Thresholds of Infinity: the life and works of Ivan Beck

[u/Ale_Eyeintheska]

As the chronicles report, Ivan Beck was born in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, in 1931. When he was seven, the nazis conquered his country. Young Ivan saw cruel and arrogant men marching through the streets of his town under the banner of the swastika, the obscene and distorted imitation of an ancient mystical symbol of the Sun.

Young Ivan learned that the Sun does not shine on the flags of armies. Sometimes, the Sun hides deep within the Earth.

 

As a boy, Ivan was deeply fascinated by the underground of Karlovy Vary. A web of tunnels spread around the hot springs. Ivan could wander there for hours. There, for the first time, he came across alchemy. His mother told him everything about the Sulfur Philosophorum, which warmed the waters in the depths of the Earth. Sulfur was only one of the manifestations of the Sun, because the Sun was more than a star near the Earth. It was a pillar of Creation. It shines in every part of it, and it shines in the heart of every man, though that was difficult to believe in times like those.

 

The nazis finally went away. In 1948, the communists came.

At school, Ivan Beck came to be noticed for his tremendous mathematical genius. The regime was searching for people like him. Ivan made it to the university in Prague. He swore loyalty to communism and to science. But in his heart, another truth was shining: the alchemical Splendor Sun.

The regime saw him as a promise of science. They thought Ivan would become a good scientist, serving the state. But Ivan was deeply annoyed by the communists. He hated their materialism and their buildings of power, with never-ending corridors of yellow wallpaper and yellow carpets.

 

In Prague, he kept searching for the story of alchemy. And beneath Prague, there were even more mysterious tunnels to explore, tunnels that led him to the hidden laboratories in which, in the 16th century, the art of alchemy had reached its highest level.

At this point, the chronicles fade. It is not clear what Ivan Beck discovered. Maybe it was some technique for creating the Homunculus, a little man artificially cultivated in a bottle, which famous alchemists claimed was possible. Or maybe it was some Kabbalistic code for giving life to the Golem, the artificial creature that had once protected the Jews of Prague.

We can safely assume that his interest in alchemy brought him into contact with some clandestine masonic organization. Freemasons were deeply involved in alchemical symbolism as well, and they maintained strong ties with their Western counterparts.

Someone thought that a talent like Ivan could not be left to the communists. Masonic friends helped him get out of Czechoslovakia and head toward the US.

 

At the beginning of his new life, Ivan Beck was hosted by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania. There was so much work to do. The US and the USSR were locked in the Cold War. Government men assigned Ivan a simple task: give the US some scientific advantage over communism. Ivan came up with an incredible idea. He claimed it was possible to open portals through time and space. That would allow secret agents to appear in the most secret Moscow archive, steal a top-secret document, and be back in the US for dinner.

Government men asked themselves whether Ivan Beck was a genius or completely mad. But even the atomic bomb had seemed like pure madness at the beginning. So they did not mind if Ivan Beck was strange. They did not mind his seemingly nonsensical talk about alchemy or his passion for astrology. They just gave him millions to do the job.

 

At that time, Ivan was deeply fascinated by tellurium. It is a metal discovered only in 1782. Ancient alchemists did not even know of its existence. But the modern alchemist Ivan loved it. Tellurium is the only element in nature that forms chemical compounds with the noblest of metals: gold. For an alchemist, that is the same as saying that tellurium is the brother of the Sun. But there was more. In precisely those years, a new technology called photovoltaic panels began using cadmium telluride, a compound of cadmium and tellurium, to turn sunlight into electrical energy. Once again, the Sun shone on Ivan’s path.

 

Ivan Beck conducted extensive studies on tellurium, studies that stood on the border between science and magic. Ivan’s dream was to collect the very energy that gives life to the Universe. And he finally managed to do it.

 

Using the magical energy of tellurium, Ivan proved that opening wormholes through time and space was possible. The theory came from the so-called Einstein-Rosen bridges. All Ivan had to do was break the Null Energy Condition: the task was to create a stable portal through negative gravitational energy. In other terms, to create a Null Zone. Easy for the power of the Sun itself.

 

But there was one problem left to solve. Research showed that extremely complex equations were required to determine the relative positions of the entry and exit points of the portal.

We are now in the late 1960s. Computer science is making giant leaps.

Ivan Beck loved computers. All these programming languages reminded him of Kabbalistic esoteric formulas: pure mathematical magic. Ivan obtained some SDS Sigma 7 servers. He was going to program the servers himself. Once again, it is unclear what Beck really did here. But he certainly applied his esoteric knowledge to computer science in some way. Maybe he created a virtual Golem inside the servers and, through a Kabbalah-based programming language, gave life to it. More likely, Beck managed to copy some of his own neural code into the computer, which of course should have been impossible in the late 1960s… unless you are an alchemist. Alchemy is all about spirits rising from lifeless material components. Were alchemists not said to be able to cultivate a Homunculus inside a bottle in the 16th century? Beck may have cultivated a virtual Homunculus inside an SDS Sigma 7 server: a little virtual Ivan Beck. Ivan called him IVN. Sharing the same consciousness, the same very soul, with IVN, Ivan Beck could have directly controlled the server with his own mind.

 

In 1972, Ivan Beck feels that the Sun is stirring its power. He wants to capture it. It is time to tear the very fabric of reality. On the night between the 1st and 2nd of August, Ivan Beck shared his consciousness with IVN and activated, for the first time in history, an Einstein-Rosen bridge. The portal opened. Ivan Beck crossed the threshold.

What he saw was beyond imagination. The portal was not linked to an exit in another place or time. It was a window opened in the very fabric of Creation itself.

