“The conception of happiness, in other words, resonates irremediably with that of resurrection. It is just the same with the conception of the past, which makes history into its affair. The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection. Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before? Is there not an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today? Have not the women, who we court, sisters who they do not recognize anymore? If so, then there is a secret protocol between the generations of the past and that of our own. For we have been expected upon this earth. For it has been given us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim.”
- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
I
I worked with a member of the O5 Counsel once, though it was many years before she would actually claim that title. She worked under me as an assistant researcher, tasked with searching the archives for whatever piece of information my latest whim demanded, and I must say was rather clumsy at the work. One day she went to search through the stacks and did not return for almost three days. When she re-entered my office she was wearing the same clothes as before, with haggard eyes and a bloodshot face. She would not tell me what had happened despite any order, and soon after requested a transfer out of my department.
Almost 15 years later she returned to my department, this time ranking infinitely above me. She dismissed her guards and poured us glasses from a bottle of vintage wine. We sat drinking for a while before the wine made me to the question I’d been holding in for so many years.
“What happened to you in those archives?”
She stared at her wine as she swirled it in the glass. “I was expecting you to ask that. I think it’s the question I came here to answer.” She sighed and placed the glass on the table, then leaned forward.
“I’m not sure how to explain it. Not sure if there even is anything to explain. I don’t think I did anything more than reading. I was looking for what you asked for, those files on Midwest Emo, and I just… found something else. A journal. An old one, black leather. I could barely read the handwriting inside at first. For some reason I kept trying, and I got the hang of it pretty quickly.”
She paused, and I knew it was for my benefit, not hers. There’s no such thing as an O5 member stopping by for casual drinks and reminiscing. They’re playing the game at too high of a level for that.
“It must have belonged to somebody important.”
“I don’t think so.” She shrugged. “It was too anodyne. Too day-to-day. As far as I could tell it belonged to some union member in Kansas during the 50s, but he didn’t seem to be an influential one. Damn good writer though. It was mostly just personal stuff, little musings, observations, complaints, but he knew how to pull a word out like the best I’ve seen. Never read somebody bitch about their job so philosophically. You ever read Pessoa?”
“You’re asking me that?”
“Yeah, of course. Well it was kind of like that. Went on for about three fourths of the journal and then it just ended. The next ten pages were blank.” While talking she’d emptied the wine glass. She refilled it almost to the top and kept going, ignoring the drops that spilled on her suit paints. “The rest was a diagram.”
“Just one?”
“Ha. You’ll see. I’d completely lost track of time by that point, but I must have spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out. I actually had to rip the last 20 sheets out and arrange them on the floor before it all started making sense.”
“I’m finding it hard to believe you lost track of so much time reading one journal you didn’t come back for 68 hours.” I could feel my natural curiosity starting to override my sense of self-preservation, and I had to struggle to fight it back down. That was what she was counting on, I told myself.
“Let me finish. The damn thing was… I don’t know how to describe it. Each sheet had two sides to it, and somehow he’d managed to arrange it that when you put them all in a 4x5 grid, it wouldn’t matter which side of any sheet was facing up: it’d be completely coherent. Flip a different sheet over and the whole diagram stayed coherent, but the meaning completely changed.” She paused again.
“Fuck me,” I said. I was trying to imagine what it would have been like for her, kneeling down in that warehouse. Turning over page after page. Endlessly reclassifying data. Two to the power of twenty different combinations. “I’m amazed you came back at all.”
“It was… I don’t want to say luck. Something more frightening. I turned over a page randomly and I realized that this specific combination, this specific diagram, it was for me. Not someone like me, not some hypothetical outside observer, but me. Specifically. In that warehouse. It was telling me to wake up. It told me a lot of things. You’re not authorized to know most of them.”
For many minutes before she pulled something out of her jacket the only sound in the room was the ticking of my old clock and the running dishwasher. She laid what was in her hand on the coffee table and pushed it over to me. It made a harsh scraping noise against the glass surface.
“I think you can guess what’s in here.”
I picked it up. Turned it over in my hands. Weighed like nothing, unsurprisingly.
“They’re copies,” she said, “but that doesn’t matter. I’ve run every possible test there is on the originals. Nothing anomalous about them. Just ink on a page. These’ll be enough.”
“What the fuck is this?” I asked. I could feel my hands trembling as they held the pages. “Revenge? For what? I didn’t treat you that badly.”
“Michael,” she said, and I flinched at the new edge in her voice. “It’s an order.”
“Bu why me? Send it to Data Analysis or Machine Learning. They’re the ones who crunch numbers. They’ll know what to do with all this.”
“You want me to ask the computer geeks how to understand the writings of a die-hard 50s union man? Come on, I know I had more from that bottle than you.”
“We can’t-“
“You can,” she interrupted. “You will have, quite literally, an unlimited budget when it comes to this project, and you will produce work of a quality in accordance with that. In addition, we will start directing funds to other projects in the Department of Cultural Studies as you desire. Within reason of course. Hell, I might even call in some favors. Clear some air with the Archivists. How would you like to have the only Department in the Foundation where membership comes with an automatic Library card?”
