Disembodied Voices and Nodal Knowledge

Invisible creatures, they’re everywhere. Gets so you can’t even make a trip to the fridge without tripping over a fairy or stubbing your toe on a psionic entity composed entirely of fermented bits of industrial data. Even now, I’m writing to you across the void. I’m just a voice, a string of data. For all anyone really knows, I’m a long dead four hundred fifty pound Russian programmer writing to you from 1992 in a program I set to unleash to you from my still whirring Gateway, a minesweeper box open and waiting even still for my rotund fingers to return and conquer it.
That would be quite a trick especially since I’m about to talk about William Gibson’s 1996 novel Idoru, but maybe that’s part of it. But no, I’m not going to spend this post spreading a rumor that William Gibson is actually a feral computer program triggered years ago and reaching out to readers across the void, though I would ask you this: how many of you have actually seen him in person?
Before we explore further the invisible cosmic entity that is William Gibson, let’s skate back down the timeline to 1938 to Out of the Silent Planet, the first of three in C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy. Dr. Elwin Ransom is kidnapped and taken to a nearby planet where he meets a bevy of strange and exotic beings, the god-king of them all being a creature named Oyarsa, leader of the eldila, a race of spirit like creatures who watch over the creatures of the planet. Here’s a hunk of C.S. Lewis’ eloquent description:

“He perceived, gradually, that the place was full of eldila. The lights, or suggestions of light, which yesterday had been scattered over the island, were now all congregated in this one spot, and were all stationary or very faintly moving. The sun had risen by now, and still no one spoke. As he looked up to see the first, pale sunlight upon the monoloths, he became conscious that the air above him was full of a far greater complexity of light than the sunrise could explain, and light of a different kind, eldil-light. … Every visible creature in the grove had risen to its feet and was standing, more hushed than ever, with its head bowed; and Ransom saw (if it could be called seeing) that Oyarsa was coming up between the long lines of sculptured stones. Partly he knew it from the faces of the Malacandrians as their lord passed them; partly he saw –he could not deny that he saw— Oyarsa himself. He never could say what it was like. The merest whisper of light –no, less than that, the smallest diminution of shadow— was travelling along the uneven surgace of the ground-weed; or rather some difference in the look of the ground, too slight to be named in the language of the five senses, moved slowly towards him.” (Lewis, 188-119)

Here, it seems that C.S. Lewis is describing something akin to angels. His description of invisibility seems more spiritual, as if he is speaking to the Christian ideal, not a big stretch for Lewis, of a nearly invisible god and bevy of nearly invisible angels. The idea of invisibility, almost intangibility, separates Oyarsa from the unwashed masses. Oyarsa doesn’t dirty his feet by walking, he floats antiseptically separated from the physical world. Oyarsa, like the other invizzies that I’m going to tell you about live in a world of concepts and ideas. His is not the problem of where am I going to get my next hot dog or how do I get this smell off my feet, he’s concerned with the corruption of the planet, the fate of all living beings on his planet and others nearby, and how a race can live and die with dignity.

Let’s squeeze another invisible specimen in our digital pincers. Climb with me, up the ladder of time, if you will, to 1970, where we meet Fannie Mae, a Caleban. She is the invisible starlet of Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star. (Note to readers who’ve notched this book in their bed-post, I haven’t revealed anything yet, I don’t believe, and I’ll be careful.) She, if this creature does indeed wear the flourish invisible extras to distinguish between the sexes, exists on a separate plane of being from people and other physical beings. By existing on this plane, she is able to teleport beings around the universe, a very useful skill for people who don’t like to stay in one place for too long.

“The Caleban radiated. Its communication registered in the sentient mind as sound, but the ears denied they had heard anything. It was the same order of the effect the Caleban had on the eyes. You felt you were seeing something, but the visual centers refused to agree.” (Herbert, 19-20)

The Caleban is also pretty tough to hang out with since it only speaks in “connectives” a concept that seems to be based on the changes, connections, and differences between things. The Caleban recognizes nodal positions, which is a confluence of idea, a massive set of data, when viewed together gains meaning. “I date the verb as a nodal position,’ the Caleban said.” (Herbert, 102)

Kind of heady, but that’s the idea, wire the mind to blow with something that can’t quite be grasped, reach toward mental nirvana by surpassing meaning, arrive at pure bliss with a good solid bonk in the head. Still, these creatures are not invincible. The Caleban is pretty busy being whipped by a galactic masochist, and Oyarsa mentions that his planet got sort of jacked up by a force he wasn’t quite able to stop. These creatures aren’t god, per se, they’re more like a way of getting outside of ourselves and looking in, a way of talking about what you’re talking about, the calculus of ideas, the idea of not just looking at what we’re saying to ourselves, but perhaps the way we’re saying it, wrestling with the tone of meaning head on… Interestingly, both Oyarsa and the Caleban can barely see people who register similarly on the edges of their perception.

