Chasm Read online

  Chasm

  Eighty-Nine

  Manifesto for an Abstract Literature

  Nick Land

  Time Spiral Press, 2015

  www.timespiralpress.net

  §00 — 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 didn’t 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 hadn’t.

  I hadn’t.

  “No,” I said.

  “Nothing more, then.”

  “No, nothing. It’s 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 won’t need to contact us when it’s done.”

  “Understood.”

  “Good luck then,” she concluded meaninglessly.

  The empty shell of a smile, then I left. She didn’t look up.

  §01 — 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 didn’t 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 weren’t enough data-points to plot a convincing trend.

  §02 — 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, I’m an outside contractor. There’s a piece of cargo to dispose of. That’s the mission.”

  “‘Cargo.’” The repetition was derisive, but undemanding. He didn’t like the obscurity, but I could tell that he’d already given up on me as a source of information. The speed and clarity of that call was impressive.

  “Pre-sealed. Confidential. That’s all I’ve got.”

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

  “Sure.”

  §03 — 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 wasn’t 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, isn’t she?” Frazer concurred. Still, there was an unmistakable ambiguity in his tone.

  “Worried that she won’t leave you anything to do?” I guessed.

  His silence was confirmation enough.

  “On the positive side, it will mean there’s time to think,” I added.

  “That’s ‘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 we’d 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 didn’t 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.

  §04 — 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 other’s throats. He’d 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.

  “You’ve worked with t
hese three guys before?” I asked. The documentation had been vague about it.

  “Some.”

  “Nothing to worry about?”

  “They all do what they’re 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.

  Bolton’s educational credentials were extraordinary. They were what I would have expected of somebody building an experimental nuclear fusion reactor.

  “With these qualifications he’s working on boats?”

  “He’s ‘between things’. Says the sea helps him think.”

  A spy would have hidden this expertise, so it didn’t look like a security risk. Besides, in the event of any kind of technical problem, he’d be an asset. It still didn’t add up, but there was no time for that now. HR wasn’t my responsibility.

  Scruggs was the anti-Bolton. In another age, he would have been called a ‘wharf rat’. His family background wasn’t so much broken as shattered. It had been a circus of abuse. Even from the highly-abbreviated version made available for convenient inspection, his criminal record was an impenetrably tangle of astounding density. Yet, at some point deep into the descending glide-path that was his life, he’d discovered religion and – by all socio-economic indications – been saved. He’d managed to make the transition from petty dockside larceny to working on boats. The salvation story was dramatic enough, but it only very marginally nudged my default hypothesis that Scruggs was bad to the bone. He was going to be trouble.

  The last of the three was a more perplexing choice, at least initially. Had central casting set out to provide us with a Queequeg it would have had cause for self-congratulation.

  “This guy ‘Zodh’ – that’s all the name we’ve got?”

  “It’s all I’ve ever had.”

  “It says he’s from Guam.”

  “That’s where he found us.”

  The attached photograph was not selling him hard. It would have been a conspicuously singular face, even without the hideous grooves of ritualistic scarring, and the dense spatter of tattoos that swirled across it. The individual it portrayed was socially and ethnically dubious – partially Polynesian I suspected, but speculation quickly subsided into randomness. The stare he had cast into the camera lens delicately balanced an unsettling combination of amusement and coldness.

  “He speaks English?” I asked, hoping the question was unnecessary.

  “Yeah … of a sort.”

  “Christ.”

  “It hasn’t been a problem, up to now.”

  “You know, the whole ‘mystery man’ aura here isn’t working for me. It looks far too much like gratuitous risk. Why do we need him?”

  Frazer cocked his head back slightly. By all appearance, it was a gesture designed to signal a radical lack of interest – even mild contempt. “Adaptability? Mental flexibility? I don’t know. It’s your call.”

  I looked at the photo again, and sighed. “Okay, what the hell.” There wasn’t enough information here to support a sound decision. The company had seen all these files, and green-lighted the crew. Why complicate things? I deleted all the documents. It was what it was.

  The Qasm SUV had a kill-cradle for the tablet. After a perfunctory check, I placed mine inside, and pressed the ‘wipe’ button.

  “Really?” commented Frazer, who’d been watching the process.

  “It’s in the contract. ‘No communication or information-storage devices to be taken on board’,” I recited from memory.

  “But nothing about extinguishing all related data.”

  “Habit.”

  He shrugged. That was all he was going to get, and he knew it. He switched tack.

  “Do they have some superstitious objection to the thirteenth?” Terra firma was burning the soles of his feet. He wanted us to be already underway, but that wasn’t the way Qasm understood time.

  “No. And they don’t care about St. Valentine’s Day, either.”

  “Everybody’s here.”

  That was true. The other crew members were lodged in a small hotel on the bluff.

  “There’s a schedule,” I said. It shouldn’t have been necessary.

  We had another twelve hours to kill. Nothing was going to erode and then eliminate any of them except tolerated duration.

