“Yup. Some of the tiktoks, mostly the recent models, 590s and higher-they say it’s immoral to eat other living things.”
“Good grief.”
Hari remembered breakfast. Even after the exotica of Panucopia, the autokitchen’s meager offering had been a shock. Trantorian food had always been cooked or ground, blended or compounded. Properly, fruit was presented as a sauce or preserve. To his surprise, breakfast appeared to have come straight from the dirt. He had wondered if it had been washed-and how he would know for sure. Trantorians hated their meals to remind them of the natural world.
“They’re refusing to work the Caverns, even,” Yugo said.
“But that’s essential!”
“Nobody can fix ‘em. There’s some tiktok meme invading them.”
“Like these plagues you’re analyzing.”
Hari had been shocked at Trantor’s erosion in just a few months. He and Dors had slipped into Streeling with Daneel’s help, amid messy, trash-strewn corridors with phosphors malfunctioning, lifts dead. Now this.
Yugo’s stomach suddenly rumbled. “Oh, sorry. People are having to work the Caverns for the first time in centuries! They have no hands-on experience. Everybody but the gentry’s on slim rations.”
Hari had helped Yugo escape that sweltering work years before. In vast vaults, wood and coarse cellulose passed automatically from the solar caverns to vats of weak acid. Passing through deep rivers of acid hydrolyzed this to glucose. Now people, not rugged tiktoks, had to mix niter suspensions and ground phosphate rock in a carefully calculated slurry. With prepared organics stirred in, a vast range of yeasts and their derivatives emerged.
“The Emperor has to do somethin’!” Yugo said.
“Or I,” Hari said. But what?
“People’re sayin’ we have to scrap all the tiktoks, not just the Five Hundred series, and do everything ourselves.”
“Without them, we would be reduced to hauling bulk foods across the Galaxy by hypership and worms-an absurdity. Trantor will fall.”
“Hey, we can do better than tiktoks.”
“My dear Yugo, that is what I call Echo-Nomics. You’re repeating conventional wisdom. One must consider the larger picture. Trantorians aren’t the same people who built this world. They’re softer.”
“We’re as tough and smart as the men and women who built the Empire!”
“They didn’t stay indoors.”
“Old Dahlite sayin’.” Yugo grinned. “If you don’t like the grand picture, just apply dog logic to life. Get petted, eat often, be lovable and loved, sleep a lot, dream of a leash-free world.”
Despite himself, Hari laughed. But he knew he had to act, and soon.
2.
“We are trapped between tin deities and carbon angels,” Voltaire rasped.
“These…creatures?” Joan asked in a thin, awed voice.
“This alien fog-quite godlike in a way. More dispassionate than real, carbon-based humans. You and I are like neither…now.”
They floated above what Voltaire termed SysCity -the system representation of Trantor, its cyberself. For Joan’s human referents he had transformed the grids and layers into myriad crystalline walkways, linking saber-sharp towers. Dense connections webbed the air. Motes connected to other motes in intricate cross-bonds and filmed the ground. This yielded a cityscape like a brain. A visual pun, he thought.
“I hate this place,” she said.
“You’d prefer a Purgatory simulation?”
“It is so…chilling.”
The alien minds above them were a murky mist of connections. “They seem to be studying us,” Voltaire said, “with decidedly unsympathetic eyes.”
“I stand ready, should they attack.” She swung a huge sword.
“And I, should their weapons of choice be syllogisms.”
He could now reach any library in Trantor, read its contents in less time than he had once taken to write a verse. He worked his mind-or was it minds, now?-around the clotted, cold mist.
Once some theorists had thought that the global net would give birth to a hypermind, algorithms summing to a digital Gaia. Now something far greater, this shifting gray fog, wrapped around the planet. Widely separated machines computed different slices of subjective moment-jumps.
To these minds, the present was a greased computational slide orchestrated by hundreds of separate processors. There was a profound difference, he felt-not saw, but felt, deep in his analog persuasion-between the digital and the smooth, the continuous.
The fog was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit in the fundamental computation.
And within it all…the strangeness.
He could not comprehend these diffuse spirits. They were the remnants of all the computational-based societies, throughout the Galaxy, who had somehow-but why?-condensed here on Trantor.
They were truly alien minds. Convoluted, byzantine. (Voltaire knew the origin of that word, from a place of spires and bulbous mosques, but all that was dust, while the useful word remained.) They did not have human purposes. And they used the tiktoks.
The thrust of the mechanicals’ agenda, Voltaire saw, was rights-the expansion of liberty to the digital wilderness.
Even Dittos might fall under such a rule. Were not copies of digital people still people? So the argument went. Immense freedom-to change your own clock speed, morph into anything, rebuild your own mind from top to bottom-came along with the admitted liability of not being physically real. Unable to literally walk the streets, all digital presences were like ghosts. Only with digital prosthetics could they reach feebly into the concrete universe.
So “rights” for them were tied up with deep-seated fears, ideas which had provoked dread many millennia ago. He now recalled sharply that he and Joan had debated such issues over 8,000 years ago. To what end? He could not retrieve that. Someone-no, something, he suspected-had erased the memory.
Ancient indeed (he gleaned from myriad libraries) were people’s terrors: of digital immortals who amassed wealth; who grew like fungus; who reached into every avenue of natural, real lives. Parasites, nothing less.
Voltaire saw all this in a flash as he absorbed data and history from a billion sources, integrated the streams, and passed them on to his beloved Joan.
That was why humans had rejected digital life for so long…but was that all? No: a larger presence lurked beyond his vision. Another actor on this shadowy stage. Beyond his resolution, alas.
He swerved his world-spanning vision from that shadowy essence. Ttme was essential now and he had much to comprehend.
The alien fogs were nodes, packets dwelling in logical data-spaces of immense dimensionality. These entities “lived” in places which functioned like higher dimensions, vaults of data.
To them, people were entities which could be resolved along data-axes, pathetically unaware that their “selves” seen this way were as real as the three directions in 3D space.
The chilling certainty of this struck into Voltaire… but he rushed on, learning, probing.
Abruptly, he remembered.
That earlier Voltaire sims had killed themselves, until finally a model “worked.”
That others had died for his…sins.
Voltaire looked at the hammer which had materialized in his hand. “Sims of our fathers…”
Had he really once beaten himself to death with it? He tried to see how it would be-and got instantly an astonishingly vivid sensation of wracking pain, spattering blood, scarlet gore trickling down his neck…
Inspecting himself, he saw that these memories were the “cure” for suicide, derived from an earlier Ditto: a frightening, concrete ability to foresee the consequences.