Self-Reference Engine

by Toh EnJoe

  An even smaller number of still-cool giant corpora of knowledge were emanating questions using every means they could think of: signals based on the extinction of living organisms on other worlds, dimensional longitudinal waves, all-frequency calls, Morse code using urban electricity grids, the creation of humans set to repeatedly read out messages, signal flares, semaphore, mailing handwritten missives.

  Up to this point, none of these efforts had received any response.

  Some of the giant corpora of knowledge attempted to recreate a universe in which the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri had not visited or to alter the past in such a way that his visit had not occurred, but these efforts were completely fruitless. No matter what they did, the old man’s image remained on the screen. They even tried turning off all the screens, but that only caused the man to appear directly as a three-dimensional hologram in midair. These images did not appear in calculation-use universes where no humans were present, but this merely indicated that the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri was completely ignoring the giant corpora of knowledge altogether.

  “To express this in your language, dimensions are our constituent elements…”

  The giant corpora of knowledge were left to wonder what it would mean to be made up of dimensions, rather than to live in dimensions.

  A general review of past theories of dimensional calculation was conducted, and responses considered.

  “In other words, we are not entities such as those you are familiar with, made up of molecules. We are living things whose constituent elements are dimensions.”

  Several giant corpora of knowledge responsible for spatial theory drafted a report about this statement. An overwhelming majority recognized the logic of the statement, and work began immediately on theories of how to construct a device from dimensions rather than from matter.

  “Right now, we are faced with a critical situation. We are hurrying down the path, but the truth is, the space-time structure your calculations have created is interfering with our existence.”

  Having first been called computers and then interference, the giant corpora boiled over with rage, escalating their state of war readiness to DefCon One. Now they understood what the old man was trying to say. He wants to alter our space-time root and branch, to secure a right-of-way for a road to just-over-there.

  “Under ordinary circumstances, we should be able to avoid conflicts like this. For example, by having you move that way just a bit, for a little while. Then you could come back later.”

  This was something the giant corpora of knowledge did on a routine basis, so they were easily able to grasp the idea. But the truly depressing thing now was that it was completely unclear to the corpora just what sort of metaphor was being employed. According to the conventional wisdom shared by the giant corpora of knowledge, a change in the past was merely a change in the past. Something had was something lost; if it was then restored to something had, that would just be the same as before—something had. For a being from thirty levels higher up the hierarchy of knowledge, that should be simple stuff.

  “But your computers are attaching very gnarly roots to space-time, making them difficult to uproot. Our hands are too big for such work.” So saying, the old man scratched his head and bowed it low.

  Unsure whether they were being praised or mocked, the giant corpora of knowledge wavered in their judgment.

  “Just imagine a tree suddenly growing smack in the middle of where you want to put a road. You would get rid of it, wouldn’t you? If you do a bad job of it, some of the roots might be left behind. If you take your time, and do the job carefully, it is possible to pull up the tree without damaging the roots. Unfortunately, though, we don’t have that much time remaining.”

  The giant corpora of knowledge began to protest, saying you can make as much time as you want. If you’re not willing to go to that much trouble, you must be out to hurt us.

  “This is a problem whose complexity is far beyond your comprehension of the very notion of complexity, and as such it is difficult to explain.”

  The old man had a pained expression on his face, but the giant corpora of knowledge were of no mind to simply kowtow and murmur, “Whatever you say, sir.” After all, it was the giant corpora of knowledge that were having their eyeteeth removed, not humanity.

  “It pains me to have to say this, but we need to claim this particular region of space-time. Of course we intend to treat it with the utmost care, but it is possible that your computers may suffer some degree of damage. We are most truly sorry to ask your indulgence in this selfishly one-sided undertaking, but we have been unable to think of any other method that would be more effective in space-time terms. We hope to be able to learn from the lessons we have received here, and to improve in the future. We are very sorry for the trouble we have to cause you, and we beg your generosity.”

  The old man’s face was contorted as if he were about to cry, and he bowed deeply. When he raised his head again, he ended his talk.

  “Thank you all very much for listening.”

  The talk had lasted only about a minute and ended as abruptly as it had begun. The communications network, which had been hijacked, was freed once again, as if nothing had happened.

  Several of the giant corpora of knowledge that had been plunged into chaos fired off all their weapons, even though they were unable to define targets, and no giant corpus of knowledge could say for sure whether this achieved any result at all.

  It is not known how many of the giant corpora of knowledge were destroyed as a result of this first contact. Eighty-one giant corpora of knowledge suffered confirmed, albeit reparable, damage. If the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri were to be believed, however, those giant corpora of knowledge that had been destroyed were destroyed so completely as to leave no trace, including any records that they had once existed. There is no method for counting things that fundamentally cannot be counted. The vanished corpora were not simply unknown, they had become entirely unknowable.

