Marissa brushed back her red hair quickly, then glanced down at her hands in her lap.
“Another type of chain reaction,” she said. “Bad synergy. The population pressures that make the capacity for conscious individual choice all the more vital are the same ones that will be working against the continued existence of that capacity. The bigger the boom, the harder the crash.”
Roger looked back into space, toward the comet shining there.
“I know nobody in the ’borbs is a big fan of secrecy,” he said, “but the immortalizing vector seems to be one situation where no one can deny its efficacy. Encrypt the data enough and you’d have to have Jiro Yamaguchi’s capabilities to access it.”
Atsuko rested her chin in her hand and stared about the small shuttle cabin, empty but for themselves.
“What makes you think someone doesn’t already have those capabilities?” she asked. “What’s happened once can happen again.”
Roger stared at his mother.
“Has it?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she said, averting her gaze from both her son and Marissa. “Only differently. That comet you’ve been watching, Roger. It seems to have come literally from nowhere, and it’s not behaving like an ordinary comet.”
“Where’d you hear that?” he asked, puzzled.
“Since I’m Council liaison,” Atsuko replied, “our telecom people have kept themselves busy informing me. There have been a series of ‘coordinated malfunctions’ involving broadcast antenna arrays on Earth and in space. The ‘malfunctions’ appear to be sending recurring pulses of information at that thing coming in—and to a few other points in interplanetary space.”
Marissa stared at Roger’s mother in an expression almost of shock.
“Something is coordinating those malfunctions?” she asked. “Through the infosphere?”
Atsuko nodded.
“Or someone,” she said. “That’s the current best guess. You can ask Lakshmi yourself on the way to the party. She has lots of theories.”
Roger glanced back toward the comet. It looked exactly like every other comet he’d ever seen.
“Sounds like we’ve been here before,” he said with a shrug. “But even if another consciousness has sprung up in the infosphere, who’s to say it won’t turn out for the best, the way it did last time?”
“No one can say, yet,” Atsuko agreed. “At the very least, the security and integrity of the infosphere seems to be compromised, in much the same way it was when Jiro Yamaguchi was developing toward whatever it was he became. Add to that how much infosphere communicating Marissa has been doing with her colleagues on the vector project. Then ask yourself if the ‘secret’ of the immortalizing vector is necessarily a secret any longer.”
Drifting past shielded mirrors and collectors, then past the habitat’s own solar power arrays until they were very nearly in free space, Roger was glad to at last see the microgee manufactories coming into view—before the implications of his mother’s last statement could sink in any further.
Coming up beside the docking bay for Lakshmi’s workspace, the ship fastened onto the docking port. When the air lock sighed open, they saw before them Lakshmi Ngubo herself, a dark-skinned, bright-eyed woman in her forties, dressed in loosely-draped, vibrantly-colored clothing, seated in a hoverchair and lightly goggled into virtual space, muttering into a sub voc microphone.
Behind her stood the cavernous space of her workshop, expanded since Atsuko and Marissa had last seen it but ever the thoroughly voice-activated smartspace. In the low gravity, slender robotic arms and voice-response waldos held and moved impossibly large pieces of equipment. The scene was still so much like it had been the first time Marissa visited Lakshmi’s place that she almost expected to still find there the loosely-made statue/shrine the Jiro Yamaguchi-construct had assembled. Marissa was obscurely disappointed to see that it was still gone.
“Hey, people!” Lakshmi said, commanding up her virtual goggles, coming toward them as her three visitors unstrapped and awkwardly attempted standing up and stretching in the very low gravity.
“Hope we didn’t interrupt—” Atsuko said.
“Not at all, not at all,” Lakshmi replied, making her way into the cabin of the transfer shuttle. “Just catching my daily dose of infotons.”
Roger had heard the term before—virtualist slang for “information photons.” Apparently Lakshmi was fond of that whole dialect of hacker slang from the turn of the millennium, about “surfing the web” and “cybertanning.”
“You must be Roger,” Lakshmi said, nodding toward him. Roger didn’t know exactly how to introduce himself. Shaking hands was out, but he somehow felt that Lakshmi’s neck-down paralysis was causing him more awkwardness than it caused her. She was the one gliding smoothly about the cabin in her hoverchair, after all. Roger just said “Yes” and nodded back.
The airlocks of ship and docking bay sighed closed and they all strapped or otherwise anchored themselves into place for the transit to HOME 2. Momentarily the ship eased free of HOME 1 and accelerated smoothly for their journey to a newer, though not necessarily braver, world.
“Atsuko told us you think there’s some sort of new consciousness operating in the infosphere again,” Marissa said, “and that it’s sending messages in the direction of the Hsiu-Johansen comet.”
“That’s right,” Lakshmi said with a nod. “Did she also tell you that the source of the messages to the comet and the source of the infosphere killings seem to be the same?”
The revelation hit both Marissa and Roger with unexpected force.
“I thought I’d spare them that,” Atsuko said, “since it’s still primarily speculation.”
Lakshmi laughed and wrinkled up her face.
“Less so every minute, unfortunately,” she said.
