Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  “After launch, of course. Aboard the star-vessel. On the Hermetic.”

  “What the hell do you mean? I was aboard? I was aboard?!”

  “Of course. What is the last you remember?”

  “Aboard the punt. I jammed the needle in my brain.”

  Del Azarchel seemed taken aback. “Ah! That is—ah. Unexpected.” Then, to himself, he muttered, “I will have to take this up with my better half.” And he ran the fingers of his right hand across the metallic face of the massy red-gold armband clasping his left wrist.

  The surface was clearly touch-sensitive or motion-aware, like library cloth. Since before Montrose was born, all telephones, visuals, games, texts, audios, and control surfaces could be built into any tool or article of clothing, practically any object, that need or whim dictated: but only weapons, or medical appliances were built with their screens and virtual keypads invisible to non-users. Montrose guessed the armband would ignore any finger but Del Azarchel’s.

  Montrose said, “I figured you returned me to Earth and sailed without me? Didn’t you?”

  “Oh, Cowhand, you still make me to laugh! Come! Did you actually think I had the fuel and time to decelerate the punt to rest relative to Earth, recelerate back, screw-turn and decelerate, reach Earth at her new point in her orbit, take the time to refuel, launch again from yet another point farther along Earth’s orbit, accelerate toward a farther downrange halfway point, and decelerate to a rendezvous even farther yet downrange—and all this while the Hermetic was adding velocity geometrically? Of course I took you aboard. At that time, we were merely waiting for your drug to wear off. It was not until Dr. Yajnavalkya examined you—you remember him?”

  “The expedition surgeon. Also, he did work in the Hodge Conjecture.” He remembered the fellow’s work, his discussions. The theorem named after Yajnavalkya proved that topological spaces defined by the human brain cell interaction nets were actually rational linear combinations of algebraic cycles. Montrose did not actually remember any details about the man himself.

  “Not until he examined you did anyone realize the extent of the modification, and even then no one was perfectly certain what you had done, since you invented the technique yourself, and did not keep notes like a professional scientist, you fool.”

  “But I told you what I was up to before I did it.”

  “Yes—a few cryptic words no one could recall clearly.”

  “Didn’t you play back the cabin record…?—Oh.”

  “Aptly put! ‘Oh’ indeed. My friend had asked me to shut off the cabin recording circuit before he stabbed himself, remember?”

  “What was wrong with me?”

  “Divarication.”

  Montrose looked a little sick, but said nothing.

  3. Divarication

  Every information function in the universe suffered from what was called divarication. Fact became legend as it was passed from generation to generation; bureaucracies grew ossified as their rules evolved to be self-serving; and even computer programs or nerve cells passing information to the next generation of nerve cells lost information, modifying it by a self-selection process into forms easier to pass along. Lines of data diverged, became unrecognizable to each other. Even processes like check-digits and data insulation suffered their own form of degradation. Entropy always took its tithe.

  Divarication in neural processes meant thought lost ability to be preserved. Senility, Alzheimer’s disease, and autism were manifestations of what could be described, mathematically, as a one function describing signal degradation.

  “I was trying to increase my brain processing speed.”

  “You did. But you increased the speed of brain degradation even faster.”

  “Pox! Was it a self-destructive feedback cascade?”

  “The opposite. You over-corrected. It was a self-reinforcing feedback.”

  “What was the tau parameter?”

  “The tau approached unity: You were in a mental stasis. As best we could tell,” said Del Azarchel, “the medulla oblongata was affected. The part of your brain that prioritizes brain attention flows placed your own self-awareness at a level below what was needed to maintain the holographic illusion of self-awareness. You forgot yourself so completely that there was no way to wake you to your own awareness again. While you forgot yourself, your brainpaths entered a logic loop.”

  “But I built in a self-correction cycle, or tried to.”

  “You had artificially sculpted out new nerve-paths, new engrams, not one created by your own information-flow patterns, but adapted to the mathematical flow model your Zurich computer run had formulated. That pattern was … alive. Self-correcting. Your epiphytes re-established any nerve-paths Dr. Yajnavalkya interrupted when he operated, or constructed new pathways around any block he established.” Del Azarchel shrugged, spread his hands. “He could not figure out what you had done: We transmitted medical records back to Earth, but the doctors and specialists there did not have you ready at hand to examine.”

