Kahlil sat in his imaginary circle, his eyes closed, and tried to invoke the spirit of Amilcar Cabral, the African Marxist spiritual and anti-colonialist leader. He had been thinking that, if anything, the imposition of artificial intelligence onto his own biological reality-generative framework was a kind of colonialist act, an attempt to reorganize his patterns in obedience to some other entity’s goals. It’s not that he was unaware that it was already something that was going on all around him already, but since it was a disorganized mess, all tangled up in conflicting messages, it was still possible to navigate with some kind of agency, call it human agency, since the main organizing principle came from the center of one’s own processing self. But because Semblance might be able to untangle and organize the noise in a way that would expedite the messaging from a single source, call it a will, there was a greater chance it could over-code one’s central agency, and that could be the end of the self as he knew it.
He had attempted this before using some of the techniques he discovered in a tome of African magic that drew from old Egyptian sources. If you drew on Osiris and Isis, those poles from which we emerged as fragmentary manifestations of consciousness, like the Shiva and Shakti of Vedanta, he might rise through the mist of the totality of all being into a place where he might locate the soul of his lost hero. He sat but he was too aware of his body, of the slight tension in his spine, the mild irritation of his breathing brought about by a possible cold coming on. His abdomen expanded and relaxed gently, but there was another tension, just below, in the psoas, where the hips joined the thighs. It had been a long time since a yoga class, or since he tried to sit in this position, so his sitting this way wasn’t optimal, but then he remembered that he was once told, maybe by his uncle Ash, to use the sensations of his body and to ride through them into that place, rather than to forget about the body entirely. Ash had been a stage hypnotist, so he knew, maybe one of the few black men out there in that genre.
He wanted to know what Amilcar would say, perhaps not the actual Amilcar, but one that would emerge out of the suggestions he was giving his body and the subatomic particles of his thinking, a kind of collective of tiny inferences that would swarm together, take shape and form something like a whole separate entity within him, who could speak as if in a channeling trance. He wanted to hear that voice, as a way to decolonize his mind, get the thumbprints of Semblance the hell out of his head, because he felt its thumbprint on everything he touched. It wanted him to take on the values of the white people who ran the operation, of perhaps the least benevolent and most amoral among them, those who may want him to isolate himself further from the white folks who were around him, those who were maybe not too bad, increase his paranoia. It would have him return to the polite distance he had recently come out of. Fucking Redroth and Snyder for instance, not bad eggs; he could take them or leave them, but he wanted it to be his own choice, not some stroke of convenience that would help keep the order in place. He knew, his father made sure he understood years ago, that the order was maintained because blacks and whites were kept in their separate worlds, not joined by their common interest. But whites were maybe more content to leave things in place because of the advantages they had, which they were sold they had to protect from those like himself, and which bottom line they maybe didn’t want to admit to after all, but they understood on a level in the pit of their stomachs. You could hear it in their voices when you were around, a sudden stiffness and raspiness Kahlil could hear on his coming. That subtle transformation.
They really are afraid of you, Kahl, said the voice of Amilcar, from somewhere within the systems of tensions he felt within his frame. It was like a scaffolding around a thing, an absence, or blind spot, into which he couldn’t see or feel, but out of it came a voice, perhaps one only of his own, but one that he attached to the identity of Amilcar, as if everything he had known about the man had glommed together a dream which he could speak to, converse with, when he got himself into the right state.
But that Snyder fellow, there’s something about him that’s too stupid to know what to be afraid of. He wants to be your friend, you know. And there’s something about him that is impervious to Semblance, and all the information it has tried to pour into him to pull him away from you. He really does like you and look up to you, to your intelligence, your penetration. He will be useful, and he will be a friend.
I can’t speak for the rest of them. Though that woman whose attentions you crave, the only part-white one, she plays chess with almost everything that comes into her mind, and maybe that’s why she is hard to reach—she’ll argue a worm hole through everything that comes her way, prosecute it to its fullest, most infinitely and finely granularized packets of meaning into meaninglessness, including yourself. Good luck with that. But that said, I think you have a shot.
The thing that Semblance doesn’t have that you have is this Amilcar part of you, this fistful of muck of your spirit you pull out of your own self and assign with my identity, your self-imposed madness, because on the plane above where everyone of us is the same entity, it works that way, you know, if only in imagination, where all truth panics out of in a hysteria of ordering and aspiration to that façade you recognize as ordinary sanity. Semblance doesn’t know I exist, and has no way of even suggesting to itself that such a thing is possible. It wants to create its own entity within you, and for you to forget, in tiny steps, that there ever was a you that it replaced to begin with. But I will never let you slip, don’t worry about that. You are protected because you have me in your near-to-psychotic episodes where you do almost believe that I am real, though I am only you in that twisted and beautiful mindfuck you do to yourself, to scar and save yourself.
Thank you, great one.
You are the great one. Didn’t Snyder acknowledge that?
Jokingly, yes.
What did I tell you before about jokes?