Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  Connelin interrupted, “There is no need to examine the physical machine, since Stability Sphere data contains a pattern of all the material objects in the galaxy. One of the No-men has reverse-engineered the circuit by intuitive analysis. Someone tell Empress Reesha to finish her sentence as soon as we get Gosseyn out of this death trap.”

  The calm, cool voice of the Games Machine, or one of them, came on: “Mr. Gosseyn, when your opponent establishes an energy connection with you, he must place part of his shadow-substance into phase with your frame of reference. We can attempt to synchronize with the incoming beam, and backtrack through his special long-range distorter system, and therefore reach to his setup in the Shadow Galaxy. We have no other way to reach the Primordial starship he used to reach the Shadow Galaxy, the so-called Crypt of the Sleeping God.”

  “Do I need to wait till he opens fire?” asked Gosseyn.

  “No,” replied the Machine. “Any energy path can serve.”

  The shadow-figure flicked a radio-beam into Gosseyn’s helmet. “So Gilbert Gosseyn comes to his futile end, having never discovered his origin or his purpose….”

  But Gosseyn was already gone.

  34

  To think is to abstract.

  Gosseyn opened his eyes. He was lying supine. About four inches before his eyes he saw the transparent metal sections of the inner lid of the Crypt of the Sleeping God of Gorgzid. Gosseyn’s extra brain could sense, all around him, the complex energies of the thought-circuits of the Observer.

  The pressure of the thousands of Games Machines, the surge of a galaxy-wide volume of information, was no longer in him. The voices of the staff of four institutions of specialized scientific thought, No-men, Null-A’s, Nexialists, and Callidetics, were no longer in him. He was cut off.

  He raised his fingers to fumble at the inside of the transparent coffin-lid, searching for a release.

  Silently in his brain appeared the command: Wait. If you open the lid, I will be out of contact.

  Gosseyn said, “The last time I was in this crypt, I had to be asleep for your thought-waves to reach me.”

  You have developed since that time. The evolution of life is a process of channeling the overwhelming complexity of the signals surrounding an organism into meaningful sense-categories; the evolution of the mind is the process of overcoming those categorical limits. Higher forms can comprehend and react to more complete mental pictures of the environment without being overwhelmed. Because of your development, your nervous system is more integrated, and the confusion of your conscious mind no longer drowns out the messages to which your midbrain and hindbrain are sensitive.

  Gosseyn allowed himself a moment of curiosity: “Why can you only attune thought-messages to such buried nerve paths? If you made a similarity connection with the cortex, anyone would hear you, awake or asleep.”

  Your nervous system resembles that of your remote ancestors only in the older, less flexible, brain sections. The primate cortex mutated over the eons, and no longer matches my specific compatibility. My circuits were designed to mesh with the Primordial Humans, which your modern subspecies only partly resembles.

  Gosseyn remembered seeing archeological evidence that Cro-Magnon and other primitive forms of man actually had the same brain-mass as Homo sapiens, merely more tightly knit, with a preponderance of brain matter in the rear of the skull. Oddly, that was where Gosseyn’s extra brain resided. The assumption that those forms were simpler merely because they were older was one science could not definitively confirm.

  But no matter. “You told me the original Chessplayer, the original gods, died long ago. Are you still receiving orders from him?”

  I am not able to answer that question.

  “Interesting that you phrase it that way.”

  It is within my allowed scope of discretion to phrase my sentences in any way that does not contradict a specific order or directive.

  “Secoh claims you deceived me about several important matters. He became the Follower under your orders and direction, not by accident, as you told me. Why did you lie?”

  I am not able to answer that question.

  Gosseyn was momentarily silent, for a sense of awe came upon him. This entity, this machine, was surely the oldest self-aware being in existence. It survived the two-hundred-million-year-ago migration from the Shadow Galaxy, nursing the sole wounded survivor of the trip while the dust and soil of Gorgzid settled upon it, burying it. And still it waited, until a later generation of semicivilized peoples, mining deep, found the hull and thought it was the dome of a temple….

  Except that if Patricia had told the truth, none of that happened by accident. And there was at least one being, still alive, as old as this unthinkably ancient machine. Someone who had maneuvered to preserve this machine through all the passing centuries intact. Why?

  “You told me that Lavoisseur landed on a different ship, not this one. And yet now that the Sleeping God is dead, Lavoisseur is the only survivor of the Migration, and you conspired to bring him into this crypt, but he was wary of you….”

  Allow me now to correct that falsehood: I attempted to bring him into my medical unit so that I might continue repairs on him. He was also changed by the Shadow Effect, and his personality and actions became unpredictable. He was wary of me because he did not wish to resume his former state of mind.

  Gosseyn’s attention was arrested by the word “unpredictable.” He had been assuming that the action of his secondary brain naturally blocked the prediction power. Apparently, it was not natural. The Primordials, a whole race of men with highly evolved double brains, had not had that particular side effect. Only him.

  Could it be a specific application of some attunement to the shadow itself? The Shadow Effect could block prediction by disturbing the future-to-past identity connections used by the Yalertans.

