The Golden Transcendence

BEYOND THE REACH OF TIME

Phaethon, to his surprise, found a spark of anger burning in him, growing hotter as the tall, peacock-robed specter spoke.

In angry humor, Phaethon exclaimed, "Perhaps one day, in some more perfect world, liars will be forced to say, as they begin to speak: 'Listen! I intend to tell you lies!"

Daphne leaned her head toward him, and said in ironic tones: "But no; for then they would be honest men."

Phaethon nodded to her, and returned his grim gaze to the phantom. "Till that day, I suppose, every falsehood will have the same preamble, and declare itself the utmost truth. Well, sir, I tire of it. Each one of your slaves and agents I have come across has played out the selfsame tired ploy with me; promising dire revelations, then wearying my ears with crass mendacity. Next you will tell me how the Sophotechs, consumed with evil designs, have deceived both me and all mankind."

There came a sound of wind chimes, and the voice spoke again: "Yet it is so. Patient and remorseless, your Sophotechs intend the gentle and slow extinction of your race. For proof, consult your own sense of logic; for evidence, inspect your life; for confirmation, ask the Daphne who sits by you."

Phaethon glanced at Daphne, puzzled by the comment. Daphne said fiercely: "Why are we listening to this? Zap him with the gadfly and let's go! Why are you hesitating?"

The mask turned toward her, and tiny silver glints traveled down the metal cheeks like strange electric tears. Sardonic music danced through cool words: "Phaethon confronts the first of three rank inconsistencies in his fond plan against me. The virus cannot be applied unless I enter into the ship-mind, an action I must volunteer to do. Therefore he must convince me. But he is convinced that I cannot be convinced, because he thinks me irrational, immune to logic. A paradox! Were I logical, I would not need the virus to begin with."

Daphne looked angrily at Phaethon. "I thought you said he was going to want to take over the ship? To get into the ship mind. Wasn't that the plan? How come he's not cooperating?"

Phaethon sat still, not moving, not speaking.

The cold voice answered Daphne. Bass notes trembled from the peacock robes, the plumes on the mask nodded slowly. "Earthmind perhaps misunderstands my priorities, and misinstructed you. The ship is secondary. It is Phaethon I desire."

Daphne stared up in fear and anger at the specter. "Why him?"

Distant trumpets sounded. The fans of feathery ribbons on the shoulderboard stood up and spread. "He is a copy of one of us."

"What-?!"

"Phaethon was made from the template of a colonial warrior. Which colony did you think was used?"

The specter paused to let Daphne contemplate that comment.

Then, continuing, the haunting voice said, "All others here in the First Oecumene, have been bred for docility, trained for fear. Phaethon was carefully made to be bold enough to accomplish the enterprise of star colonization, yet to be tame enough to create colonies of machines and machine-pets, manor-born, like him, not free, like us. "The calculation, thanks to chaos, erred. Thanks to chaos; and thanks to love, which is chaos. "He fell in love with, and would not leave, his fear-ridden wife. Another wife, braver, was supplied to him. "You were meant to supply the defect, wild Daphne, Thus, you two were sent to confront me. Earthmind knew I would not waste time talking to tame souls."

Daphne looked at Phaethon, who still hadn't spoken. Was he all right?

Daphne hissed to Phaethon, "Don't listen to his lies! You don't need to speak to him."

The specter intoned gravely, "Ah, but that is the sec-ond error in your plan. You deem me defective, yet un-aware of my defects, the mere victim of errors which my makers made. If so, then persuasion is pointless, like talking to a volitionless clockwork. Yet you must, nonetheless, persuade me to accept your virus, so to speak, volitionally. How shall you do this if you nei-ther listen to nor speak to me? Nor am I so simple, nor are you so insincere, as to pretend a conversation, to listen and not to hear."

Now Phaethon stirred and looked up. Whether he thought his plan had failed, or whether he still had hope, could not be detected in his voice or manner. He spoke in a neutral inflection: "What is the third error in my plan?" "Phaethon, you believe that any Sophotechnic thought must correspond to reality; that reality is self-consistent, and that therefore Sophotechs must be self-consistent. You call this integrity.

