Manifest Destiny

As I sit at my desk, considering all the things I want to say in this issue, I notice a small metal sculpture sitting atop my computer. It consists of a paper clip, and two of the little metal tabs that fit in PC card slots to keep the dust out when you're not using them. I bent these three scraps into the shape of a stylized snail about a year ago.

I remember the moment very clearly. I spent last summer working as a Quality Assurance person for a client management database that this company was building, and while I was waiting for a particular script to do its work, I leaned back in my chair, picked up one of the scraps, and began bending it at random.

Two summers before that, I completed the first draft of a short novel. Oddly enough, the structure was quite similar. I learned that writing could work much like sculpting. I could act like a stonecutter - pick a topic or idea and hack away at it until it took shape as a story. Or I could work like a welder - find as many little pieces as I could find, and see what I could make with them.

One of the story lines in the book involved giant artificially intelligent, psychokinetic computers. They had been designed as war machines, but had the unfortunate habit of imprinting on enemies and zapping anyone who tried to turn them off. One of the characters begins teaching them how to dream, and communicate with each other, and by the end of the story the machines blend together to become a single, unified being.

The thing that comes to my mind about this kind of writing, or sculpting, and even about artificial life, is how so many tiny things can work together synergistically to create order.

I bought a program some years ago called SimAnt. It was marketed not as a video game, but as a "software toy". A game, the creators said, had an outcome and certain rules, whereas a toy could be used for any number of games, adventures, experiments, whatever. SimAnt allowed you to hop inside a virtual ant farm and take over. As a single ant, you could find food, fight with other ants, move small objects, leave pheremone trails, and summon other ants to help you. From a higher perspective, your could maintain the colony's population by deploying more workers for nursing, gathering, or fighting the enemy red ants. If your colony did well enough, you could create queens to send to other portions of the yard or even the house, and in doing so, you had to work with many colonies at once. Finally, you had the option of playing a human being "experimentor", with an endless supply of black and red ants, obstacles, food, and pesticide. Each piece of the game was simple, yet the pieces worked together to create a rich and exciting virtual world in which to play.

My book was called Manifest Destiny, after the 19th century belief that it was right and proper for the United States to stretch all the to the Pacific and stomp anyone who said otherwise. Only here, the Manifest Corporation stretched across space to colonize the entire Universe.

Manifest Corp was run from a centralized office, Manifest Station. In order to handle its massive responsibilities, the founders had carved out an intricate bureaucracy. Workers must go so far as to sign preassociation agreements with each other, promising to be cheerful or risk the lawsuit.

I wonder now, three years after writing that draft, as I consider all the new ways in which I could improve the world I created, who else might be running around in that universe. Surely there are other people out there who could teach the Manifest Bureacrats a lesson. Surely there are other firms that thrive on the chaos of datawork and interstellar travel.

I can almost imagine Yoda in his prime. Did he roam around the galaxy, long long ago, teaching others? Did people who felt they were stuck in places like Manifest Station, or the backwater bureacracies of the Old Republic, come to weekend seminars on Jedi mind tricks?

I think I might tell them about the ants. The difference between an intelligent system like an ant hill, and a mechanical one like a bureaucracy, is that the ant hill is one organism. Kill the queen, the driving force, and all the other ants die too. People aren't like ants. We're like the ant hill. We can do many, many things at one time, and we can influence every part of ourselves to serve the whole.

I had a conversation with a young man not too long ago, who was, at times, quite unhappy with his life. It seems he had made certain decisions, yet after what seemed to him like a long time, he had not put those decisions into action. In listening to him, I began to realize that he treated himself like a bureacracy, like a stone to be cut. He had made a decision to do X, and in doing so had expected his whole life to revolve around it. He got rid of everything else, including his desire and love for X, and wound up bored, frustrated, and burnt out.

Yet alive.

Not too long, I used to go with my family to a small lot where we had a camper near the Brazos river in Granbury, Texas. I have changed much since then, but at the time, camping did not hold much appeal for me. Even so, one thing I did enjoy was cooking over a fire on a cold fall evening. I liked to watch it die down until the flames disappeared, and what was left was a red hot glow inside still-unburnt wood. Yet if I would just adjust the wood just a tiny bit and allow some oxygen in to the glow, the fire would burst back into flames.

I'm not talking about congruence here, but ecology. Synergy. Allowing each part of you to work together. You see, a blowtorch is awfully congruent. It gets its job done. But who wants to gather around a blowtorch? What couple will snuggle up near one on a winter evening?

The young man I talked about didn't need to get rid of X. He didn't need to make it the focus of his life. What he needed to do was to set up a synergy, where X supports every aspect of his life, yet every aspect supports X as well. In fact, everything can support everything else.

That's what Synergy means. Buckminster Fuller taught me that. He built structures out of thin, flexible window blinds that held his weight yet could be picked up easily with one hand. His lightweight geodesic domes are stable enough to withstand earthquakes.

Manifest Station began as a metaphor for an old way of doing things. It's a bureacracy, and stuck in its ways, but it, too can change. It will never change by giving orders. Could you imagine a great general ordering the entire US Army to pack up and go home, we're turning it off, no more fighting? Yet how powerful would it be if he stood in front of cameras everywhere and proclaimed to the world that he would not fight for peace any longer, but would devote his life to bringing peace through openminded negotiation? Ecology is a decision, a way of behaving, not a rule or an order to be obeyed.

Having learned all that I've learned since I wrote my book, I've come to a point where I'm ready to revise it. I know there will be some drastic changes in my world. Some of the characters will have to go, others will show up, and still others will begin acting in new ways that I never imagined that they could even imagine. Going back and seeing how much everything has changed since I created it might mean a little culture shock. Seeing how I've changed will be even more amazing. Yet the world is there to be played with, not wiped clean and recreated in some ideal image.

Sometimes writers say to write what you know. Or what you don't know. I don't know. Either way, it's a place to start. With an object, a person, or anything that's convenient. I'll put it together with something else, and something else and see what I can create. And I know that whatever the results are, some day I'll look at it, and I'll think, where can I go with this? And I'll go there.

Now.