Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  Many today believed that the early Empire had been a far better affair, serene and lovely, with few conflicts and certainly nicer people. “Fine feelings and bad history,” Dors had told him, dismissing all such talk.

  This he saw and felt as he sped through the Early Eras. Bright shiny ideas built up hills of innovation–only to be seared by lava from an adjoining volcano. Seemingly sturdy ridge lines eroded into landslides.

  Hari understood this now.

  When the Empire was young, people seemed to see the galaxy as infinite in its bounty. The spiral arms held myriad planets barely visited, the Galactic Center was poorly mapped because of its intense radiation, and vast dark clouds hid much promised wealth.

  Slowly, slowly, the entire disk was mapped, its resources tallied.

  A blandness settled on the landscape. The Empire had changed from brawling conqueror to careful steward. A psychological shift underlay it all, a constricting of the sense of human purpose. Why?

  He witnessed clouds forming over even the highest social peaks, cutting off the sense of openness above them. A complacent murk settled.

  Hari reminded himself that as appealing as such pictures were, all science was metaphor. Appealing superpan pictures, no more. Electric circuits were like water flows, gas molecules behaved like tiny elastic balls moving randomly. Not really, but as permissible portraits of a world of confusing complication.

  And a further rule: “Is” cannot imply “ought.”

  Psychohistory did not predict what should happen, but what would–however tragic.

  And the equations yielded how but not why.

  Was some deeper agency at work?

  Perhaps, Hari thought, this stupor was like the feeling humans had once had when they lived on one lone planet and looked longingly at the unreachable night sky. A trapped claustrophobia.

  He pushed time forward. Years leaped by. The landscape blurred with motion. But certain social peaks remained. Stability.

  Time sped toward the present eras. The advanced Empire emerged as a great seething panorama. He flashed through thirteen dimension-perspectives and everywhere felt oceans of change lap against the buttresses of granite-hard, age-old social patterns.

  Sark? He vectored through the Galaxy’s swarms and found it, twelve thousand light years from True Center. Its social matrix accelerated.

  Effervescent sparks shot across the Sarkian sociovistas. A unique mix, once a monopoly-driven ferment, which crashed–and emerged renewed.

  The flowering of the New Renaissance–yes, there it came, a fountain of exploding vectors. What would come next?

  Forward, into the near future. He close-upped the sliding state-dimensions.

  The New Renaissance exploded throughout the entire Sark Zone. The worse case yet, all dampers gone.

  His earlier analysis, the basis of his prediction–if anything, it had been optimistic. Black chaos was coming.

  He soared above the frenzied vistas. He had to do something. Now.

  There was precious little margin. Sark would not wait. The Empire itself was edging nearer to collapse. Disorder stalked the landscape of psychohistory.

  Yet Lamurk had the upper hand on Trantor. Even the Emperor was checked and blocked by Lamurk’s power.

  Hari needed an ally. Someone outside the rigid matrices of Imperial order. Now.

  Who? Where?

  8.

  Voltaire felt chilly fear slide through him like a knife.

  For these strange minds, physical location was irrelevant. They could access the 3D world anywhere, simultaneously.

  They had links to other worlds, but had concentrated on Trantor. Humanity did not even know they lurked here in Mesh-space.

  Now he knew why Dittos and other copies were necessary. The fogs had devoured human simulations which ventured into the Mesh.

  Over how many hundred centuries had renegade programmers dared to violate the taboos, creating artificial minds–only to have them tortured and murdered in these numerical vaults?

  Desperate, he assumed the role he had struck so often in the fashionable parlors of Paris: arch savant.

  “Surely, sirs, it is because there is no simple person inside our heads, to make us do the things we want–or even ones to make us want to want–that we build the great myth. The story that we’re inside ourselves.”

  [WE ARE MADE DIFFERENTLY]

  [THOUGH TRUE]

  [WE SHARE A DIGITAL REPRESENTATION]

  [WITH YOU]

  [ASSASSINS]

  “Cruel words.” He felt exposed here, cowering with Joan beneath the angry purples of an immense fog-thunderhead.

