnie de personnes d’une autre culture et que cette culture se présente d’une manière qui semble absurde à notre sensibilité, il est toujours nécessaire de rappeler qu’ils sont probablement du même avis sur la vôtre.”*

Madame Toussaint’s advices on the matter are rather more extensive than that summary, but her essential principle remains most helpful; at a bare minimum, it helped me refrain from giggling.

After about forty five minutes, the group arrived at the conclusion that they should do the exact thing that Diego had suggested, and, rousing myself from a sense of torpor, I stirred myself to interject.

“Ernest and I shall, of course,” I said, “be accompanying you in this effort.”

It was Lucretia who responded, cutting off what seemed to be another outburst from Diego. “Look, Rebecca, I appreciate that you want to be helpful, and you have been. But this is some serious xxxx we’re heading to do here. It’d be better if you and your bot stayed where you’re safe.”

I smiled. “I do appreciate your concern for my person, Lucretia. I can assure you, however, that our participation in this reconnaissance is necessary to ensure its success. Ernest is, as I’m sure you’ve noted, a remarkably capable and formidable footman, and I am not some hothouse orchid that requires tender care and protection. I am able bodied, capable of defending myself, and the only one in this room who has any knowledge of Peerage machines.”

Diego again began to speak, but I raised my hand to indicate that I was not finished, and he…somewhat surprisingly…did me the courtesy of stilling his voice.

“I am also, more significantly, the only representative of an interested party in this affair, a…how do you say it…a ‘Beautiful One’...and it is essential that I have direct knowledge of any discoveries that might be made. For the furtherance of our alliance, it is imperative that Ernest and I be part of this effort; that decision is mine alone to make, and I have made it.”

“She’s not part of the collective,” Shain pitched in. “We don’t technically have any authority over her, not that’s been ceded.”

“Agreed,” said Raj. “The points are valid, my siblings.”

Lucretia glanced meaningfully at Diego, who shrugged.

“OK. Fair enough. We have consensus. Looks like you’re coming along, then,” said Diego, and to my immeasurable surprise, there was no further discussion on the matter.

Really, sometimes it is as easy as that.

* “When one finds oneself in the company of those of another culture, and said culture presents itself in ways that seem to one’s sensibility preposterous, it is always necessary to recall that they likely are of the same opinion about your own.” Toussaint, p. 137

Chapter Eighteen:  A Vital Reconnaisance (forthcoming)

Splash Mountain and the Strange Arcs of Corporate Intersectionality

Back in 2021, my family took a trip to Disney World, where we rode the soon-to-be-closed Splash Mountain.  It was as I remembered it, from years before.  A little more threadbare, perhaps.

It's been reconceptualized now, as the characters and stories were all removed and replaced with characters from the 2009 Disney film The Princess and the Frog.  Tiana's Bayou Adventure, it's now called.  

In that replacement, there's a peculiar irony.  

The Song of the South, the film on which Splash Mountain was based, is just the teensiest bit cringey.  Just the weensiest.  (Cough.)  Zip A Dee Doo Dah isn't...um...the actual feeling one would have gotten in the wildly racist Reconstruction-era South.  That's where the Uncle Remus stories were recorded by Joel Chandler Harris, a journalist and folklorist writing in the postwar period.  Remus is an amalgam character, one who gives voice to the actual narratives of enslaved peoples that were shared with Harris.  

Harris was white, of course, which means the tales were spun through his lens, although there's considerable murkiness about what that lens actually was.  He was understood by his contemporaries... such as Mark Twain... as being solicitous to Black folk, and Remus was read in much the same way that the wisdom fables of fellow-slave Aesop might be read.  Those stories were among those my grandfather would read to me in Georgia when I was a little boy, and that was the context in which they were presented.  

In the late twentieth and early twenty first century, that's been spun differently, as it's seen through the lenses of intersectionality and cultural appropriation, which the fluffy mid-20th century Disneyfication sho nuff exacerbated.  Oof.

But there's a peculiarity about reconceptualizing that ride.  

