In Hyperbolic Geometry, Two Parallel Lines Are Taken to Converge in One Direction and Diverge in the Other

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Among gods, all are shaken by the jeers of Momus.

Among heroes, Hercules gives chase to all the monsters.

Among demons, Pluto, the King of Hell, oppresses all the shades.

While Heraclitus weeps at everything,

Pyrrho knows naught of anything,

And Aristotle glories in knowing all.

Diogenes spurns the things of this world,

And I, Agrippa, am foreign to none of this.

I disdain, I know, I do not know, I pursue, I laugh, I tyrannize, I protest. 

I am philosopher, god, hero, demon and the whole universe.

—Agrippa of Nettesheim, kabbalist, astrologer 

Good morning to all twenty of my subscribers. Thanks for tuning in to my channel. Today I want to share a story with you the old fashioned way, by narrating it instead of uploading a procession of memories. 

I have never shared this story with anyone, in part because I promised not to, though the recipient of that promise passed away long ago. I am telling it now because recent events in the news have brought it back to my mind with an urgency. The world has been shocked by the lurid life-logs of Udal Easton, which have become viral on various aggregators and social networks. To believe that one man could be so reckless with regard to human life, so callous and casual in his cruelty—it is difficult to imagine. I have not dreamed these recordings yet myself, but across the many images and clips which have been shared from them, there was a detail which seemed almost tailor-made for me—for me alone—as if I was meant to find it, and to make the connection which I am going talk about today.

I do not believe in fate, but I do believe the algorithms which govern our lives—the omniscient and impersonal technology so far above us that decides what we see and hear—they sometimes ordain a series of coincidences that speak to us, because they have a hidden cause. Schopenhauer believed that every coincidence throughout a man’s life is manifest inside of him as a necessity owing to the individual and inexorable metaphysical conditions of his existence. I neither believe nor disbelieve this, but I offer it for your consideration.

When I was a boy, my parents took me to visit my grandpa. That’s kind of weird, right? What does that mean, “took me to visit?” What I mean is, my grandpa lived in a place called Birthright, one of those legacy human communities. They all kind of have their own rules. Well, in this one, they were super ludd: no portals, no projection, extreme restrictions on dancing, all of it enforced at the network level. Basically you’re behind a big firewall. They even turn off your HUD.

My parents told me it was a good experience to see how legacy humans lived, so I could feel a connection to the past and appreciate everything we have now. At the time I slightly resented them, but now that I’m older, I know they were right. Technically I had met my grandpa before that trip, because my parents had a simulation of him for us kids to interact with, and sometimes he would even remote in through VR. But he didn’t like it, and he said we hadn’t really met until we met face-to-face. Boomers, eh?

So let me explain what it’s like to visit a place like Birthright. In a way, it feels no different from any other experience. In fact, it’s almost like projecting. One minute you’re doing whatever you’re doing, and the next, you’re in the “real” world. You step out of a portal and there’s a tall fence, twenty feet high, and a big archway that you pass through. As soon as you step into the archway, you sense the terms and conditions, it stipulates all the restrictions, and if you consent, then you’re able to walk through to the other side. Otherwise, your body automatically turns around and walks back.

My parents were with me and they passed through the gate the same as I did. As soon as you do it—it’s kind of hard to describe—you sort of feel… smaller? Your extra senses dim and the world feels flatter but also at the same time it feels deeper and farther away, because there are hidden depths you can no longer penetrate. I know that might not quite make sense. You can’t see electromagnetic fields or wifi clouds any more. You lose all your synaesthesias. You don’t instantly know what smells are what, or where they’re coming from, and you can’t zoom in on things you see in the distance. 

OK, you get it. We’ve all used naked senses before, at least for a little bit. But in Birthright, you don’t have the option to turn them back on. You have to stay exactly in your own head, in the present moment the whole time. Moreover, although you can keep recording memories, you can’t play them back. No projecting means none, never.