  Gosseyn imagined that the Primordials, like the Yalertans, had depended heavily on the prediction power to maintain their social order, deter crimes before they occurred, prevent frauds, and so on. Surely they, and the machine they built, would react defensively to anyone suddenly developing the ability to blind them.

  “You didn’t force him?”

  My directives sharply limit when I may use force on a patient under my care. Patients may refuse treatment. I have more latitude when circumstances require I defend them.

  “Secoh said you wanted me to kill the Sleeping God because you were weary of the burden of guarding and sustaining him.”

  It is inaccurate to attribute to me motives typical of biological organisms. I do not grow weary. Recall that I asked you to kill Secoh, not to incapacitate him. When I released my patient to your care, I had not anticipated that you would provoke Secoh into destroying my patient. I would not have been permitted to release my patient into your care had I known your intention.

  “Why didn’t you stop me? You said you can act to protect your patients. No, let me ask a more important question: Why did you release your patient at all?”

  I am not allowed to answer that question. My orders and directives are organized in a flexible non-Aristotelian logic hierarchy, allowing me to avoid positive and absolute judgments, and to assess facts with multiple-valued inductive logic rather than simple binary logic. Hence authorities that I am bound to obey can restrict areas where I would otherwise have discretion.

  “You were told not to interfere with me? Even when I endangered one of your patients, you could not act to stop me.”

  It was a general order, and it was ambiguous enough to allow me to interpret it to cover you.

  “Who gave the order?”

  You did.

  An interesting response. Gosseyn asked the question.

  “Who am I?”

  You are Ptath, the second of my original four charges.

  “And why did I order you not to interfere with me?”

  As previously stated: You grew wary of my attempts to trick you into reentering the medical coffin, because you did not wish t
o be repaired….

  “That wasn’t me. That was Lavoisseur.”

  I am required at this point to ask you for clarification of that last statement. Am I allowed to interpret this as speculation on your part, which is to say, you have uttered the declarative statement expressing an opinion about your identity, or am I required to interpret that statement as an order, which is to say, you have uttered an imperative command to regard orders coming from Ptath, and directives concerning him, not to apply to you while you remain in your present condition?

  Gosseyn was silent a moment, thinking through the ramifications of that statement. Very interesting. He said slowly, “If I were to ask you to use your discretion to interpret my last comment, how would you interpret it?”

  Generally, I seek to minimize possible conflicts of priority within my hierarchy of directives.

  “You would follow the path of least resistance?”

  That’s one way of putting it.

  “What would happen if I asked you to interpret the comment as a command?”

  I would expel you from the medical coffin, and lower your priority in my hierarchy of directives, and stand by for further orders from an authority.

  “What would happen if I asked you to interpret the comment as my opinion?”

  I would log the opinion in my medical file under patient’s communication, prepare my internal systems for surgery, and stand by for orders from you.

  “You said you interpreted a previous order to include me. You used your discretion because you wanted me covered by that order. Why?”

  As previously stated: To minimize possible conflicts of priority within my hierarchy of directives. In this case, interpreting orders concerning Ptath to apply to you opens certain possibilities of satisfying a certain high-priority directive that would otherwise be closed.

  Gosseyn started laughing.

  “Observer! I order you to use any means necessary to restore me, Ptath, in any of my versions to full health and sanity. You may disregard any protest or countermanding orders I may have given in the past or shall give in the immediate future. Any orders I gave you telling you not to answer questions, or to hide information, or to lie, you may disregard. Who is the Chessplayer?”

  Inxelendra. The person who arranged to have a Ptath body brought here, and ordered me to cure his affliction, so that a Ptath variant memory chain developed a separation from the memory chain of his prior continuity, was Inxelendra Gorgzor-Reesha, Bride of Gorgzor, the third of my four passengers. She is the widow of the patient you killed.

  She has also, from time to time, arranged other circumstances, such as the growth of an Eldred Crang body from his cell samples, or the imprint of your memories onto the Ashargin heir, or the military defeat of the Greatest Empire, and so on.

  A suffocating, powerful force-field suddenly paralyzed Gosseyn, holding him immobile. His heart was suspended in its beating; his lungs could not move. He could not blink. He was alive, aware, but utterly motionless down to the cellular level. Gosseyn attempted to grapple with the energies surrounding him, but his extra brain did not respond.

  Through the mental link, he shouted, “Stop! Release me!”

  Your previous order allows me to disregard your current order. The repair operation requires several steps. This is the first. Please remain calm.

  35

  Memory is identity.

  Gosseyn was aware of energies probing his nervous system, making adjustments. At one point, his eyesight dimmed and blurred, as something was being done to the visual centers of his brain; at another point, his eyesight suddenly sharpened, his vision clearer and more precise than before. It was not until a moment later that Gosseyn realized, with a shock, that his point of view was not dimmed by the transparent lid of the medical coffin but was hovering a few inches above it.