Again, the stories in Harrises writing were almost entirely the authentic narratives of enslaved African peoples.  That's a known known.  Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox derived their inspiration from West African trickster narratives, in which the weaker or the oppressed use their wits and wiles to overcome those who hold power.  As is so often the case with the disenfranchised, one has to dig through the narratives of their oppressors to find their truths and the tales they told.  For all of the flaws and clumsiness of the Uncle Remus stories, that's the purpose they served for the people who first told them.

The echoes of those stories have now been erased.

In their place, a story that is...different.  The Princess and the Frog isn't an African tale, nor is it a tale told by the African peoples who were brought enslaved to America.  It is also not a narrative with roots in the Black American experience.  It's rooted in a Germanic story, a classic European fairytale.  One that's been reframed to celebrate Creole and Bayou culture, certainly, but still. 

It feels...um...what's the word when you paint over a white thing with blackness to entertain an audience?  It's..uh...yeah.  I mean, how isn't it that?  

So to make amends, you replace the authentic stories of enslaved peoples with...a European fairy tale?  Capitalism is so weird.

If Disney wasn't run by lazy profit-driven execs happy to make bank off of commodified intersectionality, they'd have left the ride alone, and there'd have been a remake of Song of the South instead.  Lord have mercy, if there's ever been a Disney film that needed a hard reboot, it's that one.

It could have been something more...real.  Something that reframed those tales to surface the real and existential challenges facing Black folk in the Klan-dominated Reconstruction era South, and drilled down on the deep African roots of those now cancelled stories.

Maybe Barry Jenkins could have directed.  Ah well.  In another timeline, perhaps.

Of Trump and My Anarcholibertarian Predilections

Last year, I sat in front of a class of undergraduates and talked about my postapocalyptic Amish novel.  At one point, in response to a question from one of them about separatist/quietist movements, I described myself as having "anarcholibertarian predilections," which got a laugh from a couple of bearded young men at the back of the class.  

It's such a silly, self-absorbed, overwrought way to think of yourself, which makes anarcholibertarianism a perfect match for silly, self-absorbed, overwrought me.

I've dabbled with the idea that I might politically self-identify as libertarian over the years, but if I am, I'd have to be of that peculiar variety.  Every time I think I'm there, when my frustration with the rigidities of bureaucratic folderol and the clucking propaganda of twitter pharisees and apparatchiks have me considering going full Ron Swanson, libertarians disabuse me of the notion that I could ever possibly fit within that "movement."  

Not that it's a movement, not really.  It's as incoherent as the language on the AI generated image I prompted for this post.

The news about Libertarianism recently, insofar as there is ever any meaningful news about libertarianism in America, is that the Libertarian Party has invited Donald J. Trump to speak at their convention.

It's yet another reason why any libertarian worthy of the name would steer away from the American party, and a reminder of how neofascist, corporatist, and "strong man" ideologies have devoured the concept of libertarianism in America.  If your libertarianism ends up justifying the power of a despot, an oligarch, or a charlatan, it ain't libertarianism.  

It's monarchism, and honeychild, there is a difference.

My libertarianism doesn't bend the knee to anyone, including myself.  Perhaps that's because it's less a political philosophy and more a question of my theology, which seems a better place for libertarianism to hang its hat.  That is, let it be clear, not me saying it is less relevant.  It's me saying it's more central to my identity as a person, my understanding of how human beings are to live together, and our relationship with our Creator.

There's probably some pre-existing definition of the word anarcholibertarian, one that was argued and fretted over by earnest folks with Germanic surnames a century ago.  I mean, surely there is.  I don't care.  I mean, being anarcholibertarian, why would I?

My libertarianism is "anarcho" because I don't trust human beings with power.  Put the prefix "an" in front of "arch," and that's really all you're saying:  "no power."  Whatever the power structure may be, there is within it moral hazard.  The concentrations of power that manifest in political systems become self-perpetuating, as power seeks to reinforce itself.   There is no form of political system that is immune to this, because political systems are human social constructs, and humans love love love power over one another.  

Which means...because no human community can function without power...that I prefer systems that check and balance the powerful.  Oligarchies and despotisms, being the self-serving things that they are, are the enemy.  Social democracies and liberal republics are invariably frustrating, but they do a far better job of preserving the average soul's liberty than any other system.  This is precisely because they put the brakes on power, because they make the concentration of authority in a single person or group more difficult.  We've forgotten this, we Americans, as we posture and bellow at one another from our position of privilege.