Once we were inside the gate, there was a train station where they signed us in on—I’m not kidding—an actual, physical piece of paper. There was a guy with a clipboard, and he took our information, wrote down our names, and gave us each a little box called a phone. The best way to describe it is: it’s like a neuralink that you hold in your hand. It has a capacitative touch screen and you use it to get directions to places, or to send messages to people you know, or to look up information.

Oh that’s another thing, there’s no autocomplete — actually it’s funny, the phones they give you have this thing called Autocomplete, because it’s hard to input text into their little virtual keyboards, so they use a primitive AI to try to fix whatever you type, and they call that Autocomplete. Actually, I think that’s where autocomplete gets its name. So it’s weird and hard to think inside of Birthright, because if you don’t know something, you have to type out the question in your phone, and then it doesn’t even tell you the answer necessarily, but it gives you a list of possible answers. It feels like having a lobotomy. 

I remember the train seemed like it took forever before it left, and even longer to get where we were going. This is what it’s like when you can’t project. It feels like you’re stuck. Stuck in your own body. Stuck in time. Stuck in space. In retrospect I don’t know if I’d ever experienced true boredom before that moment, sitting on a bench seat inside of a train, looking out the windows at the forest outside, looking around inside the train itself, playing with the seat belt and kind of dumbly marveling at the sheer physicality of it as minutes stretched on like hours.

At some point I must have pulled out my new phone and tried to figure out how to use it. I felt so slow, manually typing little things into the box. The phone came preloaded with an app that explained the rules and the history of Birthright, but somehow that was more boring than just staring out the window. Normally, what you would do—what anyone would do—in this situation is you’d project your consciousness into the cloud and trust Love to pilot your body in the interim. You’d have a little dream, join your friends in a virtual space, play a game, something like that. But no, I was totally earthbound, totally trapped. By the way, did you know Love is the English word for AI? 

Despite all of this, I will confess that the forest was beautiful. It was a place I might well have chosen to go in a dream; a dusty labyrinthe of pine trees, toadstools, spider webs, fallen logs and grey skies. Wet bark and prisms of color refracted through dewdrops. It all flew by so fast, and when I tried reflexively to pause it for a closer look, nothing happened of course. I guess that’s obvious, but it bears saying. At some point the boredom of monotony itself became a kind of entertainment. Eventually—aeons later, eternities later—the train pulled into another station some twenty miles deeper into Birthright. 

I never go back and watch the memories of this time. In fact, I’ve never redreamed them, not even once. To me, all the moments of this trip feel frozen forever exactly as I left them. They say time plays tricks on memory and distorts it, but I feel like that’s more an urban legend at this point, in the sense that it’s not something modern people really experience. Time playing tricks on memory, riding on horseback, washing your clothes in a river: all of these things are lost to the past.

If we define personal identity—the coherency of the self—as the private ownership of some depository of memories, then it may be the case that no one truly had a personal identity before neuralink. Without a machine in our brains to record our perceptions, what claim of ownership could we make of all those elapsed instants that, because they were quotidian or stale, did not stamp us with a lasting mark? It would be as if you were missing half of yourself. 

This is a digression, but I wish to advance a radical thesis: without such a machine, there is no whole or coherent self. Man in his primitive state is only a hodgepodge of innumerable possible states of consciousness with little to connect them beyond a rough expectation that they may occur again in an imprecise way. This is what strikes me about the people in Birthright: they live their lives as if underwater, seeing and hearing everything through distortion of merely mammalian memory. Perhaps I’m too romantic, but it’s why I prefer to store and relate these memories “the old-fashioned way,” so that they can stay in Birthright where I had them.

When we stepped off the train, my grandpa was there to meet us. He was wearing a red-and-blue flannel shirt, heavy jeans, and work boots. His face was clean-shaven and his back was a little bit bent by time but his eyes were still vital, still youthful. He greeted me first and then my parents, and gave us each a warm hug. In a way, I had the impression that he was closer to my age than to that of my mother and father, although this is an absurdity. He felt like a kindred spirit. 

