What the Fire Sees: A Divided Reader

Preface

Divided was incorporated in 2018. There were two books that drove this decision: Ian White’s Here Is Information. Mobilise. and Douglas Crimp’s Before Pictures (both 2016). Both transcribe unvalidated states and formations, which makes you feel a different life is plausible, because it is in fact already here, unvalidated. Reading this writing, you sink into its rhythm and then keep searching for it. The rhythm was the message.

What the fire sees, the vision of the thing that produces light, is a primal thought and a reverse perspective. Wanting to know outcomes in advance – desiring a guarantee before the show – is a conservative position as it can only rely on established systems of value. Old modes, old institutions guarantee one’s legibility while breaking intuition. Forecasting is precisely the opposite of politics and what we believe is important in shared work: a risk taken together because things can be done differently.

Then how can difference not be a consumer choice? Conflicting positions are not a form of entertainment or titillation to be leveraged. Instead they make a case for what it means to remain torn, complex, unconsolidated, and for that to be a ground. In this book, we are trying to make an architecture like this, with no world-building aspiration. The market singles one out as a consumer only, harnesses desire and makes it personal. It’s a sham and a bad rehearsal: desire is not connected to any single choice, it functions in the mutual realm.

Sontag’s advice to a writer was to find a limb and go out on it. This was a way of speaking about form. If the unknown and emancipatory aspect of words is calibrated by the consensus of neoliberalism, there can be no limbs. We are interested in writing as a medium that decouples the grip of the status quo from the words themselves: putting everything in movement, disrupting patterns of thought and freeing (trusting) the reader. A kind of writing that has let go of the need for control.

Forever

Amy Ireland

The wall rears up at an uncanny angle and folds itself suddenly inwards over my head. There’s a crunch as something collides with my left temple, followed by a burst of supernatural pain which mushrooms rapidly, incoherently, outwards before lodging itself someplace deep beneath the parietal bone. What was I saying? I was saying something. I try to get a hold of myself, forcing my eyes to focus on a pair of combat boots planted next to my face, which, I now understand, is on the floor. I can’t get up. There’s a girl, she is peering down at me from somewhere far above the tops of the tall black boots. Even through the face-scrambler I can see that she doesn’t mean well. I try to protest, but she is crouched right over me now, holding my head down and pressing something cold against the base of my skull. The chill relents for just a second as if she’s hesitating, then returns all the more fiercely, accompanied by the full resources of the body’s capacity for pain.

*

The first thing I am conscious of is Dee’s voice. She’s talking to someone else. A doctor? An attendant. ‘He’s my husband,’ I hear her say. An air-conditioning unit snarls warily in the corner. I struggle against the tightness of the sheets. My body is intact. Thank God. Pus-white room. The furniture’s all on wheels. It’s a clinic. Dee is in a chair by the bed, watching me. Noticing the sudden, subtle activation of the muscles in my face, she places a hand on my thigh through the sheet, and says, ‘So, how’s it feel?’

Something is up. The room is overwhelming. Everything is so highly defined that there’s hardly any depth of field – it’s all foreground. Nothing out of focus, each line a distilled migraine of perfect form. It’s excruciating despite the austerity of the medical environment. Like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, where some kind of spiritual ideal is extracted from nothing but the most obedient replication of nature. A whole vertigo of whites inhabits the interstice between the embossed paper mat on the table beside the bed and the plastic tray it sits beneath. If my concentration lingers a little too long on any one feature, a whole new world blossoms out of it. Like a sort of noetic zoom. I seize involuntarily on a grain of whiteness which unfolds into a glacial landscape of gothic micro-tonalities. Then my attention is drawn by a peculiar specificity of shadow and the zoom function kicks in again, lurching me into a meta-hellscape of fractal whiteness. Completely abstracting me from the world of the clinic, of Dee, of human relationships. It starts to occur to me that I might not be able to find my way back.

