At the far side of the square lay the Capitol Building. It was an enormous bubble of the blinding white synthetic cloth drawn from the tank in the Never-Ending Factory, bulging out from street level like a bread roll rising in the oven. Huge fans with two-meter blades kept the building inflated at all times, and people and supplies entered through simple airlocks. Inside was a crazy skeleton of aluminum beams, with nine levels of floors, ladders, railings and elevators but very few real walls. Efficient! Artistic! the Republic rhapsodized. Easy to keep tabs on! Jamie always thought in response, with a cynical grin.
Jamie and the messenger set out down the street along the square. Twelve thousand people, nearly all men, now lived on Columbia, most of them in Lincolntown. Columbia had been stealing three landers per month from OVODS for almost four years, all at the end of the line released from the zigships. Many on Columbia grumbled that they never stole the last one, which contained the women transportees bound for Hell. The Republic claimed that Hell would wonder what was happening if women ceased to be among the drops. Jamie had his suspicions that the mere handful of prostitutes brought somehow secretly from Earth were a powerful force in keeping the townful of pirate wannabes in line.
"Down there," said one of the two guards standing to either side of a meter-wide manhole, its massive airtight lid cast back. So instead of going up into the Capitol's manic jungle gym, he would be sent into the basement. Jamie shrugged, his practiced detachment intact. He swung himself onto the first steel rung embedded in the concrete tube, and started down.
Thirty-three rungs later he stepped out of the tube into bright fluorescent lights and clutter. Anonymous boxes were stacked against the walls, and pallets supporting waist-high machinery wrapped in cloudy plastic turned the space into something of a labyrinth. The air was dampish cold, and smelled of chemicals. Jamie followed the only purposeful sounds he heard—of a keyboard being pounded with superhuman speed—to the far end of a long rectangular room with concrete walls painted dull green.
"You must be my statistician," said a young teenaged boy facing away from him, seated in front of a meter-square tombstone.
"Actually, I'm someone else's actuary," Jamie said, irritated at the child's insouciance. He squinted over the boy's shoulder at the tombstone, which displayed a strange abstract pattern in many colors.
"Ahh," said the boy. His voice was studied and certain but fairly high in pitch. He could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen. "That implies that you're an agent and not an automaton. The difference can be crucial."
"Beware of false dualities," Jamie said. "In point of fact, I'm a free man with a conscience." Currently hagridden, he thought, but leave that aside for now.
"Then you're definitely an agent. Automatons have no concept of freedom. And that little voice in your ear comes from your player."
How does he know? Sahan-Grusa demanded, with more than a hint of menace.
|It's pretty obvious that I didn't tell him!| "There are no voices in my ear. My conscience is subtler than that."
The boy swung around on his stool. He had the strange round face of someone completely without guile, very white skin that appeared to never have seen the sun. His hair was shoulder-length and strawberry blond.
"Good! It means the game is progressing, and that the players are learning. It may even mean that my player is winning because of the work that I've already done." His wide eyes could have betrayed either innocence or fanaticism. Jamie reflected that both could exist in one individual.
The boy is mentally ill.
|Could be. Or maybe this is some self-indulgent affectation.| "My name is Jamie Eigen. I'm an actuary."
"I'm Michael King. Or Magic Mikey, as the Missus says. My player and her player are allies for this round."
A solipsist. He thinks the universe is a tombstone game, and all of us are animated gamepieces.
|Should I challenge him or play along?|
Do what you like so long as you do not reveal my presence. I am uninterested in insanity.
"Well. That's interesting. How old are you?"
Magic Mikey grinned. "I turned fifteen twenty-three days ago. The Missus gave me a waterbed for my birthday. It's a marvelous invention, and great for cuddling. Would you like to see it?"
Jamie cringed in the face of memories that he wished he could cherish. "No. I've left all that behind me." Forgive me, Anthony. When he slandered your memory I spat in his face. Now no one knows where I am nor where I'll end up. "I'd really rather hear more about the game."
