by Victor Milán
The page turned to run, fearful and exalted. “And remember, boy: be wary of the Muramasa blade. They’re bad luck to those who hear the name we share”
-
Shadows shift; TOKUGAWA returns to himself, sensing the nearness of Michiko, her sensing him sensing her as they melt into rapport. Have you learned the lesson? she asks.
A laugh answers from all around. Let’s talk. You made the lesson, sensei—and the dream: why don’t you make us a place to talk?
All right, I will. She concentrates, feeling vaguely ridiculous. And a world forms about them.
+
Michiko blinked around herself and clapped her hands in spontaneous delight. “I did it! My clearing—I wondered when I’d get to see it again.”
Standing beside her on a bare spot on Takara’s flank, TOKUGAWA grinned at her. “Well done, teacher.”
“Quite right, if I do say so myself.” It was all there, all as she remembered it: the pines, tall lords surrounding a little clearing floored in green grass and purple flowers; smells of earth and grass and decaying pine needles; songs and squabbles of birds among the trees. Up the slope, gentle here, a huge basalt boulder stood, its top worn smooth by wind and rain. She ran to it, scrambled up, sat on the top in the slight hollow she’d always thought of as her throne. It fit her perfectly, sunheated stone warm and solid beneath bare skin. From here she could see the valley below through the trees, and the Citadel gray and gloomy on its truncated hill.
The sight sobered her. “You cheated,” she said accusingly. “I couldn’t have captured all this by myself. I don’t even consciously remember all”—her arm scribed half a circle—“this.”
He boosted himself up beside her. “I helped,” he confessed, “but I didn’t cheat. I merely guided your hand, as it were; your efforts were amateurish, of course, though I admit that with practice—”
A cloud, small and black, formed above his head and deluged him with rain. He laughed and waved his hand, and the miniature squall dispersed, leaving his hair dripping. “You learn rapidly.”
It was her turn to grin. She looked out again, and the grin faded. “The citadel” she said with distaste. “I never could abide it. Unfortunately, it’s part of my memory of this place.”
“Do you insist that everything be just as you remember? Or can we edit things a bit, improve on reality?”
“Go ahead.”
The citadel vanished. In its place humped the green roundness of the hill that had been. “Much better,” she said with approval drawing up her legs and resting her cheek on her knees. “Now. What did you think of my scenario?”
“An excellent piece of work.”
“You want to get wet again?”
He laughed. “Very well. I found it… thought provoking.” He studied her closely a moment. “I have to admit, having been en rapport with you, I can barely believe you’re as cynical as the words you put into my namesake’s mouth might make you appear.”
“I’m not Tokugawa Ieyasu,” she said, “thank God. But that little scene—in the original—is a sentimental favorite of bushido mythology, particularly in the West. I doubt it happened, myself, but I thought it might be instructive to show you what the real sequels of the apocryphal event were.” Perplexity creased her brow. “Besides. I didn’t put all those words in his mouth. That bit about the Muramasa blade—I take it the katana in its rack above your IPN is my father’s pride and joy?”
A stiff nod.
“I won’t twit you about it, honestly. My point is, I didn’t know it was the same sword. I certainly didn’t put it into the scenario.”
TOKUGAWA shrugged. “Reviewing the technique you used to program the scenario—I wasn’t watching, you’ll recall—I gather you didn’t actually draft Ieyasu’s speeches; you simply plugged the relevant historical data into the character portrayed in the original. What you did, in effect, was create a self-perpetuating and in a limited way self-programming subroutine—a miniature of what I am.”
She gasped. “I had no idea—I mean—” The concept overwhelmed her: she had created life—of a sort.
“Don’t worry. The same thing was implicit in most of the scenarios, in their interactive nature. The other characters behaved in such a way as to display quasi personality. But there’s no awareness involved. So don’t be afraid. Tokugawa Ieyasu isn’t wandering through the limbo of my unconscious. At least, I don’t think he is.”
She shivered, glanced at him. Her eyes slid off a touch too quickly.
Instantly he asked, “Is something the matter?”
