Tom falls into the choking dark, and beyond it. He writhes his mind and being down into the channels of his body. He tracks himself, sees himself physical, binds the fire of him down into the pulse of blood, and the twisting of muscles, and the little trackable sparks of lightning in the brain.<\/p>\n
He surges against that wall between life and death that lives in the body.<\/p>\n
He pushes against the edge of consciousness, strains it, writes out the equations of his thinking, his being, his living<\/i>, in raw physical terms that his body can understand.<\/p>\n
He holds himself up before the lens of him and he makes himself into galvanic movements.<\/p>\n
He scores them like a composition.<\/p>\n
He orchestrates them with a charge of lightning, pours them down into a dead koala\u2019s skin.<\/p>\n
The atoms of it read out his music. Its muscles twitch and its heart begins to beat. A little black hat coalesces from the lightning \u2014 at first from the shadows between the sparks of it, at first from the remaining darkness when the light of momentary arcs and sparkles fades away, but then it acquires its own autonomous existence. It plays out the image of Tom\u2019s hat above the koala even as the koala itself takes on a replica of his life. It forms itself, that apparent hat; it forges itself; it refines itself into a hat of black lightning, a lightless sparkling, a black and thrumming fire of the vacuum energy of space.<\/p>\n
The koala looks up at him grotesquely.<\/p>\n
It tilts its head.<\/p>\n
A dream flits from Tom\u2019s eyes to the koala. It catches and flickers within the eyes of the koala in their turn. It is life<\/i>, Tom thinks, perhaps, life<\/i>; the koala looks back to him and almost, almost, almost he is not alone.<\/p>\n
The koala\u2019s little tiny fingers move, as if to pick up a pair of scissors that is not there and cut through the walls of its cage; or, possibly, through death.<\/p>\n
Then it goes still.<\/p>\n
Tom gives a great groan. Then he picks the koala up. He shakes it.<\/p>\n
\u201cStay with me,\u201d he says. \u201cStay with me. Do not go into the light.\u201d<\/p>\n
Koalas do not speak English.<\/p>\n
\u201cStay with me,\u201d he says. \u201cYou are a dead koala, an anonymous dead koala that nobody cares about but I, but I care, I do, I do, I am Tom Friedman, I am Thomas the First, I am head boy of the House of Dreams, and I have brought you back to life. Become a scientist, dead koala. Become a friend. Become alive<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n
The koala shakes all over. Its hat falls off. It dies.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday,\u201d Tom says. \u201cToday we have crossed a barrier that no thing crosses, you and I, we have broken the wall of death and life \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
He falls silent.<\/p>\n
He stares irritably at the koala.<\/p>\n
\u201cDamn it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
He puts the hat back on the koala. This has no effect.<\/p>\n
Tom leans back in his chair.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy do I even try to put cute little hats on dead animals?\u201d he asks himself. \u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n
He has no answer.<\/p>\n
There may not actually be an answer; other than, because he does.<\/p>\n
Cheryl comes in after a while. It’s a couple of hours later but Tom hasn\u2019t really moved. Neither has the koala, being dead.<\/p>\n
He looks at her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI awaken the hidden potential that is in things,\u201d he says. \u201cThat is the purpose of my hat. That is why I cannot predict what someone will become, save through observation and experiment: the potential is hidden. That is more generally the virtue of my science. But I am coming up against a key limitation of this approach.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe a paradigm shift?\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose are difficult to produce on demand,\u201d Tom sighs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could fold you a paradigm-shifting gun,\u201d she says. \u201cAlthough the recoil\u2019s a right bastard.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThanks,\u201d says Tom. His eyes twinkle. \u201cBut no.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFair enough,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
He fades back into melancholy. \u201cSometimes I worry that they are just dead. You know? That I can\u2019t do this because the whole afterlife concept is ridiculous. But then, what of Linus?\u201d<\/p>\n
Cheryl looks at him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d he asks, irritably.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere isn\u2019t an afterlife,\u201d she says. \u201cThere isn\u2019t even a life<\/i>. There\u2019s just the is.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, yes,\u201d he says, waving a hand vaguely. \u201cBut I mean, the potential has to be there before it can become a thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d she says. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLike,\u201d he says, \u201cwhen my hat refines somebody.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cListen,\u201d she says. \u201cThis is the hardest lesson. The paper doesn\u2019t contain the swan; the stone doesn\u2019t contain the statue; the world doesn\u2019t come down to us saying what may be invented and what may not.\u201d<\/p>\n
He is sputtering because she<\/i> is trying to teach him<\/i> \u2018the hardest lesson.\u2019 But younger or no, his junior or no, she\u2019s still Cheryl of the House of Dreams. Reluctantly, he rolls his eyes and lets her give the speech.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can do anything, Tom,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s what the House of Dreams is made of<\/i>. We don\u2019t take possibilities from a finite set of possibilities and then implement them. We fold the world into a mirror of ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut that\u2019s not what I want<\/i> to do,\u201d says Tom, who isn\u2019t satisfied with merely infinite possibilities. \u201cWhat I want<\/i> to do is take an existing koala-life or whatever that is floating around out there and bring it into fruition with my science.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t use science to make things have already existed or not,\u201d says Cheryl.<\/p>\n
Then she frowns.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell,\u201d she says, \u201cI mean, you probably shouldn\u2019t, anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n
He grasps at an argument. \u201cBut to refine a thing,\u201d he says, \u201ce.g., a sequence, you refine what is already there<\/i>, not what you put in it. That\u2019s \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
He falls silent.<\/p>\n
After a while, she says, \u201cIn the great mathematics of the world, there is no god that divides the transfigurations, clarifications, and refinements from the changes, or, for that matter, from the things. There is only: this is this, and that is that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s bloody depressing,\u201d says Tom.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo!\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s brilliant. It means that we can do anything we like.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cExcept make people better,\u201d Tom says. \u201cI mean, as their own people. I mean, without compromising whatever it is that they already are.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh,\u201d she says. \u201cWell, yeah.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOr, you know, connecting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cheryl suddenly blushes.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, Tom,\u201d she says, embarrassedly. \u201cI\u2019d forgotten. You don\u2019t have a gigantic paper snake.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are many things he could say to this, but he says none of them. He doesn\u2019t even think of more than half.<\/p>\n
She pats his arm, smiles sadly, and goes back to her origami.<\/p>\n
After a while he realizes that he\u2019s been staring at a dead koala for what must have been hours. His drink has gone cold. His hands and feet are numb. Cheryl has wandered away.<\/p>\n
He stares into the koala\u2019s empty eyes.<\/p>\n
There had been a living koala.<\/p>\n
Arguably.<\/p>\n
There is now none.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow does that even happen?\u201d Tom asks, in the direction of the corpse.<\/p>\n
Where does the koala-life go?<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tom falls into the choking dark, and beyond it. He writhes his mind and being down into the channels of his body. He tracks himself, sees himself physical, binds the fire of him down into the pulse of blood, and the twisting of muscles, and the little trackable sparks of lightning in the brain. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3399,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"series":[47],"class_list":["post-5283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-storm-that-saw-itself-chapter-4","series-the-storm-that-saw-itself"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/Hat_1_blankbg.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5283"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6141,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5283\/revisions\/6141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5283"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=5283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}