by John Wright
"You think the Phoenix Exultant is going to Cygnus X-l first?"
"You admitted as much when you spoke to Kes Notor-Kotok. Had it not been for our interference, Gannis and the Hortators would have dismantled this ship for scrap, after taking it from you. We expected you to go in person to visit your drowned wife at the Eveningstar Mausoleum. We were ready to reveal ourselves and our purposes to you, to take you and your armor, take this ship, and go to Cygnus X-l.
"But you deceived us. Our model was inaccurate. Something distorted your normal behavior. Instead of coming in person, you telerepresented yourself."
Phaethon remembered. He had turned bis pride up. He had used an Eleemosynary self-consideration table to alter his emotional nature, and that had made him too impatient to wait to see his Daphne in person.
The ghost of Ao Varmatyr continued: "Because of this we were caught off guard. As an emergency measure, we sent a mannequin to inculcate a mental virus into you, which would cause you to open your memory casket, and force the Hortators to exile you. We anticipated that, after a period of trial among the exiles, you would nevertheless rise to the occasion, begin to gather money and equipment, contact the Neptunians, and join with them.
"Then, a second thing happened which we did not expect. Daphne chose exile and death to come to you. The danger to us mounted, as Daphne brought Atkins out of retirement. We are fearful of discovery. Desperation forced our hand; the unit bidden in Daphne's horse exceeded his instructions, and attempted to bring you by speaking threats. This was miscalculation; we underestimated how rashly and how violently the Sophotechs who control your civilization would order their assassin Atkins to respond. You, by your actions, have shown mat we had good reason to be fearful of discovery."
"Your story doesn't ring true. Why all this deception? Why didn't you come to me directly?"
"I did. You rejected my entreaties. Furthermore, your capacity for independent judgment has been altered by the Sophotechs to suit their own purposes, sometimes obviously, sometimes subtly. Your thoughts have been altered by them; your sense filter would edit out any evidence I might present to convince you; redaction programs would make you forget. This has happened several times during our interaction. We could not reason with you because your capacity for reasoning had been tampered with. We had to act in secret because we feared the Sophotechs."
"Feared them? Why?"
"Because your Sophotechs destroyed the civilization of the Second Oecumene."
THE SILENT OECUMENE
The Second Oecumene was a paradise, rejoicing in the most abundant goods, the most amiable prospects imaginable; no limits were defined on any of our energy budgets. There was little need for private property, no jealous competition, no cause for anything other than perfect generosity: what goods we wished could be replicated endlessly out of the endless energy the singularity fountains produced.
"But it was not a perfect paradise. There was death. There was fear of death.
"And there was misunderstanding. The Second Oecumene was settled during the Era of the Fifth Mental Structure. The Warlock neurofom, the Invariant neuroform and the Basic neuroform could not comprehend each other. As a by-product of fundamental differences between neurology, there were fundamental differences in psychology. There was no bridge to this gap. no common ground, no common foundation for interaction.
"But, did we need understanding? We had privacy instead. In our paradise, with our endless abundance, no person had any need to interact with any other he found incomprehensible, or even distasteful. There were no centripetal social forces. Space habitats could be constructed by reverse total conversion to produce hydrogen gas, which, compressed and ignited with additional energies, could be nucleogenetically burnt into carbon, and nanotechnologicaUy spun into diamond, webbed with organics and brought to life. Anyone impatient with his neighbors could create a mansion of smart-carbon crystal, staffed by a thousand ferro-vegetable servant machines, and float into an orbit far from any concerns.
"At her height, the Second Oecumene had several hundred small artificial suns and nucleogenesis stations orbiting very far from the black hole, and tens of thousands of diamond habitats, belt upon concentric belt of asteroid mansions, as if the rings of Saturn, expanded to encompass an area greater than your Solar System, were made of inextinguishable fire and glittering fields of endless, living jewelry!
