Joan drew her sword, but the passing slabs of sound brushed it away.
You like to think of yourself even in this distant time and place as famous.
Huge sheets of humming pressure fell upon them, as if a gargantuan deity were calling down from the faceless ashen sky.
“You challenge me?” Voltaire shouted back.
You like, in short, to think of yourself.
Joan laughed heartily. Voltaire reddened.
“I defy you, insulterer!”
As if in reply, their Euclidean plane bulged-
And he was the landscape. He had a hot volcanic spine murmuring warmly beneath, while his skin was moisture and grit. Winds beat his skin. Tinkling streams caressed him. Mountains rose from him like bruised carbuncles.
Joan cried out somewhere. He cast up a ridge line, strata buckling, shards flying. She was a lofty cylindrical spire, snow-crowned and cracking with lava pus.
Above them roiled pewter clouds. He knew them somehow as alien minds, a fog of connections.
Hypermind?came the idea. Algorithms summing?
The shifting gray fog wrapped around all Trantor. Voltaire felt how he looked to that fog: spattered life, electrical jolts in widely separated machines which computed subjective moment-jumps. The present was a computational slide orchestrated by hundreds of separate processors. Rather than living in the present, they persisted more accurately in the post-past of the calculated step forward.
There was a profound difference, he felt-not saw, but felt, deep in his analog persuasion-between the digital and the smooth, the continuous. To the fog he was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit in the fundamental computation.
Then he saw what the fog was.
He tried to run, but he was a mountain.
“They are-others,” he called to Joan uselessly.
“How can they be more different than we?” she replied forlornly.
“We, at least, were conjured up from human stock. These are alien.”
2.
They had escaped, somehow.
One moment the alien fog had enveloped the mountain ranges. The next, Voltaire had extricated himself and Joan. But he kept saying, as they fled across a barren sea of stinking liquid corpses, that they had to…to give birth.
“We make ourselves into children?” she called to him, avoiding the sight of twisted, bloated bodies below. Somehow the alien fog manifested its loathsome self by reminding them of human mortality. Thus it dogged them.
“Bad metaphor. We must manufacture and hide some copies of ourselves.”
He raised a hand and shot her a bolt of knowing:
Termed variously Dittos, Duplicates, or Copies, all such hold a tenuous existence. Society has decisively rejected what antiquity called the Copy Fallacy: the belief that a digital Self was identical to the Original, and that an Original should feel that a Ditto itself somehow carried them forward into immortality.
“We must do so to be sure we survive, when the fog catches us? I will slay them, instead!”
Voltaire laughed. “Your sword-they can control it, if they like. They captured your defense programming, and mine-though, as they implied, I rely mostly upon wit.”
“Dittos…? I fail to understand.”
“Refuting the Copy Fallacy is straightforward, an exercise in the calculus of logic. A simple exercise makes the point. Imagine yourself promised that you will be resurrected digitally, immediately after your death. Assign a price tag you will pay for that, insurance of a sort. Then imagine that, well, perhaps it would not be started right away, but sometime in future… .we promise.As that date recedes, people’s enthusiasm for paying for Self Copies dims-demonstrating that it was the hope of continuity they unconsciously relished.”
“I see.” She vomited into her hand with what she hoped was a ladylike reserve. The stench of the bloated corpses was penetrating.
“In the end, Copies benefited themselves, not the dead. Thus on Trantor, and throughout the Empire, it is illegal.” Voltaire sighed. “Moralists! They never understand. To ban something makes it enticing. That is why such entities inhabit this Mesh.”
“They are all illegal?”
“All but the fog. That is…worse.”
“But if a Ditto is the same as a person, why not-”
“Ah. The contradiction of Copying, known in antiquity as Levinson’s Paradox: To the degree that a Copy approaches perfection, it defeats itself.”
“But you just said-”
“In being an absolutely perfect Copy-so that no one can tell it from the Original-it transforms the Original into a duplicate, yes? This means the perfect Copy is no longer a perfect Copy, because it has obliterated, rather than preserved, the uniqueness of the Original-and thus failed to copy a central aspect of the Original. A perfect, artificial human intelligence would inevitably have this effect on its natural precursor.”
Joan held her head. “Such traps of logic! You are like the Augustines! “
“There is more. Here-”
A huge Voltaire appeared on the horizon, striding toward them in velvet finery. They flew around this Voltaire Peak and it thundered at them, “I am a Copy, true, but I have thought on these fogs you encountered.”
“You saw them?” Joan shouted.
“I was made some long intervals ago, but my Lord-” the apparition bowed to the tiny Original “-had datapunched me forward.”
“He is a quick study,” the Original said modestly.
The Ditto thundered, “Speaking broadly, I penned of such fogs in my magnum opus, Micromegas. I haven’t a copy, alas, or you could ingest it in a trice. I portrayed two giants, one from Saturn, the other from Sirius.”
Joan called, “You think this fog comes-”
“It evaporated from the leading edge of this Empire-hence, a fog. As humanity spread, so did the fog rise above the plane of the Galaxy like a funeral dirge. It is ancient and strange and not of us. In Micromegas, I held that all Nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws. Surely it would be very singular that there should be a little animal, five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.”
“We follow the Creator, not laws.”
Voltaire Ditto waved away the objection, holding his nose against the reek from below. “The Lord’s laws, then, if you demand an author-though a great one stands before you already, my love.”
“I doubt your kind of love applies here.”
Peak Voltaire smiled. “Falstaff cried in The Merry Wives of Windsor, ‘Let the sky rain potatoes!’-because the new luxury vegetable of that time, imported from exotic America, for a while was believed to be an aphrodisiac, because of its testicular shape. Similarly, I greet the strange and alien as potential aids.”
“The fog wishes to murder us.”
“Well, one can’t have everything to one’s liking.”
With a wave from the Original, rains fell from a porous leaden sky upon the Alps Voltaire. He eroded, smiling with resignation as he spread into rivulets.
The Original flew to Joan and kissed her. “Worry not. Running a Ditto of your Self, giving it autonomy, means it can also change itself-become NotSelf. Your Ditto could shape its own motivations, goals, habits, edit away memories and tastes. For example, your Ditto could erase any liking for impressionist opera and overlay a passion for linear folk.”
“What are those?”
“Mere acoustic fashion. Your Ditto could enjoy rhythms that would have bored your true Self into a coma.”