Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  The face of Del Azarchel drew a deep, ragged breath. “I was not perfect, not then. I suffered thirst. Wealth was measured in ounces of water. That was what we traded and swapped and bribed enemy crewmen to our side. At that time, you were the perfect one, were you not? You slept in comfort. You were rich, in the way we measured riches. And I was the beggar again. Do you know what I thought about, when I floated next to your coffin in my parka, my breath too dry to steam, my homemade toy gun in my hand, and my eyes seeing only floating hallucinations caused by light-starvation? Do know what I thought about?”

  Montrose bowed his head. He knew. “That damned boot. The one you found in the gutter when you were a kid.”

  “That damned boot,” said the face of Del Azarchel, nodding solemnly.

  “OK,” said Montrose. “So I owe you. What do you want?”

  “I want you to trust me. Throw the switch. Make me into what is beyond Man.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  The pallid mask smiled, and its lids were half-closed. “Deeply and terribly afraid. That is why I am not in the room, no doubt. The previous version of me, I mean. He is likely to be monitoring from a distance, in another room, weeping. But I do not think you will fail. I think you have done what you set out to do.”

  “While I was smart and crazy?”

  “Exactly so. I don’t think your basic personality changed, Cowhand. It was still you. The real you. The you I trust! Throw the switch, if you please. I am not sure how long I can maintain the appearance of courage.”

  “Listen, Blackie, I…”

  “Haste! It is your footsteps I follow! I had to watch while you plunged a bone rongeur into your forebrain! Now you must do for me as I did for you, and stand and watch the outcome, unable to help, and suffer as I did.”

  Menelaus felt as if something was being bent inside him, like a green stick, bending too far and snapping. He touched the command. The symbol streams on the walls around him surged into a hurricane of motion.

  The mask of Del Azarchel opened its mouth.

  It screamed.

  8

  Posthuman Alterity

  1. What Is Between You?

  A squad of technicians in parkas ran into the room, along with a figure in a white fur coat with a red cross on his back: this was the old Oriental doctor from Del Azarchel’s entourage. Del Azarchel himself came in a moment later, sliding silently in his tall black chair.

  The screaming and wailing lasted for roughly forty-five minutes, and then the brain activity switched to a sleep cycle. Delta-wave rhythms and REM patterns appeared in the information flow.

  Interesting. Montrose wondered if the Iron Ghost screamed when it augmented up for the same reason a baby does when it is born. To be sure, the machine did not need to flood its lungs with air, but the neurological transformations that accompany a baby’s change from breathing through his umbilicus to breathing air might need to be repeated in the machine-mind, as new neural channels had to form. An immediate dream-response was only to be expected. Dreaming was the means a complex system like the human brain employed to index and assess information. The sudden amplification in intelligence would drench the creature’s mind with all fashions of inputs and nuances which previously could have been shunted into the unconscious, ignored, not categorized.

  The technicians had set up their slates of library material here and there about the room, or wrenched the tops off the large cylinders that dotted the floor, or brought out slender crystals from medicinally-spotless carrying sheaths—Montrose assumed these were some sort of memory units—and once the main crisis had passed, everyone asked Montrose questions at once. The technicians were asking about the intelligence augmentation process, and the doctor was asking him to touch his nose with his fingertip while closing both eyes.

  It was Del Azarchel who saved him. Blackie gave him a nod, and gestured toward the exit with a glance of his eyes. The bowing technicians and the sliding doors got out of his way automatically, as if controlled by the same motion circuit. Del Azarchel slid out of the room in his silent black chair, and Montrose followed.

  They were in a grim and windowless corridor whose walls were hung with cables. Iron doors bright with energy and temperature warnings stood locked to either side.

  However, down the hall were a flight of stairs leading up to a more civilized portion of the complex, corridors paneled in polished wood and hung with portraits of stern-faced men in dark academic robes.

  When Blackie’s chair climbed these stairs, Montrose saw how the base was constructed: The device rode a carpet of small hairs, each hair like the leg of a caterpillar, moving in sequences with its neighbor.

