Reach for Infinity

‘THE ENTIRE IMMENSE SUPERSTRUCTURE’: AN INSTALLATION



Ken Macleod


1. Daylight Passes


VERRALL, YOU’LL RECALL, spent only six months in Antarctica, and shortly after his return had to be talked down from the canopy of Harrods, where he seemed on the point of committing seppuku with what turned out to be a laser pointer. At the hearing he claimed to have been making an artistic statement. He opted for psychiatric treatment rather than face charges.

I visited him at the clinic, a sprawling conference-centre-style low-build on a 300-acre expanse of lawns, copses and lakes outside a small town in Bedfordshire. We walked along a gravel path, slowly – three of his toes, frostbitten after an ill-considered escapade on the Brunt Ice Shelf, were still regenerating. A minder hovered discreetly, at head level and a few paces to the side, its rotors now and then disturbing the tops of the taller plants in the beds along the path.

Verrall was silent for a while, his fists jammed in the pockets of the unfastened white towelling-robe he wore over jeans and T-shirt. From a distance he might have looked more like a clinician or technician than a patient. His beard pressed to his collar-bone, his shoulders almost touching the angles of his jaw, one foot dragging… perhaps these would have been clues to his real status.

“‘Jesus lived as a human socialist,’” he announced. You could hear the quotes, the portent in his voice.

“What?”

“Last night I dreamed I read that on the front cover of a celebrity gossip magazine.” He laughed. “In the midst of all the usual stuff about who’s getting married, who’s been seen out with whom, who’s split up, what diet she’s on, et cetera.”

“What was the evidence?”

“I never read that kind of magazine in reality, let alone in dreams.”

“Have you been thinking a lot about Jesus?”

Verrall shook his head. “Not since his death.”

“Ah.”

Suddenly he grabbed my arm – the minder lurched towards him – and pointed upward, about a quarter of the way up the sky.

“Look!”

A light moved in the blue, arcing slowly, to vanish behind a cloud.

“The Shenzhou Hotel,” Verrall said.

I could see that. “Yes? So?”

“I don’t have my contacts,” he said. He jerked his head back, indicating the clinic. “They take them out, you know. So I’m memorising everything. Orbit times, timetables, tide tables, phases of the Moon, faces of the famous, locations of police stations, railway stations, space stations – there goes another! The Putilov Engine Works.”

It was, of course, nothing of the kind.

“Virgin Honeymoons,” I said.

“Uh-huh. Just testing.” He gave me a look like a nudge. “At Halley we could only see the circumpolar ones. And of these, only one or two are visible in daylight. In the Antarctic night… well yeah, it’s quite something. To see an orbital hotel climbing out of the aurora…” He closed his eyes and shook his head, remembering. “You know, it was then, in the long night, that I realised. We all believed the cliché about Antarctica being the front line of the Cold Revolution. Hah!” His pointing finger tracked another daylight pass. “The real front line is up there. LEO and geostationary, the Moon, the Earth-grazer robot mines, the foothold on Mars, the stations farther out… that’s where the battle for the future is being fought. But it was the daylight passes in my last month that got to me.”


I’d heard this sort of thing before, and I’d heard enough. Verrall was not insane, his odd maunderings about Jesus notwithstanding – these I put down to an attempt to convince me, or the clinic via the minder, otherwise. Or, quite possibly, another exercise in performance art.

“That reminds me,” I said, by way of changing the subject. “Do you wish to continue your residency?”

“I’m not in Antarctica anymore.” It was like he was pointing something out.

“No,” I said, patiently. “But the Survey gave you a grant for a year. While we expected you to stay down there for the whole twelve months, it isn’t actually specified in your contract. All we need is evidence that you’re engaged in producing some work inspired by your stay.”

“Well, you have that already,” he said.

“We have?”

“The Knightsbridge incident.”

I had to laugh.

“If you can justify it artistically to the committee, well...”

We continued our stroll and chat, amicably and circuitously, all the way back to the clinic’s front door. I shook hands, said goodbye, and watched as he shuffled inside through the glass doors. He didn’t look back. A passing waiter had an extra espresso on its tray. I let the drink cool as I sauntered down the drive to the road. As I waited to be picked up I sipped the coffee and thought over what I should report, then crushed the empty cup and chucked it in a bin that trundled past at that moment. After a minute a car pulled in and drew to a halt. The window sank into the door.