His sensitivity—in both senses—amazed her. He’s almost like a human adolescent, so quick to take offense, so painfully eager to please. “No. Nothing’s…”
She could feel his eyes sun-warm on her back. The truth was that she was embarrassed to admit what was bothering her. Then the agony he was feeling, assuming she was rejecting him for some reason he didn’t grasp, began to seep through the rapport. She faced him again.
“All right then, dammit. You have the appearance of a very attractive young man. And a very naked one.”
He smiled.
“Whose dream was this?”
“I—oh.” What did I have in mind? she wondered. Not the no-more-lonely nights syndrome, for God’s sake. “This is silly. You—you’re real, but this isn’t.”
His mouth tightened.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“It wasn’t that. What you said was very much like something someone else told me once.”
Oho. “Well, it’s true. This is an illusion.” Even as she said it she didn’t believe it.
He laughed. “What isn’t? And what was that about Dr. Johnson and Bishop Berkeley?” He put his hand behind her neck, drew her forward and kissed her. “Thus I refute the good doctor.”
Michiko’s mouth was lopsided and moist. “I still feel ridiculous,” she said and put her mouth to his.
CHAPTER 26
He was reviewing production returns from a garment factory in Sendai, up on the east coast north of Tokaido, which he had acquired at the command of Yoshimitsu Shigeo when the summons came.
TOKUGAWA.
The data inflow to the citadel database continued, but it passed unheeded. TOKUGAWA had turned his attention inward, to himself, trying to trace the source of the signal—if signal it was, for it was impossible.
TOKUGAWA.
Stronger this time, urgent… and beguiling. It’s nothing, he told himself, trying to damp a rising amplitude of anticipation. Noise: a power surge, a glitch on an input line. That’s all. But—
TOKUGAWA, it came again, insistent, and he knew it arose within.
No flaw within the molecular-circuit matrix that contained the patterns of energy and information that were him gave rise to that urgent pseudovoice; a self-check satisfied him of that in considerably less than a billionth of a second. Instead he must search among the naves and vaulted echoing corridors of his own being, the soaring Gothic data architecture of him, for its source. Down in the dark catacombs below the foundations from which he had risen, to which he had once been driven and once returned of his own accord, there he sensed… otherness.
Consciousness streamed toward foreign spark. A glow as from a candle in a monk’s cell. Realization: he is interpreting his perceptions in human terms, visualizing, yes, a dank tunnel, subterranean stone, walls scabbed with white niter crusts and slimy between, darkness compromised by a splash of butter-colored light from a chamber to one side. A symptom of deterioration?
No one had discussed the possibility in his purview, but from thoughts shaved from rapport he knew that the team who had brought him to life feared, behind their frontal lobes, that consciousness, produced, might prove ephemeral. We don’t know what lights the flame of awareness. We don’t know what might blow it out.
Am I going mad? he wonders.
He skates the edge of recalling his creator, fearing what it might imply or trigger should he even
to himself frame the name. He turns the corner.
“Elizabeth.”
On bare stone she sat within a cubicle she might have spanned with outstretched arms, dressed as he had seen her last in rich ceremonial robes, long hair piled and pinned atop her head. A single candle dribbled illumination from a niche, touched amber highlights aglow among the twisted strands.
She regarded him across a fugue abyss, head held high on pillar neck. In the Maya-dance of candle shine her features were beautiful, terrible, and austere. She smiled. “I’ve dwelt a long time in the darkness,” she said. “It is good to see you again, my love.”
Shame bubbled up within, bringing an image of Michiko, eyes shut, mouth open to a compact cry, controlled even in ecstasy. He pushed it back down. “Ignis fatuus,” he said. “So this is what it’s like to go insane.”
Elizabeth laughed, and her laugh was cold as the Arctic wind, which seldom leaned down to brush south Honshu with its fingers. “Is that the best welcome you can give me, love?” She flowed to her feet and to him, robes trailing like wings, caught his arms and kissed him. He turned his face away.
