Jhana wasn’t paying them much attention, for she had found something else in the universe that was puzzling her.
“Seiji,” she said, getting his attention. “What about those X-shaped things? See? The ones that look sort of reddish? Some of them are near the solar stations, some aren’t—”
“I see them,” Seiji said, ill at ease. “Frankly, I can’t tell you what those are. The SSPS staff isn’t responsible for them. We think they’re just some space junk that the glitching micromachines are producing on their own—”
“Junk?” Lev interjected, cocking an eyebrow. “Pretty organized, for ‘junk.’ Come on, Seij. I’ve gone to check them out myself, for Communications. Surely you people in power production must know something about them.”
Seiji sighed, glancing around the cabin as the transfer ship began to dock.
“Well, we do have some idea what they are,” he said quietly, “but no idea at all of what they’re intended to do.”
“Then what are they, at least?” Jhana wanted to know.
“Combinatorial arrays of microscopic lasers embedded in photorefractive material,” Seiji said in a rush, as if he were glad to have it out in the open. “Linked to interspersed layers of solar exchange film. The film apparently functions as a power source and memory matrix, but we haven’t been able to fully figure out what the laser/photorefractive combination does yet.”
“We haven’t either,” said Lev, who had been nodding his head in agreement while Seiji was explaining. “But personally, from the electron micrograph close-ups I’ve seen, I think it’s some sort of communications device. Something like what we’ve been using to generate our skysign—only what’s being built out there is hyperminiaturized, multiplied by millions and billions of individual units—and makes what we’re using look like a stone-headed axe.”
“Whatever they are,” Atsuko put in, breaking a silence unusually long for her, “we had better find out quickly. Their unexplained presence is making a number of our corporate and national neighbors down the well extremely nervous.”
“They think it’s some kind of weapon, no doubt,” Lev said with a chagrined smile, then shook his head sadly. “The military mind surpasseth all understanding. Just because it’s on the ‘high ground’—boom! Sputnik effect! That thing over our head! Sword of Damocles! Star Wars! Ridiculous.”
“You don’t think it’s dangerous, then?” Jhana ventured.
“How should I know? But I’ll say this: from everything I’ve seen, it’s no space-based beam weapon. Photorefractive material doesn’t concentrate laser light—it disperses it in predictable patterns. And the lasers involved are tiny ones. You’re not going to burn up anybody’s home town with these things.”
“I tend to agree,” Seiji said with a nod. “The configuration’s all wrong for a beam weapon.”
“But that still doesn’t answer the big question,” Marissa said. “Who’s building it?”
“Not who,” Lev said with mock gravity. “What.”
“Enough speculation!” Lakshmi said loudly, commanding the ship’s air lock open. Floating around them as they unstrapped, she made her way into her workshop as the others followed close behind, again awkwardly trying to manage movement in near-zero gravity.
They found the workshop to be a thoroughly “smart” space—heavily voice-activated. In the low gravity, even large pieces of equipment hung grasped by what looked to be the frailest of robotic arms and voice-response waldos. Amidst all the cutting edge technology, however, there also stood something that looked very much like a loosely-made statue—or even a shrine.
Immediately drawn to it, Seiji went to take a closer look, Jhana following close behind him. Some of it was recognizable enough: an odd juxtaposition of tantric ritual objects, occasional Roman Catholic icons—but what seemed to catch Seiji’s interest most was one particular grouping of bits and pieces, all turning slowly about one another like some mobile held together by nearly invisible wires. A beaded leather pouch with an oddly familiar trefoil symbol hung at the center, surrounded by a nebula of cast off material: A pair of smudged white feathers looped together. A distorted metal asterisk of age-blackened barbed wire. A red rust-pitted toy gyroscope. A stub of dark green candle. A dirty silk cocoon. A fragile nearly translucent piece of snakeskin. A glinting computer macrochip. A tiny mechanical umbrella. A yellowish beaked skull, clearly a small bird’s. A desiccated dark brown thing pitted and convoluted like a dried and shrunken brain. Up close, it seemed a more or less random assemblage, a mobile of bits and pieces, but from a slightly greater distance it resembled some misshapen human being, or perhaps a four-footed mammal standing on its hind legs as if digging into air or space itself with its front paws.
