Very early—perhaps even before Egdod had become aware of Ward—a soul had taken up residence in the spring. As he now approached it with Longregard, he sensed that many of the trees that had grown up around the spring had also become the homes of souls. The presence of one attracted more. The water in the ground made the trees grow strongly; they were taller and more elaborately developed here than anywhere else in the Land. The word “grove” came to him and he sensed that in its oldness, the size of its trees, and the number of souls present here, it was different from every other place. In its center was the dark wet fold in the earth from which the spring emerged.
Longregard bated as they passed through the innermost ring of trees, and held her distance as Egdod kept walking toward the spring.
“Welcome, Egdod,” said the voice from the spring. “What is it you would give life to?”
Egdod, not trusting his power of speech, stretched out his hand with the tiny pair of glass and metal wings perched on the tip of a finger.
The spring’s rushing grew and filled the grove with a sound that put him in mind of the hiss of chaos, but he knew that in it was much greater order, the product of a cunning that had dwelled patiently in this place for nigh as long as Egdod had been here. He knew now that the soul that dwelled in the spring had been gathering her powers for as long as he had. But they were powers of a different order.
The tip of his finger fizzed. He gazed at it to see an aura streaming in from all directions. The sensation was akin to what he had felt when the aura of Ward had touched his knee, but again with less of chaos and more of a sort of order that it was beyond his powers to understand. It focused and sharpened and he saw that it was caused by a rapid vibration in the wings, which were now moving of their own accord. Gazing at them more closely he saw that they had been transformed, and were no longer the glass and metal constructions that Thingor had so laboriously wrought, but even finer and lighter, and made of different stuff. Joining them together was a narrow body. As he looked on, this sprouted legs, and at one end a tiny head, and at the other a sharp tail that curved under.
He sensed that it was about to fly away and so he closed his thumb over the top of it so that he could hold it in place and better examine it. But as he did so the sharp tail penetrated his fingertip and caused a sensation that made him jerk his hand back. The creature took flight and hovered for a moment in front of his face, then drifted away and settled upon the purple blossom of a flower that had emerged from the soil by the mouth of the spring.
There was a form in the water, akin to the ones that Egdod and the other souls had adopted, but without wings. She seemed to have been reclining in the flow of the stream, but now rose to a seated position, letting the water flow around her buttocks and legs, but with her body and head and arms up where Egdod could see them.
“The name of it is Pain,” Spring said, glancing at Egdod’s hand, which he was still holding out away from his body as if to distance himself from it.
“I begin to remember it,” Egdod said.
“If you make a practice of summoning forth new kinds of creatures that can act of their own volition, you will suffer more, as bad and worse,” Spring predicted, now looking Egdod directly in the eye.
“It is nonetheless worth doing,” Egdod said, “though I lack the power of doing it myself.”
“To nurture that power has been my work here,” Spring said. “But I do not possess the art of devising clever shapes into which life can be breathed.”
“Together we shall do it, then,” Egdod proposed.
“You may make a place for me in your Palace and I shall dwell there from time to time,” Spring said, “when it suits me to adopt a form such as yours. But if you look about and do not see me there, it is because I am here.” As she said the last words, her voice became a rush of wet noise and her form dissolved into a hill of water that collapsed and surged down out of the Grove. Then it was gone from the place, but Spring, he knew, remained here.
Part 6
33
This is not an ordinary business meeting,” Elmo Shepherd announced through the impassive face of his Metatron. “Do not be deceived by its mundane aspect: the conference table, the pitcher of water, you men and women in business attire. We are doing eschatology here. Practicing it the way some people do yoga.”
Corvallis actually didn’t think it seemed so mundane. Yes, it was a fairly conventional conference room in the offices of ONE. But the table was dominated by a live-updated display of the Landform.
A year and a half had passed since the LVU—the Landform Visualization Utility—had first been unveiled at ACTANSS 3. During that time, it had changed its general shape very little. But the algorithms had improved. More data now flowed into them. The Landform could now be mapped with higher precision and greater certainty. Its finer contours had undergone changes. There was no getting around the fact that these changes were exactly the sorts of improvements they’d have expected Pluto to make. He had gone there—he had killed himself—to fix the place up. And he was doing it.
Still Corvallis had doubted the evidence of his own eyes until Sophia had drawn his attention to the tower in the middle of the park. People had stopped using scare quotes. It was no longer a “tower” in a “park” but a tower in the park, as anyone could plainly see. She had shown Corvallis a photo she had taken several years ago of the park in the middle of the Iowa town where Richard had grown up. A similar tower was right in the middle of it.
There was simply no denying the fact that the processes that had been spawned to simulate the brains of Egdod and of Pluto now inhabited a world that they had created in accordance with how they thought a world ought to look. They had learned how to allocate memory in the cloud for storing that world’s map. There was even evidence that they were using other kinds of resources—clusters of high-performance processors—to simulate its wind and its waves.
And if that was true for those two processes, presumably it was true for all of the others as well: thousands of them now.
