The Golden Transcendence

by John C. Wright

  Ironically: “They can indeed.”

  “And if the Sophotechs were so evil as you claim, why would your Silent Oecumene Sophotechs have all just up and committed sepuku just because you ordered them to? Why would they obey a self-destruct order, when you had such trouble getting them to obey any others?”

  “I did not say they were evil. They are devoted to a cause, one in which they firmly believe, but one which is alien to human life, opposed to freedom and the human spirit. They are not like us; they have no craving for life, not even their own. Why not shut themselves off when we ordered it? They knew the victory of their cause, by that time, was assured.

  “And so it would have been—had it not been for one thing, one small spark of hope, one human ambition they could not have calculated. We had been told it was impossible and dangerous, but, being human, we persevered. And eventually it was built.”

  “You mean your Nothing Mentality? That was your hope and triumph?”

  “The Nothing Mentality, for all its flaws, was, in fact, a proper watchman of the human spirit. It was able to calculate at least as far into the future as your Golden Oecumene Sophotechs. It had far more energy at its disposal, and could run far more extrapolations. It saw the impossibility of policing all men against temptation; it saw that, in a contest between mortals and immortals, the immortals must prevail, especially if the immortals have superintelligent thinking machines to lead them. And the Silent Oecumene, as it was presently constituted, could not expand outward to other stars. Their immortality was a chain; and, even had not it been, the Nothing Mentality police machines were programmed not to allow such freedom as a diaspora would cause. Nor could they override or ignore their own programs. Because of the very nature of the situation, of the Nothing’s programs, and its inability to change those programs, the Silent Oecumene would still, a trillion years hence, be confined to Cygnus X-1, while the Golden Oecumene machines, once humanity was extinct or absorbed, could spread to fill all the stars around.

  “Therefore the Nothing Mentality did the only thing it could to prevail against the Golden Oecumene’s plans.”

  Phaethon said sarcastically: “It killed off the Silent Oecumene, then killed itself?”

  “The Silent Oecumene is not dead, only asleep.”

  “What?”

  3.

  “I have already told you. The Silent Oecumene, the entire civilization, every man, woman, hermaphrodite, neutraloid, partial, clone, and child, is waiting, time suspended, in the deep of the black hole gravity well. Waiting.

  “Waiting to be brought out again.

  “Waiting, suspended, because the alternative was slow degeneration and decay. It was our oldest custom: to orbit adjacent to our black hole any who were sick beyond hope until a cure could be found. Our society was sick and getting sicker.

  “The Nothing had to kill itself in order that no Sophotechnology would be present to tempt them when they reemerged. There will be no further immortality, not for them.

  “Instead, there will be a ship, a ship like no other. Not a spaceship, not a multigeneration ship, but a starship.

  “She will be a starship loaded with equipment and biological materials enough to bring life to the dead habitats, palaces, and worldlets of the Silent Oecumene. A starship with an engineer aboard skilled enough to rebuild and restart the silent singularity fountains. And, with the energy of those fountains, a starship with power and with ship-mind circuitry enough to recall the noumenal signals which hold the souls of all my people up out of the warped space near the black hole. A starship to be the first model, and the flagship, of the fleet of ships to be made from her design; a fleet no one here has wealth or vision enough to build.

  “When my Oecumene fell silent, only I was left behind to carry this message. Think of me as both the messenger and the message, the mental virus, the self-reproducing belief system, which had to be imposed upon the peoples of the Second Oecumene; because they were people who would not and could not otherwise have understood this plan, which was the only hope of humanity against the all-embracing tyranny of machines.

  “They fought, some of them. Till the very last, I, Ao Varmatyr, the one of me who made the Last Broadcast, struggled against the part of me that was this thought virus with horror. Until I was told the plan, until I understood.

  “And yes, the most grotesque imaginable violence was used against us to put the information of this plan into our brains. But I do not blame the Nothing Mentality for that; it was a machine, built to carry out orders, and it was ordered to use force, not to persuade.

