Advanced Mode · Dossier6 min read

The Advanced Mode

There never was a Professor Daniel Charles Barker. And yet in the CCRU files his life stands complete, with titles, dates and a list of publications, and the more closely one reads it the less one wants to believe that no one lived it.

Professor of Anorganic Semiotics at Kingsport College of Miskatonic Virtual University, since 1992. Trained as a cryptographer in the early seventies. A man whose only tool, all his life, was decipherment. He began at MIT, in the information sciences, harmless enough, in noise reduction and signal modulation. Then he came to a NASA-related organisation with an interest in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and his task was a fine one. He was to harden the procedure by which one tells an intelligent message from a merely complex pattern with no sender.

And here, in this apparently technical question, the abyss opened into which Barker's whole work tips. For the longer he searched, the clearer it became that the organisation was not seeking intelligence at all but organisation, a pattern that looked like sense. They had confused the goal with the tool. Barker's research veered off this model, downward, beneath the level on which there is intention, subject, meaning at all. What remains when all of that is stripped away he called tic-systems, coincidental deposits of information, a ticking without intent, patterns no one means. The friction grew intolerable, he had to leave, and that was messy, because he held a high security clearance.

What Barker took with him was a grip, cold and simple. A pattern is not interpreted, it is deciphered. Geotraumatics, he says, is in the end nothing else, a rigorous practice of decoding. There is a voyage, but a strangely immobile one.

Apply that grip to the earth, and the earth stops telling a story. It has no meaning, it has a record, burned in by impacts and slow cooling. Its geology is not a text to be construed but a trace to be read like an intercepted transmission. And at the centre of the record, sealed beneath the crust, lies the memory of a first trauma, a blow from the outside the earth has never recovered from and that drives it still.

This memory has a name. Cthelll. It is the inner third of the terrestrial mass, a semifluid metallic ocean hotter than the surface of the sun, generating the planet's magnetic field as it tidally pulses to the orbit of the moon. Cthelll remembers no one, it is a memory without a person, an outside sealed in the innermost. Fast-forward seismology, Barker says, and you hear the earth scream. The trauma is not over, it runs on, every day, beneath your feet. And in the Numogram this place sits at a single address, at zone nine, at Gt-45, where pure number tips into the glowing deep.

How Barker came to know this is itself a story, and it reads like a breakdown. Southern Borneo, November 1980, a project named Scar. In a monitoring hut, while outside a tropical storm slowly builds and the rain spatters on the roof in the same rhythm as the keys of his machines, Barker hunches over SETI tapes, unscrambling clusters of dots into hints of contact. Something is clicking together, a notation without memory, and you could easily take it for an initiation. Then the stuttering begins. Body-tics, micro-spastic tremors, the chronometric ticking melting into the noises of the jungle, into the chirping of the cicadas, a rhythm-virus that calls demons. He speaks later of a flight into the jungle, of a tick-borne sickness, of a place called Ummnu.

And here the text pulls the floor away. For when they bring him back, to the States, to a medical installation, they tell him that these are the facts and the rest is fiction. There was no flight into the jungle, no tick-disease, no contact. It all happened in America, it all checked out. The doctor snorts over the file, that nonsense about an infection, obviously made up, tacked on afterward. And you, the reader, no longer know whether Barker deciphered a truth or sank into a delusion, and it is exactly in that not-knowing that the tick does its work, it climbs, it sticks, it sucks, a vector for hallucinations, a ticking that latches onto mammal heat and will not let go. At the deepest point of the descent something waits the text can barely utter, a many-limbed, clicking abomination with seventeen dead-glowing eyes, the Unutterable, already closed around you from outside when you arrive. Nothing happens to Barker except downwards, that is the catch and the ticket both.

What the earth carries, the body carries on. Barker's Spinal Catastrophism reads upright posture as a chain of injuries laid down in the spine, the crisis of the biped. Your back-pain is then no disorder but a memory reaching back to the first movements of life, a seismic trace in the bone. The planet and the spine are the same recording device, at different scales.

Barker was born, it is said, on the night of the dead, folded into the end from the beginning. That is the figure's last move. A man who never was, whose existence sees through itself as fiction, and whose doctrine stands nonetheless, consistent, cold, undeniable. He is the purest case of what the CCRU does, an invention built so densely that the question of whether it exists does not touch its force.

[Critic, expandable] Barker's doctrine mixes three kinds of material, and they can be separated. Secured is a part of the geology, the glowing early earth, the impact at the end of the dinosaurs, the semifluid core and the magnetic field. Contested to fringe is some of what he leans on, Thomas Gold's Deep Hot Biosphere counts as an outsider thesis, as does the Aquatic Ape theory that surfaces elsewhere in the system. Invented is the frame, Barker himself, Kingsport College, Cthelll as a proper name, geotraumatics as a whole. Its strength and its trap are the same. It reads real catastrophes as symptoms of a single body, so densely that the question of proof becomes secondary. And yet this fiction has borne real thought. Out of the invented Spinal Catastrophism came a real book, Thomas Moynihan's study, proof that a theory-fiction works whether or not its author existed.