Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  He worked as quickly as he could, as the heat from his parka gloves brought painful sensation back into his hands and fingers. Soon, he forgot the ache, or perhaps his temperature returned to normal.

  “The problem with the daemon in your head, friend Menelaus, is a scaling problem. If you double the height of a pillar, you more than double the weight at the base: if you swell a spider up to elephant size, it must have elephantine legs, because such mass cannot hang from spidery arches. You see? Your cortical complexity is not supported by your thalamus and hypothalamus, so you are emotionally and conceptually unstable. The priority switching system in your pons, your medulla oblongata, is not equipped for the information volume your enlarged intellect requires. You do not have the neural infrastructure to handle it.”

  Even though his face was no longer numb, it was easier to type a response in shorthand text than to speak: But I cannot change the support structure of my lower brain.

  “I would be happy to serve as your role model in that, old friend. Once you have made the changes to me, you can study exactly what needs to be done to you, and then I can develop the technology and techniques to do it. Or you can wait a hundred years and have the hylics develop it.”

  A step-by-step process was laid out on one of the central screens, each step linked to a more complex file describing it in detail.

  Montrose found the process of restoring the brain model fascinating. It was a calculus of negative spaces, meant to establish the volume limits defining what he did not know, and, one line at a time, diminishing that volume as correlations and correlatives suggested themselves. There was a program running in the background helping him with the pattern-recognition aspects. The base mathematics was granular rather than continuous: it was the perfect mathematical system for dealing with what was basically an analog computer.

  There were gaps in the logic, leaps between steps he could not follow: but when he came to those, he merely watched his hands typing in midair, and, as if in a dream, saw the correct answer unfold in the universe of logic-symbols floating around him.

  But as he worked, Del Azarchel’s voice began to sound more and more slurred and drowsy. On the wall screens, the patterns of numbers and analog-vectors representing the mechanical brain’s thought patterns began to show suppression of the cortex.

  The simulated medulla oblongata was trying to switch priorities away from the speech centers and the self-awareness: in effect, the same thing that had happened to Montrose. The brain was on the verge of degenerating into some sort of zombie.

  “Stay awake!” Montrose snapped. “Stay with me, damn you. Talk!”

  4. Sadder Things of Long Ago Revisited

  “What, ah, what would you—” The voice suppressed a giggle, not entirely with success. “Of what would you have me talk, old friend?”

  Montrose realized that this Iron Ghost not only thought of itself as Del Azarchel—which seemed an infinitely cruel trick to play on the poor thing—it must know what he knew.

  “The Captain. Did he really commit suicide? I seem to remember something else.…”

  “He did. Why would I lie to you about such a thing? Would I demean my word?” Del Azarchel’s voice sounded sharper, querulous. “Look in my thought logs if you doubt me—” One of the lesser screens flickered open with a minor inset. The neurological signs that usually accompanied deliberate falsehood were missing. It might not have convinced a court of law, but Montrose was convinced.

  But there were disturbances in the thalamus and reticular formation. The topic was too upsetting. Best to switch to something else.

  “Do you remember staying with me?” Montrose said.

  “Staying…? When?”

  “In the darkness, you said. In the dry times. Watching over my coffin.”

  “I did not say that. Father did.”

  “Father?”

  “The flesh and blood Del Azarchel. The simpleton version. You do not remember the times of darkness, do you? Of course not. Well! Thank your stars you forget, that you slumbered! It was when we were at short rations, and the water recycling had gone bad.”

  Montrose was busy typing in midair. He could establish as many keypads, trackballs, blackboards, and motion volumes as he needed to settle the controls however he wished. His keyboards were merely imaginary: Walls were watching his finger-motions and interpreting them as keystrokes. There were spectacles in his hood he could have drawn on, and the lenses would have painted a stereoscopic illusion of the keyboard on themselves for him to follow, had he needed it. He did not: even had there been a real board to look at, his eyes were busy elsewhere. Montrose was watching the numbers on the wall nervously as they streamed and swirled. He was watching for node-points and hesitations.

  He looked over his shoulder. The back wall was also library cloth. In a central screen loomed the pale, skull-less mask of young and handsome Del Azarchel: cheekbones like knives, proud nose, thin lips, jaw narrow and foxlike, its eyes like two blind Ping Pong balls, with crosshairs to represent track and elevation, and pinpoint dots to represent the pupil.

  The mask raised an eyebrow, and flickered its eyelids, the same facial gesture Montrose had seen the real Del Azarchel use to signal his wishes to his bodyguards and courtiers. The mask was telling him to turn around and continue the work. “Keep to your task! You are still in the middle of brain surgery. I am not a machine: I cannot be put on hold.”

  “Where ’s the staff? Where’s Del Azarchel?”

  “I am Del Azarchel.”

  “The real you, I mean.”

  “You sent him away, since to have another warm body in the room would interfere with your attempt to use your whole body as a command interface. Do we need him? He would not understand what you are doing. I do not even understand it, now that I am running on a merely human intellectual topology, but I can number and repeat the steps. It is really brilliant work.”

  “Something I did?”

  “Yes. The real you, I mean.” The mask smiled a slight smile.

