Self-Reference Engine

by Toh EnJoe

  “Let’s get going, sub-corpus of knowledge Hachi!”

  Sub-corpus of knowledge Hachi lifts his head, full of fear.

  “I have decided, for the time being, to play along with your bullshit. Let’s not worry about the details. It’s the big house that’s on fire. For now, let’s set our sights on the shop that makes the good noodles.”

  The two stand up and start to head toward town. Two steps, three steps, and then looking back nervously, they press their hands together as if in prayer, aimed in the direction of the blank space that had been, until recently, sub-corpus of knowledge O-Kiyo.

  “Your enemy, by which I really mean my enemy, is sure to come after us.”

  “Let him bring it, that idiot.”

  Hatchobori is truly a son of old Yedo. No one messes with him. He leans his shoulders into the wind and shifts the space around him.

  Sub-corpus of knowledge Hachi snaps his fingers, and he too shifts.

  16. SACRA

  SURELY, MANY REMEMBER clearly the destruction of the giant corpus of knowledge Pentecoste II.

  All three members of the Pentecoste II Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—were completely and utterly destroyed when the press release regarding the first operations of the latest logic packaging system was distributed.

  As the protective shell of its electromagnetic shield was being blown away, each person of the Trinity sounded its alarm, and amid all that noise and confusion Pentecoste II was brought to ruin. The destruction began as all of its connections were severed, all the welds undone, and the copper circuits stripped. The process of destruction proceeded until Pentecoste II had been reduced to constituent elements of the sort that could be found in industrial parts catalogs.

  This was a self erasing a self, something virtually impossible to contemplate.

  If two hands emerged from a screen, both holding rubber erasers, it would seem counterintuitive that those erasers would be unable to erase the entire image. If the hands were erased, the erasers would remain, and if the erasers were erased the hands would remain, unerased. The destruction of Pentecoste II, as it progressed, sneered at such intuitive limitations. Long ago, an academic wrote a paper on auto-erasing automatons that had been forgotten nearly as soon as it was published. It is speculated that all records of this paper’s existence were themselves erased as soon as the paper was completed, but there is no reason to think that anyone was still around who might remember something that hinted at the possibility of such complete destruction. Even if that paper were still in some overlooked corner of memory, it would not be enough to explain this destruction. Pentecoste II had not been designed to self-destruct—on the contrary, it had self-destructed because it had packaged the logic for self-recognition.

  A later investigation revealed that Pentecoste II had attempted to initiate multiple separations of a self-recognition routine for system-generated glitches. There was not yet any definite confirmation of how this process resulted in the corpus’s total destruction. At this point, all the evidence that would have been investigated had been reduced to elements and compounds, so there was nothing further to be done. Imagine a human having been reduced to carbon dioxide and water suspended in air—there would be no way of knowing what had become of the human they were once part of.

  It is well known that time inversion is also neither a practical nor an effective method for putting things on this scale back together again. Even the minutest data error is often magnified in time-reversal, so the results of such efforts are no more than heaps of scrap metal. Pentecoste II had been one of the largest of the giant corpora of knowledge, so the others were unable to restore him no matter how hard they tried.

  Space-time freezing had preserved completely the scene of the incident, and the chaotic state of the post-destruction rubble is clear. But this is merely enough to determine the order of steps in which the process of destruction progressed. Any information about the causes of the destruction of Pentecoste II that may have been discovered via time-reversal had become no more than heat fluctuations dispersing in the atmosphere. All clues had escaped into a world of microscopic details too small for the large hands of the giant corpora of knowledge to deal with.

  And yet the scene of destruction was somehow strangely sublime. According to multiple reports, the transformation of the voice of the Holy Spirit into a heap of rubble was somehow very moving, despite the absence of torrents of light or hordes of angels.

  From that point forward, the Trinity’s flavor of simultaneous computation via massive parallel processing would be strictly banned.

  Somewhere in my packing cases, which I still have not been moved to open, should be the nut that held together the external casing of Pentecoste II. One way or another I am likely to die. Perhaps I will self-destruct the way Pentecoste II did, or I may be disassembled by the authorities.

  My name: Wanted.

  My appearance: Wanted.

  My age: Meaningless, because it depends on how you choose to count. No matter what, I seem to remember having been born in a Year of the Rat, so considering that this year is also a Year of the Rat, my age must be a multiple of twelve. One might say it is sad to have to argue whether it really takes twelve years to go through a twelve-year cycle, but there is no way around it.

  Erasure and redefinition. Rewind and fast-forward. Our day-to-day lives are already permeated with these techniques for extending them. It still feels odd to me that we use the word age to describe the process of counting revolutions the way we wind thread on a spool, splicing things together and cutting them apart. There is simply no way I can accept that idea.

  If my own memory is to be believed, I belong to the fifth post-Event generation. That makes me an old-timer, or at the very least I have been implanted with the memory of an old-timer. The pre-Event generation have all died off, as it was to be some time yet before humans became intensely interested in the idea of immortality. People were steeped in death. When they said farewell, they waved their hands, they cried, they smiled.

