Were some of you there when the four-children began to be born in 2100? Do you know what I mean? Those four-of-a-kind babes, born simultaneously from the same mother, fused together in body, and inseparable even in mind? Do you remember their post-natal wails as they tried to adjust to their personal society? Oh my God! Do you remember? Does any among you remember? Because no one else seems to remember and I don't know why - it's like the twelve-hour dreams of endless sterile beaches that appear to me, those days when the water can only ebb from me. Oh well, I'll try to tell you if only for my sake.
You know, we didn't really have the words to describe their physiology then and I don't think we do today. Where to start: Neither technically human nor a collective of humans? Both and neither? Either and or? E tetribus unum? E uno tetres? Anyway, whatever you thought of them, those children definitely had four emergent, interdependent minds and never quite spoke in a single voice. The two brain "hemispheres" of the four-children would beat to four different drums, so to speak, and four distinct sections could be isolated as containing one of them. The sections could be separated without *any* physical harm to any of the four sides - though of course something was lost with the disconnection, as it always is, and it turns out that any such separation (unlike with your standard human) utterly and permanently destroys the psychologies of all four identities. Those were sick experiments, but we just had to know what was going on, and that gave us a little better picture.
It wasn't so bad at first. The first batches were innocuous enough - they were two-children. No one knew how the two-children had gotten there, but at that time we relished sincerely in their birth. The revelation was immense and beautiful to our recovering society. This was, God...2040 or something. Was it two children to one mind or one child to two minds? - the psychologists never really found a consensus there. Siamese minds we called them and I liked that term. One brain hemisphere each, simple as anything. I was working as a nurse in an adjacent province when they called me for a consultation to a maternity ward - to see one of the first two-children ever born. (I don't know if it had four eyes - you'd think a thing like that would be definite, the way you understand things, but then one of them is born with forms unto itself and you're not quite sure how many eyes it particularly has.) Heh, but really, they wanted me for my actuarial degree rather than my love of the fantastic. This miracle or this abomination that plants its legs on our shores like a cross and first thing we do is to see how much is fair value for comprehensive health insurance - what is a price that will benefit both parties consistently? Four hundred a month with a fifty dollar deductible, I think we decided, with a small caveat: The deductible doubles if we discover evidence of competing or independent thoughts between the hemispheres, I believe was the arrangement. I really think a virgin birth has nothing on my visit that day. Someone made the couplet "A two-child hath arisen here/Oh Joyous endless moments!" during a flourish in a column for the paper and we repeated it and each time we drank of the couplet it tasted a little different but always nourished our understanding of the situation. Funny how it falls so flat to us today. Those times were really fantastic.
Fantastic and morally challenging, to be sure. But I don't want you thinking these Siamese minds were horrifying at all. They were new, and surprising, and *different*, but novelty is simply not horror, and in fact anyway the chief object of our culture is miracle insurance - a vehicle of state and motion for processing novelty and horror. To this end some of the first two-children struck poets and new lovers with particular fire and poignancy, and helped to us ease along the weirdness and process what was going on with a familiar frame of reference. We had bold theories that we spoke of in private: as they matured the two-children would develop interdependently, and sometimes this interdependence would wither or flourish especially, just like a relationship, and perhaps (we thought) the two-children could die of the withering of the interdependence.
Papers in those days devoted a column to a sample of 25 of the first two-children. After the war infant mortality was especially bad, and just like the rest of the population born that year, about 7 or 8 of that sample died in the first 5 years. "Died of a Broken Heart," the columns, the sickening columns, would tell us. No doubt. Not from the womb-radiation that probably produced them, not from the poverty of the age that produced such stupid diversions as the very column itself: no: For we think, as newspaper columnists in our otherwise scientific age, that the cause of death was a broken heart. As if newspaper columnists, the most banal poets in all of art, could even have understood how the two-children truly experienced things, beyond their cynical and nebulous approximations. Actually it's kind of amusing, now that I think about it. They were just taking a ridiculous metaphor to a perfectly logical conclusion. We'd eventually get some first-hand experience with the two-children, but you know that before that it was really anyone's guess in those days and the columnists didn't guess so badly, in light of that. And yes, it was a little folksy, and sometimes a little vulgar. But you know they weren't all that far off. In the two-children was a completely different intelligence that developed with an incredible degree of interdependence - an eternal conversation, a duet of improvising instrumentalists.
