THE INVENTION THAT WASN’T THERE
AUGUST 1, 2011. Martin Frxx was working on a grant from the National Foundation for Progress. In his studio in a small town in Ohio, he was building something made out of stones and fire.
However, quite soon the stones and fire, as he put it, changed places. This was a remarkable occurrence. Frxx hadn’t planned things that way, but he accepted them.
When two examiners from the Foundation came to his studio to check his progress, they stood in front of his work table and shook their heads.
“There’s nothing there,” said the first examiner.
“And if there were,” said the second, “I’m sure it wouldn’t be symmetrical.”
Frxx scratched his head.
“I’m not following either of you,” he said. “There it is.”
“There is what?” the first examiner said.
“A Frxx plus.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a mirror of myself. But it’s different.”
“Try that again,” the first examiner said.
Frxx cleared his throat. He spoke for a few minutes. But as far as the examiners were concerned, nothing came out of his mouth.
They frowned at each other and left the studio.
Frxx recognized he had a problem. He sat down and wrote a letter to the Foundation:
“…I must caution you that your two examiners who visited me today have changed. They may not know it, and you may not observe it, but they are imbued with something new. How long it will take them to understand what has happened is anybody’s guess. A year? Ten years? Thirty years? The fact that they saw nothing on my work table is evidence of what I can only call a profound distinction. No one can come away from that essential bifurcation and remain unaffected…”
A week later, an older man came to visit Frxx. He said he wasn’t from the Foundation, he was an inspector attached to “Intell Central.”
Frxx welcomed him.
The man stood before the work table and said, “I don’t see anything, either, but I admit the possibility that something is there.”
Frxx nodded. “That’s an improvement,” he said.
“Can you describe it?” the inspector said.
Frxx shook his head.
“I don’t have the language for it. Any words I might use would be misleading. You would infer the wrong thing.”
The inspector said, “Can it be sold?”
“Well,” Frxx said, “I suppose it could, in a general sense, but what it actually is can’t enter the market. It has no place there. It only operates in the territory of the mind.”
“How so?”
“It changes interior reality.”
“In what way?”
“It introduces a new kind of thought. Not a new thought. A new kind.”
“Then,” the inspector said, “it should be destroyed.”
“Why?”
“It’s destabilizing.”
Frzz nodded. This was true.
“You could try to destroy it,” he said, “but I don’t think you’ll succeed.”
“Oh, we’ll succeed,” the inspector said. “We’ll take the back-door approach. We’ll fortify all present kinds of thought. Build them up to such fearsome strength that they’ll continue to dominate and construct things as they are.”
Frxx considered this.
“It’s not the first time you’ve come across an invention like mine,” he said.
The inspector smiled.
“Heavens no. It’s happened thirty or forty times in the last decade. That’s why I don’t dismiss you out of hand.”
“If you don’t mind,” Frxx said, “I’d like to know how you fortify all the existing kinds of thought.”
“Certainly,” the inspector said. “We spray a unique substance in the atmosphere. You might say it’s OUR invention. It multiplies the power of EXISTENCE. And you can take that at any level. The EXISTENCE of objects, of Nature, of people, of society, of information, of energy, of universe. Most of all, universe. And of pattern behind universe. Ultimate pattern. It increases the power of all these elements.”
“Ultimate pattern?”
“Yes. We know what that is, and we fortify it.”
“And as a result?” Frxx said.
“Every person on the face of the Earth increases his attachment to EXISTENCE at ALL LEVELS. And increases his desire to explore and feel and understand EXISTENCE.”
“And this works?” Frxx said.
“Look around you,” the inspector said. “How many people really care about anything else?”
“So,” Frxx said, “you know then that there is something else. A different KIND of something else.”
“Yes, and your invention promotes it. It promotes imagination.”
The inspector shook his head and walked out of the studio.
Frxx stood at his window for a while. He realized the inspector was right. His invention was…a silent whisper that reminded a person he had the power to invent, well, universes. Along side which, this universe and everything it contained or implied was only one EXISTENCE. And probably a mild one at that.
The invention of radically different kinds of universes was possible. And so was the invention of Xs that weren’t really universes or systems at all. What they were he had no words for.
Frxx sat down at his table and opened his notebook. He began to write. His first sentence was:
THE COSMOS IS A FORGERY OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
JON RAPPOPORT