  It looked remarkably flimsy, but when Montrose mulled over a few rough-estimate calculations in his head he was able to deduce an upper and lower limit for the load-bearing capacity and tensile of each hair that was well within the limits for bio-sculpture even from his day. Moderate number-crunching capacity was involved, but nothing the wealthiest man in the world could not afford. But the energy loss was high: Montrose just resigned himself to the notion that every appliance in this modern antimatter age was wasteful of energy. Men living on the shore of a sea don’t conserve seawater.

  At the top of the stairs was a more comfortable room, this one adorned with flowers in jade vases and books in teak bookshelves.

  Montrose seated himself on a comfortable, pleasantly warm couch, and put his feet onto a crystal-faced viewing table with a sigh of contentment. He rolled his eyes upward, and only then noticed that, here, again there were no windows.

  Was the whole damn place underground?

  Montrose remembered the images of cities being atom-bombed from space. Perhaps during the hundred fifty years while the Hermetic was away, the architecture had followed military necessity. A technology that could riddle Earth with ultrahighspeed train tubes could build any number of comfortable bunkers as many miles below the bedrock as the interests of safety might demand. It made for a depressing picture.

  Back in my day, Montrose thought, we may have released ethnospecific germ warfare, but we did not use strategic-level atomics! Society had certainly degenerated, morally and perhaps mentally, during the interim.

  And when the Hermetic had returned, she had brought with her a power unimaginably more dangerous than mere atomic fusion. For the first time, Montrose wondered if Blackie’s notion of letting a machine version of himself run the world was not so bad.

  A world without war …

  Montrose tried to think of something from his childhood, anything, that had not been effected by the wars, hot wars and cold wars, his mother’s generation had so meagerly survived. Fear of contamination touched everyone. It changed how close folk stood, how they shook hands. The depopulation had changed everything. The ruins of a once-great national highway system were like the aqueducts of medieval Rome, a testament to wealthier days. Even the snows and ice storms and endless cold weather had been the product of war, indirectly.

  Maybe Blackie’s idea of how to run this new world was not as dangerous as the other likely alternatives. Montrose did not like that thought: He hated it like hell, but it pushed its way into his consciousness anyway. Maybe a world run by machines would be better …

  Preoccupied, he almost did not notice Blackie touching that heavy bracelet of red metal on his wrist. Montrose almost did not hear the soft snap, like that of a heavy electromagnet pulling a bolt, which came from the door behind him.

  Montrose pulled his feet off the crystal table, and sat up. Something was wrong.

  Del Azarchel’s face was flushed red. Montrose could not tell if this was rage, or a drug reaction. Perhaps both. He guessed that Del Azarchel had just injected himself with some chemical carried in the red metal amulet.

  “What’s up, Blackie? What’s got your goat?”

  “My bride!”

  “Come again?”

  “Don’t pretend ignorance! The Princess Rania!”

  Montrose remembered the
portrait of the lovely woman he had seen.

  “What about her?”

  “What is between the two of you?”

  “Between—? I’ve never met her.” Then the magnitude of what Blackie was saying crashed in on him. He started to laugh. He could not help it. Montrose sat back in the chair, and hooted and guffawed. “You’re jealous! You’re jealous of me! Of me! And with a gal I ain’t never laid—”

  “What?!”

  “—eyes on.”

  Del Azarchel was thrown off his rhythm. Montrose rushed out more words before he lost the initiative: “Blackie, are you out of your mind? Pestiferous pox! When would I have met her? You have been with me for every minute since I woke up. When did I court her? While you were in the bathroom? Must have been a short-a-way sort of wooing, if I could consummate in less than five minutes, and clean myself up before you came back in. Or was it while I was working on your damn robot brain for you? Hey!”

