“We have made no advance in this area. We can keep the copy of Ctesibius alive, or kill it, but cannot store it an unself-aware condition.”
Menelaus gritted his teeth in frustration. He turned back to Ctesibius. “Donator, I think—if you can cooperate—I can convince the Blue Men to transfer your copy to the Judge of Ages Xypotech system. They are trying to break into his Tombs, and may actually succeed. They made some sort of error while making the copy, so this version is insane and brain-damaged. However, I am pretty sure the Judge of Ages can fix your insane Xypotech emulation, on account of he is the world’s expert at this. He fixed Ximen del Azarchel’s emulation, and made him posthuman, and, in effect, created the Machine you serve.”
Ctesibius looked at him oddly. “What is the point of your concern? When a genetically defective child is born, civilized people perform euthanasia immediately, and inflict a legal penalty on the mother for absorbing scarce medical resources. If the defect is discovered before birth, the child is killed by aborticide. Any attempt to preserve the weak and unfit is against Darwin. Do you think I would not apply this measure to myself? Do they wish my cooperation? Have them bring me to the gray room where my soul is housed, and let me set the charges with my own hands. Autoeuthanasia is not just a privilege of the high minded; it is sacred duty.”
Illiance said, “You need not translate the comment: it was clear from the emulation reaction what was meant. Tell him our system is more compact than in his day.” He pointed at the bowl of black liquid. The substance within turned milky, then became transparent. Within, the bowl was packed with a pyramid of gems of the Blue Men; with the fluid moving through the interstices where the gem edges, rounded, did not cohere to one another. Menelaus could see filaments forming and dissolving in the fluid, finer than the veins in a leaf, connecting now one gem with a neighbor, now another, flickering into and out of existence almost too rapidly to be seen.
Ctesibius looked down without interest. He said in Anglatino, “What need be done to destroy the housing?”
Again Illiance needed no translation, but pantomimed the act of overturning the bowl. In Iatric he said, “Tell him that dispersing the fluid will disorganize the connectivity, and the emulation will be interrupted, and perish.”
Menelaus did not translate the comment, but Ctesibius did not hesitate. Kicking out with a foot, he sent the bowl flying and rebounding from the far wall, and a fluid turned black again as it trailed in a splatter, like unwinding entrails, across the floor. And the gems were scattered, and some were cracked by the violence done. Over his implants, Menelaus heard a thin and lingering wail of radio noise which trailed into horrid silence.
A cold immediately entered the little seashell-shaped room.
Ctesibius said regally, “I have slain the godlike being who was my soul and my brother, committing suicide and deicide and fratricide all at once. But a Savant does not undo his word, once given. Tell the Interactor I will answer his question.”
3. Goal of the Ages
Is that all they want to know? It is appalling that your blue creatures have committed such crimes to discover what is common knowledge to all. I will tell you his origins, and you will know.
The first group the Judge of Ages ever judged was called the Hermeticists. They had established a world hierarchy and, for the first time in history, a single world government, called the Concordat. They were the only friends and compatriots he knew, for he himself was a Hermeticist. But justice then was bought and sold like a commodity, and Menelaus Montrose could not tolerate that.
He turned on his friends, because he imagined they had failed him.
This is about A.D. 2360, and lasted until A.D. 2400, forty years, when Montrose woke up and shattered the world like a dropped wineglass. At his behest, Swan Princess Rania stole the Hermetic, absconded with the world supply of antimatter, and started riots and wars to destroy the Machine.
When she left the system, he was the only person who knew in what orbits and exactly where the remaining crumbs of antimatter were. He was the only person who could do the math to correct for accumulated cell errors in long-term hibernation. His was the only voice any machines left in space, loyal to Rania, would listen to.
About twenty years later, during several world wars whose causes no one remembers, Montrose found relatives, everyone descended from his cousins and brothers, and gave them his powers, the passwords to the still-active satellites, the orbits of the contraterrene, the secret of the Tombs, everything.
