True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (27 page)

A similar state of affairs exists in cyberspace today; most people are willing to confront the 'bots, mailing lists, avatars, and sundry other denizens of the virtual world as real entities, possessing their own interior natures, but a few—in particular, those pioneers—recognize that these synthetic projections are conveniences of the mind, and wholly under the mind's control. The esoteric secret of cyberspace is that it is utterly composed of Blake's “mind forg'd manacles,” that we are prisoners of our own design, and, for the few who realize this, the opportunity of freedom beckons.

Roger Pollack, as Vinge's hero in
True Names,
accepts this freedom as his due, and masters the world of magic as a prisoner grapples for the keys to his cage; only in this wizardry, in this compression of the incomprehensibly complex world of planetary networks into the pseudo-archaic forms of castle and keep, dungeon and dragon, can he create a space entirely for himself. Only within a fantastic world can his soul explore the incredible possibilities the real world has come to offer. And so, too, do the modern technopagans lay the veil of magic and mystery across a world almost wholly integrated in every aspect, knowing that the intentional act of drawing this veil over the world provides, for them, the fertile conditions for the soul's growth into trans-human form.

There and Back Again

Magic has two faces; although principally psychological in nature, the magical worldview prescribes that interior activities must have an influence on exterior reality. The boundary between these two, always muddy, fades into confusion within the constrictive simulations of cyberspace. Transcendence, or Singularity, inside cyberspace would be a false transformation, a half-answer. Gods bottled up inside the virtual world would not be gods at all. As Gibson recounts in
Count Zero,
in the years after transcendence, the Voudoun
loas
reemerged as entities with real-world influence, god-forms who can freely partake in the commerce of information and material. Magic is a form of power, an ability to make the world-at-large conformant to personal will, not just a clever technique for mental housekeeping. However, magic in this aspect immediately presents its darker nature in the lust of result, the drive to have everything within one's control, to be the puppet master in a land of slaves. Translating magic from cyberspace into the material world makes it true, and truly dangerous.

So Vinge's tale, replete with magical imagery, would be incomplete, and without consequence, if the magic had been fundamentally separated from the powers imparted by the mastery of that magic. More than just a system for the manipulation of symbol systems of radical complexity, magic is the mechanism by which Mr. Slippery, Erythrina—and the Mailman—translate their will into real actions, even while it equally presents the grand threat to their continued existence. Here we come to the core theme of
True Names,
hidden under layers of affecting surface detail; the mastery of reality by magical technique opens hidden possibilities of human being, for inasmuch as their magic
works,
it presents temptations greater than any they have known—greater than any they can experience and still call themselves human.

Only in this complete form—from magic into action—can we hear Vinge's articulation of the real nature of the Singularity. High on the asymptotic curve toward infinite extension of our capabilities, our abilities with language will—in Vinge's eyes—produce a revolution in the real world, a revolution he sees as necessarily catastrophic. When Roger and Erythrina encompass the extensive computing power across a networked planet, their point of view becomes decidedly post-human, as if the frail shell of flesh and fantasy that has thus far sustained their dreams has—in a moment—become a hollow substitute for the nearly unbounded powers of a god. Despite their powers within cyberspace—significant and dangerous in themselves—they find in the taste of the real the forbidden fruit, which leaves them fully aware of their nakedness and ignorance. There is no going back; their translation is utter and singular, and, like Adam and Eve, they are cast from their bliss into a hostile world.

Seated comfortably before our computers, we can tend a garden in Linz, Austria, or take a peep through a camera located on the other side of the planet; we can cast our bread upon the waters of the global network, and wonder what gifts might be returned to us. We can tap into a firmament of knowledge that grows to encompass the entire extent of human experience on Earth, and we can wage war against our enemies. For all of its disembodied qualities, cyberspace has a reality that belies its ephemeral nature; because we are tied into it, we are its eyes and ears and arms and legs. We are already extended enormously by its reach, but more will come. Much more.

In
True Names,
Vinge used the most visible aspects of future technologies, such as fast computers and orbital laser cannons, to give a tangible quality to this magical power of will, but it may be—for ourselves—that the least visible elements of the future will become the ground for the expression of post-human capabilities. Our doing has grown increasingly fine, now nearly approaching the infinitely fringed boundary to quantum impossibilities. Forty years ago, in a famous lecture, physicist Richard Feynman predicted an opening of the atomic structures of nature to human ability; his colleague, Marvin Minsky, passed the kernel of this idea to one of his graduate students, K. Eric Drexler, who wrote a book about it:
Engines of Creation: The Coming Age of Nanotechnology
(1986). In one word, Drexler summarized the infinite extension of human ability—fundamental control of the material universe.

Although the published text is interesting—inspiring a generation of both scientists and science fiction authors—the original manuscript version of
Engines of Creation
can be classified only as a mind-blowing masterpiece of futurism, a text so wild, so positively singular, that the publisher naturally balked at an open distribution of its disturbing conclusions. (I leave it as a research problem for the reader to discover precisely what these conclusions might be.) On his first pass, Drexler charted out the very top of the asymptote, where it grinds toward a tangent infinity; these are the abilities that greet us, at the opening of the cyberspace frontier. The magical world within becomes, with some simple machinery, the magical world without; the same laws of magic and will bind both our self-constructions in cyberspace and our exterior imaginings in the fabric of the material world.