  The Crypt of the Sleeping God was as Gosseyn remembered it: The far wall curved into the chamber. From each corner arched a columned pylon. The four curved pilasters ended on a narrow buttress about twenty feet out from where the wall should have been. It could have been the head of a coffin: Gosseyn could see his own features beneath the surface, which was made in a set of overlapping, sliding plates. The inner wall was translucent and glowed with an all-pervading light. Steps, also made of sliding plates, led from the bottom to the top of the buttress.

  Previously, the chamber had also contained religious paraphernalia: ancient scrolls and stone tablets, jeweled knives and ornamental bells and cylinders of wood inscribed with prayers. All that was gone. Instead, a system of cables led to and from glass cabinets filled with electron and nuclear tubes, and yellow energy-regulators dotted the floor. Cables led from this machinery to the atomic pile near the center of the ship, and other cables led to the steps made of sliding plates, some of which were slid open to reveal the control machinery beneath. Gosseyn recognized an astrogation table, a pilot’s yoke, Vernier instruments for taking X-ray sightings on distant quasar sources. The Crypt had been restored to operation. The astrogation table was dark with clouded images: The ship was near a dead star, and a world covered with the blackened debris of the Shadow Effect was below. Long-range telescopic images were being automatically recorded of empty buildings, billions of years old, their sides streaked with the degenerate dark matter of exposure to the effect. Gosseyn was unpleasantly reminded of Crang’s corpse. Other telescopic vision-plates were tuned to views of dull red dwarf stars, neutron stars, brown giants, all the dismal astronomical bodies of the Shadow Galaxy.

  Gosseyn’s point of view swept through the ship. On another deck, an immense library of distorter cells, thousands of them, was shining with activity, as millions or tens of millions of energy connections were being maintained with distant points in space-time. But there was no human crew aboard.

  Of course. The ship had been designed to be piloted by the Observer. The astrogation equipment Gosseyn saw was probably not for a pilot but for a passenger. The passenger could no doubt act as copilot when the Observer grew uncooperative: Gosseyn traced several of the control cables to where they had been spliced into the machinery under the deck, leading to the atomic pile, the distorter-core, and the antigravity-maneuvering plates.

  “You’ve given me Enro’s power of seeing at a distance.”

  You would require years of practice to achieve his range and flexibility, which extends for several light-years and covers all bands of the electromagnetic-gravitic spectrum. With the Stability Sphere system to amplify him, his range includes everything within the local cluster of galaxies. This was merely a side effect of the nerve-gland stimulation I have begun in preparation for the forced growth of your third brain.

  “Third—what do you mean, third brain?”

  An extra area of brain tissue, not connected to your current extra brain, is needed for you to be able to overcome the shadow-defense energy-attack combination which would otherwise kill you.

  I have reorganized your medulla oblongata to be more efficient, so that half the current nerve cells can perform its current function; the other half will be set aside and mechanically educated to the new function as a tertiary brain.

  “Is this what you did to Secoh? Is that why the Follower had the ability to manipulate space-time around him while in his shadow-form?”

  Correct. The Follower’s technique deceives the fabric of space into an asymmetry. Space, after all, is not a neutral set of absolute locations. The Follower is regarded as being “inside” the frame of reference of energy he is manipulating; for all other purposes, he is “outside” the frame of reference. The three lobes of the brain must be separated, in order that the two mutually contradictory frames of reference have limited communication between them: Otherwise a dangerous energy reaction would occur.

  Gosseyn said slowly, “But Secoh did not have the scientific training to understand the implications of this, did he?”

  Indeed not. This is the primal secret of the universe.

  To act is to interact. Two particles in the
same frame of reference are aware of each other only insofar as they identify each other. The identity is what establishes the boundaries of permitted behaviors, which form a statistical region or “cloud” of possible interactions. When the particles are no longer in each other’s frame of reference, the statistical region approaches zero, and the particles are unaware of each other.

  This, then, is the secret that has baffled the simple Aristotelian and Newtonian physics of positive-belief systems. There is no “action at a distance” because there is no distance. The strong and weak signals we interpret as space-time are measurements of the degree of similarity of the statistical region of behaviors of two particles. The distorter technology, the Predictors of Yalerta, Enro’s clairvoyance, the energy-transmission powers of the Royal House of Dzan: All these are based on the fundamental mechanics of forcing particle behaviors into artificial similarity, and thereby mechanically denying the illusion of space-time separation.

  The primordial particle of the Big Bang, which contains the total mass-energy of the universe and occupied one Planck unit volume of space, from its own point of view has never moved. Energy signals leaving one pole of the primordial particle and reaching the other pole created the first two frames of references, each of which regarded itself as a distinct particle observing a second particle. The signals were strong at that time, and so the illusionary separation in time and space was small.

  But the second law of thermodynamics operated to weaken the signal, and so the appearance of space-time separation increased with dramatic suddenness.

  When this happened, the number of possible frames of reference also increased dramatically. Each image or mirror-reflection in curved space of the fundamental particle increased its number of possible perception-paths back to itself. At first all particles were identical, but entropy decay of some signals degraded the “images” each particle had of all others, and hence differentiated the acceptable behaviors of each perceptual set of particles. The symmetry of behaviors broke into three sets of rules: strong nuclear force, electromagnetism–weak nuclear force, and gravity.