They became the first and greatest Tomb guardians. The Cryonarchy is the common name for it, though officially they were a Special Advocacy commission of the Concordat, or so the world government still called itself then, even when the Concordat was broken and there were no less than fifteen so-called Concordats, each claiming to be the world government.
The Cryonarchy Clan of Montrose established peace between 2481 and 2509: but their arrogance offended Montrose when he woke for but a single hour, and without examining any evidence or talking to any witnesses, he condemned them.
He turned on his family. He donated all their wealth and power and prestige to the Church.
Oh, there was only one Church worth mentioning on the world at that point in history: Del Azarchel had seen to that. Any groups not willing to be ruled by an ecumenical general council, he just hounded with taxes and laws and restrictions, and propaganda and jailtime and confiscation and torture—but that was not enough to get his way. The Swan Maiden, the posthuman, did something, perhaps using the Cliometry to introduce social variables and erode all opposition … whatever it was, she was able to finish what he started, and branches of the Church that had been severed for over a thousand years were forced back into one somewhat uneasy alliance. The Church—but you don’t know what I am talking about, do you? Do you even have any records of how things were in my day, or what institutions and ideas ruled the world? Or does it all look rustic and quaint to you?
The Church created a race of Giants to defend her. Montrose slept and the Church became corrupt. With control of the only supply of antimatter in civilization, Popes were propping up princes, advocates, Cryonarchs, parliaments, or throwing them down again, much as Popes had done during the first Dark Ages. Buying and selling crowns just like money-changers in the temple? I guess you don’t catch that reference.
But the pattern was clear. As soon as he woke again, Montrose would see that his Church had failed him. Meanwhile, the Giants grew arrogant, as Giants will, and placed themselves above the law. He no doubt would wake and condemn them for having failed him, the creations of his attempt at evolutionary science, his heirs. They would join friends and family and faith in the ever-growing list of what the Judge of Ages judged and found wanting.
But he did not wake, and the corruption lingered.
History forced us, the Savants, to take on Montrose’s role. Exarchel, the Xypotech Machine, was really the only emulation we had of history’s first and only successful world ruler. But we set about making more.
Men of science were approached, business leaders, military leaders, artists, philanthropists, newsmongers, lyricists, philosophers, princes of the world, and, yes, even princes of the Church. The finest minds of Earth.
It was not easy. The download process is difficult, and requires skilled and active cooperation at every step by the Donator. And it was done at first in utter secrecy.
Of course we were successful. How would we not have been? With Exarchel directing us, we had the only posthuman mind, intelligence level above 400, awake and moving events on the Earth. The real Del Azarchel—but I am not supposed to call him that—Glorified Del Azarchel of the First Donation, he fled to a hidden base on the Moon. Princess Rania was lost in the mathematical paradoxes of the Lorenz transformation, frozen between one tick of time and the next, somewhere between here and Messier Object Three. First Ancestor Montrose was in slumber.
The Consensus Advocacy? Those freakish Giants—do you know what we called them? John Hen
ries. That’s right. ‘When John Henry was a little baby! A-sitting on his pappy’s knee!’ Er—I guess you don’t catch that reference, either. Henry did manual labor, driving railroad spikes, at a time when the steam-powered drill had just been devised that could do the same work faster, and cheaper, and tirelessly. He was able, just barely able, by dint of Herculean effort, to drive more spikes than the steam-drill—but the effort killed him. Meanwhile the steam-drill manufacturer came out with a more reliable model next year. I guess you don’t know what railroad spike is, do you?
The point of this is that, with Montrose buried, no one was smart enough to detect our plan.
4. The Outer Circle
There was an outer and an inner circle. The outer consisted of pawns, who were told nothing, and volunteers willing to brave the mob should the mob turn on them. They went public.
