[8] a short novel, notes from my dao in a deterministic universe, from in a tapas bar after the singularity — part 8 of a serial

And so here we merge after the singularity… the singularities which are anticipated and those that are not, there are thirty or forty people in the world who know about the two events. Its the dao and we are the only three people who have lived through this before. I’ll explain. The singularities are the equivalent of the New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki singularity which marked the beginning of the anthropocene. Though arguably the recent singularities are still ongoing. But this is merely the background to this small event. At a certain point in the future, the multitude will become aware of these singularities. But in the present, anywa we wonder if we would have dealt with Nomiko differently if we were unaware of the singularities? And yet wait — why is she called Nomiko here rather than say Nishi, Katherine or Susan or even Rares? No matter, she became one of the liaisons between Tokyo and which is to say me really. In a control society they have to believe they are in control. Whilst the dividuals know they are not. We didn’t know what political motives could rise up over us like a tidal wave, nor did we care. Sam and I felt betrayed by our inability to live differently than before [<<we are conceptual personae of exiles…>> Osaka says.] Even though there is no other way, our lives determined by the universe. Sometimes I wish we had just been supplied with a printed list of actions that it needed carrying out, but instead we had to negotiate our way deterritorializing the world we almost recognised…

But still how do I feel about my clone? Though I have written this, talked about her existence with the two people that understand the situation, her not being one of them. discussing the ontological crisis that our existence represents. We have talked about her existence endlessly over the years since this took place, just as we have talked about the missing Sam. The one from here went missing and died in Tokyo. We wanted and had to work out how to live when the versions of ourselves who were born here are different. Though we are the ones who must apply the necessary corrective actions. Osaka who has her own clone in Tokyo suggests that we are first time this type of correction action has been applied by the universe. Makes sense, Sam thinks. Might be less entropic than the more obvious asteroid solution… a semi sentient species becoming extinct through the use of an asteroid…Sam thinks we exist here to prevent some children being born, to prevent some new science being invented. To kill and prevent science as in the Strugatski story. Definitely, maybe. The additional complexity of our relations with the non-psychopathic version that lives here has made things difficult. Motives had nothing to do with us. The people who died because we came here. The people who lived because we came here. Only an indeterminist would think it was anything to do with us. Then, as now, there is nothing in my imaginary that thinks of itself as Nomiko any longer, I have lived longer with my adopted name and identity in exile than i did as the young woman, the psychopathic version of Nomiko that I once was. But still what do I feel about my clone? The differences the samenesses the impossibilities. She has always found talking with me difficult. This is what I am most interested in writing into my notebook, to capture the memories, the pen gliding over the paper. Her working here, whatever her real work is, scarcely mattered, scarcely matters. As at the moment of writing this what is important was how much time they spent together and how Nomiko and he lived together in her warehouse apartment in Bow. Needless to say we kept both of them, along with everyone else who we might imagine threatening us, under strict surveillance. As much or more than the levels of surveillance my replacement mother, the council and the state keep us under surveillance. And him what about him? I thought he died beside a frozen lake, a pond really in Hokkido. But here he is in London working in small computer technical support.

it was the last friday of the month, the long holiday weekend, so there was a group of people from K spending time in the bar. I am leaning against the bar talking with Sam, who is (still) a tall man, (still) lightly built, I touch his face, his right arm, his body. (Moments of desire). My kevlar lined leather jacket is hanging on the stool besides us, its not to heavy, black, red lining, collar, zips, inside and outside pockets, beneath, I am wearing black trousers, flat soled boots, and a dark black brown short sleeved leather teeshirt. My dragon tattoos emerging from the sleeves, few people here know what they mean. And my usual underwear. He is in a dark coloured Paul Smith suit, I cannot remember whether it was grey, dark brown or black… So, Sam being nicer (laughs) than I am treats his mother, sister, friends as if they are the original ones… Whereas O and I find this difficult, O is with J looking after the children, our children, she is being aunterly. So, it’s friday afternoon, before the late summer weekend holiday and we are taking the long weekend off. O and J are staying tonight at least.

And then explain the dao; one says the dao when one wants to to speak of the great process of things and its fund of immanance. One says my dao when referring to my personal way of doing.things and achieving success. In our deterministic universe my dao haunts me. The personal dao is procedure…process and these excerpts of spoken words, phrases, sentences spoken, dialogism, reflects the dao of my psychopath youth. Now thought my dao is different. Is dao the same here? Are the texts the same?