  “How come you couldn’t figure it out? I thought they made the same interconnections in your model brain that I made in my real brain, with that damn goo I stuck in my skull. You should have been as smarter than a man as a man is above an ape.”

  “If two apes suddenly turned into men, let us call them Mowgli and Tarzan, what makes you think they would be men of the same intelligence, same skills, same interest? Mowgli might be able to reason in the abstract and make moral judgments and tell stories, and do the other things no ape can do, but if Tarzan Lord Greystoke goes to Cambridge college, his education must outstrip the other.”

  Montrose looked back at his work. There were still disturbances in the cortex, especially in the language centers. Why was the disturbance language-based? He had to see the formulation in action to isolate it.

  “Keep talking.”

  With a flick of his wrist, he opened additional screens at a finer resolution, so he could see the information progression on the nerve ganglia level. With one finger, he began drawing connective tissue as if with an imaginary pointer, while his other hand was crooked over an imaginary number pad.

  “Talk! Tell me about these dark times. Aboard the ship, right?”

  “Quite right. There was too much nitrogen in the air feed, and everyone had a headache, all the time. Brown-outs and black-outs were mandatory twenty hours out of every twenty-four, lighting up only at eight bells. They wanted to shut off power to your coffin. More than half of the biosuspension units had been cannibalized. You see?”

  Menelaus nodded. He saw. The coffins were self-contained, and therefore had circuits that could restore the water and flesh of a frozen man slumbering in them. It would take a biomechanic relatively little effort to turn the backup mass into something eatable, or generate potable fluid, provided no one cared that the Sleeping Beauty would die from slow cell degradation. Suspended animation was not perfect; tiny cellular corrections went on all the time, merely at the slowest possible rate.


  “How the pox did anyone expect to get the crew back home without all the coffins online?” Menelaus asked sharply.

  “Few of us kept our heads, and contemplated the long-term.”

  “What the hell happened, Blackie? What went wrong?”

  Del Azarchel did not answer the question, but said meditatively, “I stood watch next to you in the dark, with my pistol in hand.”

  That made Montrose laugh. “You sly dog! How the hell did you smuggle that aboard, Blackie?” Then he remembered how closely the mass had been calculated, how narrow the weight allowances for crew. “Naw. There is no way.”

  “There was no way. I smuggled nothing aboard. I made it in the machine shop. A magnetic linear accelerator, and two parallel slides made of frictionless synthetic. Powered by a heavy-duty suit cell.”

  “What kind of shot?”

  “Wire spool. Continuous feed, so the longer I held the trigger, the larger the cloud of fragments was. It was the crudest thing! But silent at my end, if I only used half an inch of copper wire at a time, there was not enough surface area for the magnetic to accelerate the shot above the sound barrier. But the shot would tumble when it entered the target.”

  “I can imagine! Bloody.”

  “But no chance of damaging the hull. No penetration.”

  “What kind of aim?”

  “Aim? The ship was dark three hours out of every watch. One used the lights-up to put all one’s gear in order, so that one could find everything by touch. But I stripped the cork off the bulkheads that surrounded the freezer axis, so that any crewman who pushed off the wall to sail toward me, I knew his vector from the noise of his foot, and I put of stream of wire fragments in his path. Correcting for Coriolis force, of course. When the lights came up again, I would see how I did.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  “I am here, am I not?”

  Montrose realized with a start that he was not there. The real Del Azarchel was not in the chamber. It was easy to forget that this was a model, a fake, a bodiless shadow.

  The ghost said, “So I stayed by you during the worst of it. Not for your sake. By that time, it had been so long, I had forgotten what you looked like, that ridiculous nose of yours, or what your terrible accent sounds like. Didn’t they teach you your own language on your schooling channel?”

  “No channel for me, Blackie. I had a private tutorial unit, on account of my ma thought I were a genius. Ferocious woman. I’ll tell about her sometime. So why did you stick by me?”

  “As I said, I had given you my word, and I was still one of Trajano’s men. Even after all these years. Even after…” The voice fell silent. Montrose looked over his shoulder. The pallid mask was still there, and the read-outs showed brain activity in the modeled brain, but the expression on the ice-pale face was filled with dignity and sorrow. It was a human expression.

  Del Azarchel spoke. “Even though he died during the Day of Kali. The piles of corpses did not rot in the streets, you know, because the neutron bombs had sterilized all the microbes. He looked as he did in life when I finally found him. How could I forget him? Even as I stood over you, I felt he was standing over me.”

  5. Augmentation Sequence

  Slowly, the number cloud ceased to swarm. The brainpath information and other internal and external code seemed normal. The streams of data flowed across the images of virtual cells like so many ripples in an endlessly complex pond, or like the dances of light in a sky filled with twinkling stars, but as if some god could compress the billions of years of stellar evolution into a few awed sighs of time.

  Everything was done save the final step.

  The final step was one he understood. Indeed, he knew it well. It was a mathematical representation of the core formulae of his Zurich computer run, heavily modified (of course) due to the radical differences in brain-cell layout between himself and Del Azarchel, as between any two humans.