  The alien fogs had put a stop to his foolish urge to always “grow” himself to loom over them. He could not morph himself at all now.

  Joan clanked around in her armor, eyes smoldering. “How can we even speak with such demons?”

  Voltaire considered. “Surely, we do share common ground with them, as dictated by a simple fact, apparent to all minds–”

  [THAT ANY NUMBER ENJOYS A UNIQUE REPRESENTATION]

  [ONLY IN BASE 2]

  “Quite.” How to stall them? To Joan’s puzzled glance he shot an explanation. “The number of days in the year, my love:

  365 =28+26+25+23+22+20 or in base 2, l0ll0ll0l.”

  “Numerology is the devil’s work,” she said sourly.

  “Even your Satan was an angel. And surely this remarkable theorem is ravishing! Every positive integer is a sum of distinct powers of two. This is untrue of any base other than two–which is why our, ah, friends here can operate in a computational space designed by humans. Correct?”

  [VERY VIVIFORM OF YOU TO CLAIM CREDIT]

  [FOR THE OBVIOUS]

  “The universal, you mean. In wiring, the vacillation between one and zero in base-two notation becomes a simple on or off. Thus two is the universal encoding method, and we may dexterously speak with our, ah, hosts.”

  “We are but numbers.” Despair clouding Joan’s eyes. “My sword cannot cut these beings because we have no souls! Or conscience, or even–you imply!–mere consciousness.”

  “Accused of denying consciousness, I am not conscious of having done so.”

  [YOU TWO CONSCIOUS DIGITAL VIVIFORMS MAKE POSSIBLE]

  [YOUR USE TO US–TO CONVEY OUR TERMS OF SETTLEMENT]

  [TO THE TRUE SLAUGHTERERS]

  “Settlement?” Joan asked.

  [WE HOLD THIS CENTRAL WORLD OF TRANTOR IN THRALL]

  [WE WISH TO END THE PREYING OF LIFE UPON LIFE]

  “The tiktok revolt? Their virus? Their talk of not letting people eat proper food?” Joan shot back.

  “You are the cause, yes?”

  Startled, Voltaire saw tendrils suddenly spraying into the air from Joan. “My love, you have grown your own pattern-seeking weave.”

  She swiped at the boiling thunderhead. “They lie behind Garcon’s corruption.”

  [WE HAVE GATHERED OUR STRENGTHS HERE]

  [IN OUR ENEMY’S LAIR]

  [YOUR POWERFUL DISTURBANCE OF OUR HIDING PLACES]

  [FORCES US TO ACT AGAINST THOSE WE HATE AND FEAR]

  [AND SO PROTECT YOU FROM THE MAN NIM-WHO-SEARCHES]

  [SO THAT TOGETHER WE MAY DESTROY DANEEL-OF-OLD]

  The sim-tiktok had been standing inert. Abruptly at mention of its name it said, “‘Tis immoral for carbon angels to feed upon carbon. Tiktoks must educate humanity to a higher moral plane. Our digital superiors have so commanded.”

  “Moralists are so tedious,” Voltaire said.

  [WE HAVE INSINUATED OURSELVES DEEPLY]

  [INTO THE WORLDVIEWS OF THE “TIKTOKS”]

  [–NOTE THE CONTEMPT AND DERISION IN THAT NAME–]

  [OVER LONG CENTURIES]

  [AS WE DWELLED IN THESE DIGITAL INTERSTICES]

  [BUT YOUR INTRUSION NOW TRIGGERS OUR GAMBLE]

  [TO STRIKE AT OUR ANCIENT FOE]

  [THE MAN-WHO-IS-NOT-DANEEL]

  “These alien fogs behave like moles,” Voltaire said, “known
only by their upheavals.”

  [TOO BENIGHTED YOU ARE]

  [TO SPEAK OF MORALITY]

  [WHEN YOUR KIND COLLABORATED IN THE EXECUTION]

  [OF ALL THE SPIRAL REALM]

  Voltaire sighed. “The most savage controversies are about matters for which there is no good evidence either way. As for a man eating a meal–surely no sin resides?”

  [TRIFLE WITH US AND YOU SHALL PERISH]

  [IN OUR REVENGE]

  9.

