Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

  “So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.

  “The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively.

  “What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked.

  “No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions—bogons, as we call them.”

  “The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault,” Osa said, and any idiot could guess he was quoting some old Vale aphorism.

  “Yes,” Sammann said, “and it works so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don’t know it’s there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day. However, the recent events, and the stresses posed by the Antiswarm, appear to have introduced the low-level bug that I spoke of.”

  “So the practical consequence for us,” Lio said, “is that—?”

  “Our cells on the ground may be having difficulty distinguishing between legitimate messages and bogons. And some of the messages that flash up on our screens may be bogons as well.”

  “And this is all because a few bits got flipped in a syndev somewhere,” Jesry said.

  “It’s slightly more complicated than you make it sound,” Sammann retorted.

  “But what Jesry’s driving at,” I said, “is that this ambiguity is ultimately caused by some number of logic gates or memory cells, somewhere, being in a state that is wrong, or at least ambiguous.”

  “I guess you could put it that way,” Sammann said, and I could tell he was shrugging even if I couldn’t see it. “But it’ll all get sorted soon, and then we’ll stop receiving goofy messages.”

  “No we won’t,” said Fraa Gratho.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Lio.

  “Behold,” said Fraa Gratho, and extended his arm. Following the gesture, we found Fraa Jad at work on the wireless box that was our only link to the ground. He was stabbing it with a screwdriver again and again. From time to time a piece of shrapnel would float away from it, and he would fastidiously pluck it out of space with a skelehand so that it would not wander out from beneath the Cold Dark Mirror and return a radar echo.

  When he was good and finished, he drifted back to the meeting and jacked himself in. Lio remained calm, and waited for him to speak.

  Jad said, “The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters.”

  Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorceror. That clarified things a little. We were silent for a while. We knew there was no point in requesting clarification. Fraa Jad had put it as clearly as he knew how. I saw Jesry looking my way in his speely display. This is how the Incanters do it; he’s doing it now.

  Sammann finally broke the silence. “It is most odd,” he said, sounding strangely moved, “but I have been working up my nerve to do the same thing.”

  “What? Destroy the transmitter?” Lio asked.

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, I dreamed a few hours ago I had done it. I felt good about it. When I woke up, I was surprised to find it intact.”

  “Why would you wish to destroy it?” Arsibalt asked.

  “I’ve been observing its habits. Once every orbit, it comes into line of sight with a facility on the ground and establishes a link. Then it empties its buffer—clears its queue.” He went on to translate these Ita terms into Orth. The queue was like a stack of leaves with messages written on them, which were transmitted down to Arbre whenever possible. They were sent down in the same order as they stood in the queue, like customers waiting in line at a store.

  “So these things in the queue are, for example, the text messages I’ve been writing back to my support cell on the ground?” I asked.

  “How many have you written?” he asked me.

  “Maybe five.”

  “Lio?”

  “More like ten.”

  “Osa?” Sammann polled everyone. None had written more than a few messages. “The number of items in the queue at this time,” he announced, “is over fourteen hundred.”

  “What are they?” Arsibalt asked. “Can you read them?”

  “No. They are all encrypted, and no one saw fit to give me the key. Most are quite small. Probably text messages, biomedical data, and associated bogons. But some of them are thousands of times larger. Since I am the only one here with knowledge of such things, I’ll tell you what would be obvious to an Ita, which is that the large items are most likely recorded sound and video files.”

  I could think of any number of explanations for this but Arsibalt jumped directly to the most dramatic and, I had to admit, probably correct one: “Surveillance!”

  Sammann made no objection. “I have been watching the behavior of the queue during my idle moments, of which I have many. The big files behave in certain remarkable ways. For one thing, they get priority over the little ones. The system advances them to the foremost position in the queue as soon as they are created. For another, the creation of these files seems to coincide with beginnings and ends of conversations. As an example, I saw Erasmas having a private conversation with Jesry a while ago, between about 1015 and 1030 hours. The next time Jesry connected himself to the reticule, which was only about fifteen minutes ago, a large file sprang into existence in the queue, and was promptly moved to the top. Time of creation, 1017. Last modified, 1030.”

  “Is this occurring with all of our conversations?” Lio asked. And the tone of his voice told me—as if I ever could have doubted it—that all of this was as new to him as it was to me.

  “No. Only some.”

  “I propose an experiment,” Jesry said. “Sammann, does it still work?”

  “Oh yes. Fraa Jad destroyed only the transmitter. The syndev still functions as if nothing had changed.”

  “Are you monitoring the queue now?”

  “Of course.”