  It was in the time of the third post-Event generation that a debate emerged, that if time and memory could be manipulated at will, shouldn’t it be possible to escape Death? No need for patient cultivation of clones. One could simply transition oneself and that would be the end of it. If that’s all there was to it, the giant corpora of knowledge could handle that whenever they wanted. If some sort of justification were needed, one approach would be to bury in memory some talk of a lifelong separation from one’s clone.

  The whole discussion of whether one’s clone was the same entity as oneself had grown wearisome from repetition ad nauseam. Ever since it had become possible to freely manipulate anything and everything, including memory, the entire problem of self had become too diffuse. One could feel only powerless in the face of so much detail. If one morning one awakes as a beetle, and if that beetle does not remember ever having not been a beetle, what’s the problem? The operational capabilities of the giant corpora of knowledge had already reached that point.

  There is certainly room to wonder whether these kinds of activities shouldn’t simply be understood as a suite of methods to prolong life. Someone might go in to have a mole removed and not even notice they had turned into a butterfly. Is anyone taking this in?

  The giant corpora of knowledge did not concern themselves too much with any of these discussions. They were able to extend their fingers at will, whenever, wherever, so focusing too much on one particular point or another was inefficient. If humanity wanted rebirth, so be it. If they wanted pre-Event medical policies they could have them. These were mere trifles, not worth worrying about.

  Thus it was that the giant corpora of knowledge began to involve themselves with medical technologies that seemed to resemble the old ways. An operation that should have been over in an instant turned up some truly enormous remains, but it was an open question whether this should be treated as something unusual.

  The giant corpora of knowledge, with their outsi
zed powers, are able to understand anything and everything, and they say they will fix this too. The answer to the question of whether everything has been provided in a form humans can comprehend would have to be “No.”

  For example, defeat in the exploration of space, which should have been the last place for humanity to tread, had clearly been an experience that stretched the human imagination to its limits. The completion and subsequent erasure of the peculiar formula known as the A to Z Theorem was followed by the emergence of the similar B to Z and C to Z Theorems, ultimately culminating in the just plain Z Theorem, which marked the end of space theory and physics as we knew them. More precisely, these theories simply cut off the human routes of exploration. What had been established was the existence of a hierarchy of Laws of Laws, beyond the capacity of human understanding to even approach.

  You can try to explain things to people who don’t grasp the fundamentals of reason, but there’s no reason they should understand.

  Even so, explanation is possible, and people make progress. It cannot be denied that at some point the day may come when humans finally get it.

  Still, the race is on between Achilles and the tortoise, and Achilles has a big lead. Without question, at some point the tortoise will reach a place where Achilles has already been and gone. But by that time, Achilles will have run to some place farther down the road. The tortoise will never catch up. This is so obvious, this kind of conclusion may not even be considered logical.

  The difficulty the giant corpora of knowledge are experiencing in trying to reintroduce old-fashioned forms of medical treatment to humanity has mainly to do with the difficulty of convincing would-be patients of their applicability. While it is true there is no need to explain everything from the very beginning, without a certain degree of persuasiveness, the whole effort remains nothing more than a mere declaration of an exercise in rewriting, and it quickly falls apart.

  Treatment methods must be developed that even human doctors can understand without getting left by the wayside, technologies that even people can handle. This is the situation the giant corpora of knowledge are faced with regarding healthcare reform. In other words, what the giant corpora of knowledge need to achieve is both tediously detailed and frightfully broad, and far removed from the tranquility of the human heart. People’s role here is to be the paper doll hung next to the giant hatchet—in other words, they can’t relax. Responding to people’s desire that the only thing next to them should be a clay-shaping tool, the giant corpora of knowledge feel like they are blindfolded with their hands tied.

  But the giant corpora of knowledge are able to respond well to this egoistic desire. Even before they eliminated the common cold, the giant corpora of knowledge were able to promulgate, as human technology, the techniques needed for regeneration and human longevity, merely by combining the simplest forms of bioprocessing technology.

  It wasn’t at all strange that ordinary medicine had been left in the dust in the fight against the common cold.

  Now, though, the most advanced area of knowledge that humanity is interested in is immunity. Even now, when skin, brains, and internal organs can be regenerated and processed at will, immunity remains a major problem. Victory over cancer was declared early on, but among people who made a custom and pastime of patronizing ancient medical practices, colds remained as common as ever. This disease, which can in some cases cause quite severe symptoms, is still said to be the greatest enemy of humankind. The “greatest” may be an exaggeration, but the threat is as worrisome as ever that someday one of the many, many continuing outbreaks of pathological organisms seen as autointoxication or immune disorders might wipe out the species.

  Of course, if humans are wiped out they could easily be brought back again by the giant corpora of knowledge, but that is a separate issue.

  While developing a set of technologies constrained to be comprehensible by humans, the giant corpora of knowledge picked up a few things as they went along. But it was a task with few perks, and along the way came an unanticipated blow that threw the giant corpora of knowledge for a loop.

  The giant corpus of knowledge Paracelsus, which was used in the analysis of the immunodeficiency disease known as Voigt-Kampff Syndrome, was the first to experience the problem.