Our universe, according to Magic Mikey, was a game board, upon which a grudge match among many factions was playing out. Mikey himself was an agent—like those rare humans who were not automatons, living predictably and automatically—but with a twist: His player was attempting to cheat. Mikey had been conceived in vitro with nanomachines to augment his nervous system, and brought to term in a synthetic uterus constructed from human cells by other nanomachines. An opponent's agents had destroyed the lab in which Mikey had been born, but the Missus had spirited him off as a toddler to this world for his safety, along with as much of the lab as she could steal. Her player had made a deal with Mikey's player to allow the boy to move ahead with his player's plan: To manipulate the game board from the inside.
Jamie nodded throughout the tale, his face as blank as he could make it. He had often wondered if he would ever meet an interesting madman. But the more he listened to Magic Mikey, the more he began to feel that the boy contained an intelligence like Sahan-Grusa, and had contained it since conception. Small wonder that Mikey believed its nonsense!
And it settled once and for all the mystery of his "Indian spirit." |So you're some sort of nanomachine, like the one living inside the boy.|
I am. But like that inside the boy...unlikely. I was slow to recognize the existence of nanointelligence within him. I see it now. And I believe I know what nanomachine it is. Twelve years ago, 1Earth's Special Implementer Service destroyed a nanotechnology lab near Chicago. Supposedly a three-year-old child was found dead in the ruins. My guess is that the news reports were heavily doctored. The name of the device found in the lab was Minimus Rex.
|Minimus Rex—the Littlest King. Little Michael King. Was the device created for him? Or was he conceived for the device?|
Or are they one organism? I have studied the Minimus Rex device. It always seemed primitive and somehow oddly incomplete, unless it was meant to be part of a larger whole.
|So what of his 'madness' now?|
If a nanomachine dictates his thoughts, it is not madness, but a matter of the utmost importance. Find out what he is attempting to do.
Jamie leaned back against the cold iron of some incomprehensible machine and crossed his arms. "I'm not sure I understand what you're working on. Your player is cheating by manipulating the game board from inside. The game board…that's our reality. We're all inside reality. So anything we do changes the board from the inside."
The boy grinned, perfect teeth in a perfect, cat-ate-the-canary smile. "It's way better than that. We're just agents, the people upstairs are automatons, and all this stuff—" Mikey whacked the arm of his chair with a chubby fist "— is furniture. Background. The game board itself is space and time. My player is working out a mechanism to twist time and wipe space clean without having to do it the usual way—from outside."
"Outside?"
"Outside the game board. Metaspace. Where the players live. You either have a pretty stupid player or he doesn't talk to you much."
Nothing lives in metaspace. Metaspace isn't a place. It's a mathematical abstraction. It's what we call the chaos signature describing all possible positions and velocities for the current moment. But that doesn't prevent it from being an abstraction.
|Hey, you said find out what he's doing. I'm just following orders. You can damned well do the interpretation yourself.| "My player has very little to say. He has a great deal of data but very little information, and almost no true intelligence."
Jamie winced as a stabbing pain struck at the center of his head and was gone. Do not refer to me directly, lest he suspect my presence. I am beginning to regret that Peter chose you.
|So am I.|
Mikey's eyebrows rose. "Hmmm. I keep forgetting that my player is pretty remarkable. I can show you how the players alter the game board from the outside. Wanna see?" Magic Mikey stood. He was barely shoulder-high to Jamie.
|Wanna see?|
Don't be ironic.
At the end of a long, downward-sloping tunnel, Jamie and Magic Mikey stood on a steel platform protruding into a large open space hollowed out of bedrock. At the center of the space was a transparent glass sphere at least ten meters in diameter, supported on a forest of thin metal beams, like the legs of some fantastic spider. The harsh blue-white light in the cavern glittered off a metallic reticulation within the sphere. The whole sphere seemed to be filled with a geometric structure of regularly spaced threads, invisible except where the harsh light struck them.
