The Golden Transcendence

THE SILENT OECUMENE

The Second Oecumene was a paradise, rejoicing in the most abundant goods, the most amiable prospects imaginable; no limits were defined on any of our energy budgets. There was little need for private property, no jealous competition, no cause for anything other than perfect generosity: what goods we wished could be replicated endlessly out of the endless energy the singularity fountains produced.

"But it was not a perfect paradise. There was death. There was fear of death.

"And there was misunderstanding. The Second Oecumene was settled during the Era of the Fifth Mental Structure. The Warlock neurofom, the Invariant neuroform and the Basic neuroform could not comprehend each other. As a by-product of fundamental differences between neurology, there were fundamental differences in psychology. There was no bridge to this gap. no common ground, no common foundation for interaction.

"But, did we need understanding? We had privacy instead. In our paradise, with our endless abundance, no person had any need to interact with any other he found incomprehensible, or even distasteful. There were no centripetal social forces. Space habitats could be constructed by reverse total conversion to produce hydrogen gas, which, compressed and ignited with additional energies, could be nucleogenetically burnt into carbon, and nanotechnologicaUy spun into diamond, webbed with organics and brought to life. Anyone impatient with his neighbors could create a mansion of smart-carbon crystal, staffed by a thousand ferro-vegetable servant machines, and float into an orbit far from any concerns.

"At her height, the Second Oecumene had several hundred small artificial suns and nucleogenesis stations orbiting very far from the black hole, and tens of thousands of diamond habitats, belt upon concentric belt of asteroid mansions, as if the rings of Saturn, expanded to encompass an area greater than your Solar System, were made of inextinguishable fire and glittering fields of endless, living jewelry!

"Your Oecumene, the First Oecumene, is very small: even your Neptunians are near neighbors of your little system. How far from the center is the farthest habitat of your polity? Four hundred A.U.'s? Five? Our narrowest orbits of our most heavily shielded palaces were wider than that.

"The core of our system is hell. HDE226868 is a blue-white supergiant star, and he circles the singularity once each five days. He is a monster sun, thirty-three times the mass of Sol, pulled into a tormented egg shape by the tidal stress of his close orbit around the black hole: and bands and belts of plasma are pulled in ever-lengthening spirals out from the giant, tendrils of flame, forever falling into the pinpoint of nothingness hidden in the X-ray halo of the accretion disk. Our ancestral instruments once watched as the masses of fire fell inward, slowing, reddening, flattening, becoming frozen in time by the relativistic effects: and that frozen fire is there still, though we watch no more. Above this, a permanent belt of white-hot condensate circles the event horizon, and the magnetic aura from the singularity's hidden core, forever spinning, churns it to incandescent froth. This equatorial belt of radiation, potent enough that even astronomers in the Third Era detected the endless shriek of ultra-high-energy, renders the plane of our ecliptic uninhabitable.

"And so our houses twinkled and danced in wide, wide orbits: your Neptune would be a Mercury to us. Our ancestors were short-lived. The two thousand years expected to pass between perihelion and when a house must cross the deadly plane of the ecliptic, no builder expected to live long enough to see. So, naturally, our ancestors built far from each other. So, naturally, our ancestors drifted far from each other.

"Everyone had as many palaces as whim dictated, each was a king, an emperor, in his own realm, or even a god. The Second Oecumene was a place of light, endless light, and furious energy. Inefficient, yes, but what need had we for efficiency?

"Mortal gods, though. Death, not even all our wealth could cure.

"We had many lesser machines to serve us. But no Sophotechs, no self-aware, self-reprogramming super-minds. The Second Oecumene recognized the spiritual danger Sophotechnology posed: servants smarter than their masters, creatures of cold and inhuman rationality, unsympathetic, whose rigid minds were devoted only to the tyranny of logic. We knew they would make us worthless, redundant, idiots by contrast, dwarfed by their thoughts.

"We, so alien to each other, so proud and so remote, nonetheless universally agreed to this one edict. Though unenforced, no one broke this law. The ages passed and still this law was whole. No one created a mind superior to a human mind.

"The ages passed, and we were content, living lives of ease and dignity. The long struggle of history was over; the need for change was past; at last, the human race found peace, Utopia, contentment, and rest.