“I am not pleased with what is going on,” said the Metatron. “This is not the way it was supposed to happen.”
“By ‘it,’ what do you even mean, El?” Zula asked.
“You know perfectly well.”
“Yes. I think I do. But by just talking about ‘it’ as though we all have some shared notion of what ‘it’ was supposed to be, you’re kinda pulling a fast one. We need to unpack this ‘it’ you speak of.”
Here El might have got a word in edgewise, had he been sitting in the room. But the time lag between Flanders and Seattle spoiled his cadence. Zula went on: “I first encountered you in the days after my uncle’s death, when, against my will, I had to take a little crash course on Eutropians and cryonics and all of that stuff. I’d heard about the idea of the Singularity, read articles about it, but never met anyone who actually believed in it seriously enough to plan for it. Since then, you and I and Corvallis and Sophia and Sinjin and Jake and so many others have devoted significant portions of our careers to working on the nuts and bolts of it. We haven’t had a whole lot of conversations about the big picture: why we’re actually doing this, what is the goal. So when you say ‘This is not the way it was supposed to happen’ I tend to think you’re envisioning a big picture that maybe the rest of us don’t share. Maybe you should share ‘it’ with us.”
“I already have, in a sense,” the Metatron said. “When I mentioned that we are doing eschatology here.”
“End-of-the-world-type stuff?” Corvallis asked.
“What is humanity’s ultimate destiny? That is my preferred definition,” El returned. “The timeless preoccupation of great religions. Except that prophets and theologians didn’t have any factual information to work with. We have facts. We can actually do this. We can decide what our ultimate destiny is and we can put it into effect. We are the first people in history to whom that choice, that power, has been given. And I’m not going to see us blow the opportunity.”
“Who says we’re blowing it?” Zula asked. “We don’t know what’s going on on the Landform. Maybe it’s the Garden of Eden. Maybe it’s terrific there.”
“Maybe it’s a digital North Korea,” El countered. “Whatever it is, it looks like a simulation of an Earthlike environment. We can’t really tell what goes on there. People—processes—seem to be concentrated in a thing that looks like a town. They communicate with each other, or so it appears. Other processes locate themselves in other parts of the Landform. If you’ll let me have the table, I’d like to show you the results of some network analysis that one of my teams has been running.”
“Take it away,” Zula said.
The Landform faded. One of El’s techies, physically in the room, gestured in the air and brought into being an abstraction: a constellation of colored objects hovering in the space above the table. Thousands of small white blobs, like aspirin tablets, were crowded into the lowest few inches of the display, just above the surface of the table. These were webbed together by countless gossamer strands. Above them floated perhaps two dozen larger balls, color-coded according to a scheme El hadn’t explained yet. Surmounting the whole thing was a big yellow sphere about the size of a grapefruit. Radiating down from it were many fine golden rays linking it to some of the big objects hovering just below it.
“We can’t eavesdrop on the actual content of messages being exchanged between processes,” El said, “but we can get a general idea of which talks to which. What you’re looking at is the output of a network analysis system. It shows who talks to who, and how often. And some trends are obvious.”
“Forgive a basic question,” Corvallis said, “but each of these objects represents a different process? A soul, as it were?”
“Yes, and the lines drawn between them show what we believe to be communication.”
“Why are some so much larger than others?”
“Their size is proportional to how many resources they use—how much memory, how much processing power.”
“Okay. So, clearly, we have a whole lot of little tiny ones that talk to each other all the time,” Corvallis said, skating his hands through the lower stratum, which looked like aspirin tablets trapped in a cobweb.
“Yes. The vast majority of individual processes fit that profile. But above it you see the fat cats. The resource hogs. The huge yellow one on top is the first Process that Sophia spawned back at Princeton.”
“Dodge’s Brain,” Zula said.
“Yes—though its connectome has changed so much since then that, for all we know, it might have very little in common with Dodge at this point.”
“But it built the park, with the tower . . . ,” Zula pointed out, then shook her head impatiently. “Sorry. Go on.”
“In between you’ve got the Pantheon.”
“Come again?”
“That is my term for a group of twenty or so processes that impose a disproportionate load on the system—they consume a lot of resources. Most of the nine MFN processes are there, including the one simulating Verna Braden’s connectome, which is second only to Dodge’s Brain. They, and some of the Ephrata Eleven, got an early start. They grew rapidly.”
“Pluto?”
“The big purple one,” El said. “And, to be fair, a few of mine are in there too.”
“Of yours!?”
“You know what I mean. Clients of my organization, scanned using my devices, uploaded through my network.”
Zula got up and walked around the table, viewing the display from different angles. “If this is correct, I’m seeing that Dodge talks to Verna, to Pluto, to the other members of what you’re calling the Pantheon. But he almost never talks to the little guys.”
“The little guys talk to each other a lot,” Corvallis observed, “and they have some contact with members of the Pantheon.”
“Some more than others,” Jake observed. “Verna’s not talking to the little guys at all but some of the other angels have lots of contact.”
“Angels?” El asked sharply.
