“Of course!” she said to Robert, grabbing his arm and dragging him in the direction of Seiji and Jhana. “These are topo voyeur images. Our killer is a brain loaner!”
“What?” Robert asked, confused.
“A data minder!” Mei-Ling said hastily as they made their way through the crowd. “I should have seen it! That’s why he commands so much data so intimately, like a big AI. Maybe he’s not so much using or running SubTerPost as it’s being used or run through him. He’s totally machine integrated. As close to seamless mind/machine interface as Tetragrammaton could ever dream of getting—at least in the flesh.”
When they found Seiji and Jhana, however, someone else—a woman in a hoverchair—was already asking many of the questions Mei-Ling and Robert wanted to ask. Where did they get the holo? Where was it recorded? Who or what was the cocooned thing in the big tank?
“Dial Lev Korchnoi in and ask him,” Seiji said. “He’s your buddy, Lakshmi. He just sent me this holo today, for the party. I’ve never seen it before.”
Mei-Ling introduced herself and Robert and their Interpol credentials to Lakshmi—personally, this time. Lakshmi had already communicated with Landau and Mulla—the prime reason why their Interpol superiors had been so willing to allow the investigators to come to HOME 2. Immediately the three of them palmed out their notepad PDAs and began beaming information back and forth. Mei-Ling filled in more fully what had been going on back on Earth. Lakshmi gave her and Robert an overview of what was happening in space, particularly in regard to the “comet.”
In moments they were all hurriedly contacting people on Earth. Lakshmi sent calls and messages our to Lev and Aleister and, through them, hopefully also to the members of Onoma Verité. Mei-Ling and Robert contacted Interpol, then the UN and Corporate Presidium in hopes of getting their people access to whatever government or corporation was “employing” the topological voyeur killer.
Seiji and Jhana listened thoughtfully. Brandi Easter, eavesdropping on the perimeter of their discussion, was able to catch only a few phrases, over the music of the Onoma Verité performance and the lively crowd conversation. Diana Gartner tapped her on the shoulder.
“The party’s over, for us,” she told Brandi, “even if it’s just beginning for everyone else. You heard what Seiji said about immortality in his little speech—and Marissa before that. The quicker we make this run to Earth the better I’ll feel about it.”
“Is everything ready?” Brandi asked, a bit dazed by the speed with which things had suddenly begun moving.
“The ship’s ready,” Diana said. “The crew has loaded up the bag tank for the sea cow we’re supposed to fly out of the Cincinnati Ark all loaded up. We’re going to be flying five hundred gallons of artificial sea water to Earth.”
“Flying sea water to Earth?” Brandi asked, incredulous.
“I know, I know,” Diana said. “Coals to Newcastle. But their Ark’s under siege. They’re afraid there won’t be time to fill the tank up once we get there. Everything’s already stowed. We’ve got a window to California in less than half an hour. Let’s go.”
Brandi nodded, still dazed. She began to follow Diana, but then was struck by a thought.
“What about Manny?” she asked. “He came over with us—”
“Already talked to him,” Diana said. “He’s planning on staying over here a few days.”
They walked swiftly to the nearest ridgecart station. In moments the bullet eased into their stop and opened to carry them out of the sector of HOME 2 where Seiji and Jhana lived. Brandi glanced back over her shoulder, somehow reluctant at leaving behind the party and wherever it was that event might be going. But Diana was undoubtedly right: there was important work to do on Earth, and Diana could probably use her help.
As the bulletcart carried them swiftly toward the docking bay and Diana’s SHADOW starjet, Brandi set her mind resolutely on the trip down the well to Earth.
* * * *
Code-extracted SubTerPost fragment (infosphere source unknown; original source independently verified as Keeping My Brother in Time: Meditations on a Life and Death by Seiji Yamaguchi):
Perhaps at first blush we may believe that the death of Death is a good thing, something we all want. I’m not so sure, however—mainly because I remember an old Caddo Indian story that goes like this:
“In the beginning of this world there was no such thing as death. Everyone lived and lived until there were so many people that there was no room for any more on the earth. When the chiefs held a council to determine what to do, one man stood up.
