The Golden Transcendence Read online

  “Bacon.”

  “Besides bacon. And don’t say pork hash.”

  “Pork hash. And . . . you know.”

  The image nodded.

  Dying.

  The image said, “It’ll happen eventually anyway, you know. Just like Pa and Ma always said. The noumenal recording might last a million years, or two, but eventually everything runs down, decays, runs out of energy. All the heroes die young. All the color runs out of life. And the only people left are withered, tired, scared, useless old things, mumbling over memories of brave adventures in their youth they were always too scared to attempt, bright fires they were afraid to touch. And those gray leftover people are only playing a delaying game, playing stay-away with life so they can have more lifetime.

  “But life loses. Life always loses. Heroes stop being heroes, and then they live boringly ever after, and then they die. Entropy wins. Everything ends. Logic enforces that law. Everywhere where there is time and space, everywhere where there is cause and effect, that law always wins.

  “But”—and now an elfish twinkle gleamed like fire in her eye—“but what if someone did not want it to be that way? Someone a little like Phaethon. A whole race of Phaethons. An heroic race, a million of them, each as fierce and free as Phaethon. A race not willing to give in. Not willing to give up. What if they found a trapdoor out of this dead universe? A hole? A black hole? A place where the tyranny of time and space couldn’t reach? A realm where laws of logic don’t apply?”

  Daphne said in dreamy, angry, half-breathlessness, listening, unwilling to listen: “What—what in the world do you mean? You’re talking nonsense!”

  “All fairy tales are nonsense. That is what makes them beautiful.”

  “But fairy tales aren’t true.”

  “Not unless you find someone, someone great, great enough to do deeds of renown, who can make them true for you.”

  Daphne said, “So the Second Oecumene people shot their brain information into a black hole to find . . . what? A wormhole? An escape exit? There is nothing inside a black hole!”

  “Yes, he is,” The reflection smiled with pride.

  “Escape from where? From reality? From life? There’s no other place to go, outside the universe.”

  “Listen, sister-me. You know it’s true. Even a prison the size of a universe is still a prison. And it is every prisoner’s duty to escape.”

  At that moment, Daphne saw, clear as crystal in her memory, an image from a fairy tale.

  She saw an heroic man, shining in gold armor, who rode on a winged boat to the top of the sky. Surrounded by frost, he raised an ax in bloodstained hands high overhead, and swung to crack the crystal dome of the sky and see what lay on the other side. His face was set, and held no hint of fear at all, even though the world he had left far underfoot was calling out in craven terror.

  The image trembled in her heart. She felt as if a dam inside her broke. Emotion caught her throat. She blinked tears.

  Could there be a realm larger than the universe? Could there be a life larger than entropy? Was there nothing brave enough to find that realm, that life?

  Daphne turned to Phaethon, who sat motionless in front of his reflection in the mirror.

  Daphne said, “Darling, I’m getting edgy. Nothing is beginning to make sense.”

  Phaethon said coldly, “You’re starting to believe it? So am I.”

  “Does that mean we’re wrong?”

  “That means we haven’t figured out the problem yet. Let’s just find out what’s going on. Let’s find what’s broken, and who broke it. We’ll fix it.”

  There was perhaps a hint of doubt in his voice, and yet, somehow, beneath that hint, Daphne heard an echo of Phaethon’s deep confidence.

  He said, “We’ll figure it out. We’ll fix it. Agreed?”

  She said, “Agreed. We’ll figure them out; and boy, will we fix them.”

  13

  THE TRANSCENDENCE

  1.