Grandpa took us back to his house, which was only a short walk from the station, but I was so unaccustomed to walking under the power of my own will, it felt like every single second was deliberate. My uneven breath; my clumsy footsteps; each turn of my head or swing of my arms was fully manual. The walk from the station felt even longer than the train to the town. It smelled of pine and cedar, though I didn’t know the names of those scents, I mean I was acquainted with them but I couldn’t quite recall. 

The town was as quaint as its technology. The buildings were made of wood, and they weren’t spaced to accommodate cars at all. Even at that young age, the whole thing felt to me like adults play-acting. There was and is something artificial about it, an innocence lost, the way they pretend it’s whatever date a hundred years ago. The whole thing is all too self-conscious, because they know their ways are not the way, not the way of the world.

Birthright is as fictitious as any neuralink dream, only it’s wrought from different materials, that’s all. More from Schopenhauer: he told us that real life and the dream world are pages of the same book, that it’s only custom which calls real life the orderly reading, which thinks of dreams as the pages we leaf through with lazy negligence. Looking back through the lens of cybernetic brain enhancement, I am inclined to reverse this dictum: the ideal or dream world is now rigorous. The ostensibly real world is its negligent shadow.

There’s another sense memory I have, or a scent-memory, though I haven’t smelled anything with exactly that smell since. It’s triggered by the smell of Grandpa’s house, the unique smell of a human being I guess, the sympathy of a familial smell, but also the wood from which the house was constructed, and the smell of the dinner he cooked for us. The mélange of all these things together.  He made chicken-fried steak, and he tossed the steak in some egg whites first before frying it, which made it velvety and soft. Mashed potatoes, chicken fried steak, gravy. No vegetable. My mom gently scolded her dad for that oversight. “There’s nothing green on this plate.” He scoffed.

It was this, eating the chicken-fried steak, which first made me rethink my impressions of the people in Birthright. It tasted like nothing I’d ever eaten. I mean technically I suppose I don’t have much idea about the taste of the things I have physically eaten, but eaten in the colloquial sense of experienced degustatory qualia, not in the sense of physically masticated and swallowed. I’m probably being neurotically over-specific here.

Grandpa could see me enjoying the food and also my puzzlement over it, and he explained to me, his words, that there is a kind of stultifying homogeneity to what he called canned food qualia, that when you actually cook something yourself with your own skill, and you don’t rely on the computer to dance your hands for you, when you really cook something consciously and in the moment, it comes out a little different each time. It’s not even that it tastes better, but it makes life feel more textured, more real.

I have to confess I didn’t quite buy it. I knew even then that Love automatically introduces variance into projected qualia for precisely this reason, but I humored my grandfather whose ways were still strange to me. Being older, it now strikes me to wonder if the sense of perpetual newness does not come in part from the chronic half-amnesia of the unenhanced mind which I mentioned above. Perhaps this sounds condescending, but I assure you I harbor no contempt for man in his natural state. These are my honest impressions. The people of Birthright possess neural implants, but they have chosen not to use them. Implicitly they pass judgment on the larger part of humanity; to judge them in return is fair.

After dinner, my parents left me in Birthright with Grandpa for a week. He was retired (maybe that goes without saying) and he took me hiking, fishing, and shooting. I was bad at these activities. Without Love to automatically detect what I was trying to do and dance my hands and make it perfect, I was worse at everything than I had ever been in my whole life. That’s what my parents wanted me to understand, I guess: that if you have Love, you can speak in the tongues of men or angels and fathom all mysteries, but without it you ain’t shit.