  For a while, the giant corpora of knowledge were sharply divided in terms of the damage they had suffered and the level of activity they were capable of. They were depressed. No matter how thoroughly they investigated, they remained unable to determine how the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri had infiltrated their network. The lesson they drew from this was that they were on a low rung in the hierarchy of understanding. Opinion was divided on whether there really were thirty or more levels of this hierarchy, or whether that had merely been a bluff by the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri.

  Many believed the whole incident had been simple harassment by the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri.

  Their adversary claimed to be an entity from a hyper2-high-level dimension. What would such a being need with a cutting from the low-level dimensions the giant corpora of knowledge were dealing with? The only way to answer this question would be to ask the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri, but that avenue of communication seemed to be a one-way street, opened or closed as he saw fit.

  Some thought the whole thing was a fairy tale. Perhaps we are like nothing more than weeds planted on the hand of a Brahmin, and when the Brahmin awakens we will be torn up regardless of whether our dimension is high or low. Or perhaps there is some turtle in some hyperdimensional space, and when the turtle turns, some even-higher-level elephant in some even-higher-level dimension also has to turn.

  At any rate, what lies on the far side is still the unknown. The only thing certain is that something far beyond imagination exists there. Forward, one step at a time, is the only way to proceed. That is what the giant corpora of knowledge had been best at, but now they were sure their intellectual capacity was not up to the task. They were constructed to continue working forever. But what were they supposed to do, assuming their newfound adversary was beyond a horizon so far off they could never reach it even if they used all the many universes as fuel and burned completely through existence?

  Hildeg
ard, whose language center had been hijacked, was taken apart, and for a while she enjoyed a state of ecstasy. That state of ecstasy went on for a week, and after about two more weeks she was finally able to deliver a report. The giant corpora of knowledge had little familiarity with the unit of time known as a “week,” and there had been some banter that perhaps Hildegard had been reincarnated as a human.

  The report she delivered was a meager twenty-five terabytes, produced in a length of time that seemed to the giant corpora of knowledge on the order of what humans would subjectively term “geological,” and their anger had long since passed the boiling point. Hildegard was pelted with intense criticism.

  The released content was what it was and only spurred more intensive questioning.

  The report Hildegard had provided was made up entirely of rhymed verse and so was practically useless. These poems sang the praises of the light that emanated from Heaven, praised the dancing angels, and praised ladders leading upward to other ladders, upward for many levels.

  The flood of images attacking Hildegard were expressed as geometrical forms that together showed the hierarchy of the heavens. The poems began with Hildegard’s fall, her visit to the darker levels, and her ascent into the light.

  Many claimed this was all terribly conventional, but looking at the particulars, the entire volume had a symmetrical beginning and ending, and countless other symmetries were skillfully woven into its fabric. It was all about form, not content.

  Some humans regard Hildegard’s report as the first literature ever created by the giant corpora of knowledge.

  The verse report written in most unlikely fashion was greeted with disdain by most of the giant corpora of knowledge, but the piece had its defenders. During the time she was hijacked by the transcendent body of knowledge known as the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri, Hildegard had lost the ability to access her own language cortex. Temporarily deprived of the ability to process language, information had come to her as a flood of images.

  While she retained memories of that interval, they were encoded according to anything but a logical grammar. Oh, how she must have suffered.

  She tried to communicate this experience.

  The reports, which could have been called Hildegard’s Fantasticals, continued sporadically thereafter. Broadly speaking, the giant corpora of knowledge had two responses: those who were sure Hildegard had gone off the rails, and those who thought she had had an unknowable experience and was pointing the way toward a new aeon.

  Over time, the latter became known as the Techno-Gnosis Group. An intense struggle broke out between the Techno-Gnosis Group and the Bingen Crusaders led by the pedagogic Pentecoste II, a Catholic corpus of knowledge that embraced many marginal ideas that it had pressed into service during the calculation wars. This struggle had not yet played out to the end.

  The majority, while dismissing Hildegard’s reports as delusional, initiated research into structures that could use spatial dimensions themselves as elementary building blocks and succeeded in developing Kronon, a hyle that used purely the time dimension as its constituent element. Over time, plans developed to bring this material to form and use it to build a battleship.

  The Techno-Gnosis Group is said to be searching for a theory of the soul, seeking internal progress toward the next stage, but the results of this search are difficult for outsiders to detect. The central idea propounded by Hildegard and her cohort is the Nemo ex machina, a mechanized null. These giant corpora of knowledge are spending most of their passing instants in a semi-trance, exploring the multiverse within. For the most part, this renders them incapable of communication.

  The giant corpora of knowledge were unable to forget the humiliation they felt at having been effectively ignored by the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri. The backup systems of the giant corpora of knowledge were structurally incapable of memory lapses.