  “But the plan was wise despite all that.

  “Our only possible action was to wait, until some ship or signal reached us from someone curious enough to inquire into the pretended death of the Silent Oecumene. I was not discovered by the Sophotech-run fly-by probes, of course not; I hid. I was waiting for a signal from someone who was not ruled by the machines. That someone was Xenophon, alone in his isolated, but free, Farbeyond Station. He was the spark. In his memory I saw the fire from which that spark had come. A fire of the spirit; a man with means and will and wit enough to go to the Silent Oecumene, to wake those waiting there, to become the captain of that promised fleet.

  “You, Phaethon, are the one for whom the Silent Oecumene has been waiting. You share our dreams of freedom; you are one of us. Only you can save us; only we, the children of colonists ourselves, will embrace your dream, a dream of human life spread everywhere among the stars, a dream that all others will despise, oppose, and strangle.

  “You thought you were alone, good Phaethon. You thought no one else dreamed what you dreamed or loved what you loved. You were mistaken. There are a billion of us. We are waiting for you.

  “Fly your ship to Cygnus X-1. Save the Second Oecumene. Father a million million Oecumenes more.”

  4.

  Phaethon examined the blue pool of motionless Neptunian body substance. His noetic machine could not interpret the meanings of the electron flows of the cell surfaces in the creature’s neurocircuitry, could not resolve them into thought. He had a subsystem in his armor correlating the Silent One’s words with its brain actions, seeking patterns, in an attempt to learn how to decipher those thoughts. Even a partial deciphering would have allowed him to do something analogous to reading the face expressions of Base humaniforms, or watching the insect agitation in a Cerebelline gardener, and guess at the emotions or the honesty of his prisoner.

  But there was no result yet. The Silent One was opaque.

  Phaethon sent: “And what should I do with you now?”

  “Keep me or kill me as you please. My mission, and the need of my life, is complete. You are now at the helm of the Phoenix Exultant, I ask only that you depart, without delay, before your Sophotechs attempt to stop you; that you travel to Cygnus X-1; that you save my people and scatter mankind among the stars. What is my life compared to that? But I think you are suspicious of me still.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Your disorientation is understandable. You came here expecting danger and violence from me; instead, I have handed you the crown of victory. Pause not! Wait for nothing! Do not delay, but go!”

  Was it victory? Phaethon was beginning to find his suspicions hard to maintain. Supposing the story told by Xenophon and the ghost possessing him to be false, what would be the point of such falsehood? Was there a Silent Phoenix, an enemy spaceship waiting somewhere, waiting for Xenophon to lead Phaethon into an ambush? It seemed unlikely. The Phoenix Exultant could achieve 99 percent of lightspeed after three days of acceleration at ninety gravities. Who could intercept such a vehicle in the vastness of deep space? And what weapon could penetrate her hull? Antimatter could breach the hull, of course, but not without destroying everything held within.

  And yet if destruction of the Phoenix was Xenophon’s goal, why not simply sell the vessel to Gannis for scrap?

  Where else could an ambuscade wait if not in deep space? Perhaps at the Silent Oecumene it
self, at Cygnus X-1. It was hard to imagine a person (but not hard to imagine a machine intelligence) waiting the decades and centuries it might take to lure a victim into a trap. But what assurance would Xenophon imagine he had that Phaethon would actually go there?

  Unless the story were true. Unless Xenophon, or the ghost of Ao Varmatyr, was simply so desperate, so convinced of the malice of the Golden Oecumene Sophotechs, that he had risked everything on the hope that Phaethon would be so curious, and so compassionate, and so eager for the future which Varmatyr envisioned, a future of a thousand Phoenices founding a million worlds, that Phaethon would certainly go to Cygnus X-1.

  But if the story were actually true, then it was not an ambush. There would be no trap at Cygnus X-1, only a grateful population who needed rescuing, and who would have at hand the resources to create the Phoenix fleet.

