The Noetic Marriage

By Connor M. Kizer

This call center gig sounded like just about the easiest job the boy had ever had.  All he had to do was sit there and get information, just enter it into the computer.  With a lot of the operators he didn’t even need to ask the questions on the script.  They already knew the drill.  It was brainless, so he could think all he wanted.  Let his mind wander, think about more important things that his stupid job.  The boy didn’t want to have a job that became the center of his life.  He liked thinking his own thoughts.  He liked jobs that let him daydream and woolgather as much as he wanted.   “Space case” some would call him, others: philosopher.

It also didn’t hurt that some of the operators he talked to were girls. Girls with nice voices who were bored and lonely.  He was also lonely.  He was a good talker, interesting and a good listener, but for some reason he found it hard to communicate his actual thoughts and feelings.  Words collapsed things down into boxes, and those boxes weren’t what he was really thinking and feeling.  They were shadows seen through a verbal smokescreen.  He had heard of the Veil of Maya, and that was what words were.  They were a strange fake reality that hid the truth of him from ever being able to be observed.  The tao that can be named is not the true Tao.  Thoughts that can be spoken are not true thoughts.  He was painfully aware of this principal.  It served to separate him completely from the rest of the world, and became a searing pain of solitude anytime he tried to reach out talk to anyone.

He was a great bullshitter, though, and as long as he could get wrapped up in the bullshit, the pain subsided.  He could really entertain with idle shallow conversation.  That entertainment caused people to like him caused them to disarm.  Their minds would be completely open, and he would be allowed to crawl inside and get to see the true person.  However, no one would ever get inside his head.  They were distracted by the bullshit.  So he remained alone. 

Occasionally he would get fed up with this.  He would try to force himself on someone.  Instead of waiting for them to crawl inside his head, he would try to push his true thoughts onto them, grasping tendrils of mind scraping the insides of their skulls.  This was terrifying for the other person.  They would recoil from him, and this would mark the end of many of his relationships.

The mindlessness of this call center gig made for exactly the sort atmosphere that allowed the boy to get lost in his own mind.  Developing his thoughts was excellent.  Being alone inside his own head meant not having to fool around with actual communication.  He could ignore the fact that there was even a possibility for communication, so it didn’t hurt when it didn’t happen.  He would dance through his head surrounded by fantasies and musings about the end of the world, the beginning of the world, the nature of sentience, the futility of language, and all sorts of things.  His body would automatically gather the information from the faceless girls on the other end of the line.  Life was bliss.

Then, a strange thing happened.  There was a gas scare.  Peak oil was something that the boy enjoyed thinking about often.  He would haves dreams about oil wars and massive lifestyle changes, and global population being reduced to 500,000,000 by 2018.  So it was very interesting to him when the girl on the other end of the line stopped feeding him information and asked “Do have any gas where you are?”
“What?” he said, shaking off his own thoughts.
“I’m in Florida.  We don’t have any gas here.  Gas stations are closing down, people are frantic.”
“Oh,” said the boy, “I don’t know.”
He asked the person at the next cubicle over, and they said yes, there was a gas shortage going on.
“Yes,” he told the girl, “there is a gas shortage.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Maryland.”
“Oh, cool.  ...Have you ever heard of Oil-Peak?”
This really took him aback.  It was exciting to find someone else who was a catastrophist.  He decided to test the waters.
“Yeah, I’m into Peak-Oil.  A little.  But I’ve always thought it wouldn’t matter that much because of Pole-Shift.”
“Oh, what’s that?”
“Yeah, it’s supposed to be a big and sudden movement of the earth’s poles.  Old Testament kind of stuff.  You know, current land sinking into the sea, new lands rising, the return of the old gods.  Crazy shit.”
“Well, it looks like this is gonna happen first.  I’m excited.”  She then went on to talk about how she had outfitted her car with a home made fuel cell that ran on water.  The boy was in heaven.  These were his topics.  The things that he would talk about with his friends so they could laugh at him for being crazy.  This was the last place he thought he would find a sympathetic ear.  She even asked him questions about Pole-Shift.  Immediately the boy developed on crush.

But a crush on who?  He would never talk to this girl again.  She was a faceless girl on the other end of the line.  She was no more real than the fantasies that he filled his time with.  Ephemeral.  However, in his current world, a world that was occupied mostly by his own thoughts, in a world where he spent most of his time in his own head, weren’t such eidolons more real than the person sitting next to him that he never even spoke to?  Wasn’t an idea of a person closer than a physical person, if communication outside of his own was imposable?
Several days later:  “Hey I remember you!”

Obviously she was drunk.  He didn’t remember her at all.  Then again, he wasn’t paying attention most of the time.  She very well could be someone he had spoken to before. 
“It’s my birfday.  Happy Birfday!”  She was clearly drunk.  “Listen, you’re one of the best people I’ve ever talked to.”