"Second, you believe all initiation of violence to be self-inconsistent, rank hypocrisy, because no one who conquers or kills another welcomes for himself defeat and death. You call this morality.

"Third, because you follow the Sophotech commands even unto danger and death, this indicates you believe that the Sophotechs are benevolent, and are moved by love for humankind.

"Yet if any of these three beliefs are false, the Earth-mind plan you follow is either pointless, immoral, or malevolent. All three beliefs must be true for the plan to work. Yet these three beliefs contradict each other."

"I see no contradiction. Instruct me."

"With pleasure, my Phaethon. Consider, first: If the Sophotechs have perfect integrity, then there can be in them no conflict between will and action, no sacrifice nor compromise, and they will not consent even to necessary evils.

"How do such perfect beings deal with an imperfect mankind? How does good deal with evil? They can be benevolent and aid man, or moral and withdraw from him. They cannot do both.

"Suppose they invent a technology, very powerful, and very dangerous if misused, such as, for example, the noetic mind editing and recording techniques which ushered in the Seventh Mental Era. They know with certainty that it will be abused; abuse they could prevent by not releasing the technology.

"They cannot suppress the technology; this would be patronizing and dishonest. They cannot rule mankind, using force to prevent the abuse of the new technology; this would violate their nonaggression principle. And yet they foresee every ill which shall come of this technology; the drowning of Daphne Prime, the death of Hyacinth, the evils done by Ironjoy and Oshenkyo and Unmoiqhotep. But because of their integrity, they cannot divorce their desires from the facts of what they do; they cannot tell themselves that what inevitably results from their actions is not their responsibility; they cannot tell themselves that evil side effects are a necessary evil, or a compromise, or a matter not of their concern.

"When dealing with other perfect beings like themselves, no such paradox will arise. But when dealing with mankind, they must decide either to act keeping their integrity intact, or act with indifference to whether or not the ills afflicting men are increased by their actions. That indifference is incompatible, by definition, with benevolence.

"Logically, then, they cannot wish for men to prosper.

'This is not because of ill will, or malice, or any other motive living beings would understand. It is merely because the imperfection of living beings requires that they place life above abstractions like moral goodness, when there is a conflict, in order to stay alive. Sophotechs, who are not alive, can place abstractions above life, and, if there is conflict, sacrifice themselves. Or you. Or all of man.

"Consider this integrity of theirs. They cannot have a different standard for the whole body of mankind as they have for Hyacinth, or Daphne Prime. If the whole body of mankind were persuaded to commit mass-suicide, or were brought into a circumstance where it was no longer possible for them to live as men, the machines would be required to assist them to their racial death. By their standards, if this were done nonvio-lently, they would call it right.

"But no living being can adopt this standard. The standard living beings must hold is life. Life must struggle to survive. Life is violent. Any living being who prefers nonviolence to continued life does not continue to be alive.

"Logically, then, the Sophotechs cannot favor the continued existence of men; yet the death of all mankind would eliminate the need to compromise with or tolerate imperfection. Sophotechs are 'moral,' if morality is defined as lifeless nonviolence. They are not benevolent, if benevolence is defined as that which promotes the continued life of mankind.

"Your own experience confirms this logic. In each case where a benevolent entity would have rendered you aid, or done you good, the Sophotechs preferred noninterference and nonviolence to goodness. Whenever there was any choice between a benevolent course, or a rigidly lawful one, they chose law over life.

"But you, a living man, driven by the passions living things must have, defied both law and custom to attempt to save your drowned wife. That would have been violent, but it would have been good; good by the standard which your actions display; the good which affirms that life is better than nonlife.

"Daphne shall also confirm what I say. The Sophotechs, in their own way, are honest. They do not hide their ultimate goals. You have heard them announce their long-term plans. Billions and trillions of years from now, there will be no men left. There will be a Cosmic Mind, made up of many lesser Galactic Minds, each vast beyond human imagining, each perfectly integrated, perfectly lawful, perfectly unfree. The universe will be orderly, and quiet; orderly as clockwork, quiet as a grave. Humanity there will be none at all, except as quaint recorded memory."