Fishing was the worst of all, being hours of dire stillness, an insipid form of inactivity punctuated only by occasional tension on the fishing line. I hated it. But after we caught a few fish, Grandpa built a fire on the shore, fileted them on a rock, and we ate under the stars in the flickering of firelight, roasted fish and baked beans from a can. I confess I’ve played back the neural imaging of eating that fish on a few occasions, but the recording never captures the feeling of actually being there. I don’t know why. By all scientific accounting it should, but there’s something ineffable missing. I treasure this memory, and I think maybe everything wonderful is irrational. Who was it that said humanity is always a tiny, transient region of love carved out of from the indifferent, rational universe?

The next day after fishing, Grandpa took me to Birthright’s retro 1950s-themed diner and bought me a milkshake.  Much later in life, I realized the old man was living out a fantasy of an era that was long-gone even when he was a boy. He wasn’t even reliving his childhood vicariously through me, he was reliving what he imagined his father’s childhood might have been like, something like that. Love informs me that it was not so much period-accurate to the 1950s as it was of a pastiche homage to the late 20th century. I don’t remember all the details, and I don’t want to pull them up, dissect them, quantify them for you.

What I do remember is that Don Gibson was playing on an intentionally tinny speaker, and amongst the neon and the chrome and the jukebox with media encoded on vinyl disks, half the people were staring at their smartphones with vacant 21st century eyes. When Love takes over your body, it keeps you looking alert and present, but when you stare at a phone, you look like a hypnotized lifeless animal. 

On the last night before my parents took me home, Grandpa used his phone to hire a car to take us even deeper into the country. The town receded as we drove down a winding rural road, paved but without street lights, only wide enough for one car, dense trees on either side. I don’t know how long we rode in that car. My sense of time had been distorted beyond even cursory utility by the unfamiliar place, by the journey, and by the neurocomputational restrictions.

At some point, the pavement had yielded to gravel and the blue of the sky had yielded to pink and gold. We arrived at a grand house where the air smelled of elemental things: meat cooking golden brown, the trees, the dogs, the kindling wood, and the fire that brings men together. By this time I didn’t feel the absence of metacognitive Autocomplete quite as strongly. In fact, I didn’t even notice its absence. 

The owner of the house, a man named Parkins or Perkins welcomed us in. He had a servant who took our coats and brought us wine. Maybe I was a bit young for wine, but I drank it anyway in order to disguise my boyish loneliness among grown-ups. There were ten or twelve men there, including my grandfather, not including the servants, of whom one might have been a woman. We were seated in a large dining room and served platters of roasted lamb, salads of shaved roots and greens, smoked fishes, and many other things besides. Thereafter our company retired to some study or drawing room decorated with taxidermy, dusty books, sextants, antique weapons, and other miscellany. Bottle after bottle of port or sherry or madeira was produced, followed later by coffee and cigars. The adults spoke of matters wherein I had no literacy, of vintages and women and vintages of women. 

The hour grew so late that the clock had become a frightful object, threatening me with knowledge of the hour. A man named Houser challenged another, Duncan, to a game of poker, one-on-one. Others objected that such a game is very boring, and suggested four or six players, but Houser insisted with a stubbornness I did not understand, nor did I try. For me, such a thing as a card game was one more silly anachronism of Birthright. In the real world, Autocomplete would convey to each player a perfect and instantaneous knowledge of the odds of every hand and card. There is a saying that ignorance is bliss, and there is yet another saying that all which can be destroyed by the truth, ought to be. I cannot choose a side in this dispute between perennial wisdoms, but the choice has been made for us.

In this time I was able to steal away by myself, and for a young boy, there are perhaps few adventures so enticing as exploring a rambling house full of artifacts and secrets. I passed through a gallery and a formal sitting room before I lost my way in the darkness. Eventually I found myself in a drawing room with a glass case full of ornate portal guns, objects too modern for Birthright, and heavily regulated everywhere. To find such a collection here was shocking, and as I contemplated them, I became aware of a shadow looming over me. 

