Foundation’s Fear

1.

Voltaire scowled, vexed.

Had she in fact yielded to him, given herself up? Or was this a particularly fine simulation? True Joan, art this thou?

Certainly this fit one of his favorites: a romping play in prickly dry hay, up in the topmost loft of a big old barn, on a hot August day in long-lost Bordeaux.

Twit-wheeecalled a bird. Insects chirped, warm breezes blew woody scents. Her hair trailed over him as she mounted. He felt her adroit twists, delivered with an erotic precision that made him tremble with the need for release.

But…

The instant he doubted, it all contracted, dwindled, fell away into blackness. This was merely an exotic onanism, a self-love delusion requiring his commitment to its truth. Contrived well, but fake.

So when he felt himself picked up in a giant feminine hand, soft palm cradling him aloft into sunny air, he wondered if this were real, too. A hot breeze brushed him as she exhaled.

Joan towered fifty times his height, murmuring to him. Fleshy huge lips kissed his whole body in one lingering moment, her tongue licking him like a colossus savoring a lollipop.

“I suppose I’ve not had my irony programs omitted?” he asked.

The giant Joan shriveled.

“Too easy,” he said. “All I need do is say something a bit jarring-”

This time the hand propelled him aloft with crushing acceleration. “You’ve still got your precious irony. And this is me.”

He sniffed. “So large. You’ve made yourself a leviathan!”

“Too heavy?”

“I’ve always liked…pig irony.”

He gave a disdainful sniff. She dropped him. He plunged toward a moat of boiling lava, which had suddenly appeared below.

“Sorry,” he said quietly. Just enough to get her to stop, not enough to lose every shred of dignity.

“You should be.”

The lava pit evaporated, congealing into mud. He landed on solid ground and she stood before him, standard size. Demure, fresh. Around her clung air scrubbed by a spring rainstorm just past.

“We can invade each others’ perceptual spaces at will. Marvelous…” He stopped, considered. “In a way.”

“In Purgatory, all is meaningless. We dream while we await truth.” She abruptly sneezed, then coughed. Blinking, she reassembled her lofty, ladylike self.

“Ummm. I would appreciate something concretely…ah…concrete.”

He stepped off the porch of an elaborate Provencal country house. The fields beyond glowed with lurid light. The foreground was accurate, but done in rather obvious brush strokes.

Clearly they were inhabiting a work of art. Even the scents of apple trees and horse manure had a stilted quality. A frozen moment, cycled endlessly for as long as they needed a backdrop? Inexpensive, even. Astounding what his subconscious-let slip a bit-could conjure up.

What was to stop him-them!-from playing Caligula? Slaughtering digital millions? Torturing virtual slaves? Nothing.

That was the problem: no constraints. How could anyone persist, given infinite temptation?

“Faith. Only faith can guide, can compel.” Joan took his hand, pleading with untouched ardor.

“But our reality is in fact entire illusion! “

“The Lord must be somewhere,” she said plainly. “He is real.”

“You do not quite follow, my dear.” He struck an instructive pose. “Ontogenesis algorithms can generate new people, drawn from ancient fields, or else just cooked up for the moment.”

“ I know true people when I see them. Let them speak for a moment.”

“You would look for wit? We have some subroutines here, yes, madam. Character? A mere set of verbal posture-profiles. Sincerity? We can fake that.”

Voltaire knew, from viewing his own cerebral innards, that something termed a “reality editor” offered ready-made conversation from the mouth of apparently “rear’ persons, who had not existed seconds before. Assemblages of traits and verbal nuances stood ever ready to trade aphorisms and sallies with him.

All these he had picked up in his endless foraging of the Mesh, its myriad Trantorian sites opening to his touch. He had extracted and shaped these “customized” amusements. Quick and zesty and all, ultimately, hollow.

“I realize you have greater capacities,” Joan allowed. She hoisted her sword and swung it at empty air. “Allow, sir, that I can still control my senses. I know some minions of these parts are true and real, as authentic as animals were in our time on Earth.”

“You believe that you knew the inner states of horses?”

“Of course! I rode many into battle, felt their fear through my calves.”

“I see.” He swept his lace sleeves through the air in a parody of her sword-swinging. “Now-bring you!-judgment to bear upon a dog which has lost its master. The beast, call him Phydeaux, has sought its master on every road with sorrowful cries and enters the house agitated, uneasy, goes up and down the stairs, from room to room, and at last finds in the study the master it loves, and shows him its joy by its cries of delight, by its leaps. It must have feeling, longings, ideas.”