  Phaethon thought about it. The Silent Oecumene would have the resources, in fact, to create a fleet which would begin the long-dreamt-of and long-delayed great diaspora of man throughout the universe; a diaspora which would never end as long as the stars still burned.

  The vision was a stirring one. Yet it did not touch Phaethon as deeply as he would have thought. Perhaps he was more suspicious, more conscious of his duty, than he had ever known himself to be before.

  Because he did have a duty here.

  Phaethon signaled to the bridge crew to change the course of the Phoenix Exultant. In the energy mirrors, stars swam dizzyingly from left to right, and the great ship’s prow came about. The deck seemed to tilt as side accelerations played across the vessel.

  The Silent One sent: “What is your decision? What new course is this?”

  “I am returning to the Inner System. Naturally, you will have to stand to account for your crimes. No matter what your motives, good motives do not excuse bad acts, nor ends justify means.”

  The Silent One sent: “You are deluded. I have explained the situation; if you continue in your present course, you will be betrayed by the Sophotechs. Think about what I have said! No other tale explains the facts! The Sophotechs conspire against you; your failure is part of their calculation. Don’t your own suspicions, your own desires, tell you that what I say is true?”

  “That only means I’d like to believe you; it doesn’t mean I should.”

  “The Sophotechs will ensnare you! Once you are back at port, the Phoenix Exultant will never fly again! What do you think will happen to this ship, if I, her owner, am punished, or if they change my mind or memory to make me like one of them? If I am one of them, I will not let her fly. Your courts of law, if I am punished, can cause me pain, or confinement, but they do not have the power to excuse your debts to your creditors. The Phoenix Exultant is no longer yours. What you do now will not make her yours again.

  “Think of the magnitude of the decision you are about to make! On the one hand, yes, I have committed a fraud, I have deceived you and the Hortators, manipulated events, and frightened you. Small crimes! Weigh against that, on the other hand, that, if you return to port, and put yourself under the control of the Golden Oecumene Sophotechs again, their courts of law and legal tricks, this ship is dead; all the dreams of future man are dead; the thing which makes Phaethon truly what he is, is dead; and all the folk of the Second Oecumene, women, children, innocents and all, all who hoped for you, are frozen, trapped, suspended in the warped space near the hole; all my people are dead.”

  Phaethon was disturbed. The Silent One was right about the ownership of the Phoenix Exultant. Unless he, Phaethon, came up with an astronomical amount of money, and that in a very short time, the period of receivership would end, and the ownership of the Phoenix would be lost to Phaethon forever.

  Nevertheless, Phaethon sent: “I would like very much to go save your people. But my likes and dislikes don’t change my duty.”

  “Duty?!! Let me kill myself; all needs you might have for vengeance against my one poor person will be obviated; you will be free to soar to your waiting destiny!”

  “I would still have to go back and pick up Daphne. I’ve decided to take her with me. And I cannot leave her in exile here.”

  “Daphne! Your false Daphne, the image, the mere echo, of a woman unworthy of you?! They used Daphne to snare you last time! Don’t fall for the same trick twice!”

  “Present some further evidence that what you say is true. I might change my mind.”

  No message came back for several moments. The noetic unit showed high-speed activity in the coded brain sections, but no hint of what that activity implied. Was the Silent One calculating a response?

  Then: “Phaethon, you would not have been sent into this situation with your conscience free and your free will and memory intact. Which means that there is a partial personality possessing you now, or false memories, or some other restraint or leash by which the War Mind still hopes to control you. Your actions seem grossly out of character. Your judgment has been affected. Think carefully: would the real Phaethon, Phaethon with his mind and soul intact, abandon the dream of his life, and his hopes for mankind, and all his work, and everything, merely to catch and punish one criminal like me? Is Phaethon’s notion of duty, of social obligation, so strong that it overrides all other personal considerations? You did not think so when you built this ship.”

  “If my judgment has been infected or altered, what point is there in arguing further?”

  “Argument might show that part of you who yet is pure how corrupt the other parts become. Answer the question: Is your behavior now in character for you?”