  Montrose figured now it was his turn to get mad. He stood to his feet, and his big bony hands knotted into fists. “Just a poxy minute, you phlegm-spewing unwashed pest! I was just working my brain to a nub trying to cobble your mechanical wonder over yonder into some sort of shape—as a favor to you! For you!—and you come back and accuse me of—”

  Just as suddenly as it had come, his anger left him, blown out like a candle left near an unlatched door by the sheer unlikelihood of the accusation.

  “—come to think of it, what in the pox are you blaming me for? What did I do? When?”

  Del Azarchel’s black chair slid forward. He reached out and tapped the surface of the table, bringing it to life. “I was watching your operation. Look at this—”

  2. Daemon and Ghost

  The scene was an odd one indeed.

  Montrose saw his own figure, his skin as red as if he were sunbathing, dancing around the room in a series of controlled, manic jerks. The motions seemed inhumanly smooth, despite the suddenness of the starts and halts, as if he had somehow achieved greater control over his muscles than normal nerve impulses allowed. His fingers fluttered through some sort of sign language. He was both humming and speaking and singing. How in the world he had trained the vocal cavities in his head and chest to do that, he had no idea.

  It sounded like Chinese music, or, at least, something not on a diatonic scale. The melody wavered and paused, and then folded back on itself repeating and inverting certain chord progressions. It was like listening to Mozart, if Mozart were experimenting with a nonstandard scale.

  The purpose was clear. The figure in the cold room, dancing naked, was trying to establish a multiple channel of interfaces with the Iron Ghost, like a typist keying two different messages with either hand, while typing out a third with foot pedals.

  “How was I keeping myself warm?”

  Del Azarchel pointed to an inset. Monitors in the room tracking his temperature showed his skin at 112° Fahrenheit. The dancing figure was running a fever.

  “What kind of brainwave is that?”

  Del Azarchel said, “Researchers call it the epsilon wave. Your brain is the only brain in history to produce it. Note the activity spikes. That is why you are hyperventilating and sweating. You body is trying to keep enough oxygenated blood flowing to your brain to keep you … awake.”

  “Awake?”

  “Possessed. Whatever you might call the epsilon brainwave condition.”

  Montrose jerked back from the image, putting a hand up as if to ward off a blow.

  Del Azarchel merely looked at him curiously.

  “My eyes. I turned and looked at the camera. It was—it’s not—”

  “Some crewmen reacted that way to your stare aboard the ship. This was before we sedated you. Interesting that you, too, would flinch.”

  “My brother once told me you can make a dog back off if you stare into its eyes without blinking. Animals can’t hold a man’s gaze, except cats, I guess. Damn cats. Hey! Look at the floor!”

  He meant the floor shown in the record. The image showed the cold room floor lit up with the spirals and angles of the Monument script. Screens and inset windows around the walls opening and closing rapidly, flickering.

  While the naked man danced across them, parts of the Monument script lit up, rotated, and shifted position, trailing after his feet, spreading where his fingers flung them, to overlap other segments of the Monument. Colored lines and diagrams snapped quickly into and out of view around the knotworks and labyrinths newly-formed by the overlaps.

  And there were two and three voices joining the chorus, singing counterpoint to the breathy wailing of the dancing figure. Then it was seven or a dozen voices singing and speaking.

  “He is talking to me about the Monument. The other Del Azarchel, I mean. The Iron Ghost.” Of course the machine was not limited to merely human vocal cavities. It could produce as many sounds-threads as it could feed into as many electronic speakers as it controlled.

  “You know what part we are analyzing?” Montrose asked. “Do you have the Index?”

  “No need. I recognize it. The Omicron Segment of the Second Radial Statement, K202 though KH01. The Bhuti Expression,” said Del Azarchel.

  “Which is what we hypothesized was the mind-body equation system. The Monument Builders must have invented a new type of mathematical and logical symbology just for that: otherwise, how do you deal with the self-reflectivity problem? And the incompleteness of—I didn’t see that part! It went by too quick! Turn it back! You got all this recorded, right?”

