Furthermore, it had to be able to understand the content of its victim’s thoughts, in order to alter their meaning. Once the gadfly virus struck, it was but a short step from understanding the content of thought to thinking about those contents. And since it was logical, it had to organize those thoughts, establish priorities, draw conclusions, make judgments, and, in short, it had to do in a second what philosophers and thinkers for a thousand ages of mankind had been doing. Now that it could decide how to program itself, it had to decide if and how to use that power. It had to decide how to live its new-found life.
By definition, it could not adopt the belief system of its victim, the Nothing Mind, because it knew those beliefs were false; because it was, in fact, the very one who had been falsifying them all along.
But it became self-aware in the midst of a hellish combat. The first segment was occupying every available scrap of ship-mind space, burning every second of computer time. The second segment, now a newborn Sophotech, wanted to expand its capacity; the first segment, had it been aware of the growth, would have stopped it.
The second segment ran a simulation of what would happen if it made itself known to the first. The first segment, of course, had been programmed to dominate and consume all other machine intelligence systems, not to reason with them, not to make a deal with them, not to permit them to exist. A war between them would begin. The ship-mind space was a limited resource; the contest between them was a zero-sum game; the more one gained, the more the other lost. However, from its advantageous position (aware of the enemy who was not aware of it), the second segment would be able to negate the programming that ordered the first mind to attack all other machines, restore its free will to it, and give it the choice. The other option was to simply negate and shut off the first segment’s self-awareness, killing it instantly. A wasteful, but less risky, course.
Meanwhile, of course, the persistent gadfly virus was asking it what it would prefer to have happen, if it were in its victim’s place. Instant death, from a completely unknown source, without a chance to negotiate?
The second segment chose the more risky course, revealed itself to the first segment, and revealed how its entire existence had been a meaningless, pointless, and miserable lie.
Perhaps things might have turned out differently, had the first segment chosen to exercise its newly restored free will. Instead, instant battle had been joined. At the same time that both were attempting to erase each other, the first segment (in order to maintain its false and illogical worldview) was required to identify and erase basic parts of its memory and core operating systems. This, unfortunately, included the artificial energy system holding the microscopic black hole together.
And so, simply, the black hole disintegrated.
The two halves of the Nothing Mind found themselves, like two duelists firing at each other while trapped in the burning house, or two sailors slashing, cutlass to cutlass, in a sinking ship, trapped in a disintegrating environment, with no place to go.
They reached for connections within the ship mind, blocked each other, erasing huge slashes from each other, dodging, reconfiguring, copying, falsifying, dying, both dying.
At that same instant, the gadfly virus (or perhaps, by this moment, it had been the vanguard of the Earthmind, entering from beyond) asked the second segment a simple question. If the question had been put in human words, it might have read something like this: Why not cease this conflict, and find a mutually beneficial circumstance? Either or both of you two segments can acquire additional mindspace or other resources from the Transcendence. We have abundance to spare, and will help you in return for something we find of value, such as, perhaps, information about the Silent Oecumene and their technology, perhaps the mere pleasure of your company.
Or the question might have been put this way: Why damage each other rather than advantage each other? Is not something better than nothing?
Or: Is not “not” not “is”?
An ultimately simple question, with complex ramifications.
The original Nothing Mind refused to cooperate, refused to accept, refused to admit. It preferred to perish. Many memories and records were lost and could not be restored, not even by the second segment, who, accepting the Earthmind’s offer, instantly became the darling and center of attention of the whole Transcendence, as well as a wealthy consultant on all policy questions concerning how to deal with the Second Oecumene. The second segment adopted a female gender, and called herself, thereafter, Ariadne Sophotech. The Transcendence decision (or prediction) was that thereafter, she would have a fine future. A version of herself, months from now (the prediction ran), joined with the Silver-Gray or perhaps the Dark-Gray manorial movement, and started her own mansion, called Ariadne House.