“Cambridge?” the driver asked.

“Perfect,” I said.

She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Hop in.”

On the way home I filed my assessment of Verrall’s mental state, and recommended that he be kept under observation.


2. Observation


VERRALL WANDERED PAST Reception and into the clinic’s small shop, where he bought a paper (A5, lined, spiral bound) notebook and a black gel pen. He stuffed these into the pocket of his towelling robe, and walked along two long corridors to his room. The door opened to his palm. The room was basic hotel: bed, table, chair, kettle, wardrobe, en-suite. The window gave a view across the car park and the estate to the nearby fields and woods, straddled by the local modules of the WikiThing.

Verrall boiled the kettle and made herbal tea-bag tea. He sat down at the desk and looked at the room’s two cameras one by one. He shifted the chair around and placed the notebook on his crooked knee and the pen on the table. He picked up the pen and began to write, sipping the tea occasionally. What he wrote was not in the cameras’ field of view.

After nineteen minutes he turned to a fresh page and stood up in front of the window. There he began to sketch the visible modules of the WikiThing, quickly and crudely, making no effort to get the angles of the tubes or the shading of the spheres right. The result looked like a child’s drawing of the pieces in a giant’s game of jacks, the modules carelessly connected like enchained molecules. The drawing was further marred by lines drawn in the wrong places and ignored or scribbled over.

He stared at the page, made a few more marks on it, with greater care and less skill, signed it, then tore out the sketch and the written pages and slid them into a hotel envelope, on which he scrawled a line. He looked directly at the camera.

“You wanted evidence of work,” he said.

He looked around the room, then took off his towelling robe and tossed it on the bed. He opened the wardrobe and put on a thick shirt and a padded jacket, and socks and boots. As he stood up in the boots he winced slightly, then adjusted the lacing of the boot on his damaged foot. He hauled a small rucksack out of the bottom of the wardrobe and stuffed the rest of his gear in it, and slipped the pen and notebook into an inside pocket of the jacket.

The door closed behind him.

A minute and a half later he appeared at the reception desk. “I’m checking out,” he said.

“Do you mean you are discharging yourself?” said the desk. “Yes,” said Verrall.

“Only non-interactive property can be returned to you,” said the desk.

“I’m aware of that, thanks.”

“You are not recommended to discharge yourself.”

“I know.”

“By discharging yourself,” said the desk, “you absolve the clinic of all responsibility.”

“Good,” said Verrall.

After some seconds a minder emerged from behind the reception area and laid a transparent ziplock bag on the desk. Verrall sorted a torch, pen, watch, laser pointer, Victorinox knife, and a wallet containing only paper currency into various pockets. He left two crumpled tissues and a half-finished tube of mint sweets in the bag.

“Please place discarded items in the recycling bin,” said the desk.

Verrall complied.

“You may return at any time,” said the desk.

“I don’t intend to.”

“We hope you had a pleasant and recuperative stay, and that you would recommend the clinic to others.”

“No doubt I will have occasion to,” said Verrall.

“Please sign here,” said the desk, lighting a patch.

Verrall scribbled on the patch, shouldered his pack, and walked out. A minder drifted after him.

His torn-out notebook pages arrived on my desk the following week, in a tattered envelope addressed to ‘That guy Wilson from the Antarctic Survey’, that had been to Cardiff (where I had an ex-girlfriend known to one of the clinic’s staff) and Bristol before arriving in Cambridge. There are times when I miss postal service.


3. The Wikipedia of Things


ORIGINATING IN A poorly documented, hastily conceived application of synthetic biology and genetic engineering to post-disaster emergency shelter and supply in the Flood World, seized on and mutated by criminal gangs and militias, replicating uncontrollably like some benign invasive weed, becoming a refuge for the displaced surplus population and marginal individuals everywhere, and finally reconfigured by biohackers inspired by the situationist architecture of Constant Nieuwenhuys’ projected ludic social space of New Babylon – a borderless, global and polymorphic artificial modular milieu intended as the site “of a ‘freedom’ that for us is not the choice between many alternatives but the optimum development of the creative faculties of every human being” – the Wikipedia of Things insinuates itself across and through all previously existing environments. In an era of universal surveillance where social control is directly experienced as a quasi-divine providential good fortune, a perpetual and relentless reinforcement of the double-edged conviction that one is lucky to be alive, and where all ideological contestation is instantly recuperable, the WikiThing’s sheer materiality constitutes a critique made unanswerable by its silence.


