Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  “Xypotechnology is not like digital computing. It involves dynamic process. The thought-structure of the human mind, the biological structure of the human brain, is time-related. Remember, the simulation here is an analogue: if, in real life, a human brain just stopped and every molecule ceased moving, the brain information is lost. The information about the size and position and location of the atoms and molecules of the brain might not be lost, but that information would no longer contain a pattern of embedded information.”

  “Why did you pick yourself as the subject?”

  Del Azarchel raised his face, and there was a note of pride in his voice. “I seek deathlessness. A single assassin’s bolt could do me in, and all my plans and dreams die with me. I wish my dreams to live, even if I die.”

  “But it won’t be you.”

  “True, as far as I am concerned, but to him—he will think himself me. It will be my legacy: a son closer than any son.”

  “You are making a world-ruler. A permanent version of yourself.”

  Del Azarchel did not deny it. He said, “Without a machinery of immortality, the human race is too short-lived and short-sighted to retain the world peace I have provided. My desire is that the race survive at any cost, to any length, preserved in thought even if not in body. The question is whether that is your dream as well?”

  Montrose stared thoughtfully at data patterns shining along the walls. “I don’t suppose star colonization is very practical without some sort of higher machine intelligence to help out. Compared to the animals on Earth, we’re a long-lived race. Compared to the distances we have to travel and the time spans we have to endure, if we are going to have the stars, we’re not.”

  Del Azarchel had a stiff, expressionless expression on his face.

  “What is it?” Montrose asked.

  Del Azarchel merely shook his head, and would not meet his eye. Montrose almost did not recognize the look, since he had never seen it on Del Azarchel’s face before. The look of a man with a bad conscience. A look of guilt.

  “You want to tell me what is wrong here?” He meant what was wrong with Del Azarchel.

  Del Azarchel answered a different question. “As with you—divarication. The brain structure demotes self-awareness.”

  “Why can’t you cure him the way you cured me?”

  Del Azarchel smiled a half smile. “Labor disputes. Or a lover’s spat.”

  “Come again?”

  Del Azarchel shook his head. “I thought you would know better than—Ah, I thought you would know best precisely what the Zurich runs had done, which brain structures had been changed and how—this is, after all, your work.”

  Montrose started paging through the information glittering from the walls.

  2. Something to Warm You

  Some time later he said, “Blackie, I think I have something!”

  “An answer?”

  “Answer? Plague, no. You crazy? I have outlined a preliminary order of research, a place were you can get hordes of undergraduates and out-of-work data arts professors to start working. In a few months or a few years, after you have solved certain insoluble problems, we can look at the issue again, and start thinking about the next logical step. There are some exciting possibilities here.”

  “Years?”

  “I am an optimist. I should’ve said ‘decades.’ You did not think I performed the Zurich supercomputer runs in my head? It took months of computer time, running continuously, and Ranier had hired a staff to help.”

  Del Azarchel looked somewhat blank-faced.

  Montrose laughed aloud. “What the pox you thinking, Blackie? That I would walk in here with a piece of chalk and a blackboard, and just write down the answer for you?”

  Del Azarchel brought out a flask and a silver cup from a compartment beneath his seat. “I am under certain time constraints I have not mentioned to you. My fiancée is in transit right now, and out of radio communication, and I had hoped to, ah, surprise her. Would you care for a drink? Something to warm you.”

  “If you can get her to wait eight months, and you give me the kind of computer team Prince Ranier put together, I can do it. He bought those Zurich runs for me. You know he was as rich as Croesus, don’t you? His whole country was nothing but a cross between a casino and a smuggler’s bank. I figure you got more resources than him.”

  Del Azarchel offered him a slender silver cup. “I have resources beyond what he imagined. Drink.”

  Montrose raised the cup to his lips, and paused without tasting it. “You old dog! Did you say you had a fiancée?”