But anyway, the two-children could already barely communicate with us, and therefore it raised some moral astonishment to discover that a few cases of cross-breeding had occurred almost immediately after they reached the age of fertility. This cross-breeding was a sticky moral question, of course, but it soon became a practical concern when the three-children started to arrive. 2065 or so it must have been, because I know the radiation was again a concern. "Our little democracies" the papers now called the three-children. Was that satirical? No, it was just the optimistic backwash from the blood-sip of that still-unfathomable war. China was not "the next superpower", for that distinction again belonged to God and winter and bread. Yes the old superpowers once more reigned across the Earth. "Our little democracies?" No, and as some of the two-children developed enough composure and communication to start writing in adulthood, we became aware of some rather vicious realities of the two-children. Psychologists knew they had essentially been socialized with themselves, and themselves alone, for the most part, and so very visceral personality traits had developed between the personalities of the two-children. If there was love, as the poets hoped, it was the love of raw and smashed-together familiarity: the ever-hardening malleability of the infant's psychological puzzle of roles where just about anyone can fit anywhere, for we are built to be born into any society. I wonder if they had been instead born into a peaceful society if their relations would not have been built on domination and hate, though, for that is the image they received from their bizarre vantage point.
Knowing this, it became obvious to the educated that the first three-children were not going to be living out an Amish or a Buddhist or a Christian fantasy in their heads but were instead living out the astonishing and baroque decadence and torture of new forms of power and oppression. Every year more multi-children were born and every generation the number of children represented increased. They formed their own little societies based not on number but on the power structure among the hemispheres; a four-child with three of them in one hemisphere and one in the other has more in common with a three-child with two in one hemisphere and one in the other than a four-child with two in both. They could cohabit with the first, but never with the second. Bashing their nebulous heads against one another, the oligarchs and egalitarians could not abide the other.
Less than two centuries after the birth of the automobile the race of man was finally in real danger to the odious four-children, who were born with frightening frequency in the last decade of the 21st century and built their own cities with inconceivable orders - a wooden mound of termites stood stark in Antarctica against the anthills of human civilization. The egalitarian permutation was a recessive gene and died out within a generation. All of them had 3 people in one hemisphere and 1 in the other, a dictator of sorts. They had mastered machines that thought like they did. They (and some of the lesser-numbered children) in concert provided the final push towards a genuine artificial intelligence.
And none of you remember them? God our schools must be so bad in this immortal era of hemispherectomies and total spatial isolation. The artificial intelligence is thinking so quickly in the second hemispheres of all of us even those of us born so far ago as to have witnessed all of this so long ago.
You know, we didn't really have the words to describe their physiology then and I don't think we do today. Where to start: Neither technically human nor a collective of humans? Both and neither? Either and or? E tetribus unum? E uno tetres? Anyway, whatever you thought of them, those children definitely had four emergent, interdependent minds and never quite spoke in a single voice. The two brain "hemispheres" of the four-children would beat to four different drums, so to speak, and four distinct sections could be isolated as containing one of them. The sections could be separated without *any* physical harm to any of the four sides - though of course something was lost with the disconnection, as it always is, and it turns out that any such separation (unlike with your standard human) utterly and permanently destroys the psychologies of all four identities. Those were sick experiments, but we just had to know what was going on, and that gave us a little better picture.
It wasn't so bad at first. The first batches were innocuous enough - they were two-children. No one knew how the two-children had gotten there, but at that time we relished sincerely in their birth. The revelation was immense and beautiful to our recovering society. This was, God...2040 or something. Was it two children to one mind or one child to two minds? - the psychologists never really found a consensus there. Siamese minds we called them and I liked that term. One brain hemisphere each, simple as anything. I was working as a nurse in an adjacent province when they called me for a consultation to a maternity ward - to see one of the first two-children ever born. (I don't know if it had four eyes - you'd think a thing like that would be definite, the way you understand things, but then one of them is born with forms unto itself and you're not quite sure how many eyes it particularly has.) Heh, but really, they wanted me for my actuarial degree rather than my love of the fantastic. This miracle or this abomination that plants its legs on our shores like a cross and first thing we do is to see how much is fair value for comprehensive health insurance - what is a price that will benefit both parties consistently? Four hundred a month with a fifty dollar deductible, I think we decided, with a small caveat: The deductible doubles if we discover evidence of competing or independent thoughts between the hemispheres, I believe was the arrangement. I really think a virgin birth has nothing on my visit that day. Someone made the couplet "A two-child hath arisen here/Oh Joyous endless moments!" during a flourish in a column for the paper and we repeated it and each time we drank of the couplet it tasted a little different but always nourished our understanding of the situation. Funny how it falls so flat to us today. Those times were really fantastic.