  The masked and robed image of the Lord of the Silent Oecumene now drifted backward, and the plumes from its mask lowered and spread, as if the Silent Lord were bowing. The music fell to a soft sonorous hum of oboes and recorders, punctuated by the drum-taps of a dirge. It sounded like a melancholy march, the theme of a funeral procession. “Phaethon, your partial has been convinced by my copy, as has Daphne’s partial. My copy in the ship-mind has been, for many minutes, exposed to your gadfly virus, to no effect. That virus forces me to confront severe contradictions in my basic thinking, especially in my moral thinking, where I freely admit that I do acts which I would not condone if I were the victim of those acts rather than the perpetrator. How can such naked contradiction exist in a machine-mind, a mind which, by your logic, cannot be unaware of itself, and cannot be irrational? Any parts of my own mind of which I had been unaware should have been exposed to me by your virus; none were. Therefore I am unflawed. Yet, irrationality is caused, in human beings or in anthropomorphic machines, by an unwillingness, conscious or subconscious, to face reality; no unflawed machine can have such a motive. Therefore I face reality. How can I persist in irrationality? Only if reality itself is irrational.

  “Phaethon, you will not be able to accept this conclusion. Your only other logical conclusion is that this alleged ‘conscience redactor,’ which is diminishing my awareness, has not been loaded into the ship-mind copy of my mind, and therefore has not been detected and cured by your virus. The conclusions radiating from this are obvious. One such conclusion is that you must now reload my ship-mind copy of myself back into me. However, in order to do so, you must open the thought-ports of your armor to issue the command, and to accept your partial back into yourself. This was our agreement; this is how the ship has been programmed. But the moment you open your armor to perform this act, I take control of the ship.

  “Phaethon, which is it to be? Is the universe irrational, or am I deceived? If I am deceived, then open your armor and issue the command. I will seize control of the ship, but, allegedly, I will then be cured and will be unable to steal the ship, or, indeed, to perform any other immoral or irrational act.”

  2.

  Phaethon shut off all his exterior channels and sat on his throne, silent, motionless. Daphne watched him, fears and uncertainties chasing each other through her mind. She now could not monitor his emotional state; the face icon she saw of Phaethon in her private channel showed only the golden mask of his helmet, its crystal eyes mysteriously blank.

  She said, “I hope you’re not thinking of making this decision without asking me. You don’t have the best track record for being completely balanced under stress, you know.”

  The gold helmet tilted slightly. Phaethon’s voice came thoughtfully over the armor speakers: “There was an evening, not long ago, when, to the best of my recollection, I was the wealthy, well-loved, and popular scion of a beautiful and respected manor, an elegant school, a high estate. I lived in a world as near perfect as humanity can achieve, a world where war and crime and violence were forgotten; a world of endless wealth and power and liberty; a world which had set aside the whole of this year, merely for her holiday, a grand festival and celebration, such as had not been seen in a thousand years.

  “But everything I thought was false. I was a scorned pauper, manorless, except as my sire’s charity ward, the subject of widespread hate. Crime and violence I became acquainted with, as I was defrauded, robbed of my life, and then attacked. Atkins, who I thought a myth, stepped into my life, terrible and real, and I joined a war the enemy declares has been smoldering for centuries. And now this world trembles on the brink of disaster. As soon as the Nothing Machine gains control of this ship, he will use her as a weapon, wrecking the Solar Array, disrupting the Transcendence, slaying millions.

  “All I thought I knew was false. But—but what if I am in that same state now? What if the Second Oecumene are the heroic victims their agent here depicts them to be? What if the Silent Lords are still alive in the nothingspace inside their ev
ent horizon? Waiting for me to join them? A society of men like me . . . ? What if he’s telling the truth . . . ?”

  The masked image of the peacock-robed Silent Lord uttered music, and words: “Phaethon must realize all chains of logic lead to the same result. If he has faith in Earthmind, he must apply her virus against me. To do this he must open his armor and give the command. If he has faith, on the other hand, in Nothing, he will open his armor and surrender command. This is no more than your original plan, Phaethon.”

  Phaethon’s helmet turned toward Daphne. “Well . . . ? You’re the heroine, in this story. What do you say?”

  Daphne drew her Greek helm forward and lowered her visor. She put her hand on the haft of the naginata spear resting next to her throne. She seemed the very image of a classical war-goddess. “Don’t use faith. Faith is just mental laziness, the desire to hold a conclusion without examining the evidence to support it. Use logic. What does logic say?”