At this point I was hyperventilating. I tried to stand up and my legs immediately betrayed me, sending me sprawling back into the chair. I lost hold of the manilla envelope. She picked it up off the floor and placed it on the coffee table.
“I’m going to be watching this closely. You’ll have the freedom to approach it how you think is best, but I want updates. I want progress. I want to know every fucking thing it’s possible to know about these pages. Do you understand?”
I’m amazed that I was able to nod. My head was spinning so fast I could barely tell which way was up. When it finally settled back down, she had left and I was covered in so much sweat it was starting to stain the leather chair. The next morning I began making phone calls.
[she also gives him the journal]
II
I decided the first step was to go to Data Analysis anyway. She was right – for the real meaty stuff there wasn’t much they’d be able to do, but if you wanted someone to rip out every scrap of information from a sea of noise and lay it out in a nice pretty chart, they were awful handy to have around. In less than two days I had ultra-high definition scans of every possible permutation of the diagram accessible from any computer in the Cultural Studies Department. Next I needed people to look at them.
Sanders was an obvious choice for a project manager. They’d been at this Department for almost seven years, and in that time never delivered work that ranked an evaluation less than “highly satisfactory”. Plus they’d just gotten back from a rough field assignment – I figured they’d appreciate the chance to stay inside for a while. Not that I expected the job this time to be any less stressful than dealing with an outbreak of sentient, fascist modern art. I called them into my office. They showed up ten minutes later dressed in a beige suit that, if I weren’t the ones signing their ungodly amount of overtime slips, would have made me suspect they were skimming off the budget.
“You’ve cleaned your office,” they said as they quietly shut the door behind them. “What’s on your mind, Director?”
I handed them a tablet with the permutation the poets at Data Analysis had decided to call 00000000000000000000 displayed on it, briefed them on everything except who the assignment had come from, and told them to pick whoever they needed for it.
“If you need more people than we have, tell me,” I said. “I’m aware that we have uh… something of a personnel shortage. I don’t think it’ll be difficult to get more. We’re going big on this one.” I drummed my fingers against my desk, waiting for a response. Sanders was hunched over the tablet. They were zoomed in on a piece of text that had been written in a spiral shape and kept turning the screen like a steering wheel to read it.
“You’ve read this one, Director?” they asked.
“Yes.”
“So you-”
“Yes,” I said again.
“They’re all like this?”
“Not like it specifically, no.” I’d skimmed through about a hundred of the permutations at random, which was enough to knowing that ‘skimming’ any one of them would be about as informative as listening to a first grader give a book report on Tolstoy. “Generally, yes. Like I said, when you need more personnel, they’re yours.”
“Director, you don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that that the first permutation of this diagram contains a message for our department specifically.”
“It contains what?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you, Director. I thought you already knew. Look. These points here, here, and here. If I’m correctly reading the message – not guaranteed – they point to a modification of the portion here. Which means…”
I groaned as I followed the path they traced across the diagram to the final cipher. “Incredible. A teamster from 80 years ago is making fun of us before we even begin. Lovely. I bet that bitch knew all about it too. Fuck it. Come with me. I need a cigarette.”
It was storming like hell and a cold as shit, which I was grateful for, because I wouldn’t have been able to keep my temper from exploding if the weather was good. This past week had been bad enough without God rubbing it in my face that there were other people who weren’t miserable. Sanders and I stood under a covering by back exit to the parking lot. They clearly weren’t happy that I’d told them to come with me, but weren’t the type to vocally complain. They kept eyeing the place where the “No Smoking” sign used to be before I’d ordered it removed.
“You’re probably wondering who that bitch I referred to earlier is,” I said.
“I am curious, sir.”
The nicotine wasn’t calming my nerves as much as I would have liked. It seemed to be one of those whole-body meltdowns I was having: every system from stomach to muscles to nose firing off messages that I was under a severe amount of stress. Thank you, body, for that essential piece of information.
“That’s too damn bad. Though Hell, it probably wouldn’t even matter if I did anyway. I know for a fact the information is in there.”
Sanders was silent. They still had the tablet, were still examining that first permutation. Messing around in the upper right corner.
“How’s your Shakespeare, sir?”
“Rusty,” I said. “What do you need?”
“Macbeth. Act 3, Scene 4, line 87-95.”
I’m ashamed to admit that it took me a moment to come to it. I was just trying to be modest before, but maybe I really was starting to get on in years. “‘Blood hath been shed ere now, in the olden time time, ere human statute purged the gentle weal: ay, and since too, murders have been performed too terrible for the ear. The time has been that, when the brains were out, the man would die, and there an end: but now they rise again with twenty mortal murders on their crowns, and push us from our stools: this is more strange than such a murder is.’ Does that fit?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, sighing. “I would need to spend more time with the rest of this permutation, but it seems to. The problem is I’m beginning to suspect each diagram is interlinked.”
I nodded. My cigarette was almost dead, so I lit another. “That’s not surprising.”
“It’s not?”