Fantastic and morally challenging, to be sure. But I don't want you thinking these Siamese minds were horrifying at all. They were new, and surprising, and *different*, but novelty is simply not horror, and in fact anyway the chief object of our culture is miracle insurance - a vehicle of state and motion for processing novelty and horror. To this end some of the first two-children struck poets and new lovers with particular fire and poignancy, and helped to us ease along the weirdness and process what was going on with a familiar frame of reference. We had bold theories that we spoke of in private: as they matured the two-children would develop interdependently, and sometimes this interdependence would wither or flourish especially, just like a relationship, and perhaps (we thought) the two-children could die of the withering of the interdependence.
Papers in those days devoted a column to a sample of 25 of the first two-children. After the war infant mortality was especially bad, and just like the rest of the population born that year, about 7 or 8 of that sample died in the first 5 years. "Died of a Broken Heart," the columns, the sickening columns, would tell us. No doubt. Not from the womb-radiation that probably produced them, not from the poverty of the age that produced such stupid diversions as the very column itself: no: For we think, as newspaper columnists in our otherwise scientific age, that the cause of death was a broken heart. As if newspaper columnists, the most banal poets in all of art, could even have understood how the two-children truly experienced things, beyond their cynical and nebulous approximations. Actually it's kind of amusing, now that I think about it. They were just taking a ridiculous metaphor to a perfectly logical conclusion. We'd eventually get some first-hand experience with the two-children, but you know that before that it was really anyone's guess in those days and the columnists didn't guess so badly, in light of that. And yes, it was a little folksy, and sometimes a little vulgar. But you know they weren't all that far off. In the two-children was a completely different intelligence that developed with an incredible degree of interdependence - an eternal conversation, a duet of improvising instrumentalists.
But anyway, the two-children could already barely communicate with us, and therefore it raised some moral astonishment to discover that a few cases of cross-breeding had occurred almost immediately after they reached the age of fertility. This cross-breeding was a sticky moral question, of course, but it soon became a practical concern when the three-children started to arrive. 2065 or so it must have been, because I know the radiation was again a concern. "Our little democracies" the papers now called the three-children. Was that satirical? No, it was just the optimistic backwash from the blood-sip of that still-unfathomable war. China was not "the next superpower", for that distinction again belonged to God and winter and bread. Yes the old superpowers once more reigned across the Earth. "Our little democracies?" No, and as some of the two-children developed enough composure and communication to start writing in adulthood, we became aware of some rather vicious realities of the two-children. Psychologists knew they had essentially been socialized with themselves, and themselves alone, for the most part, and so very visceral personality traits had developed between the personalities of the two-children. If there was love, as the poets hoped, it was the love of raw and smashed-together familiarity: the ever-hardening malleability of the infant's psychological puzzle of roles where just about anyone can fit anywhere, for we are built to be born into any society. I wonder if they had been instead born into a peaceful society if their relations would not have been built on domination and hate, though, for that is the image they received from their bizarre vantage point.
Knowing this, it became obvious to the educated that the first three-children were not going to be living out an Amish or a Buddhist or a Christian fantasy in their heads but were instead living out the astonishing and baroque decadence and torture of new forms of power and oppression. Every year more multi-children were born and every generation the number of children represented increased. They formed their own little societies based not on number but on the power structure among the hemispheres; a four-child with three of them in one hemisphere and one in the other has more in common with a three-child with two in one hemisphere and one in the other than a four-child with two in both. They could cohabit with the first, but never with the second. Bashing their nebulous heads against one another, the oligarchs and egalitarians could not abide the other.
Less than two centuries after the birth of the automobile the race of man was finally in real danger to the odious four-children, who were born with frightening frequency in the last decade of the 21st century and built their own cities with inconceivable orders - a wooden mound of termites stood stark in Antarctica against the anthills of human civilization. The egalitarian permutation was a recessive gene and died out within a generation. All of them had 3 people in one hemisphere and 1 in the other, a dictator of sorts. They had mastered machines that thought like they did. They (and some of the lesser-numbered children) in concert provided the final push towards a genuine artificial intelligence.
And none of you remember them? God our schools must be so bad in this immortal era of hemispherectomies and total spatial isolation. The artificial intelligence is thinking so quickly in the second hemispheres of all of us even those of us born so far ago as to have witnessed all of this so long ago.
Still playing with the "terrifying, Lovecraftian narrator" idea. But I really didn't think the sci-fi/fantasy through enough. One of the reasons it works for Phillip K. Dick is that he was a legitimately schizophrenic human being that had distilled the most terrifying concepts and aspects in his mind before writing a word of a story.
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