[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 28

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That’s the worst. When you reference something funny, but the other person hasn’t seen it, so you’re left hanging. “It would look something like what you saw during the ceremony!” she blurted out, suddenly excited to have thought of a basis for comparison. “That’s about the closest you can come. I wish I could offer you more. It’s not even your sensory organs that are the problem, but limitations inherent in the brain you’re processing that input with.”

I scowled at the implication that I was some kind of simpleton. Then again, I do often forget to take all my clothes off before getting into the shower, and I keep ordering crabjuice just because the bottle looks cool and I don’t remember that I hate the smell until I open it.

Yet for some reason, the three or so pounds of gelatinous grey slop in my skull is considered the greatest marvel of the natural world by every neurologist ever to live. Well, not my brain specifically. I don’t want mine to be the brain they determine that by. Human brains in general, though, fall short in some well documented areas that computers excel.

However it also far exceeds any computer ever built at other tasks. Pattern recognition, especially optical. Consciousness. Modeling reality. There is, as yet, no virtual reality device as convincing as a dream. Or one’s visualization of characters, settings and events expressed only as words on a page.

That leaves room for both, doesn’t it? A cybernetic future, platform agnostic. Biological components used wherever they perform better, and artificial components used wherever they don’t. There’s no one right answer to every question, after all. No catch-all, no silver bullet.

Nature does not deal in “better” or “worse”. Humans can remember what, seven digits? Reliably? For chimps, it’s something like twice that figure. Intelligence is multidimensional, isn’t it? There is no single best design for a brain, as there are unavoidable tradeoffs involved. I doubt if making the brains out of silicon will change that.

A place for everything, and everything in its place. A role for biology to play, and a role for technology. The key is putting it all together in a way which maximizes the unique advantages of the constituent parts.

How long did the raw power of nature go essentially wasted until intelligence evolved to give direction to that power? Are we not the part of nature which is capable of reflecting? Analyzing? Making decisions?

In that case, won’t there be a central role for evolved intelligence even in a future largely dominated by machines? Will it just be a new kind of raw power that we give direction to? If so, we’ll have to arrive at a new, more harmonious synthesis.

Biological life cannot currently survive in a purely technological ecosystem, and vice versa...but a cyborg, uniquely, can walk in both worlds. The path of compromise: Spiritual, physical and political. More easily said than done, I fear.

True symbiosis will require a permanent truce between the two paradigms, because both must last long enough if they are to one day converge. Even before then, it may turn out that only evolved intelligence is conscious in the way that we understand that word.

It’s certainly true that only evolved intelligence has such a deeply ingrained survival imperative. Perhaps just what is needed to motivate the slow, tedious and agonizingly difficult colonization of space. An AI indifferent to its own destruction couldn’t be expected to last for long under those conditions.

I should’ve guessed. Two billion years of evolution, of design by trial and error...the results of all that sunk time and energy is too valuable to toss out the window just because it’s possible to replicate most of it technologically now. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

I really used to think that way, though. So laser focused on finally making it to fullmetal, I never gave a moment’s thought to whether that was actually the all-important goal it seemed to be. I was under the same metal-worshiping, meat-disdaining spell that everybody else was. They still are, last I checked.

Somebody has to tell them. Somebody has to tell the world not to give up on biology! On softness, warmth and feeling. Am I alone in these thoughts? Surely somebody else knows about all this. It can’t be entirely up to me to get the word out, there’s no guarantee I’ll even survive this jungle long enough to be rescued.

I peppered Asherah with questions, hoping she would be more forthcoming with answers than she was during our playful duet earlier. She wasn’t. She just kept insisting that we’d already reached the limit of what humans need to know in order to play our role in the larger process.

It’s like when you’re a kid asking what a dirty word means, and your mother says she’ll tell you when you’re older. My stomach grumbled. When I checked my system clock I found I’d been laying here on the forest floor, talking to Asherah for nine hours. Well, not quite. We were singing for some of it.

Without a word, only a predictably warm smile, Asherah nourished me. A vine unfurled from the jungle canopy above, reaching within inches of my face. All along it sprouted colorful fruit that I recognized from the banquet back at the village.

I felt so comfortable. So innocent. What need did I or anybody have of instant noodles? Or frozen dumplings, or soylent for that matter? There already exist fruits, vegetables and grains. Nano-biotechnological self-assembling food. There is no more advanced form of nourishment, but paradoxically it was around before anything recognizably human walked the Earth.

Leave it to us, to turn down an apple for an artificially flavored, apple shaped candy. Or to snub our noses at orange juice in favor of orange soda, because it contains more sugar and is more brightly colored. All out of our tiresomely bottomless appetite for wild exaggerations on what nature has already perfected.

No other animal but a human would chop down a tree in order to fashion it into a shelter from sun and rain, when the tree already was an adequate shelter. A living shelter which self-repairs, and self-replicates without need of a construction crew.

Medicine grows out of the Earth as well, though not in the conveniently high concentrations we’re accustomed to buying over the counter. “You gave us everything we could possibly need” I whispered to the mesmerizing green face above me. “But it wasn’t good enough for us.”

She pouted. “That’s right! I mean have you ever tried coconut milk? I really knocked it out of the park with that one. But I digress. There was a time when you were content with what grew out of me. I gave freely of myself. I fed you. I sheltered you. I healed you. You’ve changed so much since then...”

I self consciously stroked the cold, hard plastic of my prosthetic arm...for some reason wishing to hide it right then. “You wanted more” she added. “Bigger, better, faster. I couldn’t keep up! Evolution only moves so quickly! Look at all the problems you made for yourself, too. How many of you sleep in the streets? How many die of exposure to wind and rain because you’ve banished trees from your living spaces, or do not permit their correct use?”