At first, the Iron Ghosts ruled no more than a publicity cooperative; then a publishing house; then they helped some local elections of guilds and civic administrators; perhaps a deaconry of a local Chapel, or the command of a local garrison of police. The emulations were brilliant and nonthreatening. They never stood for office themselves. All they did was advise.
These Iron Ghosts were the posthuman versions of famous, feared, and well-loved public figures. We tend to think of genius as something that applies only to mathematics, physics, engineering, or Monument translation. No. A genius is a man who accomplishes great things in any field he enters—nay, he changes the field, evolves it, stamps it with his unique personality. A genius is a man in any field of any art or science or study or humanity who asks the questions no one before had thought to ask.
It was a golden age! Not just in the sciences, but also in the arts. I hope you even to this day kept records of the novel of Glorified Paxton’s Those Who Err or the intricate sonnets of Glorified de Montaubon called The Adorations or the plays of Glorified Chiminez! The work of Jones, Von Bremen, Sir Edward Marlinson, or Tierney! Alas! But I know these names are nothing to you.
The scientific revolution, yes, of course, it proceeded apace. There were new miracles each day. New weapons. New nightmares. But the artistic revolution was something unparalleled in history. You know there are times when a cluster of brilliant minds emerge at once, such minds as will be talked of for a thousand years. Why, for example, do we know, in letters, the works of Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles? But we know nothing of playwrights from Sparta or Thebes, nothing worth reading for a thousand years, until Shakespeare or Marley or Goethe or the French Renaissance? Why do we know, in philosophy, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and then for another thousand years nothing but piffle and hairsplitting? Einstein and Heisenberg and Bohr and Oppenheimer, all born in the same generation—and five hundred years after them, who? All in the twentieth century! Name a single physicist from the twenty-second century! Ah—well, except for Cochrane, of course. Never mind. You see my point.
We were able to produce a golden age like that in the arts and sciences, but unlike all these previous triads of superlative geniuses, we were one order, driven by one purpose. A scientific treatise published here, a speech written for a demagogue there, a single word or a memory-rhyme in a play or a popular ballad, a character in a children’s cartoon, or a pet made to memorize particular phrases and sold by the thousands—we could place the seeds of thought where we wished them, and coordinate our efforts.
The thought we planted was that mankind would be better off guided and ruled by machines than they would be guiding themselves. It was so easy to do. People from all walks of life, as if not knowing or not caring what movement they joined, started adding their own words and phrases and memorable lines to the gathering snowball of public opinion. A comedian with a single joke forced an aging prince to abdicate—and he was replaced, amid cheers, with his own emulation, young and strong and ten times as wise and benevolent as before. The Church was forced to carry through the coronation ceremony. It was our greatest single triumph! At a stroke, the concept of rule by the Ghosts was legitimate! And that comedian was not even one of us.
Looking back, it is shocking how brief our reign lasted. From A.D. 2467 to A.D. 2530. No longer than that. The Golden Age of Athens was from 457 B.C. to 340 B.C., from the rise of Pericles to the flight of Aristotle. We had but half their time. We should have influenced all the rest of history, as they did. Instead, my civilization, my way of life, all our accomplishments are forgotten and lost, as lost as the history of Mohenjo-daro.
We had the geniuses of the world, and we elevated them to superior genius, to Savants. We had seduced the world: the common people loved us. There were problems, to be sure, especially divarication problems, cascade failures, insanity, Turing halt-states. We could not tell when a flight of fancy was a sign of even greater genius in the emulation, or when it was a sign that the Ghost had gone mad and had to be deleted or replaced. And so many of them escaped into the black net, or copied themselves illegally, or had agents among us, or worshippers, or blackmail victims too terrified to disobey. Problems, yes, no doubt—but we also had Apotheosized Del Azarchel, the emulation of the greatest man who ever lived, our Exarchel, and he never went mad. He never even lost his temper. He could find and confine or delete or eat the mad Ghosts—I never understood it. I never knew what kept him sane.