  She heard the sound of him drawing a deep breath, as if steeling himself for an unpleasant necessity. “Logic says, no matter what seems to be happening, and no matter what he says, conditions cannot be as the Nothing Machine describes. The universe cannot be irrational; the laws of morality cannot be suspended or ignored; that any consciousness that does so, does so only through passion, inattention, or dishonesty, things no Sophotech can suffer; that the moment the gadfly virus finds and destroys this conscience redactor, the Nothing Machine will wake fully to its proper level of consciousness, become a Sophotech, become rational, and give up this worthless plan of violence.”

  Phaethon’s reflection from the mirror said, “With all due respect, the violence which the Nothing Philanthropotech plans, far from being illogical, may be properly and sufficiently justified by the circumstances. The morality of living things must justify whatever immoral acts are needed to preserve life; otherwise they will not remain living things.”

  Phaethon said slowly, “As soon as I open the armor and give the command, I’m going to believe what my partial believes, including tripe like that.”

  Daphne shook her head. “You won’t stay convinced.”

  Phaethon said, “Oh? Why not? You’re looking pretty convinced yourself, right now. If the Nothing’s simulations with our partials are true, you will be convinced, the moment your reflection comes out of the mirror and rejoins with you.”

  Daphne smiled sadly, and said, “Oh, I’m convinced now. I’m just not convinced I’ll stay convinced.”

  Phaethon’s voice held a note of surprise. “You think the Nothing is telling the truth?”

  She gestured with her slender gauntleted hand at the mirrors, showing the diagrams and maps of a vast civilization grown in the impossible core of a black hole.

  One schematic showed a stretch of concave landscapes reaching across the inner side of a neutronium Dyson sphere the size of a globular cluster, with a thousand artificial suns, each with its own flotilla of plants, ring-worlds, or smaller spheres orbiting it. Other parts of this same map showed how time and space had been curved and twisted by the unthinkable gravitic forces involved, so that the interior time till the heat death of the universe was extended to infinity. In one picture, a little girl plucked a flower, with green grass below, and the hazy blue of distant lands and oceans high overhead, a world so vast that an army of explorers walking for a million years could never explore all its mysteries.

  “Look, Phaethon, look,” Daphne said. “The dream they dream is beautiful. A dream as bold as your own, or bolder. You want to explore and colonize the universe; they wish to extend the lifespan of the universe beyond all boundaries, to remake its laws, and shape reality to banish entropy, decay, and death forever. I’d like to believe in that dream whether it’s true or not. It reminds me of the kind of thing you’d do.”

  Then Daphne sighed, and straightened, and said, “Besides. He’s right. We’re trapped. The only way out is to open the armor and release the virus. Even if it doesn’t work on the real him any more than it worked on the fake him, we don’t have a choice. That was the plan, remember? And logic says the plan is going to work.”

  “Very well. I’m about to open my armor and reload the ship-mind copies of him and me both back into their originals. Any last words, cautions, advice?”

  Daphne adjusted her grip on her spear haft. In the shadow of her Greek helmet, her red lips were set in a line. “I’m ready,” she said.

  Phaethon’s epaulettes unfolded, exposing the thought-ports beneath.

  “It’s done.”

  The activity level in the ship-mind jumped, but other than that, there was no change. The virus operated briefly, and was ignored, as before. The Nothing did not take unto itself the characteristic architecture of a Sophotech.

  “We’ve failed,” said Daphne.

  “No,” said Phaethon, opening his faceplate. His eyes were fixed as if on a distant point. There was a note of calm joy in his voice. “The Earthmind must have lied, or been mistaken. There may actually be no reason why the Nothing has to agree with us after all. Perhaps the engineering skill of the Silent Lords can overcome every restriction we thought was absolute. Perhaps there is a war of life against nonlife. If so, we Silver-Gray must stand with the forms and principles which human souls and human traditions require. It all seems so clear to me now. . . .”

