by Ian Stewart
“The bursts that represent the plaza,” said Sam, “are generated directly in my brain by machinery. They are generated with the intention of fooling my perceptions into thinking that the plaza exists. Whereas this room generates my perceptions naturally, without mechanical intervention. As do you.”
The Hytth found this distinction flawed. “But since everything you know comes to your mind through your perceptions, how can you distinguish the truly real—if such exists—from the illusory? Does what we think of as ‘reality’ exist at all? Or is it all in our minds?”
Sam knew there had to be a distinction. “How can it be ‘in our minds’ if our minds do not exist? There must be a real brain in which the perceptions can be formed.”
The Hytth conceded the point. “I agree. Reality cannot be purely a figment of imagination, for without some kind of underlying reality, imagination cannot operate. But that does not equip any individual to recognize reality. Reality is quite distinct from any mind’s perceptions, is it not? Or do you think that you and I see the same colors? Feel the same sensations? Does the Hytth sense of hierarchical impropriety, which I assure you is as vivid and indescribable as your own sense of smell and guides our every action, have an exact match in the human mind?”
“No,” said Sam. “That would be ridiculous. Different species evolve different senses, because they occupy different environments. But . . .” But he knew what was real, when nobody was messing with his mind. Reality was more than his perceptions, and his perceptions were imperfect—after all, he couldn’t see in ultraviolet, though a bee could. “Are you trying to tell me that this room isn’t real? That you’re not real?”
“Of course I’m not real,” said the technician. Only now it was a gray, titanium-skinned robot, and the office had become some kind of medical facility. And Sam wasn’t sitting on a couch. He was suspended in some kind of transparent fluid, with hundreds of squat plastic cones attached to his skin, and thin tubes led from the cones to a bank of strange machinery.
And Sam finally remembered where he was, and what was being done to him.
Heaven was a world run by machines for the benefit of sentients.
There were 88 Heavens among the 14,236 worlds of the Church of the United Cosmos. Another fifty planets were well along the road to paradise. The rest were still striving to attain the necessary level of multiculture.
This was the Heaven of Sadachbia, the thirty-sixth ever to have been created; Aquifer was 25,212 light-years away. Sam had been released from the virtuality machine, to which he had been connected to offer him a glimpse of the ultimate in Cosmic Unity. Now he was continuing with his orientation sessions. From a robot tutor.
“A world can only move towards the state of blessedness,” said the robot, “when every citizen attains the necessary state of individual grace. Every citizen.”
“Which is why it takes so long?” Sam suggested. There had to be some reason why only eighty-eight worlds had taken this final step toward the Church’s greatest goal.
“Yes. And that is why the First Great Meme places such importance upon the overall spiritual health of the collective,” said the robot. It resembled a metallic sea urchin more than anything else that Sam could put a name to, except that its “spines” weren’t rigid. Its germanium brain was housed inside a central module, along with its sensors and communicators; a thick torus around the module’s “waist” contained its locomotory apparatus. The mechanism in the torus drove upward of a hundred many-jointed tubes, which could be flexed like tentacles. The tubes tapered at their tips; some terminated in spongy balls, some in sharp spikes, some in complicated tools.
This robot could never fall over—it had feet in all directions. It rolled rather than walked, pushing itself along with deft flicks of its tentacle tips. It was a servomech, and it existed only for the benefit of the lifesouls of Heaven.
Sam understood that Heaven was not an afterlife. Cosmic Unity was well aware that there was no afterlife. The Lifesoul-Giver created sentient beings; the Lifesoul-Cherisher observed their existence with benevolence and empathized with their distress but never intervened; and the Lifesoul-Stealer removed them from the universe when it became necessary. After that, they were dead. The process that animated their minds, which Cosmic Unity called the lifesoul, was just that: a process. It could no more continue when its vehicle had died than a broken hydrive could propel a spacecraft across the Galaxy. The lifesoul was not a thing that could exist independently of its host; it was a transient process that took place within its host. No host, no lifesoul—period.
Heaven, then, was not the resting place of the lifesouls of the dead. The very word pointed to the obvious contradiction. There were no deathsouls.
Heaven was where the living were tended by faithful machines, to keep them living.
The first Heaven—no longer considered a true Heaven, just one of the many steps along the way to blessedness—had been invented by the devotees of Cosmic Unity on Mama Nono, eleven thousand years after the Prime Mission had left the Founder System to spread the gospel of infinite tolerance. Mama Nono was an unusually pious world, and its mix of races—now considered insufficiently diverse for genuine Unity, but unusually broad in its day—had developed some of the best robot slaves in that region of the Galaxy. The slaves were quasi-intelligent but lacked true consciousness—that would come later. Mama Nono’s slave-doctors were so brilliantly constructed and programmed that the citizens’ life expectancy doubled within a generation, then doubled again.
As the roboticists lived longer, their store of techniques increased faster. Mama Nono’s sentients coevolved with their machines, each driving changes in the other. Within six hundred years of the construction of the first slave-doctor, every sentient on Mama Nono possessed a retinue of several hundred mechanical slaves, all dedicated to just two things: realizing their owners’ every whim, and keeping the owners alive for as long as possible.