Now lets node it on forward to Gibsons 1996 Idoru. The main character, Laney, is a dude who can see patterns in large flows of data, essentially drawing meaning from abstraction. His talent is to uncover nodal points to reveal crucial information about people from seemingly insignificant data. It’s the reason the grocery store wants you to slide in your value card and bugs sneak into your computer to track your clicks.

“Laney was not, he was careful to point out, a voyeur. He had a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures, and a medically documented concentration-deficit he could toggle, under certain conditions, into a state of pathological hyperfocus. This made him, he continued over lattes in a Roppongi branch of Amos n’ Andes, an extremely good researcher… The relevant data, in terms of his current employability, was that he was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society.” (Gibson, Idoru, 30-31)

“Laney’s node-spotter function [from Idoru] is some sort of metaphor for whatever it is that I actually do. There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process.”
(Gibson, August 1999. … snatched from Wikipedia…^ Johnston, Anthony (August 1999). "William Gibson : All Tomorrow’s Parties : Waiting For The Man". Spike. http://www.spikemagazine.com/0899williamgibson.php. Retrieved 2007-07-13. )

Laney is set out to discover why an international rock star has pledged to marry an idoru, Rei Toei, a lady celebrity who is entirely a digital creation. She, like the Caleban and Oyarsa does not exist in physical reality as we know it. On occasion, she is projected into reality using some sort of holographic generator, but again, she represents knowledge in a way that exists on the edge of what man can understand. Even still, of the three invisible entities, the idoru is most real, most like a person, in fact, she is a bride.
These invisible creatures represent knowledge, a compendium of ideas greater than physical reality. These nodal ideas uncovered from vast bodies of knowledge, can lead to greater self discovery and social evolution. In each of them is embodied the struggle to communicate those nodal ideas to more simple, physical beings.
In Out of the Silent Planet, man travels to a far away place to encounter these ideas. In Whipping Star, man can already travel to that far away place and now must figure out how to communicate with something that exists on a plane composed only in nodal ideas. And in Idoru, Laney, using nodal knowledge, must figure out why that man is communicating with a nodal being.

The Doorway Into Summer

Tradition tells us that when tromping off into the thick of a good science fiction story a reader suspends her disbelief , that when she picks up a story to read it, she says to herself, “Hey, I know that there’s no such thing as intergalactic spaceships, time travel, and ruptures in the space-time continuum, but for the sake of having a little fun, hearing a good story, I guess I’ll go along with it.” But for a moment, let's consider this from another angle. Let's say that perhaps the best science fiction does not ask us simply to suspend our disbelief, rather it asks us to ascend our belief. It asks to say to ourselves that perhaps what we have never before accepted in our heart of hearts could indeed be possible. And when we look at it from this angle, we find that there is such a rich history of realized examples to pull from. People dreamed of outer space long before they sent up their dogs and monkeys to test out the waters. William Gibson, author of Neuromancer (1984) coined the term “cyberspace” and envisioned the Internet before it existed...

So, in honor of the potential of science fiction, and in fact, the potential of what we can discover in the world around us, and in ourselves. I’m breaking earth on this blog with an excerpt from Robert Heinlein’s “Doorway into Summer." First published in 1957, Heinlein invents, in fiction, a simple device: the automated floor vacuum. You may know it now as the Roomba. I’m following it, below, with Heinlein's casual description and vision of Autocad, the crucial design software now used by architects and engineers the world over.

"What Hired Girl would do (the first model, not the semi-intelligent robot I developed it into) was to clean floors ... any floor, all day long and without supervision. And there never was a floor that didn't need cleaning.
It swept, or mopped, or vacuum-cleaned, or polished, consulting tapes in its idiot memory to decide which. Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray on its upper surface, for someone brighter to decide whether to keep or throw away. It went quietly looking for dirt all day long, in search curves that could miss nothing, passing over clean floors in its endless search for dirty floors. It would get out of a room with people in it, like a well-trained maid, unless its mistress caught up with it and flipped a switch to tell the poor thing it was welcome. Around dinner time it would go to its stall and soak up a quick charge -- this was before we installed the everlasting power pack."
(Heinlein, 20-21)

and ...

"By the time I got to Miles's house I was whistling. I had quit worrying about that precious pair and had worked out in my head, in the last fifteen miles, two brand-new gadgets. One was a drafting machine, to be operated like an electric typewriter. I guessed that there must be easily fifty thousand engineers in the U.S. alone bending over drafting boards every day and hating it, because it gets you in your kidneys and ruins your eyes. Not that they didn't want to design -- they did want to -- but physically it was much too hard work.
This gismo would let them sit down in a big easy chair and tap keys and have the picture unfold on an easel above the keyboard. Depress three keys simultaneously and have a horizontal line appear just where you want it; depress another key and you fillet it in with a vertical line; depress two keys and then two more in succession and draw a line at an exact slant.
Cripes, for a small additional cost as an accessory, I could add a second easel, let an architect design in isometric (the only way to design), and have the second picture come out in perfect perspective rendering without his even looking at it. Why, I could even set the thing to pull floor plans and elevations right out of the isometric."
(Heinlein, 40)