‘They say it will take you a while to adjust,’ Dee offers, sensing my disorientation. ‘But you’re looking pretty good … for a guy who’s been in a vat for nine months.’

‘Why is everything so … intense?’ I ask.

‘Ah, you don’t remember?’ the unnamed attendant enquires, a little too amicably, as if the question were also a test.

‘I remember blacking out,’ I venture.

The attendant frowns. ‘You paid for this Mr Bettencourt. You don’t remember?’

The logo on his coat reads ‘ID’, with the ‘I’ followed by an infinity symbol, the second loop of which is half filled in to make the ‘D’. It’s a first-tier private clinic.

‘Fuuuck,’ Dee interjects. She always took pleasure in crudeness. A personal protest against what she saw as my relentless civility and erudition, something I liked to call ‘cultivation’, but which for her was merely a direct and unearned expression of my family’s money. And to tell the truth, it probably was. Most of it was from outrageously expensive neurological modifications. It was also her way of telling my family she didn’t need their money and could do perfectly well on her own. ‘It’s like they said though,’ she continues, ‘your long-term memory’s intact. Right? I mean, you still remember me?’

‘Yes. Well, you’re a lot more … acute now.’

She grins wickedly. The skin around her eyes folds into deep, unfortunate runnels. Her stubbornness has cost her a certain level of biotechnological luxury I at least had taken full advantage of. She seems old.

‘You look younger than me now,’ she says, guessing my thoughts with telepathic acuity.

‘I do?’

The attendant taps something into his tablet.

‘Shit you really are hopeless,’ Dee continues. ‘The vat thing? You got de-aged.

That takes a moment to sink in. I struggle to extract my forearm from the network of tubes that runs over it, under it, and into it, and lift it as high as I can until a hand comes into view. The skin is uncharacteristically smooth and uniform, like a teenager’s, and the nails are frighteningly long, but there’s a mole, and a familiar stippling of blond hair across the knuckles that assures me it’s my left hand. But my left hand forty years ago. The attendant activates the camera on his tablet and holds it screen-side up to me so that I can see my image on the display. Staring back at me is an alternativetimeline version my nineteen-year-old self. He’s not quite the same nineteen-year-old I remember. The wide bone structure is there, freshly discernible under regrown tissue. There are no lines in his cheeks or his forehead, his hair has miraculously re-sprouted and the hairline decamped from the fall-back position high atop the cranium to its old post, just north of the brow. But his expression is different. Vacant. A bit lost. Like a dementia patient. It gives him an otherworldly quality. It’s almost angelic.

‘I’d always assumed you’d die before me, since, you know, statistically, women live longer than men, and you were already way older than me,’ Dee says, ‘but I never foresaw this.’

My overclocked sensorium detects a note of ridicule in that last clause I wouldn’t normally have picked up on.

‘Mr Bettencourt,’ the attendant commands, interrupting any possible enquiry into the source of Dee’s derision. ‘You’ve suffered severe memory loss. Hence the need for the mind jack. It’s a memory upgrade that will ensure your sense of succession is maintained in the face of the lapses that tend to occur as a result of your life-extension treatment. A large percentage of recipients experience this side effect. Unfortunately, it’s part of using experimental technology, and as you are no doubt aware, if you had left it any longer, you wouldn’t have been eligible for the extension. The good thing is that the jack retains so thorough a ledger of your day-to-day experience, and at such high resolution, that, should you wish, you can instantly and perfectly reconstruct any moment of your past experience in order to relive it or re-inspect its contents. It also records unconscious psychic detail and will grant you perfect recall of your dreams. The depth of information it is capable of accumulating does have certain ethical and legal consequences … Groups in third and fourth are trying to have them classified as low-level consciousnesses as we speak, but this is mainly an excuse to prevent us from installing them. Besides,’ he adds, with professional inscrutability, ‘should this be true, well, you could consider yourself backed-up for life. But we will discuss these details further when you have healed.’ He lowers the lighting in the room using the tablet. ‘All visitors are required to leave before midnight, Mrs Bettencourt,’ he says to Dee. Then just before the exit, he turns and declares quite unexpectedly, ‘You’ll be reassured to know that security here is of the highest order,’ before vanishing through the door.

