FLUXIUM
It was a distractingly swift, darting motion Prof. Aaron McLaren noticed bothering his peripheral vision as he worked late one September.
His garden shed was fully kitted out with all his choice paraphernalia, the reference books and his Mac. He liked the solitude. It was a good environment for working – if he could fight the ever-prevailing urge to procrastinate (or masturbate).
McLaren was a public intellectual. A passionate and vocal atheist, he had in recent years taken his initially tentative forays into the dismantlement of monotheist “delusions” to ever grander, more public arenas. The more he did it, the longer he survived it, the braver he became. It was now a calling, and all his hard-won academic status, his much-vaunted scientific methodology, was brought to bear upon this vigorous belief. The world needed to hear the truth, and to wake up from its protracted slumber of ignorant institutionalized mollycoddling and ethics-by-numbers. The bronze-age warrior sky-god did not exist.
The book he was currently writing – his third on the subject – was taking shape under the working title “The God’s Father”. He had charted the anthropological “birth” of religion world wide, the understanding of nature via anthropomorphic elementals; Gods; The eventual political motivations that resulted in the cult of monotheism, a mere 500 years before the birth of Christ. And he had woven through his narrative the science that had made his name; The popular (memes; the notion of ideas as replicators, belief systems as viral); The fashionable (String and Membrane theory; the – in his view – absurd notions of the agnostic hedge-better, and likelihood of there being a giant teapot orbiting the sun, because, of course, everything is possible); The true (Evolution and Darwinian theory, natural selection, the question of purpose in replicators such as DNA); And the classical (Astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology – the working mechanics of all that is and all that is alive.) He had jumped through time, comparing the natural misunderstanding of the universe as witnessed through the primitive eyes of our hunter-gatherer forebears, with the wilful refusal to abandon archaic and redundant belief systems by the modern indoctrinated ill-educated masses and their institutions. He had savaged the word “institution” along side “conformist”, which he saw as the blinkered unimaginative heart of the conservative. They both suggested stagnation, and the desire to remain forever the same, as though everything was right and good as it stood and everything that opposed or threatened that was somehow dangerous.
McLaren had been deeply entrenched in a theoretical passage about the what-ifs of deity, enjoying the fantastical nature of it while somewhat smugly marvelling at the incredulity of it all; the notion that there could be a single entity – whose origin is not ours to question, all power be to he – who built a vast and mostly empty universe, found a tiny corner (some ball of magma with a thin earth crust mostly covered in water, and wrapped in a veil of gas, pelting around a nuclear fusion factory hundreds of times its size) to sprinkle the seeds of life upon, and form man in his own image. A being that created dinosaurs then wiped them out – presumably because they never developed enough brainpower or self awareness to question the nature of their existence, and therefore had never discovered their maker. Or maybe he just planted the bones of giant beasts to further test us? That’ll be it. And this God made pigs, whose flesh even the cat will not eat of (except, of course, for sliced ham which his own cat, Erasmus, was very partial to) merely, it would seem, to make our paths yet more hard to find, our lives still more complex to live. He created endless holy things we must not damage or slaughter, and menstrual emissions that might taint a god-fearing man indelibly. He made a perpetual place somewhere at the end of days for us all to be delivered unto, either to burn for our earthly sins, or to live in eternal peace – possibly with a great many virgins. And all these differing monotheist beliefs were the clear and true and righteous and only correct one, though they all stemmed from the same geographical historical origins.
Why? Why would any being bother to do that? What might motivate it? What might be its reason for such an act of cruel creation? What father would give his children the right to slaughter each other for not believing in him in the correct manner? And how might we find the correct manner when it is determined by the random nature of the culture we are born into? For his amusement McLaren attacked this section from the point of view of somebody who truly believed in a genuine – he thought – attempt to understand what it was that convinced the faithful of such a deity’s existence. He tried to conjure the beliefs of his childhood, the unquestioning naivety of the child listening to a trusted adult. He tried, as a personal experiment, to find his faith again through rational means. But as always, the more he looked at it the more he found misdirection, memetic transference, indoctrination, delusion, fear and cultural perception.
The flickers and blurs that intruded left and right of his monitor, seeming to come from behind his head, burnt themselves out like shooting stars before they actually entered his field of view long enough for him to grapple with their structures. He initially put the experience down to tiredness, chemical aberrations in the working of his eyes, though he did not feel it. He’d give it another hour – he was enjoying himself – then call it a day. But within five minutes the blurs were becoming more insistent, to the point that they engendered the sense of moving backwards through something at speed, as though his head – he mused fancifully – were entering the atmosphere of a planet. He could almost hear the whoosh; feel the heat, as he blazed earthward, still tapping away at his Mac as he descended in a bright arc through an alien sky.
Suddenly he was desperately afraid to turn round. The powerful logic he relied on at all times began to exert itself. This was internal, he knew that immediately. It was certainly some mental condition he was experiencing. The motion blur that now dominated his peripheral awareness had become almost a tunnel. But for the screen and keyboard, his stilled fingers upon their designer squares, all was motion. It would surely pass, this episode, but he would have to ride it out – if, that is, it was not to be the end of him. He was aware that his fear of turning around was entirely irrational, but fear it was, and very insistent.
After a minute that might have been an hour – a cliché he associated with being at the computer – McLaren began to notice that there were shapes in the streams. He had started to think of the phenomena as a kind of slipstream. In reality he thought it likely to be the result of undetected blood pressure, something like that. He liked his cheese and port a little too much for it to be healthy. There was possibly pressure being exerted upon his visual cortex, or it was something physical to do with his eyes. Maybe he was having a mild stroke; there was damage happening to his brain. Whatever the disconcerting and worrying physical cause, it soothed and amused him to imagine it as a nonsensical metaphysical phenomena. And it looked and moved like a stream of some sort or other. It had eventually passed beyond the edges of the monitor, and was also now “happening” upon the screen itself. He watched it as though it were a particularly beguiling screen-saver. The monitor edge remained, as did the keyboard, his fingers. But there were shapes in the stream. Living shapes. And they were looking back at him.
