“I guess it started as a form of insult,” said Savi. Lightning flashed, illuminating the lines on her face, but the storm had moved on far enough that the thunder came late, from very far away. “Although to be fair, I called my own people that before calling yours the word.”
“What does it mean?” demanded Harman.
“It’s a term from a very old story in a very old book,” said Savi. “About a man who travels through time to the far future and finds humankind evolved into two races—one gentle, lazy, purposeless, basking in the sun, the eloi, and the other ugly, monstrous, productive, technological, but hiding in caves and darkness, the morlocks. In the old book, the morlocks provided food, shelter, and clothing for the eloi until the gentle people had fattened up nicely. And then the morlocks ate them.”
Lightning flashed across the fields again, but it was a pale, receding light. “Is that what our world is like?” asked Daeman. “Us as the eloi and the calibani and voynix as the morlocks ? Do they eat us?”
“I wish it were that simple,” said Savi. She laughed softly, but the noise held no humor.
“What are the calibani?” said Harman.
Instead of answering, the old woman said, “Daeman, show Harman one of your palm tricks.”
Daeman hesitated. “Which one?” he said. “Proxnet or farnet?”
“We know where we are, darling,” the old woman said sarcastically. “Show him farnet.”
Daeman scowled, but did so. He told Harman to think of three blue squares in the center of three red circles and suddenly a blue oval was floating over both of their palms. “Think of someone,” Daeman said, feeling strange. He’d never taught anyone anything before, if one didn’t count sexual techniques. “Anyone,” he added. “Just visualize them.”
Harman looked dubious but concentrated. An aerial representation of Ardis filled Harman’s oval, then a diagram of the layout of Ardis Hall. A stylized female figure was standing with a group of stylized men and women on the front porch of the manor.
“Ada,” said Daeman. “You were thinking of Ada.”
“Incredible,” said Harman. He stared at the image for a moment. “I’m going to visualize Odysseus,” he said.
The image shifted, changed magnitude, searched, but came up with nothing.
“Farnet doesn’t have a lock on Odysseus, according to Savi,” said Daeman. “But go back to Ada. Look where she is.”
Harman frowned but focused. The stylized cartoon of Ada was in a field a hundred yards or so behind Ardis Hall. There were scores of other human figures represented seated in front and around a void. Ada joined the crowd.
Daeman looked at Harman’s palm image. “I wonder what’s going on there. If Odysseus is in that empty spot, it looks as if the old barbarian’s addressing a crowd.”
“And Ada’s listening to him or watching him perform,” said Harman. He looked away from the palm oval. “What does this have to do with my question, Savi? Who are the calibani ? Why are the voynix trying to kill us? What’s going on?”
“A few centuries before the final fax,” she said, folding her hands together, “the post-humans got too clever by half. Their science was impressive. To all intents and purposes, they’d fled the Earth to their orbital rings during the terrible rubicon epidemic. But they were still masters of the earth. They thought they were masters of the universe.
“The posts had rigged the whole Earth with the limited form of energy-data transmission and retrieval that you call faxing, and now they were experimenting—playing really—with time travel, quantum teleportation, and other dangerous things. A lot of their playing around was predicated on ancient sciences from as far back as the Nineteenth Century—black-hole physics, wormhole theory, quantum mechanics—but what they relied on most was the Twentieth Century discovery that, at its heart, everything is information. Data. Consciousness. Matter. Energy. Everything is information.”
“I don’t understand,” said Harman. He sounded angry.
“Daeman, you’ve shown Harman the farnet function. Why don’t you show him the allnet?”
“Allnet?” repeated Daeman, alarm in his voice.
“You know, four blue triangles above three red circles above four green triangles.”
“No!” said Daeman. He thought off his own palm function. The blue glow winked out.
Savi looked at Harman. “If you want to begin to understand why we’re here tonight, why the post-humans left Earth forever, and why the calibani and voynix are around, visualize four blue triangles above three red circles above four green triangles. It gets easier with practice.”
Harman looked suspiciously at Daeman, but then he closed his eyes and concentrated.
Daeman concentrated on not visualizing those shapes. He forced himself to remember Ada naked as a teenager, to remember the last time he had sex with a girl, to remember his mother scolding him . . .
“My God!” cried Harman.
Daeman looked at the other man. Harman had stood, stumbling out of his chair, and was whirling, moving his head in jerks, staring open-mouthed at everything.
“What do you see?” Savi asked softly. “What do you hear?”
“God . . . God . . .” moaned Harman. “I see . . . Jesus Christ. Everything. Everything. Energy . . . the stars are singing . . . the corn in the fields is speaking, to each other, to the Earth. I see . . . the crawler’s full of little microbes, repairing it, cooling it . . . I see . . . my God, my hand!” Harman was studying his hand with a look of total horror and revelation.
“Enough for the first time,” said Savi. “Think the word ‘off.’ “
“Not . . . yet . . .” gasped Harman. He stumbled against the glass wall of the passenger sphere and clawed at it weakly as if trying to get out. “It’s so . . . so beautiful . . . I can almost . . .”
“Think off!” roared Savi.
Harman blinked, fell against the wall, and turned a pale, staring face in their direction.
“What was that?” he said. “I saw . . . everything. Heard . . . everything. ”
“And understood nothing,” said Savi. “But neither do I when I’m on allnet. Perhaps even the post-humans didn’t understand it all.”
Harman staggered to his chair and collapsed into it. “But where did it come from?”
“Millennia ago,” said Savi, “the real old-style humans had a crude information ecology they called the Internet. Eventually they decided to tame the Internet and created a thing called Oxygen—not the gas, but artificial intelligences floating in and over and above the Internet, directing it, connecting it, tagging it, leading humans through it when they went hunting for people or information.”
“Proxnet?” said Daeman. His hands were shaking and he hadn’t even accessed farnet or allnet tonight.
Savi nodded. “What led to proxnet. Eventually, Oxygen evolved into the noosphere, a logosphere, a planet-wide datasphere. But that wasn’t enough for the post-humans. They connected this super-Internet noosphere with the biosphere, the living components of the Earth. Every plant and animal and erg of energy on the planet, which—when connected to the noosphere—created a complete and total information ecology touching everything on, above, and within the Earth, a sort of sentient omnisphere that lacked only self-awareness and identity. Then the post-humans foolishly gave it that self-awareness—not just designing an overriding artificial intelligence, but allowing it to evolve its own persona. This super-noosphere called itself Prospero. Does that name mean anything to either of you?”
Daeman shook his head and looked at Harman, but even though the older man knew how to read books, he also shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Savi. “Suddenly the post-humans had an . . . opponent . . . that they couldn’t control. And it wasn’t over yet. The post-humans were using self-evolving programs and projects of other sorts as well, allowing their quantum computers to pursue their own goals. As impossible as it is to believe, they achieved stable wormholes, they achieved time travel, and they transported people—old-style humans as guinea pigs, since they’d never risk their own immortal lives—through timespace gates via quantum teleportation.”