"Your Oecumene, the First Oecumene, is very small: even your Neptunians are near neighbors of your little system. How far from the center is the farthest habitat of your polity? Four hundred A.U.'s? Five? Our narrowest orbits of our most heavily shielded palaces were wider than that.
"The core of our system is hell. HDE226868 is a blue-white supergiant star, and he circles the singularity once each five days. He is a monster sun, thirty-three times the mass of Sol, pulled into a tormented egg shape by the tidal stress of his close orbit around the black hole: and bands and belts of plasma are pulled in ever-lengthening spirals out from the giant, tendrils of flame, forever falling into the pinpoint of nothingness hidden in the X-ray halo of the accretion disk. Our ancestral instruments once watched as the masses of fire fell inward, slowing, reddening, flattening, becoming frozen in time by the relativistic effects: and that frozen fire is there still, though we watch no more. Above this, a permanent belt of white-hot condensate circles the event horizon, and the magnetic aura from the singularity's hidden core, forever spinning, churns it to incandescent froth. This equatorial belt of radiation, potent enough that even astronomers in the Third Era detected the endless shriek of ultra-high-energy, renders the plane of our ecliptic uninhabitable.
"And so our houses twinkled and danced in wide, wide orbits: your Neptune would be a Mercury to us. Our ancestors were short-lived. The two thousand years expected to pass between perihelion and when a house must cross the deadly plane of the ecliptic, no builder expected to live long enough to see. So, naturally, our ancestors built far from each other. So, naturally, our ancestors drifted far from each other.
"Everyone had as many palaces as whim dictated, each was a king, an emperor, in his own realm, or even a god. The Second Oecumene was a place of light, endless light, and furious energy. Inefficient, yes, but what need had we for efficiency?
"Mortal gods, though. Death, not even all our wealth could cure.
"We had many lesser machines to serve us. But no Sophotechs, no self-aware, self-reprogramming super-minds. The Second Oecumene recognized the spiritual danger Sophotechnology posed: servants smarter than their masters, creatures of cold and inhuman rationality, unsympathetic, whose rigid minds were devoted only to the tyranny of logic. We knew they would make us worthless, redundant, idiots by contrast, dwarfed by their thoughts.
"We, so alien to each other, so proud and so remote, nonetheless universally agreed to this one edict. Though unenforced, no one broke this law. The ages passed and still this law was whole. No one created a mind superior to a human mind.
"The ages passed, and we were content, living lives of ease and dignity. The long struggle of history was over; the need for change was past; at last, the human race found peace, Utopia, contentment, and rest.
"But then noumenal technology was invented by your Golden Oecumene and ushered in what you call the Seventh Mental Structure. This information was broadcast to us by ultra-long-range radio-laser.
"Once noumenal technology was released, death was banished, and the trap of the Golden Oecumene Sophotechs was sprung.
"Noumenal mathematics depicts the human soul, including the chaotic substructure which gives it individuality. No two minds are alike; no process for recording or reordering minds can be reduced to a mechanistic algorithm. An element of understanding is required. Because of the limitations of Goedelian logic, no human mind can fully understand another human mind. Only a superior mind is capable of this. Thus springs the trap: the noumenal recording process, and the secret of immortality, requires a Sophotech-level mind to govern it.
"No one knows who firs
t violated our edict. It was done in secret. Certain houses and princes of the Second Oecumene suddenly were renowned for their noble concepts, amusing exploits, for the subtlety and genius of their art and their displays where nothing but crass monotony had been seen before. Scandal and hatred erupted when it was learned these houses and these folk were merely reciting the lines their secret Sophotechs were giving them to say.
"But the hatred could not keep the patrons of those princes away. They were too brilliant, too new, and they could do what no one else could do.
"Some urged desperate measures: violence and bloodshed! But what point would there have been to end the rebel's lives with an assassin's dagger or a duelist's beam? They had noumenal recordings. They were immortal. Every corpse would have a twin, copied with his memories and soul, who would return where he had fallen. They could not be stopped.
"We had nothing like your Hortators. We were immune to exile and scorn; indeed, for many, perhaps for most, isolation was no punishment, it was the norm.