<<Who would have imagined the version of you here was a police.>> Sam said. He is looking across at them. <<Do you resent the fact that you died here because of her being police?>> I asked him after we understood the differences we existed to correct. << No, it would have been easier if she didn’t exist as well. You find it more entertaining than I do…>> He said. <<I’m glad because it means she is not a copy of me. You have no spare version of me.>> I said << Impossible, I prefer my wife… >> He said. I said for him, to him, << the things that interest are why us? why is it so difficult? why has it been so impossible? Why this collective subject ? I’m enjoying observing them,>> I said to him. <<We are old in young bodies. Desire is strange for us.. for them its just normal.>> Our words are overcoded by our deep affection for one another. We speak and drink, eat and watch. Giyeme Beyene is playing in the background. <<Zhuangzi says “If you do good, do not seek renown. If you do evil, avoid punishment…” >> I said.<<Though our bodies are the same age as theirs, our minds are decades older, it shows in the things we desire…>> Sam said looking across the room. <<we are copies of our original selves, not of the ones from here.>> << It was either us or an asteroid wiping out the species…>> Sam suggests. <<Imagine employing the Si-fan to save the species…>> I said. << Not surprising only the Si-fan has a reason to care.>> <<Feeding ones life… as Xi Kang said>> <<Her parents are not the same as my parents…>>

We look like twins, and are genetically identical. We are not twins but more like clones. She is the original and I am the older copy who exist to apply corrective actions to the species, world, to correct. She is wearing a white linen shirt, grey linen trousers and white shoes. I am more muscular than my clone. To the people in the cafe bar we look like identical twins, the differences are discernible to those who look at us, the way we look, stand, talk and think. Giyeme Beyene is playing in the background. On the other side O’s clone is less physically damaged than she is, i think this is why her clone is in Tokyo whilst she is is in London. Her experiences are vastly different. Events had long ago placed us on a collision path. We tried to avoid meeting her, but it was inevitable that we would. She thought she was interested in meeting me, but discovered she was not. They arrived late, I could see her leg was hurting as she limped to the table. We are in the (not) too crowded bar, do we recognize ourselves? i do not know when my clone diverged to become like this. She was a police, whereas I was their nightmare. At her age I was an exiled assassin, still psychopathic. Gradually becoming unpsychopathic. Unlike me N is not a psychopath. She thinks of me as her clone and she is unable to understand the scale of the differences between us, the decades, the social, how I was constructed and yet I can see that what motivates N it is only a little mysterious. Something so final in the words. Something immovable in the semantics that created us.

We are sitting here at the bar waiting for our food, drinking and then eating tapas, holding a few hours in the late afternoon to speak. She is looking across at me perhaps looking at where I hung my jacket on the back of the chair, my soft leather teeshirt attracting glances, stares, or was in the dragon tattoos emerging from my short sleeves? Did anyone understand what the dragon tattoos mean? Do they have the same meaning in this place as they did at home? Did either of them really understand what they meant, I don’t think so. Nor could N understand why I was wearing such a glamorous top, this time at least I can enjoy the glamor.

<<It makes little sense, to be as old as we are again and not to exploit the differences from last time…>>

Nomiko is leaving for Tokyo tomorrow. He, the other N, Nick, Niklas feels terrible about this. He is scared she will not return. He is resigned to the fact she may not return. They talked about everything, their lives, what they had done since New York, cases, the work, meetings, friends, politics, science. Stockholm was the last work he did for the council, it was a way of being forgiven and allowed to become an exile. In other words their lives apart. In other words their lives becoming closer. Edging as one does towards domesticity and togetherness. Trying to establish a relationship with the monster sitting across the room from them, (at the table with them? I don’t remember.) She was on her second margarita and was a little lightheaded. We had always skirted around the edges of the discussion that was the ontological difference, the crisis of being that would always separate us, and yet not. But on this day we stopped, in this tapas bar, on this evening as I watched them surrender and fall into domesticity and togetherness. Becoming domesticated. But how were we to speak? She and I could never speak. I pretended. I stopped pretending. I told her about my preference for Meile white goods. To be. There is no difference, there are differences, we are simply different types of criminal. She never understood this. <<you came here into exile, I am a prematurely retired police,>> she says, lying about her retirement. (How do I know this? Because we have them under intense and perpetual surveillance). Let’s begin again with the other one… Nomiko who is leaving for Tokyo tomorrow. She can travel whilst we cannot. He cannot travel to Tokyo. I cannot travel to Tokyo. Everyone had tried to have relations with, believed it was possible to imagine a collective or singular subject, a community that might exist, a society that isn’t broken. But its not possible. They are sitting at a marble table that was once a sewing table. They are slightly drunk, deep in the fuzzy sets of their lives, not understanding that no matter what the society is like, what the communities they live in are like being will always remain unbearable [ …always already broken in our deterministic universe… ] We know this better than anyone. N and N both believe things could be better. But her clone, me, (call me) Song is different, thinks that Humans are determined to be like this, and that even after all these decades of trying I am still exuding a sense of all pervading menace. After this friday knowing the scale of our problems and we are learning to talk together. feel relaxed.