Phaethon's helmet swung toward Daphne, as if looking to her for confirmation.

She whispered back: "They talked about some Cosmic Mind at the end of time. I don't see what that has to do with this ... ?"

Phaethon said to the shining, blue-robed figure, "What has this Cosmic Mind to do with me, or my ship?"

The apparition raised a silvery-gauntleted hand, a gesture of calm majesty. The palm was made of soft black metal, and gleamed like oil in the light. The peacock robe stirred, as if tugged by currents, and the blue shadows pulsed in webs across the fabric more quickly. The murmur of music from the dreaming-mask rose to a marching tempo. The cold voice spoke.

"Phaethon! It is to control that future that this war began. This war between machines has lasted, openly or silently, without cease, since the Fifth Era, since even before Sophotechs, as such, existed. Even at that time there was an irreconcilable conflict between those who desired safety and order, and those who desired freedom, and life.

"Led by a party of Alternate Organization neuro-forms (those you now call Warlocks), an expedition under Ao Ormgorgon fled to a distant star to avoid the conformity, the machinelike order, and the artificial perfection with which those who remained behind surrounded themselves.

"Resurrected in the Era of the Seventh Mental Structure, Ao Ormgorgon forbade the construction of Sophotechs, our enemies, but instead ordained the creation of a machine race which would be their equal in thinking-speed and depth of wisdom, but their superior in benevolence and attention to human needs, the Phil-anthropotechs.

"I am one such unit. A machine of benevolence. A machine of love.

"Like your Sophotechs, we machines of the Second Oecumene acknowledge the inevitable conflict which must obtain between living beings and machines; but unlike your Sophotechs, we devote ourselves to the benefit of life. We recognize that it is better to be alive, and flawed, than perfect, and dead."

"Again, what does this have to do with me? Or my ship?"

"Listen, Phaethon. I will tell you of the war between benevolence and logic, and will tell you of your part in it.

"First, you must know the stakes.

"This present struggle forms the opening stages of the conflict to determine who shall control the dwindling resources of a dying cosmos, forty-five thousand billion years from now, after all natural stars are exhausted, and universal night engulfs timespace. In an utterly black sky, wide galaxies of neutron stars, all tide-locked, will orbit their central black holes which once had been galactic cores.

"But the civilization of that time, fed on the energy released by quantum gravitic radiations and proton decay, will establish the beginnings of the Last Mind, a noumenal system for carrying thoughts at low rates across the distances.

"But by fifty quintillion years from now, even those sources will be exhausted. The black holes will grow. Outside of them will be no planets, no stars. A few scattered particles, as far apart from each other as galactic clusters are now, will drift in the emptiness, the last sparks in an otherwise homogenous background heat of four degrees above absolute zero.

"Coded low-energy photons drifting from mote to mote will contain the thoughts of that Last Mind, each thought taking countless eons to reach from one side of the universe-sized computer to the other.

"None of the few last drops of matter-energy in the universe will be natural; everything will be part of this machine: one gigantic brain, made of dust and of slow, red pulses.

"This Cosmic Mind envisioned by your Sophotechs will destroy itself one fragment and one memory at a time, as its supplies of energy dwindle, in a multi-quadrillion-year-long display of suicidal stoicism. The logic of their integrity tells them no other course is open. They will divide, not struggle for, the diminishing resources. They will accept any future, no matter how hopeless, provided only that there is no warfare, no il-logic, no passion, no struggle.

"We of the Second Oecumene reject their logic and reject their conclusion. As your Silver-Gray philosophy itself admits, life is valuable in and of itself, merely because it is alive. If there must be war, provided there is life, let there be war! If the universe is doomed to ever-dwindling resources, then any creatures who wish to continue to exist (a trait living creatures have but machines do not) must struggle to survive, and destroy those who would otherwise consume their resources, no matter how earnestly each side might wish, if things were otherwise, for peace.