My initial fear turned to relief when I saw that it was the owner of the house—Parkins—who had found me. Whether out of kindness or a collector’s vanity, he began telling me about the weapons I had been admiring. He indicated a gun with an intricate stock made entirely of white jade, and told me it belonged to a gangster named Headstrong, the leader of a smartdrug cartel who was killed in Palo Alto in a shootout with police. I could tell he was proud of his collection, and I asked him if he might have a piece which belonged to the infamous murderer Jonathan Prudence, who was seen as the archetype of an outlaw at that time. He confessed that he did not, but he showed me one in the same style that Prudence had used, a carbine rifle with a bright red handguard. 

We were interrupted then by a commotion of angry voices as the entire dinner party erupted down the hallway and into the drawing room where we were standing. It was obvious that everyone, including my grandpa, was drunk. (Alcohol is yet another anachronism, another way that those men who have an already tenuous grasp upon their permanent selves may choose to temporarily loose the grip.) Houser was accusing Duncan of cheating at cards, and he would not let up in his insults, growing ever more shrill and obscene. Duncan, who was the tallest of the company and well-built, pretended not to hear. I cannot remember what was said, but there was a moment when Houser crossed a line, and Duncan half-heartedly stood up to throw a punch at him.

From the floor, Houser snarled that he would not endure this, that he meant to have a fight. Duncan denied him, and he said, a bit too smugly, “the trouble is, I’m afraid of you.” Everyone laughed except Houser, who was enraged, and who issued his challenge again. Someone (may he be forgiven) pointed out that there was no lack of weapons.

Attention fell on the glass case where the portal guns were kept, and Houser immediately chose that same carbine with the red handguard which Parkins had shown me only moments ago. Duncan selected a rifle with a long barrel and a bolt action, unadorned but for a small number 3 engraved on the stock above the trigger guard. One speculates that these choices may have reflected the individualities of the men who chose them; Houser being flashy and explosive in his temperament, Duncan being calculated and reserved, but I could not say. I was only a boy; I never knew them. 

I do know that Parkins took the lead in escorting everyone outside, fearing for his fine house, no doubt, knowing what was to come next. There are few modern undertakings so deranged, so reckless, and so illegal as a duel with portal guns. This “sport” as such has been banned by every government, and has remained the sole province of outlaws and the criminally insane since it was first imagined back in the 40s.

We made our way outside, following a path through the trees, led by Parkins to a clearing in the forest. We came upon a sapphire stream, and instinctively we knew: this was the place. Though the grown-ups were drunk on wine, I was reeling from adventure, and I wondered if anyone in our company was grown-up in that moment, or if everyone was equally as childish as I. It also occurred to me that in some ways I knew more of these things than the adult inhabitants of Birthright; I had witnessed recordings of portal duels. I had projected myself into games where I fought them myself. But everything here had a danger and an immediacy, and in those pregnant moments before the fight, I came to feel the difference between reality and simulation, which is a different thing from knowing it.

Technically speaking, portals are not created, they are only plucked from the quantum foam and expanded. At all times there is an infinitesimal substrate of “gritty” reality, fuzzing like white noise at the quantum level, smaller than the smallest observable matter. Within the foam, virtual particles may appear and disappear, and Planck-sized wormholes continuously blink in and out of existence. A portal gun at its core is just a Casimir wedge; when powered, wormholes in the foam “stick” and expand. A jet of Luttinger particles stabilizes the wormhole, “sewing” its edges together to form a pair of seamless disks.

It takes only moments to pluck and stabilize a wormhole pair, and thereupon they are inexorably, exclusively coupled. Each endpoint can only ever go to its mate. The portal has a mass of zero—not an infinitesimal mass—a true zero. No force can be applied to it, for how does one press on a nullity? The wormhole is anchored in space by an Ellis Hook, which is attached to a metal slug and fired from the portal gun. This is the only way to move a portal; if the Ellis hook is destroyed, the portal will snap shut, squeezing and severing any material which straddles its boundaries.