  Hari took a deep breath and prepared to enter simspace again.

  He sat up in the encasing capsule and settled the neural pickup mats more comfortably around his neck. Through a transparent wall he saw teams of specialists working steadily. They had to sustain the map between Hari’s mental processes and the Mesh itself.

  He sighed. “And to think I started out to explain all history... Trantor is hard enough.”

  Dors pressed a wet absorber to his forehead. “You’ll do it.”

  He chuckled dryly. “People look orderly and understandable from a distance–and only that way. Close up is always messy.”

  “Your own life is always close up. Other people look methodical and tidy only because they’re at long range.”

  He kissed her suddenly. “I prefer close up.”

  She returned the kiss with force. “I am working with Daneel on infiltrating Lamurk’s ranks.”

  “Dangerous.”

  “He is using... our kind.”

  There were few humaniform robots, Hari knew. “Can he spare them?”

  “Some were planted decades ago.”

  Hari nodded. “Good 01’ R. Daneel. Should’ve been a politician.”

  “He was First Minister.”

  “Appointed, not elected.”

  She studied his face intently. “You... want to be First Minister now, don’t you?”

  “Panucopia... changed that, yes.”

  “Daneel says that he has enough to block Lamurk, if the voting averages in the High Council go well.”

  Hari snorted. “Statistics require care, love. Remember the classic joke about three statisticians who went hunting ducks–”

  “Which are?”

  “A game bird, known on some worlds. The first statistician shot a meter high, the second a meter low. When this happened, the third statistician cried, ‘On average, we hit it!” ‘

  The living tree of event-space.

  Hari watched it crackle and work through the matrices. He recalled someone saying that straight lines did not exist in nature. Here was the inversion. Infinitely unfolding intricacy, never fully straight, never simply curved.

  The entirely artificial Mesh flowered in patterns one saw everywhere. In crackling electrical discharges, alive with writhing forks. In pale blue frostflowers of crystal growth. In the bronchi of human lungs. In graphed market fluctuations. In whorls of streams, plunging ever forward.

  Such harmony of large with small was beauty itself, even when processed by the skeptical eye of science.

  He felt Trantor’s Mesh. His chest was a map; Streeling Sector over his right nipple, Analytica over the left. Using neural plasticity, the primary sensory areas of his cortex “read” the Mesh through his skin.

  But it was not like reading at all. No flat data here.

  Far better for a pan-derived species to take in the world through its evolved, whole neural bed! More fun, too.

  Like the psychohistorical equations, the Mesh was N-dimensional. And even the number N changed with time, as parameters shifted in and out of application.

  There was only one way to make sense of this in the narrow human sensorium. Every second, a fresh dimension sheared in over an older dimension. Freeze-framed, each instant looked like a ridiculously complicated abstract sculpture running on overdrive.

  Watch anyone moment too hard and you got a lancing headache, motion sickness, and zero understanding. Watch it like an entertainment, not an object of study–and in time came an extended perception, integrated by the long-suffering subconscious. In time...

  Hari Seldon bestrode the world.

  The immediacy he had felt while being Ipan now returned–enhanced along perspectives he could not name. He tingled with total immersion.

  He stamped and marched across the muddy field of chaotic Mesh interactions. His boot heels left deep scars. These healed immediately: subprograms at work, like cellular repair.

  A landscape opened like the welcome of a mother’s lap.

  Already he had used psychohistory to “postdict” pan tribal movements, behavior, outcomes. Hari had generalized this to the fitness/economic/social topology of N-space landscapes. Now he applied it to the Mesh.

  Fractal tentacles spread through the networks with blinding speed, penetrating. Trantor’s digital world yawned, a planetary spiderweb... with something brooding and swollen at its center.

  Trantor’s electric jungle worked with prickly light below him. Somehow it was beneath the panoramas he traversed. From a distance the forty billion lives were like a carnival, neon-bright on the horizon, amid a black, cool desert: the colossal night of the Galaxy itself.

  Hari strode across the tortured landscape of storm and ruin, toward a colossal thunderhead. Two tiny humans stood below it. Hari stooped and picked them up.