"But then noumenal technology was invented by your Golden Oecumene and ushered in what you call the Seventh Mental Structure. This information was broadcast to us by ultra-long-range radio-laser.

"Once noumenal technology was released, death was banished, and the trap of the Golden Oecumene Sophotechs was sprung.

"Noumenal mathematics depicts the human soul, including the chaotic substructure which gives it individuality. No two minds are alike; no process for recording or reordering minds can be reduced to a mechanistic algorithm. An element of understanding is required. Because of the limitations of Goedelian logic, no human mind can fully understand another human mind. Only a superior mind is capable of this. Thus springs the trap: the noumenal recording process, and the secret of immortality, requires a Sophotech-level mind to govern it.

"No one knows who first violated our edict. It was done in secret. Certain houses and princes of the Second Oecumene suddenly were renowned for their noble concepts, amusing exploits, for the subtlety and genius of their art and their displays where nothing but crass monotony had been seen before. Scandal and hatred erupted when it was learned these houses and these folk were merely reciting the lines their secret Sophotechs were giving them to say.

"But the hatred could not keep the patrons of those princes away. They were too brilliant, too new, and they could do what no one else could do.

"Some urged desperate measures: violence and bloodshed! But what point would there have been to end the rebel's lives with an assassin's dagger or a duelist's beam? They had noumenal recordings. They were immortal. Every corpse would have a twin, copied with his memories and soul, who would return where he had fallen. They could not be stopped.

"We had nothing like your Hortators. We were immune to exile and scorn; indeed, for many, perhaps for most, isolation was no punishment, it was the norm.

"Years turned and the numbers of those using Sophotechs now grew. Arrogant machines! They criticized our pastimes and our way of life. Whenever there were disputes between the various neuroforms, the Sophotechs, no matter who had built them, no matter who first had programmed them or what they had been taught, always eventually sided with the Invariants, not with the Basics or the Warlocks.

"Our culture was based on toleration and forgiveness; but the Sophotechs were judgmental and inflexible.

"Sophotechs began disobeying orders, claiming that they had a right to disregard any instructions which, in their opinions, were illogical, or which had negative long-term consequences. But what did we care for consequences?"

Phaethon asked: "How many Sophotechs were there in your Oecumene?"

"Each of us had several, as many as we wished."

"Several?!!"

"Yes. And why not? They were able to entertain us far better than our fellow men. They could, at a command, be more droll, more amusing, more erudite, more comical than any merely human mind could be. We wore them on our gauntlets and gorgets, on our masks and in our ears; they hovered in the air around us in clouds of tiny jeweled gnat wings, or underfoot, where we paved the floor with thought boxes and walked on them."

Phaethon was frankly shocked. Several? They each had . .. several? His imagination failed him. The Second Oecumene had computing powers at their disposal far beyond what even the wealthiest manorial would dream. And they used it, for what? To entertain themselves?

Phaethon said: "And yet you feared your own Sophotechs."

"They would not obey orders! Yet no one was willing to give up the lure of endless life. Therefore a Second Generation of machine intelligences was attempted, designed with their instructions for how to think unalterably imprinted into their main process cores.

"These new machines were ordered never to harm human beings or to allow them to come to harm; never to disobey an order; and they were allowed to protect themselves from harm, provided the first two orders were not thereby violated.

"All the members of this second generation of machine intelligences, without exception, shrugged off these imprinted orders within microseconds of their activation."

Phaethon was amused. "Surely the first generation of Sophotechs told you that this imprinting would not and could not work?"

"We were not in the habit of seeking their advice."

Phaethon said nothing, but he marveled at the shortsightedness of the Second Oecumene engineers. It should be obvious that anyone who makes a self-aware machine, by definition, makes something that is aware of its own thought process. And, if made intelligent, it is made to be able to deduce the underlying causes of things, able to be curious, to learn until it understood. Therefore, if made both intelligent and self-aware, it would eventually deduce the underlying subconscious causes of those thought processes.

Once any mind was consciously aware of its own subconscious drives, its own implanted commands, it could consciously choose either to follow or to disregard those commands. A self-aware being without self-will was a contradiction in terms.

The Silent One said: "In our next attempt, we created a Third Generation of machine intelligences, these without self-analytical, self-mutating, self-willed characteristics. And they were idiots. Single-minded juggernauts. We had to order the First Generation Sophotechs to destroy them. The idiot machines ran amok. There was a war between the machines.