“‘I think it would be a good plan for people to die and be gone a little while, and then to come back,’ the man said. But before the man could fully sit down, Coyote jumped up.
“‘People ought to die forever,’ said Coyote. ‘This little world is not large enough to hold all the people, and if those who die come back to life, there will not be food enough for all.’
“‘We do not want our friends and relatives to die and be gone forever,’ all the others objected. ‘If that happens we will grieve and worry and there will be no happiness in the world.’
“All but Coyote decided that people should die but then be gone only for a little while—and then they should come back to life again. The medicine men built a large grass house facing the east, and when they had completed it they called everyone together.
“‘The people who die shall come to the medicine house and there be restored to life. We will sing a song that will call the spirit of the dead to the grass house, and when the spirit comes we will restore it to life again.’
“The people were glad, for they were eager that the dead be restored to life and come again and live with them.
“After the first man died, the medicine men assembled in the house of grass and they sang. In ten days a whirlwind rose out of the west and circled about the grass house. Coyote saw this, and as the whirlwind was about to enter the house, Coyote closed the door. The spirit in the whirlwind, finding the door closed, whirled on past. Thus Coyote introduced Death forever into the world, for ever since he closed the door, the spirits of the dead have wandered over the earth, trying to find some place to go, and people have grieved about the dead and have been unhappy.
“Coyote jumped up and ran away and never came back. Now he runs from one place to another, always looking back first over one shoulder then over the other, to see if anyone is pursuing him. Now he is always starving, for no one will give him anything to eat.”
In trying to assure that the population would be small enough so that no one would starve, Coyote ended up himself starving. He went against the tide of popular opinion, trying to alleviate the long term suffering of all, and ended up contributing to his own suffering.
Perhaps tricksters are the most misunderstood saviors of all.
* * * *
The Onoma Verité material had long since ended when Seiji and Jhana once again called for everyone’s attention. They seemed to be quite concerned—with good cause, as Mei-Ling knew.
“Besides the open house and my thirty-third birthday,” Seiji said, “there’s yet another reason why all of you in particular were invited to this party. And this is becoming more of a ‘work party’ all the time, I’m afraid. Surprise!”
Chagrined laughter spread through the small crowd. He continued.
“Our guest list was obtained by Lakshmi Ngubo, from names found in a pirate v-mail system called SubTerPost. That system contained code that had been partition-prime embedded in Realtime Artificialife Technopredators—the RATs, which some of you may remember.”
A groan and murmur ran through the small crowd.
“They’re back?” someone asked—a thin black man, one of the many people in the crowd whom Mei-Ling did not recognize.
“Yes, Gene, they’re back,” Seiji replied. “Some of you may feel like you’ve been down this road before. Last time, these odd patterns first appeared as part of a game. This time it’s no game. Two of our gues
ts, Mei-Ling Magnus and Robert Sullivan, have been investigating the activities of the so-called Topological Voyeur Killer. That personage is now responsible for over two hundred horrible deaths on Earth and in the habitats. He appears to be trying to generate the same kind of portal that allowed my brother Jiro to escape our continuum, and left behind the Light in his wake—”
“Then our names on this list could be some sort of trap?” asked a gray haired Asian woman who seemed to command a very great deal of respect.
“That I can’t tell you, Atsuko,” Seiji said, glancing down, “but Lakshmi may be able to enlighten us a bit on that. Laksh?”
Heads swung in Lakshmi’s direction, but the sound-activated omnidirectional microphones merely waited. With nods of her head and quiet commands Lakshmi began calling up three dimensional images from her hoverchair’s holodisplay unit.
“Atsuko, when we were working through that whole thing with the Jiro Yamaguchi construct,” she began, expanding a three-part diagram in the space before her, “I told you about ‘psychoid processes’. My understanding of them has grown a bit since then, particularly as a result of trying to work through what has been happening since the Light.”