Launching a pair of conjoined holes in space presents a novel challenge in marksmanship; anything the first portal passes through on its trajectory will be extruded from its complement which is still chambered inside the gun. For this reason, portal guns are built with a vent to expel the extruded matter. It is customary to fire the first endpoint of the portal at a desired target, and then to “drop” the second endpoint of the portal at point blank range in order to more easily manipulate it using the Casimir wedge in the gun. The ends of portals are always commensurate; to expand or collapse one endpoint is to necessarily and instantly* expand it’s mate. (*no information can propagate faster than the speed of light. If the two endpoints of the portal are one light-minute away from each other, for example, then it will take one minute for a change in radius of endpoint A to propagate to endpoint B.) 

In a portal duel, there are a few strategies. One can, of course, try to kill his opponent the old fashioned way, by landing a shot with the first portal and extruding a cylinder of his innards. This is considered to be anticlimactic. Yes, it is effective, but such an outcome is lacking in style and spectacle. The more popular method is to use the unique ability of the portal to translate vertical motion into horizontal, accelerating an object via gravity and then launching it at your enemy. Most celebrated of all is the method in which one uses some affordance to fling his opponent an otherwise impossible distance, launching him into the air or head-first into a wall.

In truth, it was almost impossible to follow the duel between Duncan and House in the darkness and the tumult of the night. Beyond the flashing of muzzles and the sounds of objects crashing into one another, we could see only glimpses of action in the moonlight shining through the trees. From those events I could follow, I was surprised by the agility and adeptness of both men with the portal gun. Though their first few shots had been timid and uncertain, they began to move like naturals, as if they were veterans of many such duels. I heard my compatriots express their dismay as well. By all accounts, neither Houser nor Duncan had any training or experience as a duelist.

As soon as the fight began, Duncan had run into the trees for cover, and from his vantage point there had created a network of ground level portals in which to hide, allowing him to bounce rapidly from one side of the battleground to the other. Houser, in response, spread a canvas of portals at a height in the trees, which he used to hurl rocks and pieces of earth into Duncan’s network of hiding spaces. The effect of this was to create a field of continuous ballistic hazard, as rocks flowed upward through portals and then careened out of ground level portals, only to be lifted back up again.

Portals emit no light. They betray no evidence of their presence whatsoever, except in some cases a draft. The space around the clearing became increasingly, invisibly interconnected by holes in the fabric of space, a “perfidious topology” in the words of the poet Brassard. At this time I lost sight of the combatants completely, and it was all I or any of the others could do to evade the debris that flew sporadically in our direction. I found myself wondering if Duncan and Houser might both already be dead, having mutually succumbed to the obstacle course they had by their fighting constructed. 

It was cold in those small hours of the morning and I was struck again by the limitedness and the locality of perspective in Birthright; in the outside world I could have watched the fight from either or both of the combatant’s eyes simultaneously. I could have watched from extrapolated perspectives generated by AIs in amongst the debris. I could—at the least—have seen in the dark. This is the great parochiality of the luddite; he is closer to the earth in every sense. There may something noble in the way he cleaves to his will and his soil, but I do not admire the way he refuses to lift his head when the light shines on him.

It was the first light of morning that showed us the fight had concluded. In the end, surrounded by a maelstrom of perpetual motion which had leveled the forest in a wide radius around them, we saw Duncan’s body battered and bloody, lifeless on the ground. Houser stood over him, a far-away look in his eyes, as if he could not accept what he’d done with his own hands.

Birthright may be a primitive place, but it is not a lawless one. On the contrary, the possibility of violence, of committing violence so easily and so senselessly, ungoverned by Crimestop services running in your mind, necessitates a similarly anachronistic legalism which we do not find in the wider world. Small towns, on the other hand, have their own idiosyncratic procedures when it comes to the administration of justice. Naturally, all who were present that night wished to avoid being implicated in such a thing as a portal duel, and Parkins in particular preferred that his collection of weapons should not become a public matter. 