If only it were that simple. I didn’t fancy explaining the complexities of homelessness as a social issue though. She’s as ill equipped to understand such problems as I am to perceive monoteverial space.

“You chop down trees to make homes, then you don’t even let anybody live in them. Don’t lie to me, I’ve seen it. Row upon row of empty, decaying dwellings. I won’t guess at the meaning of it. I don’t care to know. It’s self-evidently perverse.

Have I not already given you enough? Is that it? You don’t even ask anymore, or give thanks. You just take whatever you please! Then you have the nerve to whine when I become exhausted, and cannot provide as much as I used to. None of you need to be told the common sense truth that your machines must be taken care of if you expect them to take care of you. Why, then, don’t you realize that the same is true of nature?”

I inquired what she plans to do about it, given how strongly she feels. “You’ve seen it already, back in the village. I haven’t spent all this time in exile just twiddling my thumbs, you know. Houses which grow from the ground! Tools, clothing, fruits and vegetables which can assume any flavor or texture.

It’s a true alternative to the metal world. A branching path down which you might still go, if you shudder at the coldness and rigidity of metal. Those among you who would return to my care, who would honor me as their ancestors once did may partake of these new blessings. It’s my finest work in a billion years, if I might toot my own horn.”

I wasn’t about to tell her not to. Rather, if I could deliver seeds for every type of plant I saw in the village to the developed world, it would herald the dawn of a new age. An age of gentleness, harmony and compromise.

Listen to me. I knew this would happen. Hippie dippie shit like this is why I always avoided psychedelics in college. Maybe I’ve lost my mind? Maybe that’s all any of this was about. That’s how it happens, isn’t it? Some prophet emerges from the woods, comes back from the desert, or down from a mountain after talking to a hallucination of a burning bush. Or a bunch of trees, or visions resulting from a heat stroke.

Still, does that discredit any of it? Maybe I’m not the first person to come into contact with emergent natural intelligences. These “small gods” of the ocean, mountains and forest. Themselves only constituent parts of something yet larger.

As I recall, many of the oldest and most universal of creation myths center around a masculine sky god impregnating a fertile Earth mother with the seed of life. Caves and the remains of temples, littered with clay phalluses and figurines of pregnant women with exaggerated proportions.

How did I miss it before? The obvious, in-your-face femininity of nature. Delicate little flowers peppered the meadow before me as I meandered through the trees, as though adorning her grassy green hair. Motherhood, and fertility more generally, must surely be the most natural and primal source of religious reverence there ever was.

The mushrooms, vines and other sources of psychedelic substances have existed since before anything recognizably human walked the Earth. It’s safe to say I’m not the first to have such an experience, by a long shot.

Many of the geometric patterns and symbols I glimpsed in the darkness that night, I’ve also seen in the architecture of various ancient cultures. Mayans, Aztecs, Toltecs, Egyptians, Babylonians and so on. I felt as if I now had a good idea where their inspiration came from.

It made all the sense in the world that animism and fertility worship predate every other form of religion. They follow almost unavoidably from the altered states induced by certain naturally occurring substances.

Substances which inebriate, certainly. But which also accelerate pattern recognition. Perhaps the only area of cognition function they actually improve, in most other ways being profoundly debilitating. There’s no shortage of success stories in the tech world where important breakthroughs were arrived at by the use of LSD or some analogue

If there exists a pattern I’ve overlooked, some relationship between bits of information in my brain that I didn’t realize are related, there exists no better way to identify it. Could that be what’s happened to me?

Have I glimpsed a fundamental pattern to the universe? A fractal structure of awareness, wherein groups of organisms able to communicate form emergent gestalt superorganisms that the constituent individuals cannot directly perceive?

Ones which then comprise yet-larger organisms and so on, well beyond the scale we’re able to observe and model? Just as our cells, even were they intelligent, would not be privy to our thoughts? Nor would they even be aware that we exist, except as their habitat.

The alternative is that whatever those villagers put in the tea hasn’t worn off yet. That the apparent grand pattern of reality is a false positive. What is the human brain, but a pattern recognition engine? The preponderance of conspiracy theories, the Man in the Moon, L.Ron Hubbard’s face appearing on toast and so on are testament to our ability to perceive patterns where none exist.

Asherah interrupted my rumination, asking what I was so preoccupied with. I saw no reason to sugar coat it. “Wondering if you’re real, or if I’m still tripping balls. If so, that was some powerful shit they gave me. I mean, it’s day three and you’re still here. Talk about leaving no ball untripped.”

She smirked. “What have you been filling your belly with, then?” She extended another vine with the savory red fruit dangling from it. “Did you imagine these as well?” I had no answer for her which I found satisfactory. So far all of it appeared seamless. There’s been no indication which elements of my experience have been real, and which were hallucinatory.

Perhaps I would never receive those answers. I’ve heard urban legends about acid trips that never end. I’ve also heard that’s impossible, and that the claim residual amounts of LSD can accumulate in the spine, released in small amounts for decades, is medically unfounded.

I don’t know what to believe anymore. But I also can’t remember why it’s important to know that. Philosophical navel gazing isn’t going to help me find Dad. I’ll never even find my way out of these woods if I can’t stop getting lost up my own ass.

I winced, noticing for the first time that my leg’s resumed swelling. I could’ve sworn I treated that, but I can no more trust my memories at this point than my immediate experience of reality. I knelt to examine it, as well as gingerly prod it with my finger as if that would help in any way.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 29!}