I too was transparent to him. During our conversation he deduced that I had investigated reinforcing loops, and as we communicated, he derived a general preventative without my detecting it. Then he observed the specifics of my particular attack while it was working, and learned how to reverse its effects. I am astonished at his discernment, his speed, his stealth.
He acknowledges my skill. <A very interesting technique; appropriate, given your self-absorption. I saw no indication when – > Abruptly he projects a different somatic signature, one that I recognize. He used it when he walked behind me at a grocery store, three days ago. The aisle was crowded; around me were an old woman, wheezing behind her air filter, and a thin teenager on an acid trip, wearing a liquid crystal shirt of shifting psychedelic patterns. Reynolds slipped behind me, his mind on the porn mag stands. His surveillance didn’t inform him of my reinforcing loops, but it did permit a more detailed picture of my mind.
A possibility I anticipated. I reformulate my psyche, incorporating random elements for unpredictability. The equations of my mind now bear little resemblance to those of my normal consciousness, undermining any assumptions Reynolds may have made, and rendering ineffectual any psyche-specific weapons of his.
I project the equivalent of a smile.
Reynolds smiles back. <Have you ever considered—> Suddenly he projects only silence. He is about to speak, but I can’t predict what. Then it comes, as a whisper: ‘self-destruct commands, Greco?’
As he says it, a lacuna in my reconstruction of him fills and overflows, the implications coloring all that I know about him. He means the Word: the sentence that, when uttered, would destroy the mind of the listener. Reynolds is claiming that the myth is true, that every mind has such a trigger built in; that for every person, there is a sentence that can reduce him to an idiot, a lunatic, a catatonic. And he is claiming he knows the one for me.
I immediately tune out all sensory input, directing it to an insulated buffer of short-term memory. Then I conceive a simulator of my own consciousness to receive the input and absorb it at reduced speed. As a metaprogrammer I will monitor the equations of the simulation indirectly. Only after the sensory information has been confirmed as safe will I actually receive it. If the simulator is destroyed, my consciousness should be isolated, and I’ll retrace the individual steps leading to the crash and derive guidelines for reprogramming my psyche.
I get everything in place by the time Reynolds has finished saying my name; his next sentence could be the destruct command. I’m now receiving my sensory input with a one-hundred-and-twenty-millisecond time lag. I reexamine my analysis of the human mind, explicitly searching for evidence to verify his assertion.
Meanwhile I give my response lightly, casually. <Hit me with your best shot.>
<Don’t worry; it’s not on the tip of my tongue.>
My search produces something. I curse myself: there’s a very subtle back door to a psyche’s design, which I lacked the necessary mind-set to notice. Whereas my weapon was one born of introspection, his is something only a manipulator could originate.
Reynolds knows that I’ve built my defenses; is his trigger command designed to circumvent them? I continue deriving the nature of the trigger command’s actions.
<What are you waiting for?> He’s confident that additional time won’t allow me to construct a defense.
<Try to guess.> So smug. Can he actually toy with me so easily?
I arrive at a theoretical description of a trigger’s effects on normals. A single command can reduce any subcritical mind to a tabula rasa, but an undetermined degree of customization is needed for enhanced minds. The erasure has distinctive symptoms, which my simulator can alert me to, but those are symptoms of a process calculable by me. By definition the destruct command is that specific equation beyond my ability to imagine; would my metaprogrammer collapse while diagnosing the simulator’s condition?
<Have you used the destruct command on normals?> I begin calculating what’s needed to generate a customized destruct command.
<Once, as an experiment on a drug dealer. Afterward I concealed the evidence with a blow to the temple.>
It becomes obvious that the generation is a colossal task. Generating a trigger requires intimate knowledge of my mind; I extrapolate what he could have learned about me. It appears to be insufficient, given my reprogramming, but he may have techniques of observation unknown to me. I’m acutely aware of the advantage he’s gained by studying the outside world.
<You will have to do this many times.>
His regret is evident. His plan can’t be implemented without more deaths: those of normal humans, by strategic necessity, and those of a few enhanced assistants of his, whose temptation by greater heights would interfere. After using the command, Reynolds may reprogram them – or me – as savants, having focused intentions and restricted self-metaprogrammers. Such deaths are a necessary cost of his plan.
<I make no claims of being a saint.>
Merely a savior.
Normals might think him a tyrant, because they mistake him for one of them, and they’ve never trusted their own judgment. They can’t fathom that Reynolds is equal to the task. His judgment is optimal in questions of their affairs, and their notions of greed and ambition do not apply to an enhanced mind.
In a histrionic gesture, Reynolds raises his hand, forefinger extended, as if to make a point. I don’t have sufficient information to generate his destruct command, so for the moment I can only attend to defense. If I can survive his attack, I may have time to launch another one of my own.
With his finger upraised, he says, ‘Understand.’
At first I don’t. And then, horrifyingly, I do.
He didn’t design the command to be spoken; it’s not a sensory trigger at all. It’s a memory trigger: the command is made out of a string of perceptions, individually harmless, that he planted in my brain like time bombs. The mental structures that were formed as a result of those memories are now resolving into a pattern, forming a gestalt that defines my dissolution. I’m intuiting the Word myself.
Immediately my mind is working faster than ever before. Against my will, a lethal realization is suggesting itself to me. I’m trying to halt the associations, but these memories can’t be suppressed. The process occurs inexorably, as a consequence of my awareness, and like a man falling from a height, I’m forced to watch.
Milliseconds pass. My death passes before my eyes.
An image of the grocery store when Reynolds passed by. The psychedelic shirt the boy was wearing; Reynolds had programmed the display to implant a suggestion within me, ensuring that my ‘randomly’ reprogrammed psyche remained receptive. Even then.
No time. All I can do is metaprogram myself over randomly, at a furious pace. An act of desperation, possibly crippling.
The strange modulated sounds that I heard when I first entered Reynolds’ apartment. I absorbed the fatal insights before I had any defenses raised.
I tear apart my psyche, but still the conclusion grows clearer, the resolution sharper.
Myself, constructing the simulator. Designing those defense structures gave me the perspective needed to recognize the gestalt.
I concede his greater ingenuity. It bodes well for his endeavor. Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism.
I wonder what he intends to do after he’s saved the world.
I comprehend the Word, and the means by which it operates, and so I dissolve.