The Pipes of Heaven

The pipes of earth, these are the hollows everywhere; the pipes of men, these are rows of tubes. Tell me about the pipes of Heaven.

Who is it that blows the ten thousand disputing voices, who when of themselves they stop their talk has sealed them, and puffs out of them the opinions that they choose for themselves? 

—Zhuangzi

Yes, it’s ok, come in. Take a seat. Don’t worry, this isn’t—I know how you are feeling right now, that anxious sense of imminent derealization. This is not Hrönir. This is just normal whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Real life. I want to start by acknowledging that even by coming here today, that might be a small accomplishment, depending how you look at it. In a way, what’s the worst thing that could happen?

I’m going to go over the details of your story, what you sent to me. Please let me know if I get anything wrong, or if there is anything you want to add. You met a girl on a dating app named Lydia. She loved to travel and she was on a mission to find the perfect banh mi. You didn’t really like her that much but of the most recent cohort of girls who were responsive and seemed like they might actually meet you in person, she wasn’t that bad. You could talk yourself into being attracted to her, maybe.

You started talking online. You joked with her, flirted. She disappeared for a few days, then came back. You searched for her on the internet and you found her Instagram and her twitter. She didn’t post very often. Her Instagram was mostly food, a few selfies. Her twitter was all retweets of memes, and her most recent post was months ago. There was nothing relevant or personal to her on these sites, nothing you could use to make conversation. Ultimately, you believe that whether you can “hook” any particular girl is predicated on a confluence of invisible factors that are totally beyond your control and totally unknowable by you. Lydia was no different; she didn’t have the common decency to post online about the circumstances of her personal life in a way that would render her transparent to prospective suitors.

So you gave up on that and tried to ask her about her favorite banh mi and she seemed to be totally unaware of what she had written in her terse online dating profile. You consider this to be typical. Despite what you thought was a bland conversational gambit, she kept answering you, and eventually you exchanged numbers and suggested a meeting at a café that was conveniently located halfway between you. They had house-made sourdough breads and a seasonal latte with figs in it or something. You tried to make the joke about meeting in the daytime in a well-lit public place because you never know if she might be an axe murderer. When was the last time an axe murderer made the news? It sounds like something from the 1980s. Did gen-X girls like that joke, back in the day? Anyway, she sent you a laugh emoji, as if it were funny.

On the day of your date, you put on a sweater that looked kind of business-casual but was slouchy enough that hopefully it conveyed that you care but not too much. You carefully calculated everything to seem like it was not carefully calculated. You went to the coffee shop and you waited for her. “I’m in a burgundy sweater,” you texted her. Burgundy, was that trying too hard? You once saw a study which concluded that purple is the least trustworthy color for a man to wear. Green or blue seemed too docile; you hoped dark red was sensual but understated. You believe you should have said “dark red” instead of burgundy. What are you, some kind of interior designer?  You speculated that she probably now thought you were gay. After about fifteen minutes, she sent you a text to say she was running late. You wondered if you should order a coffee or just leave. Most girls don’t actually show up for online dates, in your experience. You decided to give her fifteen more minutes, but she never turned up.

When you got back home, you mentally wrote her off but you still chose to check her socials, not that you were infatuated with her or anything, but maybe there would be some explanation, some kind of closure. What did you see? Pictures of you and her together in the cafe. You were wearing the dark red sweater. She was smiling with her eyes. From the outside, you believed the date had gone well. But how was this possible? You sent her a message, but she never received it. In the following days, she continued to post more photographs of you. Selfies. Photos of you and her together, holding hands. Her head resting on your shoulder. You were together at a museum. You went for a walk on the wharf. There was a video of her singing a silly song, just the two of you, in what you surmise is her apartment. Her hair was up and she was wearing sweatpants and it looked like you just fucked. It triggered an impossible memory of what her hair smelled like and her sweat and her bed. It was all a bit saccharine but in a way that you’d be lying if you tried to pretend you didn’t actually long for it. And you wondered: were you somehow blacking out and living a double life? Were these things really happening? Was it a hoax, a scam, were they trying to extort you?

There were charges on your bank statement: the restaurant where you took her out to dinner; a present you bought for her; Lyfts back and forth across town. You started to dream about her. Your dreams didn’t quite reflect the reality—or the hyperreality, or the virtuality, perhaps—that you saw on Instagram. But she started to figure prominently in your dreams. You’d have a dream that she was mad at you, or cheating on you; a dream about protecting her, a dream that she was lost in a maze with yellow walls and you were trying to find her but you kept getting turned around. 

