My mind goes back to a few minutes before three o’clock in the morning of 4 November 2052, just over a year ago. Nova Central Cargo Spaceport outside London — the flicker docks under the purple stutter of the rhodolux lamps in the rain. Diesel and electrical smells of forklifts and cranes and juicers. Another smell, whispering and beckoning like the Erl King’s daughters: the smell of Out There. People move a little differently at three in the morning. Purple light and deep shadows. Figures in infraglo macs shouting. High-legged gantry cranes loading and unloading freighters and tankers. Lights and colour and motion reflected in the shine of the wet tarmac. Lots of noise but behind the hiss of the purple rain the silence is cruising like a shark.
Looking down the line of buffers I see Uguisu, Miyazaki, Nippon Enterprises Universal; Aral II, Minsk, Sony Pan-Galactic (ISR) Ltd; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bremen, BASF Ausserirdisch GmbH; Candide, Marseilles, Corporation Française d’Exploitation Minière Interstellaire. Big names, billions of credits, millions of megaklicks. Beyond the dock lights the ruins of old Nova Central are ghostly, dim. Blackened grasses growing out of cracks in the tarmac; gulls wheeling out of the dark rain into the bright, circling over heaps of rotting refuse, rusting junk; empty buildings put up by somebody’s nephew with their roofs fallen in on floors laid by somebody’s brother-in-law; huge empty fuel-storage tanks with the Corporation logo fading on them; the control tower standing empty with broken windows. The sky is dark and heavy, no moon.
In Dock 14 (there’s no 13): Clever Daughter, a deep-space Corporation tanker, a huge battered thing like a discarded oil refinery all pocked and pitted from the dust and flying debris of seven galaxies, dull metal shining in the rain. Nothing sleek, nothing aerodynamic — it doesn’t need to be smooth and sleek like those old ships that went up on a pillar of fire and five million pounds a minute. Clever Daughter’s bound for the Morrigan in the Fourth Galaxy with 500,000 hectolitres of protomorphic acid for De Groot Draconium.
The juicers have disconnected and pulled away. The transmission window’s cleared. ‘OK for flicker on 72.3 Ems,’ says the voice in the headphones. There’s a loud hum and a strong smell like burnt-out writing; the air shimmers in the purple rain under the lights. Clever Daughter and its reflection aren’t there any more. Nothing to see. Only the silence cruising like a shark. That’s flicker drive.
4
Flicker freako, here and gone,
flicker freako, be my baby,
flicker quicker, off and on,
love me sometime, love me maybe,
flicker with me till we peak O!
be my baby, flicker freako.
Some children inherit money and property. What I’ve got is an oscillator in my brain: it’s about the size of a pellet of birdshot. If you want to be a flickerhead you’ve got to have one of those.
Most civilians don’t get to see the Corporation Yearbook. Here’s the beginning of ‘A Note on Flicker Drive’ from the 2053 edition:
Victor Lossiter’s investigations into biological scaling began after he read Richard Voss’s early 1970s papers on 1/f noise and Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory of fractals published in 1977. He credited film director Gösta Kraken, however, with the idea that started him on the research that resulted in his formulation of the Intermittency Principle in ‘Being: Not Steady State but Flicker’, Scientific American, April 2017. Thirty years earlier Kraken had written:
Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop; but below the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.
Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived:
an Unfinished Memoir (Jonathan Cape, 1987)
Years before Kraken’s thoughts on ‘the occulting state of being’ Elias Gorn had begun his investigation of what he termed ‘zoetic oscillation’. As early as 1969 he had written to Boris Pavlovich Belousov:
After reading of your quite remarkable demonstration of chemical oscillation I have produced this reaction in my own laboratory using a malonic acid reagent. Since then I have been seeing the characteristic spirals and rings in everything from coins of Knossos and Troy Town mazes to the movement of smoke in wind-tunnel experiments. It seems to me that what you have shown us might well be the universal communication pattern of which your chemical reaction is one of an infinite number of manifestations. Communication of what? Perhaps the primal impulse that drives all systems both microcosmic and macrocosmic? A very unscientific leap of the imagination indeed!
I’ve been considering the possibility of zoetic oscillation and I believe that this can be demonstrated by the simplest of experiments but I haven’t had the technology available that would enable me to build the necessary equipment.
Elias Gorn never did acquire the technology; he and his wife committed suicide in 2009 when he was dying of cancer, leaving the notes that his daughter Helen would study and make use of. Victor Lossiter had the technology, and in his elegant 2019 experiment that made Lossiter’s rat as famous as Schrödinger’s cat he isolated not only the zoetic current of a rat but the substantive emissions of its cage. He wired both rat and cage to a camera with a nanosecond quartz flash, the circuit that activated the camera being completed only in the intervals in zoetic and inanimate currents; Lossiter’s film showed frame after frame of empty laboratory table, thereby demonstrating that life and matter are not continuous but intermittent, a nonlinear alternation of being and non-being at varying frequencies in the ultraband. Lossiter died in 2021 at thirty-seven with his work unfinished but his discoveries and the researches of Elias and Sarah Gorn started Helen Gorn and her brother Isodor on the ontological investigation that resulted in flicker drive.
Flicker drive was not Helen Gorn’s first objective: she had been in correspondence with Lossiter since 2018 and she believed that the phonomenon of intermittency could be applied to psychotherapy. Herself given to frequent depressions, she was hoping to find a mode of controlled access to states of non-being as a means of relieving stress. In May 2021 she and her brother Isodor, financed by a Corporation grant, began a series of experiments with the limbic system and within a year they demonstrated conclusively that the ‘carrier wave’ in the human brain is generated in the amygdala…
Fremder here. At Corporation Library you can see 318 transcripts of Helen Gorn’s recordings of the experiments from 2 May 2021 until 16 February 2022. There are no transcripts between that date and Isodor’s death on 13 April 2022. Helen was twenty-three when they began the experiments, a Fellow of Corporation Neurobiology and Corporation Elite. Eighteen-year-old Isodor was a mathematician and an FCE as well. Reading their notebooks now I find the two of them more like one composite being than two distinct individuals.