  “Damn. I’d like to see the records.”

  “I will send them to your amulet as soon as you get one. In the meanwhile, let me sum them up: Our best guess is that your new brain thought its new format was proper and healthy, and every time you slept, your delta-wave sleep would put you back to your damaged brain-arrangement again. How did you do it?”

  “Not sure. The RNA correction template, ah—that was one of the things I copied straight out of the Monument Math.”

  “Copying something you did not actually know what it meant or how it worked?”

  “Well, I figured it was worth the risk.”

  Del Azarchel snorted, then chortled, then laughed aloud. “A breath of springtime air from a long-vanished world! Now I recall my wild youth, and why I liked you. By the devil, you are rash as a corsair! Are you sure you have no Spanish blood in you?”

  “How did you fix me?”

  “With very special help. That main, ah, expert, I called into to handle your case, she happens to be molecular neurosurgeon of remarkable skill, as skilled as she is with that as with everything she undertakes.”

  “But you know what she did?”

  “The same thing Dr. Yajnavalkya tried, putting up nerve blocks to hinder the extra brain tissue you grew in yourself, but without stopping the essential functions the new tissue usurped. We have divined enough of the pattern, the algorithm, of what you did with your Zurich computer runs, to set up a block that will last.”

  “But how do I make it work?”

  Del Azarchel looked puzzled. “Make what work? The cure is permanent.”

  “Make the cocktail work! I want the experiment to work. It might seem like years ago to you, but to me, I was just now in the middle of the test. Do you have a way to augment my intelligence without the side-effect of wiping out my self-awareness? Why are you grinning?”

  “Because I had forgotten what you are like. Because I believe the answer to your brain augmentation theory is in the Monument. And I believe the answer to how to read the Monument correctly is in your brain! You might not remember, but when we reached our destination, we brought you out of suspension. We managed to, ah, wrestle you into your suit. When we took you to the surface, you had a reaction to it…”

  “Reaction?”

  “You calmed down. You were drawn to certain parts of the Beta and Omicron groups from the first radial area. You seemed happy—even awed. Like a child again. We thought maybe you would return to yourself. I hoped … well…”

  “I remember that! The horizon was right close, like a stone’s throw away, and I could see Dr. Velasquez and Dr. Ramananda standing off a ways. Their feet were below the horizon, and their heads were pointing away from me, so they seemed to be leaning backward. The surface was like black glass. And I saw a dim bright star overhead. And it was too late … for something … I was afraid … afraid not for myself, but…” His voice trailed off.

  Del Azarchel was staring at him carefully. In a neutral voice he
said, “Do you remember anything else? Who you feared?”

  Montrose shook his head. “Catching fog in a pail. I can’t bring it back. I really buggered up my brain something awful, didn’t I?”

  “The basic theory was sound.”

  “So I flew to the damn Diamond Star.” Montrose spoke in a tone of awe. “I was there. I was there! I flew all the way there and don’t remember a damned thing about the damned voyage!”

  “Well, to be fair, there was not much to remember, not for you. When you were not tied up, we kept you in cryonic biosuspension. We feared further nerve degeneration. And as for what you forget: well, to call it ‘damned’ is not so wrong-tongued a word to use.”

  Montrose shook his head, and his face was haggard with misery. All the work on the Monument had gone on without him. He was the kid who missed Christmas. Everyone else got a present.

  “Years. Decades. Half a century there and half a century back again,” he muttered. “I slept—I slept through it—”

  “And you are still young!”

  4. Sadder Things of Long Ago

  “Well, where is everyone else? Where is Ramayana, Bhuti, or that jackass Narcís? Where is the Captain? I want to see Captain Grimaldi.”

  “She is in transit.”

  “She? She who?”

  “Ha! Sorry, my friend. Forgive a slip of an old man’s tongue. Captain Grimaldi is no longer with us. He did not return from the Diamond Star. The expedition ended in disaster, in tragedy. More than half the crew perished.”

