At the lowest magnification was … a mask. It was a crystalline face, made of hard planes of light, with dots and crosshairs to indicate eyeball directions and motions.
Del Azarchel’s face. It was a simplified version, smooth-shaven, with skin like plastic. There was no skull, nothing above the hairline and nothing behind the ears.
It was staring at him. It raised its eyebrow in that typical way of Del Azarchel’s and gave him a polite, if aloof, nod of recognition.
Menelaus said, “It’s—the damn thing is looking at me. I mean, heh, it looks like it is looking at me. Damnification! Almost looks alive.”
The pale lips moved. Speakers in walls carried the voice stereophonically. “Alive? Ah, my friend, you could say that. And such a life!”
The pinpoint eyes looked past Menelaus’s shoulder, turned toward the seated Del Azarchel. The gaze was sardonic. “A happy life, I suppose, for I exist without pain or hunger or want—without lust or love—but, alas, a life that is too brief. Ironic, if you consider the point of this exercise is to grasp for life, endless life.”
Menelaus yanked his hands together as if he were swatting a fly, a loud clap. As if banished by the noise, the cold and superhuman face was gone, and the walls of the room were once more a dull gray void.
“You copied yourself?”
Del Azarchel said, “The seed system modeled my every braincell, down to the molecular level. Whatever my brain did, it did. The thing we humans do not understand, the way the immaterial mind is connected to the matter in the brain, I simply copied it. Ah! And to elevate my copied self to posthumanity, I also copied this.”
Del Azarchel tapped the red amulet on his wrist, and streams of patterned data flowed along the walls.
Montrose said, “I know that part of the Monument well. Delta 81 through 117. It is what I used to make the Zurich computer runs.”
Del Azarchel smiled and inclined his head. “I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Yes, I copied not only your work but your approach. I copied segments of the Monument math, treating as algebraic unknowns the values I could not translate. Due to your work, I was able to make a perfect copy of myself—as myself. To augment the copy into posthumanity, ah! There I had the simulated molecules introduced into the simulated braincells of the simulated brain, to do just what you had done to you. Your Prometheus Formula: I imitated the effects electronically. Unlike you, however, I had more than one try.”
To Montrose’s surprise, grim sorrow clouded Del Azarchel’s face.
He continued: “I was each and every one of them. Closer than any twin brother could be: starting from a perfect replica, thought for thought like me, developing into areas I could not follow! And each time, one at a time, knowing it might end in madness and death, they asked, no, they demanded the experiment proceed. Such brave brothers I lost!” Now he laughed, and turned away, wiping his cheek brusquely to hide a tear. “I suppose it is mere arrogance of me to admire a copy of myself, is it not? But I felt I died each time one trial run had to be shut down.”
Montrose looked at the equipment around him. “I don’t understand.”
“Shutdown is death.”
“Can’t you just restore any copy from tape back-up, or whatever it is called? Don’t you make daily snapshots?”
“Xypotechnology is not like digital computing. It involves dynamic process. The thought-structure of the human mind, the biological structure of the human brain, is time-related. Remember, the simulation here is an analogue: if, in real life, a human brain just stopped and every molecule ceased moving, the brain information is lost. The information about the size and position and location of the atoms and molecules of the brain might not be lost, but that information would no longer contain a pattern of embedded information.”
“Why did you pick yourself as the subject?”
Del Azarchel raised his face, and there was a note of pride in his voice. “I seek deathlessness. A single assassin’s bolt could do me in, and all my plans and dreams die with me. I wish my dreams to live, even if I die.”
“But it won’t be you.”
“True, as far as I am concerned, but to him—he will think himself me. It will be my legacy: a son closer than any son.”
“You are making a world-ruler. A permanent version of yourself.”
Del Azarchel did not deny it. He said, “Without a machinery of immortality, the human race is too short-lived and short-sighted to retain the world peace I have provided. My desire is that the race survive at any cost, to any length, preserved in thought even if not in body. The question is whether that is your dream as well?”
Montrose stared thoughtfully at data patterns shining along the walls. “I don’t suppose star colonization is very practical without some sort of higher machine intelligence to help out. Compared to the animals on Earth, we’re a long-lived race. Compared to the distances we have to travel and the time spans we have to endure, if we are going to have the stars, we’re not.”
Del Azarchel had a stiff, expressionless expression on his face.
“What is it?” Montrose asked.
Del Azarchel merely shook his head, and would not meet his eye. Montrose almost did not recognize the look, since he had never seen it on Del Azarchel’s face before. The look of a man with a bad conscience. A look of guilt.
“You want to tell me what is wrong here?” He meant what was wrong with Del Azarchel.
Del Azarchel answered a different question. “As with you—divarication. The brain structure demotes self-awareness.”
“Why can’t you cure him the way you cured me?”
Del Azarchel smiled a half smile. “Labor disputes. Or a lover’s spat.”
“Come again?”
Del Azarchel shook his head. “I thought you would know better than—Ah, I thought you would know best precisely what the Zurich runs had done, which brain structures had been changed and how—this is, after all, your work.”
Montrose started paging through the information glittering from the walls.
2. Something to Warm You
Some time later he said, “Blackie, I think I have something!”
“An answer?”
“Answer? Plague, no. You crazy? I have outlined a preliminary order of research, a place were you can get hordes of undergraduates and out-of-work data arts professors to start working. In a few months or a few years, after you have solved certain insoluble problems, we can look at the issue again, and start thinking about the next logical step. There are some exciting possibilities here.”
“Years?”
“I am an optimist. I should’ve said ‘decades.’ You did not think I performed the Zurich supercomputer runs in my head? It took months of computer time, running continuously, and Ranier had hired a staff to help.”
Del Azarchel looked somewhat blank-faced.
Montrose laughed aloud. “What the pox you thinking, Blackie? That I would walk in here with a piece of chalk and a blackboard, and just write down the answer for you?”
Del Azarchel brought out a flask and a silver cup from a compartment beneath his seat. “I am under certain time constraints I have not mentioned to you. My fiancée is in transit right now, and out of radio communication, and I had hoped to, ah, surprise her. Would you care for a drink? Something to warm you.”
“If you can get her to wait eight months, and you give me the kind of computer team Prince Ranier put together, I can do it. He bought those Zurich runs for me. You know he was as rich as Croesus, don’t you? His whole country was nothing but a cross between a casino and a smuggler’s bank. I figure you got more resources than him.”
Del Azarchel offered him a slender silver cup. “I have resources beyond what he imagined. Drink.”