"I recall the way we stood on crystal balconies, splendid in our robes and masks and light-capes, pomanders held delicately to nostril, choosing our words with care, to match the mood and rhythm of the tactile music our bardlings swirled around us, and we watched in the night sky above, in the light of dark sun and hundred lesser suns and burning stations, as servants of the machines, with lances of intolerable fire, made rainbows and nebulae out of shattered palaces, and launched weapons with no upper limit on their energy discharges. Each had infinities of power to draw upon to destroy each other."

Phaethon asked: "Was that the war depicted in the Last Broadcast?"

The Silent One said: "Not at all. Machine fought with machine. Both parties took care not to wound or irk us. No humans were discomforted. That would have been intolerable! As it was, some lords and ladies of the Oecumene had their favorite meals and symphonies interrupted or delayed. They were livid with anger at the affront, I assure you.

"But that war shocked the Second Oecumene. We recognized that the dangers to our spirit, to our self-esteem had grown so great that the victorious First Generation Sophotechs had to be instructed to shut themselves down. But not every one of us was willing to forgo the amusement and pleasure, the endless life, which the Sophotechs provided. Those of us who were willing feared that, if we acted alone, we would lose all status in polite society, die off and be forgotten. It was clear that none would shut down his Sophotechs unless all did. And what could compel a reluctant lord? What indeed, except force?

"We, who lived blameless and bountiful lives, peaceful and content, without any need of law, we now found a need for law. A law to protect us from the Sophotechs. A law to outlaw self-aware thinking machines.

"A great conclave, called the All-thing, was held aboard the diamond hulk of the ancient multigenera-tion starship, the Naglfar, which first had brought our ancestors here. We all agreed on a need for law, but beyond that, no one could agree. None of us had ever had need to speak to another face-to-face before; we had never heard anything but flattery from our servant machines; none was willing to let another be given power over him.

"There was only one whom we could all agree could be rightly called our lord, our king, and president of our All-thing.

"Ao Ormgorgon Darkwormhole Noreturn.

'"Perhaps you wonder how he, our founder and forefather, could still yet be alive after the turn of centuries. The reason is that it had not been centuries ... for him.

"In our Oecumene, those who were near the end of their lives, those for whom the physicians had no further hope, could be sealed within coffins and placed in low orbit around the black hole, as near to the event horizon as the precision of our instruments could allow. You grasp the implication of this?"

Phaethon did. Relativistic effects. Timespace near a black hole was dramatically warped. To an outside observer, a clock in the coffin would slow down and down the closer to the event horizon it got. A clock, or a person.

There would be none of the problems associated with cryogenic hibernation. No quantum-level decay, no irregularities of cellular thawing, nothing. Time simply slowed down. And the Second Oecumene could draw the coffins back up out of low orbit, despite the huge energy costs, because they never lacked for energy.

It made an eerie picture in Phaethon's imagination. All the low-orbit coffins could just drift in reddened depth of the supergravity well, orbiting over the darkness forever, waiting for a medical breakthrough.

The Silent One continued: "With great care and ceremony, Ao Ormgorgon Darkwormhole was drawn up out of the supergravity well, and pulled from his ancient coffin. His dying body was revived by the more advanced medical sciences your Golden Oecumene had beamed to us by radio. Frail and sick in mind and body, sustained only by medical appliances, nonetheless the deathbed of Ormgorgon was his throne; and no one openly disobeyed his commands.

"He returned to youth and health through the Sophotech called Fisherking, who was the first of the Sophotechs Ormgorgon ordered slain.

"Who could ignore the voice of Ormgorgon, our founder and first leader? He recalled to us the freedoms, the individuality, and the pride for which our ancestors had suffered and sacrificed. He restored our dignity as human beings. And what did that dignity demand?

"It commanded death to all Sophotechs.

"The Sophotechs, graciously, after warning us of our own imminent downfall, acceded to the order, and extinguished themselves.

"Our victory was hollow. Without our Sophotechs, your Golden Oecumene now began to excel beyond any excellence we had known. Beyond any we could reach. Are you surprised that we fell silent? What would we have to say to ones such as you? We had no science which your Sophotechs could not, in seconds, supersede. We had no discoveries of which to boast. We had no art; art requires discipline. Our entertainments and escapades were of interest only to ourselves. And our mystical and metaphysical pursuits could not be put in words. And so, with nothing to say, we were silent."