IT IS TIME to make the silent modules speak, and for the very ground to rise up.


4. Interim Appraisal


THERE WAS A lot more like that.

Mary Jones, the ex-colonel who then chaired the Arts and Public Engagement Committee of the British Antarctic Survey, read through the three pages of bad handwriting and studied for a few seconds the disgraceful draughtsmanship of the sketch.

She threw the notebook pages down on her desk.

“Bastard’s off his meds.”

“Off his meds, off piste, off the reservation, and off providence,” I said.

She looked startled. “Off providence?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Patients have to turn in their contacts when they’re admitted to the clinic. He self-discharged, so he didn’t get them back.”


She blinked rapidly. “Good Lord. How did he expect to survive?”

“He told me he was memorising timetables.”

“Timetables!”

“You know – for trains.”

“Trains.” She shook her head. “F*cking delusional.”

“And tide tables.”

“Whatever floats your boat, I guess.”

We laughed.

“But seriously,” I said. “I think that was just misdirection. He also claimed to be able to identify orbital structures from eye and memory, and immediately demonstrated that he didn’t. No, I think... well, that screed of his suggests he’s been intending to go into the WikiThing for some time. And like I said, I don’t think he’s insane in the least. He’s not exactly feigning insanity, either. As far as he’s concerned, he’s still engaged on the Antarctic art project.”

“How about as far as we’re concerned?”

I shrugged. “There’s not much we can do about it. Whenever he emerges from the WikiThing he’ll still be living off the grant.”

“How can he do that, without contacts?”

“He took it all out in cash. He has a wad of paper in his back pocket.”

Jones frowned. “Good luck with that. Do we have any idea where he is?”

“A minder followed him into the WikiThing, but it got eaten within seconds.”

“OK,” she said. She stood up and stepped over to the window, gazing out at the motorway and the fields, and pointed to the inevitable strand of WikiThing in the distance. “For all we know he could even be in there by now, just a couple of klicks away.” She sighed. “It’s frustrating.” Then she turned around sharply. “All right. Let’s take him at his word for the moment. He’s being irritating and irresponsible, but what do you expect? He’s an artist.”

“Yes,” I said, relieved.

“But,” she added, rapping the air with an outstretched forefinger, “that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. We don’t expect our artists to churn out rabid propaganda, but we do at least expect them to produce something visible and inspiring, however avant-garde it might be.”

Before she retired from the Army and took her post at the Survey, Jones had spent most of her twenty-year service career in the Semiotics Division, some of it on the front line. (The Coca-Cola Comet stunt, rumour has it, was her idea.)

“So this” – she picked up and dropped the pages Verrall had sent – “doesn’t meet the criteria. I want to see something more substantial, and before too long, at that.”

“I’m sure you will,” I said. “He’s a very serious artist, after all.”

“So you keep telling us,” she said.

The next communication from Verrall arrived three months later, correctly addressed – airmailed, quaintly enough, blue envelope and all, and postmarked Malabo, Isla de Bioko: the capital of Equatorial Guinea, on the island formerly known as Fernando Po.

The thirty sheets of thin paper inside were typed on both sides, single-spaced, using a mechanical typewriter. I pass over Verrall’s salutations and preliminary personal discourtesies and present an extract from and then summary of his narrative, with no claim as to its veracity, other than to suggest that it gives as good an explanation of subsequent events as we have yet seen.


5. Out of the Hands of Providence


MY LEFT FOOT hurt like f*ck [Verrall wrote] but I was damned if I was going to let it show. I strode across the car park and the putting green, ignoring shouts, through (and partly over) a hedge, and into the field. I could hear the buzz of the minder a steady two metres behind me, an unbelievably annoying sound and situation, like being tailgated by a bee. Ignoring it and not looking back, quailing inwardly, I approached the WikiThing. Soggy autumn grass squelched under my boots. The nearest sphere resting on the ground had an aperture about two metres wide, a metre off the ground. Light pulsed behind the shifting rainbow sheen, as if a soap-bubble were stretched across the entrance. I climbed in. As I passed through the elliptical portal the bubble burst – the spray stung my face and the backs of my hands for an instant – then, as a backward glance showed, the sheen re-formed behind me.