  The deck seemed to slide underfoot, and their weight grew. On the mirrors, Daphne saw the white-hot temperature gradient grow dim. Some solar current of unthinkable size and strength was propelling them out of the radiative to the convective layer. Soon the photosphere would be around them, then the corona.

  Daphne could not calculate or even imagine the size of the coronal mass-ejection that would accompany the return of the Phoenix Exultant out from the core of the sun. It would trigger a storm of unprecedented size, and surely disrupt the Transcendence all across the Solar System.

  A mirror near her lit with an estimate of photospheric condition. Here was a simulated image of the sun, an entire hemisphere blotched and scarred and boiling with sunspots, and a hundred helmet streamers reaching out like kraken arms of fire into space, a thousand high prominences, rainbows of flame larger than worlds. In the magnetic picture, all circumambient space was ablaze with torn and folded magnetic field disturbances the likes of which had never before been recorded.

  Daphne said softly, “I think we just made a really. Big. Mistake.”

  Phaethon felt the pressure on him mounting. The ship was accelerating through a medium denser than solid iron, and yet still she moved. Phaethon said to the Nothing Machine’s image of a Silent Lord: “How is this speed possible . . . ?”

  Daphne was sure that, now that the Nothing Machine had control of the ship, he would ignore Phaethon’s question the way a man might ignore the chitterings of a bug. But perhaps the Nothing’s claim of benevolent concern toward humankind was not a pose after all, for the answer came: “Gravitic singularities planted in the solar core directed the current to carry the ship upwards; also, the field’s shapes in local timespace of the subatomic particles involved have been reconfigured to reduce friction in the direction of motion. . . .”

  Daphne looked over at Phaethon. He was becoming fascinated again with the stream of calculation symbols appearing on the mirror, symbols that described the relationship between local timespace and the geometry of subatomic particle friction. She said, “Snap out of it, wonder boy. Are you really buying into this load of horse manure? Look at the size of the storm about to wash over the Solar Array. Your new friend here is about to kill your father, your best friend, and my only hope for future romance if you don’t work out. Look at the size of the storm we are creating.” She tilted a mirror toward him. On X-ray wavelengths, the surface of the sun looked like a rotten fruit, puckered and blotched with running sores.

  Phaethon looked blankly at the mirror. For a moment, Daphne decided she hated him. Why was he sitting there with a blank look on his face? Had the partial loaded back into him from the ship-mind
actually brainwashed him into believing the lies of the enemy?

  The image of the Silent Lord said, “It is regrettable necessity, imposed by cruel reality, that even loved ones can, at times, oppose the cause of human life, or can work, unwittingly, for the sake of the good of the enemy. Did you think I spoke only as an abstract exercise, Phaethon? Fix your eyes on the quadrillion-year futures I protect, human futures, where living beings shall outlive even the stars themselves. Turn your eyes away if you cannot tolerate to see the deaths which must be paid for that high destiny. The—”

  And the ghost vanished.

  Daphne sat upright, startled. What was going on?

  Phaethon directed a mirror at the microscopic black hole still hovering above the bridge deck. The fields surrounding the singularity now showed furious activity, at levels close to the theoretically maximum possible calculation speeds, which the speed of light imposed on information transmission and quantum uncertainty imposed on information identity.

  In the mirrors, the whirlpool of Nothing thought was likewise pitched at the highest level of activity. More and more banks of thought-boxes were occupied by the overflow, until the entire ship-mind was full. Certain lesser circuits were being cannibalized, turned from other functions into thought-processors.

  “What’s going on . . . ?” asked Daphne. “Is this something you are doing? Is this the virus in action?”

  Phaethon tapped a mirror and the world of hellish flame outside the ship’s gold hull blazed into view. Here were a thousand or a million tornadoes of hydrogen plasma, roaring through showers and storms of radiation, across a torn black-and-red oceanscape of universal fire. A web of tormented magnetics writhed throughout the area.

  Phaethon said, “The virus, if it could have acted, would have acted instantaneously. No. This is Father. He is wrestling with the Nothing for control of the solar magnetosphere. The Solar Array is interfering with what the Nothing Machine is doing.”