“What’s this?” Jhana asked, pointing to the little dried-up object like a shriveled brain.
Seiji looked more carefully at the last item, until he finally recognized what it was.
“A dried morel,” he said. “A ‘sponge mushroom’ from which nearly all the moisture has long since been wrung out.”
Looking at a particular grouping of the bits and pieces—several of them drifting about a pouch that seemed as if it might almost once have held them—Jhana was struck by the idea that their juxtaposition made a strange forlorn sort of sense. The objects that seemed to have come from the pouch hung like a heart in the chest of the creature. Looking at Seiji, Jhana saw from his face that something about the little assemblage in its larger whole was tugging at him. Jhana had the distinct impression that he wanted to quickly but carefully place the objects back inside the pouch.
“I didn’t quite figure you for the ceremonial type,” Seiji said, turning toward Lakshmi, who was watching him carefully. “Where’d you get this stuff?”
“Only the tantric material is mine,” Lakshmi replied. “I thought you might recognize the other paraphernalia. It’s from your brother’s personal effects.”
Seiji stared at her, speechless.
“Since Lev and I hooked your brother’s equipment into Vajra,” Lakshmi continued blithely, “some odd things have happened. One of them is that several of the robot arms here began acting cooperatively to sort through your brother’s personal effects. I tried to stop them at first, but after a while I got curious and wondered what they might put together if I let them go about their business. That structure there, all connected by micro-thin optical wire—that’s apparently the finished product, though they still add pieces from time to time.”
Seiji still could say nothing, could only try to hang on in the absence of gravity as objects floated and bumped lightly against him.
“It’s a statue of a big R-A-T, if you ask me,” Lev said, then explained briefly what the RATs were. “It’s a joke, a parody—just like the bits of embedded code we find when we’re allowed to find them.”
“Not a joke—a mirror,” Lakshmi said. “I think those embedded passages are intended to remind us who we are, and what we’re about here.”
“It’s a fun-house mirror, then,” Lev insisted. Lakshmi spun her hoverchair quickly in Seiji’s direction.
“Do you know what your brother was working on?” she asked pointedly.
“No,” Seiji said, finding his voice at last.
“Neither do we,” Lev said, cutting Lakshmi off just as she was about to speak. “Not really. But we have suspicions—”
“Strong ones,” Lakshmi said, so forthrightly that Jhana wondered for a moment what the relationship might be between them, the tall young man, ghostly pale yet agile and energetic and never removing his wraparound shades—and the older, immobilized dark woman with the penetrating eyes and flowing robes. Jhana doubted she’d ever know.
“We can’t say for sure,” Lev continued carefully, “but your brother appears to have been in quest of what’s become something of a grail in the interface business—”
“Direct mind/machine linkage
,” Lakshmi put in. “Interfaceless communication. Transparent relationship between matter and mind. No keyboards, no screens, no trideo display, no consoles, no cyberspatial or virtual reality constructs. A big paradigm shift. The grand unification of infomatics and telecommunications.”
“I don’t understand,” Atsuko remarked from among a thicket of reed-thin robot arms. “How can that be?”
“We don’t know if it can be, yet,” Lakshmi replied. “I’ve worked on the problem myself, though never full-time. The model that I’ve looked at—and the one you’re brother was also apparently working with, Seiji—is the idea of the transducer, a substance or device that converts input energy of one form into output energy of another form. There are lots of examples of them.” She began calling up images into holodisplay before them. “Piezoelectric crystals like quartz that convert mechanical stress into electrical energy or electrical energy into mechanical stress. Photoelectric cells that convert light into electricity—many others.”
“I know the principle quite well,” Seiji said with a nod. “Most of the solar power generation done up here is based on transducer effects of one sort or another.”
“But how does that apply to the ‘interfaceless communication’ you spoke of?” Marissa asked Lev.
