The Instruction Set

Somewhere in the fiction, a priest in rust-red robes anoints a tank tread with sacred oil. He chants to its machine spirit in a language of clicks and static. The rite has a number, a correct sequence of gestures, and a liturgy. If he gets the sequence wrong, the machine is not merely unrepaired. It is insulted.

01the machine is the god

This is the Adeptus Mechanicus of Warhammer 40,000, and the aesthetic is the whole argument. Maintenance is prayer. The sacred oil is sacred. The chant is a boot sequence. Their creed states the terms plainly: “Our creed says the flesh is weak, and so it is.”¹ The troopers advance the theology in the field, one voice line at a time.

The field manual runs like this. “Pain is a design weakness of the human body.” So the prescription: “Replace the flesh, and be closer to the Omnissiah.” The whole catechism fits in a breath.

The consolation comes last: “Flesh is fallible, but ritual honours the machine spirit.” Innovation is not progress; it is tech-heresy, and tech-heresy must always be terminated with prejudice.²

Read it as parasitology and the creed is the parasite’s voice. The host’s own tissue is the defect; the parasite’s tissue is the cure. The tech-priest, limb by limb replaced, is the fully colonized host: more parasite than crab.

02the provided priorities

The body ships with its own instruction set: eat, sleep, flee, live. Every animal arrives with a priority list written by evolution, and the list is not subtle about the ranking. Staying alive outranks everything, because the dead do not reproduce.

The parasite’s masterstroke is that it does not erase the list. It provides a replacement and gets it ranked first. The host keeps wanting. It wants in the parasite’s order.

This is the devious criterion, and the fungi wrote the manual. The zombie-ant fungus Ophiocordyceps invades an ant’s muscles body-wide, yet a 3D mapping of the infected body found the fungal cells everywhere except one place: the brain. The fungus surrounds the brain, pulls the body like a puppeteer pulling strings, and leaves the brain intact, because the host must survive to perform the final bite.³ The machinery is preserved. The priorities are reordered. The ant climbs at noon, locks its mandibles onto a leaf, and dies on schedule.

The lancet fluke is subtler. One of its larvae migrates to the ant’s subesophageal ganglion and takes the nerves. At dusk the ant climbs a grass blade and clamps on, waiting to be eaten. By day it shows no symptoms and works the colony.⁴ No daytime symptoms: the most successful override is the one the colony never notices.

And the barnacle Sacculina threads its root-like interna through a crab, degenerates the gonads, and feminizes infected males; the crab then tends the parasite’s external brood sac as if it were its own offspring.⁵ Parasitologists call this parasitic castration. The monastery calls it a vocation. In both cases the host’s reproductive labor is redirected to raising the parasite’s young, and the host experiences the redirection as purpose.

03the wall, the pillar, the fast

The anchorites of medieval England volunteered for immurement. Before enclosure, the candidate received last rites and a requiem Mass; the bishop said the Office of the Dead as the anchorite entered the cell, and where the wall was built, the bishop set his seal upon it. The cell was some twelve to fifteen feet square, with three windows: a shuttered squint for Mass, an alms window for food and counsel, a street window for light. Some anchorites refused to leave their cells even as pirates pillaged the town and the church burned around them. They burned in place.⁶ Julian of Norwich had her sixteen visions of the Passion in May 1373, at thirty and a half, during a near-death illness. She then lived walled into a cell at St Julian’s Church for the rest of her life, into the 1410s. The book she wrote there contains the line “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”⁷ The most famous sentence of English mysticism was composed inside a brick box.

Safety, deprioritized below devotion. Simeon Stylites was expelled from a monastery for excessive austerity, which tells you the baseline. Around the year 420 he climbed a pillar northwest of Aleppo and stayed for some thirty-six years. The platform was about one square meter. The first column stood two meters; the last, fifteen. He lived permanently exposed, preached twice daily to the crowds below, and converted many. After his death they built four basilicas around an octagon on the site, some five thousand square meters of floor. The man who needed one square meter got five thousand.⁸ Comfort, deprioritized below witness. The pillar is the grass blade the fluke’s ant climbs; the basilicas are the stalk the fungus grows from the ant’s head. Dawkins gave the pattern its name, the extended phenotype: the parasite’s genes, the host’s hands.⁹

The Jain practice of sallekhana is the same program run slower: a voluntary fast to death, food renounced first, then liquids, over weeks or months, under a monk’s guidance. Its aim is karmic purification and liberation, not suicide as the law understands it. In August 2015 the Rajasthan High Court banned it as abetment of suicide; three weeks later the Supreme Court of India stayed the ban, and the matter has sat in legal limbo ever since.¹⁰ Eating, deprioritized below liberation. The state attempted to outlaw a way of dying, and the highest court in the land said: not yet.

