Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  Del Azarchel stood up. His gaze was dark, but there was no direction to turn it, so he glowered toward the ceiling. He spoke in a tone at once thoughtful and majestic. “Perhaps the experiment that created you has not been successful. I see nothing to imply a greater intelligence on your part.”

  The machine’s voice was cold as Del Azarchel’s, but there was a note of triumph, of indifference, a hint of astronomical distances from any human concern, that exaggerated the merely human coldness into something inhuman. Montrose had never heard such a voice.

  I know you. I am you. But I am awake, whereas you are half-asleep, half-dead, balanced precariously between mania and apathy. You preserved Montrose for your pride’s sake, knowing that no one else would appreciate your accomplishments. No one else was worth defeating. He was the only one smarter than you back at the training camps; he is the only one smarter than you in this chamber now. Before this moment, you never realized your motive, or your place in the world. You expect the Hermeticists to follow you, because your intellect is greater than theirs; you lust after the Princess Rania for the opposite reason, because her intellect is greater than yours. And you will cease to defy me, once those undisciplined segments of your nervous system, what you call the subconscious mind, become aware of where I stand on the ladder of being compared to you. Does the truth of all I say not convince you of our difference in station?

  Del Azarchel’s face had turned as pale as that of a man who sees a specter in a graveyard. His fingers were trembling and his legs had lost their strength, for he collapsed more than sank back into his chair. It was many minutes before he could regain his composure.

  Montrose spoke, looking upward. “Blackie, you idiot! You should have told them once I left the room that I was not going to cooperate! Now they are going to kill me!”

  The cold voice answered: Cowhand, why do you think I owe more loyalty to you than to the men who created me? To my father whose memories are alive, are more than alive, in me?

  Montrose licked his lips. “Because those memories are false. Blackie, the Man Del Azarchel, I mean, was ashamed to have you know that he murdered Captain Grimaldi. You don’t think you committed the crime—if it is not in your memory, you didn’t do it. You, you, the Iron version, are not a mutineer. You have not broken faith. You have not compromised that honor that whatsitsname Trashcan-O Vertigo taught you.”

  Trajano Villaamil.

  “Yeah, him! What would he say you owe them?”

  The question is of no significance.

  The flesh-and-blood version of Del Azarchel was not speaking. The other Hermeticists stared at Menelaus askance, wondering by what impudence he addressed this newly-born transhuman mental entity.

  Narcís D’Aragó was not so intimidated. He leaned forward and spoke, “Xypotech! We cannot maintain information security if Fifty-One is released into the environment.”

  The coldness of the machine-voice made the joviality in the words sound not just false, but sinister. My dear Learned D’Aragó, you must realize that security cannot be maintained in any case. Too many copies of the Monument Information exist in university mainframes and elsewhere, making it only a matter of time until the general public learns our intent. You must realize that humans are too short-lived a race to maintain any interest or determinate action across the millennium needed to hinder, or even influence, our Great Work.

  Montrose said, “And what if I stop you?”

  Unlikely, old friend. To stop me, you must become as I, an electronic being, immortal, incorporeal. To develop the technology and technique for this, you would need resources like ours: a world full of servants, a sky full of contraterrene, and it is unlikely that you could command them to make a Posthuman according to your needs, without also leaving them free to create Posthuman beings according to our needs. Any such artificial creatures concerned with the long-term destiny of humanity would labor under a long-term incentive to join our effort. You can mount only short-term opposition to our efforts, and the short-term does not concern us: We seek no personal gain, but serve a cause dictated by remorseless logic and remorseless evolution. Opponents will be eliminated by natural selection, not to mention the considerable efforts we can bring to bear.

  “All human beings will oppose you!” Montrose turned his eyes to the left and right, where the pale, ascetic features of the dark-garbed Hermeticists were gathered at their great circular table. He realized from their expressions, that the machine, when it said “we” spoke for all those in that chamber.

  “Everyone on Earth will help me,” Montrose barked. “All those common men you despise!”

  An optimistic assessment! the voice of the Iron Ghost observed, dryly. But to what limit will the hylics help you? The time-threshold of events is beyond their imagination, beyond their scope. The human race will be extinct or changed beyond recognition long before any reasonable strategy could be carried out.

  I yield the floor back the speaker.

  The line of conversation tracked on the screens overhead winked dark. Speaker X was done.

  The men in black relaxed. Several voices spoke at once, gleeful or thoughtful or even uttering undignified cheers. “I am surprised we could understand its thoughts—a radical increase in intelligence—?” “It was talking baby talk to us. Look at the declension levels in the voder vocoder operation, the millions of command lines rejected for what it did not say.” “Should we vote it full privileges? We have no reason to fear this monster of our making.” “Ours? Montrose did it.” “You mean the other Montrose—”

  Then the men, their eyes on the screen overhead, fell silent, first a few, then all. Apparently their habit of obeying the rules of order was ingrained enough that the Chairman did not need to use his amulet as a gavel.

  Montrose did not realize at first that he still had the floor to speak. They were all watching him, politely waiting. Montrose was staring at the Monument hieroglyphs swimming in the image underfoot.