  Montrose turned his face away. On the walls he saw images of cities and ships burning. He should have known. Grimaldi had been a Brahmin, and practiced ahimsa, sacred respect for all life. He would not have opened fire on his fellow human beings, not even to stop a war, or bring peace to the world. Grimaldi could not have been in command of the ship shown in these pictures.

  Montrose had a strange, dreamlike sensation, as if he had touched a corpse, but only now remembered the feel of the cold flesh against his hand. As if the corpse had rotated in zero gee, and he saw dead eyes staring blindly, wall-eyed, at nothing, the dry mouth hanging open, the motionless and shriveled tongue like a worm. The sensation made Montrose’s eyes sting, and he raised his arm to wipe tears against the back of his hand, at which he stared in surprise.

  “The Captain is dead? How did he die?”

  Del Azarchel leaned forward and touched his arm. “He was like a second father to you, was he not?”

  “My life weren’t nowise hard as yours, Blackie, but life didn’t kiss my rump much neither, if you take my meaning. Grimaldi crow-barred me out of a pretty tight spot, and…” Montrose suddenly could see in his mind’s eye the barrel of the pistol of the last man he’d ever faced. What was his name? Mike Nails. He’d lost almost a year to hospital-induced slumber that time. Montrose had been slow on the trigger then, because he wanted to delope and walk away. Because he’d lost his nerve. “… and, by the Plague, I am sure to have died and been planted in the ground had Grimaldi not given me a new deal from a fresh deck. So I owe him everything.”

  “We will have time later to speak of the sadder things of long ago.”

  “It’s not long ago to me!”

  “The Captain, he did not perish in a praiseworthy fashion. I did not wish to mar his memory by telling tales.”

  “I got a right to know!”

  Del Azarchel smiled and leaned back. “Why this talk of rights? What you ask of me is yours. We never would have made it to the Diamond Star had you not solved the difficulties surrounding neuro-memory Divarication in long-term suspension. All of us are in your debt.”

  “All of us? Which us?”

  “The Hermeticists. The crew.”

  “Who made it back?”

  “There are only seventy-two of us left.”

  Montrose was silent, shocked. Two-thirds of the expedition had perished.

  Del Azarchel said, “We did not return to our old homes and our old nations when we returned, for all those things were gone, or changed beyond recognition into crooked mockeries of what we knew.” He gave a moue of distaste. “I will not disgust you by repeating the conditions of Spain. She was not my country any longer; those occupying her were not my countrymen. The officers and crew of the Hermetic, the greatest ship ever aloft, they were my countrymen! The stars were my nation! We are the Conclave of the Learned, but we should be called the Brotherhood of Man, for we are loyal to no country, no tribe, no sect, no faction. We are the Men of the Mind, serving only the abstract ideals of the pure reason, and devoted to nothing less than the entirety of the human race.”

  This reminded Montrose so strongly of the make-believe Science Councils that peopled the cartoons he read in his youth, and ruled the make-believe future world, that at first he grinned. Maybe it was high time experts, folk who knew what to do, were telling people what to do, rather than folk lucky enough to be born rich enough to buy, photogenic enough to win, or crooked enough to steal a bag of votes?

  But a frown drew his eyebrows together even before the grin left his mouth. No self-respecting Texas mob would let anyone tell them what to do, and that went double for experts, and twice double for some high-pockets breed of anyone that couldn’t be voted out of office when he got caught.

  “Sounds like all-you-all is running the show. I ain’t sure what to make of that.”

  “Not all you. All we. You are of our number. You may make of it anything you wish! Did I not say this future was ours, our own?”

  “And you? You look like you ain’t done so badly for yourself. What’s your part?”

  “My official title is Nobilissimus ‘the most distinguished,’ but my roles include various presidencies, tribunates, and ministerial positions awarded by certain electors from Concordat members that still maintain democratic forms, and titles of royalty granted when I became regent for those ruling royal families from members that do not. Privately, I am the owner-in-chief of the World Power Corporation, a cartel that controls how and where the antimatter we brought back from the Diamond Star is employed—my private position gives me much more influence over world affairs than my public, which is occupied by a nonsensical amount of ceremony. But between us, my only title is Senior.”