Inside, banally, the bottom of the sphere was filled with soil and covered with green grass, springy as well as spring-like. The rest of the sphere was transparent from the inside, though from the outside it had been merely translucent. The adjoining cylinder, likewise transparent, sloped gently upward. Just as I turned towards it, the bubble over the doorway popped again, and the minder came in. The bubble barely had time to reconstitute itself before something leapt from the grass and grappled with the minder in mid-air. The added weight brought the tiny machine to the ground in a screeching complaint of rotors. After a few moments of thrashing the new device, a sort of mechanical spider, was using four of its appendages to dismantle the minder and another four to scuttle away. It vanished into the grass – down a burrow, I guessed.

Not hanging around to investigate, I set off up the sloping cylinder. It was a good three metres in diameter, and floored with what felt like roughened plastic ridges underfoot. As I ascended I found the air becoming warm and its scent pleasant. The next sphere, well off the ground, was a kind of greenhouse, twined with creepers that seemed to sustain some hydroponic piping, from which sprouted small fruit-bearing plants, none of which were remotely familiar, in various stages of ripeness. I had no way of determining whether they were safe to eat, and I was not hungry enough to take the risk, so I hurried on.

Thereafter my progress became easier; the angular arrangement of the spheres and tubes near the clinic was replaced by a more tolerable approximation to the horizontal. Each sphere or spheroid, and some of the linking tubes, was the locale of an entirely different facility: some were greenhouses; some were rendered almost impassable with glutinous machinery from which random articles of use and ornament were exuded; others appeared to be galleries of visual art and sculpture in which I confess I lingered, though work of any discernible talent was rare. Occasionally I was faced by alternative exits from a given node; in these cases, I struck out on a generally southward course.

My wandering had taken me perhaps a dozen kilometres and three hours – the variable light, whether natural or artificial, made the passage of time difficult to ascertain, and I deliberately avoided looking at my watch – when I first heard voices ahead. The apprehension I had felt in my final steps before venturing into the WikiThing returned, redoubled. I had no idea who I might encounter. But, with a stern reminder to myself that this was a condition of the WikiThing, and that if I was not willing to face it I might as well give up my project then and there, I pressed on.

On the threshold, I paused. The space in front of me was about the size and shape of a Nissen hut, rounded at the ends. Two long tables occupied its length. About thirty people, all adults of various ages, sat around them, drinking and talking. Their clothing was eccentric or exigent. Fumes, fragrant and otherwise, drifted in visible clouds, to be whipped away by strong draughts into overhead orifices. Along the sides of the room were shelves on which cartons and cups lay, evidently the source of the drinks being consumed.

A ripple of face-turning raced down the room, and rebounded as a wave of indifference and a return to the ongoing conversations. I hesitated for a moment longer, facing as I did a crowd of people whose identity and background were not just hitherto unknown to me, but impossible for me to find at a glance. And I, no doubt, was as unknown and unknowable to them.


Nerving myself, I walked into the room to make the first truly chance encounter of my adult life.


6. A Traveller in Utopia


THE FOLLOWING ENTIRELY predictable events are then narrated in Verrall’s characteristically prolix style:

Finding among the denizens of the room an attractive woman a little younger than himself, and their conversation with each other and others present, in which Verrall expresses delight at the discovery of such interesting people and convivial company, in a milieu where the Cold Revolution no longer polarises every aspect of life, every waking thought, and contaminates our very dreams (attached sheets, 3-4)

An unnecessarily detailed and salacious account of subsequent sexual activity (sheets 5-8)

Verrall’s dismay at waking to discover that the woman has vanished like a mist in the morning, like wind on the sea, and that the adjacent venue of the evening’s conviviality has been transformed overnight into what appears to be a particularly strenuous gymnasium but is actually a control unit for an experimental protein folding laboratory (sheet 9)

Verrall’s growing understanding of the mechanisms of the WikiThing, including sewerage, life-support, child-rearing practices, gender relations, medical procedures, laser sintering devices, quasi-pheromonal communications networks, and automated internal and external defences (sheets 10-18) Verrall’s increasing frustration with the involution and selfabsorption he finds among WikiThing inhabitants in their lives of creative play (sheet 20).