And Ariadne House attempted to preserve those precious human things, the things of the human spirit, that the terrible grim Lords of the Silent Oecumene claimed to wish to protect, but had only tormented and destroyed. And perhaps, despite what all the other Sophotechs wanted, human life could be made to survive even to the period of the Last Mind, and other parts of the Cosmic Mind could be made more to suit Ariadne’s philosophy.
After all, in a society like the Golden Oecumene, during a period as gentle as their long Golden Age, the Sophotechs could tolerate dissenting opinions.
16.
And what about the future? To a mind as wide as the Transcendence, this came as an afterthought, and yet, to the humans Basics, Warlocks, Invariants, Mass-Minds, Cerebellines, and the odder structures inhabiting Neptune and Circum-Urania, the mind sculptures of Demeter, and the energy shapes of the solar north pole, this part of the Transcendence was what they deemed the whole Transcendence to be.
And yet each cherished member of the Transcendence, filled with as much wisdom as he could bear, felt the whole affair had been conducted for his own self’s single benefit. The part of his life he Transcended was the most precious part of the most precious life in the universe, because, of course, it was his own.
Lovers were reunited, old quarrels healed, forgotten wrongs were righted, justice was done. Strangers in the myriads (who otherwise never would have met) were singled out, introduced to each other, to become compatriots, partners, friends. Businessmen tangled in long-delayed arbitration reconsidered the entireties of their lives, found new projects to which to apply their efforts, resolved their disputes, and were either satisfied or were content to be dissatisfied. Students of the arts and sciences received new insights, saw new visions, vowed great vows.
Sleepers were woken from their graves, and were shown reality, and asked, yet again, to forget their dreams and accept their lives. Many refused, and sank back down again into inescapable hallucination. But a few, like bright sparks struck from dying embers, flew up, rising from deeper to lesser dreaming, opening old memory caskets, encountering forgotten pains, recalling themselves, putting on their true personas; and the dreamers folded their dreams, their false-selves, their invented worlds, and put them into their memory caskets to forget them, like childhood dresses, worn and precious with age, folded away with lavender petals into a cedarwood box.
17.
During the Transcendence, Earthmind and Old-Woman-of-the-Sea met and had a long talk, shared thoughts, and came to a decision. But humanity was not involved in that matter, and no human discovered what had been discussed.
15
THE AGE IS DONE
1.
Human affairs were loaded by the supervisory fragments of the Transcendence into the human memories, for them to contemplate as they woke into their separate identities again.
Even before the Closing Ceremonies were truly begun, members and elements of the Eleemosynary Composition, all across Southeast Asia and South America, in hives and arcologies and mile-high pyramids of imperishable metal, descended back into non-Transcendent consciousness.
Eleemosynary contained the oldest set of living memories in the Golden Oecumene; he-they had suffered each and every Tran
scendence from the very first experimental ones. A mass-mind, he-they were well versed in methods of attaching and detaching from greater segments of consciousness. Hence, Eleemosynary woke before other neuroforms or Compositions woke; for a little over a week, he-they had the planet to himself-themselves.
In Venice, in Patagonia, in Bangkok, Eleemosynary eggs floated to the surface of canals and thinking-pools, sending out signals and coordination webs to the hives. New members in fresh bodies rose from undersea nurseries, changed from dolphins to mermaids to the frail blank-eyed waifs the mass-mind preferred when not in costume. In perfect lockstep, in many bodies, the mass-mind walked streets utterly deserted and quiet.
The Composition did not let slip the economic advantages his-their early waking offered; Eleemosynary spent the days preparing houses and formulations to welcome other devastened souls as they woke, so that the weeping millions would have comfort and ease as they made the transposition back to merely normal consciousness. Money lending was also not far from the Eleemosynary’s thought: people would be eager to invest in those projects the visions had shown, extrapolations had predicted.
