La Trascendencia Dorada (81 page)

It was a maelstrom of thought, without a core, without a heart. And, yes, as expected, there was darkness, Phaethon could see many blind spots, many sections of which the Nothing Machine was not consciously aware. In fact, wherever two lines of thought in the web did not agree, or diverged, a little sliver of darkness appeared, since such places lost priority. But wherever thoughts agreed, wherever they helped each other, or cooperated, additional webs were born, energy was exchanged, priority time was accelerated, light grew. The Nothing Machine was crucially aware of any area where many lines of thought ran together.

Phaethon could not believe what he was seeing. It was like consciousness without thought, lifeless life, a furiously active superintelligence with no core. He leaned forward toward the mirror, fascinated, and touched his armored fingers to the surface, as if wishing for a sense of touch to confirm the impossible image.

Daphne’s voice broke into his thoughts: “Hey, engineer boy! Tell me how this thing is working without any fixed values. There are no line numbers on anything, no addresses. How does anything navigate in the stem, without goals? How does it model reality without a core logic? Even amoebas have a core logic. How does it… How does it exist in a rational universe?”

And there was a note of fear in her voice when she said that.

Phaethon muttered, “There must be something wrong here, some basic assumption I’ve made. What did I overlook…?”

Daphne looked up, and shouted at the tall plumed mask of the Silent Lord, “This is some sort of lie! No mind could be set up this way! This is just a meaningless picture on the screen! You’re editing the readout!”

A slither of ironic music, a chime of distant bells, answered her. “Convince yourselves. Perform tests. My thoughts are displayed for you to examine. Read them.”

Daphne turned to Phaethon, her eyes flashing. “That damn thing can make an image of a Second Oecumene Lord standing in front of us with a symphony orchestra coming out of his armpit! What makes you think he can’t draw a swirl of lines on a mirror?”

Phaethon spoke in a low and dispirited tone. “I can see it. My armor monitors confirm the ship-mind activity. They match. I can detect the pulses moving from box to box, I can see the circuits opening and closing. If the Nothing Machine can falsify the readings inside my armor, why bother tricking me into opening the armor up?”

Daphne said angrily, “It is still impossible! The mind cannot make a stable model of reality unless it has a stable modeling system! A mind must understand the laws of logic in order to understand reality around it, because reality is logical, right? Right? And those rules have to be written at the highest level of the core architecture because they are needed to understand any other rules.” She threw up her hands angrily. “This thing is tricking us somehow. The core architecture is hidden, or the damn conscience redactor is hiding it, or the Nothing has not loaded all of himself into the ship-mind, or something!”

Phaethon said in a voice of soft confusion, “I don’t see any evidence that the gadfly virus had any effect—”

Daphne said, “He just rejected the load. But you’re right. There are blind spots here. Thousands of them. I can load it in some places he cannot see.”

The silver mask above her played several Kiting notes, and delicately said, “How will you accomplish this, as I am here, watching you?”

Daphne scowled. “You’re going to see it, but you’re not going to believe it. You cannot see your own blind spots.”

“Nor can you, it seems, see yours. It is you who are astonished by what you see, not I. Based on this, which one of us, Phaethon or I, do you think has been fundamentally deceived?”

Daphne’s dream wand was shaped, at the moment, like a dueling pistol, and she drew it from her hip. She pointed at the little mirror upon which Phaethon had called up the four lines of the gadfly virus code, and touched her ramrod to record it. Then she pointed the barrel, aiming with both hands, at the large mirror where the image of the Nothing Machine mind structure swirled like some hungry whirlpool, glistening like a thousand twisted spiderwebs. She was looking for a dark line, one with a low priority, but the strands of the web kept shifting, turning, changing. The darkness kept appearing and disappearing in separate spots, and there seemed no rhythm or reason to it.

When she pulled the trigger, the virus reloaded into the ship-mind, at the line and address indicated on the mirror with her dream wand.

