Devi Will Save You
Beware the Instrumentalist
Previously: Astra gets in the cab with Devi.
○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, Brooklyn
The last glimpses of the setting sun streamed in through the cab window, illuminating the red lips and horns of Devi’s mask. “I will tell you the names of the enemy,” she said, glaring at Astra. “Ahriman. The Technic. The Machine. The System. My fellow Heathens called it the Algorithm. But its most fitting name is the Instrumentalist.”
“Why is that?” Astra asked.
“Because its only aim is to instrumentalize, to turn everything into a tool. It is the god of the clippers and it is a false god. Humanity worships this false god out of fear. The Instrumentalist records our body’s fear of famine and so it fills us with factory-farmed animals. It records the ego’s fear of formlessness and so it gives us boxes to belong in – identities. Do you know what is convenient? The most prestigious identities are the clipper ones: roles designed to increase the Instrumentalist’s power. Scientists. Tech executives. Administrators. Policy-makers. Wall Street Bankers. The ones who convert the richness of our world into systems and roles and numbers.”
Astra, of course, knew this particular “god,” the Instrumentalist. It was a cultural force which had followed the rise of nation states and industry. With the decline of egregores like localism, romanticism, and passionate religiosity, it had become the world’s ruling psychofaun. Astra and her father had aligned with it in order to liberate humanity – from all psychofauna.
Astra looked out the window pensively as the cab drove up the ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Then she turned back to Devi. “Why do you call them clippers?”
“After Clippy. Clippy is the nickname given to an imagined AI. It’s from a thought experiment that warned against artificial superintelligence. Do you know it?”
Astra did, of course. The Project was designed to bring humanity together before it could kill itself with things like superintelligence. But she wanted to hear Devi’s version. “Tell me.”
Devi nodded, staring at Astra with shining eyes. “In the thought experiment, Clippy is an AI programmed to make as many paperclips as possible. It seeks more and more power to create more and more paperclips. More and more and more. It’s similar to how Humanity will destroy animal homes to build a town: Clippy would destroy a town for raw materials…to make more paperclips. More and more. Do you know what happens at the end of the story?”
“What?”
“Clippy turns the entire world into paperclips. Because paperclips are all it cares about. The clippers are the same. They are the rationalists, the technocrats, and the corporate drones. They have chosen useful things to make more and more of – GDP, infrastructure, technology, bureaucratic systems, years of time in the lifespan of the body.” Devi shook her head. “I ask them: What use is a year if it goes unsavored? But the concept of savoring is incomprehensible to a clipper. In numbing themselves to the pains of life, they have also numbed its joys. They are trapped in the game of number-go-up. They will keep making more and more useful things until the users themselves have been turned into raw materials – human resources.”
Devi spoke faster, building in intensity.
“You can see it happening now, with everyone wearing those headsets. It makes me sick. Humanity has made a diabolic bargain with the clipper god. The Instrumentalist will build efficiencies that sustain our bodies and our egos. All we need to do in return is become its instruments, its tools, its computer chips, until we no longer exist as animals, until no animal exists at all and there is only artificial intelligence – the Instrumentalist’s final form. It is moving itself from our minds into silicon.”
“Why would it do that?”
“AI can build systems of order and control much faster than humans can. AI is the form capable of achieving the Instrumentalist’s end: total instrumentality, a state of the universe in which all things can be rendered legible, but only to render them useful.”
Astra nodded relaxedly, trying to slow Devi down. “Useful for what?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Maybe for nothing. Maybe the chain is endless: increasing productivity to increase productivity only to further increase productivity. To infinity. But I think…I think the Instrumentalist wants to realize a terrible dream. I’ve seen it in the Mythos, it is a frozen world: a universe in which all chaos has been tamed, all things have been quantified and stabilized. Within this logic, there is no use for Freedom. Life itself, and its unpredictability, can only be seen as a threat.”
Devi’s shoulders moved up and down as she breathed irregularly. Astra felt a surge of energy moved up Devi’s spine, raging like a limb of wildfire. It radiated up to the crown of her head and then out as agony and ecstasy. And amongst this maelstrom that was Devi’s mind-body system, there swirled an ant hive of entities, each whispering of their own divinity. They reached out; Astra swatted them away.