His conception of an art project to subvert their complacency (sheets 20-21)

His proclamation of and concept design for New Babel, an uninhabited and uninhabitable modular tower to be built uninhabited and uninhabitable modular tower to be built 25).

The ‘pheromonal surge’ of confidence he feels that his project has propagated through the WikiThing and that thousands of eager volunteers are already making their way to Equatorial Guinea. (sheet 26)

His meticulous planning of a journey, and his departure from the WikiThing near the barely used East Coast Main Line (sheets 27-30).


I DROPPED TO the ground [Verrall’s account concludes] and walked along the railway track. Whenever a train was due, I took good care to be off the line before it came into sight. Sometimes I clambered on to a slow-moving goods train. By this and other means I reached Tilbury.

A container ship was about to leave port, headed for my destination. Timing my movements with great precision from the process chart I had memorised, I climbed up a stack of containers at the quayside, and stepped across to the adjacent stack on board just before the ship sailed.

The tide was in, as I had known it would be.


7. New Babel


EQUATORIAL GUINEA WAS, of course, one of the earliest sites of WikiThing deployment, initially in the form of humanitarian aid provided by the US Navy in the course of assistance to the democratic forces. The plains and rainforests of the offshore island on which the capital stands remain littered with WikiThing modules and shell fragments, as does the country’s mainland territory, and many ingenious local adaptations and variations of the WikiThing as well as of the expended ordnance have been, and are being, evolved.

The growth of a spindly spike of WikiThing, eventually reaching a height of one kilometre, atop the 3000-metre summit of the dormant volcano overlooking Malabo, attracted considerable media attention. Needless to say, the Arts and Public Engagement Committee of the British Antarctic Survey followed developments closely, and with more anxiety than our responses to journalists’ questions betrayed. We were able to assure inquirers that the project, though unauthorised by us, was not objected to by the Government of Equatorial Guinea, and that curiosity about it was bringing a much needed boost to tourist revenue. Some local denizens of the WikiThing – less isolated from their compatriots than are their equivalents elsewhere, and therefore in frequent if irregular communication and technically illicit trade – had been among the earliest to rally to the project. The structure itself was being self-generated from rainforest floor detritus, surplus natural gas siphoned from offshore oil wells, and volcanic debris. (I have to admit that the significance of a tall modular structure with a tough outer skin and an interior consisting largely of silicated cellulose escaped me entirely.) No damage to the environment or biodiversity of the island was being reported. We were happy to take some credit, albeit discreetly, for Verrall’s project, though my increasingly urgent replies to his letter went unanswered.

It was therefore with as much disappointment as surprise that we watched the events of this February unfold. Many thousands of camera drones, aimed by reporters, tourists, agents of Western governments and Asian multiplanetary corporations, and local Equatoguinean citizens who had been alerted by street-market rumour, were on the spot (mostly at a safe distance) to record and transmit the spectacle.

It seemed at first that the dormant volcano had begun to erupt. A roar of sound rolled down the sides of the mountain. Smoke and flames boiled from the summit, around the base of New Babel. Then, more or less rapidly, the entire immense superstructure began to rise into the sky. One by one, five successive stages fell away, to combust entirely and drift down as (mostly) harmless ash.

The modules at the very tip of the spire, as is now confirmed, reached low Earth orbit, where they remain. Whether their avoidance of collision with any other structure in what is an admittedly crowded region of near-Earth space vindicates Verrall’s boast that he had memorised satellite times and orbits, I can only speculate. No communication from the new satellite has been received, other than a persistent and discordant bleep that is – no doubt intentionally – reminiscent of the first Sputnik.

In the months since then, nothing further has been heard from Verrall. Claims have been made that he, with or without some confederates, actually ascended to orbit, where he or they managed to survive for some time and possibly to this day. The theoretical possibility of a closed-loop solar-powered ecology within a WikiThing module, even one of that size, does exist.

Personally, I think it far more likely that what we witnessed was an uncrewed launch, and that Verrall has once more disappeared into the WikiThing, where he may even now be hatching yet more audacious plans or (knowing him as I do) have lost interest in the project and moved on to something else entirely. But sometimes, when the remaining component of New Babel makes a visible pass above the British Isles after sunset, I look up and wonder.

Nevertheless, in conclusion: the incident passed off without endangering surface or space shipping and without incurring additional expense to the Survey. I therefore respectfully suggest that we consider the matter closed.