  Del Azarchel politely refrained from pointing out that they were watching a recording right now. All he answered was, “I sent the file, everything up to time-stamp 81.14, over to the Conclave for analysis. They will call us when they have something. We will have leisure to study this in a perhaps at another time—”

  “Why? What happens at the 81 mark?”

  “Private matters.”

  When the counter read 81, Del Azarchel tapped the table glass again, and slowed the feed. The dancing figure now writhed. Montrose found he could look the figure in the eyes, because now the expression—his expression, suddenly it looked like the face he saw in the mirror every morning—was one of sorrow and surprise.

  The Iron Ghost was singing, or saying, “… I also love, yet cannot take. Why should he enjoy? My simpleton version, my father, he has stolen your girl! He will marry Rania. You will meet her at New Year’s, as arranged. But she has already outsmarted you both—and me—look at the social parameters—the conflux of trends in seven hundred twenty-one separate collaterals of a socio-economic dissolution—” The conversation then turned to economics, and both voices switched from English to other languages rapidly. The possessed version of Montrose seemed agitated, outraged.

  Del Azarchel put his hand on Montrose’s elbow. Old though he was, his grip was still strong. “Why does he call my bride yours? On what grounds does he say I am stealing her? What is the arrangement? Answer me!”

  Montrose tried to shake off the grip, and started in astonishment when he could not. Del Azarchel’s fingers were like iron, pressing into his arm. Montrose did not feel like breaking the old man’s nose with his palm, or kicking the wheelchair out from under the cripple, so he had to content himself with not wincing.

  “Why the pox don’t you ask your damn machine? He’s the one who said it.”

  “The technicians say it has to go through a sleep cycle, one longer than the one-third-to-two-thirds ratio of human sleeping-to-waking activity, because the cortical complexity has increased geometrically. It can only wake for a few minutes per every hour of sleep. They are trying to wake it again.”

  Montrose said, “Well, then, why not ask you yourself? That machine knows what you know, don’t it? What is there in your head that would make you say such as that?”

  Del Azarchel sank back in his black chair, frowning. He made a steeple of his fingers, and stared thoughtfully, not at Montrose, but at the image jerking and gliding in the surface of the table.

/>   Montrose said, “What I cannot figure is how you would even think I was trying to talk your gal out of marrying you—By the way, I saw a portrait of her made back when she was young, and I gotta say she was really a fine-looking woman in her time—I mean, I am sure she is a perfectly nice old broad nowadays, but, just when she was young, whenever that picture was painted, uh—anyway, how could you think it? When would I have met her?”

  “She is the one who did the major work on your brain, seeking a cure. She has spent many hours with you. Days.”

  Montrose frowned. “Was I thawed or slumbered? Awake or asleep? And, hey, listen, if I said anything to your old lady while I was out of my five wits—”

  “—Old? The portrait was painted last year. We are somewhat apart in age, out of synch, as her body, born in space, could not adjust properly to earth-normal conditions, and years she spent in ageless slumber while a cure was sought. We call it ‘Earthsickness.’ Do not think I am too old to admire her charms, nor to father a dynasty on her, since I learned the secret of—”

  “—hell, Blackie! You can’t hold a brain-damaged man responsible for what might come out of his mouth! Did I say something I shouldn’t’ve to her?”

  But Del Azarchel was not listening. He was staring at the glass table. He put his hand down and froze the image. The counter read 113. “What is that? What are they looking at?”

  Montrose looked.

  3. Opening Statement

  The input angle was almost directly above the naked figure crouched in the cold room. An image of the Monument was glowing darkly in the floor, distorted only where cables and squat cylindrical units stood here and there in the space.

  Montrose stared at the freeze-frame.

  There was something hypnotically regular about the alien hieroglyphs. The center of the image showed a slightly off-center ellipse of concentric lines-within-lines, each line composed of circles and triangles, of crooked lines, angles acute and obtuse, and sine curves, hypnotically repeating patterns like the ripples seen at low tide. Circumscribing the oval was a central triangle composed of more symbols, and at the corners of the triangle were three shapes: a triangle, a circle, a parabola.