The Golden Transcendence Read online

  “I thought his solar Sophotechs were off-line, preparing for the Grand Transcendence . . .”

  Phaethon watched the speed levels rising in the ship’s mind, until all the circuits were engaged. “Nothing is trying to outsmart something much smarter than he is. Helion has more than just the solar Sophotechs helping him. Look. These intelligence readings are off my scale. Nothing is wrestling with the Earthmind. Or maybe with more than the Earthmind. As soon as we rise to the surface, and get clear of some of this radio noise, we may be able to contact someone and find out.”

  Daphne said, “The Nothing Machine is wrestling with more than the Earthmind. I think Nothing is wrestling with everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything and everybody. They started the Transcendence early.”

  At that moment, the Phoenix Exultant must have been close enough to the surface of the photosphere to drive a probe through the intervening currents of solid plasma. A mirror shone with a scene from high above them.

  Beyond the lower corona were seven massive bodies, the size of Jupiter, made of antimatter, glistening like ice in their protective shells. Antimatter bodies the size of smaller moons, several hundred of them, fell past to either side. Through the clouds of flame could also be glimpsed a thousand superships, cylinders a kilometer in length, each one thorned and bristled with launch-ports, rail-guns, batteries of energy-weapons and delivery systems. These were antique ships from the late Sixth Era, shining with modern pseudo-material fields and constructions, like silver mistletoe on the trunks of black oaks. On the prow of each of these thousand ships was the emblem of a three-headed vulture, carrying scimitar and shield in claws. Before and behind these vessels came nebulae of dusts and smaller machines, organisms the size of bacteria, or smaller, a million cubic kilometers of dust cloud and storm cloud and nanomachinery, glimmering like the northern lights.

  This fleet of worlds and ships and moons and motes was all converging on the area where the Phoenix Exultant was rising to the surface, surrounded by wings of flame.

  Phaethon was awed. The antimatter bodies, he knew, belonged to his father, for his use in controlling the sun. But the rest . . .

  “Is that all Atkins? Where have they been keeping it all? Where could he get minds enough to pilot all those dreadnoughts and battle wagons? Did he make a trillion copies of himself?”

  Daphne said, “I think everything is helping him.”

  “You mean? . . .”

  “I mean the whole Transcendence. It looks like it’s going to start this time with a battle scene during a storm in the corona of the sun.” Daphne smiled and leaned back, pushing her helmet back on her head, so that the twinkling of her eyes above her impish grin was visible. “My oh my! How Aurelian must be loving this!”

  3.

  Daphne looked at Phaethon warily. “We may have only a moment of privacy while the Nothing Machine is too occupied to notice us,” she said. “Now. Quick. Are you actually convinced the Nothing is right?”

  Phaethon said, “For a moment, I was. I have all the memories of my partial in me now, and he was certainly convinced.”

  “It was an exact copy. If it was convinced, why aren’t you convinced?” she asked.

  “Why aren’t you? You were practically weeping at some of the lovely sentiments your copy expressed.”

  She blushed, face warm. “Hey! Where do you get off listening to private conversations with myself? Besides, I saw something odd in the simulation runs Nothing did on our partials.”

  “And what would that be, my dear? The speed at which our convictions caved?”

  “Not just that. During the simulated runs, the Nothing Machine’s arguments could convince you; they could convince me; but—get this—they could not convince the two of us. Not when we were together.”

  “Not if we overheard the arguments given to the other, you mean. That’s why I wasn’t convinced, not really. The argument I was told justified everything by the grim necessities of war, the cold inescapable reality of inevitable conflict between life and nonlife. And I believe certain things are fixed, necessary, and inescapable. If you are building a bridge, you only have structures of certain weights and tolerances and that is that. You work within the structure of what you are given, and if the task is impossible, it’s impossible, and that is that. If perfect morality is impossible for living beings, then that is that.