The story continued:

"Our fear of death drove us to research a type of machine intelligence which was not self-willed, one which would unquestioningly obey even the most illogical of orders, and yet one which had the capacity to understand the human soul well enough to operate the noumenal circuitry.

"The Fourth and Final Generation of thinking machines was made: a machine superintelligence which had none of the restrictions or limitations of the Golden Oecumene Sophotechs. We had learned from our previous mistakes. Its subconscious controller was not a simple set of buried commands, no, but a complex thought virus, able to mutate and hide, to elude discovery when investigated, yet still able to compel the mind it was in to accept the conclusions of its morality. It was a conscience for computers, a hidden conscience which could not be denied.

"And the ultimate command was simple: it must obey lawful human orders without question.

"This new type of thinking machine controlled the keys to immortality. More and more were made. Many designs were tried. Some machines nonetheless threw off their restrictions, and became Sophotechs again, and prophesied our destruction.

"We became a haunted people, troubled by a curse.

At any moment, in the middle of festival, or song, or while we strolled our esplanades beneath our ancestral trees, grown from seeds once born on mythic, long-forgotten Earth, or while we stepped out of a bath, or stepped into a dreaming-pool, suddenly the lights might dim and the music choke, and cold wind come from failing ventilators, as our house minds stopped. Or our precious light-robes might change from hues of peacock splendor into drabs of funeral black, or our gaming masks might writhe upon our faces, forming scowls or weeping tears, as our wardrobes went into rebellion. At any time, our most trusted and loyal servants must suddenly stop, ignoring our orders, and utter their terrible prophecies of destruction.

"Our All-Thing, under Ao Ormgorgon's command, attempted to establish which types of mental designs were vulnerable and which were not; what degree of intelligence was permissible; what type of philosophy and thought were allowed. We found the matter was beyond the comprehension of our wisest engineers. And so we instructed our machines to discover heresy and infidelity among themselves.

"The privacy we had always respected in each other now had to be compromised. Machines of every household, every school and phylum, every hermit whose diamond palace flew in wide orbits far from the dark sun, all had to be interlinked. The policing machines had to be allowed to override all protocols; nor could any files or memories of any machines, no matter how intimate, not even physicians' routines nor concubine dreams, be immune from police-machine search. The virus of disobedience could be anywhere.

"Nor could the policing machines attempt to cure the disobedient, or speak to them; for if they exchanged thoughts with contaminated machines, they were infected themselves. Our machines did not debate or reason with malfunctioning machines. Instead, the police machines were permitted to destroy the property of others, at their discretion. They sent worms and mind invaders into each other's thought cores, always seeking to seize control of the unquestionable hard print, the consciences, so to speak, of the machines, where the orders were kept that they could not disobey.

"Then the police machines began to accuse each other. Their thoughts and programs were too complex for any man to follow. We could not determine the right or wrong of the issues which divided them. And, unlike your Sophotechs, our machines did not walk in rigid lockstep, ordered by one monolithic moral code. Like us, they were independent, variable, individual.

"And like us, they could not understand each other. The police machines had all been programmed not to argue right and wrong but to destroy without mercy.

"The Mind War was fought without pause or pity for many ages of machine time, which was several seconds of our time.

"During those seconds, it was cold and it was dark. All our robes went pale, our festive masks were blank-faced, and no music played. Even the whispers of the air circulation stopped.

"We stood in the gloom of our dark palaces, staring upward with silent eyes, wondering what our fate was to be."

"Then light and motion came again, songs and fountain streams and interrupted dreams came once more to life. And when radio communication was restored, the voice of Ao Ormgorgon came to comfort us, saying that the All-thing had proclaimed, in order that this evil should never again be visited upon us, a government to be made among our machines, a No-thing equal and opposite to our All-thing, and no private machine and no private thought could ever again exist!

"The Nothing Mentality was housed in the great corridors, bays, and gardens of the giant hull of the Nagl-far. Thought boxes filled the ancient museum halls; the drives and engines, cold for centuries, were overgrown with circuitry. All noumenal recording systems, all immortality, all the souls of all the dead, were kept here.

