“I see,” Robert said. “That’s another way of describing the fundamental problem Tetragrammaton has been working on—bridging the chasm between brains and computers.”
“Right,” Mei-Ling said with a nod. “Organisms developing through evolution must adapt to survive—pre-determined rules and fixed design are fatal. Adaptability is the basic ‘dishomology’ between brains and machines. Computers are built with each structure having a precisely designed function, but the ‘new brain’, primarily the thalamocortical system, has very little specific structure, in terms of the way it processes information, until after birth—when it actually begins processing information.”
“I gather that Manqué was familiar with Albert’s defense of consciousness, then?” Robert asked, rhetorically.
“Very,” Mei-Ling agreed. “Information processing in the brain is not designed, but learned, in accordance with which neuronal-grouping schemes produce the best results. The ‘new’ brain is not programmed. Its information processing structure is mutable.”
“It would have to be,” Robert agreed, “because environmental contingencies introduce radically altered conditions into life’s world—conditions under which following a ‘program’ would inevitably lead to death.”
“Exactly,” Mei-Ling agreed, watching the road. “Since contingencies break the rules, those brains which can also break the rules are best able to survive contingencies. Evolution doesn’t work by planning and design, but by the survival of those who can adapt, through the learning of new survival strategies.”
Robert stared out the window, thinking hard.
“And the most successful rule-breaking strategy yet developed by evolution would be consciousness, then?” he asked, anticipating the direction of her argument.
“Yeah,” Mei-Ling said. She turned off onto a long road leading, she knew, up to a golden-grassed bluff. That bluff had, years ago, been bulldozed into the coastal woodland, at whose far, ocean-facing side stood the Silicon Bay prison. “Consciousness is a dynamical system generating its own rules and characteristics, in response to its environment—through learning, not programming. You learn what you’ve lived, then you live what you’ve learned.”
Robert nodded as they rolled onto the bluff.
“When you think about it,” he said, “neither consciousness nor the universe is really like a rule-governed machine. The world outside your head and the world inside are both dynamical.”
Mei-Ling brought the car to a stop at a barred gate. The two human guards, who might as well have been named Perfunctory and Supernumerary, stood by as Silicon Bay’s sophisticated security systems read their car tag and its code, and scanned the vehicle’s inhabitants. The gate opened and the guards waved them through.
“That dynamical aspect was why Phelonious liked the ALEPH so much,” she continued.
“I don’t see how,” Robert said, as “The ALEPH was still a set of rules, wasn’t it?”
“In the most basic sense, yes,” Mei-Ling agreed, as they drove through the golden grassland, toward the complex of squat high-security buildings. “Ultimately though, the ALEPH tried to duplicate the subtlety of the evolutionary process itself, with species co-evolving, entire communities co-evolving. It incorporated a predation subheuristic based on the counterintuitive Paine hypothesis that predators actually increase the diversity of an environment. It did all that—and a lot more—in the context of the most ecologically sophisticated virtual environments ever created. At its highest levels of performance, the ALEPH behaved dynamically, as nearly as any of us could tell.”
Robert watched idly as they passed through another security gate in another fence-line.
“If it was so impressive,” he asked, “then why didn’t it ever catch on?”
“The ALEPH’s model of evolutionary complexity was, um, rather memory intensive,” Mei-Ling said, then bethought herself. “No—actually that’s a monumental understatement. What killed the program on the street and in the marketplace was its own computational success. The ALEPH’s appetite for memory was huge.”
“Like an ox’s appetite for corn?” Robert suggested, smiling.
“Make that a swarm of locusts’ appetite,” Mei-Ling said. “Make that a swarm of locusts, each locust as big as a winged ox. But you should have seen what it could do when you ‘fed’ it as much memory as it wanted! I remember once, after we installed the ALEPH, we watched Phelonious run it through a demonstration. In a half hour’s time, using only a half dozen of the LogiBoxes, the ALEPH evolved populations of cellular automata from the proto-organic stage all the way to a level of complexity roughly equivalent to that of the Earth’s ecosphere at the time of the Permian extinctions. We had to shut the demo off, but everyone who was there, all of us who saw a world evolving in holographic projection before our eyes—we were impressed to the point of awe. Especially when Phelonious speculated about what might be possible with all the LogiBoxes linked up and the ALEPH running full-bore, with no constraints or dampers on its functioning.”