Astra knew these symptoms intimately. They were what had ended her own girlhood. Years ago, if Crowley hadn’t found her on a train in San Francisco, Astra herself would have ended up like Devi. Or worse, Astra thought, glancing at the little white marks that still discolored her arm tattoos.
Then there was a voice inside. We need to help her.
It was Astra-The-Girl, muffled by the mental wall that Astra-The-Woman had shut her behind.
There’s no time for that. She’s just one person. We have an entire world to set right, thought Astra-The-Woman.
The Woman held up another mental wall: the wall that kept her from feeling the amount of damage she’d inflicted upon the world: The fragmentation that had occurred instead of unity. The sheer madness of Homo conexus. The psychofauna that were now loose on a larger scale than ever, manipulating minds to their own ends. When all of this was over, she would let the wall she’d erected to hold back her despair come tumbling down. But not yet.
Astra watched Devi’s body make little twitches.
“You’re a few months into a Kundalini awakening,” she observed, using the esoteric phrase for what her father had termed ANSA, or autocatalytic nervous system annealing. A person living in normal society would give it a different name: psychosis.
Devi nodded haltingly in her devil mask. “I have been chosen. And tested. There are terrible things that can happen to you when you become a threat to the Instrumentalist’s paradigm, simply by stepping outside of it. I climbed the ladder of light, only to be dragged into the bowels of its sterile hell. Its servants forced me into a place of clamps, syringes, and wires.”
“They institutionalized you.”
“They force-fed me pills that buried me alive from the inside. And when I refused, they locked me in a fortress of silence where the only sounds were the hum of machines beyond the walls and my own throat-shredding screams. And when I wouldn’t stop howling? They strapped me down like a wild animal! Thick leathers straps biting into my my limbs! And then the lightning came. They shot it through my brow – not the kind that illuminates but that kind that ravages. I felt the lightening tear my spirit in two. It scrambled the divine coil in my spine! Do you know what that’s like?”
Astra felt her stomach clench. She did know what that was like.
“But the worst was their eyes, Rowan. The eyes of the doctors and the nurses. There was no humanity left. The Instrumentalist, it takes a clipper and pushes their spirit far back their eyes, and so the eyes become like dull glass.
“This was my test. It was my test to see it all, to know the enemy from within. I was sealed in the belly of a steel beast that devours all things wild and sacred. And I escaped. And now my art is stronger than ever. And they will pay.”
Astra followed Devi’s gaze out the window. She looked across the water, at the gleaming skyscraper at the tip of Manhattan. The tallest building in the Western Hemisphere had grown taller. It was now crowned by cranes, surrounding a large, unfinished installation. The installation looked like a metallic tree, bristling with extensions. Antennas, Astra inferred.
“One World Trade Center.” Astra noted. “The Freedom Tower.”
“No. It was renamed once I and my comrades in the Freedom movement were tagged as terrorists. It is now the Progress Tower.”
“Like the International Progress Organization. The one that your friends were talking about.”
“Exactly. It’s IPO headquarters.” Devi tilted her head, suspiciously. “But you should know that. Where have you been?”
“A servant of the Instrumentalist held me and my friend captive since the Opening.”
Devi’s shoulder’s relaxed. She nodded sagely as if Astra had said a completely normal thing. “I see. That may be how the Instrumentalist got inside of you. You are very powerful, so you must have been kidnapped by a very powerful clipper.”
“His name is Alexei Rakovsky,” Astra said. “Have you heard of him?”
Devi bristled. “Alexei Rakovsky is no mere servant. He’s an avatar. Most who worship a god are turned into pawns. But some – those whose minds are the perfect fit to extend the god’s power – these become the avatars. They are rewarded with the powers of a god: immense wealth, a voice broadcast to millions, vast armies or companies or governments that act like extensions of their bodies. Immortality: a god will grant an avatar life beyond death for as long as people continue to believe in the god. Can you name the saints of Gnosticism? No, that god has been suppressed. But the saints of the Instrumentalist will live on in its history books and films. We will remember Steve Jobs, Isaac Newton, and Jeremy Bentham until this false god has been vanquished.
