The World Data Net, he said, was the ultimate analog. Like a person, it too consisted of a myriad of tiny subselves (the eight billion subscribers), all bickering and negotiating and cooperating semi-randomly. Subscriber cliques and alliances merged and separated… sometimes by nationality or religion, but more often nowadays by special interest groups that leaped all the old borderlines… all waging minuscule campaigns to sway the world’s agenda and to affect their lives in the physical world.
Astonishing, Jen thought. The boy had made a major metaphorical leap.
Of course, the government analogy was a little overextended. But the notion that consciousness is out way of getting all our secret selves out into the daylight, so they’ll either cooperate or compete fairly — that’s the important part. It explains why a neurosis loses most of its power once it’s known… as soon as all the mind gets to see those dark secrets one isolated part had kept hiden from the rest.
Walking past the busy technicians, Jen sat down at her display and resumed working on her model, modifying it along lines inspired by Nelson’s insight. The subvocal was the only input device fast enough to follow her driving pace. Her teeth clicked and her larynx bobbed as she almost spoke words aloud. The machine skimmed those phrases faster than she could have pronounced them, and it extrapolated, drawing from its capacious memory bits of this and that to fit into a growing whole.
Those bits were mostly object blocks taken from the very best intelligence-modeling programs around. That cost money, of course, and over in one corner Jen saw her personal account dip alarmingly. But each of the programs had something to recommend it. Each had been slaved over by teams of talented researchers with private theories they wanted to prove — each ostensibly contradictory, incompatible with the others.
At that moment, however, it had ceased mattering to Jen whose doctrine was closer to correct. Suddenly, it made perfect sense to merge them, combine them — to try to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
By the Mother… what if they’re all right? What if self-similarity and recursion can’t typify a living system without yet a third attribute — inclusion?
There was certainly a precedent for such a melange… the human brain, the physical organ itself, was built in layers. Its newest evolutionary innovations hadn’t replaced earlier sections. Rather, each in turn was laid over older parts, joining and modifying them, not canceling or superseding.
Most recent were the prefrontal lobes, tiny nubs above the eyes which some called the seat of human personality… the latest floor of rooms added to a skyscraper of mind. Underneath lay the mammalian cortex, snared with man’s closest cousins. Lower then, but still useful and functional, the brain portions appropriate to reptiles still performed useful chores, while under those pulsed a basic reflex system remarkably like that found in primitive chordates.
So it would be with her model. Gradually pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The Berkeley Cognition Scheme, for instance, mated astonishingly well with the “emotional momentum” models of the Beijing University behaviorists. At least it did if you twisted each of them a bit first, in just the right way.
Of course, whenever she ventured into the net to seek these and other programs, she had to experience firsthand what was going on out there. It was utter chaos! Her early ferrets got completely lost in the maelstrom. She had to write better ones just to reach the big psychology library clearinghouse, in Chicago. And even then it took several tries before the emissaries came back with what she needed. The latest retrieval had taken seven whole seconds, causing her to smack the console in irritation.
By now Jen realized — with perhaps a pang of jealousy — that her own grandson had achieved unrivaled heights in the art of stirring people up, far exceeding her own modest accomplishments. The Net spumed with ferment over events Alex Lustig had set off. Somewhere, sometime soon, len figured the whole Rube Goldberg contraption had to blow a fuse.
Watch it, old girl. Your own metaphors give away your age.
Okay then, let’s try a few similes.
The chaos in the Net was like spray blowing over a small boat. All sorts of unwanted material accompanied the subroutines her ferrets brought back. Jen was both alarmed and amused when some bits of software dross actually fought not to be tossed out! They clung to existence in her computer like scrabbling little life-forms and had to be tracked down lest they scurry into some corner and use up scarce memory, or maybe even breed.
On impulse she looked to the small screen where she’d exiled the cartoon creatures called up by her own free associations. In the foreground, for instance, shimmered a teetering house of cards and spent, smoking electrical fuses, clearly extrapolated from recent surface mumblings.
Then there was the tiger symbol, which had lain in that same spot all these weeks. The simulacrum purred lowly, lounging on a nest of what looked like shredded paper.
She told the snippet of herself. If you insist on hanging around, then it’s time I put you to work.
The tiger yawned, but responded when she tapped two teeth together decisively — asserting the dominance of her central self over its parts. Subvocally she gave it instructions, to go hunt those spurious flurries of unwanted software — all the scampering, chittering irrelevancies that kept swarming into her work space from the Net’s chaos, disturbing her work.
The weather’s high, she realized. At times like these, any mobile thing will seek shelter, anywhere it can.
With that thought, flecks of rain seemed to dampen the tiger’s fur, but not its mood. With another yawn and then a savage grin, the cat set forth to clear away all interlopers, to give her model room to settle and grow.
On other Polynesian islands, the people lived lives much the same as ours. Their chiefs, too, were beings of great mana. Our cousins, too, believed the course of the warrior was just below that of the gods.
But in other ways we differed. For when his canoes arrived from ancient Hiva, our forefather, Hotu Matu’a, knew at once where he had come. This is Te Pito o Te Henua — the island at the center of the world.
We had chickens and taro and bananas and yams. There was obsidian and hard black stone, but no harbor, and our canoes were lost.
What need had we of canoes? What hope to depart? For we believed the closest land to Rapa Nui was the bright moon itself, who passed low over our three cratered peaks — paradise overhead, barely out of reach. Believing we could get there with mana, we built the ahu and carved the moat.
But we had slain great Tangaroa and were cursed to fail, to suffer, to live off the flesh of our brethren and see our children inherit emptiness.
It is hard, living at the navel of the world.
• CORE
He was shaving when the telephone rang. Alex wasn’t happy with the new razor he’d bought after the escape from New Zealand. Its diamond blade was far too sharp, unlike his old one, which had worn down nicely over the years since his sixteenth birthday. That wasn’t the only thing he missed. Stan and George also — their steadiness and calm advice. Communications were supposed to be safe from the rising noisiness on the Net, but despite military assurances, they had worsened for days.