  Del Azarchel looked at once proud and shy, like a man who wants to boast, but dares not. “You mentioned how much a ladies’ man I was in my wasted youth—in hindsight, I cannot tell you how I regret that. I wish I had never touched another woman, never looked at any other, so that I could be all for her! If she wanted it, I would give her the world!”

  Montrose grinned, ignoring the drink in his hand. “Who is she?”

  “Prince Ranier’s daughter, Rania.”

  “Eh? Did he have a kid before he left? But that was a hundred fifty years ago!”

  “She spent a good deal of time in suspended animation. And I must tell you, all the others who sued for her hand, D’Aragó, de Ulloa, and i illa d’Or—everyone onboard was in love with her—heh, I suppose it is easy to be head over heels in zero gee!—but no one else won her.” A boyish glee, like inner fire, burned in him, and Montrose saw the young man he remembered from what to him was merely a yesterday ago, now like a ghost possessing the silver-haired cripple he saw today.

  “What? Is the Hermetic still aloft? Are you planning another expedition? Sign me up!”

  “No further human expeditions are planned.”

  “We’ll have to change that!”

  “Unlikely. In any case, the Hermetic is kept in-system, for maintenance of our power.”

  “Energy power or political power?”

  “The two are linked. Contraterrene cannot be allowed on Earth or near it: even the inner system is too crowded with terrene-matter particles for safety. The Hermetic alone has the magnetic-field tools needed to herd the antimatter packets into transplutonian orbits, and the drive to reach the outer system.”

  “What about building another ship, then? Ain’t you got the riches?”

  “More than enough! The Bellerophon was christened and towed to launch orbit five years ago. She merely awaits her crew.”

  “Wait—but you said…”

  “I cannot risk a human crew. Need I remind you of the losses aboard the Hermetic? Half the greatest scientists and mathematicians of our generation died on that ship, setting back the cause of human progress by a century. No! Starfaring is inhumane, and therefore meant for inhumans.”

  Montrose almost dropped the cup he held. “Plague and pox! You mean the crew will be—!”

  “Crew and captain at once. You are standing inside him.”

  “Pox!”

  “The Bellerophon saves a great deal of mass with no need for life support. It is the next generation of starship, designed to hold only the next generation of intelligence.”

  “The crew is just you. Your emulation here.”

  Del Azarchel gave a nonchalant nod of the head. “You see how it saves of training time and cost? I am already skilled as a ship’s pilot, and familiar with the nuances of star-mining, and capable of investigating the Monument when the ship reaches V 886 Centauri.”

  “What happens to the Hermetic?”

  Del Azarchel shook his head ruefully. “Never fall for a woman smarter than yourself! She forced me to re-outfit it, stem to stern, even though we both know that ship will never sail again. But popular opinion—argh! Never mind. Even the Master of the World is a servant after all to those he rules. I had to prepare the Hermetic for starflight in order to get the Concordat to cooperate with constructing the Bellerophon: starships are legally equivalent to theater nonconventional weapons. You see, the political situation—ah, never mi
nd. Let’s just say she can beat me at chess and bluff me at poker. Still! I have two starships now, with sails a hundred miles wide!”

  “Tell me of this gal. Euchered you something dreadful, did she? Hell, I like her just hearing of it! And everyone on the ship was a-courting of her?”

  “Oh, indeed! To see her you would understand. Like the ocean, she is deep and mysterious and terrible, and yet, how she shines! A goddess; a step above the human race! She is everything I have dreamed—she is the golden future I seek—smarter, wiser, and makes every other woman look like a foolish child. They all seem so clumsy compared to her. The swan is in her footstep, music in the turn of her head. And at the same time, she is so lighthearted, gay, and free in her spirit—like fire, like sunlight, like starlight—and she knows things, strange things, no one else can divine.”

  “She must love you, eh, Blackie?”

  “To possess her will be my crowning accomplishment. It will quiet the multitudes, and lend the final sanction of perfection to my reign.”

  Menelaus was not sure what to make of that comment. So he shrugged and said, “How did this old lady get aboard the ship?”

