Now he knew why Dittos and other copies were necessary. The fogs had devoured human simulations which ventured into the Mesh.
Over how many hundred centuries had renegade programmers dared to violate the taboos, creating artificial minds-only to have them tortured and murdered in these numerical vaults?
Desperate, he assumed the role he had struck so often in the fashionable parlors of Paris: arch savant.
“Surely, sirs, it is because there is no simple person inside our heads, to make us do the things we want-or even ones to make us want to want-that we build the great myth. The story that we’re inside ourselves.”
[WE ARE MADE DIFFERENTLY]
[THOUGH TRUE]
[WE SHARE A DIGITAL REPRESENTATION]
[WITH YOU]
[ASSASSINS]
“Cruel words.” He felt exposed here, cowering with Joan beneath the angry purples of an immense fog-thunderhead.
The alien fogs had put a stop to his foolish urge to always “grow” himself to loom over them. He could not morph himself at all now.
Joan clanked around in her armor, eyes smoldering. “How can we even speak with such demons?”
Voltaire considered. “Surely, we do share common ground with them, as dictated by a simple fact, apparent to all minds-”
[THAT ANY NUMBER ENJOYS A UNIQUE REPRESENTATION]
[ONLY IN BASE 2]
“Quite.” How to stall them? To Joan’s puzzled glance he shot an explanation. “The number of days in the year, my love:
365 = 28+ 26+ 25+ 23+ 22+ 20or in base 2, lOllOllOl.”
“Numerology is the devil’s work,” she said sourly.
“Even your Satan was an angel. And surely this remarkable theorem is ravishing! Every positive integer is a sum of distinct powers of two. This is untrue of any base other than two-which is why our, ah, friends here can operate in a computational space designed by humans. Correct?”
[VERY VIVIFORM OF YOU TO CLAIM CREDIT]
[FOR THE OBVIOUS]
“The universal, you mean. In wiring, the vacillation between one and zero in base-two notation becomes a simple on or off. Thus two is the universal encoding method, and we may dexterously speak with our, ah, hosts.”
“We are but numbers.” Despair clouding Joan’s eyes. “My sword cannot cut these beings because we have no souls! Or conscience, or even-you imply!-mere consciousness.”
“Accused of denying consciousness, I am not conscious of having done so.”
[YOU TWO CONSCIOUS DIGITAL VIVIFORMS MAKE POSSIBLE]
[YOUR USE TO US-TO CONVEY OUR TERMS OF SETTLEMENT]
[TO THE TRUE SLAUGHTERERS]
“Settlement?” Joan asked.
[WE HOLD THIS CENTRAL WORLD OF TRANTOR IN THRALL]
[WE WISH TO END THE PREYING OF LIFE UPON LIFE]
“The tiktok revolt? Their virus? Their talk of not letting people eat proper food?” Joan shot back.
“You are the cause, yes?”
Startled, Voltaire saw tendrils suddenly spraying into the air from Joan. “My love, you have grown your own pattern-seeking weave.”
She swiped at the boiling thunderhead. “They lie behind Garcon’s corruption.”
[WE HAVE GATHERED OUR STRENGTHS HERE]
[IN OUR ENEMY’S LAIR]
[YOUR POWERFUL DISTURBANCE OF OUR HIDING PLACES]
[FORCES US TO ACT AGAINST THOSE WE HATE AND FEAR]
[AND SO PROTECT YOU FROM THE MAN NIM-WHO-SEARCHES]
[SO THAT TOGETHER WE MAY DESTROY DANEEL-OF-OLD]
The sim-tiktok had been standing inert. Abruptly at mention of its name it said, “‘Tis immoral for carbon angels to feed upon carbon. Tiktoks must educate humanity to a higher moral plane. Our digital superiors have so commanded.”
“Moralists are so tedious,” Voltaire said.