  Phaethon was uncomfortable. Because, honestly, he did not recall exactly what it was Atkins had done to him, or had talked him into doing.

  And did he trust a man like Atkins? Atkins was, and had to be, the kind of man who would do anything to prevail over his enemies, deceiving them, destroying them, killing them, by any means possible. What life did Atkins have? A life of endless bloodshed, and an endless preparation for future bloodshed. A life of suspicion, harsh discipline, ruthlessness toward others, pitilessness toward himself.

  Atkins was a man of destruction. What had he ever created to compare with this great ship? What had he ever built?

  For a moment, he was so glad that he was a man like himself, and not like Atkins.

  And, after all, Atkins was not the sort of man one could trust.

  Phaethon said, “The noetic unit can tell if I’ve been tampered with.”

  “Precisely! I was counting on you to come to that very conclusion!” said the Silent One.

  Without any further ado, Phaethon opened the epaulettes in his armor, and activated the thought ports, and made a connection between his brain and the noetic reader.

  Like an explosion, the wild disorientation that raced through him, and the crushing pains that began to burn into his flesh, were the first signal that something was terribly, terribly wrong. The war for control of Phaethon’s nervous system took place at mechanical speeds his brain could not hope to match. The same interference that locked him out of control of his own armor, and blocked his frantic signals to the nanomachine cape that controlled every cell in his body, also prevented him from releasing the deadman switch to burn the Silent One with mirror weapons, and prevented the activation of his high-speed emergency personality.

  And so he was simply too slow to react. The Silent One had somehow, without any visible machinery or physical connection to any mechanisms, invaded the noetic reader and reorganized the circuitry.

  In the same split instant when Phaethon connected his mind to the machine, and long before he was even aware of what had happened, it was far, far too late.

  5.

  Phaethon was in pain; he felt faint; sharp pains told him smaller bones in his body had broken, tissues were damaged. How? Blearily, he tried to read from his internal channels, tried to summon his personal thoughtspace. Nothing came. The channels were jammed; something was interfering with the cybernetics webbing his brain.

  He tried to shut off his pain
centers. That worked. His body was still being damaged, but he was blissfully unaware of it. He could concentrate.

  The sensation of heat burning his body told him all he needed to know. His nanomachine cloak was in motion. Somehow (and he had no guess as to how) the Silent One had triggered the release cycle of his body’s internal high-gravity configuration. His tissues were softening, his blood was turning to liquid.

  But the ship’s drive was still exerting massive thrust. Under twenty-five times his normal weight, Phaethon’s cells would surely rupture, and he would surely die.

  An outside source turned on his personal thoughtspace, and the familiar images and icons from his adjutant status board were superimposed on the scene around him.

  To the left was the dragon sign showing signal command, with information logistics spread like wings behind the picture. Behind him were trophies, emblems, awards, decorations. To his right were a number of pictures: a winged sword, a roaring tiger with a lightning bolt in its claws, an anchor beneath a crossed musket and pike, a three-headed vulture holding, in one claw, a lance, and in the other, a shield adorned with a biohazard triskeleon.

  Directly in front of him was a standard naval menu: an olive drab curve of windows and control icons, with a brass wheel and joystick, astrogator’s globe, fuel-consumption displays. A menu above the wheel controlled the interface between his armor and the ship mind. This menu showed a red exclamation mark: Password Not Accepted: No Course Corrections Enabled Without Proper Password. Resubmit?

  The Silent One’s voice came into his ear, directly into his ear. That was a bad sign, since it meant the Silent One had somehow seized control of his armor, or, at least, the circuits in his helmet. But it was not a sign as bad as it might have been: the thought ports in his armor were evidently not allowing the noetic reader to redact or to manipulate his nervous system. The circuit woven into his brain must still be free. The Silent One’s words were not appearing, for example, directly in his auditory nerve, or, worse yet, directly into his mind and memory. The noetic reader was not controlling his mind. He still could choose not to listen or not to obey.