  A subtle tremor of resignation passed through him. Loss of control was something he already knew about, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

  §05 — Nestled into the cliff, close to the dock, was a small, atmospheric bar, called The Crab Pot. The name made it sound like a restaurant, but the little food that was served there looked inedible. It had settled itself confidently upon the sharp cusp between authenticity and simulation. This was the kind of place a million bars around the world wanted to be, but since it grasped the fact, whatever innocence it might once have had was now gone. It had adjusted itself neatly to its own stereotype, with netting and crab traps complicating a softly-illuminated, cave-like interior, unsullied by audiovisual technology. There wasn’t even a jukebox. Dock hands and tourists patronized it in roughly comparable numbers.

  Even at midday it was half-full. Most of the patrons were clustered around the bar, laconically swapping jokes and sea stories. The dark rum – which everyone already seemed to be drinking – looked good. We ordered two coffees, which weren’t terrible.

  The periphery was mostly empty. It was easy to find a quiet corner.

  “So, the company …?” Frazer began. The formless stub of a question was already tilting forward, towards the cargo. That was understandable. Realizing that frontal engagement was futile, he had set out now upon a more patient and indirect route, although it was nowhere close to being indirect enough.

  I sipped at my coffee, waited.

  “Thing is,” he continued, in a slow, cautious drawl, “I’ve no idea what ‘QASM’ stands for, what it is, or what it does. It’s strangely difficult to find out. I’m assuming it’s a business, with customers, but if so, it’s not exactly broadcasting the fact. Say I wanted to buy something from them …”

  “You don’t.”

  “On the web, the company says it’s selling ‘deep technology solutions’,” he persisted. “Okay, that sounds like a business – like marketing spin – but it isn’t really telling me anything at all.”

  “This is coming up now?” It wasn’t at all where I wanted our conversation to be. I’d somehow imagined he would know that.

  “First chance I’ve had to raise the question.”

  “In person?”

  “It’s not exactly email material.”

  I let that pass. The communication channel wasn’t going to matter a damn to this stuff. There was what could be said, and what couldn’t. A meatspace encounter made no difference to any of it.

  “Let’s take a step back.” Regression wasn’t really the direction to be followed, because progression wasn’t an option on this map. We weren’t going anywhere with this. Rather, it seemed necessary to move the conversation sideways, into a more realistic context. “What I do for Qasm – what they pay me for – has a lot to do with not asking questions. It’s a professional ethos. Or exactly the opposite, whichever you prefer. They contract me to make problems disappear. So you can see how this mission slots into that, I’m sure. Crucially, doing nothing – ever – that could contribute to their information risks is where it begins.”

  “You’d rather not know?” he summarized, at an angle. He seemed genuinely curious, rather than judgmental.

  “It’s my job not to know.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “It’s what I do.”

  “So interrogating you further would be completely pointless?”

  “That is the only point.”

  “Yeah, I’m beginning to get it.” He even smiled, but only a little, and only for an instant. “They’re putting you on the boat to keep me in the dark.”

  �
��You know, that’s probably true – but they’d never tell me, and I’d never ask.”

  He shrugged, not quite amused, but not conspicuously annoyed by my flippancy, either. I had no idea how much money he was going to make for the next three weeks of work, but it had to be abnormal. He was being paid for acceptance, in the absence of understanding. We all were.

  §06 — The cargo had been pre-installed within a technologically-sophisticated closed unit, whose design had followed a smooth, asymptotic curve to the edge of the absolute. It was like the Pythoness herself, but to a higher power. Upon arrival at the destination – as confirmed by the inbuilt satellite navigation system – my responsibility was to enter the activation code and initiate the release sequence. Three weeks on a boat, for nine key-strokes. After a ninety-second delay, the thing we were transporting would then be dropped into the earth’s deepest submarine abyss. Execution of this simple task would be the culmination of the mission, completely exhausting whatever meaning it might have. In any case, by the end, we’d probably still have learnt next to nothing about it.

  The cargo disposal unit occupied a compartment, situated below deck, and accessed from the main cabin, that doubled-up as a compact storage bay and workshop, encroached upon by the fuel tanks and engine cowlings. The entire crew could fit inside, but it was a crush. There was no way more than two people would have been able to do anything productive there at a time.

  The unit was located on the port side of the compartment, balanced by two of the three fuel tanks. Its containment sheath was a seamless polycarbon shell, perfectly rigid, yet peculiarly neutral in tactile quality. It had no color at all. The matt black substance was so unreflective it appeared almost as a hole in space. The sensible absence tempted me to touch it again, and it still felt like a hardened – vaguely repulsive – void. Nobody else wanted to make any kind of contact with it whatsoever. We stood, crammed together, in silence for a moment, as if absorbing its imperceptible, tense hush. It wasn’t quite coffin-shaped, but to an over-active imagination it might have suggested the casket for an alien child.