The Mountain in the Sea A Novel

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

"I was a nautical engineer, before all of this. This—" He gestured around them, to the darkened, sweat-stinking barracks lurching in the storm. “This world didn't exist. It was a story in the news. A story I clicked past without reading. Autotrawlers crewed by slave crews. Another world, a degraded shadow of our own. How was I to know there was a hole in the world that I could fall through, like falling through an open manhole? That I could fall right through that story in the news, and end up on the other side, on a planet I don’t even recognize? And become a person I don’t recognize.”

Rustem felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Later he would remember this moment—when this man’s words penetrated to the core of him. Later he would say to someone, “I didn’t know, until that second, that all of us have a portal. I didn’t even know, then, that he had found mine. But I felt it. It was like he reached into me, and turned a dial, and the entire mechanism that made me who I was shifted into a new configuration.”

“Another metaphor. Metaphors are all I have to talk with, anymore. I’min this world now where words don’t work, so I keep having to dig around,find concepts somewhere else..."

“It’s a good nickname. Bakunin wrote God and the State. Have you readit?”

“No.”

“He was right about many things. And wrong about some things. Butmore right than wrong.”

“I should read it, I guess,” Rustem said. “I’m not much for books.”

“You do another kind of reading."

“I suppose you could say that.”

“There isn’t time in life for everything."

“No.”

We are, and have always been, a part of the world. We do not stand above it. We are “involved” with the world. This word has a sense not just of participating, not just of complication, but also of a curling inward, a coiling we call “involution.” We are coiled into the world, nestled inside its processes, wound into its forms.

There are two selves in the mind. One is the present self, the ship—neural activity, tacking between the elevated and the mundane. Between thoughts of the meaning of life and of how to glue a handle back on a broken coffee mug. The other is the current on which the vessel is borne: the more permanent self. The memories of childhood, learned concepts, habits and resentments—the built-up layers of previous interactions with the world. This self changes as well, but only slowly—as slowly as a river’s course is changed by shifts in environment and erosion, time wiping a sandbank away or building one up anew. We consist only of change—but some change is fast, and some comes only over years, decades, a lifetime.

And sound was muted, as if…” “As if,” Evrim said, “everything had moved a bit farther away.” “Yes,” Ha said. “That is exactly what I was going to say. How did youknow?” “Because that is exactly how I began to feel six months ago. What didyou do to make the feeling go away?” “I didn’t do anything. I hid it from everyone. I kept on studying, kept on talking to other people, kept on doing everything exactly as I had been. Whatseemed most important was to make sure that nobody knew. I learned to hideit. To smile. To ‘join in’ with everyone in group activities. To pretend to besomeone I was not.

“Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan says trauma is ‘etched into our physical being.’” “Yes,” Ha said. “I think I was just in such a state of emotional distress—the boy I loved who did not even know I existed, the long years of loneliness, my obsessive studying and the exhaustion it caused—all of it came together,and in that moment something just … shifted inside my mind. And it stayed shifted. When I walked out of the building, the colors were not as bright asthey should have been. It was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud—but the sun was right there in the sky. Right there, where it had been when we walked into the prison. Only now it was dim enough for me to look right at it.

Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond theboundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in thesand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen adriver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in that person—knows the way out of the maze: Empathy. Identity with perspectives outside our own. The liberating, sympathetic vibrations of fellow-feeling. Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.

“Shut up. I have more to say. You’re more than conscious. You are also human. It doesn’t matter what you are made of, or how you are born. Thatisn’t what determines it. What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world. You live in the world humans created, perceiving that world as humans perceive it, processing information as humans process it. What more is there? Being human means perceiving the world in a human way. That’s all. So, you arehuman. You may also be more than that, but you are certainly as human as most people I have known. More human than some.”

It wasn’t that she had ever believed he was real—it was more like she had believed he was enough. And when the sense he was not enough surfaced—sometimes suddenly, an intrusive thought that jarred the harmony between them—she had been able to silence it. For Years.

So I don’t look too closely. Why? Because I keep lying to myself. Making the pieces fit the way I want them to, not the way they are. That is what got me trapped here: Lying to myself. Staying in my own head, making decisions alone. And now I am in trouble again, and I have no one I can trust. Why? Because I haven’t worked hard enough to build that trust. I have to break this pattern, or the same thing will happen again. I need to stop running away from the people I need support from. I need help.”

Communication is communion. When we communicate with others, we take something fromthem into ourselves, and give them something of ours.Perhaps it is this thought that makes us so nervous about the idea of encountering culturesoutside the human. The thought that what it means to be human will shift—and we will lose ourfooting.Or that we will finally have to take responsibility for our actions in this world.

What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to selectbetween different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: to befuture-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity tochoose between different possibilities, we say we don’t “feel alive”—and here I think we guessat what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices.

“What more are we? Our memories, our actions, our memories of ouractions. Nothing more than that.”

When the brain stores long-term memory, it changes the memory from activity to structured connections. Imagine it like this: You are trying to remember a phone number. At first you have nowhere to write it out. So you say it to yourself, over and over. That is activity. Then you finda terminal and write the phone number out, converting activity to physical structure. These persistent connections, filed away as structures in the brain, form the more permanent self. The momentary activity is the fleeting “you”—such as the “you” reading these words in this exact moment. If you recall these words of mine later, it will be because they have, in asense, been written down in the neural connectome of your brain, taking up a physical presence inside you.This is why it can be so difficult to overcome trauma: Memories are inscribed in us. They are etched into our physical being.

Even if Evrim may have been very close to being human when Dr.Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan brought them online, they would not be now: without sleeping, and especially without forgetting, they must be drifting further and further away from anything that could be called “human.” That’swhat we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our mindsforever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, were organize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.

Again and again I asked myself how humankind could transcend the limitations of our ownform, the rigidity of our structures. Again and again, the solution seemed impossible. In ourbodies as in society, our structures are built to replicate themselves, and themselves only. Weare embedded in habit. We dread the truly new, the truly emergent. We don’t fear the end of theworld—we fear the end of the world as we know it.

But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside ourskulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone,in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it throughits sensory apparatus.

“So, it’s a joke, right? Or not exactly a joke. Someonesaid that people don’t really want to date other people. They don’t really wantequal partnership—you know, two full people in a relationship. Two peoplewith demands and desires and differences of opinion about everything. Whatthey want is one-point-five people in the relationship. They want to be thecomplete one, the person who controls the relationship—and they want theother person to be half a person. You know, someone who gets them, but whodoesn’t have their own demands. Someone who appears complete, with allthese personality quirks and their own opinions and stories about the world—but not in an annoying way. Not in a way that would demand you change.

Partly, the friendship was a result of Eiko’s new determination to caremore. There was a time when he would have kept to himself. A time wheneven someone coming to his aid would not have been enough for him tobegin confiding in that person. But now his determination to care had begunto feel almost religious.That didn’t mean it felt real to him—not yet. He still felt that distance,that detachment. But he was groping toward it, toward something genuine.Fellow feeling, or whatever one might call it: he had no word for what it was.He was forcing himself to connect, to feel, to identify with others. Becausepeople had to matter. They had to. If they did not matter, it meant he did not

It was here that she had learned what it meant to be completely alone.She found herself thinking of Evrim. Of what they had said about theautomonks at the temple:I find them eerie. Repulsive. I suppose it is the same for you when youlook at a monkey. Unsettling.That was how she felt, looking back at herself as a child: Like looking atsome half-minded thing. An inferior version of the self she was now. A failed attempt.