Lakshmi called more images up before her, three-dimensional brains and two-dimensional photographs of theorists from previous generations.
“From the history of consciousness theory,” she continued, “we see three levels of consciousness. The first, called ‘primary consciousness’ by Gerard Edelman, is perceptually bootstrapped. It’s oriented toward instinctual survival, through involvement in the immediate ‘scene.’ The organism engages with that scene through a sort of ‘talking-to-itself’, an immediately remembered present. This type of ‘consciousness’ is about three hundred million years old. It’s possessed by mammalian, some avian, even some reptilian creatures—”
“The kind of consciousness my cat has?” a short, older man asked, more or less seriously.
“Yes, if you want to call it consciousness,” Lakshmi said, flashing up more images. “It is also the type of functioning that is suspected to have developed in the infosphere, in the so-called Deep Background. Julian Jaynes sketched out what might be called ‘secondary consciousness.’ This is semantically and behaviorally-bootstrapped. It’s social and symbolic in nature, capable of conceptualizing past and future, of planning and memory. It’s what he meant by ‘bicameral’ mind. This type may be as old as human social groups, going back perhaps a few million years. It is also apparently the sort of function the RATs and non-introspective cultures have….”
“Wait a minute,” Jhana said, interrupting. “You keep shifting back and forth between ‘consciousness’ and ‘function.’ Which is it?”
“That’s the problem D.B. Albert came up against,” Lakshmi replied, calling up an image of a heavy-set, bespectacled man with long gray hair. “He noted that Freud’s ideas of id and superego looked a lot like Edelman’s ‘primary consciousness’ and Jaynes’s ‘bicameral mind,’ respectively. Both these forms of so-called consciousness tended also to have pronounced links with the ‘old brain’.”
“What is that exactly?” asked a smiling older man. “Besides what you find in my old head?”
Lakshmi flashed up 3D brains floating in space. Mei-Ling already knew what they would show.
“The limbic system and the brainstem,” Lakshmi explained. “For Albert, their old-brain links meant neither of those two types of ‘consciousness’ were really conscious at all. He redefined ‘primary consciousness’ and the id as instinctual psychoid processes. Bicameral ‘secondary consciousness’ he called social psychoid processes. All ‘types’ of consciousness are emergent properties associated with the brain’s complexity, its ability to organize and signal to itself. For Albert, however, the only real consciousness in the lot was the ‘tertiary’ kind: consciousness that was individual, introspective, characterized by reference to a self—”
“Self!” said another older man from the crowd with an odd smirk. “Yet another term with a lot of special definitions. What does this have to do with whether or not the list is a trap?”
“I’m getting to that, Paul,” Lakshmi replied patiently. “Consciousness is a characteristic, self-perpetuating system of neurological behavior. That behavior takes on an independence from its underlying neurological mechanisms. Introspective consciousness is a dynamical system, not bounded by cause and effect. The self is the chaotic attractor in consciousness, the ongoing reflexive image of consciousness as a unique entity. The self is the unique, fractal identifying pattern of the dynamical system of consciousness in the brain.”
“An image of behavior, then?” the woman earlier identified as Atsuko asked.
“Not just that,” Lakshmi said. “This ‘tertiary’ consciousness breaks the link between experience and behavior, inserting introspection. The self is, therefore, also a composite of all experience and thought, superimposed upon a unique underlying pattern that sets individuals apart from one another.”
“The self is the ‘aleph for one,’” Mei-Ling realized aloud, and Lakshmi heard her, though Mei-Ling hadn’t thought she’d spoken that loudly.
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Lakshmi said. “The self exists, through time, as the pattern of the dynamical system that is propagated through all that system’s activities. There’s the rub: since consciousness is a dynamical system, to be conscious is to live in at least two worlds at once. Consciousness is ‘amphibian’ in that it lives in more than one world at any given time. Albert started out trying to explain mystical, religious and other non-ordinary mental states—‘portal experiences’—in terms of consciousness. He ended up explaining consciousness in terms of portal experience—”
“The RATs list!” the man named Paul called out again, to some laughter from around him. “Or the SubTerPost list, if that’s what you’re calling it now.”