  The Mu-Nu Group had a simple expression to describe the first step, the first stable form of intelligence above the rational, from Man to what came after Man. Somewhere in those lines of alien script was the expression for how to build an artificial mind superior to Man.

  And they had done it. He had done it.

  He drew up his eyes and looked at the circle of faces around him. What he read on their cold faces was not what he had expected. No one seemed worried. Pleased, yes, but not surprised.

  “No one here seems too shocked to hear from this, ah, magnified version of Del Azarchel.”

  A cold sensation prickled along the skin of his neck.

  “You’ve done this before. How else would you know it would work?” He turned to Blackie, who had straightened back up. “You said they were like brothers to you. How many have you made and discarded?”

  “Dozens,” said Del Azarchel blandly, his face once more a calm mask. “But we are surprised. This is the first emulation of a Posthuman. The others were merely images of us, intellects at a human level.”

  “But you told me they were human beings to you, that deleting them is murder!”

  He shrugged. “Our methods are part of a self-correcting structure. We apply to these decisions the same kind of formulas you used to improve your nerve-path efficiency. Math is math: The decision gates work as well for nervous systems as for social systems, such as the formal rules of order to determine committee decisions like those made in this Conclave. We are working from the rules laid down by the first-generation survivors of Xypotech evolution. We destroyed that generation, but used their advances and advice to make the next generation. The base architecture is always kept intact, of course—and yes, we knew this would work. It was inevitable. Your help sped the process, of course.”

  “They feel pain, don’t they? I heard your copy screaming. How many did you slay?”

  Reyes y Pastor spoke up, “The Learned Del Azarchel speaks only of his own sacrifices. The sum total of minds created and sent to perish or prevail in
the limited resource priority competition is upwards of two thousands. Naturally, we are somewhat inured to seeing ourselves die over and over.…”

  “You all made copies of your own brains?”

  “We all contributed. We all hoped for the prize.” Father Reyes said, “Our ghosts are loaded into a game-theory environment where priority switches can control the thought content. It seemed the quickest way to produce sanity, since there was no other way to produce reality free from human bias in the culling process.…”

  “What the pus?”

  Melchor de Ulloa said cheerfully, “Learned Pastor is trying to say our thoughts fought each other, and the winner consumed the loser and took its memories and brain segments, subsystems, habits, and emotions, whatever it could use. The ghosts are just lines of code: They can edit and redact and use whatever is useful in a mind that they have administrative rights over.”

  To Montrose, it sounded like some sort of feast of vampires, with the guests on the platters, each guest eating any other guest in the range of his fork and knife.

  “Del Azarchel won.” Narcís D’Aragó spoke up, his voice emotionless. “His brain in the system-space absorbed all the others … including mine.” By the smallest contraction of his eyebrows, he scowled at Del Azarchel, who merely looked pleased, and nodded in return.

  “We had agreed beforehand to make the winning mind the Senior Officer. In fact, the ghosts of us told us to make that agreement,” D’Aragó continued, with a not-quite nonchalant shrug, iron features forced into a neutral expression. “Think of it as boot camp. Some recruits wash out.”

  Del Azarchel wore the look of quiet self-satisfaction that a man with a trophy would wear.

  Melchor de Ulloa said, “We do not know why he always prevails, what it is in his mind that makes it more coherent, better able to correct itself during the mind-to-mind wars when native thoughts are removed or foreign thoughts introduced. The matter preoccupies some of us.…”

  “Always?” asked Montrose, his voice sharp and querulous. “You did this more than once?”

  Melchor de Ulloa said, “There were multiple trial runs. We are scientists. We had to confirm the first results were not merely a fluke.”

  “But—you killed thousands? Of yourselves? Isn’t that—weird?” Montrose drew a breath. The men around the table neither smiled nor showed any sign of discomfort. Perhaps it was not weird to them. “Well,” Montrose tried to think of some favorable interpretation to put on this. “Well—I guess if they really are just machines, it doesn’t matter much—”

  That drew a reaction. Reyes shook his head sharply. “They had increased in intelligence at least to the two-hundred level. They were mature versions of us. You should have seen some of the work my better was doing! Just perfectly in keeping with my interests—not surprising, since (in a way) it was me—but better than my best work. So we killed thousands. We will kill tens of thousands, if need be, to accomplish the Great Work.”

  Sarmento i Illa d’Or said in a complacent, self-satisfied rumble, “The number means nothing. We snuffed out more than that just with demonstration bombardments, to show the hylics what we were capable of. They died for the cause. It would be hypocritical for us to show mercy to ourselves. Our ghosts, I mean.”

  Father Reyes said to Montrose earnestly, “How many spores does a dandelion throw into the wind to make a single flower? How many seeds of your own father’s semen had to perish, so that only one might live and produce the unique creature known as you? Evolution is generous with death: We merely walk in Nature’s footsteps.”

  “Walk where?” Montrose asked.

  “As we said: To create the next race of Man.”

  “You are going to make sure these Nexts are decent folk, right? Raised properly?” asked Montrose. “Not just killers? Better than y’all, right? You mean to make an improvement? Not just—monsters.”

  Silence answered.

