Chasing a Light Beam – Chapter 12: “The Solution”

THE SOLUTION

Widely held beliefs are not the same as truth.

-Ben Bob Boyle

The universe is not as it seems. Life is not as it seems. Thoughts are not as they seem. Wives are not as they seem. Nothing is as it seems. If you think everything is okay, it’s because you don’t understand the situation.

To be unconscious is to experience death, except that you awaken from the former. Flawed consciousness, then, is akin to death, and all human consciousness of reality is flawed. Ben questioned, while chasing the beam, the significance of philosophical reasoning about quantities that themselves are beyond the human’s evolved capacity to understand. Libraries of bovine excrement. What is life? A river of chemicals that flows through space-time with no particular destination. The happiness of stupidity was not an option for Ben Bob Boyle; that path was closed. Reality’s way happens, even if you don’t believe in it. The universe really doesn’t give a damn what you believe.

Ben focused his vision on the martini glass, and carefully lowered it to the table. He spread his fingers wide and mechanically moved away his hand. Such minor things as avoiding broken crystal seemed worthy of what attention he could muster from his vodka-clouded mind. He pushed the ottoman aside and balanced himself with the chair’s arms, rising with the majority of his weight on his uninjured foot. He dropped the recorder into his pants pocket, in case he remembered something else the world could not survive without hearing. He limped, with an occasional stumble, toward the refrigerator. He rescued his frosty half-gallon friend from the freezer. The bottle, like Ben himself, was half-empty.

He headed for the door at one end of the kitchen, the one that led to the garage. Opening the door of his SUV, he climbed and pulled his way into the driver’s leather seat, using the hand that was not attached to the vodka bottle. He shut the door tightly, checking to see that it was sealed. “Don’t worry, folks, ” he said to no one, “I’m not gonna be drinkin’ and drivin’ tonight.”

He opened the center console and found his collection of Hank Williams CD’s. He started the truck’s engine and slipped one of the CD’s into the dash’s player. A steel guitar twanged a greeting. Ben used both hands to raise the vodka bottle to his mouth. He gulped a slug that he figured was the equivalent of two or three martini’s. He hummed along with ol’ Hank for a while,and he never realized the moment when his consciousness lapsed, and he he drifted into a drunken stupor. It had happened many ties before, but this time there would be no hangover. The truck’s air conditioner brought in the fumes from the garage through the dash vents. Hank was singing “Long Gone Lonesome Blues”:

I’m gonna find me a river, one that’s cold as ice.

And when I find me that river, lord I’m gonna pay the price, oh lord!

I’m goin down in it three times, but lord I’m only comin up twice.

Ben was unconscious now. His skin had changed to a bright, cherry-red color. The carbon monoxide molecules were methodically replacing the oxygen attached to the hemoglobin in Ben’s blood. The  normal pattern of his breathing disguised the lack of oxygen transfer into his red blood cells. It was not sinister. There was nothing malicious in the way the chemicals went about their work: their physical configuration simply gave them a superior affinity for Ben Bob’s hemoglobin. They just did what chemicals do, with pitiless indifference.

Ben’s brain began to die. The complicated upper regions, the parts most recently evolved, were the most sensitive to the absence of oxygen, and they went first. There were no longer any thoughts, nor any dreams. The more primitive area, the stem, had evolved much earlier; it confined its activities to the reflexes, like breathing, and was more tolerant of oxygen deprivation. It, too, now became inactive, and the breathing and heartbeat ceased. The information in his brain was no longer accessible. Ben Bob Boyle, the person, was dead.

The precise moment this description became accurate cannot currently be determined, any more than the precise moment that Ben’s configuration of particle summations became “alive”. Ironically, the genes that evolved from the first chemical replicator three and half billion years ago into a configuration that yields “consciousness” did not also evolve a simple method for understanding it.

In the end, the flow amplitudes for a multi-particle configuration yielding “thought” or “movement” or “surgery on old men’s penises” had summed to zero. There was no conscious life after death, but there was persistence after death. No amount of matter was diminished, and Ben’s mass still had the same equivalent energy. Nothing was “missing”. Nothing ever goes missing from the universe; it just behaves in a different manner. Nothing unusual has ever happened. Ben’s genes had been defeated; they would replicate no more. He had dictated their end, the equivalent of his own, on his own terms, using the very consciousness those genes had methodically developed to protect themselves over billions of years.

Had it all been worthwhile? Ben once had a seventy-year-old patient who returned with an extrusion of his penile implant only ten days after the surgery. When asked what happened, the man explained that for years, a youngish waitress in a bar in Kaplan where he played a weekly game of bouree always rubbed her breasts all over him and smiled as she served the drinks. He was old and harmless, and she was teasing him. Shortly after his surgery, he took her in the bar’s back room and showed her what he could do, much to her delight. Ben reminded him that there was a six-week healing period; he would have to have surgery again. “Was it was worth it?” Ben asked. With no hesitation, the old man said, “It damn sure was, Doc.”

What remains? Perhaps anti-death. Should I cry for Ben Bob? No more than he should cry for me. It’s senseless to say he will be happier now; his particle summations will simply “be”. Perhaps transhumanist intelligence will one day reconstruct a conscious version of him. Perhaps an identical configuration in another universe goes about his business, prevented by the laws of physics from any awareness of this version’s demise.

No unhappiness remains for Ben Bob in this universe.

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