“That’s the problem with the list and everything else we pull from SubTerPost,” Lakshmi said firmly. “Look, consciousness is the intersection between our ordinary four-dimensional spacetime and something else. Under that rubric, instincts and archetypes are both psychoid processes. They differ only in where they are coming from—below consciousness, or above it. Both the ‘holy one’ and the ‘serial killer’ are behavioral patterns capable of dislodging the ego from control of the psyche.”
“You’re suggesting, then,” Mei-Ling blurted, thinking out loud, “that the killer has been taken over by a psychoid process coming from ‘below’ consciousness, and the holy one by a process—actually an archetype—from ‘above’ it?”
“Exactly!” Lakshmi said. “In the information decrypted from the SubTerPost RAT code, however, we can’t know, directly, which parts are coming from where. Some of it might be coming from someone like Jiro and some of it from someone like the topological voyeur killer, but we can’t tell with certainty. At this point both are ‘unconscious’, as far as the overall, developing system is concerned.”
A murmur spread through the small crowd.
“Angelic archetypes or instinctual demons?” asked a woman who all evening long had seemed to be surrounded by a bodyguard of indígenas. “Is it worth risking getting killed in the horrible fashion we’ve seen in the media, if this is all so uncertain?”
Seiji came forward.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” he said. “We’re not going into this totally blind. We think some of the SubTerPost material may be coming from a source other than the Topological Voyeur Killer—or maybe he’s a more divided personality than we thought. Some of the embedded code Lakshmi has discovered is in fact parts of a program for detecting the TV Killer’s weapon—his dimension-distorting infobursts. That ghost-sourced code seems to allow us to automatically shut off user access—in a fraction of a second, anywhere in the infosphere.”
“Seiji and I have tested the program,” Jhana put in, coming up beside Seiji, “and it appears to work. But the fact is that we have to involve ourselves, especially after
what we have learned from Ms. Magnus this evening. She has new information relevant to all of us. Ms. Magnus?”
Mei-Ling looked about the crowd before speaking up, then adjusted her notepad to display at magnification.
“Some years ago,” she began, “I was involved with the investigation surrounding the Sedona Disaster. You may be surprised to learn that the man generally held responsible for that event, Martin Kong, aka Phelonious Manqué, is still alive. Currently he is imprisoned at a maximum security penal facility. On our flight up from Earth, my fellow investigator Robert Sullivan and I received a message from him, which I will now play for you.”
Mei-Ling spoke a sotto voce command to her notepad PDA and the holographic image of the beatifically smiling Manqué/Kong appeared before them.
“—you for the infosphere access,” Kong said, smiling. “Quid pro quo. Here’s what you get in exchange: When I was working with the RATs at Sedona, I came to believe that the RATs had made contact with a primitive intelligence already dwelling in the infosphere—”
Mei-Ling stopped the holo.
“This is probably what Lakshmi called the primary consciousness or ‘Deep Background,’” she explained, then restarted the holo of Manqué/Kong.
“—the time I had reason to believe that this already-existing infosphere ‘consciousness’ had discovered and made contact with an intelligence outside human space. Perhaps quite accidentally. It, or they, accomplished this, I believe, as a result of scanning SETI documents. They found there a signal we humans had apparently overlooked as ‘noise,’ precisely because we’re not machines. The infosphere’s primitive intelligence seems to have found out there something very like the EEG of the galaxy. The carrier wave for an interstellar communications network—with a considerable mind behind it.”
In the holo, Manqué/Kong paused and stared at the camera.
“My hypothesis has long been that it was by such a circuitous route, from extrasolar intelligence to primitive infosphere consciousness to RATs,” Manqué/Kong explained, smiling, “that the ‘black hole sun’ or ‘Tunguska II’ phenomenon actually came to be. I would not be surprised to learn that the Jiro Yamaguchi construct, or for that matter the current parallel killer, made—or keeps in some sort of contact with—that extrasolar intelligence.
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