  “What old lady?”

  “Your fiancée! Rain-on-you, or whatever her name is.”

  “Rania. Princess Rania of Monaco. But before we speak, let us toast!”

  The fluid was hot in Montrose’s mouth, and he felt it draw a line of burning down into his stomach.

  “Yee-ow! What is that stuff?—Hey. How come you ain’t drinking with me…?”

  “I am afraid the effect on me would not be fruitful.”

  Montrose opened his mouth to answer, but at that moment, he felt a lightheaded sensation, as if his skull were filled with helium. Every object looked both small and sharp in his vision, far away but crisply defined.

  Del Azarchel pointed. “Look at the divarication problem again. I need you to save my child.” Montrose noticed the pattern of veins and bones in Del Azarchel’s thin hand, and realized that the biochemical structures involved were binary. That was not his real hand: He could define the pattern of liver spots and skin irregularities against a theoretical formula and see the deviations.

  He was fascinated by the image of Del Azarchel’s finger pointing. Several levels of meaning occurred to him, but he decided on the simplest, and turned his head and focused his eyes (first his right eye, then his left, operating each tiny eye muscle separately, according to a new method of nerve impulse transmission he only that second recognized how to do) and saw the curving writing system of the aliens, the Monument notations, covering the walls.

  Then …

  3. Number Swarm

  At first, there were only patterns; not even numbers, just the abstractions of the relationships, which danced and roared and stormed like a tornado. Here a swarm of fields, each expressing a different function, rotated and spun and fit together. When the fits were harmonious, pleasure, and where they jarred against each other, disgust.

  But where was it? Like a babe that cannot distinguish between itself, its hand, and the beam of light falling on its crib toward which it reaches its hand, the mind could not at first draw the distinction between the abstractions whirling in the imagination, and the much more prosaic symbols flickering in the air around. No, not in the air. The symbols were in the walls, shining from library cloth, stream upon stream and window upon window, fields as orderly as soldiers marching, fractals as wild as the sea-wave as it crashed.

  Not numbers; Monument notations mixed with Greek letters and Arabic numerals. At this point he became aware that the numbers were not the abstractions they represented. What he was seeing in his mind was only partly adumbrated by the streaming numbers. Then he became aware that he was aware. Not a mind only, a human. Menelaus Illation Montrose. He had just been … Just been … Talking with Del Azarchel. Or … What had he been doing?

  A meaning spoke out of number stream. Do not stop! Complete the function!

  It was not a voice. The notation itself formed a pattern that held an innate packet of meaning. For a moment he could simply see it, as if it were text, because the symbols followed the same pattern and ratio as thought itself. Then, like a bubble popping, it was gone. Like trying to recall a dream on waking, he could only snatch at a fragment:

  All known fields—the gravitational spin connection, gravitational frame, Higgs fields, electroweak gauge bosons, and fermions—could be represented as different aspects of one superconnection over a four-dimensional base manifold. This superconnection is constructed by adding a connection 1-form field to a Grassmann number 0-form field, both valued in different parts of a Lie algebra … the comparative to the psychophysical equations of Weber, Von Helmholtz, and Fechner formed an obvious correlative, with the inverse of strength of sensations related to the degree of stimulus … the measurement problem in quantum physics was parallel to the dichotomy between symbol and symbolized in psychology …

  It was slipping away. He had to act fast. He could feel himself getting stupider, his senses dulling, and his mind was like a telescope slowly going out of focus.

  He moved some of the streaming symbols—he did not notice at first how he was doing it—but he reconnected the cortex, the thalamus, and the hypothalamus to the model of the medulla oblongata. The complexities of the brain stem and upper spinal column flowed into the array like an army of ants; thousands and tens of thousands of nerve registers moving.…

  He noticed then how he was flinging the streams of symbols into their assigned patterns. He had done it by catching his breath and increasing his heartbeat. The library cloth of the walls was following his slightest gesture. He must have had the gain turned up to the highest possible register, the range normally used for polygraph tests, so that the walls were tracking his galvanic skin response, blush response, and temperature gradient, in addition to the gross muscular motions of his facial expressions and body language.