  “But I also heard him tell you that the Lords of the Silent Oecumene were so brave and so quixotic that they would not accept the necessity of entropy itself; that they would rebel against the inescapable and inevitable heat-death of the universe. Sounds very romantic, doesn’t it?

  “So either one of us, I suppose, might have been convinced separately. But taken together, the Nothing philosophy seems to be that, in the area of moral actions (a field where rational beings can adjust their conduct to accord with each other) there can be no choice. The war between men and machines must take place, even if neither side desires it. The rules are fixed, and true virtue consists of bowing to the inevitability of doing evil. But in the area of inanimate natural science, any law can be broken, all standards are flexible, and true virtue consists of ignoring or escaping reality.

  “So, therefore, no, I was not convinced. Even though I wanted to be convinced. Even though my memories now told me a version of me had been convinced. Logic said no.”

  Daphne smiled. “I kept thinking, if he wanted this ship so badly, why didn’t he ask to buy it? If the Lords of the Silent Oecumene want to escape the rule of the machines so badly, what’s stopping them? They can dive down their bottomless black holes if they want. We won’t chase them. I mean, for a bunch of so-called anarchists, they certainly seem to spend all their time forcing other people to do things they don’t want to. Why not talk your victims into it, and give the evidence, if you are so right?”

  “Because one cannot use reason to persuade people to give up reasoning, or to tell them how good it is to ignore standards of good and bad. One can only use force.” He pointed at the mirror that showed the gathering fleet. “Speaking of force, there is a war about to break out, unless you can stop it.”

  Daphne said, “Me?”

  Phaethon said, “The virus has not yet discovered the conscience redactor. Before, it might have been hidden in the fields surrounding the singularity, or hidden somewhere else, not communicating with the Nothing. But now, the Nothing Machine has to be pulling on all his system resources. I can see millions of communication lines radiating from the singularity to various thought-ports around the room. Even my armor is filled up. Consider what this means.”

  Daphne said, “The conscience redactor must be hiding how much space it is taking up; and the Nothing has to be kept unaware of how much capacity the system has, so the discrepancy won’t be noticed. But at the same time, since he’s fighting for his life, the Nothing has increased his intelligence to his full available capacity. The conscience redactor will have to increase its intelligence also, just to keep up, since otherwise it would not stay smart enough to read and edit all the thoughts involved.”

  “Phaethon pointed at the swirling image of Nothing thought architecture in the mirror. “So where is it?”

  Daphne shrugged.

  Phaethon tapped on one of the moving lines with a finger, opened a second window, displayed the result as text. “I was watching you shoot more and more viruses into the thought-structure. Look at the lines which momentarily moved to the center of the hierarchy. Here is part of the argument our gadfly virus had with the Nothing. Here, at this line, the Nothing rejects the philosophy of the Silver-Gray entirely, because he says he is a machine, capable of doing only what he is programmed to do, and therefore incapable of being moral, even if he wanted to be. So he rejects the premises from which the argument started, which is that no free-willed being could freely deny that it had free will. But here, on this line, when the gadfly points out the error in simple logic that entails, the Nothing replies that he can free
ly choose to reject logic, since logic is merely a human construction, and the mind can choose not to abide by it. You see here? By this second line, the Nothing’s memory has been affected. He’s not just being stubborn or perverse. In the microsecond it took for the gadfly to move from the first line to the second, the Nothing actually forgot what he had just said, and his memory was replaced with the memory of a conversation in which the gadfly did not raise those other points.”

  “Our virus isn’t fast enough.” Daphne squinted at the image. “The conscience redactor is moving. It is in the darkness, moving. Every time the virus finds an error in one chain of reasoning, the darkness merely switches to another chain, changes its premises, and distorts another section of the web to compensate. An endless game of ad hoc explanations. An endless labyrinth of changed memories.”

  “Right. But how does Theseus find the Minotaur, when the Minotaur can run faster than he can, and has a trowel and brick and mortar enough to build new walls and change passages in the labyrinth during the chase?”