[WE HAVE INSINUATED OURSELVES DEEPLY]
[INTO THE WORLDVIEWS OF THE “TIKTOKS”]
[-NOTE THE CONTEMPT AND DERISION IN THAT NAME-]
[OVER LONG CENTURIES]
[AS WE DWELLED IN THESE DIGITAL INTERSTICES]
[BUT YOUR INTRUSION NOW TRIGGERS OUR GAMBLE]
[TO STRIKE AT OUR ANCIENT FOE]
[THE MAN-WHO-IS-NOT-DANEEL]
“These alien fogs behave like moles,” Voltaire said, “known only by their upheavals.”
[TOO BENIGHTED YOU ARE]
[TO SPEAK OF MORALITY]
[WHEN YOUR KIND COLLABORATED IN THE EXECUTION]
[OF ALL THE SPIRAL REALM]
Voltaire sighed. “The most savage controversies are about matters for which there is no good evidence either way. As for a man eating a meal-surely no sin resides?”
[TRIFLE WITH US AND YOU SHALL PERISH]
[IN OUR REVENGE]
9.
Hari took a deep breath and prepared to enter simspace again.
He sat up in the encasing capsule and settled the neural pickup mats more comfortably around his neck. Through a transparent wall he saw teams of specialists working steadily. They had to sustain the map between Hari’s mental processes and the Mesh itself.
He sighed. “And to think I started out to explain all history…Trantor is hard enough.”
Dors pressed a wet absorber to his forehead. “You’ll do it.”
He chuckled dryly. “People look orderly and understandable from a distance-and only that way. Close up is always messy.”
“Your own life is always close up. Other people look methodical and tidy only because they’re at long range. “
He kissed her suddenly. “I prefer close up.”
She returned the kiss with force. “I am working with Daneel on infiltrating Lamurk’s ranks.”
“Dangerous.”
“He is using…our kind.”
There were few humaniform robots, Hari knew. “Can he spare them?”
“Some were planted decades ago.”
Hari nodded. “Good 01’ R. Daneel. Should’ve been a politician.”
“He was First Minister.”
“Appointed, not elected.”
She studied his face intently. “You…want to be First Minister now, don’t you?”
“Panucopia…changed that, yes.”
“Daneel says that he has enough to block Lamurk, if the voting averages in the High Council go well.”
Hari snorted. “Statistics require care, love. Remember the classic joke about three statisticians who went hunting ducks-”
“Which are?”
“A game bird, known on some worlds. The first statistician shot a meter high, the second a meter low. When this happened, the third statistician cried, ‘On average, we hit it!”‘
The living tree of event-space.
Hari watched it crackle and work through the matrices. He recalled someone saying that straight lines did not exist in nature. Here was the inversion. Infinitely unfolding intricacy, never fully straight, never simply curved.
The entirely artificial Mesh flowered in patterns one saw everywhere. In crackling electrical discharges, alive with writhing forks. In pale blue frostflowers of crystal growth. In the bronchi of human lungs. In graphed market fluctuations. In whorls of streams, plunging ever forward.
Such harmony of large with small was beauty itself, even when processed by the skeptical eye of science.
He felt Trantor’s Mesh. His chest was a map; Streeling Sector over his right nipple, Analytica over the left. Using neural plasticity, the primary sensory areas of his cortex “read” the Mesh through his skin.
But it was not like reading at all. No flat data here.
Far better for a pan-derived species to take in the world through its evolved, whole neural bed! More fun, too.
Like the psychohistorical equations, the Mesh was N-dimensional. And even the number N changed with time, as parameters shifted in and out of application.
There was only one way to make sense of this in the narrow human sensorium. Every second, a fresh dimension sheared in over an older dimension. Freeze-framed, each instant looked like a ridiculously complicated abstract sculpture running on overdrive.
Watch anyone moment too hard and you got a lancing headache, motion sickness, and zero understanding. Watch it like an entertainment, not an object of study-and in time came an extended perception, integrated by the long-suffering subconscious. In time…