“But how do you know?” Roger asked.
“That’s a bit complex,” Lakshmi said, “and I don’t claim to be certain. My best guess is that while Jiro Yamaguchi was functioning as a distributed artificial consciousness, he came into contact with a distributed artificial unconsciousness.”
“The RATs, you mean?” Marissa speculated.
“No, no,” Lakshmi said, frowning deeply. “Something the RATs found already extant in the infosphere. A whole cyberspatial society, electronic life evolved from a virus program, inhabiting the human infosphere. Innumerable artificial lives trying to break through to the other side.”
Roger laughed abruptly. The others looked pointedly at him.
“All the Whos down in Whoville shouting We are here! We are here! We are here!” he explained. “But then how come they weren’t discovered?”
Lakshmi sighed.
“I know it sounds like wheels within wheels,” she said. “Part of it may have been that we weren’t looking for them—weren’t expecting something radically ‘other’ in machines of our own construction Part of it may have been that their ‘room’ normally has no doors into ours, no windows. I personally believe we didn’t ‘hear’ them when they pounded on the walls because all their attempts to contact us have been greeted as so-called glitches, bugs, errors, jokes, pranks.”
Roger still wasn’t convinced.
“How do you know this new layer, if that’s what it is, was around before?” he asked. “How do you know it hasn’t just come into existence since Yamaguchi beamed out?”
Lakshmi shook her head vehemently.
“Think of the years of supporting evidence,” she said. “Think of all the speculation that the infosphere has had its own quirky intelligence, if not consciousness, since the earliest days of the Internet—”
Atsuko had been glancing out the window at the comet which had come into view on her side of the craft as the shuttle maneuvered. Now she seemed struck by a sudden thought.
“Like a brain then,” she said. “The Yamaguchi construct would be the new brain, like the cerebral cortex. Ultimately not a rule governed machine. Through the networked distribution of the RATs, the Yama
guchi construct was connected to the entire infosphere, to the many but old-brain programmed ‘intelligences’ there, all still functioning within design parameters as rule-governed machinery, handling basic operations.”
“Exactly,” Lakshmi said, with a nod and a smile. “The layers together make up what some have called an ‘artificial brain’—the only structure capable of demonstrating artificial consciousness. The Yamaguchi construct, the RATs, and the deeper society of distributed artificial unconsciousness—together they formed something more than the sum of their parts. A society of Thought. An electronic ecology of Mind thinking. Not cyberspace, but info-jungle brainforest. Oversimplified, the lower layers are what Jung called ‘autonomous psychoid processes.’”
“Which are?” Roger asked.
“They come from the idea that each human consciousness contains many ‘selves,’ as it were,” Lakshmi said. “I spend most of my time working with complex yet still rule-governed machines. My mistake was in thinking of those ‘selves’ as subroutines, blocks of code usually subordinated to the authority and goals of the main program, the Self with a capital S. But the Self isn’t a program, and the psychoid processes aren’t just subroutines. Their relationship is a lot more complicated. Looked at from a deeper perspective, inexplicable errors are a sort of proof of at least some type of consciousness.”
Roger’s awareness of Lakshmi’s physical paralysis disappearing completely in his appreciation for the nimbleness of her mind.
“How’s that?” he asked quickly.
“Remember that consciousness is really the awareness that ‘I’ am aware,” she said. “Most of the time, even human beings aren’t conscious that way. If you were conscious that way while you were trying to ride a bike or play the piano, you’d fall off the bike or play the wrong notes. That’s exactly what some of the inexplicable infosphere glitches have been all along: something like consciousness flaring up.”
“Or something flaring up into consciousness?” Atsuko speculated.
“Right,” Lakshmi agreed, brightening. “Something interfering with the usual rule-governed, humdrum, programmed unconsciousness which is the status quo state of computers. Consciousness, in relation to the brain, exhibits a type of feedback layering we still can’t really approximate with any known machine system—at least not intentionally.”
A puzzled expression crossed Marissa’s face.
“When Jiro Yamaguchi’s construct disappeared, then,” she asked, “the RATs didn’t really disappear? And this distributed artificial unconsciousness—it’s still out there?”
Lakshmi nodded.
“The RATs went dormant,” she said. “They probably returned to wherever they’d been hiding since the Sedona disaster. The hive-like, social intelligence ‘lives’ in the infosphere, I think. Call it Deep Background, for lack of a better term. That intelligence would be even harder to find, since it’s thoroughly integrated into the matrix of the infosphere itself.”
Roger strained uneasily at the safety straps holding him in against the absence of gravity.
“But you believe that someone,” he began, “this infosphere killer, has found them both?”
Lakshmi nodded, then looked at each of them, in turn.
“Yes,” she said. “As Jiro earlier found them. A new construct wants to take up where Jiro Yamaguchi left off. A new consciousness, an individual ‘me’ space to which all the experience of the artificial global brain can happen—again.”
Marissa looked down, smiling wryly.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” she said.
Lakshmi, though, shook her head vigorously.
