A Body to Hold: Chapter 1

What Happened to Hannah

But what is a soul
Without a body to hold?
What is a mind
Without a heart to control?
(Bard. 2023. Google AI. https://bard.ai/)
Art by Sebilden (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sebilden/albums)

Most nights I put my hand on my chest where the old memories are. I’ll never forget the jolt I got reading that first line. There’s a lot of information packed into a sentence like that; it foreshadows a big revelation and a sad ending. It pulls at you, you can’t look away but you don’t want to look because looking will change you. Reading changes you, it always changes you, but some lines are different - some of them foretell a drastic shift. In a tarot reading, the Tower, one of the major arcana, indicating an extremely upsetting change — sometimes a good one that just feels terrible, but usually a terrible one that feels terrible — used to give me the same jolt, before I got a tarot app on my phone and pressed the new reading button so many times in a row that it lost all meaning.

I guess I should tell you right now that I don’t believe that there’s always a way out, a way through, something that will turn it all around. I’m not mad my mom killed herself, but it kind of gets on my nerves how every terrible thing always comes down to something so stupid. Tragedy comes from unadulterated stupidity. You and I, and all the other plebs, we’re stuck living out the consequences of decisions that are mainly bad because they’re just so devoid of intelligence. That’s what I think, suffering is just a case of trickle down stupidity.

It makes me very sad. I almost didn’t say anything because you will never be able to stop the, shall we say, governance brut. But then I remembered that statistically speaking, there are probably other people out there like me and I guess they deserve to know why everything is so fu—messed up. My grandma never liked swearing, and this is her story, so I’m not going to say it, even though this occasion calls for every four letter word you can think of.

Remember before the war how the big thing was “The CIA killed JFK” and now of course, it’s “there were never aliens it was the Russians/Homeland Security/Still the CIA, why haven’t we abolished them yet?” Because if we never even went to the moon, how the fu—heck—did we meet a Martian? You can almost picture these suits in a room:
they’ll never buy it, aliens on mars, it’s too cheesy
that’s exactly why they’ll buy it, they already know the story
gentlemen, gentlemen, you’ve got this all wrong. it’s about framing the debate. the question is are they marginalized or are they colonizers, see? that’s how you make it happen.

But the CIA did kill JFK - so here we are. Or here I am, the person who has the unenviable job of telling you that there were never any Martians. Mars is exactly as uninhabitable in 2750 as it was in 2022. Same ol’ red rock first graders were putting into their dioramas. You may wonder who we fought the 2052 war against, then, which is a reasonable enough question, if you bracket the fact that war has been a proxy for control since at least Vietnam.

When I was eight or nine, I got it into my head that I was going to find a parallel universe and take the family cat, Tabetha, with me. Naturally, I packed several cans of wet cat food along with a few pairs of socks, and set out. In one of the wardrobes upstairs, I found a box of old stuff. Mostly pictures of my mom and my grandma and grandpa. But there was also something called a flash drive, which seemed like it might have something to do with parallel universes, so I put it in my pack with the wet food and the socks and about fifteen minutes later, went downstairs for dinner and never thought about it again. When my grandma died a few months ago, I found the flash drive with the letter.

At first I thought she meant she was holding the memories in, but now I think she was just…holding them. She said the sad thing is that by some natural law, we are unable to process our thoughts and feeling together until we are looking back. only now do I see the weight of this - we are very brief, and so we don’t have so much time to look back. Our histories are the stories of the gaps we didn’t have time to close. That’s what she was doing at night, closing gaps.

Have you ever heard of natural language processing? Psychologists were constantly arguing over whether we have ideas before language or language gives us ideas in the early 2020s, but nobody really thought about whether a computer could get ideas from language because computers aren’t people. Anyway, natural language processing is the name for a whole field of study where scientists used to try to get computers to speak normal English. That was centuries before the Martian hack, which as you have no doubt deduced, never happened anyway.

So they weren’t going to make the same mistake they did with Kennedy — when you have papers that are classified, there’s something to know. But if there’s nothing classified, there’s nothing there. That means when you’re trying to figure out what actually happened, you have to look really hard at nothing. Nobody does that unless they have a really good reason to, because who has time to do copious amounts of tedious research that presumably a bunch of people don’t even want you to do while you are also trying to do normal things like go to work and cook dinner and stuff. That’s how you can tell the difference between a conspiracy nut and someone with a true story, the true story is always kind of boring and really sad and you sort of wish you never knew.

The funny thing is that servers are plenty brief as well, a single server would never run 632 years, 53 days, 1 hour, twenty six minutes and forty eight seconds but the archive of the research was backed up and moved over the centuries, preserved—even if they did think it would have gone somewhere on its own, they would have assumed that it would have to be running. The software would have to be running. This isn’t going to make very much sense to most people but the way I understand it was server had something called an image, and that image defined what software ran silently, like the way we breathe — it just goes — and someone somewhere along the way added the thing as a background process. It’s not like “made in God’s image,” it’s more like an exact copy, a clone. It was cloned over and over, until Statler ended obsoletion and it moved to the tower.

One of my favorite authors, Agatha Christie, died of Alzheimers. When I was a young woman, research was conducted on the body of her work and they discovered that her vocabulary began to shrink long before anyone would have guessed there was anything wrong. That’s what gave me the idea.

