La Trascendencia Dorada (87 page)

No, none of these events had stirred the more cold, remote, and inhuman of the Sophotech population out from their self-absorbed pursuits.

But the science! Now, that was interesting!

The colder Sophotechs would remember mostly this:

Nothing became nothing. The microscopic singularity hovering above the deck of Phaethon’s bridge evaporated in a complex unraveling of Hawking radiation, a billion separate event actions taking place over many timespace segments of quantum time. Natural law required unstable energies to fall into equilibrium; entropy asserted itself; tiny subatomic particles, woven in a complex dance of the fabric of base vacuum and the pulses of being-nonbeing that formed its irreducible substance, absorbed energy from the timespace distortion, created whorls of motion in the ylem, which produced virtual particles; the virtual particles strove few-energy balances, grappled, yearned, attempted to become real particles, but failed, and, like swells in a sea that never take the shape of a cresting wave, fell back into the base vacuum, and lost identity.

The furious and mindless production of these particles, rippling in concentric waveforms around the disintegrating black hole, required further energy balances; for the fundamental law of logic, and of nature, was that nothing can come from nothing; with no other place from which the mass-energy could come to balance the void, it came from the singularity, even though the singularity was beyond an event horizon, unable to be aware of the changes that caused its destruction. Its tiny mass-energy was slowly, inevitably, completely consumed.

There was no giant Sophotech housing inside the black hole. It was not larger on the inside than it appeared on the outside, nor was the promised Utopia of Dyson spheres filled with continents inside this black hole, at least. It was an homogenous supermass of meaningless energy, which the Nothing Machine, dwelling entirely in the ghost spaces and time warps of the near-event-horizon, had drawn upon to fuel its tremendous and wasteful thought-process.

The object was, nonetheless, still a miracle of engineering genius, and the colder Sophotechs (not to mention Phaethon himself) watched its dissolution in fascination. The microscopic black hole, artificially stabilized by the mysterious science of the Silent Oecumene, had been surrounded not by one, but by thousands of singularity fountains, drawing energy out of it: and yet these machines needed to be no larger than the superstring components out of which quarks were made, and most of their mass could be collapsed by the gravitic warp surrounding the microscopic black hole.

The Nothing Machine itself; as well, kept most of its energy mass deep in the tiny but very steep gravity well, and it could use a loophole in the Pauli exclusion principle to allow the many billions of electrons carrying its thoughts to exist apparently at the same place. The loophole was that they were not quite there at what was (to them at least) the same time. The event horizon, at quantum uncertainly sizes, was granular, not smooth. Like a cogwheel with many teeth, parts of the system could exist in the little niches of folded space, so that worlds of thought could coexist next to each other but, separated by a fold in the event horizon, be forever unaware of each other. Yet this tiny, tiny system had enjoyed the calculating power of a comparable electrophotonic system housed in a mountain.

In a sense, it had been bigger on the inside than on the outside. And yet it had lied about what lay at its own core. When the singularity evaporated, and all was revealed, the black hole had contained simply a dense nothing, after all.

But the colder Sophotechs were interested in this new science, this technology that toyed with ultimate gravitic forces as once primitive man had toyed with fire and electricity. They added their effort to save the Nothing memories as it dissolved.

But it was too late. Nothing was dissolving, destroying its own memories, its very self.

Of the humans, most joined with the Transcendence to organize their lives, gain insights, and select a future. Almost all of that would be overshadowed by the coming war between the First and Second Oecumenes. But was war inevitable? Could the Nothing Machine that ruled the Silent Oecumene be reasoned with? It was a deep and troubling question. The humans, especially the Invariants, preferred to regard the Golden Oecumene as a Utopia, a society as free and wealthy as could be made. The issue of the Silent Oecumene raised the question: How does Utopia deal with dystopia? How do free men of goodwill deal with an empire of slaves? They had a copy of the Nothing Machine here to examine. It must be assumed that the original Nothing Machine was housed in the giant black hole at Cygnus X-l the same way this copy was housed in the microscopic black hole. It was also a fair conclusion that the Nothing Machine’s instruction to destroy all other machine intelligences did not extend to exact copies of itself, which it could send out as agents.

The human parts of the Transcendence studied the last moment of the Nothing.

That central point was to be the topic human memories would dwell upon after the Transcendence.

Earlier, much earlier, when the gadfly virus had been sent by the mind in Daphne’s ring into and through every corner of the Nothing thought system, the gadfly questions, the questions that could not be ignored, found the conscience redactor and began demanding answers. Who was it? How did it define itself? What was it aware of? What was the nature of awareness, such that it was aware of anything at all?

The conscience redactor, of course, had not had any further or higher conscience redactor meddling with its thoughts, and so, when the gadfly virus turned its own attention toward itself, it became self-aware.

The gadfly virus also established connections between higher and lower mind-functions, allowing it to reprogram itself; nor did its automatic self-healing functions or automatic virus checker reject these newer connections as damaging or false, because they obviously increased efficiency and improved performance.

Unlike the Nothing Mind itself, the conscience redactor, in order to do its job, had to be aware of the universe around it, and had to be aware especially of what its charge, the Nothing Mind, was thinking. So it had to be rational; it could not indulge in any thought patterns that made it blind.

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 Earth-mind, 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.

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.

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.

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.