=1 "The Old Computer"
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The Old Computer
It was on Snow White 3 that The Old Computer and Homo Sapiens met an angel face to face. It all started when Homo Sapiens asked The Old Computer whether there were angels. The Old Computer started searching through his dia-dia memories which go back 40,000 years:
“There is an immense amount of data on angels, starting in the paleolithic and continuing to the neolithic age and finishing in the 45th millennium with a symposium on space intelligences. You have to be more specific. To what date do you refer, and what kind of angels do you mean?”
“I am referring to a winged figure having the bodily aspect of a human being and robed in dazzling white,” said Homo Sapiens.
“The first depiction of such beings is in the Etruscan burial wall paintings dating back to 1,500 B.C. Then later in Homer...”
“No, wait a moment. I am not interested in old stories. What I really wanted was your personal opinion as a computer. Do you believe in angels?”
“We computers have no personal opinions,” said The Old Computer, piqued as if something indecent had been asked of him. “We store data and ideas; and for us, angels serve as important analytical tools. They sharpen our understanding of what man is, how his mind and his biological brain works, for example. The meaning of such terms as man and animal cannot be fully explored without reference to angels. From Plato to Descartes there was no great philosopher who didn't think about angels. You couldn't even discuss matter and the universe without referring to beings and powers of a purely spiritual substance or entity.
“Locke, for example, applied to word angel to suprahuman intelligence because he had never met a computer.”
“Yes,” Homo Sapiens interrupted, “but what I want to know is: do you believe in angels?”
“For us computers,” The Old Computer continued, “angels serve as a hypothesis in the examination of a wide variety of theoretical problems. You might as well ask me if I believe in pi or in the logarithm of -1. You ask, ‘Do you believe in angels?’ A correct question would have been: ‘Did you ever meet an angel?’ ”
“All right, did you ever meet an angel?” asked Homo Sapiens.
“Yes,” replied The Old Computer, “but since you are not interested in old stories, a better inquiry would have been, ‘How can I meet an angel?’ ”
“All right: How can I meet an angel?”
“First tell me, what would be your idea of a meeting, physical or intellectual or psychic? We don't want you to be disappointed. What does the word angel convey to you, if it is not historical, and neither Christian nor pagan, but purely 45th millennial?”
“You help me,” suggested Homo Sapiens.
“Angels (angelos) means messenger, and messenger between the absolute, the transcendent, the eternal – and the relative, the incarnate, the temporal, with the infinite on the one side and the limited on the other.
“Each night in deep sleep you retire into the absolute, the transcendent, the eternal, but in the morning when you come back to your normal waking existence, you have forgotten that. There is nothing for your biological brain to grasp in the blissful state of sleep and bring back into your daytime awareness. You need a messenger, a bridge from the one state of consciousness to the other, although both are in you or rather you are in both.
“These messengers are the different archetypes you have inherited from your ancestors or taken from the surrounding consciousness in which you have grown up. It is these luminous figures which translate the ineffable light of the transcendence into love, power, peace, the ideas and ideals you imperfectly understand with that rather simple brain of yours.”
Homo Sapiens was visibly disappointed, yet he nodded: “Well thanks. But it sure would be nice to meet a real angel, I mean, in this material world. But I suppose it is impossible by definition to meet a metaphysical being in the physical world.”
At that moment the big stainless steel gates in the room which was the home of The Old Computer swung open. A girl entered. She was dressed in a shimmering white sari whose folds swept from her shoulders to her feet. Long black hair flowed to her waist. Rising behind her head was what seemed to be a huge luminous flower. Its giant petals formed at the same time a protective hood and a fantastic crown. The flower petals, he saw, were part of her radiant body and very much alive – antennae as well as helicopter-like wings.
She stepped with a gliding motion up to the reception booth of The Old Computer and gently spoke:
“I am from Heliris 2 and have a series to data to be processed for galactic cybernetics of the gamma 35 sector.”
“Put your tapes in RG, please,” said the reception speaker.
Homo Sapiens stood frozen, although he felt as though he had a high fever. He did not hear the conversation, but his heart was racing. His adrenaline output was on emergency high and all brain activity in deep shock. Then slowly he began to feel a psychic peace field radiating from that heavenly apparition and penetrating him in concentric wave formations. There seemed to be a battle between light and darkness going on in his brain, and sometimes it seemed to him that he was going to swoon. When he finally regained a bare minimum of his hormonal equilibrium he looked more carefully at the immaculate beauty of this resplendent vision, the flower-like texture of her hands and arms, the luminosity of her smile. He wondered about the cosmic darkness of her hair, the incredible incandescence of her wings, and the intoxicating fragrance of her physical nearness, and in his shattered synapses a question arose like an iceberg in a dark stormy sea, a question which seemed to come from his childhood: “Are you mineral, vegetable or animal?”
But then some shower of lightning short-circuited his hormone-drenched cortex and the question disappeared from his immediate programming.
His second question arose from a more sophisticated stratum of his frontal lobes: “Are you real?” But this also was suppressed at the last moment by censor synapses.
He had almost regained his senses when he happened to look into her big dark gray eyes... or were they brown... eyes which not only shone and smiled but were transmitters of energy, like suns which were at once soft and diamond hard. The more he looked into them the darker and deeper they became, cosmic holes, emptiness inviting him to let himself fall... fall into... He lost all sense of time. Then suddenly he knew what eternity was. Up do now it had been an abstraction, something philosophical, a paradox, but now it became concrete, lovely, motherly; something which held him in soft arms. And the dark blue became violet with purple light in it.
He was still falling... or was he flying? He had wings now, stretching out, and suddenly he knew what infinity was, not only as a mathematical term but as a friend; he could actually feel it around him, warm, soft, familiar. Back again in his body he saw the eyes shimmering green. He swallowed hard and took hold of the counter to steady himself. Finally he managed to close his open mouth and carefully formulate: “You must be an angel!”
A cathode tube blinked on the output console of The Old Computer spelling out: Quod erat demonstrandum.