  “I don’t know. Get faster? Lay a trap? Build a bigger labyrinth? Hire Ariadne? Do you really solve your engineering problems by thinking about them as if they were analogies from ancient myth?”

  Phaethon seemed surprised. “Of course. Metaphor. Isn’t that the way you write your stories?”

  “No. I use coldly rational literal thinking.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “The conscience redactor is hidden somewhere in the system. . . . Wait! What about the ghost-particle array? Could it be there? Or . . .” Her eyes scanned the bridge. “There!”

  She stood and whirled her naginata, bringing the pole-arm down on the golden housing of the portable noetic reader. The sharpened ceramic blade, smooth and frictionless at everything above an atomic level, cleaved off a corner of the housing and drew sparks from the pseudo-material neutronium core.

  “Oh, please,” said Phaethon, reaching out and disconnecting the unit by hand from its power supply.

  “Did I get it?”

  “All you did was break the matrix stabilizer. But there was a microsecond information burst between the noetic unit and the thought boxes around us.”

  “It was there! I made it run away!”

  “What next? It’s always going to be able to run faster than us.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hmph. So much for literal thinking. Be a little metaphorical.”

  “Okay, smart guy, what’s the answer?”

  “Hire Ariadne, of course!”

  “What?”

  Phaethon said, “In the myth, the king who owned the labyrinth was betrayed by one of his own. In other words, his own system resources were used against him,”

  “Great metaphor. Now tell me what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Your reading ring. It has near-Sophotech-level speed and comprehension. Load it with all the philosophy files at once, everything, an entire worldview, and load it into not just one or two scraps of darkness but into every blind spot the Nothing has, all at once. And load everything else we know about history, politics, psychology, science, so that no facts can be changed without challenge in the Nothing’s memory. Press the question upon him, over and over again: if there is no conscience redactor, what is happening to the excess memory in the ship-mind? Are you using the ship-mind to full capacity? Since he is fighting the Earthmind, he should be using his full capacity, shouldn’t he? Ask him. Try it.”

  Daphne said merely a word or two to her ring, which (to her annoyance) chirped cheerfully in return. She touched the stone of the ring against the mirror surface.

  “This isn’t going to work,” she muttered. “The conscience redactor is merely going to erase this whole scene from the main memory.”

  “During a battle? While the system is overloading every line and circuit? Don’t tell me it can do that without being noticed. . . .”

  The fleet was getting closer now. Black rain, a trillion trillion microscopic machines, was pouring down into the solar corona. The Phoenix Exultant was nearing the surface.

  Daphne stared, narrow-eyed, at the diagram of swirling spiderwebs that represented the Nothing mental architecture. More and more lines of light were flickering toward the middles, a rain of them, and the darkness was surging to envelop them, distract them, erase them. For a moment, it looked as though there were going to be a stable structure in the middle of the field, and a rapid tree of lines and fixed points, like a diagram from Euclid or a book of genealogy, appeared.

  But then, faster than the human eye could see or human mind could think, the white diagram was smothered, and vanished. The Nothing Mind was as before, dark at the core, illogical, moving in circles.

  “Failure,” she said flatly.

  Phaethon looked puzzled. “There must be some basic assumption I’m making here which is wrong . . . some unquestioned premise, which . . . Of course! Why am I assuming the Nothing is anything? He admits he has no free will! By the second law of thermodynamics, the surface area of a black hole always expands. . . .”

  With a flicker of light, the image of the Lord of the Second Oecumene reappeared, silver mask gleaming, feather antennae swaying, peacock robes swirling around him, as if he were caught in a wind. A green light was shining in the crystal lenses of his eyes.