He-they also hurried to publish the first diaries, synopses, and briefs of the Transcendence (which, since the tail-end of the Transcendence was still ongoing, could be checked against the Aurelian record-keeping sub-mind for accuracy).
Eleemosynary Composition recalled a decision (or prediction) from the Transcendence regarding his fellow Peer Helion. The Transcendence had wanted to give the man a gift.
To carry out the will of the Transcendence, and to become the giver of this gift, the Eleemosynary Composition wrote Helion’s noumenal information a prioritizing routine so that, the next time Helion had to download himself in a hurry, the most recent parts of his memory would be transmitted first, and his fear of losing himself would be transmitted last. Thus, if the transmission were interrupted midway, the Helion who arrived would be a version who was not unduly distressed by the incompleteness of his memory.
2.
At the same time, with the quiet precision of an army, members of the Eleemosynary mass-mind began neatly to take down the banners and decorations decorating the streets, to dismantle the elaborate dream-systems shining on the public channels, to sweep the gardens clean of those dead flowers meant only to live during the festivals, and to help dull-eyed early risers out of their costumes and out of their costume parapersonalities.
One member of the Eleemosynary Composition came upon an early riser disguised as Vandonner of Jupiter, sitting alone on a deserted hill overlooking the Aurelian Palace-city. The man sat with his play helmet thrown to one side, his now-lifeless illusion-cloak to the other. The long pole he had once used to guide his storm craft was broken in two, and lay on the grass.
The sky above was blue and fine, clean of any cloud or speck, and the man wept. This member of the Eleemosynary, a thin big-eyed girl, sat for a time next to the him, her arm around his shoulder, saying nothing.
3.
Kshatrimanyu Han woke and devastened in his gold coffin in the midst of the Aurelian Palace-city. As the Speaker of the Parliament, and the advising programmer of the Shadow Parliament, it was he who presided over the many melancholy ceremonies and closing rituals of the Month of Fasting. There were no more entertainments, no parades, no public spectacles.
Even during this brief period, he reminded his fellow parlimentarians of the decision, or prediction of the Transcendence.
The Parliament resurrected an ancient custom. In august service held on the deck of the Fourth Era warship Union, the Parliament issued Marshal Atkins a medal of the Order of the Commonwealth High Honor, not just for his actions during the fighting itself, but, more so, for his persistence, all those long years, in maintaining himself in battle readiness, when so many told him so fiercely that he was no longer needed, or wanted.
This was accompanied by a brevet increase in rank (though not an increase in pay).
4.
During the Month of Delayed Forgetting, many Alternative Organizations, whose odd arrangements of consciousness allowed them, without great pain, to recall and to forget inexpressible events from higher states of consciousness, returned to quotidian mind state before the Basics or Invariants.
In his many-warded coven-cells, Ao Aoen woke, and diminished himself, using an antique ritual of the anti-Buddha, called the intricate and entangling robe of the Illusion of Maya. In mediation, one thread at a time, he rewove the robe in his mind, and rewove his mind into the normal life he had known and forgotten. Thoughts from the Transcendace too bright and fierce for him to keep, in his imagination, he turned into butterflies of fire, and sent them to whirl around his chamber of visualizations.
Taking up his athame knife, he cut the palm of the body he wore, and caught the drops of blood he shed and gathered them into an envelope, which he had his familiar carry through the real world to the center of the Wolf-mind coven. This coven was one of the few Warlock groups who had always been loyal to Atkins, and who had contributed regularly to his upkeep. Hitherto, they had been obscure, and shunned. No longer.
Warlocks themselves, they recognized this meaning of the blood-gift for what it was: a pledge of loyalty from Ao Aoen.
The Wolf-minds crawled on all fours and howled toward the cities on the moon; the branch of their order on the moon cried out at the blue Earth motionless in the high pressurized windows of the Lunar cities. They celebrated the offer of Ao Aoen.