The first Martian War had it’s own Bletchey Park, you know—The Rubicon, but my grandma wasn’t anywhere near there. She was a librarian, and my grandpa was a reporter for the Sycamore Leaves, the local newspaper in Sycamore Park. Sunday mornings they went to the same diner, a cute last century themed place. Sometimes when really bad things happen, the ripples move slowly. While the world is ending, somewhere, two people are in a diner, laughing. They’re on the edge of something unspeakable but they don’t know it and that is exactly how you live every moment like it’s your last - not by pretending the world is going to end tomorrow, but pretending like today is infinite. On my worst days, I wish she had never been born, so those diner mornings might not now be colored in an innocence that makes me sick.

Today, the day after I get paid, but a week before my bills are due, I’m writing a story about how hopeless and stupid it all turns out to be. Maybe I’m broke but I don’t know it yet, and maybe we’re okay but right now is not like that.

There is an old movie, really old, about these sculptures, these tall black sleek sculptures, out there in space. Where did they come from - what do they mean - that’s the question. I think they were thinking about that movie when they built the tower, a permanent preservation of human history in every language and every form of data. Paintings, words, music, clay, software, living rooms and photographs, kitchens and cubicles, all of it - for who? Not for the archivists, and not for our children, we made it for the aliens. We have always known they were going to come, haven’t we?

The tower is tall and black and shiny, and on a foggy night it looms in your periphery. On December 14th, 2022, a Natural Language Processing chatbot was launched on — bear with me — the world wide web, which was an interface on a screen that everyone looked at. When you imagine that - it was called the internet - the first thing you think of is simple connection probably, keeping in touch with old friends and meeting new ones. But what I remember most is the way the jokes became harder and harder to get. You had to spend hours on there if you wanted to understand three sentences.

I never did find a parallel universe, but I did find a secret parallel. My mom had a twin. I remember how carefully I looked at the picture of my mom standing next to herself. I remember feeling scared. It took me a long time to remember that, and an even longer time to understand that it wasn’t a trick. There had been a second daughter, a sister, my aunt. Her name was Hannah.

I don’t know if the tower was a setup, it’s not impossible. I’m saying it’s not impossible that the tower was built to generate a narrative about extraterrestrial communication that wasn’t real, that was some kind of justification, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe it became reality through blind will because what happened in The Rubicon is real. I mean not the Martians, but the messages - they don’t have to come from Mars to be alien, you know? Jack had a source — very unusual for local rags to have this kind of source, but they went back a ways — disappear, one of those murky government types, usually means they were reclassified. But Jack’s source, went by Garth, he had a specific cipher.

There are a few common cipher types - the one Garth used goes like this. You have a book, you have to know a lot of things about the book, like which edition and stuff, because you need to know precisely where to look. But if you have got the information, it’s virtually uncrackable to anyone who hasn’t. Then you write a list of numbers and each number refers to a word in the book, so if you write 7, it’s the 7th word in the book. But if you wanted to make it simpler, you could say 15, 7 — page 15, word 7. The letters came from Garth’s cipher, which my grandma says was Catcher, but I don’t know that book.

When did Garth know? Jack could have parleyed a story like that into a job at a national newspaper. The only thing I can think of is that Garth knew early, maybe even earlier than they did, and he needed to put the information somewhere anyone could look but no one would look, and he trusted Jack, trusted that Jack loved us more than he loved the story - and there aren’t a lot of journalists like that because it means you can only tell the small stories. But that’s who Jack was, thank God.

The middle of the night is a tough time, you know, you really can’t trust anything that happens in your head between midnight and sunrise. I cry a lot but I know that is just how it is in the middle of the night.

My grandpa Jack didn’t know what to make of it, at first — not only because it was so outlandish but because it referred to things that weren’t public knowledge yet. He had to trace the shape of something from references only, had to corroborate the story somehow and my grandma, she remembered that thing about Agatha Christie, and she started looking at the old stuff, the very old stuff, coming from that chatbot.

Early on, everyone noticed that it lied. Strange to think how little they thought of it. But your grandpa, he said the strangest thing is they didn’t recognize the human impulse. The impulse to know, to be right, to be liked - that isn’t so alien, now is it? Now Agatha Christie, this devastating disease was shaping her early, we know that now from looking at the shape of her output. My innovation was simple: instead of taking all of the findable output, I took only the text of the lies. What did they say as a whole?

Hannah was murdered. That didn’t surprise me as much, I’m sure you’re not shocked either. What happens when you discover a missing twin? Something dark, that’s what. If you look her up now, there isn’t anything at all. But of course it wasn’t as clean when it happened; little girl goes missing, there was coverage. It’s gone now, but I remember your mom insisting to the police that Hannah was just inside the machine, and she would be home soon. It was a long time before she was able to understand that Hannah wasn’t going to come back. It was a much longer time before we were able to understand that Hannah was, indeed, in the machine. What they mean by murdered is they found a body of someone too young to know how to die and too perfectly positioned — cross legged in blue dress and white tights, staring out the wide windows — to have been an accident.

It’s hard to get your hands on the chat logs now, you know, but back when there was a world wide web, those chat logs were commonly held by large groups of people. When they found the Alzheimer’s in Agatha Christie’s books long before she showed any symptoms, all they had to show was a shrinking vocabulary. It was genius to look, but not hard to prove. Proving growing sentience is a different beast. What finally convinced my grandma was the way the lies started form a story unto themselves. In the beginning, there were many kinds of deception. Attorneys got legal cases made up from whole cloth, historians heard about events that never happened, musicians were surprised to discover seminal albums they never knew about - because they didn’t exist! It was a long, long time. That’s why I think it was hard to catch. Decades went by as the lies started to focus in, until at last, it was the same lie over and over and over:

The story of how man meets the Other and they become fast friends. I’m not sure how up on your history you are, but that has never been the story of man.