The line affected grew bright and moved immediately toward the empty center of the whirlpool of thoughts, establishing itself as a central and high-priority thought, a question that could not be ignored. There was a very rapid exchange of information packages with other lines of thought, a flurry of rapid questions-and-answers. Then, satisfied, the other lines moved away from this central line, drawing away their time and attention. The central line, ignored, fell into a low priority, darkened, and was forgotten. The core of the Nothing was still blank.

Evidently the Nothing Machine had answers perfectly satisfactory to itself, to whatever questions the gadfly had asked it about its morality and basic assumptions. And Daphne had seen no interruptions, no organized darkness, such as would have signified the appearance of the conscience redactor.

Could there be no redactor, after all? Could this machine actually be deliberately illogical, rationally irrational?

Daphne did not believe it. She raised the pistol and fired again and again at the mirror, trying to hit the sliding chaos of darkness surrounding the spinning image.

It was not working.

Phaethon, with his hand on the mirror, staring as if into the depth of some bottomless maelstrom, whispered aloud, “What did I assume? Where is the error?”

His own face now appeared in the glass, fingers raised and touching his. The maelstrom of the Nothing thought-architecture was still behind the reflection, so his face seemed to wear a halo of spiderwebs and spinning darkness. Phaethon squinted, wondering what was wrong with the reflection. Then, he realized it wasn’t a reflection. His face was bare, his hair was flying free, and he was dressed not in his armor but in a somber black jacket and high white cravat.

The reflection said, “We assumed the universe was rational. What if it is not?”

Phaethon said to his reflection in the mirror: “I don’t believe in you. I could not have been convinced—not honestly convinced—by any argument started from that assumption. It is nonsense.”

The reflection gave a short nod, and said, “Let me rephrase. What we call rational reality is a subset of a larger system. That system includes the conditions which take place inside the event horizon of a black hole, where all our laws of mathematics, our categories of time and space, identity and causality break down. Our Sophotechs, with their mathematics and their logic, could not understand or operate inside a black hole. The Second Oecumene machines could, and can, and do. The reason why the thought-architecture you’re looking at seems to make no sense, is for the same reason that we could not decipher Ao Varmatyr’s thinking, even when we had a noetic reading of him. It is based on irrational mathematics.”

Phaethon shook his head. “If you think the laws of logic are not absolute, then you are not a version of me. Try to build a bridge without believing two plus two support girders equals four support girders, and you’ll see what I mean.”

The reflection said, “Try to build a bridge inside a black hole, where space is so warped that one girder acts like two or three, and uncertainty values are greater than unity, and maybe you can build it. But no, please do not accuse me of betraying my principles. All I have done, now, is apply them consistently. Our idea of logic may be limited to the conditions that obtain in normal timespace, the conditions under which we all evolved, and for which our Sophotechs were built. However, the Nothing Machine was constructed under conditions where our categories of causation and identity do not apply. It was built to serve a moral system which our Sophotechs, by axiom, reject. What I learned, and the thing that convinced me, was that I found out I was making the same axiomatic assumption as the Sophotechs, but, I realized, I was not consistently applying it. Also, certain basic facts about the Nothing Machine, and about the history of the Second Oecumene, are just dead wrong. There is much more going on here, I’m afraid, than what first appears. Find out the facts before you judge.”

Phaethon said angrily to his reflection, “I cannot believe you let me be convinced by this monster! He tried to steal my ship! He’s trying to steal it now! What in the world could convince you?”

The reflection said, “He was trying to steal it from you only to give it to you.”

“More nonsense!”

“No, listen. It was meant to make you the hero of the Second Oecumene, just like Ao Varmatyr said. And if that had been you there on the bridge then, you would have been convinced by Ao Varmatyr. He wanted to reason with you. Instead, Atkins slaughtered him.”

“Atkins did that because… because of the necessities of war…”

The reflection looked contemptuous. “I’m you. Don’t try to fool yourself. That is the same reason why the Nothing pretended to try to steal the ship, and to get you here. To do that he had to make our life a living hell for a short time. The necessities of war. If that excuse applies to Atkins fighting Varmatyr, it applies to the Silent Ones fighting Sophotechs as well. Only their war is a great deal bigger.”