Preserving the liberty of the powerful is and has always been unnecessary.  The wealthy and the social elite have their armies of lawyers...or their actual armies...to ensure that they are free to do as they please.  Rules, like the covenant of marriage or the Constitutional process for the peaceful transfer of power?  These things do not apply to them.

The more someone loves power, revels in it, glories in it?  The less one should trust them with it.

Yet so many of us, once again, howl for a king. 

The First English Language Use of the Word "Multiverse"

"...we of the nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any god of whose character she can be an adequate expression. Truly all we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance; with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such of her particular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, Nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world."

- from William James (Harvard philosopher, brother of Henry James, founder of American psychology), "Is Life Worth Living," 1895, the first English language use of the word #multiverse.

Why I Will Mow In May

Spring has sprung, and that means that the ground cover in my front yard is suddenly growing again. Grasses and chickweed, bugleweed and clover and dandelions, a wild heteroculture suddenly surging upward in a riot of green. That means that it’s mowing season again. 

Some folks don’t like mowing, viewing it as an onerous and pointless chore. But I’ve always liked it. As a teen, I looked forward to mowing the yard, because it was utterly satisfying. Sure, it needs to happen pretty much every week, but it’s one of those things that you do that has a definite result. It’s not abstract, not uncertain. It’s not a Zoom to develop a plan to create a task force to consider writing an overture to the General Assembly, as much as that warms the Presbyterian heart.

You do it, and it’s done. Like a made bed, or a sink emptied of dishes, it's as satisfying as a contented sigh.  

There's been a pushback against mowing lately, of those earnest "well-actually" Newthinks that pop and
meme about in our addled collective subconscious.  

Mowing is bad.  Don't mow.  Don't mow for the whole month of May!  No Mow May!  Let the pollinators pollinate!  Let the grass grow, man!  Let your freak flag fly!  It's habitat, too, bro, cultivate habitat, for our little crawly friends.

Which it certainly is.  Ever take a long walk through a field of tall grass at the height of summer?  Though I grew up in the urban megaplexes of DC and London and Nairobi, I remember doing that.  One particular afternoon hangs in memory, a hike near the rural Virginia home of a family friend when I was thirteen.  I remember how alive that meadow was, the slow windblown eddies across the surface of it, how the waving grass leapt and whirred with hundreds of grasshoppers.   I remember the brightness of the sun, and how alive everything felt.  I remember the tickle of the grass against my arms, against my bare legs.  

And after we got back, I remember not just the tickle, but the ticks.  The dozen-plus ticks I found clambering on my legs, on my back, in my socks, in my shorts, and squirming their way with thirsty intent towards my tender regions.  Even thinking about that now makes me itchy.  

Tall grass is habitat, without question.

That said, I'm no fan of the synthetic, lifeless monoculture of the American suburban lawn.  It's false life, with all the uncanny valley wrongness of astroturf or a reanimated relative.  It's why my own lawn is speckled with flowers and variety, all of which is evidenced here on this page.  But if you don't mow, you and your children and your dogs and neighborhood chipmunks will suffer.

Because mowing is not merely aesthetic. It serves a purpose.  That purpose, for me, goes well beyond reducing bloodsucking parasite populations.  

I am a gardener.  In my yard, mowing serves my compost piles, which I rely on to hyper-locally produce the earth that fills my nearly 300 square feet of raised beds.  For them, mowing is absolutely vital.

Back in the Fall, every single leaf that fell from the thirty plus trees that shade my back yard went into a pile, because, well, it’s compost. Six months worth of coffee grounds and filters, every peeled carrot shaving and bit of onion skin for half a year, all of it has been blended into that giant pile of dead leaves. It’s easy to look at that brown mound in winter and see nothing. It seems inert, lifeless, just a lump of matter. Which it is, right up until the moment you feed it with mowed greens in the Spring.

Because mowing a lawn is an act of harvest.  It's profoundly and directly useful, and I look forward to it as I look forward to collecting up fallen leaves in November.