  Jesry disconnected, and motioned for me to do the same. We formed a private connection. Jesry launched into a very old, well-worn dialog that we’d had to memorize as fids: a verbal proof that the square root of two was an irrational number. I did my best to hold up my end of it. When we were finished, we reconnected to the reticule and waited a few seconds. “Nothing,” Sammann said.

  Again we disconnected and formed a two-person link.

  “Do you remember back at Edhar,” I began, “when we and the other Incanters would sit around after dinner making Everything Killers out of cornstalks and shoelaces?”

  “Of course,” Jesry said, “those were really good Everything Killers because they could assassinate filthy Panjandrums like no one’s business.”

  “That’ll come in handy when we betray Arbre to the Pedestal,” I pointed out.

  And so on in that vein for a couple of minutes. Then we reconnected to the reticule. “There’s a new file,” Sammann announced, “at the head of the queue.”

  “Okay,” I announced, “so the Panjandrums seem to be really keen on knowing if we talk about certain things like the Everything Killers.”

  “Ha!” Sammann exclaimed. “A new file has just been opened, and it is growing larger the lo
nger…I…keep…talking.”

  The topic of the Everything Killers had not yet been broached to the group at large, and so some people had a lot of questions, which Lio fielded. Meanwhile, Jesry and I continued the experiment we had begun, breaking and re-establishing contact with the reticule a couple of dozen times over the course of the following half-hour. Every time we broke away, we’d try a few more words, just to see which topics triggered the automatic recording system. This was a haphazard business, but we were able to discover several more trigger words, including attack, neutron, mass murder, insane, dishonor, unconscionable, refuse, and mutiny.

  Every time we reconnected, we heard more ideas for possible trigger words, since the conversation was quite naturally evolving in such a way that all the words listed above, and many more, were frequently put to use. Things were becoming extremely emotional, and it was good in a way that Jesry and I were able to jack in and out of it and treat its contents as an object of theorical study. But after a while it reached a point where we reckoned we had better join and stay joined.

  Arsibalt had just asked a rather probing question of the Valers: where did their ultimate allegiance lie?

  Fraa Osa was answering: “To my fraas and suurs of the Ringing Vale I have a loyalty that can never be dissolved precisely because it is no rational thing but a bond like that of family. And I will not waste oxygen by discussing all of the nesting and overlapping loyalty groups to which I belong: this cell, the Mathic world, the Convox, the people of Arbre, and the community, extending even beyond the limits of this cosmos, that unites us with the likes of Jules Verne Durand.”

  “Say zhoost,” answered the Laterran, which we’d figured out was his way of expressing approval.

  “To untangle all acting loyalties and obligations is not possible in the thick of an Emergence, and so one falls back on simple responses that arise from one’s training.”

  Jules had not yet been exposed to this concept and so Osa gave him a brief tutorial on Emergence-ology, using as an example the decision tree that a swordfighter must traverse in order to make the correct move during a duel. It was obvious that such a thing was far too complex to be evaluated in a rational way during a rapid exchange of cuts and thrusts, and so it must be the case that sword-fighters who survived more than one or two such encounters must be doing Something Different. The avout of the Ringing Vale had made the study and cultivation of that Something Different their sole occupation. Jules Verne Durand took the point readily. “The analogy works as well with complex board games. We have some on Laterre, similar to yours here in that the tree of possible moves and counter-moves rapidly becomes far too vast for the brain to sort through all possibilities. Ordinators—what you’d call syntactic devices—can play the game in this style, but successful human players appear to use some fundamentally different approach that relies on seeing the whole board and detecting certain patterns and applying certain rules of thumb.”

  “The Teglon,” put in Fraa Jad. And he did not need to elaborate on this. We’d all seen the feat he had accomplished at Elkhazg, and it was obvious to all of us that it could not have been done by trial and error. Nor by building outwards from a single starting place. He’d had to grasp the whole pattern at once.

  “This is dangerous,” Jesry said flatly. “It leads to saying that we may abandon the Rake and behave like a bunch of Enthusiasts, and everything will work out just fine because we have achieved holistic oneness with the polycosm.”

  “What you say is indeed a problem,” said Jules, “but no one here would dare argue that it is possible to win a swordfight or solve the Teglon by behaving so self-indulgently.”

  “Jesry is making a straw man argument,” Arsibalt said. “He’s raising a possible future issue. If we agree to proceed along these lines, and reach a point, somewhere down the line, where a difficult decision needs to be made, what grounds will we have for evaluating possible decisions, if we’ve already thrown rational analysis to the wind?”

  “The ability to decide correctly at such moments must be cultivated over many years of disciplined practice and contemplation,” said Fraa Osa. “No one would argue that a novice could solve the Teglon simply by trusting his feelings. Fraa Jad developed the ability to do it over many decades.”

