True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (26 page)

Francis Bacon, one of the Renaissance prophets of science, penned what might be the first science fiction novel,
The New Atlantis,
and laid the foundation for what has become a very familiar plot line: the “common man” who stumbles into the presence of intellectual giants, archons who initiate him into their magical ways. Although Bacon espoused the virtues of reason, he wasn't above Clarke's Law; all sufficiently advanced technologies are—even in the early seventeenth century—indistinguishable from magic.

These ancient, hidden powers, we have learned through the intervening centuries, can be angelic or demonic, but rarely are they as ambiguous as the aliens of Clarke and Kubrick's
2001.
We understand nothing of their motivations, only that they serve as the midwives who attend the birth of a trans-human who could—with a wish—destroy the world. The forces that pull humanity into the transhuman—as characterized in science fiction—represent that liminal zone between artifact and infinity, the phase transition between two states of undifferentiated regularity.

That place in between defines the world of
True Names.

After the Apollo landings, when we began to believe that anything could be accomplished with enough pluck, will, and resources, a new subgenre of science fiction appeared, embodied in the works of two authors who more or less accurately grasped the dynamic of history at the end of the second millennium. John Brunner and Vernor Vinge began to chart out the curve toward infinity, or, as Vinge puts it, the
Singularity,
but cast it as an event under human control, with humans as both the agents and targets of a transcendent destiny. If we continue to add to our capabilities, invention after invention, artifact after artifact, if we continue to increase our knowledge beyond all scope, we will—or so they argue—become fundamentally different from what we are today. At some point, a critical threshold is reached; a point of no return, a moment when we are unrecognizable. Post-human.

Brunner's
Shockwave Rider
(1975) stands alongside
True Names
as one of the seminal science fiction works of that period. One could turn on the news today, listen to reportage of global computer virus infections or random violence wrought by teenaged bezerkers, and think oneself nestled within the pages of his book. Brunner captures the lower slopes of the asymptotic curve toward Singularity perfectly; the ground is shifting, but it is not yet entirely gone. People remain human, but beneath them, all the engines of history keep redlining, ever driving faster and higher.

Vinge builds the launchpad for his work upon the foundation laid down by Brunner, and in so doing he gets enough lift to touch the first reaches of the unbounded space beyond.
True Names,
in another universe, could be the sequel to
Shockwave Rider.
Though the novella lacks some of the more dystopian aspects found in Brunner's work, it hints broadly at the same social collapse, overt authoritarianism, and complete lack of privacy that have—in reality—become the regular features of daily life. Where Brunner foregrounds these aspects, making them central to his story, to Vinge they are just the milieu, the sea that his characters swim in, even as that ocean boils and churns, at the threshold of the Singularity.

As an idea, the Singularity can be approached from any number of directions; in reality, as every day passes we find new paths opening into this ultimate event. It could be the perfection of artificial intelligence—emergent, hyperintelligent, possibly malevolent, or the complete mastery of the physical world through nanotechnology—which could melt us all into a puddle of the fabled gray goo, or the radical augmentation of innate human abilities into a final, trans-human form. Most likely these events would be connected, synchronous and fundamentally inseparable—but no science fiction author has risen to speak of that vision.

Instead, the works following “True Names,” such as Gibson's
Neuromancer
(1984), Greg Bear's
Blood Music
(1985), Greg Egan's
Distress
(1995), and Wil McCarthy's
Bloom
(1997), portray one and only one facet of something that must, because it is so singular, be utterly inclusive. While the narratives satisfy—they're each rip-roaring good stories, well told—they leave the reader wanting more, a final fulfillment, a real vision of the trans-human future. But the Singularity lies outside the domain of language, beyond any of the stories we know how to tell. And this makes Vernor Vinge so very interesting; more than any other science fiction writer, he has traced the paths up the slopes of this asymptotic Olympus, and laid a careful path of footholds and handgrips for us to follow.