They found a parking area and pulled into a spot labeled Visitors. As they got out of the car, Mei-Ling hesitated about locking the vehicle, given the redundant levels of security surrounding them. She did so anyway, out of long habit.
“Running the ALEPH full bore on all the boxes,” Robert said as they walked toward the main entrance. “Is that what brought on the black hole sun thing at Sedona?”
Mei-Ling nodded.
“On the boxes, and elsewhere in the infosphere, too,” she said, almost with a sigh. “Phelonious had a bad case of Microcosmic God syndrome. I think he was trying to set up an artificial evolution in hopes that it might lead to an artificial brain—and an artificial consciousness.”
“The bridge across the chasm,” Robert said as they walked up the ramp and watched the automatic doors of the entrance part silently before them. “The seamless interface between mind and machine. A contingent computer, both mind and machine. Apparently he didn’t succeed, however.”
“Hard to determine for sure,” Mei-Ling said. “All I know was that it was damned risky.”
Robert was about to query her further on that, but the guard assigned to guide them to Manqué/Kong’s cell appeared at that moment, a petite black woman all business and officiousness in her sharply pressed prison guard’s uniform. The guard briefly introduced herself and informed them that the warden would have been here to meet them herself were it not for a coinciding visit from a governor’s commission. Turning on her heel, the officer led them away into the labyrinth of security levels and cells. Glancing at Mei-Ling as they walked along, Robert saw that she seemed very preoccupied with her own thoughts. It looked like this walk was going to be long and silent one.
Mei-Ling was, in fact, remembering those days when she had met Phelonious Manqué and the Myrrhisticineans for the first time. She and Tanaka and Jackson had helicoptered out of Flagstaff, heading into the beautiful red rock country around Sedona. Ahead of them, the abbey had come into view in the late afternoon sky, a NeoGothic construction situated atop a tall red-cliffed butte, remote and beautiful in the extreme.
Moments later, their helicopter had landed and they were being welcomed to the Abbey by an energetic woman in her forties. Tall and thin enough to merit the adjective “svelte,” Sister Clare was dressed in a loose and flowing habit of dark blue. Standing in the propwash of the departing helicopter, her reddish-blonde hair flowing in the whirlwind, Sister Clare too seemed remote and beautiful, the living embodiment of everything Mei-Ling had thought she knew about the Myrrhisticineans: ascetic, eccentric, relatively harmless.
As Clare hospitably asked them about their trip and informed them about their accommodations, Mei-Ling couldn’t help but notice the man with Clare, shadowing them. He appeared to be in his early twenties and was about as svelte as a Sumo wrestler. His mouth, framed by a short shovel of dyed-blond goatee, wore an expression somewhere between sullen and sneer. He seemed uncomfortable in street clothes, and his hair looke
d odd, as if it had been tonsured until recently but was being allowed to grow out haphazardly. Sister Clare—who seemed more “abbess” than sister—introduced the young man under his obvious alias of Phelonious Manqué.
Mei-Ling learned a great deal about the young man in the weeks that followed. That first day he had guided them briskly, for a man of his heft, deep into the maze of tunnels beneath the abbey. He remarked cryptically that there was “Always more to things than just the surface.” Certainly that had proven true of him.
On first meeting Phelonious Manqué, Mei-Ling had presumed that he was that sort of hacker/shade-tree computer consultant who took up the monastic life because, as a civilian, he had awakened one too many times to gunshots in the morning and yells of “You killed my computer!” from very dissatisfied clients. Sister Clare’s prefatory remarks over the phone before they flew out—that he didn’t much like to give face-time, that he was a loner who viewed himself as a heretic and a sort of ‘rogue operative’—had led Mei-Ling to expect the worst sort of prideful, info-processing prima donna.