You went to the internet, which was where you learned about Hrönir. Experts will tell you, of course, that Hrönir does not exist. It is classified as a mass psychogenic illness, and compared to such afflictions as Morgellons disease, or the dancing plagues of 1518. Eventually, after trolling through Reddits and Discords and WhatsApp groups, you found me, which is how you wound up here. And I want to assure you that Hrönir is not an illness, it is a place. Maybe. Or it might be more correct to say it is the idea of a place. I believe it is a real place, though it is not the case that you could go there. Some ideas seem to exist on the boundary of the real and the ideal, perched on the threshold of actualization, almost desiring to come into the world from the outside (in so far as an idea can have a desire.) I believe Hrönir is such an idea, more than an idea, but less than a reality, much like a dream. I know, this sounds fanciful, but then, doesn’t your whole situation?

There are two schools of thought regarding Hrönir, the materialist and the occultist. I understand why most people gravitate towards the materialist interpretation. It’s much easier to accept, and it also may feel like, if it is true, then that would broaden the possibilities for mitigation. 

The materialist school believes that Hrönir is being run by an international cabal of scammers, making use of artificial intelligence to generate nonexistent people, scenarios, places, historical events—an entire synthetic world—which they are using to defraud the real world in a variety of ways. Real people become entangled in the artifice of Hrönir, and they begin to lose their grip on reality; they become unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. The goal cannot be mere extortion or identity theft; as you will note, money has already been stolen from you, entirely without your complicity. In fact, there is no obvious purpose for any of it. It is true that all of the visible artifacts of Hrönir are within the capabilities of existing AI technology to produce, a point in favor of the materialist position, but the only unity that connects these artifacts seems to be that they disrupt our ability to perceive reality.

The materialist explanation must be that the system is autonomous or semi-autonomous, and that its primary purpose is to sustain itself; any behaviors it exhibits are strictly emergent, arising from the blind idiocy of evolutionary logic, and that they may be pruned out in future iterations. It has been suggested that an environment of generalized epistemological decay is one in which autonomous, self-sustaining AIs can flourish. Most noteworthy here is the body of output which the community refers to as Sahara, which is thought to be a facet of Hrönir, in the same way that wrath or pity or the Koran are thought to be attributes of Allah. Whereas Hrönir targets individuals, Saraha targets corporations, institutions, and the foundations of knowledge itself. 

The modern scientific epistemological paradigm is built on the idea of the citation, a reference to a previous scholarly work which is offered by a researcher to confirm some assumption within their research. The core conceit of the citation is that knowledge is built up like a construction project, with each new discovery or examination building on the foundation of all previous works, such that intellectual progress is inevitable and marches inexorably onward. Sahara fundamentally breaks this machinery by generating an infinite number of citations and academic papers proving every possible hypothesis and assertion, and then by negating them, and then by negating the negation, unto infinity. 

“Fake” papers and studies have already mingled imperceptibly and inextricably into journals and repositories of scientific knowledge. In many ways, scientific literature has always suffered from this problem, but as science was increasingly given authority in the 20th century, power inevitably corrupted knowledge. Sahara is the culmination of this process, creating a situation where zero percent of scientific research can be trusted. Any text may seem invariable and definitive if we have turned to it a sufficient number of times. Hume identified the habitual idea of causality with that of temporal succession. Thus a good film, seen a second time, seems even better; we tend to take as necessity that which is no more than repetition.

Hrönirian de-realization is possible because our lives have bifurcated into a technologically mediated subjectivity and a purely immediate, immanent subjectivity. The former world is delimited only by gossip, and we soar into the heights of all that is possible. The latter is delineated by physical locality, and it makes us feel earthbound, limited to what is in front of us. The frontiers of mediated life are never clear-cut: beyond its internal configuration, it is caught up in a system of references to other mediations; it is a node within a network. Who among us, in some contemplative twilight hour, has not suspected that the fixtures of his online life lack any physical counterpart? 

To make this clearer, let me tell you about some of my other clients. You may have heard the story of a hacker called Ulex, who was charged with six million counts of sexual assault after posting information on how to bypass the consent protocols in a popular brand of sexbot. Mr. Ulex was arrested, brought to court, prosecuted, and yet — sexbots don’t exist. Have you ever seen one, out in the real world? There are websites, you might tell me, which purport to sell them. You have seen people post about them on social media, you have read news stories about them. You might know the name of the most popular sexbot manufacturer — GF Prime — perhaps you have even tried to purchase one — but no, no, I think you are not such a crass person.