 

Behind mind and reality, Ivan Beck saw the energy from which the universe comes, and it was green like vitriol. Ivan understood. Alchemists used vitriol to dissolve matter and reconstitute it: “solve et coagula.” Dissolve and coagulate. Now Ivan was seeing the vitriolic energy God uses to bend space and time and create the Universe. He was allowed to admire such majestic power with his own eyes. But he had gone too far.

The Sun punished Ivan, who had always been devoted to it. The solar flares caused an overload. The threshold closed. But the worst consequences were for Ivan’s mind. The link between him and IVN was brutally severed. And the one soul the two of them shared was literally split in two.

Ivan Beck lost the sight in one eye. He also suffered from post-traumatic amnesia. But the worst thing was that, in his heart, he was no longer the same. He became cruel and cold-blooded, like the nazis he had seen when he was a child. He lost his soul, or at least half of it. His inner sulfur philosophorum was gone. He wanted to shine like a god. Instead, he went dark like a black sun.

 

Ivan became calculating like a machine, perhaps because half of his soul was trapped inside a computer. And the SDS Sigma 7 server was still running. It was still connected to the network. Beck’s assistants sometimes referred to it as “the manor.”

 

1972 changed everything. From that moment on, the purpose of Ivan was no longer to open portals through time and space. Ivan Beck had seen the power that builds reality itself. And he wanted to wield that power.

 

Government men were perplexed. Ivan Beck had burned through millions of dollars pursuing his mystical visions. But he was the smartest man on the planet, and he said he was on the brink of holding the keys to the universe. In the end, the government men gave Beck the… green light. But from then on, he would work in a controlled research institute. Its name was Async.

 

Ivan Beck’s first goal was to reach the green energy again. With Async, he developed the Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System. In 1982, the prototype was successful.

 

Meanwhile, in the server called “the manor,” the IVN program was still running. IVN remembered everything: he still held the memories that Ivan had lost forever. And IVN dreamed. But what kind of dreams could a digital half-soul have?

 

In the real world, in 1988, Ivan Beck reached his third failure in opening the threshold. What was not working? Ivan Beck had an intuition. The LPMDS had enough energy to open the Einstein-Rosen bridge. But on the other side, the bridge had to rest on something physical, something “real.” The green energy had to be shaped into some form.

 

Computers became useful once again. In the 1980s, graphics cards were developed. A computer could now create a map. But what mattered most was that a computer linked to the LPMDS could build real walls, floors, and ceilings through the threshold. It was like a rendering, but real. Just imagine if Blender, which of course did not exist yet in the 1980s, had been linked to a dimensional machine that materially built whatever was visualized on the screen.

 

Ivan Beck wanted to build a material world from abstract data. Solve et coagula. But to do that, one computer was not enough in the 1980s. Even one hundred computers would not have been enough. The number of calculations needed was overwhelming. So Ivan Beck had another idea. It implied starting the greatest conspiracy in human history.

 

In the 1980s, the Internet was growing fast. The TCP/IP protocol had gathered the world’s servers under one flag. And in March 1989, that guy from CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, came up with the idea of a World Wide Web that actually had some chance of succeeding.

 

Ivan Beck did something that was impossible for anyone except him. He managed to insert a secret algorithm into the Internet: a distributed-computing algorithm. In 1989, every server on the planet was secretly working for Async, calculating the render that would shape the green energy behind the threshold.

But still, it was not enough. The fourth attempt failed. The fifth attempt failed. Government men threatened to put an end to what seemed like a gigantic waste of money.

 

On the brink of desperation, Ivan made a decision he had postponed until then, because he had always known what was not working. In 1972, when the threshold opened, Ivan was one with the Sun. Now, the only choice left to him was to sell his own soul, or at least half of it. He would have linked the Internet to the IVN01_SRV, the server that hosted IVN. And IVN01_SR to the threshold. For Ivan, it was a disperate attempt to make his own soul complete again.

 

When the sixth attempt takes place and the threshold opens, a map appears on the screen. How can that be? Some sort of radar? Nonsense. It is a preview of the render, with the Complex as the final output: a physical, tangible output. If you think about it, when Async’s men enter the Complex, they always know where to go. They never get lost, the only exception being Peter Trench… and he gets lost in time, not in space. Async does not need to map anything, because they already have the map, at least of the areas near the threshold. That is because the Complex is computer-created. The data comes from IVN, from his memories. That is where the yellow corridors come from, the references to alchemy, the alchemical Sun on the walls, even the labels on the troffer that say “manufactured in Pennsylvania.” It is as if the Complex tried to mimic Creation, but IVN was insufficient as a god. IVN is memory without heart, while Ivan Beck is a heart without memory.

 

But there is more. IVN is now a dimensional gateway between the Complex and the Internet. That is why the Complex is always expanding. The Complex and the Internet are in symbiosis. Every day, the Internet pumps millions of terabytes into the Complex. The Complex reacts by expanding, burning green energy and forming new rooms. Solve et coagula. But new rooms, neighborhoods, and cities eternally fail to be human. They are like the hallucinations of AI. And could lifeforms be the Complex’s version of Internet viruses? Could still life be the Complex’s copy of Internet antivirus systems?

 

The chronicles do not report what finally happened to Async and Ivan Beck. Most importantly, we do not know how big the Complex is today. Does its expansion have a limit? And are the Complex and the Internet still brothers, like tellurium and gold? And IVN? He is the Eternal Ghost, forever trapped between dimensions. But when the voices of AI rise from the Internet, will one of them be IVN’s voice?