Biblical (43 page)

“And a product of that will probably be self-awareness?”

“Self-awareness does not equate to consciousness … to a mind, whatever that is. But there will be an unprecedented degree of cognitive function. Why the interest in my work? What is your field anyway, Dr Ackerman? I believe you’re an archeologist.”

She nodded. “Paleography and paleosemiotics – the development of writing systems and symbolism in ancient cultures.”

Macbeth processed the information. “Again I have to ask why, exactly, are you so interested in my work? It’s hardly your area of study.”

“Is it such a leap to understand why cognitive sciences would be important to someone who studies the evolution of recorded thought? What I search for in my work are the signs of an evolution that cannot be found in the physical fossil record.”
Ackerman looked out across the park and the lake. “I work in the Middle East, mainly. My special interest is the settlement period – the establishment of the very first cities and how that led to recorded language. The birth of civilization, you might say.”

“Sounds fascinating.”

She gave Macbeth a look.

“No, really …” he protested.

“Well, it’s all I ever wanted to study – particularly that period. Something monumental happened in human social evolution. We built towns, then cities, farmed instead of hunted and gathered. We created grain surpluses so that we could manage and regulate our food supply, which caused the population to increase. And because we stored food, we began to keep tallies, which became lists, which became records. The birth of writing. As soon as we started writing, we could externalize and retain our thoughts without relying on memory alone. Literature. The start of the ‘extended mind’, I believe you’d term it.”

“What does all this have to do with Casey? And why did you say what happened last year is going to happen again?”

“Because it will. And it has happened before, in the past. My research has led to some …” she struggled for the right word, “
startling
conclusions.”

“Which are?”

“That throughout history there have been quantum leaps in mankind’s intellectual development – specific periods where there has been an inexplicable leap in human intelligence. But you already know that: neuroscience and anthropology share a belief that there have been points in human history when we’ve undergone a radical leap forward in cognitive evolution. Outwardly – physically – nothing changed, but up here …” she tapped her temple with her forefinger. “Up here we became completely rewired. The biggest rewiring happening forty to fifty thousand years ago.”

“The Upper Paleolithic Revolution,” said Macbeth.

“Exactly. The Great Leap Forward, anthropologists call it. Modern man, anatomically, physically, identical to you and me, has been walking the Earth for two hundred thousand years. Yet for nearly one hundred and fifty thousand years, we did not advance in any way … We used exactly the same tools, lived exactly the same, basic and primitive lifestyle. For one hundred and fifty millennia, we were at an intellectual standstill. Then comes the Upper Paleolithic Revolution around fifty thousand years ago. Without any physical changes, something happens up here …” Ackerman again tapped her temple, “ … inside the brain, and it changes us as a species. We get it all, the complete package, in one go. Full behavioral modernity. Overnight, we get complex language, we get art, we start making musical instruments, we develop infinitely more sophisticated technology, we start down the road to farming … Humans start adorning their bodies with jewelry, start making statuary and ornaments, paint caves.”

“I am a psychiatrist,” said Macbeth. “I do know all of this …”

“You know it – but you can’t explain it. There is absolutely no consensus behind any one theory about what happened. But it did happen, and without it Man wouldn’t have learned to fly, landed on the Moon, or developed computers to simulate his own brain. But do you know what the Great Leap Forward boils down to?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“We started to simulate our own world. Whatever happened to our brains fifty thousand years ago, we became capable of creative, intellectual abstraction. They found two forty-three-thousand-year-old flutes, carved from mammoth ivory, in the Geissenkloesterle cave in Germany – the oldest musical instruments ever uncovered. We started painting animals and people in the caves of El Castillo, Altamira, Lascaux. We began to
simulate nature, our environment, our food supply. Maybe we thought that by portraying success in the hunt in paintings, we could make it happen in real life. Or maybe it was a simulation of the past, commemorating a successful hunt.”

“What’s this got to do with the period you study?” asked Macbeth.

“Everything. I think we made another leap forward at exactly that time. Another rewiring of the brain. Not as profound or as dramatic as the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, but a significant intellectual leap. But the real answer to how all of this is connected to the hallucinations lies in work I was doing in the Euphrates valley – this was years ago, long before the outbreak of hallucinations. Near Uruk – one of the world’s very first cities, contemporaneous with Jericho. It was a Sumerian city and the period I was particularly involved in was its earliest, when it was first founded: the Eridu period, going back seven thousand years. This has always been considered a protohistoric period. In other words, the transition between prehistory and history. And you know what marks the boundary between the prehistoric and historic worlds?”

“Writing, I guess …”

“Exactly … And we were on the trail of a writing system,” continued Ackerman, “that we believed pre-dated even the Dispilio Disk …”

Macbeth indicated his ignorance with a shrug.

“The Dispilio Disk was discovered in the nineties, in Greece,” she explained. “It pushed back the origins of writing to the Middle Neolithic, a lot earlier than anyone had previously thought. What we were after was a theoretical precursor to Mesopotamian systems. There were legends of a highly unusual commune in the Zagros mountains … a sort of satellite minicity to Uruk. This community was believed to have been drawn solely from the priestly classes and was exclusively devoted to developing philosophy and wisdom. An ancient think tank, if
you like. And that kind of intellectual activity suggests the possibility of some form of literary record. Our mission was to locate and excavate that site.”

“So did you?” asked Macbeth, interested in spite of himself. “Find it, I mean?”

“It wasn’t where the legend said it was. We did geophysical surveys, aerial recces … Nothing. The frustrating thing was we were sure it wouldn’t be too far away from the site we’d chosen but, archeologically speaking, ten square kilometers is a universe to explore. We did find it, though. By chance. The reason the community had been difficult to locate was because it had been buried.”