<< I cannot ever go there, seeing my family is not possible.>> He says. << And i cannot stay here. Because they would send people. >> Nishi says to him. << I would rather stay. Perhaps I’ll tell them. Perhaps I cannot…>> Nishi says.<< I WOULD like to travel with you…>> He cannot bring himself to say why he cannot. <<Why am I sitting in the bar watching this woman? this couple? Why do we exist?>> Nishi asked him. <<Why do they exist?>> A rhetorical question neither of them knows how to answer.

<< At least she can travel back and forth. >> I say as gently as I can manage to Sam. (Sometimes I am surprisingly gentle towards her.) I say — She is the original, we are exiles, nomads applying necessary corrections. < Did you come alone? Are you alone? > She asked me once. No I told her, we came together. I do not tell this policewoman that I am here to kill the people she cannot.

In a sense the difference is delineated/exemplified by the fact that these people cannot escape from their pasts, from their futures, just as they don’t know why they ended up sitting together in this tapas bar in London. How they managed to avoid harming one another is a mystery and yet I know why. The universe needs us to exist to do something(s). Exist. Become. I (Song, Park and so on) pauses and smiles. They couldn’t do it so it brought us, employed us. It doesn’t matter whether it was me or my partner who said that, its the dao. I am looking past my partner who will be interrogating a sociopath on Tuesday. Sam would also have a clone, except the other Sam died in Tokyo. More than friends. I don’t think I would ever have spoken to N if Sam did not exist. Shortly after we arrived in London, we began to study everything, comparing what we could remember, and all the rather strange and fantastical details amongst which we found ourselves, a peculiar ontological gesture to understand why Why WHY? We departed from happiness and began constructing happiness again.

“From every knot in the wooden floor of the cafe, every blemish in the polished concrete floor, the hiss of the essence of the espresso machine, to the rhizomic grass growing in the crevices of the walled courtyard to the rear of the cafe, the tree growing in the sunlight corner, to the last slither on the stairs, scuff marks, mud, the Saharan sand in the air and steadily coating the vehicles. This was all a neo (now almost) secret preparation for the continuation of the friendship. Later we would meet with others at the bizarre decadence of the hospital club sipping vodka late at night over burgers. (Who could imagine me there?) The insanity of love and friendship. Beyond this the detailed examination of the others desired objects means little, the surprising curves and angles of the body, the folds and warm limits emerging from the laughter. It must be so unless the opposite is true and we’d rather be sitting drinking margaritas and whiskey sours than returning to the apartment in the building which her mother had bought for her. I don’t think we had sex that night. But she, Nishi has always insisted we did. Nishi occupied the top floors of the building, I had taken one of the studio apartments as mine. << In case we break up, find ourselves incapable of being together.>> i explained/said. << A space that is yours, a hidden space…>> she called it. When she arrived in the building she had put a small, crackling record player between the desk and the door, she turned the room into what passes for a home for a denizen of the liquid modern, the acres of empty space gradually filling with things arriving from home. It became a place she can curl up in her private space and breathe more easily; on evenings spent in front of the machine, (which changed into expensive digital equipment later) and in front of the machine with a growing circle of friends, whose conversation gave her depressed and melancholic soul hope, sometimes when laughter filled the now bigger space she wondered what it was like to be a mother. A grey parrot living in a large cage, which moved upstairs to her apartment, did she ever let it out to fly around the room or local sky ? We were as in the phrase <<I see it a aberrant and broken, you see it as the normal course of events….>> Words announcing the return of seduction. Others have other words, looks, gazes, gestures. But we had tried all of these with others and sometimes with each other. All we had was a new knowledge of what monsters we might have been. Her with her scarred and repaired body, me with my endless running from my past, my family. The ontological chasm is revealed. “

I, Song, with his arm around my leather covered waist and my hand on his shoulder, her clone, said to him <<We should go.>> before saying as we travelled north, that <<We both needed to get used to the idea that we would have to surveil them for the foreseeable future.>> Sam sighs, <<I know, I’ll raise a surveillance request and arrange the contract is signed off tomorrow…>> Such is the banal consequence of the daoist and her partner looking at her clone across a tapas bar in London.