  Montrose realized he had not said “Señor,” the Spanish honorific—but “Senior,” the name of the Expedition member in charge of coordinating extra-vehicular teams: the chief of the landing party.

  Montrose looked toward the window, and saw the snowy peaks and clefts rearing above ruins. Night was falling, and soft yellow lights now dotted the sheer walls of the far craters. Other lights gleamed on glass-roofed gardens like emeralds or glanced dancing through waterfalls like threads, the polished silver dashing into the crater depths, making them shimmer with rainbows in the gathering gloom. He wondered if that was another set of mansions, or part of this one.

  The spread was bigger than most towns he’d been in.

  “How much is yours?”

  “All of it.”

  “What, the castle, the crater, the mountain range?”

  “Everything on the globe. Everything under the sky. I am the Imperator Mundi, the Master of the World.”

  He smiled and there was a glitter in his eye.

  “I am master not just of Earth, but of the destiny of Earth. Not just these lands surrounding, but the years and centuries to come, I can shape. We will share the glories of royalty and the luxuries of wealth, you with me. Let us command the future to be a golden one, and to bring forth everything we have dreamed!”

  6

  Intellect Emulation Mechanism

  1. A Golden Future

  “So. You’re Master of the World. Sounds mighty nice. But … Only one?”

  Del Azarchel blinked. “How many do you prefer?”

  “How many can I get? What do we have by way of colonies on the Moon yet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Damnation and pustules! Sounds like you’re marching slipshod. Colonized Mars?”

>   “It’s colder than Antarctica, the oxygen is locked into surface rust, and the microatmosphere is only thick enough to carry hypersonic sandstorms able to disintegrate the metal hull of any lander unfortunate enough to survive hard-down. So, no, I am not the Lord of Mars or the Moon.”

  “No Mars bases! Prickly hat of Jesus! What kind of crappy future is this?”

  Del Azarchel smiled an urbane smile. “One that avoided global holocaust, despite the weapons of absolute war in our arsenals.”

  Montrose plopped himself down on the bed, slouching, his eyes glittering with a weird mix of disappointment, puzzlement, and wonder. “You see,” he said finally, “I dreamed about Mars when I was young. That was one of the things I dreamed about. Also, I wanted a car that flew. Rocketpack. Raygun.”

  “What have we not dreamt, we dreamers? We dreamt of power, energy in abundance to accommodate our dreams; we dreamt of expanded consciousness, intelligence augmentation, nerve regeneration, organ rejuvenation, and artificial life, extended life, intensified life! We dreamt of minds created according to design, techniques to cure insanity and sin, sciences to create new forms of life, beasts and birds to be our serfs and playthings and companions, and then to work the great work of creation! To make the Man beyond Man, the next step of evolution, as far above us as we above the ape. And even this would be merely the first step in the cosmic dance!”

  Montrose gave him a hard look. “You ain’t translated the Monument yet, have you?”

  “Not so! We translated the whole of the Alpha Segment.”

  “That all?” The Alpha Segment was less than one percent of the surface area. “It’s been, what, a century? Almost two? I was thinking maybe y’all got up through the Beta, Gamma, and Delta segments, and maybe part of Eta?”

  Del Azarchel looked surprised. “How the devil did you—that is a good guess. Really good. We have made major inroads into just those segments, and nowhere else.”

  “Don’t look so impressed. This room: I don’t see any force fields in the lamp or tractor-presser beams shooting out the sink or anything other gee-whiz-wow-wonder gizmos that I should see, if Earth science had a working unified field theory. Pictures here on the walls show wars on Earth and wars in space, but I don’t see anything that looks like a fundamentally new weapon system—the kind of new that comes from a new model of the universe. The Beta Segment of Monument symbols we knew were a particle menagerie and periodical table, and Gamma Segment was pretty sure to be the linguistic calculus, and I know that part contained the key to translating the higher sections. Eta Segment—you all mocked me when I said it, but Eta looked to me like game theory, perhaps an introduction into something more basic, like a really rigorous mathematical analysis of economics and politics. If you actually have the Earth under one rule these days, you must know a damn sight more about political economy than anyone of my generation. But you don’t seem to have more physics. So—No great guess involved.”