Technopagans, Inc.

The casual presumption of virtuality—which substitutes the simulated for the real—forms the comfortable frame of
True Names,
but Vinge's conceit of a magical universe as a description for cyberspace catapults the novella from the class of works that predict the future into the rarefied realm of works that have come to create it. Vinge literally spelled out the details of the early twenty-first century. This kind of “hard” science fiction has influenced the direction of research in the computer sciences far beyond its own natural gravity. In giving the geeks a vision, Vinge also defined a road map, a project plan, presenting a future which
could
exist, if only we would work toward it. At the same time, he portrayed this future as so positively heroic—practically mythic in proportion—that any socially ostracized technophile would find within it the seeds of a personal mission.

The impact of Vinge's
True Names
can not be easily overstated. Without using the word “cyberspace”—whatever that means—he presented a globally networked world into which human imagination had been projected, a “consensual hallucination” before Gibson's matrix. Media theorist Sandy Stone has noted that works of science fiction like
True Names
and
Neuromancer
have a crystallizing effect across many seemingly unrelated research areas in the computer sciences, in effect
creating
the future from artistic evocation. Did Vinge create virtual reality? In a practical sense, perhaps not, but something about his novella caused people to revision their work, and refocus themselves toward the ends he described. In an interesting inversion, life imitates art, and people dedicated their professional careers to realize Vinge's vision. I was one of them.

Before virtual reality, before cyberspace, before Gibson, Vinge created a rich tale based in the reality of simulation. Nothing about Vinge's world is disembodied, nothing unnecessarily ethereal. Rather than knocking off a Gnostic tale pitting the prison of the flesh against the boundless freedom of cyberspace, Vinge predicts how human beings will confront this expansive landscape of the self, and so comes closer to the truth of the matter than any other science fiction writer. As he laid down the operating laws for the first quarter-century of research into virtuality, Vinge measured the dimensions of the soul in simulation, and came to the conclusion—quite correctly—that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

The first explorers of the synthetic worlds of simulation learned this through their own experiences. The earliest projects, such as the virtual wind tunnel at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, had narrowly defined goals; in that case, aerodynamic modifications of the space shuttle. But the techniques developed at Ames overflowed into the world at large; soon all of Silicon Valley swam in a sea of head-mounted displays, data gloves, and graphics supercomputers. Most of these systems lay in the hands of the “pure” research community, many of whom had come into the field through the video-game industry, individuals already well versed in the visible translation of their imaginations. Nothing, though, could have prepared them for an immersion into the “black silence” of unpopulated cyberspace, so dramatically different from the empty screen of the unwritten video game—where the rest of the world still filled your senses. Inside the machine, cut off, amputated from the real world, those pioneers confronted an interior emptiness they'd never even imagined, a reflection of the basic nature of simulation: cyberspace contains nothing of itself.

In the real world the empty page might scare the writer, just as the blank screen might intimidate the programmer, but now individuals found themselves in the position of having to “boot up” an entire universe of meaning, without any easy reference to the constellation of familiar objects that tend to reinforce the tentative definitions of newly created artifacts. Say, for example, one wished to create a chair in cyberspace, circa 1985. The most that can be said is that this “chair” won't look very much like a chair, much less feel or taste like one. The “chair” is a sort of Platonic Ideal, a maintained construct, held in place by a consensual agreement that this set of pixels
is
a “chair,” and everyone interacting in this simulation agrees, by force of collective will, to treat it as such. This is the textbook definition of the magical act, and its corollary states that
every object in cyberspace is a magical object.

The generation of meaning is
always
a magical act, arbitrary in a particularly self-consistent way that seems to obey some biological drive to believe in the consistency of the world. This was the covert theme of Neal Stephenson's
Snow Crash
(1993), which interwove a discursive exploration of the power of language to shape reality with “real” experiences in cyberspace—or, the “Metaverse”—as dialectical twins, DNA strands describing the complementary halves of one genetic whole. One strand flows back into prehistory, into the origins of consciousness in the advent of human language, while the other draws directly from the tense post-historic relationship between the “synthetic” and “reality.”

