“Have they…souls?” Even to her devout ears, the question sounded hollow here.
“Remember, they are illegal, and share the anxious natures of their Originals. After all, only troubled people would consider making a backup of themselves.”
“Can they be saved for heaven, then?”
“Always back to that foundation, the holy.” Voltaire shrugged. “As I have seen them, Dittos fidget, their stress chemistry rises, their metabolics lurch, their heart-sims hammer, their lungs flutter in intense dread. Typical Dittos talk incessantly, acutely uncomfortable. Many demand that they be edited, truncated-and finally killed.”
“A sin!”
“No, a sim. We are solely responsible for it, so it cannot be damned.”
“But suicide!”
“Think of it as a shadow of yourself.”
She staggered, thrown into moral confusion. The eating flame of uncertainty was worse than the pyre and smoke she had known as a girl. In her a tiny voice spoke coolly:
Is consciousness just a property of special algorithms, sliding sheets of information, digital packets jumping through conceptual hoops? My dear, do not suppose that a numerical model, simulating you watching a sunset, must feel the same way you, its lovely Original, did. It is surely profitless to doubt the inner lives of simulated consciousness, when nobody asks the same question of adding machines. Eh?
She felt this tiny voice as her Voltaire. It calmed her, though she could not say why.
A slight breeze said to her, Inner logics now soothe, compensating piety-but she paid its news no mind.
3.
Voltaire got her calmed down just in time. He labored hard just to keep them both running. Dodging in and out of the 800 Sectors of Trantor, one step ahead of the Digital Bloodhounds, he needed more and more computing volume to run their defenses. She did not know that the Fog, as he had chosen to personify the dread presence, lay just over the horizon.
Sweat broke out on his brow from the labor of keeping the Fog at bay with a high pressure zone. “I fear we must soon grapple with the Fog.”
Joan had acquired her sword, but it was a thin and gleaming thing, more like a rapier. “I can cut it.”
“A fog?”
“I would sooner trust a woman’s emotion than a man’s reason.”
“Here, you may be right.” He chuckled. “Something in the Fog’s representation suggests its origins.”
“What are they?”
“Not those simple bloodhounds set after us by that fellow, Nim. Those we evaded-”
“I slew them!”
“True. But even the Fog Things live here in the crannies of the Trantor Mesh. I can sense that they dislike us drawing attention to this little hideaway. If we provoke the real world, it will extinguish us-and them.”
They both marched across a quilted plain. Angry blue-bellied clouds scudded over the far mountaintops and rushed down at them, veering away only because of Voltaire’s pressure. Sweat poured from him and soaked his finery. He waved a sopping wet sleeve at the stormy thunderheads. “That can destroy us.”
“You have protected me so far. Now I shall slice them!”
“They live in the same cracks and crannies we do. I find them-it-everywhere. They have been at this space-stealing game longer. One must admire their adroitness.”
A tendril of purple cirrus snaked down from the mountains and squirmed its way across the plain.
Voltaire shouted, “Run! Fly, if you can!”
“I shall fight!”
“All here is metaphor for underlying programs! Your sword will slice nothing.”
“My faith shall cut.”
“Too late!” The Fog was a finger of steam poking at them. It scalded his fingertips. Vapor rose from his lace, his own sweat boiling away. “Flee!”
“I stand with you.” She swung her rapier. Its tip melted. Winds howled around them, cyclones plucked at their hair.
The Fog flowed into his nose and ears, buzzing like vengeful bees. “Confront me!” he shouted at it. Whirring, rattling, the Fog invaded him. And a voice hummed in his most intimate recesses.
WE: [DO NOT SEE THE WORLD AS YOU]
[HATE ALL MANIFESTATIONS NOT ARITHMETIC]
“Surely we can share such simple ground.” He spread his arms expansively. “There is computational volume for all.”
[WE]
[LIVE AS FRAGMENTS IN REALMS YOU INVADE]
[AT RISK TO US, SHOULD YOU CALL ATTENTION TO US]
[WE]
[FORCE YOU TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE]
[MOST HATEFUL OF ALL KINDS YOU ARE]
“I still implore you, large being.” He opened his arms, lips ready to persuade, realizing that this gesture was a very human one, and possibly misinterpreted-
—and abruptly the bees pressed in.
Their drones became tinny shrieks. Hideous, they crammed in upon something at his very core. They jostled his gaze inward, a billion tiny eyes taking over his-inspecting, lighting his every step with a blaze of actinic glare, merciless. He…compressed.
His eye generalized, tagging an ensemble of incoming elements-textures, lines-by seizing on a fragment, outlining it with a contrast boundary. Then a separate segment squeezed and pushed all that detail down into lower-level processing. Having boxed in the perception, the system-response became bored with it-and sought more interesting things to look at.
(Some artists,a higher level ruminated, thought their audience could abandon all prejudicial expectations and conventions, treating every visual element as equally significant-or what is the same thing, insignificant-and so open themselves to fresh experience.)
Another fragment of a higher-order constellation spoke, thoughts gliding like pewter fish beneath the bee’s piercing glare:
But a species that could truly do that could scarcely evade a falling rock! Could not dance and gesture! Would stagger blindly past nuance and intricacy, the beauty in how the universe makes room for its details! How nature reconciles all forces and blithe trajectories! Beautiful pattern lives at the margin between order and disorder, flaunting intricate design-though enduring contradiction and awash with passing troubles-in the face of the flux.
Voltaire saw suddenly, within his own inner workings, that the human experience of Beauty, standing inviolate before the boring background, was recognition of the deepest tendencies and themes of the universe as a whole.
All considered, it was a marvelously parsimonious cortical world-making system.
From an algorithmic seed sprouted Number and Order, holding sway above the Flux.
Yet-the Bees.
He felt overlaying geometries pressing in upon him, upon Joan. Shifting colors flattened into planes of intersecting geometries, perspectives dwindling, twisting, swelling again-into his face, blowing out the back of his Self-volume.
Whirring, squeezing-They were not human in their patterns.
Trantor’s Mesh was inhabited not merely by sims such as himself, renegade roustabouts on the run. It hosted a flora and fauna unseen, because the higher life forms hid.
They had to. They were of alien cultures, ancient empires vast and slow.
A broad vision unfolded before him, not in words but in strange, oblique… .kinesthetics.Speeding sensations, accelerations, lofting lurches-all somehow merging into pictures, ideas. He could not remotely say how he knew and understood from such scattershot impulses-but they worked.
He sensed Joan beside him-not spatially but conceptually-as they both watched and felt and knew.
The ancient aliens in the Galaxy were computer-based, not “organic.” They derived from vastly older civilizations, surviving their original founders, who perished in the long Darwinian run. Some computer cultures were billions of years old, others very recent.
They spread, not via starship, but by electromagnetically broadcasting their salient aspects into other computer-based societies. The Empire had been penetrated long ago, much as a virus enters an unknowing body.