“This isn’t admiration or flattery,” she said. “This is jealousy, pure and simple. Envy of what Jiro Yamaguchi’s construct achieved. This is an attempt to do it again, but not the same. This new construct hasn’t gone through the psychomachia we saw with Jiro’s appearance. This one also appears not nearly so benevolent as Yamaguchi’s construct.”
Roger unconsciously stroked his beard, thinking.
“The waves of topo voyeur killings?” he asked, using the popular term for them that had come out of Earth’s varied media.
Again that vigorous shake of the head from Lakshmi.
“I think the killings, for all their brutality, are strictly small-time,” Lakshmi said. “A grotesque sideshow. Everted and eviscerated bodies are just the tip of what has to be a very big and very cold iceberg.”
Marissa frowned deeply, drumming her fingers on an armrest.
“Then what is all of that really about?” she asked.
“Those information pulses to that ‘comet’,” Lakshmi said, “and to several other regions in interplanetary space. That’s the main attraction. The killings are just part of a psychological defense-response, protecting that deeper project.”
Roger looked intently at the dark woman in bright clothes seated in the immobile hoverchair.
“What do you think that project might be?” he asked.
Lakshmi frowned.
“I only wish I knew,” she said, and fell silent.
Atsuko seemed surprised by the sudden quiet.
“I’m amazed, Lakshmi,” she said, a smile lurking just behind her lips. “I thought you of all people would never shy away from speculation.”
Lakshmi made a shrug confined to her eyebrows and the muscles of her face.
“Some speculations are too wild,” she said, “even for me.”
Roger glanced at Marissa, who looked nervous. He wondered what her future-reading talent was feeding her now—if it was feeding her anything—but he was hesitant to ask. The long quiet minutes stretched out, but he didn’t get a chance to inquire. He was caught up in his own thoughts, his own reading of the past.
It had occurred to Roger that the topo voyeur killer’s problem now was the inverse of what his own had been. In the days before the Light, he had been a social creature in denial, pathologically obsessed with flouting the rules of the social system in order to maintain his sense of himself as an individual. This killer, it seemed to him, was just the opposite—a profoundly asocial being hell-bent on “fitting in” by diffusing himself throughout the public sphere, subliming his ego to a nothing that could exist everywhere by existing nowhere. Almost a type of suicide, he thought. But every suicide is also a homicide. Psychologically speaking, he supposed every homicide could in some sense be a suicide too.
The transfer shuttle began to brake and the thick cylinder of HOME 2, tapered smoothly at its ends, came into view, glowing pearlescently in the light of sun and moon and stars.
Appropriate that Jhana Meniskos should live here, Roger thought. This habitat seemed to have been built with much more of an eye to the aesthetic niceties than HOME 1 had been. The clunkiness had been all sheathed over on this one, probably in the last hours before its official opening. That sort of streamlining would be easier to do here. HOME 2 had an active-surfaced “smart” macrostructure, built and maintained completely by micromachines.
After hearing what Lakshmi had had to say about the new consciousness in the infosphere, though, Roger suddenly developed a renewed fondness for the “dumb” and “static” structure of HOME 1—be it ever so humble and clunky.
* * * *
The apparition of his brother in virtual space had played on Ray’s mind from the moment he returned the satlink unit to its hiding place. Despite the risk of dangerous solitude to himself—and the fear that the pattern might betray his mission to the psiXtians—Ray had returned every day and activated the unit each time out. Since there was probably no one here who could explain what had happened to him, and certainly no one he felt safe confiding in, he had to figure out for himself what he’d experienced.
Once more he left his hole in the ground, running (or at least walking) the gauntlet of the psiXtian community and its beliefs as, making his way out, he traversed the sandstone and terra cotta-colored corridors of Sunderground.
“—Gödelian incompleteness means th
at creation, as a divine system, cannot be both complete and consistent. The universe must be either incomplete, or inconsistent—”
His footsteps sounded hollowly on the packed alluvial clay of the floor.
“—for decreasing voter turnout was that Democracy, even just plain representative government, was a form of ‘participation mystique’ which Americans came to believe in less and less. Members of disenfranchised groups tended to vote still less, because they saw even slimmer chance that their participation would have any real effect—”
Breezes, lost in the labyrinth, eddied about his face.
“—group identification. The limits of segregation defined the limits of toleration, and vice versa. The so-called political correctness movement was the flip-side of the hierarchical stereotyping it was intended to fight. Both approaches to difference relied on group markers for authority rather than on the specific qualities of the individual, ‘color of skin’ rather than ‘content of character’. Even that distinction was problematic, though, given that, for most ‘problems’ and ‘failings,’ the political Right of the time tended to emphasize individual responsibility and social non-responsibility, while the political Left often emphasized individual non-responsibility and social responsibility—”
Ancient history, Ray thought, shaking his head as he walked on at a more rapid pace. What possible relevance could it really have to the present?
“—recapitulates phylogeny, mythology recapitulates paleontology, psychology recapitulates mythology—”
Dappled sun shown down through the lightholes, cones of brighter light along his way ahead. Off to his left, Ray heard the voice of one of the old flaccid ashbacks lecturing a class, and he slowed his pace.
Standing Wave Page 34