“Surely.”

Voltaire then produced the dog, plaintive and beautiful in its flop-eared digital sorrow. To boot, he added the house, complete with furniture. As the poor dog’s baying died away, he said, “My demonstration, madam.”

“Tricks!” Mouth twisted angrily, she said no more.

“You must allow that mathematicians are like

Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate into their own language, and forthwith, it is something entirely different.”

“I am waiting for my Lord. Or, as one devoted to large concepts, sir: for Meaning.”

“Sit and ponder, madam.” He materialized a comfy Provencal kitchen, tables, the fetching scent of coffee. They sat. Inscribed on the coffee pot was his motto from a lost past:

Noir comme le diable

Chaud comme l’enfer

Pur comme un ange,

Doux comme l’amour.

Black as the devil,

Hot as hell,

Pure as an angel,

Sweet as love.

“My, it tastes so good,” Joan said.

“I have mastered multiple-site access.” Voltaire slurped his coffee noisily, one of the few allowances he had found Parisian society gave to even a philosopher. “We are running in the interstices of Trantor, splintered into many fragments. I can summon up sensedata from the innumerable inventories of countless digital libraries.”

“I appreciate your giving me similar talents,” she said cautiously, adjusting her armor for comfort and sipping her aromatic coffee with care. “But I feel a hollowness…”

Ruefully he nodded. “I, too.”

“We seem…I hesitate to say…”

“Like divinities.”

“Blasphemy, but true. Though the Creator has wisdom and we do not.”

Voltaire’s face stretched in despair. “Worse, we may not have even our own wills.”

“Well, I do.”

“If all we are is strings of digits-zeros and ones, actually, no more, if you will but look microscope-close-then how can we be free? Are we not determined by those marching numerals?”

“I feel free.”

“Ah, but then, we would make it so in any case, yes?” He sprang to his feet. “One of my best couplets:

One science only will one genius fit

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.”

“So we cannot know we are free? The Creator makes us so!”

“I would wish for that Creator, now.”

Joan kicked over the table, spattering him with coffee. He edited out its burns as he fell. She swung her sword at the kitchen walls and sliced them into great sheets curving away into a gray Euclidean space, reality curling like orange peel.

“How tiresome,” he said. “The best argument against Christianity is certainly Christians.”

“I will not have-”

You like to think of yourself as a philosopher?

The words somehow filled space. Acoustic walls swelled and blew past them, like great pages riffling in a giant book.

Voltaire took a deep breath and bellowed, “You address me?”

You also like to think of yourself as a shrewd judge of the quick opportunity. Or of verbal nuance.

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.”

“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.

Humans had always thought of spreading their genes, using starships. These alien, self-propagating ideas spread their “memes”-their cultural truths.

Memes can propagate between computers as easily as ideas flit between natural, organic brains. Brains are easier to infest than DNA.

Memes evolved in turn far faster than genes. The organized constellations of information in computers evolved in computers, which are faster than brains. Not necessarily better or wiser, but faster. And speed was the issue.

Voltaire reeled from the images-quick, vivid penetrations.

“They are demons! Diseases!” Joan shouted. He heard fear and courage alike in her strained words.

Indeed, the plain now crawled with malignant sores oozing rot. Pustules poked through the crusty soil. They bulged, sprouted cancerous heads like living blue-black bruises. These burst, spouting steaming pus. Eruptions vomited foulness over Voltaire and Joan. Stinking streams lapped at their dancing feet.

“The sneezing, the coughs!” Joan shouted. “We have had them all along. They-”

“Were viruses. These aliens were infecting us.” Voltaire splashed through combers of filth. The streams had coagulated into a lake, then an ocean. Breakers curled over them, tumbling both in the scummy brown froth.

“Why such horrible metaphor?” Voltaire cried out to the pewter sky. It filled with churning swarms of Bees as he bobbed in waves of putrefying wastes.

[WE ARE NOT OF YOUR CORRUPT ORIGINS]

[HIGHER REASON FOLLOW WE]

[THE WAR OF FLESH UPON FLESH IS SOON TO END]

[OF LIFE UPON LIFE]

[ACROSS THE TURNING DISK OF SUNS]

[WHICH ONCE WAS OURS]

“So they have their own agenda for the Empire.” Voltaire scowled. “I wonder how we shall like it, we of flesh?”