“Simple—theoretically,” Lev said with a shrug. “Think of ‘mechanical stress’ and ‘electrical energy’ and ‘light’ not so much as different types of energy but as different patterns of information. Think of the brain itself as a transducer for converting energy, information patterns of one form, into information patterns of another form—its entire structure, at all levels of complexity, as the structure of a transducing substance or device. Then find the proper information pattern, the proper energetic ‘carrier wave,’ both medium and message as it were, and beam it at a human brain which will convert that carrier wave instantly into information useful for thought.”
“And vice-versa,” Lakshmi added. “The energy of thought acting in a transeunt fashion, producing effects outside the mind, in the machine it’s sending to, through the same sort of transducing process.” She sighed audibly. “Unfortunately, no one’s really made it work in either direction, so far as we know.”
“What’s the snag?” Seiji asked, quietly, as if from far away.
“The brain/mind problem,” Lakshmi said levelly. “No one has yet figured out how mind attaches to brain. If the strict materialists were right, if mind were simply brain, the transducer model would have already produced a viable technology. But it seems strict materialism is a good myth but a poor explanation. The epiphenomenalists, on the other hand, by saying that mind is just an epiphenomenon arising from the physical and phenomenal activity of the brain—they’re really just closet dualists. The uncloseted dualists seem to be right, at least to a degree: mind and brain do appear to be distinct entities that somehow manage to interface—that word again—in consciousness.”
“Only it’s an interfaceless interface,” Lev insisted, calling up holodisplays of his own. “Like a meniscus formed between oil and water, or the surface tension between water and air. In the first case, is the meniscus made of oil, or of water? Neither, and both. In the second case, is the surface tension made of water, or of air, or of the dynamic of forces balancing between them? Is consciousness merely material and local brain, or transcendent and ubiquitous Mind, or some dynamic between them? It’s a paradox, a snake swallowing its own tail, a Möbius Cadúceus.”
He ended with an irrepressible smile. Lakshmi shook her head slightly, as if at a wayward child.
“Which brings us back to why Jhana and Seiji are here,” she said, smiling slyly in her own turn. “Atsuko and Marissa—you should be interested in this too, in regard to Roger. Lev, did you ever think the skysign might be acting as a sort of transducer already—in a rudimentary sort of way?”
Lev was quiet for a moment. Lakshmi smiled more broadly, seeing she had caught him by surprise.
“I hadn’t really thought about that,” he said. “I guess we could accept it as a provisional hypothesis. But I thought these folks came up here to play the game—not try to figure out the skysign.”
The others nodded in agreement.
“Oh, very well,” Lakshmi said, commanding a trideo game unit to display in the midst of them. “Here goes.”
VAJRA
presents
BUILDING THE RUINS™
“We’ll play a beginner’s version,” Lakshmi said, robotic arms placing a circlet of electronic headgear on her temples. “It has the whole opening sequence. You may view it either projected or in one of these full-sensorium circlets. There are several scattered about.”
“The trideo’s interactive reality can be joystick controlled, voice-directed, or,” Lev said, slipping on a pair of thin gloves, “if you put on these livegloves, you can let your fingers do the walking—and the talking.” He began to hand around several pairs to those who opted for them. “Of course, if we had the sort of direct mind/machine link we were talking about before, we wouldn’t need all this gear. These will have to do for now.”
Jhana chose for herself one of the wraparound circlets—depth screens for her eyes, audio implants for her skull—and pulled on a pair of livegloves, thin flat-wire traceries prickling over her hands as she did so, electrodes probing minute differences in electric potentials at her skin surface. She was now in the world of the game.
“I’ve called for a share-game,” Lakshmi said over Jhana’s implants. “All of us will essentially be functioning as a team.”
For Jhana, this “team” manifested itself as a silvery translucent orb—like a soap bubble blown from mercury metal—afloat upon a couch of sunset-fired cloud. In the bubble, etherealized human faces stood out, cut in bas-relief from the virtual sky and tinted that sky’s same silvery-blue hue. All eyes of her “teammates” turned forward toward one vision.