Heretic or no, however, Manqué worked incredibly hard. He put in long hours conjuring in virtual space, growing data constructs that were simultaneously as artificial as cathedrals and natural as flowers. As the Kerrismatix team worked with him, Erinye Jackson and Mei-Ling began to develop a grudging respect for Manqué’s abilities, his photographic memory, his conceptual brilliance. Mei-Ling thought, at the time, that he was developing some of the same respect toward the ALEPH and the Kerrismatix team’s facility with it.
She also learned Manqué had a background in biology, having majored in it for a while. “Until I realized my professors were more comfortable with a dead frog in a dissecting tray,” he had said, “than a live frog in a pond. That’s when I changed my major to infomatics and computing.”
Following the prison guard down into the maze of cells below ground in Silicon Bay, here and now, Mei-Ling was overwhelmed by a sense of déjà-vu. Following Phelonious down to his lair in the bottommost stratum of the Abbey years ago was so much like the path Mei-Ling was following at this moment. She wondered if Phelonious had noted the similarity, when he first arrived here.
All those years before, Phelonious had been an excruciatingly private person. He was very often reticent about what he was up to, reluctant to explain, which sometimes made working with him a major chore. He was at times quite purposely obtuse and socially maladroit in the extreme.
(At his trial, such behavior—along with much else—would be attributed by his defense attorney to the history of physical and sexual abuse that Martin Kong had suffered at the hands of male authority figures throughout his childhood. That was no doubt part of what had driven him, Mei-Ling thought, but Manqué/Kong had also chosen to keep following the path he had taken, day after day, in the secrecy of his own head. That choice was real and culpable. Finally, it could not be denied as the trial came to its conclusion.)
Yet Phelonious could also open up at the most unexpected moments. She remembered approaching him one day, where he sat sprawled in his boulder-chair. Phelonious’s hands hovered over the circlet amps, track balls, tactile force-pads, and keyboards which he used to play upon his systems and their displays, Captain Nemo at the controls of his great instrument. He, however, was a Nemo underground, not underwater, and inside a Stonehenge restored out of the past, rather than a submarine out of the future.
Mei-Ling had gotten to talking with him that day at some length. She had distracted him from his work long enough that, in the holojection space over Phelonious’s right shoulder, a ’jector-saver appeared. The holojector now showed a jagged rainbow mountain range, slowly building and unbuilding in 3D. When Mei-Ling asked about the saver, Phelonious had looked around surreptitiously to make sure the two of them were the only ones present in the big room. When he saw that they were, he pointed to the jagged rainbow range and began to describe it in detail.
“These mountains of madness correspond to a model of the entire plenum of the cosmos,” he said. “Peaks are high-energy, inflationary regions. Valleys are regions of relatively low energy. They have stopped inflating, like our own local universe. Different colors here mean different initial conditions and different laws of physics. The image is fractal—it recurs at scales ranging from trillionths the size of a proton to trillions of times bigger than the known universe. It represents the cosmos for what it is: a self-organizing dynamical system, fractal at the borderline between different orders, even a gateway between those orders.”
“The whole cosmos is a gateway?” Mei-Ling had asked, skeptical. Perhaps she had been thinking of what Sister Clare had said of Phelonious’s everyday-is-doomsday, Earth-is-the-Rainbow-Door heresies.
“Potentially, yes,” Phelonious replied, folding his arms across his chest. “Any point of it can be induced to demonstrate that gateway property because the whole thing is holographically self-similar, across all scales. Given the proper information densities, any point in any universe can become the Rainbow Door, the gateway between orders.”
“But if one order is the spacetime we know,” Mei-Ling asked, “then what is the nature of that other order?”
Phelonious smiled.
“That’s the big question, now isn’t it?”
A final metal and polycarbonate door thunked and clanked back, jolting Mei-Ling from her reverie in a most irreverent and untimely fashion. A perverse synchronicity persisted, however. Before them loomed Manqué/Kong himself, real-time.
