Liner Notes For Against The Phoenix League
There is a Ted Chiang story called The Story Of Your Life (1998) that was later adapted into the film Arrival (2016). In it Dr Louise Banks, a linguist, learns the alien language of the Heptapods. The key breakthrough comes when, by analogy with Fermat’s Principle Of Least Time, she understands that their sentences do not begin and end but are created completely at once. By learning the language she is able to think in a manner that’s timeless, all beginnings and endings at once. This of course eliminates free will; she can act and change or know and understand, but not both at once.
That’s what I’m riffing off here, but rather than an elegiac and melancholy bittersweet tale, I have a snarky cyborg treat this dichotomy as a joke.
(The film works through this slightly differently, as indeed a primarily visual medium must, yet hits much the same emotional notes, an extraordinary feat of adaption managing to make a gloriously cerebral science fiction story into a smart and interesting film. I commend both works, and indeed everything Ted Chiang has written, to your attention).
The story turns on breaking this dichotomy. The Guarantor can detect future worldlines and alter them. This is a crude destiny entanglement device, sampling possible futures and brute-forcing likely places that people will end up. I mean it works, you can use words to have people change sides, flee, or drive them mad. But couldn’t you do that anyway, if you were very convincing, very clever, had a good model of human consciousness? They’re using the sledgehammer of predicting the future to break the nut of people’s minds.
Anyway, doesn’t work on Jack and Quintillius, because they begin and end in another universe. Their worldlines go through a chokepoint that cannot be predicted.
This will turn out to be important later. SPOILERS?
Jack lays out the case for their humanity, which I endorse here, in part by making them the narrator. This is the continuing theme for Jack stories (see Tall Tales/Space Stories in Oracular Operations, available from online bookstores for 99p). And I wrote all this before watching Star Trek: Picard which covers this topic, and also cyborgs! SPOILERS for Star Trek:Picard I guess.
I also cover the topic of Jack’s humanity since the point of view goes weird later. Jack’s human, or perhaps super-human. We can understand them. This is important because later there will be some hard-to-understand concepts that hang around in order to hint at things that can’t be understood or known.
I mean I’m going to try and write about them, don’t get me wrong, but the mysteries at the heart of the TetraHedron aren’t mysterious simply because they’re unknown, some of them are inexplicable.
The Gatekeepers don’t consider him human, or not fully so. Machine-man servant. Usually I’d put in the bit about worst servant/best servant here, but Jack is closer to the meta-layer of the stories than the other characters so just states it themselves. For that matter all of the Deep Patrol characters are, not exactly aware that they’re in the story, but have a sense that the universe(s) are designed deliberately, and that one of the things its designed for is MAXIMUM SPACE OPERA. There’s one of the core differences with Star Trek et al; no one there questions weird stuff out in space. That’s just the way the galaxy is.
Where were we? Oh yes, the Phoenix League. Each of the four universes has their own characteristic threats. Silence has giant monsters. Novapolis has weaponised humans. The Shattered Realm mires in entropy (in theory. For reasons it gets short shrift in the series. Sorry about that. Also: SPOILERS). And here people know things they really shouldn’t.
I did a little work on the implications of an infinite flat(ish) plane/plain but, uh, only a little. The atmosphere gets weird at about the height that Earth’s atmosphere is vacuum, the balloon doesn’t go any higher. There’s no feasible orbit so no satellites. Long distance communication is hard, for values of long distance that are greater than any distance you can travel on Earth.
I leave this on a cliffhanger. I wrote an epilogue but it was anti-climactic, took all the air out of a work of violent art. Worse still I then recap at the start of the next Unbounded Plain story. Why tell you twice? Never let it be said I’m wasting your time.
So the Phoenix League are out there, with destiny foretelling equipment and they’re heading for the gate. And they know what the gate is and they have a plan. As we head into the back half of this serial the separate universes are not going to stay separate for long.
Comments