‘Is there a threat?’ I ask, but it’s too late for a reply.

‘Don’t sweat it,’ Dee says. ‘Nothing like what’s been happening down in fourth tier can possibly happen here.’

‘What happened in fourth?’

‘The usual. Anti-immortality sentiment, protests, kids with contraband jacks or exoskeletons lifted from the factories where they work. But there’s a manifesto that’s going around the upper tiers now. Elite stuff. Attributed to a group that calls itself the White Cell. Nature’s immune system. Get it?’

‘That is reactive nonsense,’ I splutter, a little stunned at my own vitriol.

‘Is it though?’ Dee asks. ‘You’re the one who’s trying to freeze things into place. They’re fighting in the name of time. Of change. That’s active, not reactive.’ She pokes one of the nutrient bags suspended above my head that has the clinic logo on it. ‘That infinity symbol? Kinda looks like an hourglass if you turn it on its end.’

‘But they have no idea what they could be depriving us, I mean, humanity of. This is going to change everything. Politics, economics, religion. It will be the greatest transformation in human history.’ I can feel myself warming up now. The implications of what I’ve elected to put myself through are starting to become clear to me. ‘And I will be part of it.’

A warlike expression flashes across Dee’s face. ‘You get a few families of wealthy gerontocrats monopolising continuity enhancement, or whatever the fuck the latest PR euphemism is, and everything changes a great deal once, then never again.’ She stares out the window at a view I can’t see from my position in the bed. A security drone skims past high up in the frame.

‘This is not about trying to control time … it’s about … being rational. It’s about optimising the human capacity for—’

‘You’re afraid of death,’ she interrupts. ‘It’s got nothing to do with the transformation of humankind. You’re afraid of things going on without you. You’re afraid that the universe doesn’t make sense in some way that includes you.’

I can feel the residue of an old mental defence system struggling to assemble itself in the ashes of my burned-out id, but nothing coherent comes from it.

Then she adds, almost to herself, ‘This is why it all went wrong for us.’

‘What?’ I demand. ‘What went wrong?’

But Dee withholds a response.

I try to bring my most recent memory of her to mind. Something concrete, from before the upgrade. But it’s all too vague. I just keep getting her in the chair next to the bed from half an hour ago, the pressure of her hand on my thigh. Her innate eroticism, even now, in the inclination of her neck as she peers out the window at something I can’t see. Even despite her ageing face, she still looks as handsome as ever, if a little martial. I take advantage of her distracted gaze to drink it all in, from her maybe-too-severe military haircut to the point just below her knees where the edge of the bed interrupts my view. My hope is that this might trigger a lost recollection of past lovemaking, and then this will be added to the library of memories I can replay. But there’s nothing. She’s not there. It’s just a blank. Biological memory feels like such a sham next to the crystal-clear recall of the mind jack. I return to the vision of her hand on my thigh instead, holding it in place and examining its details one by one. I notice that she isn’t wearing her wedding ring. That’s when the buzz sets in. It’s in my bone structure, but not my ears. The sense-image of Dee’s hand freezes and then starts to jitter about, I can’t clear it from my perception, it overlays everything in the room, an enormous, pale hand pressing down on me. I can feel my adrenaline rising. Instinct tells me to get out of the bed. ‘Dee?’ I murmur, hiding my urgency. Trying to get her into the clear spot in my vision. ‘Dee. The jack. It’s wrong.’

But as she turns back slowly from the window her face is no longer her own. ‘Dee?’ I manage to get one foot out of the sheets and onto the ground. ‘It’s not about controlling time.’