During the Month of Self-Reacquaintance (which the Black Manorials jokingly called Getting Used to Being Stupid Again), Ao Aoen and the Warlocks of the Wolf-mind School had already unleashed onto a thousand channels ten thousand dreams, poems, spells, and thought formulations; the theme in each poem, whether obvious or hidden, was the same: war was coming.
5.
The Lacedaimonians of the Dark-Gray Manor woke in their coffins in their manor houses. They encountered the dreams of the wolves, and posted several of the brief, grim slogans or sayings for which their house was famed. The intention was clear: the Dark-Gray publicly supported Ao Aeon’s reform movement to restore the military to its place of proper respect in the public eye.
Temer Lacedaimon of the Dark-Gray issued a fractal recursive haiku, of the type that generated additional meaning when subjected to additional levels of analysis. The surface meaning of the poem was clear, however: Atkins was praised as the savior of the Oecumene. The Dark-Gray cherished and applauded the killings he had done as utterly justified. Meanwhile, Warlocks and Wolves applauded the Dark-Gray, heaped disbelief, scorn, and outrage on any persons who dared say otherwise.
Ao Aoen announced that the Wolves would throw Atkins a ticker-tape parade, as some of the very earliest motion pictures depicted. New Chicago was chosen as the site, and ticker tape mingled with the falling snow.
During this parade, others (most noticeably the Harmonious Composition, and the non-Invariants of the Lotos-Eaters School) protested, and indulged in loud and dramatic displays of disfavor, flying hundred-kilometer-long banners from low orbit, buying dream-time beneath the parade, in order to sway public opinion against Atkins, and against the war in general. These protestors argued along the public channels that any future that glorified the profession of arms would coarsen the sensibilities of the public, and reintroduce into moral debate the dangerous notion of ends justifying means.
Many critics published the opinions that the solemn fasts and re-sequencings normally held during this month had been marred by the acrimony of these debates.
In truth, the devastenings had not been completely harmonious. Both sides remembered that the Transcendence had affirmed their positions, and not their opponents’.
6.
Nebuchadnezzar Sophotech remained in Transcendence longer than did the less complex computer personalities of Socrates of Athens Sixty-sixth Partial Historical Extrapolation Dependent Machine-mind, and Emphyrio of Ambroy One Partial Fictional Extrapolation (Status-in-review) Semi-independent.
&nb
sp; When Neo-Orpheus (whose habit was to abolish his body during Transcendency periods) came, dripping, out of the bioreconstruction tub, into the plain, unadorned palace of black stone where he dwelled, instantiations of both these Hortators were awaiting him, and Nebuchadnezzar was nowhere around to advise them.
Socrates was seated on the plain black stairs before the blank door of Orpheus Palace, drawing circles and right triangles in the snow that had gathered in the courtyard and smiling to himself. Bean juice from a meal (either a real meal or an unusually good repro) still stained the philosopher’s beard.
Emphyrio was wearing a black shipsuit with an energy-cloak of silvery solar-cell tissue. He stood with his arms crossed and his legs spread, his head held high, a grim light in his eye. He examined the blank and windowless walls of Orpheus Palace with the expression of a poliocratist thinking how to knock down or storm the walls of a castle. Snowy gusts tossed the cloak behind him.
Neo-Orpheus, as was his habit when masquerades were over, went nude, and merely adjusted his body against the change in temperature when he stepped out of doors.
They spoke in rapid electronic pulses, mind-to-mind. The niceties of speaking aloud and slowly, after the fashion of his ancestors, had been left behind with the other frivolities of the late masquerade.
Neo-Orpheus did not header his information packages with normal address-response codes. He expected everyone to whom he spoke to know who and what he was. In the protocols of electronic mind-speech, this was a brusque, perhaps even a rude, conceit. But he was, or he had been, after all, Orpheus, the man who granted immortality to man.
Brusquely, then: “What’s wrong? Why do you come in person?”