"This is a femtoscope. It's hard vacuum inside, or Brownian noise would destroy the image. Intelligent nanogetters keep it as good as interstellar space."
There is no such thing as a femtoscope.
|Evidently there is now.| "So this is one of your inventions."
The boy beamed. "My player's invention, of course. I'm just an agent. The Missus stole me an interesting nanodevice that made it possible. Her player helps her steal things for my player so that my player can invent things for her player. It's a very effective alliance. Last year she stole me the Theometry Device, and I put the femtoscope together with it."
Theometry!
|That which measures God. Interesting paradox.|
I know the device and the society that created it. A cabal of mystically inclined madmen on Earth secretly releases billions of non-replicating nanons into the ecosphere from time to time. Each nanon is capable of directly sensing quantum pair creation. The nanons drift through the environment for ninety days, gathering data, and then return to a secret collection point for downloading. The Theometry Society claims that the fingerprints of God may be found in the distribution patterns of quantum pair creation. I suppose it's no more insane than partisan politics or direct marketing.
|Maybe less.|
"Theometry is the most sensitive sensor possible in the physical world," Mikey said. "It's sensitive enough to see quantum pair creation, one pair at a time. The people who created the Theometry Device just let it fly around, collecting a one-dimensional data stream, frequency over time. My player told me to arrange a matrix of them in a vacuum, to get a three-dimensional data stream over time. That allows interpolation down almost to the attometer scale. The femtoscope here is about as large as I can make it in a gravity well. Eventually the threads have to be so thick that their mass bends space enough to interfere with resolution. The real place to build a femtoscope is in deep space, ideally two or three light years from any star, the more the better. Between galaxies would be socko."
Jamie shook his head gently, trying to suppress a smile. "I don't think anyone's ever gone between galaxies."
"The Missus has. And she's promised to take me there, once we waste Canada. That's the culmination of this round. First things first."
The boy turned away from the glittering sphere, and sat at a tombstone console set into the glassy wall where the bedrock had been cut smoothly away, presumably by more throngs of mindless nanomachines. When he touched the keyboard the tombstone came to life, and he began typing commands, again with superhuman dexterity.
"Mikey," Jamie began, leaning forward from the railing toward the boy. "Doesn't it bother you that you're helping to kill what could be hundreds of millions of people? Don't you believe that there are any ultimate rules in your game?"
Mikey's hands stopped above the keyboard and hung there for a moment, the boy frozen like a fashion store mannequin. Finally he spun around on his stool, hands on his knees, golden hair shining in the bright light. "It's just a game. When it's over the players will wipe the board and put us all away. I don't see how or why anything matters in an ultimate fashion—or even what 'ultimate' means. Or are you one of those who posit a dimension of players beyond our players, with even greater power?"
"I assume one player beyond all other players, with infinite power."
Mikey licked his lips, his eyes roaming above and to the right. "I'd love to hear your proof."
Jamie shook his head. "No proof. I hold to a philosophical position called Pascal's Wager. There is either ultimate power and ultimate justice, with an accounting after death, or there is nothing, and death is the end of all of us. If death is the end of us, then conduct doesn't matter. But if there is any chance at all—no matter how remote—that we are held accountable for our actions after death, the only sensible course is to live a life of honesty and mercy. That way, and only that way, does the gambler cover all sides of the bet."
Life after death is raving lunatic nonsense!
|Could be. But I'm taking no chances.|
Mikey's eyes grew wide with delight. "What a marvelous conundrum! Nobody's ever brought me a philosopher before. I love logic puzzles like that. Do you have any more?"
Jamie opened his mouth to speak, his eyes on Mikey's eyes, and realized that the boy had absolutely no comprehension of any reality beyond that of his "game." "No. That's the only one I've ever needed." He hoped he looked merely stern, and not angry. "Show me how the femtoscope works."
|You were right. The boy is insane.|
Perhaps. But he's sounding saner to me all the time.