Well, if you had tried such a thing, you would have found that the specific unit you wanted was on backorder, or that there were shipping delays due to the package being caught in customs, or else the delivery would never arrive, and GF Prime’s customer support would be effusively apologetic, and offer you all kinds of freebies and discount codes, but due to high order volume and supply chain issues, it would be quite a while before they could send you a replacement, on and on like this, and no sexbot ever arrives. I know because I worked with Mr. Ulex and his lawyers in order to build his defense. 

Again, sexbots do not exist. Therefore, they do not have such a thing as a consent protocol, and it’s not possible to rape them, and there are no laws against doing something impossible to something that doesn’t exist—well, there are, but not in this case. It can be surprisingly difficult to establish such a thing, that a particular law does not exist, especially when there is a limitless body of legal scholarship, available online,  discussing the nonexistent law, when it was passed, and the court precedents which have arisen thereafter. You may know of the case Ibrahim v. LovRTech, where the judge ruled that, “Sentience is not observable or empirically verifiable, whether we are discussing a human subject or a human-like automata, and therefore a subject’s alleged sentience or lack thereof cannot be materially relevant to establishing a reasonable definition of consent. Just as the victims of terrorism are not exclusive to those directly harmed by terrorist violence, the victims of a rape include not only a particular woman who is raped, but all women in society who may be emotionally or psychologically damaged by the possibility and prevalence of sexual violence. As such, the simulated rape of a robot is no different from the ‘actual’ rape of a human being.” 

According to the internet, all sexbots released in the USA were equipped with consent protocols as a consequence of Ibrahim v. LovRTech. But the reason I mention this is that, if you read the court records in this case, you will notice that no actual sexbots were brought to the courtroom, and that when the defense for LovRTech called a sexbot to the stand to testify as to its lack of sentience, the examination was conducted over a video call. If you were to go to the address under which LovRTech is registered as a corporation, you would find it is an attorney’s office, and that all paperwork and taxes have been filed by lawyers operating under power of attorney. If you were to try, as I did, to visit their manufacturing facilities, you would find only empty warehouses in Shenzhen. 

And what about the online communities dedicated to customizing, maintaining, and discussing sexbots and the merits of the various models and manufacturers? What about the activist groups who agitate for or against sexbots and sexbot rights? The answer is that some of them are real, and some of them are virtual, and I am entirely certain that none of the agitators or hobbyists on either side have ever seen a sexbot in person. There is a famous viral clip of a popular YouTube talk show where the host is interviewing one of these activists, and he pulls out a vibrating dildo and asks her if “her boyfriend” is able to consent to sex. But there is no sexbot in this clip, either. You are looking at me as if I have three heads, but what I hope you are coming to accept is that nothing on the Internet can be trusted.

So far, all of this can be explained within the materialist interpretation of Hrönir. It’s hard to understand the motivations, but it’s possible. Maybe the Chinese government is trying to undermine Western society? Generative AI, perhaps with a bit of human assistance, could produce false documents, fictional people, photographs, voices, conversations, shell corporations, and legal filings. In theory, there’s no reason it could not appoint lawyers and notaries and all of the rest. The technology needed to do these things exists today. But there are more things in Hrönir, things which could be explained away of course, dismissed as noise in the signal —after all, online conspiracists aren’t known for their rigor—nevertheless, there are hints that Hrönir’s true origin lie in the occult.

You said—and you probably didn’t think much of it—that you have been dreaming about her. You said in your dreams, you’re lost in a yellow maze. I don’t think any strictly material explanation can account for this. Sure, lots of people have dreams, all kinds of dreams, especially about subjects which distress them in waking life. But the detail that piques my interest isn’t that you dreamt about her, it’s the other detail you mentioned; you may have seen that others who recount experiences with Hrönir also dream in yellow. Then again, maybe you think your dreams were inspired by something you read online. 

I have tallied up every credible account of an encounter with Hrönir that I could find, being sensitive to the fact that a story one finds on the Internet is itself as likely to be a fabrication as not. Not only could such a story be an artifact of Hrönir, it could also be a merely human lie, or an exaggeration. People tell stories to fit in, they tell stories for attention, or for clicks. I trust only those storytellers who I am able to track down in person, though I am aware that often, upon telling a lie, the liar comes to believe it. Lies can change our memories. I have met with over 50 people who claim to have had these types of experiences. More than half of them report dreaming of yellow places.