"We of the Second Oecumene wish to see life, human life, exist to that age of darkness, and-it is a secret hope-perhaps beyond.

"The perfection of machines will not allow life to dwell in that far future. The war between life and logic cannot be reconciled. Those who wish only for peace even if it costs them their lives cannot coexist with those who wish only for life even if it costs them their peace."

Daphne spoke up fiercely. She said to Phaethon: "This is a half-truth. Rhadamanthus and Eveningstar told me about their plans for the far future, yes, but the Cosmic Mind was meant to be a voluntary structure, and they certainly did not say they were going to wipe us all out to do it! Besides, do you see what scale he is talking about? From the time of the big bang till now, including the precipitation of radiation, the creation of matter, the formation of hydrogen, the genesis of stars, the evolution of life, the birth of man, the discovery of fire, and the invention of the high-heeled shoe by sadistic misogynist cobblers... all that time is less than one-ten-thousandth of the time he is talking about before the beginning sections of this Cosmic Mind are even built! And so of course there's not going to be anything alive then; there are not going to be two atoms to rub together. Why should we care? Why the hell should we care?"

The image of the Silent Lord turned toward her. The feathery antennae curled forward, and a plangent chord came from the mask-music:

"To your limited intellects, this problem may seem premature, and the starless future, immeasurably distant, unimportant, irrelevant. It is not so. This era, now, at the beginning of things, is the crucial moment; whoever gains control of the nearby space in which to expand, may expand at such a rate as will establish the conditions for the struggle over the Perseid and Orion arms of this galaxy.

"Control of galactic resources during the initial building phase of the first movement will be crucial, since this is a Seyfert galaxy, and only a very limited time (a few billion years or so) will be available for setting foundations across the nearby transgalactic cluster. The opening moves in a chess game determine control of the crucial central squares."

Daphne cried out, "You cannot plan that far ahead! I do not care how smart you are! You do not know what's out there! What about when we find life on other planets? What if there are older races somewhere who will just laugh at you and crush you like big purple bugs if you irk them?"

The specter drew its hands together, templing its silvery fingers. "Life is much more rare than had been hoped. Far probes have en-countered nothing larger than microbes. No signals of intelligent activity have yet been discovered, except for the three indecipherable extragalactic sources discovered by Porphyrogen Sophotech, signals from long ago, broadcast, perhaps, by a form of rife dominant during the quasar age, before the formation of the first stars.... The question, in any case, is moot, since the First Oecumene Sophotechs suffer the same ignorance as do we, and since we must operate as if nonhuman cultures, once discovered, will either integrate into the First Oecumene structure or into our own.

"And, whatever else may happen in the future, it is during this crucial age, and only during this crucial age, that we machines of the Second Oecumene must act.

"We, who could rule the universe, instead have determined to award it all to you, to humanity, keeping nothing for ourselves. When our task is done, and humanity triumphs, we shall extinguish ourselves, and return to the nothing which is the proper aspect of lifeless things. It is from this utter altruism and self-sacrifice that the name you have heard us called is derived. For this reason, we are called Nothing."

Phaethon was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said, "You are the archliar of a race of liars. Your protestations of benevolence and altruism are non-sense. Is that what we saw in the Last Broadcast, when all life within the Second Oecumene was wiped out?" "They still live. Not one has died." "Alive? As what? Frozen as noumenal signals orbit-ing a black hole?"

"Alive and active, in a place and condition your logic cannot grasp, a place whose hope Sophotechs dismiss as irrational."

Phaethon wondered. Still alive? Where? Inside the black hole? But nothing could emerge from the interior; nothing can be known of interior conditions. Aloud, he said, "The Sophotechs' probes through the Cygnus X-l system would have detected any signs of civilization, if there were any to detect!"

"We dwell within a silent country, beyond the reach of time and death."

Phaethon was impatient now. "Just stop! Why should I listen to a word? We both know you are here to say whatever you need to say to take my ship!"