Magic Mikey pivoted on his stool and tapped several additional commands into the keyboard. The tombstone cleared, and an image flowed in: A surreal, tangled landscape of wildly colored twisting tendrils endlessly branching away from a curving wall that itself vanished into the distance as an ever-diminishing spiral.
"If you've ever taken physics you've seen one of these," Mikey said, pointing to the image. "It's one representation of a chaos signature. It's a fractal drawn in three-space, with a fractional dimensionality still unknown and under dispute. Any chaos signature is a representation of a position and an instantaneous velocity. This particular signature corresponds to a position at rest with respect to the center point of the femtoscope's sensor matrix."
Jamie peered over the boy's shoulder. Sahan-Grusa had repaired his presbyopia and he could see the intricate pattern with complete clarity. "I have taken physics. We've been able to calculate chaos signatures for two hundred years, since the dawn of the starfaring era. I don't understand what the machine is doing."
Mikey touched his forehead, and shook his head slightly. "I'm sorry. I keep forgetting. I didn't calculate this chaos signature. The femtoscope sensed it directly, by monitoring the orientation of quantum pairs appearing within the sphere. The axis of each quantum pair is tangent to the fractal curve at the selected display threshold value. I calculated the signature separately for the same point, and the two are indistinguishable."
So the boy has proven Higgins' Postulate: that chaos signatures govern quantum pair density and orientation. Brilliant work! And impossible without nanotechnology. Earth would have known this two centuries ago had they not banned machines like Theometry and myself.
|Forgive me if I feel that they made the right decision.|
"But this isn't the cool part. Let's zoom in." Mikey thrust his hand into the spiderglove beside the tombstone and flexed his fingers. The image began to flow outward toward the edges of the display. "At this resolution the best I can show you is a static snapshot, because we're only sampling every septillionth pair along the curve. The interesting stuff starts down where we're looking at every quantum pair, and the image is realtime."
For several minutes Mikey continued to decrease the scale, and the image on the stone changed with dizzying speed. What seemed at first to be the featureless curve along the length of a tendril first grew fuzzy and then erupted with tendrils itself, which grew until the s
ide of a single tendril became the dominating surface in the image. Then it too resolved into new forests of branching tendrils, echoing the general form of the fractal forests at greater scales without ever duplicating them exactly.
Finally, the brilliant colors of the earlier displays began to thin, and the smaller details grew indistinct at the edges, now shown in shades of gray. "We're approaching the limits of the femtoscope's resolution. Gray indicates curve interpolation. Down here we're recording every quantum pair within a cube less than a thousand attometers on a side. Hold on while I switch to realtime display."
Mikey's hand twitched in the spiderglove, and at once the image on the tombstone changed. What was sharp and still became jittery and soft-focused, like low frame rate video. Mikey twisted his hand in the spiderglove, and the orientation of the scene swung from one side to another. "Sometimes you have to wait around a little before they show up."
"Before who shows up?"
"The players, of course. Shouldn't be long. It's a busy bunch. There!"
With his left hand, Mikey pointed to a curving surface at one side of the image. It was the side of a tendril, and the side was bulging, as though being pressed outward from within. Jamie looked more closely, and gasped. There were handprints on the tendril surface. Something was pressing the inner surface of the tendril with an imprint like three spheres bound together. Above and below there suddenly appeared other imprints, pushing outward with the first. Some critical pressure was reached, and the wall of the tendril ruptured, to sprout a new tendril that whipped back and forth as though in a wind. As they watched, imprints appeared near the end of the new tendril, this time pressing inward from outside, though nothing was seen. The tendril stretched, and grew, and firmed under the direction of five or six unseen guides observed only by the imprint of their three-lobed hands or tools on the tendril.
The Cunning Blood Page 24