But the excitement of Del Azarchel’s words, the enthusiasm blazing in his eyes, was contagious. Montrose jumped to his feet and began pacing up and down the thick, richly-patterned carpet as if from an excess of energy.
“Just this!” Del Azarchel’s voice rang out. “We are about to create our future, the one mankind has more than deserved.”
“What’ch’ya got in mind?”
“Are you feeling healthy enough to take a short trip around the globe? Or, rather, under it? I have a project I have been working on, and out of the whole human race, out of the last fifteen decades of history, you are the only one qualified to help me. Forgive my impatience, but I have been waiting years, biological time, and over a century, calendar time, to show this to you. I call it The X Machine.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“The key to flinging aside the chains of that prisonhouse called being merely human. The key to the gates opening into … beyond!”
Menelaus Montrose felt a sense of restlessness. The chamber suddenly seemed too small, and the world beyond these walls full of mysteries and wonders. “I reckon I equal up to anything. Show me this beyond of yours. But get me the hell something to wear besides a bathrobe, cant’ch’ya?”
2. Xypotechnology
A man and two boys—wardrobe master, valet, body servant—came in the chamber to help him dress, but Montrose kicked up a row, and the trio retreated in disorder, bowing and kowtowing. Montrose was almost sorry he had kicked them out, because now he had to puzzle out the garments for himself, and they seemed to have no buttons or zippers.
The clothes laid out for him were more comfortable than what he’d seen the shiny courtiers wearing: a white tunic with a black kimono-like over-garment, loose hakama-style pants beneath. The only foolery was the red and white sashes: one around his waist and the other running from shoulder to hip. He left them off.
While he dressed, Del Azarchel started to describe the political and economic setup of the new world to him, but Montrose interrupted and asked about the Monument translation efforts. The amount of surface area which had yielded to human investigation was disappointingly small, but still larger than it had been when Montrose slumbered: Montrose whooped whenever some pet theory of his own had been vindicated, and groaned at himself for his muleheadedness for the conclusions he had overlooked or gotten wrong.
He looked around for paper to jot down figures, but Del Azarchel, with a gesture like a magician, made the windows leading to the balcony darken. The glass was smart material, and could detect the motions of Montrose’s fingernail, or interpret simple words spoken slowly. The two men covered the glass doors with minuscule mathematical notation as they talked, Montrose jumping from one side of the doors to the other, scribbling furiously while he spoke, Del Azarchel, seated in his wheelchair, merely making small gestures with a forefinger, as if to command invisible chalk to script his writing for him.
Del Azarchel spoke of the recent mathematical attempts to model the human brain down to a quantum granular level.
“Come on, Blackie,” replied Montrose. “Don’t kid a kidder. That’s my field. The Montrose Neuro-cellular Divarication function established a means of modeling human brain information behavior.… I had to solve how the nervous system worked, at least on a crude level, to get it to keep working when it was in suspended animation.… But you cannot model it below that…”
“Not with human math, no. But applying expressions from the Eta Segment to a cellular automata model allows us to use Morse Theory to approximate the quantum uncertainties we associate with free will.”
He paused for a moment to let that sink in.
Del Azarchel said, “The X Machine is a self-reprogramming, self-evolving machine. A machine not just like the Mälzels and automated intellectual processors as the ship’s brain aboard the Croesus, or the Little Big Brother security brains we have aboard the Hermetic.”
“I don’t recollect Little Big Brother able to do anything approaching human creative thinking.”
“We improved them during the trip. We call it Ratiotech—thinking machines. By the time of the Space War, the Ratiotech-type electronic brains could perform deductions, and even, through large-scale trial and error, make a fair copy of inductive and value-judgment thinking. That second step was called Sapientech: judgment engines. But they were sleepwalker brains, merely machines, despite all their raw power. But we are on the brink of a true breakthrough. History will turn a corner. We are working on a version of a truly awake, truly self-aware, truly alive, artificial intellectual creature: a Xypotech, a machine that is awake.”
3. Spagyric Garden
Del Azarchel called his entourage. There they were again: Conquistadores in armor, footmen in dark coats, long-wigged courtiers in shining silk jackets, and of course, the doctor in white. Apparently in the future it took a score of men to walk down a hallway.
It was a magnificent hallway. They walked or rolled past endless lines of ornate doors, rose-abundant vases, strange statues made of liquid light. Montrose noticed how many mirrors and archways and trompe l’oeil illusions adorned the hall, which was wider than the nave of a cathedral. The architecture and décor fooled the eye to make it seem all the larger.
They walked down steps of marble and through doors of crystal into an indoor garden whose far walls held convincing green hills, and the dome was painted in an eye-deceiving illusion of early twilight skies: a western sky tainted red by hidden lanterns, with Venus bright and low, and the eastern sky twinkling with diamonds in the constellations of early stars. The clouds above looked reaclass="underline" Montrose could not tell if they were painted or projections or real wisps of dry ice fog blown in for the occasion. He wondered if all those years in cramped quarters aboard the Hermetic had given Del Azarchel a hunger for open spaces.
The high dome painting was embellished with one long-tailed star brighter than the rest, flying on silvery wings, like a sword hanging over the world. The Hermetic.
The garden was bright with things he did not recognize: purple flowers with black centers, and tiger-striped orchids, and a red flower that looked like lace, draped like long tattered strands of some defeated but miniature army. Here was a bush with leaves so white they seemed like mirrors; there an organism he did not recognize at alclass="underline" something was a set of funnels like trumpets made of what looked like green glass. And mingled among them were what seemed to be large-scale versions of microscopic organisms: things like translucent whips, puffballs of purple dotted with tawny spots, mushrooms as brightly colored as the skins of poisonous frogs.
Del Azarchel’s chair seemed able to glide across the grassy lawn with no difficulty. He made an expansive gesture. “Our grove of wonders. We use it for spagyrics, fermentation of neuro-active chemicals, or the extraction of rare compounds or ores from the ashes of plants whose roots gather trace elements from the soil. Mostly we train the fungus to grow a particular type of submicroscopic superconductive strand we use in our Xypotech circuits, strands not available anywhere else. It seems living things can spin to a finer set of specifications than any machine shop.”
“Its underground. You have to pipe in sunlight.”
“We can control cross-pollination. And, no we do not want any of these spores or experiments to fall into the hands of a well-equipped modern university, or else they would be able to reverse-engineer the mathematical model we used for our gene coding, and any fairly bright grad student might be able to figure out what we mean to do.”
Montrose gave him a hard look. “Most scientists are eager to share their results. What do you mean to do?”