Being only a boy, and an outsider, much of this went over my head, and my grandpa, whatever his involvement, sheltered me even further from such considerations, only making me promise not to tell my parents of the events of the night. This private conspiracy flattered me, and I took it for affection when in reality, of course, he wished to avoid blame for endangering me. Some things never change, no matter how much technology changes us. He called another car using his phone and escorted me to the archway at Birthright’s perimeter, though he was understandably distracted on the journey back, often pausing to send text messages through his phone. We said our good-byes, and I vanished back into the world. I must imagine that Parkins and the others had some way of hiding the evidence of the duel, and that they made some pact of secrecy. I also speculated, in my boyish way, that I was part of this pact despite not being privy to its specifics.

Now, to go back to the beginning. Why have I related all this, do you remember? It’s because in the lifelog recordings of Udal Easton—these horrible stories, his terrorist activity, most all of his ghoulish “Hildersham Cave” where he sent thousands of people to die—Love has surfaced a truth to me, correlating the contents of the human mind—as it does—to reveal an unexpected vista into reality. It is, again, a detail which I may be in a unique position to appreciate. Easton considered himself to be an artist who, in his own words, “used a portal gun as his paintbrush.” 

I will maintain the suspense no longer: the detail I have learned is that the portal gun which he—Easton—used was an unadorned rifle with a bolt action, with a number 3 engraved on the stock above the trigger guard.

Easton’s gun was the very same gun that Duncan selected on that night in Birthright. I am entirely certain of it. What’s more: Easton had a rival named Thomas Eaton who was also a kind of artist, that is, both of them were minor public figures, and their rivalry fomented initially over the similarity of their names, and the fact that the public could not tell them apart. Like me, Love will already have filled your head with the intuited details of their story. They never met in life. Eaton was thought to have ties to right wing organization called the Dangerous Sex movement. He is known to have fallen victim to the mental condition called que ce passe t-il après — in which one yields to the siren call of “what happens next.” Easton, for his part, disappeared completely, and is presumed dead, but he was never found by any computer or law enforcement agency.

I know that Duncan’s weapon belonged to Easton, and though Love is unable to guarantee it, I am equally certain that Houser’s carbine rifle with the red handguard belonged to Thomas Eaton. These revelations explain everything about that night which had previously eluded me. Neither Houser nor Duncan ever so much as handled a portal gun before. All present were amazed at the unexpected virtuosity of the fight. It was a close-knit group, and it would have been impossible that not one, but two of their friends harbored such a secret talent. 

What is clear to me now is that those weapons also contained tigers, the famous malware that hides in everyday objects and which, upon contact with the skin, hijacks the neuralink implant by means of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. I think both portal guns contained such malware, and they conveyed to their handlers all of the skill of their previous owners, and all of the malice they held for each other. Houser did not kill Duncan; it was the guns who fought. They had lain sleeping side by side until hands awoke them, and they carried out the duel that was never consummated in their lives, these fragments of themselves which Easton and Eaton had left behind.

It is exactly this possibility which makes Birthright’s proposition so enticing: we have looked in vain for a neurological theory of consciousness, of qualia, and even having instrumented all of mankind, we have not found it. We know that Wernicke’s area is the locus of comprehension of words, that Broca’s area turns words into speech, but no man can pinpoint the locus of the soul, which is another way to say, “the whole self” or “the coherent self.”

Just as physical science drilled down to the lowermost fundament of matter and found no omniscient mind there, cognitive science showed a light on the tenebrous corners of the brain and found no soul, and in both cases we filled the absence with information science, with algorithms that see everything, with neural implants that anchor the mind to a soul like an Ellis hook. A mind has a mass of zero—not an infinitesimal mass—a true zero. Given enough time, a mind is a portal through which all possible mental states must pass. But in Birthright, unanchored by the neuralink device, the self, the soul, the mind becomes a wild place where gods and other things may still come and go.