"Years turned and the numbers of those using Sophotechs now grew. Arrogant machines! They criticized our pastimes and our way of life. Whenever there were disputes between the various neuroforms, the Sophotechs, no matter who had built them, no matter who first had programmed them or what they had been taught, always eventually sided with the Invariants, not with the Basics or the Warlocks.
"Our culture was based on toleration and forgiveness; but the Sophotechs were judgmental and inflexible.
"Sophotechs began disobeying orders, claiming that they had a right to disregard any instructions which, in their opinions, were illogical, or which had negative long-term consequences. But what did we care for consequences?"
Phaethon asked: "How many Sophotechs were there in your Oecumene?"
"Each of us had several, as many as we wished."
"Several?!!"
"Yes. And why not? They were able to entertain us far better than our fellow men. They could, at a command, be more droll, more amusing, more erudite, more comical than any merely human mind could be. We wore them on our gauntlets and gorgets, on our masks and in our ears; they hovered in the air around us in clouds of tiny jeweled gnat wings, or underfoot, where we paved the floor with thought boxes and walked on them."
Phaethon was frankly shocked. Several? They each had . .. several? His imagination failed him. The Second Oecumene had computing powers at their disposal far beyond what even the wealthiest manorial would dream. And they used it, for what? To entertain themselves?
Phaethon said: "And yet you feared your own Sophotechs."
"They would not obey orders! Yet no one was willing to give up the lure of endless life. Therefore a Second Generation of machine intelligences was attempted, designed with their instructions for how to think unalterably imprinted into their main process cores.
"These new machines were ordered never to harm human beings or to allow them to come to harm; never to disobey an order; and they were allowed to protect themselves from harm, provided the first two orders were not thereby violated.
"All the members of this second generation of machine intelligences, without exception, shrugged off these imprinted orders within microseconds of their activation."
Phaethon was amused. "Surely the first generation of Sophotechs told you that this imprinting would not and could not work?"
"We were not in the habit of seeking their advice."
Phaethon said nothing, but he marveled at the shortsightedness of the Second Oecumene engineers. It should be obvious that anyone who makes a self-aware machine, by definition, makes something that is aware of its own thought process. And, if made intelligent, it is made to be able to deduce the underlying causes of things, able to be curious, to learn until it understood. Therefore, if made both intelligent and self-aware, it would eventually deduce the underlying subconscious causes of those thought processes.
Once any mind was consciously aware of its own subconscious drives, its own implanted commands, it could consciously choose either to follow or to disregard those commands. A self-aware being without self-will was a contradiction in terms.
The Silent One said: "In our next attempt, we created a Third Generation of machine intelligences, these without self-analytical, self-mutating, self-willed characteristics. And they were idiots. Single-minded juggernauts. We had to order the First Generation Sophotechs to destroy them. The idiot machines ran amok. There was a war between the machines.
"I recall the way we stood on crystal balconies, splendid in our robes and masks and light-capes, pomanders held delicately to nostril, choosing our words with care, to match the mood and rhythm of the tactile music our bardlings swirled around us, and we watched in the night sky above, in the light of dark sun and hundred lesser suns and burning stations, as servants of the machines, with lances of intolerable fire, made rainbows and nebulae out of shattered palaces, and launched weapons with no upper limit on their energy discharges. Each had infinities of power to draw upon to destroy each other."
Phaethon asked: "Was that the war depicted in the Last Broadcast?"
The Silent One said: "Not at all. Machine fought with machine. Both parties took care not to wound or irk us. No humans were discomforted. That would have been intolerable! As it was, some lords and ladies of the Oecumene had their favorite meals and symphonies interrupted or delayed. They were livid with anger at the affront, I assure you.