  Montrose realized that he was nude, and leaping here and there about the room like a ballet dancer. An awkward ballet dancer, perhaps, and one who had to jerk limbs hither and yon in ungainly combinations, but …

  Noticing what he was doing was a mistake. The rhythm broken, he stumbled and fell. The walls, seeing the wild arm-windmilling motions of the fall, shattered the number stream into nine dimensions of its matrix.

  Ruination! Whatever he had been doing was scattered into randomness. It screamed like a living thing.

  Hardly daring to move, he crossed his finger for the reset gesture, breathing out slowly to backtrack the time value by a few seconds. This reestablished the command structure as it had been the moment before he tripped. As if by magic, the number storm folded itself back into its clockwork of origami, complex as the dance of blood motes in a circulatory system.

  This last thing was like resetting one of his childhood math games back to the beginning tutorial, to allow his brothers to play it. He was able to turn off the supersensitive setting and bring up the normal interface before he forgot which commands did what.

  “That hurt.”

  It was Del Azarchel’s voice, but Del Azarchel was not in the room. Montrose was alone, and very, very cold.

  His teeth were chattering such that he could not answer back. The touch of the diamond floor was like fire on his numb fingers, the cold was pure pain. He forced himself to look left and right. There, very far away, on the far side of the room, his parka, tunic, and pantaloons. Why in the hell had be removed them? Was he crazy?

  He forced his shivering limbs into motion. The touch of the cold floor on his knees was a numbing sensation beyond agony.

  “I was not aware that I could feel pain, not within my mind, but somehow … Cowhand, why have you stopped?”

  The voice was speaking with the low urgency of a man on a ledge.

  “Who—who are…” He managed to stutter through numb lips.

  “It is I, Ximen del Azarchel. Don’t you remember? You are inside my brain. You are in the middle of brain surgery on me! I c
an feel my thoughts slowing, dying. You cannot stop.”

  Montrose tried to answer, but his numb lips produced nothing but a pale panting noise, more like a sigh than a groan.

  Just move your leg. Get to the parka. Count one. Move your arm. Count two.

  He would have headed for the door, but he could not recall where it was, and did not know if it was locked. The door was clothed over, and invisible when shut.

  He wanted to raise his head. How far? No, it was too much effort. Don’t look. Just one more step. Count to a dozen, count to a score, count to a hundred.

  How long? How long is eternity?

  At least one of those had passed, maybe two, before he touched something. His hand was burning. No, it touched the mound of furs that was his parka, and the fact that it was not ice-cold diamond floorplates felt to his hands like flame. He was not able to don the garment, because his limbs were trembling too violently. Blisters like those from a burn had formed on his fingers. But he was able to find the thermostat control, turn the parka to its hottest setting, and kneel with his hands under him atop the scalding garments. Then was he was able to stand and draw the parka on. Only after he was wearing the coat did he stoop and pick up his other garments, the hakama trousers, the black tunic, and wriggle into them.

  “Wha-What do I need to—t … to…?”

  Del Azarchel’s voice came from the walls, tense, betraying no panic. It sounded only slightly slurred, the way Blackie sounded when he should have been falling-down drunk, but could somehow force himself to stand at attention, in case the Captain pulled a surprise inspection at midnight. But no, the Captain was dead. Montrose remembered seeing the Captain, eyes staring at nothing like the eyes of a fish, tumbling in zero gee away from Montrose’s grasp.

  “Bring up the standard menu in the new format. You were trying to restructure the brain engrams according to a new topology…”

  “I d—don’t ’member wah I was d-d-d-dwing”

  “I will tell you. You explained it to me as you were doing it, and we went through a small-scale proof together. Just follow my instructions. Identify the following variables … Turn my intelligence back down to merely human levels … The method was discovered by the Princess, and is loaded in one of your slot files.…”