“No,” I said. I blew out a plume of smoke and watched it vanish into the rain. “It’s what makes things most difficult for us, so that’s bound to be what it is. You’ve got to start thinking like the enemy, Sanders.”
“You think whoever wrote this was an enemy?”
“I think,” I said, “that it’s going to be a very long time before we have an answer to that question. Go inside. Figure out how to start building the team. I need some time alone.”
They left, and the rain continued. Even with the lights of the building on I could only see a few dozen feet into the lot ahead of me: the rest was darkness and mist. I recalled the opening of a novel I’d read long ago. Deep is the well of the past. Should one not call it unfathomable? Yes, one should, and it wasn’t just the past: whoever the man was who’d burdened us with these pages, he’d also seen the unfathomability of the world to come. His work wasn’t just a well: it was an abyss. I shivered as a gust of wet wind swept over me.
It would take years for us to finish this work. Probably decades. I certainly wouldn’t work or live long enough to see the end of it. Would she? Perhaps. There were plenty of rumors about the experiments Counsel members played with their bodies, but no way to verify any of them. She’d seemed normal as she sat across from me, but I hadn’t trusted appearances since undergrad. There were too many questions, too many blind spots. I’d been with the Foundation for a long time, risen high in the ranks, and with every promotion I’d received the mysteries around the organization multiplied. It was a fractal: zoom in on one ambiguity and find out it’s made of a dozen more.
I thought of what she’d told me before she left, that she wasn’t authorized to reveal the message from the pages. Yet by handing them over to me and ordering me to search, she had implicitly given me authorization. Search through the pages long enough and we’d find whatever it was that woke her from her slumber. Which meant that either she wanted me to find it, that she thought by the time we did it wouldn’t matter, or, most disturbingly (and going by the enemy principle, most likely), that we wouldn’t recognize it when we came to it. If so then the Diagram, which I’d decided to deserved a capital letter, wasn’t a cipher that could be cracked by applying the right sequences but a hermeneutic object. Perhaps it carried no intrinsic meaning, but was rather a canvas on which meaning was applied. It wasn’t a message: it was art.
At the thought the cold seemed to grow weaker. The air became less brittle in my lungs. I flicked the cigarette, half-finished, out into the storm and turned to go back inside. Art was it? Yes, art, not a painting or book or sculpture but in the category nevertheless. Perhaps – no, certainly – the greatest work ever produced by any Earthly civilization, handed directly to me, like the encyclopedias I was gifted as a child to slake my thirst for words, and I could read it for as long as I liked. A smile was spreading across my face, irrepressible, eager. She’d known what she was doing, alright. Picked the right man for the right job. I’d play the game with her as long as I liked, give her more than she ever wanted to know.
I went upstairs and told Sanders that I’d be leading the project myself.
III
It turned out to be appallingly easy to recruit people to the project. More than easy: As soon as people found out about it they insisted on joining. We didn’t even have to lift a finger. Apparently offering safe, intellectually stimulating deskwork of possible historical importance is quite a draw. At first I tried to resist the flood of applicants. We were a varied, thinly-stretched department after all. No matter how important a project, I couldn’t afford to be handing out assignments to members already doing important work. When I found out that even those who had been rejected had found ways to get a hold of the diagram and began doing work independently, though, I had to relent. It was Sanders who gave me the final push.
“If it’s going to happen regardless,” they said, “we might as well make sure it’s happening properly.”
So I made the new rule: Anyone in the department would have free access to the diagram under three conditions: First, they would need to follow a set schedule assigned by me. We couldn’t afford to work haphazardly. Second, all findings had to be shared with the department. No private projects. Finally, other assignments always came first. Despite the severity of the order, this wasn’t our only mission. If our overall mission became compromised, permissions would be revoked.
It worked well. Possibly too well. Soon people from other departments were sending messages inquiring about the work, and soon after that their supervisors were angrily emailing me for poaching their staff. I couldn’t quite tell them I had been granted free fire on it directly from the Counsel, and I had no way to contact the woman who’d given me the mission for help. After several rounds of confused and exasperated messaging they all seemed to give up at the same time, and the floodgate of personnel opened.
They descended like wolves on an injured deer, and soon I was barely able to keep up with the pages of drafts, notes, and essays that pored in. Organizing all of the information became an even bigger problem than analysis, and almost all of the work fell to Sampson and I. A senior researcher from the Department of Legal Studies claimed to find a diagram that predicted the fall of the United States within the next 30 years. A Junior Researcher in my department eagerly claimed another contained a program for developing poetic abilities to rival Goethe, but only if the learner had no prior knowledge of German beforehand. Narrative and document, instructions, predictions, musings. Was there a pattern? A sequence? I found myself staying up late into the night, my mind going numb as I tried to piece together any sort of order in the chaos.
The first person to go mad was 9 months into the project, a member of the Neurology department who apparently thought solutions could be found by modeling the brains of people who experienced the document. A few months after that an intern submitted a report that the entire diagram could be interpreted as a Hegelian movement through the course of history, all the way up to the achievement of the Absolute thought. The reports became more and more scrambled as every researcher insisted that their area of expertise was key to unlocking the most important secrets.