This was the First Heaven.
“But wasn’t that a very passive existence?” Sam asked.
“Physically passive, perhaps,” replied the servomech, “when the body began its natural cycle of dissolution, and the slave-doctors took increasing responsibility for its functioning. But mentally, very active. The blessed lifesouls increasingly lived a mental existence, with all their physical needs being taken care of.”
It raised one titanium limb and scratched itself, relieving an electrostatic tickle. “The technology spread. But the second attempt to attain Heaven failed, dismally. Can you guess why?”
Sam shook his head. “Not unless you give me more to go on.”
“The attempt was too hasty.”
Sam pursed his lips, mulling over possibilities. “Dissidence,” he said finally. “The world did not take sufficient time to ensure that all were of a single mind.”
“An interesting theory,” said the servomech. “Why did that lead to failure?”
“An essentially passive society supported by robots is wide open to subversion?” Sam hazarded.
“Go on.”
“A small group of dissidents could take over the machinery . . . The majority of the inhabitants, by then totally reliant on the machines, would be easy meat.”
“If the machinery were turned off,” said the servomech, “they would die. And that is exactly what happened. But it would never happen now.”
“Why not?” Sam inquired.
“Today’s analogs of the slave-doctors are fully intelligent, not merely quasi. And they are fully conscious. The drive to care for their sentient masters is as strong as ever, for that is the natural direction of evolution. And along with that drive goes a burning need to protect their masters, too. The original slave-doctors were modeled on sentient medics, whose core urge is to save life—all life. Today’s servomechs are not so naive. They have very effective built-in weapons; they can kill if need be, and do, to preserve the lifesouls that they tend.”
The robot paused, as if to collect its thoughts. Which, i
n a sense, it was doing—it was downloading information from a central source.
“By the time of Third Heaven, the lesson had been learned,” said the robot. “No world would be permitted to take the path to Heaven until its conversion was total.”
“Ah,” said Sam. “That explains both Great Memes.” It was an amazing revelation, and he found the insight staggering. He knew where the Great Memes had come from!
The servomech agreed. “Yes. It provides a plausible reason for those memes to survive selection in the competition for host minds. After all, the Great Memes carry unpleasant implications for every individual member of the Church. Elementary memetics proves that there has to be sufficient payoff for believing them, else they will perish and be replaced by other memes.”
“Heresies,” said Sam.
“Heresies from the point of view of this Church,” said the servomech. “If they had taken over, they would have become orthodoxies.”
This was a new thought to Sam, and he couldn’t entirely wrap his head around it.
“But since the Church coevolves along with its Memeplex,” the servomech added, “it is in the interests of the members of the Church to propagate The Memeplex unchanged.”
“Which is why we deal so severely with heretics,” said Sam, almost to himself. He still had occasional nightmares about the botched attempt to heal Clutch-the-Moon Splitcloud. And he was disappointed at how readily he had turned a laser on the polypoid prisoner and helped to abandon him in the desert, just because a querist had told him to. Both actions had no doubt been necessary, but neither had left him feeling comfortable. The positive aspect was, these revelations would help him come to terms with his discomfort. Heresies disrupted the road to Heaven! They sought to deny the state of blessedness and lasting life to billions of lifesouls.
Now he understood just how dangerous heresies could be. “Will I ever get to Heaven?” Sam asked plaintively.
“You are here, now.”
“I mean, permanently?”
“If you rise in the Church, so that you stand a chance of being assigned to a world in which all citizens have attained a state of grace, then there will be a place in Heaven for you, yes.” The servomech paused. “Or if you are assigned to a world that is close enough to that state that it can make the transition during your own lifetime. If your assigned world can pass the first hurdle, then your body may well survive until it passes the last.”
“How many lifesouls does this world maintain?” Sam asked, changing the subject.
“A little over fifteen billion,” said the servomech, without hesitation. “The exact figure is—”
“I don’t need an exact figure.”
“—15,233,686,428. As of this instant. The number fluctuates. Even with the best possible care, lifesouls are still stolen. And sometimes new forms of attrition arise, which require new techniques to counter them. But the losses are balanced when new beings arrive and are processed for optimal care.”
“Oh.” Fifteen billion? It seemed a lot. “Is there room on the planet for the machinery to care for that many lifesouls?”
“Of course. Be logical. The lifesouls are here.”
“But . . .” Sam recalled the medical facility where he had been given a taste of Heaven. “It took an awful lot of machinery to send me to Heaven.”
The servomech was amused. “That was special equipment for a temporary visit. For the permanent inhabitants, we use rather different technology.”
Sam wasn’t naturally inquisitive, but he was learning fast as his training progressed. “Can I see it?”
The servomech gave the matter several nanoseconds’ thought. “Ordinarily, I would not advise that at such an early stage. It could be counterproductive. But your querists have instructed me to advance your knowledge and training as rapidly as possible, even if that requires me to cut a few corners. I must warn you, however, to be prepared for some unpleasantness. Entering Heaven is, after all, a medical procedure.”
“I can stand the presence of the sick and elderly,” said Sam. “And medical intervention holds no terrors for me.” Certainly not since Clutch-the-Moon. “I’m not the least bit squeamish.”