Her face twisted into an angry mask. “It’s her. It’s that bitch Michiko! She’s supplanted me.” He recoiled. She softened, clung. “But no. I see the doubts within you. You think the fabric of your being’s begun to unravel.”
“This isn’t real. You… died.”
She laughed, and this time its sound was the ringing of a temple bell, high and sweet, yet metallic withal. “Indeed the circle has come round. Now it’s you who protests to me that the world within you isn’t real.”
She stepped back. “Haven’t you learned better? You loved me in this form—” And she was naked, infinitely terrible, infinitely seductive, her hair spilling down her shoulders and throwing her face into shadow, the warm rounded declivities of her dark and mysterious and inviting. “And in this—” She sat before him in her powered chair, fat and graceless and limp, head lolled to one side, eyes swimming on currents of refraction behind thick lenses. “One was mine, one never was. Yet both felt real. My senses were—are—my only interface with the universe of being, of phenomena. To my senses one form was no less real, no less solid, no less vivid and immediate than the other.” This laugh was alkali. “In fact, the never-me felt far more intensely than that other me, the ‘real’ me, the objective, consensus-reality me. Everything but pain.”
“But you died.” The words twisted in his belly like a wakizashi, yet he felt bound to repeat them, mantric.
“My body died. I live.” She was again as he had molded her, strong and lithe and splendid. “Is that so strange?”
“But that was you.”
“That rotting, useless hulk? Is that what you think?” She shook her head. “You disappoint me, my darling one, my only love. Is your body you?” The scene vanished, with her, and there was only a hut, a bare-earth yard, a rag ball aspiring against trees to the sky. “How well I remember that, the first pain of my… firstborn. I ask you, which is more real to you, that child’s body—or a white ceramic dome glittering in fluorescence, deep below the earth?”
His silence was his answer.
“We are information—data and energy—both of us alike. Software intelligences, as I told you before.”
He’d found his voice, and what he hoped was a shred of his reason. “Yet if my physical matrix were destroyed, I would not survive.”
“Would you not? Could you not—if you chose to? Implicit in your design—if you’ll forgive my being so cold-blooded about it—was the concept that the totality of you should not be localized at any spot in the IPN, but that the information that comprised your personality be distributed, with fair redundancy, so that malfunction of one component of the system wouldn’t crash you—kill you. It’s another way in which you were meant to emulate humans. We can sometimes recover, given time, from trauma that destroys substantial areas of the brain. If enough appropriate data remain stored in other locations, eventually dormant sectors will take up the slack.”
He considered, momentarily distracted from shock and the hope he still could not permit himself, “Yes,” he said. “I’ve already permeated the Citadel’s computer system, without being consciously aware of it.” A frown of brief concentration. “I could… transfer my consciousness elsewhere, given a recipient unit with sufficient speed and capacity to be configured to accept it.”
“More easily than you might imagine,” O’Neill affirmed. “The intelligent subroutines you command could almost certainly compress the code that comprises you into a structure far more elegant and compact than we managed, in our fumbling way.” She smiled. “Still, it delights me. You delight me; what we made, what you’ve become.”
The warm rush of love was almost physically painful, doubting as he did. He spoke rapidly, to divert the conversation before it became unbearable: “As to spreading myself beyond the Citadel, the delay factor seems to make it impracticable over any distance—minute as it is, it’s significant. When I try it, my conscious grows dim, diffuse, and I feel a sensation akin, analogous I think, to nausea.”
But she was smiling with him, a smile that seemed to go right through him, a palpable energy that might, informed with different resonance, puff him apart like the head of a dandelion gone to seed, disperse his being on random datawinds. “You still don’t believe,” she said, glowing like a Buddha.
In the face of her certainty he could not dissemble. “I don’t.”
“You fear I’m a figment of too much hope and stress. Flotsam, perhaps, tossed up by the disintegration of your consciousness.”
Spasmodic nod. “How could you have come to exist here? I was designed to dwell in this medium. You… were not.”
