InputUNIMANITY

Every creature, and every single thing that is said, comes from but one Name.
- The Sefer Yetsirah

Zero: Control Interface

OFF/ON:

At the instant the world was born, it was divided in two.

On one side: light. Red. Red like the monochromatic beam cadenced at fifteen billion times per second, more commonly called LASER-Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, that which reads- writes data in all media using the Boolean encoding of binary numbers- an ember boring a single, enormous point; one that is colossal; titanic. So vast that its exact size is impossible to calculate, for, indeed, it is all space.

This is the 3 degrees Kelvin background noise that blankets the universe. It is the primordial light that precedes all creation.

On the other side: matter. White. White like the sclera of an eye, the organ directly linked to the human brain by the optic nerve-which is nothing more than an extension of the cortex to the outside-and whose diopter is scrutinized by the ray of red light, filling all the space the said organ can perceive. The refractive system of the human ocular globe is composed principally of an iris, behind which is a biconvex crystalline lens where air and cornea meet. Faced with light of such intensity, the iris automatically attempts to close almost completely, constricting the pupil to nothing-but the red light is still there, because a tiny, delicate mechanism of carbon-carbon veins linked to a minute frontal vacuum implant keeps the pupil open, keeps the eyelid from blinking, and then there is nothing but this red intensity, this red world, pure light etched on the white of the eye. Between the two parts of the world there are luminous shadows, the shining shadows of the digital operation that turns both matter and light into a number. For millions of years, the human eye has captured light. From now on, light will be the captor.

Welcome to the Technological Genesis. Welcome to its beyond, its terminal horizon. Welcome to the world of the ubermachine. Remember that a machine is, above all, a network of disconnections.

The monochromatic ray reads the entire surface of the retina, gradually etching an image of the object it scrutinizes onto a cybernetic memory. This is its function. It controls.

The ray is ejected from a standard-model, UniPol-approved ruby microcannon, which is linked to a small data processor. This machine is linked in turn to the vast planetary information-storage network, and can compare the information encoded in the global control metasystem with the millions of nerve cells that make up each and every human eye in a matter of seconds. This is its task. The light has a job.

As does everything that exists today.

The light is a cop.

It's the same with the eye scrutinized by the machine. Yes-the eye, too, has a job. At this moment, its job is to fool the searching ray of light and the computer that acts as its brain. A brain that is, truth be told, superior to most of the human brains, with their optic nerves in contact daily with the light.

The organic globule is checked by the machine-light's reading. Its iris-which, like all irises, is absolutely unique-has an optic print that is as distinctive as a fingerprint. Its iris is, in point of fact, wrong.

In the UHU/RUS K-127 database, the machine control will compare this human iris encoded by the light-cop with its seven million counterparts kept on file by the...

Chapter One
Radiohead

The organ is linked to the machine.

The organ: five fingers, a hand.

The machine: six strings, a metal beam.

A metal beam that vibrates with electricity coming from the copper coil attached to its base.

The hand, full of its own nervous electric impedance, moves along the taut strings of the long metal beam.

The six strings vibrate rhythmically under the pressure of the five fingers. The strings are attached to a body.

An electric body.

A guitar.

This body-machine produces sounds and has its own name. It even has a past, which in this world amounts to a virtual miracle.

Better still, under the hand that moves in the electrified space of the metallic strings, under the five fingers that spread starlike amid the harmonic notes, this body-machine also has a future--an even rarer commodity than a past.

We are in the Afterworld. The World After the World. And in this world, only the hand moving on the metal strings to produce sounds, to bring forth a voice, only this hand knows how to make machines sing.

It is the Healing Hand.

It is the organ that gives new life to that which has never been alive. It is the antimachine that grants the favor of Grace to the machines, though they are dying and disappearing at the same time as the creature that conceived them.

So the hand plays; it plays on the body-machine of the guitar.

And the guitar sings; it sings its own electric body.

Its electric body boasts the double coil characteristic of its make. This machine has its own name: Gibson Les Paul, 1954 model. This guitar has its own body. And a body has this guitar. A human body. He holds it between his hands, hands that run over its surface and make it sing in a multitude of magnetic frequencies.

This guitar is an instrument, and he knows what that involves: injection sense/etymology in electric language. Instrumentum, in the language that was sacred for two millennia, from the word instruere, "to build inside," and by extension: to develop an instruction for a human being. Via its Indo-European roots, it means "operation capable of acting on the physical world."

Nor is the instrument an object; it is really a piece of technology, a language, a machine. M¯ekhan¯e: a war machine, according to its Greek origins, it indicates the existence of an operative action that will permit the development of another machine. Flash introduction to the semantics of the organum, more or less meaning "organism": in this sacred language, which disappeared well before most of the others, every instrument bears within it the organum of which it is the mechanical hand; every instrument is an organic multiplex; every instrument is a body and the man who creates or repairs it is thus an organarius. An organist. A doctor.

And that is what he is: a doctor for electric machines. And this instrument, this guitar, is a body-machine.

Volume level 10 on the amplifier, a 100-watt Marshall from the 1970s. A century old; a rarity. The riff resonates heavenward, swallowing the near-universe up in a pure shockwave of white noise, full of ferocity, at once glacial and incandescent, a thermonuclear bomb. Electricity at the fingertips--and at the other end, a human body taut with pure joy, the kind that sparkles like a snowflake falling to rest at the corner of the lips, the joy of hearing the guitar sing, become one with its...