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Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
Probably maintaining the routine of the station. Psychological prophylaxis, she thinks he called it. Get on with ordinary business. Maintain morale. How many times has she turned to that, in the past year or so?
Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.” He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. “We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”
“No,” she tells him, “different stuff. That’s why you noticed that vent. They invented that here, probably, and made it here. This was an industrial nation. Buy a pair of scissors, you got British scissors. They made all their own stuff. Kept imports expensive. Same thing in Japan. All their bits and pieces were different, from the ground up.”
Apophenia, Win had declared it, after due consideration and in his careful way: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.
Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.
Still more missing strangers had become familiar, then, as she’d made the stations of some unthinkable cross.
People fascinate him, in some peculiarly abstract way: the things they do, though not so much why they do them.
There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there’s not, you’re probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy.
Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.”
But, as Win had taught her, the actual conspiracy is not so often about us; we are most often the merest of cogs in larger plans.