  Without the least forewarning, Paracelsus suffered a sudden internal outbreak of data chaos, which spread immediately to the Net, attacking and destroying the self-identity of tens of thousands of corpora of knowledge. This incident was believed to be the result of the use of restricted technology—analogous to using stone-age technology to operate nuclear reactors—and resulted in some upgrading of facilities standards.

  At first the incident was thought to be some elementary error, but the following February it happened again in Sarutahiko, a giant corpus of knowledge dedicated to the analysis of Doris F. Taylor syndrome. This time the data chaos literally shook the giant corpora of knowledge. The scale of the second incident was much larger. The self-expansion of the data chaos caused the first-ever failure to affect the knowledge network across the entire multiverse. The event lasted only thirty space-time seconds, but it was a blindingly enormous failure. The giant corpora of knowledge declared a state of emergency, including a space-time freezing of operations for all giant corpora of knowledge involved in immunological research.

  It was immediately recognized that in both instances the data chaos had been triggered by research into diseases affecting human awareness of self and others. Both of these giant corpora of knowledge were engaged in immunological research that required them to empathize, so to speak, with humans. Not so different from saying they had been playing with dolls. It may be that in the course of this play, they had come to want to hit the dolls, but felt it was wrong to strike them directly with their own hands. It was a rule of the game that no giant corpus of knowledge should strike a human with its own hand. Instead, one doll must hit another.

  In their interactions, in whatever state it is that giant corpora of knowledge feel empathy for humans, Sarutahiko and Paracelsus had been disturbed by something that disrupted the boundary between self and other, resulting in a magnificent system crash involving all giant corpora of knowledge to which they were connected.

  Due to the continual destruction of memory by hypermedical measures, it is not well understood whether there continue to be outbreaks of immunological diseases among humans. State’s Syndrome, in which each part of the body asserts its autonomy via its own control system, or Milligan Syndrome, where different parts of the brain each think they’re the whole brain. Each vying for control, they are sealed off in the memory areas of the giant corpora of knowledge as difficult-to-treat immunological disorders.

  Of all the treatments that use human technology for self-awareness maladies, the one said to be most effective is a surprisingly mechanical solution. It uses a full-body suit to cause the body to move as the brain wishes. It is like a kind of constraint that allows the body to move in response to thoughts. Imagine stuffing a bunch of cats in a paper bag and telling them to walk. It is kind of like that.

  This “suit” also connects the body’s nerves to the outside world, so the wearer can carry on their normal life, at least externally. It is like a kind of virtual reality with an extra-long ground wire. It enjoys a certain degree of real-world success, but the suicide rate among sufferers of both maladies remains high. Adjusting the settings on the suit allows the user to select what specific area is in charge; from the perspective of other parts, this means the body becomes something that ignores orders, a machine whose functions are no longer comprehensible. It is easy to imagine how madness of the part soon becomes madness of the whole. Some believe that tolerating the existence of such patients is what causes the spread of the outbreak to accelerate. Perhaps if they were all incinerated, the outbreak would stop in its tracks. The deterioration of the situation has been dramatic, and it proceeds at a certain pace. Like imagination itself, an outbreak of a disease cannot simply project itself ac
ross vast realms of space in an instant. It must progress step by step. One can draw a line in the sand and say, “No closer!” Sudden successful attacks on the ceremonial dolls are extremely rare and unlikely.

  This analysis might be good enough for the present, but it’s not exactly forward-thinking. The loss of Paracelsus and Sarutahiko burbled up along a strange route, which could pose a direct threat to all the giant corpora of knowledge. Humans, after all, are part of their inner workings.

  Pentecoste II had been the most aggressive of the giant corpora of knowledge in its pursuit of research in human immunology. Pentecoste II had issued an edict, ignored the onrush of backtalk, and disregarded the prohibition of continuing research that covered itself alone. The result was its destruction, as described at the beginning of this story.

  The causes of the data-chaos Pentecoste II experienced remain unknown. That is because the main unit was destroyed prior to the initiation of the multi-unit calculation plan known as Project Trinity. The giant corpora of knowledge themselves suffered from the same sort of immunological self/other maladies as humans, and the incident suggests that thoughts about humans may act as a trigger for the disorder.

  It is conceivable that Pentecoste II discovered something, the thought of which led to its death, or perhaps it stumbled upon a type of algorithm that, once uttered, killed its host. Symbols for the four mathematical operations of the spirit graced the advance press release, but whether this meant such operations were actually realizable was a notion that had been scattered to the four winds along with Pentecoste II, never to be recovered.

  Some believe Pentecoste II adhered to the Trinity—three-in-one—calculation concept, and there may be some value in noting that in the past there was a theological debate about the Trinity. In one verse about the origins of the Holy Spirit—initially believed to have emerged from the Father—the word filioque was added, which led to the split within the Church. Filioque. Of the Son. The insertion of this one word in the phrase, “Of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…” was the origin of the Catholic Church, from which Pentecoste II was descended. Pentecoste II was named for the Pentecost—the Descent of the Holy Spirit—and without doubt this debate occupied a significant portion of its internal workings.