All of which, at least theoretically, presents us with quite a problem, in magnitude identical to the opportunity offered. We are not, by and large, taught to be magicians, and we have not the mastery of our own fates. The Feds, in the end, had to rely on Roger and Erythrina to save civilization, because
they
had mastered the lost arts of trans-humanity,
they
were ready to boot-up into being beyond anything they had ever known. Even this,
True Names
indicates, will not suffice; though they win the war, these new trans-human entities will not willingly lay their powers down. Erythrina becomes the matrix, leaving her identity behind to serve as the vital center of a coming general transcendence. (The only false step in
True Names
is Roger's resumption of human form—but somebody has to play witness to apotheosis.) Vinge seems to say that Singularity is universal, affecting all humanity. In the words of the old song, we'll all go together when we go—one way or another. At the very end of the asymptote, there is only infinity, everywhere.

To return, at the end, to the beginning, we can cast our eyes back further than Vinge, before the modern, before the prehistoric. Our civilizations carry myths of races older than ours, of powers greater than our own, and even if the New Age has coopted most of them into the fanciful re-creations of an interstellar cargo cult, the myths remain. In particular—at least in the West—the story of Atlantis has taken on a life of its own in modern times, decompressing a few lines of Plato's
Critias
into an entire galaxy of beliefs about the utopian community
before
history. The modern variants of the Atlantis myth tell of a culture of nearly unlimited power, controlling the fields of the Earth itself with energy from its crystals, and who finally lost control in a catastrophic failure of their magical abilities, destroyed by earthquake and sunk beneath the seas.

If it is reasonable to read the myths of more advanced cultures as windows into the cultural soul—as I believe it is—this story can tell us much about how we see ourselves. We, too, have harnessed the “crystals” for great power—all semiconductors are crystals, and most of us work before liquid crystal displays. We, too, have nearly unlimited power—even our great-grandfathers would agree. And more and more we worry that our magic may not be up to task, that we might, in some singular moment, lose it all. As with the Overlords of Clarke's
Childhood's End,
we retain in the Atlantis myth the afterimage of something
ahead
of us, a moment we feel unequal to.

But magic is afoot; the battle is hardly lost.

Each day the real grows in its responsiveness to our wills. More and more the world seems … playful. And the children growing up inside this world have a fixed expectation that this trend will only continue—and broaden—as they mature. We might not be ready for the magic of the post-human, but they almost certainly will be. And chances are, they'll want to teach it to us. A new language to describe the world,
a language which shapes the world.
That tongue eludes us now, as we tarry in our nervous impatience, on this side of Singularity. It can not be more than twenty years away, for all of the energies of civilization are grinding down on our doing, so as to make it perfect.

The greater part of
True Names
—what comes after, in the wake of trans-humanity—has never been written. A problem from the gentle mathematics professor, and left for the reader to solve. As we boot into something ineffably beyond ourselves, we watch the atmosphere thin, then fall away, leaving only the vast deepness of space. The stars are dim, and far apart, as infinity approaches, but there's so much more room to move.

True Names

Vernor Vinge

Having read nine essays about cyberspace, computers, and in some their direct relation to
True Names,
we now deem it safe for you to read the novella about which so much has been written. Seen from just past the turn of the millennium, and twenty years after the initial publication of the novella, it may seem that
True Names
has little new to offer science fiction, no less science and technology.

And yet that's not true. When this story was written, in 1979–80, the term cyberspace wasn't even a whisper in people's dreams. (William Gibson coined it later.) Vinge, with this single story, changed the landscape of science fiction forever, introducing the notion of virtual reality in a feasible way which has been expanded upon but never fully supplanted by any other writer.

Films and television shows have exploited the vision of cyberspace described in
True Names.
Other science fiction writers freely credit Vinge with creating something new and completely different from anything that had come before.

How was Vernor Vinge able to concoct such a unique, fully-fleshed and freshly imagined vision? Part of the answer may lie in the way Vinge learned computer theory. A mathematician before he began studying computer science, he learned it pretty much from the ground up, reading what there was to read, but as he wrote in his Introduction to this book, he was fascinated by computers from the time he was a teen; by the time he began to study the discipline, he was well prepared to think about how it all fit together.

But more of the freshness of
True Names
comes from Vinge's imagination. In other works, such as his novels
A Fire Upon the Deep
and the recent
A Deepness in the Sky,
Vinge has taken readers to the far reaches of the galaxy, and to strange, richly imagined planets. Here, he takes us inward, to the conceptual realm of cyberspace, which he dubbed “the Other Plane,” and where the “new age of magic” lives.

Enough prelude. Here's
True Names.

 

 

 

In the once-upon-a-time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for—the stories go—once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer's true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful. As times passed, and we graduated to the Age of Reason and thence to the first and second industrial revolutions, such notions were discredited. Now it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never really was a First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names again:

The first hint Mr. Slippery had that his own True Name might be known—and, for that matter, known to the Great Enemy—came with the appearance of two black Lincolns humming up the long dirt driveway that stretched through the dripping pine forest down to Road 29. Roger Pollack was in his garden weeding, had been there nearly the whole morning, enjoying the barely perceptible drizzle and the overcast, and trying to find the initiative to go inside and do work that actually makes money. He looked up the moment the intruders turned, wheels squealing, into his driveway. Thirty seconds passed, and the cars came out of the third-generation forest to pull up beside and behind Pollack's Honda. Four heavy-set men and a hard-looking female piled out, started purposefully across his well-tended cabbage patch, crushing tender young plants with a disregard which told Roger that this was no social call.