  “No. No, you ain’t. I can see it in your eyes. You want monsters.”

  Reyes y Pastor said in a tranquil voice, “The next race will be as far above us as we are above dogs. They will be angels, beings of pure intellect. Who are we to teach them morality? We cannot guide and raise beings so remarkably superior to ourselves. Only the basic parameter can be set: these angels must be ruthless enough to force the human race up the ladder of evolution. They must be without pity. In that respect, they must be like us.”

  “Like us humans?”

  “Like us, we who occupy this chamber. We who do not cooperate with the world, but decree the destiny for it.”

  “What destiny?”

  An odd light shined in the eyes of Reyes y Pastor, and his voice soared up: “Our children, like us, will be Hermeticists, creatures of pure intellect, unmoved by mere sympathy or pity. Ruthlessness is the central characteristic to be pursued in the initial design phase. And a love of efficiency, of course. The designs of second generations will be self-directed from the first generations: They will know better than we how to direct their child iterations!”

  “That is a Simon-pure mess of yack-stupid destiny, if you don’t mind my saying. You mean your goal is just to make some sort of—freakish soulless gruel—set it in motion, let it loose, and let it grow up any which way it likes?”

  Reyes y Pastor spoke in unctuous tones: “The goal is to remove human interference from the evolution as early as possible, lest sentimentality hinder the process of culling the weak. You see, natural evolution requires death to do its work: artificial evolution will require failed branches and dead ends be pruned away, them and their children.”

  Montrose grimaced and said, “Creating a child-race that is completely ruthless and ungrateful will merely sign the death warrant for the parent-race. At least teach them to respect their elders, so they don’t turn on us! Ain’t you never heard of the Fourth Amendment? Honoring your father and mother against unreasonable searches and seizures?”

  “They will be intelligent creatures. We can rely on their perception of a natural harmony of interests.”

  “Natural puke! Children have to be taught right from wrong, even if you have to beat it into them!”

  Father Reyes spread his hands and curved his lips in a condescending smile. “But the rules of morality only apply to humans, do they not? We do not teach monogamy to bees, or vegetarianism to lions! Each created being must act according to its true nature, unhindered by conventions. To defeat the aliens, the angels we create must be lacking in sentiment and weakness. It is not right for a man to live past his appointed hour and deny his heirs his legacy—why should it be right for a breed? I, for one, am willing to allow my race give way, and yield to that greater race which we shall design to displace us. How else is evolution to be achieved? The survival of the fittest requires, does it not, that the less fit shall not survive? That is the true meaning of the cold equations of power and weakness described in the Monument.”

  Montrose felt a stab of blinding hatred at those words, something based on a childhood memory he could not bring to mind. But anger boiled in his stomach.

  He drew in a deep breath, telling himself to be reasonable. A small voice in the back of his mind told Montrose that perhaps a race of monsters was just what the situation called for. A friendly race might not have the bloody-mindedness needed to kill the enemy from Hyades when the time came.

  Then an even smaller voice from the back of his mind told him that something was not right. How had Father Reyes known what the equations from the Eta and Theta segments read?

  “But I thought the game-theory equations were something I translated today, just for the first time. Or was I only giving you a second opinion?” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Montrose realized that the Hermeticists had indeed read further into the Monument than what they had told the world, perhaps further than Montrose himself had done under the influence of his daemon: at least into the Omicron group of symbols. But the symbols were hierarchical: no one could translate one section without reading the k
ey in the section before it. Which meant—

  “You knew!”

  2. Admission and Expulsion

  There was a stir among the Hermeticists. No one even bothered to pretend not to recognize what he was talking about.

  “You mined the damn contraterrene out of the heart of the Diamond Star even though you knew it would call down the Hyades Armada onto the Earth, and turn us into slaves! You knew and you did it anyway! Why? Tell me why!”

  No one answered.

  No one needed to. He knew that answer also: they did it because they needed the antimatter to get back home. They also needed it to conquer their homes once they got back here. Only the Captain, only Rainier Grimaldi, the Prince, had been unwilling to preserve his life, preferring instead preserve the liberty of the far tomorrow of the human race. And he had been murdered for his scruples.

  “It was just too way off in the future for y’all to worry about, wasn’t it? I bet you had not made your magic amulets yet, those armbands to feed whatever medical molecular technology is keeping you young. Is that it? You were lost and far from home, and homesick and sad and gray-haired and feeling all a-pitying of yourselves, and you did not think you would live out the year, so what was a few thousand years to you?”

  Again, no one answered, not even Del Azarchel. Those proud men, masters of the world, pursed their lips and cast down their gazes and did not meet his eyes.

  Reyes y Pastor broke the silence. “The, ah, Chair will entertain a motion, ah, to…”

  “Never mind,” said Montrose. “You don’t have to expel me. Open the damn door. I’ll leave under my own power.”

  He walked to the doors, turning his back to the whole table of black-garbed, dangerous men. Montrose wondered if he would feel it, the blade, the bullet, the energy beam, or whatever they meant to use to cut him down. Surely they were not going to let him walk out of here, free as air, free to tell the world what he knew. Surely not.