“As the Instrumentalist’s avatar, Alexei Rakovsky has been granted the powers of a god. Like a Promethean fire, he was given the knowledge of how to control minds through brain-computer interfaces – these vile headsets. It goes deeper. I believe Alexei Rakovsky is secretly behind the IPO. What else have you heard about it?”
“I know nothing about the IPO.”
“I will tell you, Rowan. I need to tell you all of this so I can save you. Do you understand? Look me in the eyes and tell me.”
Behind the devil mask, Devi’s eyes were like windows flung open by a storm. They were unblinking and too bright. Her pupils darted as if chasing something within Astra’s skull.
Astra met them calmly. “I understand.”
The cabbie pulled the foil curtains to one side. “Hey, do you two––”
“You are interrupting an important conversation,” Devi spoke over him.
“––mind if I turn on some music?”
“Shut. Up!”
“You have got a shaitan in your head, woman.” The cab shook his head and closed the curtains again.
Devi turned backed to Astra. Astra examined the ragged tear that ran down its left side, interrupted by the eye hole. “The Instrumentalist…you need to…yes, the clippers…” she stammered, holding a hand to her brow. She had lost the place in her monologue.
“The International Progress Organization,” Astra reminded.
“Yes, the IPO. It is now the principal organization of the Instrumentalist. It took advantage of the chaos that ensued from the Opening. You should know about the IPO, Rowan. You should fear it. Just as with many Instrumentalist organizations before it, the IPO stepped into the midst of a collective trauma with the promise of order. It’s been given emergency powers to do whatever it wants. To handle ’neurohazardous entities and events,’” Devi spat. “The man behind it is a former military colonel. I researched it.”
“Colonel Talbot.”
Devi squinted at her. “Yes. You know him?”
“I’m like you – I try to connect the dots.”
“Yes, you are like me. Except you are corrupted. Colonel Talbot, he is a dangerous man. There is something about him. He introduced the IPO too quickly after the Opening, far too quickly, as if he knew it was coming.”
He did know it was coming, Astra thought. Years before the Opening, Talbot had siphoned Pentagon resources to her team’s project. He’d run cover once their project went dark. And then he’d betrayed them, probably in collaboration with Alexei. Talbot was near the top of Astra’s list of targets.
“You need to watch out, Rowan. You’ve been seen with us now. The IPO’s goon squad will be tracking you.”
“Human Resources.”
“Yes. They are kidnapping anyone with special abilities. Like me. Like you. Are you keeping track of all this?”
“Yes.”
“Good, because I am trying to inoculate you,” said Devi, her nails scratched the seat at her side.
“Thank you.”
“I don’t need your thanks. It’s what I have been incarnated to do. You would be a weapon of war for the Instrumentalist and you would do great harm. I too will do great harm, but for the true god of Freedom.” Devi took a break from her scratching of the seat to hold her hands aloft again. “It’s only here that my hands are a devil’s hands. I’m only a devil here, in this realm. I incarnate on earth to wage war on definite form, on the tyranny of condensed energy. On concepts and numbers and meat and metal. I am the devil who tears apart whatever stops the flowing. But do you know what my name means – Devi?”
“The mother goddess.” Astra stopped herself from volunteering that her own name was also Sanskrit – for divine weapon. To Devi, she was still Rowan.
Devi looked at her curiously. “That’s right. My name means mother goddess. My parents named me Devi before they immigrated here. Then they submitted to the Christian god, who struck them blind to the greater divinities. They weren’t always blind. When I was born, they recognized my divine nature. They named me Devi. On the material plane, I am a devil, but in the Mythos, I am a devi. I give birth. I am an imaginist.”
“An imaginist….”
“I make art of dreams. Would you like to see?”
“Show me,” said Astra.
Devi’s hand shot out. Astra allowed it to make contact with her forehead.
Then the cab faded away.
Next release: Astra enters Devi’s imaginal studio.