Now, it was not that Montrose, freshly-minted posthuman with a fine new brain and all, could not follow the intricate moves and feints of the game, and read the lies and half-truths and half-lies and threats that splashed all over the text files and documentaries of the infosphere—it was that politics bored him.
The Psychics (or, as they were also called, the “Psychoi”) actually were smarter, by fifty to one hundred points on the standard intelligence quotient scale, than the Hylics—because, despite what Del Azarchel had said, certain intelligence augmentation methods and processes, based on Montrose’s work, had been tried over the last fifteen decades. The results were cautious, and the intellectuals were not outside what was possible for humans. Montrose could have interesting conversations with them, as an adult with a bright child, especially about matters concerning Monument translation and the eventual destiny of Mankind, the threat of the Hyades Armada, and what it would mean when that force arrived.
As predicted, no Hylics had anything interesting to say on the matter. Those who were angry with Del Azarchel for inviting this attack talked as if the Armada would land within the next fifty to one hundred years. To them it was an almost religious image, an Armageddon, a Twilight of the Gods, a prophecy that merely floated somewhere in the distant yet-to-be, not a real event to occur at a real yet remote date.
Montrose realized with dismay that he had fallen into the habit of dismissing ordinary humans as “Hylics”—an Hermeticist term of contempt. On the one hand, it was simply a fact that he was smarter now than normal people. On the other hand, a superior intellect did not seem to change his personality, or make him a saint, or even a sage. It did not improve his bad temper, or even change his bad grammar.
Heck, if anything, greater intelligence put him under greater temptation to do greater evil. He saw how easy it would be to treat people like puppets: thinking back, he did not much like the way he had bought up the Endymion corporations. It was necessary for his plans, to be sure, but the people squeezed out of their companies and stocks had plans, too, didn’t they?
A bad man was much more a threat to the world than a bad dog; and a bad titan was worse than a bad man. Maybe his extra smarts would help he see and avoid the extra temptation the smarts brought with them.
At least the Hylics (or—he brought himself up short—the normal, decent people) who thought the coming of the Hyades Armada merely a prophecy thought on it. The average man would more likely complain about a stone in his shoe than some unthinkably remote eventuality destined for some unrecognizable descendant race of Mankind—assuming any lived so long.
The Psychoi would discuss the matter intelligently. But these metal-haired intellectuals made him nervous. They were smart enough that they could fool his reading of their tells and body language, and some of them worked for Del Azarchel—who was in hiding somewhere, no doubt experimenting on his own brain, trying to bring himself up to Montrose’s level.
The Del Azarchel who appeared on the library file-casts, and made speeches over the radio, was an electronic image, of course. The Xypotech, Ghost Del Azarchel, was now Master of the World, and no one outside his immediate circle knew it.
7. Picnic with the Princess
“Why not tell everyone?” Montrose asked Rania one noon at their picnic. The two of them had ridden out to a sunny glade in the park north of Beausoliel in Monaco. They were “alone” except for a squad from the Corps des Sapeurs-Pompiers in camouflage armor, and a flotilla of two-man rotor-craft gunships shaped like freakish four-leaf clovers floating silently overhead, their cannons like scorpion tails. The troopers were visible only as blurry man-shaped bubbles if the leaves and branches behind them shook in the wind. Montrose did not mind the aircraft: with their four huge hoop-shaped lifting ducts, they looked properly futuristic to him.
“In due time,” she answered, allowing herself a small smile. Rania had noticed the switch over from Man Del Azarchel to Ghost Del Azarchel based on the playing style of their planetary chessgame. Ghost Del Azarchel did not sweat the small stuff: he played for the long-range endgame.
That small smile told him she planned to stir public opinion against the machine. A general church council had been called to debate the matter of artificial intelligence, and its theological and legal implications. Also, Frankenstein themes were appearing in several plays, operas, and interactives on New Bollywood channels, and in smart books, dumb books, and a Parisian musical play. She would play the information that the world government was no longer in human hands as a trump card.
“How is your work coming?” she asked.
Montrose’s latest project, at the moment, was a drawerful of Van Neumann diamonds. These were carbon crystals containing self-replicating software, each “bearded diamond” edged with nano-tube hairs able to pull carbon out of a surrounding environment, and build another of itself, and then link and talk to it. Each diamond sensed pressure differentials on its super-hard refractory skin, and could determine which direction to grow.
As the diamonds grew, the software would build an ever-more complex computer mind, and the upper limits on its growth depended on its mass-to-surface ratio. Its smallest possible shape was a sphere of a few miles wide, but if it grew with a convoluted coral growth according to a fractal pattern, there was no upper limit. A simple calculation showed that this self-replicating machine should, in theory, produce a larger Xypotech logic crystal that the entire production capacity of every nation Del Azarchel could bring to bear. At the moment, Montrose had no idea what software or artificial mind could be stored in the emulation such a robust logic crystal could maintain.
An unanswered question was what environment to put them into, or how to construct the feeding whiskers so that things human beings needed, like oxygen, would be left alone. He could think of nowhere on Earth safe to unleash a Van Neumann machine. The nightmare hazard of Van Neumann replication growing out of control had been known and feared so long before the technology was possible, that a complete, if imaginary, vocabulary existed to describe the various forms of threat.
But he thought she was referring to his other project.
“I have several very promising lines of inquiry,” he said, “and I just translated a section from the Omicron Segment which seems to be a direct run-down of the mathematics of self-correction in multicentric medium-knit self-referencing systems of holographic memory. In other words, since part of you was made right, I think I can reverse-engineer the rest of the instructions on how to make you, and get a set of morphic intermediaries. I can fix you without changing you, if you see what I mean. I want to test it on an emulation first, an Iron Ghost of you.”
“And create a rival for your affection? I would be unhappy as a machine, so she would be unhappy if I made her like me, and if I made a version of me that was so different from me that I would not be unhappy as a machine, I suspect it would hardly be me. I would not bring a child into so dangerous a world: if the Hermeticists made a copy, they would download her into their grotesque gladiatorial games.”
“Why do they do that?”
“Because the human conscience is not infinitely malleable. Despite what you’ve heard, neural tissue changes, or changes in environment or background can only alter the human conscience somewhat. It snaps back: the conscience reacts, and exacts revenge. Not everyone lives by the same rules, but everyone lives by the same spirit.”
“What the pox does that mean? Spirit?”
“In this case, a myth about evolutionary superiority is the tale the Hermeticists told themselves on the ship to soothe their consciences—that the Iberians are superior to the Indians. You see? The ship was awash with blood clouds, and engineering was damaged in the fighting. Corpses were floating everywhere. The slaughterhouse smell could not be cleaned from the ventilation, which was not designed to scrub such volumes. The human mind has only a finite possible set of neurolinguistic responses to deal with death, murder, gnawing guilt.”