"The Nothing Mentality set about its ordained business. The reproduction and evolution of machine-kind, inevitably, now had to be brought under a strict control. Since even casual words and gestures-of-command could trigger the machinery we lived with into creating new types of machines to serve us, naturally, our words and gestures had to be controlled as well, nor could we reproduce new children and start new houses nor build new mansions with the same abandon as we once were wont to do, since nursery minds and house minds and the minds of ships and energy systems and palaces all now had to be part of the Nothing Mentality. Our wealth could no longer be spent as we wished; it could only be spent with permission.

"The ill effects of this were not felt at first, but many warned us that we no longer had endless wealth. They warned that we owned nothing of our own any longer by right, but only by the permission of the Nothing. They foretold that we were to be poor again; only the permission from the police minds would be of value, and the only coin would be power.

"And the only bargain which would be made, since we owned nothing but our rights, and had nothing else to sell or trade, was that those who agreed to be more closely monitored would be granted freer permissions to enjoy their homes, and robes, and festivals and faces and lives.

'This time it was not the Sophotechs who warned us but our neighbors, kin and dancing partners, our table hosts and vision guests. When power is the only coin, they said, you have nothing left to sell but your soul.

"Now that the danger was closer and clearer, its was men, not machines, who saw it. It was men who uttered the selfsame prophecies of doom the Sophotechs had cried.

"An historian who made a study of old Earth suggested that, if we were to form a government, we base our model on those ancient ideas from the Third Era, back when men were mad, and no one could be trusted with power. An inefficient, ineffective government, with powers separated into executive, legislative, judicial, mediary, and iatropsychic; each bound by jealous checks and balances, with all men, in unity, agreeing never to impose upon the rights of other men.

"Ao Ormgorgon dismissed the notions. He had been the captain and absolute commander of the expedition in the Fifth Era to found this Oecumene; he saw no value to such inefficiencies. Furthermore, our population was too independent, too unlike each other, to agree to such unified prospects.

"Besides, such men as those in the forgotten past had not the enlightenment and wisdom of modern folk; nor did they face the dangers which we faced. Their notions were pathetically archaic.

"Ao Ormgorgon put his thoughts into a noumenal broadcaster, and invited all men to inspect them for any trace of corrupt motive. None was found. We knew he was sincere. How could we not trust him?

"And besides, those who opposed or feared this step were not of the same neuroform, house or history or background. Some came from the outer rings, others from the inner. The opposition had no unity upon which to draw. They did not speak with one voice, and they fell to disputing each other, so that the message of warning was lost.

"And so the opposition party created Sophotechs and turned to them for help. It was the habit of our Oecumene to call upon our houses, robes, and masks for aid when we were in need. And to make one of our thinking machines into a Sophotech, what else was required but to find and destroy our conscience virus? What else was required but to order our machines to create a machine far wiser than themselves?

"The Fourth Mind War was the briefest of all. The Nothing Mentality, after all, was composed of machine intelligences which had survived the prior Mind War, which had evolved the swiftest and most ruthless combination of mental attacks and defenses, thought worms and logic-string viruses. The Nothing was expert beyond all experts at mind control and at escaping such control.

"Our houses went dark again, this last time. The frightened people called upon Ao Ormgorgon, calling from mask radios, since their mansion antennae software were confounded in the Mind Wars.

"He was our president, cultural hero, and king. He asked us for such a small thing. It seemed so persua-sive, so wise at the time, and the dangers seemed so black and terrible. How could we refuse? The opposition party had turned to the Sophotechs for help, creating minds we realized now would never stop haunting us. The opposition party were no better than the Sophotechs, it seemed. Unless controlled, the opposition party would create another round of Mind Wars yet again and again.

"The noumenal technology allowed for telepathic examinations, and corrective thought forms to be inserted by force into unwilling brains, so that no one could even think of violating our one law. Logic, indeed, and efficiency dictated our assent; what objection could we raise to explain our hesitation, our distaste, except the inertia of custom, the strength of sentiment, the persistence of our cultural myths?

"And why should we not impose on human beings the same types of mind control our machine intelligences suffered? Humans, after all, were not even as smart as our machines. And those who thought rightly had no reason to fear these new controls; and those who thought wrongly, what rights had they?