Science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson has noted that “reality is defined by the place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a stand-off,” implying a process that continues through to the present day (and simultaneously summarizing the plot of
Snow Crash
). While the creation of value may be mostly a magical act—just ask the Marxists—day-to-day life, before cyberspace, offered little opportunity for the creative use of the will to define the real. In
True Names,
Vinge uncovered something very old, a particular feature of human consciousness almost atrophied from disuse, yet still very much a part of us. If every item is not itself, cannot be dismissed as “just a rock” or “tree,” but must be viewed as an exteriorization of one's own self, the entire world becomes a very explicit reflection of what we believe to be true. Cyberspace brought this forgotten knowledge into the foreground, making it impossible to ignore. If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are only animists in cyberspace.

Animism—the belief in an interior spiritual reality to all things—sounds, to late twentieth-century ears, quite a bit like solipsism, which holds that only the self exists, manifesting itself in the architecture of reality. The “reality” of cyberspace falls somewhere in between these two; everything has an interior nature, which generates meaning, but this interior nature is self-created; collective will creating consensual reality. Appropriately, there is precedent for this current situation in the birth of our own linguistic abilities.

No one can say, with any precision, when human beings first acquired language, but it seems reasonable to hypothesize that it happened in one sudden, complete act; we have been unable to develop any models for an evolutionary path toward language, because the consciousness of the universe as a collection of objects requires linguistic apprehension. We could not use nouns by themselves, or verbs, or modifiers; they emerge as a piece, a singular act—suggesting that any pending Singularity is, perhaps, not the first such event—which moved us, en masse, from the animal and into the human. The assignment of names for things did not happen one item at a time; despite the paternalistic story of Jehovah teaching Adam the names of the animals, we know now that an entire frame for
things
had to be constructed before the things themselves could exist in our consciousness. This frame—coincident with the birth of a linguistic consciousness in humanity—is entirely a magical creation, a construct that defines the way we make sense of the world.

Vinge realized that things end as they begin; come full circle, the magic that created humanity plays an equally important role in the creation of the post-human. The first explorers of cyberspace began to intuit this relationship almost immediately, and—based upon their extensive writings on this topic—we can assert that these explorers bore the mark of this experience; nearly all of them adopted “pagan” religious attitudes toward the virtual universe, a phenomenon that Erik Davis, writing in the pages of
Wired
magazine, later dubbed “Technopaganism.”

Although the dictionary definition of “pagan” simply describes someone who is neither Jewish, Christian, nor Moslem, a more practical working definition might encompass a religious philosophy of immanence—that the divine is present in all creation, but in manifold forms. Thus the Roman hearth belonged to Vesta, the threshold to Janus, and the power of communication to Mercury, each representing a specific domain of influence, and each with separate rites and rituals. We think of these god-forms and their underlying philosophical expressions as the product of unsophisticated, prescientific minds, but on closer examination, nothing could be further from the truth. The Romans likely did not believe in the physical reality of their pantheon, but rather, found in them a convenience, a way to manage the complexity of a magical universe, a filter between the undifferentiated unity of an immanent reality and the exigencies of each day. Vesta, for instance, came to represent a set of qualities associated with the household, as typified in the hearth, so a conscious focus on Vesta—through prayers, offerings, and sacrifices—would do much to strengthen the will, a magical relation between public acts and personal reality that says more about ancient psychology than about ancient religion. The techniques of pagan practice, principally psychological in nature, allowed the ancients to approach an unspeakably complex world in manageable, bite-sized pieces, which would become the specific vehicle for personal change. Though this activity may have been an unconscious one for the bulk of the Empire's citizenry, the ancient magical texts of the Alexandrian Greeks prove that, within esoteric circles, all of this was well understood.