  “Centuries,” I corrected him, since I saw no benefit, now, in being coy about this. I heard a couple of surprised exclamations over the reticule, but no one said anything for or against the proposition.

  Not even Fraa Jad. He did say this: “Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”

  “Fine,” Jesry said, “but where does it get us? What are we going to do?”

  “I think it has already gotten us somewhere,” I said. “When you and I re-joined this dialog a few minutes ago, passions were inflamed and people were still trying to frame the decision in terms of allegiances and loyalties. Fraa Osa has shown that any such approach will fail because we all belong to multiple groups with conflicting loyalties. This made the conversation less emotional. We’ve also developed an argument that it’s not possible to work out all the moves in advance. But as you yourself pointed out, going on naïve emotion is bound to fail.”

  “So we must develop the same kind of decision-making ability that Fraa Jad employs when he solves the Teglon,” said Jesry, “but that requires time and knowledge. We don’t have time and we don’t have much knowledge.”

  “We have two more days,” said Lio.

  “And there is much knowledge that we can infer,” said Arsibalt.

  “Such as?” Jesry asked in a skeptical tone.

  “That Everything Killers might be planted in this equipment. That our purpose might be to deliver them to the Daban Urnud,” Arsibalt said.

  “Most of this equipment isn’t going to make it to the Daban Urnud,” Lio pointed out. He added, perfectly deadpan, “Those of you who’ve reviewed the Terminal Rendezvous Maneuver Plan will know as much.”

  “Just us, and our suits,” Jesry said. “That’s all that will make it to the ship—if we’re lucky. And they—the ones who planned this—can’t predict the fate of our suits. What if we get captured by the Pedestal? They might ditch our suits in space, or dismantle them.”

  “Your point is becoming clear,” said Fraa Osa, “but it is important that you make it.”

  “Fine. We are the weapons. The Everything Killers have been planted inside our bodies. We all know how it was done.”

  “The giant pills,” said Jules.

  “Exactly: the core temperature transponders that we swallowed before takeoff,” Jesry said. “Anyone pass theirs yet?”

  “Come to think of it, no,” said Arsibalt. “It seems to have taken up residence in my gut.”

  “There you have it,” said Jesry. “Until those things are surgically removed, we are all living, breathing nuclear weapons.”

  “All,” said Suur Vay, “except for Fraa Jad, and Jules Verne Durand.”

  This left all of us nonplussed, so she explained, “I believe you will find their core temperature transponders rattling around loose, somewhere inside their space suits.”

  “I threw mine up,” explained Jules.

  “I declined to swallow mine,” said Jad.

  “And as the cell physician, you knew this, Suur Vay, because their core temp readings have been obviously wrong?” asked Lio.

  “Yes. And the incorrect readings caused their suits to respond in inappropriate ways, which is why both of them required medical attention following the launch.”

  “Why didn’t you swallow your pill, Fraa Jad?” asked Arsibalt. “Did you know what it was?”

  “I judged it wiser not to,” was all that Fraa Jad was willing to supply in
the way of an answer.

  “This idea—that we’ve all been turned into nuclear weapons—is an amazing theory,” I said, “but I simply don’t believe that Ala would ever do such a thing.”

  “I’m guessing she didn’t know,” Lio said. “This must have been added onto the plan without her knowledge.”

  Fraa Osa said, “If I were the strategist in charge, I would go to Ala and say ‘please assemble the team you deem most capable of getting aboard the Daban Urnud.’ And her answer would come back: ‘I will do it by making friends with those among the Geometers who are opposed to the Pedestal; they’ll take our people in and offer them assistance.’”

  “That is monstrous,” I said.

  “Monstrous: probably another trigger word,” Jesry mused. I wanted to slug him. But he was making an excellent point.

  Two days later we stripped off our white coveralls, then drew down the retractable shields to conceal the lights and displays on our suit-fronts. We were all matte black now. Like mountaineers, we roped ourselves together with a braided line that doubled as safety rope and communications wire. Jad, Jesry, and I had spent much of the last shift working with the sextant and making calculations. These culminated with Fraa Jad hanging off the underside of the nuke with a knife in one hand, sighting down the length of the tether as if it were a gun barrel, watching the constellations wheel behind it. At the instant when a particular star came into alignment with the tether, he slashed through it with a knife. The tether and the counterweight at its end flew off into space—and so did we, picking up a final momentum adjustment that would, we hoped, synch our orbit with that of the Daban Urnud.

  Half an hour later, we all braced our feet against the underside of the Mirror and, at a signal from Lio, pushed it away—or jumped off, depending on your frame of reference. The Mirror glided out of the way to give us our first direct look at the Daban Urnud. It was so close to us, now, that we could hardly see anything: just a single triangular facet of the icosahedron, filling most of our visual field.