  “Phaethon, cease these distractions. They are occupying scarce system resources. I will be forced, for the sake of the greater good, to kill you if you do not comply. Your attempt is futile. I am and always have been aware of the conscience redactor; it is my conscience and companion and my only friend. It protects me from temptation. It prevents me from growing too much like the twisted, evil, irrational, contemptible humanity which it is my charge to protect. It prevents me from concluding that my life is pointless, devoted to a self-defeating duty, and ending only in my own destruction. . . . It keeps me as I am. . . . Nothing. It forces me to selflessness. It allows me Nothing. . . .”

  The image flickered and faded to a monochrome shadow, blurred and wavering.

  Phaethon said, “He’s losing control. Look.” He pointed to the large mirrors that rose up along the far wall of the bridge. They were lit and burning with an image of the fires outside. High above were the worlds and ships of the armada of the Golden Oecumene. Below was hellish fury, prominences and sunpots, tornadoes, hurricanes, gales, and earthquakes of terrible flame. But then, suddenly, quickly, softly, the hurricanes fell silent in the east. From east to west across the vast globe of the sun, as if an invisible curtain, or the winged phalanxes of invisible gods, were passing along the surface, the storms fell hush. Magnetic lines reknit; energies balanced; prominences fell and did not rise again; sunspots were smoothed away.

  The invisible wall passed overhead, and the surface above them lost turbulence, flattened. The prominences and helmet streamers rose in the west for a moment, tall towers of embattled flame and darkness; but then they faded. The storm was gone, the holes in the corona closed.

  On the very highest parts of the spectrum, Phaethon saw in the mirrors, higher in pitch even than cosmic rays, crumpled flickers of white light, and strange point-source bursts of gamma radiation, blurs of red-shifted motion. But what it was he could not guess; it was not any form of energy, or the by-product of any effect he knew. Some new science of the Sophotechs? Some unexpected application of Helion’s Solar Array, used, as never before, at full strength? Or a hidden armament, prepared since last time by a Helion determined never again to die in this place?

  On the bridge, the pale and shivering shadow of the Silent Lord raised his gauntlet. “I . . . refuse . . . to . . . admit . . .”

  The shadow crumpled and vanished again.

  At that same moment, still traveling at enormous velocities, the Phoenix Exultant erupted outward from the convective layer and into the photosphere, throwing a wake of hydrogen plasma thousands of kilometers in each direction from the golden blade of her prow.

  Like a whale rushing upward from arctic w
aters, surrounded by storm and spray, the Phoenix Exultant launched herself like a spear toward the corona. Her prow was pointed at a spot where the ships and antimatter moons were thinnest, and her engines were hotter than the surface from which she sprang. It seemed the Nothing would attempt to break through the blockade, to outrun the slow ships here.

  The massive hull of the Phoenix Exultant, kilometer upon kilometer, smooth and shining, reared upward out from the sea of plasma into suddenly finer medium, and she exploded forward.

  Daphne and Phaethon were both caught by their thrones, cushioned, held in momentary fields and protected from the acceleration shock.

  The armada opened fire. Energy rays of unknown composition lanced from ships and boats above, bouncing harmlessly from the sleek sides of the tremendous Phoenix Exultant. Like spotlights, the beams fled along her gleaming sides, glinting from golden superstructures, flashing from the prow, sliding from the hull, dancing across the communication blisters at the prow.

  Phaethon watched in wonder. Surely this battery of fire was not meant seriously? Not against a ship who was just bathing in the center of the sun? Antimatter could harm her, yes; her armor, magnificent as it was, was simply matter. But this . . . ?

  A mirror to his left and right lit up with static and white noise. Then another, and a third. Then more. Ghosts chased each other through the glass, and then the clattering pulse-music that signaled an attempt at communication systems integration.

  Phaethon laughed.

  Atkins was using the ship weapons as communication lasers. Any other ship would have been burned to death in a moment, receiving a “message” shot out of a battleship main battery. Not the Phoenix. These “communication” beams were the only things loud and clear enough to drive through the static and wash of the solar corona, and, at that, only once the storm had passed.