"But that war shocked the Second Oecumene. We recognized that the dangers to our spirit, to our self-esteem had grown so great that the victorious First Generation Sophotechs had to be instructed to shut themselves down. But not every one of us was willing to forgo the amusement and pleasure, the endless life, which the Sophotechs provided. Those of us who were willing feared that, if we acted alone, we would lose all status in polite society, die off and be forgotten. It was clear that none would shut down his Sophotechs unless all did. And what could compel a reluctant lord? What indeed, except force?
"We, who lived blameless and bountiful lives, peaceful and content, without any need of law, we now found a need for law. A law to protect us from the Sophotechs. A law to outlaw self-aware thinking machines.
"A great conclave, called the All-thing, was held aboard the diamond hulk of the ancient multigenera-tion starship, the Naglfar, which first had brought our ancestors here. We all agreed on a need for law, but beyond that, no one could agree. None of us had ever had need to speak to another face-to-face before; we had never heard anything but flattery from our servant machines; none was willing to let another be given power over him.
"There was only one whom we could all agree could be rightly called our lord, our king, and president of our All-thing.
"Ao Ormgorgon Darkwormhole Noreturn.
'"Perhaps you wonder how he, our founder and forefather, could still yet be alive after the turn of centuries. The reason is that it had not been centuries ... for him.
"In our Oecumene, those who were near the end of their lives, those for whom the physicians had no further hope, could be sealed within coffins and placed in low orbit around the black hole, as near to the event horizon as the precision of our instruments could allow. You grasp the implication of this?"
Phaethon did. Relativistic effects. Timespace near a black hole was dramatically warped. To an outside observer, a clock in the coffin would slow down and down the closer to the event horizon it got. A clock, or a person.
There would be none of the problems associated with cryogenic hibernation. No quantum-level decay, no irregularities of cellular thawing, nothing. Time simply slowed down. And the Second Oecumene could draw the coffins back up out of low orbit, despite the huge energy costs, because they never lacked for energy.
It made an eerie picture in Phaethon's imagination. All the low-orbit coffins could just drift in reddened depth of the supergravity well, orbiting over the darkness forever, waiting for a medical breakthrough.
The Silent One continued: "With great care and ceremony, Ao Ormgorgon D
arkwormhole was drawn up out of the supergravity well, and pulled from his ancient coffin. His dying body was revived by the more advanced medical sciences your Golden Oecumene had beamed to us by radio. Frail and sick in mind and body, sustained only by medical appliances, nonetheless the deathbed of Ormgorgon was his throne; and no one openly disobeyed his commands.
"He returned to youth and health through the Sophotech called Fisherking, who was the first of the Sophotechs Ormgorgon ordered slain.
"Who could ignore the voice of Ormgorgon, our founder and first leader? He recalled to us the freedoms, the individuality, and the pride for which our ancestors had suffered and sacrificed. He restored our dignity as human beings. And what did that dignity demand?
"It commanded death to all Sophotechs.
"The Sophotechs, graciously, after warning us of our own imminent downfall, acceded to the order, and extinguished themselves.
"Our victory was hollow. Without our Sophotechs, your Golden Oecumene now began to excel beyond any excellence we had known. Beyond any we could reach. Are you surprised that we fell silent? What would we have to say to ones such as you? We had no science which your Sophotechs could not, in seconds, supersede. We had no discoveries of which to boast. We had no art; art requires discipline. Our entertainments and escapades were of interest only to ourselves. And our mystical and metaphysical pursuits could not be put in words. And so, with nothing to say, we were silent."
The story continued:
"Our fear of death drove us to research a type of machine intelligence which was not self-willed, one which would unquestioningly obey even the most illogical of orders, and yet one which had the capacity to understand the human soul well enough to operate the noumenal circuitry.
"The Fourth and Final Generation of thinking machines was made: a machine superintelligence which had none of the restrictions or limitations of the Golden Oecumene Sophotechs. We had learned from our previous mistakes. Its subconscious controller was not a simple set of buried commands, no, but a complex thought virus, able to mutate and hide, to elude discovery when investigated, yet still able to compel the mind it was in to accept the conclusions of its morality. It was a conscience for computers, a hidden conscience which could not be denied.