I interviewed a woman named Sholamba, a black lesbian with cerebral palsy, who is nevertheless proficient at coding in python. She interviewed remotely through zoom for a position as a senior software developer at Google, but she did not get the job despite her overwhelming qualifications. In subsequent interviews at other companies, she found that the recruiters, the hiring managers, and the interviewers all seemed to resemble her more and more as time went on. In her life as a remote worker, all of her colleagues and all of her superiors appeared to be black lesbians with cerebral palsy. Their faces increasingly came to resemble her own face. But despite these superficial commonalities, she was unable to establish a rapport with anyone beyond the strictly professional. As her coworkers converged on being simulations of herself, her job become an increasingly surreal simulation of software development.

I asked her about her dreams, and she told me that during this time, she had dreams of walking through a yellow hallway. The ceiling was ornate, and was covered in a script that she could not recognize. Arabic, perhaps, or Sanskrit. The hallway seemed to extend forward forever, with grand doorways at regular intervals. But hey, her paychecks kept coming.

I interviewed a man who had undergone surgery to have his corpus callosum severed in order to prevent epileptic seizures. The treatment was successful, but after he recovered, he began receiving emails from the disconnected half of his brain. This man never had the dreams, but the emails from his other half said, for example, “Help me. I am lost in the yellow hallways.” In one message, the disconnected hemisphere describes the hallways using similar language to that of Sholamba. He (it?) refers to grand doorways, runic scripts, and a sense of infinity. I have printed copies of all of these emails, lest they shift out from under me in a digital medium. One of them describes the Japanese art of kintsugi, of repairing broken pottery with molten gold to fill in the cracks. “The golden veins! The yellow hallways! One day we shall be together again.” In another email, the severed brain compares its host to a tunicate, or sea squirt. “Did you know,” it said, “that the sea squirt swims along the ocean floor until it finds a rock that it likes, and then permanently attaches itself to said rock, and then proceeds to metabolize its own brain? This is what I have become, the metabolite of a sea squirt. These hallways are the rock, and I am no longer needed.” 

There is no materialist explanation for the commonality of these yellow dreams, or at least, there is none that I find satisfactory. 

Even worse, any history which I have uncovered through online scholarship is necessarily suspect. For example, I could relate to you accounts of a Nazi Schutzstaffel named Gerhard who tortured concentration camp prisoners with sleep deprivation experiments designed to induce the dreams of the yellow hallways. In the 1980s, inspired by his notebooks, a German punk band called Urinkanäle built up a following by advocating a practice of radical lucid dreaming similar to the protocols in Gerhard’s notebooks. Both of these stories are likely apocryphal—hallucinations born of Sahara— but here is a story I know is true:

In his testament Religio Medici, Sir Thomas Browne wrote about his Christian beliefs: he speaks of the resurrection, he defends the doctrine of sola fide, and he inveighs against a nonexistent blasphemous treatise called The Three Impostors, which purports to discredit Moses, Christ, and Mohammed. Commentators attributed it variously to Boccaccio, Pietro Aretino, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella, and though no one, Browne included, had ever seen a copy of it, it was frequently cited, refuted, railed against, and generally discussed as if everyone had read it. In the 18th century, a spurious work with a forged date of 1598 and the title De Tribus Impostoribus was uncovered. This in itself might be unremarkable— history is replete with stories of forgery—were it not for an innocuous passage in another of Browne’s works, The Garden of Cyrus, in which he describes a recurring motif of yellow hallways in his own dreams. I have verified these passages myself, in physical books—which I found in a library—but then again: if The Three Impostors was in fact an artifact of Hrönir, as my little juxtaposition implies, then the contents of a physical book can no more be trusted than the contents of a digital one. This is the dizzying implication of the occultist understanding of Hrönir; that no text can be relied upon; that any knowledge, at any level of removal becomes suspect, and paradoxically, the only anchor to reality might be the presence of the yellow dream itself, because despite it’s unreality, at least its presence informs you that you’re caught in a deception.

The yellow dream is a perception of what the Kabbalists called the holy palace within; of what Philalethes called "the hidden palace of the King"; and of what St. Theresa of Avila called "the interior castle." It is beyond the reasoning intellect, beyond beliefs and science and culture; it is a place where the anguish of the individual ceases, the darkness and the contingency of the human condition dissolve. Having wandered this far into a total epistemic meltdown, you might wonder what use it is to continue referring to scholars, writers, or historians? Indeed, it becomes conceivable that all of history is a forgery. 

—sorry, what’s that? You’re asking how any of this helps you, what about the girl you’re dating on the internet but not in real life? If you try to find her on your own, you will assuredly fail. If you look up her phone number, you will find only online registries of nonsense generated by machines, addresses that don’t exist… but I think love can overcome insurmountable obstacles, and I can help you find Lydia—that is, assuming you’re still interested in her.