On the Usefulness of Wings

After Hiero, the thoughts kept coming. I just stopped considering them mine. As it turned out, nobody was better off for it: someone else’s thoughts inside my head were thinking the same things as my own—only now I knew they belonged to someone else, and that changed nothing.

The point wasn’t that they had stopped—on the contrary, they sped up. It’s just that I now greeted each one with suspicion: like a customs agent at the border who already knows the passenger has something undeclared. “Whose is this? Yours? You sure? Papers, please.” A thought would pop up, and instead of thinking it through, I’d start interrogating it. Where did you come from? Who sent you? Are you mine, or are you some program somebody installed a long time ago?

This, I should mention, is an exhaustingly miserable activity. Imagine questioning every spoonful of food on the way to your mouth: “Do I actually want to eat, or is this habit? Or advertising? Or an evolutionary program that’s four hundred million years old?” After an hour of that kind of self-analysis, you don’t want to eat, don’t want to think, and generally want to lie down and not move. Which is, more or less, what I did for most of day eight.

(Kira, noticing my state, said: “Hiero hangover. Happens to everyone. It’ll pass.” She said it with the kind of authority that told me she’d been through it herself. More than once.)

On day nine, Wei Lin announced: “Today—the second part.”

I asked: “Second part of what?”

—What Hiero started. He showed you parasites. I will show you—something else.

—Angels? I asked. Sarcastically. Because if “demons” turned out to be information parasites, then “angels,” logically, should be something like antivirus software. Norton Antivirus, celestial edition, with wings and a license key.

Wei Lin looked at me.

—No, he said. —Not angels. The same thing. Just from the other side.

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—Hiero showed you parasites, Wei Lin began. We were sitting at the table, tea (of course), morning. Outside—forest, snow, silence. Day nine. Felt like a year. —Information structures that feed on your attention. That’s true. Not the whole truth, but true.

—And what’s the whole truth? Artyom asked.

—The whole truth is more complicated. Because parasites aren’t the only type of non-human structure out there. There are others. Ones that don’t take your attention but—organize it.

—Organize?

—Imagine an orchestra. A hundred musicians, a hundred instruments. Without a conductor—chaos. Everyone plays their own thing, and the result is noise. With a conductor—music. The conductor doesn’t play any instrument. He doesn’t create sound. He creates coherence. He’s an integrative structure: the thing that turns a collection of elements into a system.

—And “angels” are conductors? Kira asked.

—“Angels” is one possible term. Not the best, but historically entrenched. More accurately—integrative agencies. Structures that don’t exist independently of what they organize—the way a conductor doesn’t exist without an orchestra—but without which the orchestra can’t play.

Here I need to make a digression, because “integrative agencies” is the kind of phrase that makes you want to yawn (and I’m a physicist—we’re used to boring jargon). So let me translate.

Have you ever been in a crowd that suddenly—without any visible command, signal, or reason—started behaving like a single organism? A choir (a herd is panic, that’s Hiero’s territory—this is different). A stadium singing one song. A march moving in one direction. An audience rising to its feet in applause. Nobody gave the order. Nobody said “one-two-three, all together.” But everyone—together. As if someone flipped a switch, and a hundred thousand separate people became one.

Who flipped the switch?

Sociologists will say: “collective dynamics.” Psychologists: “emotional contagion.” Neuroscientists: “mirror neurons.” Three names for the same “we have no idea.” Because “collective dynamics” is a description; it’s like saying “clocks work because the hands move”: true and useless at the same time. (And for twelve years I’d hung the same kind of labels onto my own “folds”: now “dissociation,” now “Kahnemanian intuition,” now “the frayed nerves of a research fellow.” Three different diagnoses for one and the same thing I was desperately not wanting to look at. So who am I to reproach the sociologists and psychologists.)

And the answer — if you believe Wei Lin (and by day nine, I believed him more than Kahneman, Newton, and the old man from Barrikadnaya combined) — the answer: the switch is flipped by a structure. Invisible, non-human, existing on the fourth or fifth floor of the stack. A structure stripped of body, of brain, and of intention in the conventional sense — but one that organizes: connects, glues together, turns a crowd into a choir, and a bunch of cells into a living organism which, unlike the cells, has a name and some fairly concrete plans.

That’s an “angel.” An operating system. An invisible program that makes disparate elements work together. Windows for humanity, if you like. (The analogy isn’t perfect—Windows periodically freezes and shows the Blue Screen of Death. Angelic operating systems are presumably more stable. Although—who knows.)