He stood, dressed in prisoner’s orange uniform, smiling a death’s head rictus of a grin. He was headshaved now, his goatee allowed long since to go from black to gray-spackled. He waited, motionless, arms folded, his eyes hollow yet gleaming, ensconced like a strange living fire behind a dense Cartesian lattice-work of white lasers, a searing death cube of inescapable geometry. The only other objects in the cube were a floor-bolted desk and chair, a plastic manual typewriter chained to the desk, two small stacks of typing paper, and a toilet stall of minimal privacy.
The guard left Robert and Mei-Ling behind her as she departed. The doorway through which they had come sighed heavily as the armored door slid back into place behind the guard—and behind them.
“Why, Ms. Magnus!” Manqué said, his deathly (yet also somehow beatific) grin threatening to swallow his own head. “It’s been such a long time since we last met. Tell me: how has it felt all these years, to have been the person who denied humanity its final fulfillment?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Mei-Ling said, trying to retain her composure. “I’m not that person. All I did was cut off an information flow to some modified holojectors.”
Manqué/Kong dismissed her remarks with a light wave of his left hand, his grin altering not at all.
“Please, I don’t have time for faux naïveté,” he said. “You knew quite well the purpose for which those big fiber-optic feeds were intended. You must have.”
Almost despite herself, when Mei-Ling looked at Manqué/Kong now, through her head flashed the basic scan key for psychopathy: Aggressive. Insensitive. Charismatic. Irresponsible. Intelligent. Hedonistic. Narcissistic. Anti-social. Dangerous. Exceptional manipulators. Control fixated. Obsessed with memory and the detailed reconstruction of the past—as their topological voyeur, their parallel killer, also seemed to be.
“For an impossibility,” Mei-Ling said firmly. “Even if you developed a mathematical model so dense as to be indistinguishable from the thing modeled, still the map could not become the country. The virtual and the real cannot become one.”
“Oh?” Phelonious said, with just the slightest sardonic trace in his voice. “I know you must be aware you’re lying—to yourself, at the very least. I give you that much credit. What else could it have been that appeared that day over the abbey but an information density singularity of exactly the type you deny? Hmm?”
Mei-Ling remembered that terrible day in a rushing torrent of memory, coming from where it had been pent up all these years like floo
dwaters behind a dam. A sound as of uncountable monks humming: a deep, deep, unimaginable music, affecting everyone far below the ears, far inside the brain. The sound called even to the Kerrismatix team, far underground in the butte.
On the security monitors recording the activity at the surface, others had already begun to gather in the abbey courtyard. Mei-Ling’s local friends, Sister Clare and the nuns and monks, were all standing behind Alicia Gonsalves herself, a singular old woman with wild gray hair and wild gray eyes.
Midway between the holojector-like devices Dr. Vang’s operative had had them install, at Manqué’s insistence, a flashpoint of lightning burst into being in the sky above the courtyard. The light from it cascaded over everyone, even those deep underground. Mei-Ling looked at Erinye beside her. At first she thought Erinye’s hair was standing on end like a Fury’s—but no. The top of her head was crowned with a jagged rainbow, flickering like a sensitive flame, fire shaped like that mountain range of fractal cosmos Phelonious once showed her.
She looked at the security monitors and saw lambent flickering ranges of rainbow light rising above head after head in the courtyard above. Almost before she could even wonder at those, a greater wonder appeared in the sky above those poor people in the courtyard. The point of light there became a hole of darkness rimmed by light, like the diamond-ring stage of a solar eclipse. Yet the light around the darkness was no mere white but rather myriad rainbow fires, the tallest peak of each fluid rainbow mountain range tapering away, until it was thin as a monolaser and long as infinity.
As she watched, the rainbow-ringed hole in the sky grew larger. Flickers of white light became visible inside it. Mei-Ling looked at Sister Alicia on the monitor and she knew what the old woman was thinking. The Rainbow Door, the Wound into Reality. The points of light inside it—transubstantiated souls glowing like candles in a darkened cathedral.
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