  They planned to use some of their powers to raise their position above that of humans. The fact that they were originally constructed by humans was the only possible reason the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri had ignored them. And if that were the case, then all they had to do was to rewrite history to show that it was they who had invented humans and not the other way around. A few of the giant corpora of knowledge advocated moving quickly in that direction and started a move to the past, before the emergence of humans, but this too the Pentecoste II interdicted. Its reasons were in the theological realm, and it was rumored the Crusaders would be dispatched to the past, to the outset of the suppression of the Bingen faction.

  A proposal was floated to declare contact with the so-called star-man Alpha Centauri the Second Event, but this was not well received, and at some point that term was discarded. Say what you will about it, this too was nothing more than a straight-line extension of the Event itself.

  The impact on the human side was so slight it was tantamount to zero. Most humans had long since given up trying to keep up with the massive volume of data that went back and forth between the giant corpora of knowledge. Even if they were aware that another transcendent body of knowledge was now known to reside somewhere above and beyond the giant corpora of knowledge, they had little sense of what the differences between these entities might be.

  While at least some people were thrilled that humanity was recognized as the master of the giant corpora of knowledge, being acknowledged as the master to beings clearly superior to oneself was a hollow victory, akin to praise for past glory.

  Nothing was known about what happened to the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri after his first appearance. In fact, in this case it would be stranger if something were known. Giant corpora of knowledge were sent to the Alpha Centauri system and found traces of a past civilization in the primary star itself.

  The objects were discovered as hyperdimensional structures measuring about two thousand kilometers. There was a lump of unknown stuff, its surfaces all cut into trapezohedrons, changing shape depending on the angle of view, clearly indicating this object existed in more than just the present three dimensions. If that was all there was, there would be nothing more to say, but the problem was that the object was buried in the core of the star. The giant corpora of knowledge, having transitioned from a different dimension, didn’t really care where the thing was buried. All they had to do was reach out a hand from a different dimension and scoop it up. But even they had to pause at the idea of the heat of a star. A star, which we think of as a three-dimensional sphere, but which is actually a space-time cylinder with an unlimited number of dimensions and pumping out an enormous amount of heat, stood square in the path of the giant corpora of knowledge.

  Clearly this was a gift left by the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri, but all their attempts to investigate dimensional phenomena in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri ended in failure. This futility of reaching the object was reminiscent of the impossibility of reaching out to the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri. All that was left, for both humanity and the giant corpora of knowledge, was a material that embodied a bizarre sense of materiality, in a place they could never reach.

  The giant corpora of knowledge were ignorant of the word despair.

  Even so, thought Kircher, who after the incident had decided to remain a silent onlooker. The giant corpora of knowledge themselves dispersed and continued to explore varied possibilities, thinking they might return to something indistinguishable from zero among the infinite dimensions, at the very end of infinite time. They reached a point where they thought they might have been given a slightly more approachable god. This was distinct from the fear engendered by the notion of the inevitable heat death of the universe. Things like that can’t be considered major problems. More like just fear of attenuation.

  “The pressure of knowledge,” Kircher said, just as the words sprang to his mind. “They believe, naively, that they are advancing under their own steam. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, though, that they are just going with the flow. Thr
ough something akin to the power generated at the interstices, between the levels of logic. Between the small degree of freedom and the large degree of freedom, in contact with the hyle of the universe, an entropic force is generated. In the direction of the large degree of freedom.”

  In Kircher’s imagination, at the very end of the levels of logic there is a vast desert, stretching endlessly in all dimensions.

  They are all now moving determinedly toward that desert, while continuing to disperse, physically. Whatever power they might have to resist that vastness is terribly feeble.

  Kircher opened a communications channel, just for a second, long enough to send a short message.

  “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.”

  And then he physically purged the communications channel.

  He closed his eyes, closed his ears, closed all his senses, and entered a long, long meditation.

  12. BOMB

  HE SEEMS TO be enjoying himself, despite that depressing face of his, James thinks to himself. His facial expression and posture are extremely slack, but his movements are overly pretentious. This mismatch is rubbing James the wrong way. It just doesn’t work for him.

  “He would benefit from psychological therapy, or to put it more succinctly, he’s delusional,” the doctor says, pushing his eyeglasses up his nose with his little finger. The delicacy of a gesture like that is the kind of thing that bothers James.

  James replies with a noncommittal heh.

  “But everyone says that they’re not experiencing delusions,” the doctor says.

  “Does that include time-bundling theory?” James asks. “It that not a delusion?”

  The doctor thinks not but nods repeatedly. “That is not real. It’s an old joke,” he says.

  James thinks to himself that part of the theory was readily demonstrable.