All those lush green May clippings are rich with nitrogen, which is a veritable feast for the millions of teensy tinesy little microbes that have been sitting patiently among the leaves in one of the five by eight fenced compost piles in my backyard. Dump a couple of bags of cut ground cover onto the pile, give it a good oxygenating pitchin’ with a pitchfork, and the little microbiome of that pile comes to life. It’s no longer a pile of cold leaves, but teeming with life and the promise of life.

I go out, and I turn it on a wet day, and the pile smells good.  Not of rot and death, but sweet and alive.  It's warm, too, radiating heat as the energies of hundreds of millions of organisms thrive in the cuttings from my efforts.  Steam rises from it, filled with the scent of rich organic earth being birthed.  

My mowing last May is feeding my growing beans and tomatoes, my squash and my potatoes.  It will fill my table this summer.  The excess will go to the Little Free Produce stand of my church, joining with the outputs of other gardeners to feed those who have need.  That cycle of life and generous intent repeats, year by year, tied to the ebb and flow of life and the seasons.

So I will mow this May.  It isn't a drab and dismal duty.  It isn't a mindless, pointless ritual serving the cold demands of a soulless suburban deity.  

It's participating in the joyous bounty of creation.

When Our Science Fiction becomes Our Reality

"At the front of the room, Chang had told the Waterbaby to watch his right hand, which now held a small green cube. Its head tracked the movement, glass eyes tracking in perfect time. Then, Chang wrapped his hand around the cube, hiding it from sight.

“What is in my left hand,” said Chang.

Pause. “There. Is. Nothing in. Your. Left hand.” Chang closed his left hand, and then held left and right hands together in front of him, the green cube neatly hidden.

“Follow the hand with the green cube,” Chang continued. He moved both hands in opposite circles. Waterbaby diligently tracked the hand with the cube.

“Like magic for really stupid people,” Jim snarked.

“Shut up,” Jo muttered back, with a tired smile."

From the table, Chang picked up a mirror, a flat thirty by forty centimeter rectangle, with a hard black plastic backing. He held it up to the crude face, in front of the glazed lenses.

“What do you see in my hand,” Chang asked.

Pause. Pause. “A. Rectangle.” A longer pause.

“And what do you see in the rectangle?”

Silence. Then, “I see. Nothing. In the. Rectangle.”

Jo shook her head. It was more right than it knew.

FROM THE WATER, p 35

-----

The recently circulated video of Figure's new OpenAI powered bot stirred a memory of that snippet in my mind yesterday, for obvious reasons.

I wrote that ten years ago, in what was the first of a trilogy of A.I. novels that never found a publisher.  In FROM THE WATER, I explored two ideas.  First, the idea that AGI...Artificial General Intelligence...would only arrive at the point where we moved beyond language models and into A.I. systems that could connect their semiotics to the material world.  Meaning, simply, that words had meaning.  

When we think the word "water," for example, it doesn't simply inhabit a web of linguistic interrelation.  It is "wet," and we know what that means because we can touch it, and taste it, and see it.  We can hear it dripping and splashing and flowing.  

In order to achieve sentience, or so I argued from the basis of my then-reading of early two-thousands A.I. theorists, a system must be able to perceive itself.  Sentience requires the capacity for self-awareness, not simulated, not virtual, but actual.

Secondly, such a neutral network wouldn't be physical.  It wouldn't be a matter of interlaced hardware and chipsets, but a software construct.  In FROM THE WATER, I'd envisioned a virtual network, in which a complex neutral structure was simulated.  But as it turns out, you don't need that.  The complex and probabilistic interconnections within language itself can be pressed into service for that purpose.  They're already neural.  

The advances in A.I. we're seeing right now have met the terms and conditions of the science fiction of the recent past. 

We're at functional Turing compliance with our LLMs.  We're starting to see those constrained intelligences connect to the real world.  There's no reason to believe we're not on the edge of a epochal shift, one brought to us by the same earnestly blindered quants who were convinced that the internet would bring about world peace, and that smartphones were a great idea.  

It's peculiar watching the fiction you've written become reality.