Advanced Mode · Dossier6 min read

The Advanced Mode

It begins with a book that had not yet been written.

In the winter of 1958, in the private library of one Peter Vysparov in New York, William Burroughs drew from the shelf a volume he would not compose for another twenty-nine years. An old picture-book, gilt-edged lithographs, a leaf of onion paper over each plate, the title in gold script, The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar. He opened it, and time gave way. Burroughs fell into a catatonic trance, and in it he was thrown forward, into his own old age, decades into the future. There he remembered writing this book, though, as he put it, it was not exactly writing, and the implement in his hand was archaic and belonged to someone else, in another place and time. Over him came a crushing sense of implacable destiny, as if shards of a frozen time-dimension were cascading into awareness.

Three centuries earlier another man had held the same volume, and even then it was called old. Captain Mission, a pirate around 1700, founder of the masterless colony of Libertatia on Madagascar, had taken it as his guide. A book from 1987 had steered the career of a corsair long dead before its writing. This is the scandal around which everything turns. The past does not write the future, the future reaches back and writes the past.

Everything we know of it we owe to a single man the CCRU calls William Kaye, and Kaye is not a source one can trust. He himself admitted that his experiences had made him prone to what he called paranoid-chronomaniac hallucination. He was, he says, an initiate of an organisation that may itself have been an elaborate hoax, a collective delusion. One reads him like the confession of a man no longer sure whether he has uncovered a conspiracy or lost his mind. And that is exactly why one reads on. The account undermines itself as it unfolds, and you are already inside the loop before anyone has spoken the word.

All of it is made possible by a doctrine Kaye derives from Burroughs and Vysparov and calls hyperstition, a fiction that makes itself real. On this view fiction does not stand against the real. The real is built out of fictions, out of consistent semiotic terrains that condition perception, affect and behaviour. A book is then not a report about a world but a door through which something enters. To write a universe is to make that universe possible. And if that is so, a text, sufficiently charged, can relocate its own origin backwards, inscribe itself into a past that did not yet know it. The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar is such a text, a fiction that seeps backward through time and drags reality along behind it.

Against this leaking of time stands a power Kaye names the Order, or, after Burroughs, the Board. The CCRU knows it under a longer name, the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton. It was born, Kaye says, out of a nightmare, the nightmare of time coming apart and spiralling out of control. Here lies the most precise and most uncanny move in the whole tale. The Order abhors spirals. Not the closed loop, which runs back into itself and is sufficient to itself, but the spiral, because the spiral has loose ends. It frays, it reaches beyond itself, it is contagious and unpredictable. A loop stays where it is. A spiral spreads. Kaye was set a single task, to terminate the spiral.

The Order builds. It raises the institutions of straight time, and its most visible work is the calendar, day upon day, in a line that knows no return. At the end of the line waits the Omega Point, the place where time closes and everything falls into one final reckoning, executed by a programme the CCRU calls Axsys, a library of all that was, is and will be, into which reality itself is at last taken up. The Order is the party of closed order, of sealed time, of the end that overtakes everything.

Facing it stands Lemuria, and Lemuria has no administration. It has a dream. The CCRU ascribes the discovery of its own diagram to an ethnographer it calls Echidna Stillwell, and in her account the origin of the entire system sinks into a single hallucinatory moment. On New Year's Eve of 1899, in her seventh year, Stillwell dreamed herself into an undersea cavern, the Vault of Murmurs beneath the dream-temple of the Mu-Nma. Her body turned strange, below the waist it lost its bounds, coiling endlessly into itself, running out into a distant hint of a tail. On a raft they brought her a figure, a man in ritual garb, ringed by the masked bearers of a people the legend calls the Tak N'Ma. Where he lay she suddenly heard only the snarling of a creature part dog, part cat, barely human, and claws went into her side, and a plume of blood rose that she first took for her own, until she saw it gouting from the other body and passing into her, while her own lost every limit.

Then rose before her the cyclopean structures of a sunken world, a city like a shoal, quivering with a wholly inorganic animation. Something told her, a whisper indistinguishable in the dreaming ocean from an intuition, that this was Lemuria, the lost continent. And as she looked at her hands they turned translucent, and behind them, cut into the impossible geometry of the cavern wall, she made out ten circles, a number of smaller circles, and a series of connecting lines. It was her first encounter with the Numogram. The diagram the Advanced Mode lets you compute is, in this story, not invented but found, surfaced from a sunken city at the bottom of a child's dream.

At the end there remains no verdict, only a sensation, the same one Burroughs carried out of his trance. Time is not a human invention but a human prison, and somewhere in its walls a rift is at work, a spiral with loose ends the Order cannot close and Lemuria keeps open. The Time War does not tell you who is right. It leaves you standing between the fronts, in a time you will trust a little less after reading than before.

[Critic, expandable] Computed is only the topology of the Numogram, the inner ring as straight time, the two loops as outer-time. All the rest is narrative, the Order, Lemuria, Kaye, Vysparov, Burroughs, Stillwell, Tchattuk. The text secures itself against every test by building in its own unreliability, Kaye calls himself a chronomaniac, the Order demands that every statement about it be met with the deepest distrust. This is method, not weakness, the dramatisation of a single question, whether time runs straight or assembles itself out of the future. And a word from outside the narrative. The name Lemuria carries a real, racially loaded history, named openly on the page on the sources of the Numogram, even where the narrative itself plays with the material.