As a scientist his instinct was to observe first and theorize later. Hallucinations were not entirely a new experience to him, though it had been almost forty years since he had experimented with psychotropic drugs in his student years. That experience, however, had remained a fresh and vivid memory, and quite unlike what he was currently enduring. For a start his mental faculties were at present sharp and focused in as much as he could judge it. He did not feel woozy or out of control. His mind was not wandering. He was not, for want of a better term, high. The other distinguishing factor was that the strange manifestations in this instant were occurring in an alien but somewhat logical progression. There was an awakening sense to it, like the peeling away of perceptual fascia. It had not the flowering randomness of waking dreams that he had experienced taking acid, nor the clench-jawed, vaguely hysterical anxiety it had provoked. Though it was a stark sense of fear that prevented him from moving his head, (the irrational nature of which angered him greatly,) he had found that simply not doing so left him free to witness the experience in a calm and entirely lucid manner.
What prompted the conclusion of “life” in McLaren’s mind - and he admitted to himself it was fanciful - was the evident interaction, and subsequent reaction between the shapes. Their “heads”, or frontal regions, were highly evolved. They were made symmetrical by clear features. They had mouths, his first and easiest starting point. These openings were vertical, splitting the head with a thin dark line. They occasionally gaped and snapped at other less-distinct passing shapes. Were they eating? He took the two sets of watery spherical bulges to be eyes. There were other complex, quite beautiful he thought, blooms of sensory equipment in what seemed to be golds and reds. They waved, retracted and dilated, prehensile and delicate, occasionally brushing each other’s faces.
McLaren found he had dubbed them Metafauna without even really thinking about it. A passionate Darwinian, he began to explore the experience like a Victorian naturalist. Within a short time he had identified three distinct species. The largest - being the shapes he had first noticed, and which seemed to him the most sentient - he called Plateids. (It seemed the great philosophical speculations of Socrates and others detailed by Plato regarding the possible layers of the world, and how the earth may be the sky to beings that dwelt in rock, were entirely relevant to his own immediate experience.) The sluggish, amoeba-like worms - that the Plateids apparently ate - Vermiculus-Alucinor. Darting around the Plateids like indistinct silvery fish were the Piscil-Ignis, whose only notable feature was the globe of light where there might ordinarily be a head.
By now McLaren was fully submerged. All sense of the physical had gone.
***
Anthony Thorpe-Beaston was wrapping up questions at Seattle town hall in relation to his new publication “Un-Holy Diver”, a brutal autopsy on faith. The question of Prof. Aaron McLaren’s recent book “Meta Fauna” had arisen - the two had been great allies in the debunking of myth. Thorpe-Beaston took a deep breath. Though his response was much practiced the subject still rattled him. “My once great esteemed colleague and friend, Aaron McLaren, has me very worried indeed. Not, I might add, with regard to the fanciful, speculative flight of science fantasy that is his latest book - rather I am concerned for his mental well-being, as I’m sure you are aware his entire output and major hypothesis has centred around the notion of faith being necessarily a creation of the mind, and as such a delusion.
“To suffer quite such a delusion as to believe one has potentially - and accidentally, I hasten to add - broken down the fabric that separates us from this world and his realm of the Meta Fauna - the Astral plane, or the land of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (may she reign eternal) - McLaren’s “Fluxium”, well let’s just say I find it's all rather heartbreaking. That he has witnessed such things I have no doubt - though I do doubt the veracity of it. That he now claims to be able to enter this Fluxium at will and progress our understanding of it is a concept that fills me with enormous misgivings, if not utter contempt.”
A shout from the audience caused Thorpe-Beaston to pause and squint into the gloom of the auditorium. “I’m sorry what? Have I tried it? What - opening my mind to the possibility of tooth-faeries? No I’ve not tried one of professor McLaren’s workshops, nor do I intend to. I would say I’m as likely to do that as charter a flight to the North Pole to complain to Santa about the goodwill and peace to all men he didn’t bring me last Christmas - to cram two meaningless faith-based myths built round a pagan fertility festival into a single metaphor.
“As I understand it, there’s no physical manifestation on view when such venturing occurs - by which, of course, I mean that witnesses of those travelling in the so-called Fluxium will observe no outward sign of the said traveller actually going anywhere at all.”
Thorpe-Beaston waited for the laughter to subside before going on.
“My learned friends, need I say more? The truth, with regard to McLaren, is that no matter the very right and proper paths of inquiry which he brought to bear in documenting and studying the phenomena - the diligence and intelligence he used in assessing the behavioural patterns of the species and subspecies he witnessed, the professorial intellect displayed in the understanding of the Fluxium and it’s admittedly fascinating inhabitants is peerless, as always - it is still improvable, entirely delusional non-science. I cannot be emphatic about this enough. It is shocking that such a great voice of reason in such difficult and uncertain times should, in the midst of breaking new ground in the public understanding of science - on a pretty global scale! - not only present us with something so starkly against all he taught, but may also have the potential to start a whole new delusional cult to muddy up these deep and turbulent waters yet further. It has all the hallmarks.
“With that I think we can call it a day. Except to say if you have any further questions please buy my reasonably priced lucid and informative book. You’ll find ALL the answers in there.”
Much fun (and flux). One point; a wee typo: "the pealing away "...