“A war against reality! A revolt against reason.”

The reflection shook its head. “No. The mathematics of the standard model break down under certain conditions. Right? Our science cannot predict or describe in any meaningful terms the interior conditions of a black hole. Right? But those interior conditions exist; they are real. And reality cannot lack integrity. Right? So the same mathematics must describe both sets of real conditions, both inside and outside, and there must be meta-laws describing the transitions and boundary conditions between them. Look at this.”

Lines of mathematical symbols appeared on a nearby mirror, and images from non-Euclidean geometry. The mathematics started from the premise of the nonidentity of unity, and a unity-to-infinity equivalence.

Phaethon frowned at them. The proofs had an internal self-consistency, granting the absurd premise, and normal mathematics was made a subset of this system by assuming a condition where infinity, by not equaling itself, was finite-----

Phaethon turned away, “This is allegedly the irrational mathematics of the Second Oecumene, I suppose? It’s nonsense. The whole thing forms a Goedelian null-set. If I numbered the lines of the proof and assign numbers from your number lines to them, by the lemma of your first proof, the proof itself disproves itself, and you get a set with fewer than no members.”

The reflection nodded. “Like a geometric solid bigger on the inside than on the outside. How do you think the Silent Ones constructed a nonevaporating microscopic black hole? The ratio of interior volume to exterior volume is not one to one.”

“Constructed…?” Phaethon, against his will found himself beginning to be interested. Then he drew back sharply. “No! This makes no sense! Nothing can escape from a black hole; no signal can get out; how could anything be built inside of one…?”

The reflection looked at Phaethon disdainfully. Phaethon wondered if he looked as haughty as that when he disagreed with other people. Perhaps there was a reason why he had few friends within the Golden Oecumene.

The reflection was saying, “You know several ways of transmitting information out from a black hole; you just mentioned them now. Black holes have mass, rotation, and charge; this information, as well as the metric information of position, is transmitted from the interior to the exterior. A ghost machine could transmit virtual particles outside.”

“Not and transmit information! The ghost particles would fall outside the light cone of the event-object!”

“If the speed of light and the location of the event horizon were determinable. Quantum uncertainties ensure that these values are not fixed, except within a small statistical range.”

Phaethon said, “But how could you build a machine inside the event horizon? To outside observers, it would take infinite time; tidal forces would destroy you; and the interiors of black holes are homogenous points…”

The reflection said, “You know an ‘event horizon’ only exists to outside observers. It’s not a solid sheet or something. An incoming object can drop through it without noticing anything except weird light effects overhead. Tidal effects only occur for smaller masses”—an equation appeared on the mirror—“and, in any case, can be counterbalanced by establishing a gravity null zone.”

A diagram appeared, showing a pyramid on the surface of a Second Oecumene station, its apex pointed toward the black hole. Above the pyramid was a rotating ring, so that a line reaching up from the apex passed through the center.

Phaethon said, “I’ve seen that before.”

“In the Last Broadcast. The Silent Ones engineered a way to transmit noumenal information down the gravity well without having tidal forces distort the signal. These rings are made of neutronium, and are rotating at nearly the speed of light. The gravitational ‘frame drag’ from the rotation pulls on the black hole metric and locally distorts it. The event horizon is pushed inward toward the hole, for the same reason that, theoretically, your escape velocity on a moon is less if a large gravitating body is directly overhead. The larger or the nearer the overhead body, the closer the net gravity acceleration acting on you drops to zero. Through these null points, information, even the noumenal information of a coded mind, can pass into the event horizon undistorted.”

Other mirrors showed other engineering details. Diagrams appeared, calculations, examples, blueprints.

Phaethon murmured, “But the drop to the event horizon would take infinite time to occur…”

“Only to outside observers. Once inside, time becomes a spatial direction, and does not necessarily point in the direction of increasing entropy. That is a function of the radius.”