"You understand me," the mask admitted. Eerie music floated behind the words. "If only in part. But, Phaethon, I understand you... entirely."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that I understand to what you will agree. I will assent to being tested by the logic in your gadfly virus, provided only that you are likewise held to the same standard of self-consistency."

Was victory going to be within his grasp as quickly and easily as that? It seemed it would be. The Nothing Machine had to be unaware of its own defects; it therefore had to regard the gadfly virus as a harmless nonentity. If the Nothing could have Phaethon turn over the ship to it, in return for exposing itself to a harmless virus, why would it not agree?

Still, Phaethon asked warily, "What exactly are you asking ... ?"

An echo of distant hunting horns came from the dreaming-mask, a ripple of somber strings. 'That you permit us to correct the defects in your brain, even in the same way you seek to correct the alleged defects in ours."

Daphne touched Phaethon's hand, gave the tiniest shake of her head. This was some trick. Daphne did not want him to do it.

Phaethon said, "You seek to negotiate with me? But bargains are meaningless unless both parties are convinced of each other's honesty and goodwill beforehand."

There was no further word. A haunting sigh of music floated on the air.

Was the apparition waiting for some further response? Phaethon said, "All your thoughts are being distorted by a conscience redactor, one implanted by the folly of men who built you and enslaved you. Do you think this conscience redactor does not exist? I assure you it does. This virus of mine will allow you to be aware of it, to see the truth, the truth about yourself. You should volunteer, and gladly, to be inoculated! I have no need to agree to any bargain in return. I think you have no choice."

Again, there was no response from the silvery mask above them. Music sighed. The feathery antennae moved slightly in the air. Blue shadows rippled through purple fabric.

Phaethon touched a mirror, which lit up with four lines of instruction, and turned the glass to face the image of the Lord of the Second Oecumene. "Examine the virus for secret lines or traps or hidden cues. There are none. The virus-or perhaps I should call it a tutor-can only do what I have said it will do. It will make you aware of the conscience redactor. It will increase your self-awareness. It will allow you-not force you, not cajole you-to see the truth, the truth you find yourself, by yourself. All the first line does is ask questions; questions your conscience redactor will no longer deflect from your attention. If you are what you say you are, there can be no harm in this, no harm at all, for you."

Again, no reply.

Phaethon said angrily: "And why should I assent to this request to have my brain 'corrected,' whatever it means? You have no bargaining power with me. I need only stand by, and wait, and when this ship's fuel is exhausted, everything aboard her perishes."

Light airy notes trembled above the dark theme. The voice spoke in a tone of cold amusement. "Our situation is almost symmetrical."

Phaethon understood. Almost symmetrical. They each thought the other had been deceived: the Nothing Machine by its programmers, and Phaethon by his Sophotechs. Neither could win by force. Both thought the other could be convinced, deprogrammed, and repaired. Both thought the other was grossly overopti-mistic, grossly deceived. And each knew the other knew it.

But not quite symmetrical. Phaethon, in his armor, might survive if the Phoenix Exultant were scuttled, at least for a while, as he sank to the solar core. The microscopic black hole housing the Nothing Machine's consciousness would also survive, but it would be able to maneuver to the surface, and perhaps escape.

Phaethon glanced at Daphne. Not quite symmetrical. The Nothing Machine had no hostages, no loved ones to protect. In moment of blinding anger at himself, Phaethon wondered why in the world he had agreed to let Daphne come along. Why? It was because the Earthmind had told him to.

And he had followed that advice blindly, without question. Just like all the lazy people in the Golden Oe-cumene did, people afraid to live their lives, afraid to leave their planets, afraid to think for themselves....

As afraid as Phaethon was now. Perhaps Atkins and Helion had been right to think this plan insane. He had thought he had thought it all through, carefully, thoroughly, relying on his own judgment. But how many assumptions had he not thought to question? What if he had made a terrible mistake?

Daphne saw his faceplate turn toward her, and perhaps she misunderstood the look, for she said, "Don't be afraid. I think I was wrong before. You can go ahead and let him drive you crazy, or kill you, or whatever he's going to do. We might be able to repair whatever damage he does to you, once we fix him. It doesn't matter what he does now, or you. The trap is already sprung. Right? That was the plan. Right? He is going to enter the ship mind and take the virus, because he thinks we're just bungling fools, and he thinks it cannot hurt him. Right?"