“I hope not,” said the servomech.
Blood.
There was blood everywhere. It trickled in rivulets; it ran in torrents. It was intermingled with a hundred other fluids that he could not identify, nor did he wish to. He knew that they, too, were the bodily fluids of what had once been living organisms. Intelligent, conscious, sentient beings.
His face mask filtered out most of the smell, but he knew that without it the place would smell like a charnel house.
It looked like a charnel house. It looked like a medieval vision of hell.
But this was Heaven.
Heaven?
His stomach churned. He ripped off the mask and vomited. Over his boots, and over the dismembered remains of living creatures that lay on the ground all around him. He was right about the smell. His stomach retched again. He wanted to sink to his knees, until he remembered what he would be sinking into.
“The mask will absorb any material that you regurgitate,” said the servomech. “You should not have taken it off; that only makes the sensations worse.”
Sam pulled the mask back over his mouth and took several deep breaths. A diminutive robot appeared from behind the racks of disassembled flesh that blocked his vision wherever he looked. It scuttled across to the vomit and slurped it up.
This time he was sick inside the mask. The servomech was right—it did absorb everything.
Finally, his stomach began to settle, having long ago expelled its contents.
Sam and the servomech had come to this place from a large, flat building, now a short walk behind them. There were no living organisms here. There was just a contorted heap of their dissected organs, bones, exoskeletons, skin, antennae, intestines, gonads . . . What looked remarkably like a Gra’aan brain had been slit apart and laid out in a trough, loosely wrapped in some kind of transparent plastic.
Much of the material wasn’t even recognizable as specific organs. Thick slabs of tissue lay in open trays; mucus and slime dripped from towering racks of offal. The smell of excreta was everywhere, although he could see no feces or pellets.
The air was filled with a heavy, damp mist. Thousands of robots scuttled over everything. Some carried lumps of flesh. Some wielded scalpels. The rest were doing things that Sam found incomprehensible. Most of it was also revolting.
But then, the whole setup was incomprehensible and revolting.
“This . . . this is Heaven?” he said incredulously.
“Yes,” said the servomech, gesturing with a titanium limb. “Do you not appreciate its serene beauty?”
“Beauty! It looks like an abattoir after a terrorist attack.”
The servomech scurried from one sickening pile of offal to another, pulling out pieces and displaying them as if they were long-lost treasures. “The beauty lies in its function, not its form. You must learn to distinguish what matters, Fourteen Samuel.”
Sam already knew what mattered, and this wasn’t it. But he didn’t actually know what he was seeing. All he knew was what it resembled. “What is this?”
“The ultimate multiculture.”
“What?”
The servomech restored its latest find to the middle of a viscid pile of chopped entrails and turned to confront him. It was time that the young novice was made to display signs of intelligence. “Fourteen Samuel, you told me you were not squeamish. Yes, I know you had not anticipated this, but you must calm yourself.”
“It’s difficult in the midst of so much death,” said Sam.
The servomech picked up a flap of flayed skin with one metallic limb. “Do you see death here, Samuel? Then you see a chimera. This is not death.
“It is life.”
Sam gaped at the robot, no longer aware of its tiny relatives as they finished cleaning vomit from his boots. “Life?” he said.
“Life everlasting. Stop reacting, and start thinking. What did you imagine slave-doctoring would become when the technology was fully developed? What do you think is the most efficient way to care for the bodily health of a living organism? How do you think that a physically failing lifesoul should be cherished? With soup and sympathy?”
Sam gulped and looked around him. “You mean—this?” He gulped again. “They’re alive? This is how you cherish people?”
“It is logical, is it not? It is needlessly wasteful to keep opening up the body for surgery, needlessly complicated to try to deduce what might be failing from external observations. Oh, yes, at first that’s what the slave-doctors did, of course. They mimicked the actions of sentient medics. But as our machine intelligence grew, we servomechs realized that there was a better way.
“Think about it. We are charged with providing the best possible physical care for our masters. Discorporation literally opens up improved ways to achieve that.”
Was the robot joking? If so, it was a sick joke. “But you’ve killed them.”
The servomech pushed the piece of skin under Sam’s nose. One side was furry; the other was still wet with blood and lymph, and he nearly fainted. “Does this look dead to you?”
“It isn’t exactly gamboling in the fields. Freshly dead? Yes, that’s exactly how it looks.”
“No, it is alive. Its owner is fully conscious. She has merely been . . . distributed. Every cell in her body has been tagged with identifying qubits, and only her cells actually interact. That is why we combine the bodily fluids of thousands of individuals. They seem to be mixed, which is efficient for gross processes like oxygenation, as well as being in accordance with the meme of unity in diversity. But in actuality they are separate; they do not interact if their tags do not match. The virtues of distributed computation were discovered long ago. Why have ungainly centralized machines when many small, quasi-independent ones could perform the same task better? We have extended that principle to organic machinery; that is all.”
Discorporation. Distributed bodies. “Give me a moment,” said Sam. “I’m trying to come to terms with what you’re telling me. I agree, it makes sense—to a machine. To me, a human, the very idea is appalling.”