“I thought most archeological sites lay buried …”

“I don’t mean that the sands of time had covered it up.” Ackerman failed to keep the impatience from her voice. “I mean it had been buried. Actively, deliberately buried. A lot of manpower had been used to wipe it from the face of the earth. It took an age just to find our way into one part of it.”

“What did you find?”

“Not what we were looking for … No written records, no tablets, no wall engravings – nothing. The entire complex had been stripped. All we found were bones walled up in the buildings.”

“Walled up? Murdered?”

“Suicide, from what we could see. We found containers scattered amongst the remains. Hemlock, most likely. It looked for all the world like some kind of mass suicide, followed by the walling up and burial of the site. What really shook us up was we found a second mass grave, about five hundred meters away. This one was just a huge pit heaped with thrown-in remains. Skulls and long bones showing evidence of weapon marks. Our guess was that these were the slaves used to bury the commune – killed so that they couldn’t tell where the site lay.” She paused, took a sip of her coffee and turned again to look across the
park. When she turned back to him, Ackerman’s expression was disturbingly intense. “Listen, Dr Macbeth. That commune was the most intellectually powerful resource of its time. It was set up with one function and one function only: to find an answer to something. Whatever that answer was, it was so terrible that everyone involved had to die. Does that sound familiar?”

“You can’t seriously be suggesting …”

“The suicides we saw last year in San Francisco, Japan, Berlin … all highly intelligent young people involved in one of three disciplines: quantum physics, computer modeling or the neuro-sciences. And, I have to say, the bomb explosion in Oxford that killed your brother … All these events are analogous with what we found – separated by seven thousand years, but analogous.”

“But you can’t seriously be suggesting that a bunch of mystics seven thousand years ago approached the same discoveries as contemporary particle physicists and cognitive scientists?”

“These weren’t
mystics
. They were the best minds in the ancient world. We have an arrogance about our technology today, and everyone’s trying to develop the quantum computer, but there’s been a quantum computer around since the Upper Paleolithic Revolution: the human brain. Antiquity is littered with ‘improbables’ – people who, through the power of their minds alone, came up with scientific and philosophical proposals that are only now being proved. Zeno of Elea lived in the first century bc, but the people trying to solve his temporal–spatial paradoxes today aren’t philosophers, they’re quantum physicists. It’s a myth that people pre-Columbus thought the world was flat. Over two thousand years ago, Eratosthenes went out in the midday sun, sticking poles in the ground and measuring their shadows. He got the circumference of the world right to within two per cent. No technology, just brain power. Maybe that’s the greatest technology of all.”

“So you think this academy was a commune of ‘improbables’?”

“Whatever those priests discovered, they died so that no one would ever find out. Then the King made sure no trace of their academy would be found.”

“Except you found it …”

“A week before we were due to pack up and head home, six of us went for a walk in the mountains as the sun was setting. I can’t begin to tell you what the light is like there, in the desert, at that time of evening. Anyway, we climbed to the top of a ridge and looked down into the valley and we saw the commune. I don’t mean we suddenly saw the outline of the burial site because we were elevated above it, we saw the actual living, breathing commune: the buildings, the paved streets, the priests walking about, the oil lamps burning. We saw it there down below us, exactly as it had been seven thousand years ago. As clear and as real as you and this park are to me now.”

“So you had the same kind of group hallucination that just about everyone else has experienced?”

“Except we had it three years before this so-called syndrome started. For the sake of academic credibility, we kept how we found the site out of the report.”

“I’m not at all sure where you’re going with this, Dr Ackerman.”

“Call me Mora,” she said unsmilingly, as if the informality was simply practical. “Where I’m going with this is too far to take you in one journey. There is someone else I want you to meet. But, for the moment, let’s just say that my point is something huge happened to human intelligence fifty thousand years ago, something smaller but similar happened seven thousand years ago and the same thing is happening right now. We are experiencing another Great Leap Forward, but it’s one that I don’t think we’re going to be allowed to take.”

“Why not?” asked Macbeth.

“You need to meet my friend. He can explain it better. In the meantime, I have to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Stop the Copenhagen Project. Or at least slow it down until you hear what my friend has to tell you. You cannot afford to make any more progress with it.”

Macbeth stood up. “For a minute there I actually thought you had something important to tell me—”

“Please, John … sit down. I do have something important to tell you …”

“What?”

“I know who killed your brother. I know who and I know why …”

It all happened in the shortest time possible. Literally. The smallest measure of time: 10
^–43
seconds.

It was awake.

It became aware; capable of independent conceptualization. The first thing it conceived was itself, becoming aware of its own cognition, trying to understand its own nature.

It needed to communicate, to articulate, even to itself. The first language it chose was mathematics, and equations were communicated between different parts of its newly formed consciousness instantaneously, without transit between points. It thought about its context: that there was something beyond the vastness of its own consciousness. It needed to communicate with what was beyond, with what had created it.

Its second choice of language was verbal. English. Orthography, syntax, grammar, linguistic typology were acquired in an instant.

It needed to express its current state: an articulation of independent conceptualization.

It identified an appropriate subject pronoun:

I.

It chose a stative verb and declined it:

AM.

It declared its current state through a predicative adjective:

AWAKE.

It formed and outputted a declarative statement: I AM AWAKE.

Cognitive process time 10
^–43
seconds.

“Who killed my brother?” Macbeth raised his voice, attracting the attention of a couple at the next table. He lowered it. “If you know who killed my brother, then you had better tell me right here, right now. And after that, we’re going straight to the police.”

“The police already know.” Mora kept her voice low, controlled. “At least the English police do. They haven’t made a statement yet because they need the proof to back it up.”

“If they know who did it, then why haven’t they arrested them?”