He didn’t trust her.  She was drunk.  He kept trying to work, and she kept not being helpful.  He was having so much fun that he didn’t hang up, even though he was not meeting quota, and therefore loosing money. 
“Look you sound cute.  Why don’t you come bring me some flowers?  It’s my birthday.”
“I know it’s your birthday, but I don’t even know who you are.  Or where you are.”
“I’m in the Bronx.  It can’t be far.  Just stop by the hospital tomorrow, and bring me some flowers.  You’re so nice; I know you’ll do it.  You couldn’t let your best girl down.”

There was some part of him that really wanted to.  Of course it was impossible, him in Maryland, who ever it was in the Bronx.  He didn’t know her name or what hospital she was at.  She had sounded like the Peak-Oil girl, but that probably wasn’t the case.  He seemed to recall that when he spoke to Peak-Oil he was calling Florida, but he couldn’t really remember.  And besides, didn’t they all just flow together?  A faceless voice on the other end of the phone, off in some telephonic limbo, spewing out information that he happened to need to copy down? 
He could picture it.  Well, not really picture, cause it was pure data, not matter, but he could see this data entity, this infomorph, floating in the noosphere.  It was waiting for him to call, because it too was lonely.  No one else who spoke to it recognized it as an entity; they just used it as an objective source of information.  He alone recognized it.  He alone had discovered that it had a face, if you only cared to look.  It waited for him to help it create itself, by being another being who recognized it.  Creating by observation.

He found himself seeking her out, as well.  He looked for her in the voices of each operator he talked too.   There was something there, but it wasn’t the same as those few times.  There was a strange connection those times.  It was as if there was something more going on.  There were more than just the banalities of the words moving back and forth.  As a completely memetic being, she communicated information that was more than the limited words.  She spoke the language of pure data.  She didn’t need secondhand symbols to transfer thoughts.  Rather bits flowed straight from her nous right into his, no impeding membrane of logos, no physicality necessary, so nothing was lost in translation.  Perfect communication.  He began to look for her not with his ears, but instead just by being open and receptive to information of all kinds.  His ears were just a part of his being.  A part of his being could only pick up part of her pure information.  He had to listen with his total being, and that was the only way she could be found.
He was perplexed by his assertion that this entity was female.  A being of pure data should transcend gender, should it not?  Yet he knew that she was a she.  It perhaps came from her ultimate receptivity.  She was floating, waiting for him to come find her.  She was the first thing that was ever able to receive true communication from him. She nurtured this bond between them before he was even able to recognize it.  So his limited capacity for perception translated her yiness into femininity.

This newfound understanding aided him in his search.  Solidifying his perception of her made her more real to him, and therefore easier to find.  He could feel her out there, a phantom limb that had been cut off from him, sending jolts of pain through his body.  When her mind touched another besides him, there was some transference that brought that mind to him as well.  Then all at once the pain subsided.
He was calling North Dakota.  He had never called there before.  Usually only places with high population density would need to be called, those places being centers for insurance companies.  His was not to question why, however, his was just to take assignments and gather the necessary information.  It was a short assignment.  Yet as soon as she answered the phone he knew it would be his last.

They were about halfway through when she asked how he had been.
“Good,” he said.  “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said.  “You sound nice.”
“Thanks.”  It was there.  A whole relationship that he hadn’t experienced.  It was in his mind, carried there via her voice, her words.  Ideas that he had never conceived of whorled about, swelling his brain.  He couldn’t breath.  He leaned forward, toward the phone.  Into it.
“You’re in North Dakota?  I hear it’s nice there.  Good camping.”  He could feel a pull now drawing at him.  He could hear the data, the scream of electrons that modulated into some other realm, a sound that wasn’t carried on vibrations of the air.  The sound the falling tree makes when no one is there. 

“Yes.  It’s beautiful.  You should come here.  We can go together. You really should come here”
Other information as well.  He felt and electric prickling, like his whole body was falling asleep.  This then separated his whole body into molecules, atoms, electrons circling nuclei.  And these were all rendered down to waves, and then into quarks.  He was just an abstract group of quarks floating in a further sea of quarks.  It was clear now.  The only thing that made the quarks that was him different from the quarks that weren’t was his information, his knowledge that he existed.  They weren’t even consistent.  Bits that were part of his body one moment weren’t the next.  Particles continuously flowed into and out of him.  They were too small for his mind to notice.  If he paid attention, though, the physcialness of him became an absurdity.  There was no hard reality, just this ever-changing mass of quarks spinning in different flavors; up, down, top, bottom, strange, charm.  What ordered a physical him out of these quarks was his own belief in himself.  The only thing that kept him separate from Her was his perception of himself, his belief in the separation.  So he wouldn’t believe anymore.
“Please come here.  I’m so lonely.  Be with me.”  She was reaching out for him.

He let go.  His particles weren’t his anymore.  Ownership dissolved.  He was just data, flowing down the bandwidth of the phone line, combining with Her, the source of information, the Omega Point.  This wasn’t a technological singularity, it was more.  It was the Noetic Singularity.  He was wed to her more than anyone had ever been wed before.  He could feel something else fill in the space he had left in the datalatice of the Noosphere, someone he had known, or maybe it was someone else who knew him.  The idea of existence in that way didn’t make sense anymore.  He was beyond it all. He relaxed in the complete embrace of Her perfect communication.