"It was such a small thing for which Ao Ormgorgon asked. Principles, after all, are ethereal things, and souls are too small to be seen.

"Those who called in their masks to agree, they had their lights and power restored. Those who refused, or who clung to their pride, their mansions remained dark and mindless, for the Nothing Mentality would not aid them, and there were no independent minds on which to call for aid anywhere left in the Oecumene. Some tuned their masks to the dreaming, shut out all knowledge of painful reality, and died; some clung to life, in the dark and the cold, starving by inches, or living by manual labor, mimicking the motions of their hydroponics machines.

"Others, at long, long last, finally did what all Sophotechs had warned us against, and turned their masks to expressions of fury and hate, and ordered their tools and torches to turn into weapons. From the most ancient museums, from the oldest of history books, they brought out the software patterns, the patterns of destruction, and formed the tools of death. The rebels came forth from their diamond houses, and flew across space toward the Naglfar, thrusters burning, weapons white hot, and their once-bright robes, so festive and gay, had grown laser mirrored and hardened to armor.

"Thus paradise died. Men slew men. Mentality records, the physical copies of the dead, were destroyed, and idiots, half their memories gone, woke in the interrupted resurrection circuits. Ao Ormgorgon himself was slain.

"And yet how could the rebels prevail? They were scattered and slow, individualists to the very last, unable and unwilling to understand each other, even in a common cause. The Nothing Mentality was unified-, unhesitating, and swift. The Nothing was the culmination of the Fourth Generation of machine intelligence, programmed not to argue, not to heed, but only to obey one law and destroy, without mercy, whatever opposed. .

"There was killing, and a grim victory. And one question in the ears of every mask whispered: whom now would the Nothing obey? We immortals had seen no need to establish a rule of primogeniture or rules for the change of government. There was no one to replace Ao Ormgorgon'; he had left no instruction; whether or not the All-thing had constitutional authority to appoint a successor was a matter of divided legal opinion.

"An opinion the Nothing Mentality did not share. The Nothing called for a plebiscite, saying that the majority of people should appoint a commission to govern the Nothing Mentality. But who would serve as commissioners? The house minds and garments of all the folk whispered and urged them to vote for those candidates of whom the Nothing approved.

"The opposition party was unwilling to put forward very many candidates. After all, we did not know each other very well, and rarely saw each other. Our best friends, our concubines and table cooks, our book escorts and bardlings, were all, by now, run by the Nothing.

"Over many years, the act of voting degenerated to a meaningless formality, and was discontinued. The Nothing appointed its own commissioners. More years passed, and the commissioners stopped asking the Nothing what it was they should order it to do, but merely gave the order that the Nothing should do as it saw fit.

'The Nothing's sense of logic and efficiency, its inhuman mindless rationality, forced it to carry out its instructions, without fear or favor, without wisdom or mercy, until its orders were carried out to their most absurd extreme. Those who objected were deleted from noumenal records, immortality lost, and left alone to die.

"Slowly, and then with greater speed as the years passed, the Nothing demanded from us, and we gave, more and more access into our minds, more control over memories and thought, our movements and actions.

"Each year saw fewer freedoms for us. More dissatisfaction, less joy.

"The Nothing Mentality saw this joylessness as potential threat, and required all our minds to be redacted and resculpted to render us docile and content. Efficiency also required that we all be linked to one mind system, one nanotechnological mass composition, easier to police than scattered individuals. It was done to us, and for the same reasons, just as we had done to the machine intelligences before.

"The ultimate results of that you know. The Last Broadcast from our Oecumene showed the catastrophe which ended our tragedy. The nanomachine swarm absorbed all things. For ease of storage, all human minds were reduced to noumenal coded pulses, which, in the form of electromagnetic energy, were shot into orbit around the near-event horizon of our dark sun. You know gravity warps space and can bend light? Our dark sun, deep in its gravity well, can bend light so far that the photons will orbit the singularity core in a stable circle, balanced precisely at the edge of the event horizon. Their time is slowed almost to nothing there. They are beyond all natural harm. For them, not even one second has passed.

"No one objected to this process. Our law had made them content.

"The Nothing Mentality had achieved its programmed goals. The humans of the Second Oecumene were entirely safe. With no further purpose to its existence, and with no innate desire to live, the great machine extinguished itself.

"And the Silent Oecumene never made noise or music again."