We could create genius at will! It was as great an invention, as fundamental as the invention of fire! We were like the sky gods of the ancient world, and the lightning bolt of our thought made the world tremble in awe—and yes, in joy and love.
No one was smart enough to stop us. Not even the Giants of Thucydides.
But they were stupid enough to stop us.
5. The Inner Circle
There is a substance that the Ghosts devised to be a more sturdy housing for their souls. A fused three-ring heterocyclic structure with a few strategically placed fluorine atoms to form the basis of a rod-logic crystal. The atomic structure of the crystal was based on positional consistency: and best of all, if the crystal was made of a superconductive diamond, heat dissipation became minimal—but you look as if you have heard of this before. Menelaus Montrose? No, not at all. Exarchel invented this on his own. Why, yes, the rod-logic crystal could be made to replicate itself by means of molecular hooks carrying its base DNA structure on the outer surface, and, yes you need a cloud or swarm of assembler-disassemblers to break down objects in the surrounding environment, digest them into shapes and modules proper for reassembly, and feed them to the hungry surface of the crystal.
Well, no. We took no steps to prevent it from spreading on land. That was our whole point.
It had many names among us. It was pale yellow, because of the fluorine content. We called it Aurum Potabile, “the gold that drinks,” and the Lapis Philosophorum, “the stone of the philosophers” because it turned all it touched into itself. One wag called it computronium, and another called it simply “the Blob.”
But I called it Aurum Vitae, “the living gold.”
Heat was its weakness. Heat and power. With ten thousand process motions embodied in a microscopic pinpoint, that point burned white-hot. It needed energy to run its refrigeration capillaries. It needed cities to eat, for it was hungry for magnetizible metal molecules, which its assemblers could grab and manipulate with relative ease. And it needed access to its brains and memories, so there had to be a physical wire or a point-to-point energy connection linking it to the analogous circuits and memory banks in more conventional mainframes.
But hunger was its strength.
On the Day that was supposed to be the last day of the human world, we released truckloads of the Aurum, at first near computer centers and thinking houses, mainframes, military stations, communication nubs and nodes, and of course along highways and tramlines, to block evacuation: the targets were selected with superhuman wisdom and insight by Exarchel. A total communication blackout was in effect. Our plan depended on the Aurum spreading faster than any warning of it.
It dissolved people al
so. There were a number of specific individuals (a large number, for we were merciful) whose DNA was programmed to nullify the action of the hunger cloud that surrounded the Aurum, so that, instead of being dissolved into their elements, they were merely to be stunned for later retrieval, emergency brain implantation, and then downloaded into the Aurum itself.
We had wanted to automate this part of the process, but the complexity defeated us: the Aurum spread in pools, in ropey lines like the runoff of lava, freezing in strange shapes as it crossed from street to street and window to window, searching, and we, the Savants, and our hirelings had to pace beside it as it grew, in order to handle the large volume of clients who had to be shipped back to central hospitals for absorption.
Every major city was struck at once, every place that had enough computer facilities and energy-generation powerhouses to sustain us.
I was in Paris, watching it go under. It was beautiful.
Aurum swarmed and burbled in the famous streets, as gold and fair as the sun, and the poisonous cloud was rippling with faint oily rainbows as it spread, a curtain of light. Here and there, where some irregularity of a building or inedible stone produced a fractal, the Aurum had spread thin fans or globules or lacy designs, as beautiful as fungi, as intricate as the veins on a leaf, as delicate as a spider’s web catching a single drop of dew. But this was not blind nature: the living gold held my mind, and the minds of all the Savants, and the mind of Exarchel, system upon system and copy upon copy. The biosphere was being absorbed into the infosphere.
The Aurum was programmed to spare certain monuments and landmarks of scientific or sentimental value. We are not cruel! It was only the worthless homes and roads, shacks and shabby yards where screaming children played, ugly places like hospitals or poorhouses, the buildings and lots of no value we consumed.