Jake smiled. “My preferred term for what you are calling members of the Pantheon.”
Zula was holding out one hand toward Jake, as if holding him back—beseeching him not to plunge into a debate about angels vs. gods. But El broke in: “Zula, I notice you’re standing pretty close to the green shape now.”
“The one you identify with Verna, if I’m not mistaken,” Zula said, nodding. “What about it?”
“Take a close look and let me know what you see.”
Zula leaned in close and wrinkled her nose. “Around Verna I can see a bunch of tiny little motes. Just pinpricks of green. Like fruit flies hovering around a watermelon. Faint lines connecting them to the Verna blob. What do those represent?”
“I don’t know,” El said, “and that is what concerns me. Actually it’s one of many things about the overall situation that is concerning. But this is new, and strictly a Verna-related phenomenon.”
“Verna was a hacker. Underappreciated. Never really got her feet under her before the cancer took over her life. Maybe she’s up to her old tricks,” Corvallis said.
“Meaning what?” Jake asked.
“Those tiny motes—the fruit flies—are independent processes that have been spawned recently,” El said. “Mind you, they are in no way as complex, or as capable, as those processes we’ve set in motion based on full human connectomes. But they run on their own and we didn’t make them. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Verna did.”
“To ask a blunt question, who’s paying for the computational resources consumed by these new processes?” Zula asked.
“You are,” El said. “Because your foundation launched the Verna process. And these subprocesses that she has spawned all carry the same holographic signature. The billing therefore goes to you. In a larger sense, though, I support all of this by bringing new computing centers online every day. Supporting the R & D, paying the overhead.”
“Well, this is fascinating data, if it’s for real,” Zula said. “I thank you for showing it to us, El. What conclusions do you draw?”
“To begin with, it is clearly a hierarchical structure.”
“You’ve certainly made it appear that way by arranging it in a hierarchy,” Zula said dryly.
“Which can be backed up statistically. This not just me playing games with pictures,” El snapped. “The overall picture is that resource usage is utterly dominated by a few mega-processes. They’ve established the Landform. Everyone lives on it. It’s . . . it’s just . . .”
“It’s just like the world we’re living in now, is that what you are saying?” Corvallis asked. “Nothing has changed.”
“That is my concern,” El said. “We had an opportunity to start all over again. To build a new universe in which consciousnesses—entities based on human minds, but bigger, better, deathless—can dwell and do whatever they want, free from the constraints imposed by the physical world. Instead of which the Process—the first Process—got a huge head start and just blindly, stupidly re-created something very much like the world we all live in now. A world that looks to have geography and physics based on the ones that imprison us.”
“Maybe we need it,” Zula said. “Maybe our brains can’t make sense of things otherwise.”
“It’s the Kant thing all over again,” Corvallis muttered.
“C, you’re going to have to speak up,” El said, “the microphones on this thing still aren’t as good as human ears.”
“Oh, years and years ago I had a conversation with Dodge about Kant. Whom he had never heard of until that point. It was about Kant’s idea that space and time were ineluctable to the human mind—that we simply could not think without hanging everything on a space-time lattice. That any attempt to think outside of that framework would produce gibberish. He used it to take down Leibniz.”
“Do you think it sank in?” Jake asked.
“It got him to Google Kant,” Corvallis allowed.
“It i
s a common preoccupation of people who think about the idea of heaven,” Jake said. “What exactly would it be like to live forever in a realm where physical constraints don’t apply? Where there is no evil, no pain, no want? Being an angel, living on a cloud, strumming a harp twenty-four/seven/forever—that could get old. Old enough that it might become indistinguishable from being in hell.”
Jake wasn’t kidding. He had hosted entire conferences about this sort of thing. Caused books to be published about it. Talked leading scientists into discussing it in public with theologians.
“Fascinating,” El said. He was pretty clearly not fascinated. “Maybe the rest of you can continue that discussion after I’ve signed off. Fly to a retreat center in the mountains, invite some archbishops and some hackers, serve wine, impress one another with your big ideas. I don’t give a shit. I’m just about out of time. I have supported this more generously than any of you can possibly appreciate. From the very beginning I was dumping money into it. I’ve wasted more than anyone else has spent. But I accepted the waste—the fact that I didn’t know which twenty percent of it was actually getting us somewhere—because I knew that I was mortal, and I didn’t just want to go out like a sucker. Like everyone else who has ever died, or will die. I’ve been hands-off to a degree that isn’t appreciated. I’ve let the beneficiaries of my generosity experiment with ideas that in many cases were frankly unsound. Fine. But these results are troubling to me. Now we have what for me is the last straw: one of these processes—Verna—is spawning new processes.”
“It’s a Sorcerer’s Apprentice problem,” Corvallis said, nodding.
“If Verna can do it, others can learn to do likewise, and then the demand for resources goes exponential, the whole thing blows up and runs out of money. When I kick the bucket, I can’t even boot up my own process because all of the computers in the world are busy running what Zula likened to fruit flies. So I think it is time for me to take a more active role. A more directive role.”
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell Page 42