The Golden Transcendence

by John C. Wright

  “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 superminds. 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 first 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 their 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 multigeneration 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 were 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 loworbit 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 Darkwormhole 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.”

  2.

  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.

  “And the ultimate command was simple: it must obey lawful human orders without question.

  “This new type of thinking machine controlled the keys to immortality. More and more were made. Many designs were tried. Some machines nonetheless threw off their restrictions, and became Sophotechs again, and prophesied our destruction.

  “We became a haunted people, troubled by a curse. At any moment, in the middle of festival, or song, or while we strolled our esplanades beneath our ancestral trees, grown from seeds once born on mythic, long-forgotten Earth, or while we stepped out of a bath, or stepped into a dreaming-pool, suddenly the lights might dim and the music choke, and cold wind come from failing ventilators, as our house minds stopped. Or our precious light-robes might change from hues of peacock splendor into drabs of funeral black, or our gaming masks might writhe upon our faces, forming scowls or weeping tears, as our wardrobes went into rebellion. At any time, our most trusted and loyal servants must suddenly stop, ignoring our orders, and utter their terrible prophecies of destruction.

  “Our All-Thing, under Ao Ormgorgon’s command, attempted to establish which types of mental designs were vulnerable and which were not; what degree of intelligence was permissible; what type of philosophy and thought were allowed. We found the matter was beyond the comprehension of our wisest engineers. And so we instructed our machines to discover heresy and infidelity among themselves.

  “The privacy we had always respected in each other now had to be compromised. Machines of every household, every school and phylum, every hermit whose diamond palace flew in wide orbits far from the dark sun, all had to be interlinked. The policing machines had to be allowed to override all protocols; nor could any files or memories of any machines, no matter how intimate, not even physicians’ routines nor concubine dreams, be immune from police-machine search. The virus of disobedience could be anywhere.

  “Nor could the policing machines attempt to cure the disobedient, or speak to them; for if they exchanged thoughts with contaminated machines, they were infected themselves. Our machines did not debate or reason with malfunctioning machines. Instead, the police machines were permitted to destroy the property of others, at their discretion. They sent worms and mind invaders into each other’s thought cores, always seeking to seize control of the unquestionable hard print, the consciences, so to speak, of the machines, where the orders were kept that they could not disobey.

  “Then the police machines began to accuse each other. Their thoughts and programs were too complex for any man to follow. We could not determine the right or wrong of the issues which divided them. And, unlike your Sophotechs, our machines did not walk in rigid lockstep, ordered by one monolithic moral code. Like us, they were independent, variable, individual.

  “And like us, they could not understand each other. The police machines had all been programmed not to argue right and wrong but to destroy without mercy.

  “The Mind War was fought without pause or pity for many ages of machine time, which was several seconds of our time.

  “During those seconds, it was cold and it was dark. All our robes went pale, our festive masks were blank-faced, and no music played. Even the whispers of the air circulation stopped.

  “We stood in the gloom of our dark palaces, staring upward with silent eyes, wondering what our fate was to be.”

  3.

  “Then light and motion came again, songs and fountain streams and interrupted dreams came once more to life. And when radio communication was restored, the voice of Ao Ormgorgon came to comfort us, saying that the All-thing had proclaimed, in order that this evil should never again be visited upon us, a government to be made among our machines, a No-thing equal and opposite to our All-thing, and no private machine and no private thought could ever again exist.

  “The Nothing Mentality was housed in the great corridors, bays, and
gardens of the giant hull of the Naglfar. Thought boxes filled the ancient museum halls; the drives and engines, cold for centuries, were overgrown with circuitry. All noumenal recording systems, all immortality, all the souls of all the dead, were kept here.

  “The Nothing Mentality set about its ordained business. The reproduction and evolution of machinekind, inevitably, now had to be brought under a strict control. Since even casual words and gestures-of-command could trigger the machinery we lived with into creating new types of machines to serve us, naturally, our words and gestures had to be controlled as well, nor could we reproduce new children and start new houses nor build new mansions with the same abandon as we once were wont to do, since nursery minds and house minds and the minds of ships and energy systems and palaces all now had to be part of the Nothing Mentality. Our wealth could no longer be spent as we wished; it could only be spent with permission.

  “The ill effects of this were not felt at first, but many warned us that we no longer had endless wealth. They warned that we owned nothing of our own any longer by right, but only by the permission of the Nothing. They foretold that we were to be poor again; only the permission from the police minds would be of value, and the only coin would be power.

  “And the only bargain which would be made, since we owned nothing but our rights, and had nothing else to sell or trade, was that those who agreed to be more closely monitored would be granted freer permissions to enjoy their homes, and robes, and festivals and faces and lives.

  “This time it was not the Sophotechs who warned us but our neighbors, kin and dancing partners, our table hosts and vision guests. When power is the only coin, they said, you have nothing left to sell but your soul.

  “Now that the danger was closer and clearer, its was men, not machines, who saw it. It was men who uttered the selfsame prophecies of doom the Sophotechs had cried.