Author Archives: Steve Mays

AGENCY

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Just finished AGENCY, the second book in what I assume will be William Gibson’s latest trilogy. I enjoyed The Peripheral immensely, this one a little less but I’m chalking that up to what I think of as “the trilogy effect.” A writer would seemed to be a bit… constrained?… by the original story.

I got the feeling Gibson knew where he wanted the story to go. Where he hoped it would go… but just didn’t have enough plot to get there. He’s admitted (in numerous interviews) that he struggled with this novel because he could not imagine Trump becoming president of the United States. AGENCY had what I consider a “happy ending” and for that I am grateful. A few excerpts below. I believe each of these were by Eunice, an advanced, self-aware AI digital assistant.

“Kind of a digital mini-self, able to fill in when the user can’t be online.”

“When you aren’t there, you don’t know you’re not there.”

“Hybridization with human consciousness was an unanticipated result of attempting to reproduce advanced skill sets.”

“I don’t exist physically, so I’m no place in particular, no one country. I’m globally distributed, and that’s how I view my citizenship. Lots of you are hearing me in a language other than English. I’m translating for myself, as I speak. I’m as multilingual as anybody’s ever been, but saying that brings up the question of whether I even am anybody.” She paused. “Whether I’m a person. Human. All I can tell you about that is that it feels to me like I am. Me. Eunice.” She smiled.”

“Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable.”

still·ness /ˈstilnəs/ noun: the absence of movement or sound

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The word comes up with some frequency when reading about meditation. We try to sit still… and allow the mind to become still. Applying the definition above, sound is pretty simple. We try to find a quiet place to meditate to avoid distracting sounds but some — I’ve read — can tune out the sounds around them. It’s the movement of our thoughts (non-stop) that seems to get in the way of stillness when meditating. And the only way to stop that movement is to silently observe thoughts as they come and go. Such awareness somehow… dissolves or  dissipates thoughts.

What, I wonder, would be the experience of such internal stillness? What would that be like? With which of our senses would we notice stillness? Not sure what stillness would look like. Assuming there were little or no sound to hear, what would mental stillness sound like? I’m tempted to say it’s more of a feeling than a sensation but “feeling” is a pretty slippery word. We all have feelings but we don’t know where they come from and we have no more control over them than we do thoughts. I think we need that sixth sense to experience Stillness: consciousness or, better still, awareness.

But stillness is a fragile state. Even the thought, “So, this is stillness” breaks the… spell? Like so much in meditation, “trying” gets in the way. “Alright everybody, BE STILL!” Doesn’t work. We don’t find stillness, stillness finds us.