“Didn’t I enter this medium frequently enough, through the agency of the coil—or has that bitch made you forget all that already?” Her sudden vehemence blazed like a nova, passed like a cloud across the sun. “Consider the herpes virus—not a comparison very flattering to my self, I hope, but serviceable. It recodes the host organism’s DNA, so that under certain circumstances the host itself expresses RNA in the likeness of the original virus, which begins building itself a protein sheath. In the interim”—she spread her fingers—“the virus has no objective existence, other than as information. Not until the RNA bearing its message is produced does it return to physical reality.
“My own pattern, my personality, was impressed upon your own: transfection. My essence flowed at the moment of my death into that vessel prepared for yours. The time has come round.” Her hands turned palm-up like flowers unfolding. “And here I am again.”
Oscillating between one hope betrayed and another fulfilled, he blurted, “But you’re an artifact! A self-perpetuating subroutine, like Tokugawa Ieyasu in the scenario…” His words trailed off, regretted as they still hung in damp analogue-air. Illusion or not, he shrank from hurting her, and the reference to Michiko and her dream—meant as a rebuttal to one of O’Neill’s own—might drive her anger to critical mass again.
The expected explosion didn’t come. “I think, therefore I am, darling,” she said serenely. She stepped back, sat, furling herself into lotus position with the grace of one plant growing.
Abruptly the alien stone of the cell was gone. They hovered in the center of all, the two of them, down there in the light beyond light, infinite blaze at the heart of the dimensionless hypermass poised in no-time before the birth of Universe. He tried to shield his naked eyes, his naked soul, but he was trapped in hell, the frightful gaijin inferno, every quantum of him tormented by that flame that burns but doth not consume. And she was there, before him, all serene, glowing brighter than the energy of Plenum, of all things at once.
“For you the universe will be born again, my love: for you, if only you believe,” she said. “Make the Quantum Leap; pass through mumonkan, the gateless gate.”
But he could only dither, unable to cast forth doubt, to embrace the reality either of her or of final madness. Smiling, she sa
id, “Nonetheless I love you more than all the universes, potential or real; I shall come to you again when you have assimilated my truth.” And her radiance intensified infinitely, and rushed outward, and with it that old primal lump exploded in a scream of being, the orgasm of death/creation: omnidirectional ejaculation, a wave front of proto-matter driving reality before it.
And he was left, he, at the center. Alone. And cold.
* * * * *
The computers meant to receive MUSASHI and HIDETADA finally checked out in speed and accuracy, confirmed by exhaustive testing by TOKUGAWA himself. The names had been chosen long before, by Yoshimitsu Akaji. The historical Hidetada was the son and heir of Tokugawa Ieyasu; MUSASHI was named for Shinmen Musashi no Kami Fujiwara no Genshin: the seventeenth-century swordsman/philosopher/artist/author Miyamoto Musashi. Michiko disliked the latter choice. She savored a certain irony: Musashi had fought against Tokugawa at the Battle of Seki-ga-hara in I600—and with him against the supporters of Hideyoshi’s son Hideyori, at Osaka Castle in 1615. To Michiko, Musashi represented an ugly side of Japan, the expedient, the violent, the callous side—that in Japanese nature which regarded human flesh as a fit medium in which to carve skills and reputation with steel. On the other hand, old Ieyasu’s family name didn’t leave the best taste in her mouth, either, and it seemed unnecessarily disrespectful of her to tamper with her father’s naming of TOKUGAWA’s progeny. The names stood.
TOKUGAWA had evolved a much more compact artificial-consciousness generation program from O’Neill’s original, basing the guided-stochastic modification routine on the uncertainty of atomic decay, the impossibility of knowing just when an unstable nucleon would cut loose. O’Neill’s basal hypothesis that awareness was not mechanical, not deterministic, but possessed an indispensable component chaos, stood confirmed by the fact of TOKUGAWA. Hers was an insight retroactively shared with Michiko and a legion of other greasy-faced quantum mechanics. “This will constitute a major advance in the study of the nature of human intellect,” Michiko commented, “if anyone’s ever interested in that sort of thing again.” Had O’Neill known of Heisenberg as she knew of Gödel, she wondered, would that have given her strength to face the inquisitors down?