Or perhaps I’d find that the mind gestalt cannot be generated, and some sort of intervention is required. Perhaps I would see the soul, the ingredient of consciousness that surpasses physicality. Proof of God? I would behold the meaning, the true character of existence.
I would be enlightened. It must be euphoric to experience…
My mind collapses back into a state of sanity. I must keep a tighter rein over my self. When I’m in control at the metaprogramming level, my mind is perfectly self-repairing; I could restore myself from states that resemble delusion or amnesia. But if I drift too far on the metaprogramming level, my mind might become an unstable structure, and then I would slide into a state beyond mere insanity. I will program my mind to forbid itself from moving beyond its own reprogramming range.
These hallucinations strengthen my resolve to create an artificial brain. Only with such a structure will I be able to actually perceive those gestalts, instead of merely dreaming about them. To achieve enlightenment, I’ll need to exceed another critical mass in terms of neuronal analogs.
I open my eyes: it’s two hours, twenty-eight minutes, and ten seconds since I closed my eyes to rest, though not to sleep. I rise from bed.
I request a listing of my stocks’ performance on my terminal. I look down the flatscreen, and freeze.
The screen shouts at me. It tells me that there is another person with an enhanced mind.
Five of my investments have demonstrated losses; they’re not precipitous, but large enough that I’d have detected them in the body language of the stockbrokers. Reading down the alphabetical list, the initial letters of the corporations whose stock values have dropped are: C, E, G, O, and R. Which, when rearranged, spell GRECO.
Someone is sending me a message.
There’s someone else out there like me. There must have been another comatose patient who received a third injection of hormone K. He erased his file from the FDA database before I accessed it, and supplied false input to his doctors’ accounts so that they wouldn’t notice. He too stole another ampule of the hormone, contributing to the FDA’s closing of their files, and with his whereabouts unknown to the authorities, he’s reached my level.
He must have recognized me through the investment patterns of my false identities; he’d have to have been supercritical to do that. As an enhanced individual, he could have effected sudden and precise changes to trigger my losses, and attract my attention.
I check various data services for stock quotes; the entries on my listing are correct, so my counterpart didn’t simply edit the values for my account alone. He altered the selling patterns of the stock of five unrelated corporations, for the sake of a word. It makes for quite a demonstration; I consider it no mean feat.
Presumably his treatment began before mine did, meaning that he is farther along than I, but by how much? I begin extrapolating his likely progress, and will incorporate new information as I acquire it.
The critical question: Is he friend or foe? Was this merely a good-natured demonstration of his power, or an indication of his intent to ruin me? The amounts I lost were moderate; does this indicate concern for me, or for the corporations which he had to manipulate? Given all the harmless ways he could have attracted my attention, I must assume that he is to some degree hostile.
In which case, I am at risk, vulnerable to anything from another prank to a fatal attack. As a precaution, I will leave immediately. Obviously, if he were actively hostile, I’d be dead already. His sending a message means that he wishes us to play games. I’ll have to place myself on equal terms with him: hide my location, determine his identity, and then attempt to communicate.
I pick a city at random: Memphis. I switch off the flatscreen, get dressed, pack a travel bag, and collect all the emergency cash in the apartment.
In a Memphis hotel, I begin working at the suite’s datanet terminal. The first thing I do is reroute my activities through several dummy terminals; to an ordinary police trace, my queries will appear to originate from different terminals all over the state of Utah. A military intelligence facility might be able to track them to a terminal in Houston; continuing the trace to Memphis would try even me. An alarm program at the Houston terminal will alert me if someone has successfully traced me there.
How many clues to his identity has my twin erased? Lacking all FDA files, I’ll begin with the files of courier services in various cities, looking for deliveries from the FDA to hospitals during the time of the hormone K study. Then a check of the hospital’s brain-damage cases at that time, and I’ll have a place to start.
Even if any of this information remains, it’s of minor value. What will be crucial is an examination of the investment patterns, to find the traces of an enhanced mind. This will take time.
His name is Reynolds. He’s originally from Phoenix, and his early progress closely parallels mine. He received his third injection six months and four days ago, giving him a head start over me of fifteen days. He didn’t erase any of the obvious records. He waits for me to find him. I estimate that he’s been supercritical for twelve days, twice as long as I’ve been.
I now see his hand in the investment patterns, but the task of locating Reynolds is Herculean. I examine usage logs across the datanet to identify the accounts he’s penetrated. I have twelve lines open on my terminal. I’m using two single-hand keyboards and a throat mike, so I can work on three queries simultaneously. Most of my body is immobile; to prevent fatigue, I’m ensuring proper blood flow, regular muscle contraction and relaxation, and removal of lactic acid. While I absorb all the data I see, studying the melody within the notes, looking for the epicenter of a tremor in the web.
Hours pass. We both scan gigabytes of data, circling each other.
His location is Philadelphia. He waits for me to arrive.
I’m riding in a mud-splattered taxi to Reynolds’ apartment.
Judging by the databases and agencies Reynolds has queried over the past months, his private research involves bioengineered microorganisms for toxic waste disposal, inertial containment for practical fusion, and subliminal dissemination of information through societies of various structures. He plans to save the world, to protect it from itself. And his opinion of me is therefore unfavorable.
I’ve shown no interest in the affairs of the external world, and made no investigations for aiding the normals. Neither of us will be able to convert the other. I view the world as incidental to my aims, while he cannot allow someone with enhanced intelligence to work purely in self-interest. My plans for mind-computer links will have enormous repercussions for the world, provoking government or popular reactions that would interfere with his plans. As I am proverbially not part of the solution, I am part of the problem.
If we were members of a society of enhanced minds, the nature of human interaction would be of a different order. But in this society, we have unavoidably become juggernauts, by whose measure the actions of normals are inconsequential. Even if we were twelve thousand miles apart we couldn’t ignore each other. A resolution is necessary.
Both of us have dispensed with several rounds of games. There are a thousand ways we could have attempted to kill the other, from painting neurotoxin-laced DMSO on a doorknob to ordering a surgical strike from a military killsat. We both could have swept the physical area and datanet for each of the myriad possibilities beforehand, and set more traps for each other’s sweeps. But neither of us has done any of that, has felt a need to check for those things. A simple infinite regression of second-guessing and double-thinking has dismissed those. What will be decisive are those preparations that we could not predict.