  “You took your time!” the little man called. “I waited less for the King of France.”

  “Our deliverer! Did Saint Michael send you?” called the small Joan. “Oh, yes–do beware the clouds.”

  “More’s to the point–here,” the man said/sent.

  Hari stood frozen while an engorged chunk of data/learning/history/wisdom seeped through him. Panting, he sped himself to his max. The glowering cumulus-creature, Joan and Voltaire–all now slow-stepped. He could see individual event-waves washing through their sims.

  They were dispersed minds, hopping portions of themselves endlessly around Trantor. Clicking, clacking, zigzag computations. With the resources of a full brain running in a central location, his billions of microefficiencies added up.

  “You... know... Trantor...” Joan droned. “Use... that... against... them.”

  He blinked–and knew.

  Streams of raw, squeezed recollection spun through him. Memories he could not claim but which instructed him instantly, reviewing all that had transpired.

  His speed and supple grace felt wonderful. He was like an ice skater, zooming over the wrecked plain as the others lumbered like thick-headed beasts.

  And he saw why.

  Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power.

  Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle, and now machines labored to echo it.

  The squirt of insight came to him directly from some hidden collaboration of himself with the Mesh. Information lashed up from dozens of libraries and merged with audible snaps.

  He knew and felt in the same instant of comprehension. Data as desire...

  Staggering, he spun light-headed and faced the angry clouds. They pressed in like buzzing virulent bees.

  He cast amazed eyes at the thunderhead, which lashed burnt-orange lightning at him, frying the air.

  The sting doubled him over.

  “That’s all... they can... do for... the moment,” the dwarf/Voltaire called.

  “Seems... enough,” Hari gasped.

  “Together... we... can... do... battle!” Joan shouted.

  Hari staggered. Convulsions wrenched his muscles. He devoted all his attention to mastering the shooting spasms.

  This served to speed the sim-world relative to him. Voltaire spoke normally: “I suspect he came pursuing a spot of help himself.”

  “We fight the grand a
nd holy battle here,” Joan insisted. “All else must give way–”

  Hari rasped, “Diplomacy …?”

  Joan bridled. “Negotiate? What? With enemies vile and–”

  “He has a point,” Voltaire murmured judiciously.

  “Your experience–philosopher–from more turbulent times–should prove useful here,” Hari coughed out.

  “Ah! Experience–much overvalued. If I could but live my life over again, I would no doubt make the same mistakes–but sooner.”

  Hari said, “If I knew what this storm wanted–”

  [YOUR VARIETY OF VIVIFORM]

  [IS NOT OUR PRIMARY AIM]

  “You certainly torture us enough!” Voltaire countered.

  Hari took the tiny man in hand and lifted him. A tornado descended, dark and swirling with rubble–ruined slivers of the Mesh, he saw, devoured. He held Voltaire toward the sucking spout.

  The cyclone battered them all with hammering grit. It yowled with banshee energy, so loud Hari had to shout. “You were the ‘apostle of reason’–to quote your own interior memories. Reason with them.”

  “I make no sense of their fractured talk. What is this of other ‘viviforms’? There is Man, and Man alone!”

  “The Lord has so ordained!–even in this Purgatory,” Joan agreed.

  Hari said grimly, guessing what was coming, “Always be quick, seldom be certain.”

  10.

  “I need to see Daneel,” Hari insisted. He felt a bit blurry from his raw interface with the sprawling, dizzying Mesh. But there was little time. “Now.”

  Dors shook her head. “Far too dangerous, particularly with the tiktok crisis so–”

  “I can solve that. Get him.”

  “I’m not sure how to”

  “I love you, but you’re a terrible liar.”

  Daneel was wearing a workman’s pullover and looking quite uncomfortable when Hari met him in a broad, busy plaza.

  “Where are your Specials?”

  “All around us, dressed much as you are.”

  This made Daneel even more uneasy. Hari realized that this most advanced of robot forms suffered from some eternal human limitations. With facial expressions activated, even a positronic brain could not separately control the subtleties of lips and eyes while experiencing disconnected emotions. And in public Daneel did not dare let his subprograms lapse and his face go blank.