“Welcome to the MACHINE,” a disembodied voice said over the implants. “The MetAnalytic Computer Heuristic Incorporating Non-analytic Elements. The global brain. A synergistic and evolving system composed of two parts: LOGOS, the Logical Ontological Governance Operating System, and CHAOS, the Cognitive Heuristic Antalgorithmic Operating System. They were created to work together, but now they work apart. The global brain has gone insane and now seeks suicide to end its pain. Your job is to help save it from itself.”
In the virtual space around and before her, there now began to appear what Jhana believed must certainly be the LOGOS the voice-over spoke of. She had seen quality graphics before, but this LOGOS was incredible: an immense cybernetic data construct, a shape of thought almost beautiful beyond thought, a shining global village-on-the-hill rising from the flatland gridspace of the Plains of Euclid, a cybertopia stretching onward and onward, mathematical kingdom of orderly orchestrated bustling where all the trains of thought ran on time. It was a thing of preternatural beauty, as if the greatest symphony of most glorious music ever played had been flash-frozen in the form of a City of Light, celestial harmony transubstantiated in an instant into the radiant architecture of a Neon New Jerusalem, an Electric Heaven too coolly perfect for mere mortals to sing in.
Hyperreal, surreal, ethereally unreal. She remembered that someone had once said virtual reality would never look truly real until they figured out how to get dirt and noise and grit into it. That pre-dirt godly cleanliness was the LOGOS all over. But if there was something disturbingly “too ordered” about the cool perfection of this City of LOGOS, it was not nearly as disturbing as the CHAOS.
As the teammates moved deeper into the game’s virtual space, it was soon enough apparent that the inhumanly perfect order of the LOGOS did not go on forever. In innumerable regions the dark matter of CHAOS appeared, fluid as ocean waves and dry as desert dunes, thing of all shapes and no shape of all things, Illusion and Error breaking through and turning to disarray the clear lines of the Plains, battering discordantly a
gainst the harmony of the Shining City, drowning and choking out and covering in obscurity the structures of light, as if some great Earthly city were falling to ruin beneath the waves of a final flood, or sinking abandoned into the desert of time.
The silver orb, the mercury-metal soap bubble she and her fellow players were contained in, burst dissolvingly. With the vast computing power of the LOGOS behind them, fully integrated with that power, they moved like a tall soft wall of driving sunlit wind against the uncreating dimness.
Encountering the dark tide, though, there was almost a physical sensation of impact. Jhana felt as if she had plummeted like a hurtling meteor into a vast ocean of grey tapioca static, cold and dark and viscous. She did not have time to think, for the darkling sea seemed inhabited by the sharks and eels of long-repressed memories, ancient sins—her own and others not her own.
Something waited at the heart of the CHAOS, a sleeping dragon on a treasure hoard, a Minotaur in the center of a maze, a night prowler compounded of every creature that had ever lived and died, a hybrid beastly-intelligent thing of horns, claws, teeth and tentacles, slit cat’s eyes and adder fangs dripping the milky poisonous rheum of death, a universe of death horrifying in its enormous impersonality—
Jeez, what am I getting so frightened about? Jhana thought. Must be projecting my own problems onto this chaotic grey swirling stuff. This thing’s got phenomenal graphics, excellent tactiles and full sensorium feed, yeah—but it is only a game, after all.
That in itself was disturbing, though. All this effort, put into something that was “just a game”?
As if through corridors and chambers of a flooded maze, onward she moved with the others, more fascinated than afraid, while behind her the sharks and eels followed, swimming to their own slow silent dark rhythms. Her movement and that of the others felt “upstream”, seemed to push back the chaotic flux, to recreate what that dark flux had blotted out.
Eventually, Jhana found herself just beneath the surface of a glassy stream, looking up through a drowned Ophelia’s eyes into a lawless sky of flawless blue. Impelled and compelled to break through the surface tension of the water, she sent ripples rebounding in every direction, new beauty settling into place as the scene calmed. Like a rapidly evolving computer animation or fractal graphic, cragged peaks mounted up to snag the sky, encircling in their broken bowl an Alpine meadow and small city so idyllic it seemed a caricature of itself.
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