*

The wall rears up at an uncanny angle and folds itself suddenly inwards over my head. There’s a crunch as something collides with my left temple, followed by a burst of supernatural pain which mushrooms rapidly, incoherently, outwards before lodging itself someplace deep beneath the parietal bone. What was I saying? I was saying something. I try to get a hold of myself, forcing my eyes to focus on the pair of combat boots planted next to my face, which, I now understand, is on the floor. I can’t get up. There’s a girl, she is peering down at me from somewhere far above the tops of the tall black boots. Even through the face-scrambler I can see that she doesn’t mean well. I try to protest, but she is crouched right over me now, holding my head down and pressing something cold against the base of my skull. The chill relents for just a second as if she’s hesitating, and then returns all the more fiercely, accompanied by the full resources of the body’s capacity for pain.

*

‘Shit.’ A woman with grey hair and a stolen arm jack yanks a pair of goggles off her face and extracts a thin prism-shaped drive from the machine the goggles are plugged into. She holds it out to her companion who is clinging to a ladder high above, encircled by a dim halo of red light. ‘You know this guy Deianeira?’

The woman on the ladder says nothing.

‘Deianeira? Dee? You know this guy?’

‘Yeah,’ Dee shouts down after a long pause. ‘He was an ex. We’d been divorced for eight years before I looped him.’

The woman with the arm jack peers tentatively at the drive. ‘Are you … sure you’re okay with it?’

Dee stares darkly down into the bunker. At least with a biomemory she won’t be condemned to remember this shit forever. ‘Yeah. Fuck him,’ she replies. ‘Fuck all the geros. Imagine thinking you deserved to live forever. Make sure the power stays on.’

‘Sure,’ says the other White Cell operative, and slams the drive into a vacant slot in a rig that spiders out across the curved walls of the bunker – a vortex of thick cables connecting thousands of processors to a generator in the centre of the room. Dee climbs several metres up the ladder she’s holding onto and exits through a hatch in the ceiling. The remaining White Cell operative scrawls ‘Bettencourt’ illegibly on a label by the slot then hoists herself up the ladder with her jacked left arm, three rungs at a time. She unplugs the red neon tube dangling from a cord beneath the hatch, curls her legs up into the crawlspace above, and disappears. The sound of a magnetic lock echoes briefly in the distance, then silence. Nothing to relieve the pressure of the void but the flutter of green-black drive lights, each corresponding to a loop of perfect gerontocrat memory, playing over and over again, forever, in the darkness.

The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat

Aurelia Guo

Oversensitive to pain

Now us,

A nude female who smiles at the viewer

that becomes legible through the reflective interpretive act of the subject

Our brain gets very aroused when we’re focused on time

That it’s about degradation and that it can’t be pretend

The shrewd, brilliant clown

who would speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental’.

Where acts overcome identities

That their mouths almost touch their chests

a perversion of diligence: they tend to be highly rational and eager to show that they’re worthy of responsibility

as supposed proof that sexual liberation had made life unacceptably dangerous

and for buying into the idea that women do just need a good fuck

Eileen lives in a filthy house

guzzles vermouth and feels enslaved by her abusive, alcoholic father

Frigid

She sounds like a great woman

Work hard the rest is a mystery

That her work is self-consciously about fetishism

The object stands in for something else and has sexual implications

that sexual acts have private meanings that can’t be grasped from a public perspective

That it’s about degradation and that it can’t be pretend

Several of which concerned her conviction that white people litter less than people of colour

which is unchanged – other than by decay

To be dirty, to smell

Everyone looks admiringly at the dog

In real life she is allergic to dogs

which is unchanged – other than by decay

and I’m at my desk, eating my feelings

taking pleasure where she finds it

a seasoned dyke is worth more than a dozen bi-curious time wasters and that’s especially true if you’re a problem-solver with a desire for control

I do what I want, and the universe seems to be conspiring to get me to keep doing it.

Do you feel you’ve