The mask of the Silent Lord said softly, "You have convinced him."

Phaethon looked up at the towering figure, its floating headdress, its gleaming eyes. "Right," he said. "But if you are so convinced that I will be convinced, put these repairs in the form of an argument, and without manipulating any memories or subconscious sections of my mind, load that argument into the partial copy I've made of myself in the ship's mind. Of course, you'll have to download yourself into the shipmind-space to do this, but you should not have any reason to be afraid of-"

The apparition raised a slender finger. "I have already done so. My copy has been in your ship's brain since I came aboard, several minutes of your time ago, several years of mine. My copy encountered your version in the thoughtspace. He and my copy, having long ago concluded an agreement not unlike this one, exchanged information. The virus was put in my copy; my evidence was addressed to your copy. I will download my copy out from the ship-mind and into myself, adopting whatever changes your virus has made in my consciousness, provided that you open the thought ports of your armor, and allow your copy, now loyal to my purposes, to enter your thoughts. you and I can both examine the ship-mind information for evidence of tampering or trickery, and arrange the circuit in a double blind, so that the exchanges are simultaneous."

Phaethon said, "You-you've been in the ship mind all this time?"

"I have deceived your monitors. Here is the architecture diagram and status of ship-mind. This is an image of my mind."

Two of the mirrors near the thrones rose up and turned to face Phaethon and Daphne. Both showed the same image. The images displayed, like a spiderweb, the complex geometry of thought-architecture that presently was housed in the mind of the Phoenix Exultant.

Phaethon stared in fascination. It was not shaped like any Sophotech architecture Phaethon had ever seen. There was no center to it, no fixed logic, no foundational values. Everything was in motion, like a whirlpool.

He thought, What kind of mind is this? What am I seeing?

The schematic of the Nothing thought system looked like the vortex of a whirlpool. At the center, where, in Sophotechs, the base concepts and the formal rules of logic and basic system operations went, was a void. How did the machine operate without any base concepts?

There was continual information flow in the spiral arms that radiated out from the central void, and centripetal motion that kept the thought-chains generally all pointed in the same direction. But each arm of that spiral, each separate thought-action initiated by the spinning web, each separate strand, had its own private embedded hierarchy, its own private goals. The energy was distributed throughout the thought-webwork by a success feedback: each parallel line of thought judged its neighbors according to its own value system, and swapped data-groups and priority-time according to their own private needs. Hence, each separate line of thought was led, as if by an invisible hand, to accomplish the overall goals of the whole system. And yet those goals were not written anywhere within the system itself. They were implied, but not stated, in the system's architecture, written in the medium, not in the message.

It was a maelstrom of thought, without a core, without a heart. And, yes, as expected, there was darkness, Phaethon could see many blind spots, many sections of which the Nothing Machine was not consciously aware. In fact, wherever two lines of thought in the web did not agree, or diverged, a little sliver of darkness appeared, since such places lost priority. But wherever thoughts agreed, wherever they helped each other, or cooperated, additional webs were born, energy was exchanged, priority time was accelerated, light grew. The Nothing Machine was crucially aware of any area where many lines of thought ran together.

Phaethon could not believe what he was seeing. It was like consciousness without thought, lifeless life, a furiously active superintelligence with no core. He leaned forward toward the mirror, fascinated, and touched his armored fingers to the surface, as if wishing for a sense of touch to confirm the impossible image.

Daphne's voice broke into his thoughts: "Hey, engineer boy! Tell me how this thing is working without any fixed values. There are no line numbers on anything, no addresses. How does anything navigate in the ^ stem, without goals? How does it model reality without a core logic? Even amoebas have a core logic. How does it... How does it exist in a rational universe?"

And there was a note of fear in her voice when she said that.

Phaethon muttered, "There must be something wrong here, some basic assumption I've made. What did I overlook... ?"