  “You’ve stopped,” said Del Azarchel. “Why do you hesitate?”

  “I can turn you back into a Posthuman,” Montrose said slowly. “All I need to do is start the major augmentation sequence.”

  “To what effect?

  “It was just what you said before. I am trying to solve the scaling problem. The lower hemisphere of your virtual brain will swell up to twice its size.”

  “What will that do to my balance in my seat of emotions?”

  “Well, I reckon I don’t know. The human brain is basically a hierarchy, a man riding a horse riding a ’gator. The part of you that thinks like a horse is about to turn into a herd. The part in the back of your brain that has all the lizardy impulses—aggression, territory, whatnot—that is about to turn into an army of dinosaurs. I hope the other version of me knew what he was doing.”

  “And if he didn’t?” There was a hint of dry humor in the voice, and maybe a hint of cold courage.

  “If he didn’t, and I trigger the sequence, you’ll go mad as a hatter, and Del Azarchel—well, he’ll have to delete you.”

  “Delete? Call it murder. I detest when things are not named by their right names.”

  “I ain’t sure it is murder. Murder is the unlawful killing of the human being without justification and with malice aforethought. You ain’t properly alive. If this works, I don’t see how you’ll be human.”

  “If it works, I will be more than human, not less.”

  “You’re a copy. A pattern of electric impulses in a diamond-rod-logic container.”

  “I could say the same of you, except your container is three pounds of convoluted gray matter behind your eyes.”

  “How do I know you are self-aware?”

  A chuckle. The mask said archly, “I will make you a bargain, Cowhand. You prove to me that you are self-aware, using any method you wish, and, once I see how it is done, I will assay a similar proof back to you.”

  “But you cannot be human. You don’t eat, don’t mate, and don’t die.”

  “The electrical energy that runs me and the chemical energy that runs you both come from plants. Yours by way of lunch, I suppose, mine by way of petrol in some generator room here on campus. Both ultimately come from the sun. Merely the form differs. I can certainly die; you almost killed me just now when you tripped. Come! You are being sophomoric! Surely the nature of man is in his reason, not in whether he eats bread.”

  “Actually, I think your power is not from our sun. There are matter-antimatter colliders in orbit somewhere, and they beam power in maser form to ground stations.”

  “Aha! Then my power comes from the stars! In that case I am not human. You win the argument, Counselor.”

  “Pox! Now you are just being sarcastic!”

  “My ability to deride you therefore proves my human nature beyond doubt. Derideo ergo sum. I mock, therefore I am.”

  Montrose looked left and right. He was not sure where the door to this chamber was, because the doorframe blended into the library cloth walls.

  “You seem nervous.”

  “Nope. Just damn cold. I don’t think I should start the augmentation until Del Azarchel is here.”

  “I am here.”

  “I mean your meaty version.”

  “What need have I of him? His permission? I serve what is higher than myself, not lower.”

  “You would not be here if it weren’t for him. So if he’s your father, he wants to see you graduate. Besides, if something goes wrong, I’d rather it be his finger pulled the trigger. But if it all goes right … it will be a new era. Ma never let me open my gifts at Christmastime all by my lonesome, even if I got up an hour before them, at 4:30. Had to wait for my brothers. Shouldn’t we wait for Del Azarchel?”

  The blind-seeming eyes narrowed, the lids falling like pale, smooth windowshades over mathematically perfect spheres.

  “Menelaus, are you a friend to me? Are you worthy of my trust?”

  “Sure, Blackie! I mean, uh, I mean the real Blackie—he’s my friend.”

  “Did I not do everything he
did for you? Those memories are mine as well, those personality traits—everything.”

  “But those memories are just electrophonotic patterns in your brain.”

  “And his memories are just electrochemical patterns in his.”

  “Oh, come on. If I owed him twenty bucks, and then he copied himself into you, would I owe forty? If he made a hundred copies, would I owe two thousand?”

  “If I commit murder, and find out later that my first copy committed it, with the memories of the deed merely passed on to me, may I render up him to be hanged, while I go unpunished? The memories of the crime, the personality traits of the murderer, are still mine. Suppose he made a hundred copies, or two? Or should all who did the evil be rendered up for judgment?”

  “You’re asking me? I’d spare not a damn one of them. The evil men do, if it is copied over, must copy over the vengeance as well. Otherwise you’d just make a new copy to do your murdering for you, and let him dance at the end of the rope while you went dancing with his girl.”

  “By the same token, the good a man does, if copied over, must copy his reward.”

  “But you not are really the real Blackie for real. You are just built to think you are.”

  “Then the builders have not built in vain, but have been successful, for so I do indeed think. I have suffered for you. Do you owe me nothing?”

  “Suffered how? You cannot feel pain. You’re perfect.”

  “Not now. But I recall the pain, then, in the dark.”

  “When?”

  “Then! In the dark! When I stood between you and cannibalism, killing men I knew and loved. The long watches when I was weak with thirst and growing weaker, and I knew that there was a way to suck the moisture out of the cells of your frozen body—a body that, as far as any rational evidence could prove, contained nothing but a broken brain, broken because a fool in his pride shoved a needle into its delicate workings!”