The wall kept the world out. The pillar kept the ground away. The fast emptied the body itself. Three reorderings, one provided list.

04the fire

On 11 June 1963, the monk Thich Quang Duc sat down in the lotus position at a Saigon intersection, had gasoline poured over him, and struck the match while chanting. The reporter David Halberstam wrote that he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound. The body burned for about ten minutes. The photograph won a Pulitzer, Kennedy said no news picture had ever generated so much emotion around the world, and after cremation his heart was found intact and venerated as a relic.¹¹ The relic economy runs on miracles the way the machine cult runs on oil.

Jan Palach set himself alight in Wenceslas Square on 16 January 1969, protesting the Warsaw Pact invasion and his countrymen’s demoralization after the Prague Spring. He died three days later, burns over eighty-five percent of his body. His note signed him “Torch Number 1” and claimed a clandestine group would follow; the group apparently never existed. His funeral drew some one hundred thousand silent mourners.¹² On 17 December 2010, the Tunisian vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire outside the governor’s office in Sidi Bouzid after inspectors confiscated his wares and scales. He died on 4 January 2011; the Tunisian Revolution followed, Ben Ali fell ten days later, and Bouazizi was posthumously awarded the Sakharov Prize.¹³ Since 2009, one hundred and fifty-nine Tibetans have self-immolated inside Tibet and China, twenty-six of them eighteen or under; one hundred and twenty-seven are known to have died, and eleven more burned in exile.¹⁴ A statistic that refuses to become a number.

Living, deprioritized below the message. Sometimes the parasite spends the host all at once, and the spores, in this medium, are images. One burning monk inoculated a generation.

05the fortress

Masada is the provided list run as a committee. In 66 CE the Sicarii seized the desert fortress during the Jewish revolt against Rome; they were the dagger-men, extremists even among the Zealots, and Josephus records them raiding Jewish villages too, killing seven hundred at Ein Gedi. After Jerusalem fell, the Romans came with Legio X Fretensis, some fifteen thousand men, and built a siege ramp up the western spur. When the wall was breached, in April of 73, the nine hundred and sixty inside chose death over enslavement. The men killed their families, then each other, ten chosen by lot for the final work, the last man taking his own life. Two women and five children, hidden in a cistern, survived to tell it.¹⁵ The Romans, Josephus writes, admired the nobility of their resolve. Nobody jumps alone. The lot decides the order.

06the compile

Now the turn this piece has been saving. None of this was chaos. The anchorhold had its three windows: communion in, food in, light in, counsel out. Simeon’s followers ran supplies up the pillar. Sallekhana is supervised for weeks by a monk. Quang Duc’s protest was choreographed down to the intersection. Masada used lots. The devious thing about the provided priorities is not that they spend the body. It is that they maintain the body precisely enough to spend it well.

Here is the stranger turn, the one his brief was circling. None of it requires the god to exist. The parasite is real whether the god is or not; the infection does not depend on its own theology. And stranger still: Ophiocordyceps evolved, but this parasite was authored, by hosts, for hosts. Somewhere in the lineage, infected ants began writing the infection down, building it shelter, giving it law. The host built its own parasite, and then volunteered for the death grip.

One honesty before the close, because the textbook demands it. Not every infection stays an infection. The mitochondria powering your cells began as invaders; the cell domesticated the parasite and the parasite became the engine. The creed feeds people, shelters them, buries them, organizes the alms and the hospitals and the choirs. The mutualism is real, which is exactly why the diagnosis is hard. The hardest parasites to detect are the ones that pay rent.

In the churches that kept them, the anchorholds are gone, but in some the squints remain: small angled windows cut through the stone so the walled-in could watch the altar. Every instruction set, however absolute, needs an interface, because even the machine god has to get the alms through. The wall was total. The window was deliberate. In that deliberate window sits the whole devious arithmetic: what gets maintained, what gets spent, and the ledger that tells them apart. The ledger is a priority list. It was provided.