Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  He straightened up and stepped away from the mirror, partly because the nearness was driving him mad, partly because he wanted to look at her face.

  “Lecture ’em good, and take a strap to ’em, so to help remember them the lecture.”

  “And what does that suggest?”

  “Well—I reckon our kids learn universal concepts the way a baby bird learns birdsongs,” Montrose said. “Pain and pleasure mean ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ The signs we show them, simple things at first, like a swat on the rump, match like lock and key to something in their nervous system. Swat on the rump stimulates the pain centers wired to signal an avoid this behavior. Smiles and touches linked to ganglia wired up to express pleasure. Lock fits key.”

  “Then how is it possible to talk to aliens?”

  “I am not sure it is. No alien creature, things whose bodies are made of silicon rocks or methane soup or intelligent clouds of smog, things we can’t imagine, they are not going to have any locks in their brains—or whatever part of them does their thinking and fretting—that can possibly fit our keys. Our notions of justice and truth and beauty don’t mean spittle to them. How could you make a language to express things like that? Ideas that only make sense in a certain context? Except…” Menelaus frowned thoughtfully. “Same way we teach our babies, I guess. Teach them in context. Point and grunt. Swat then on the rump. Give a petting and a smile. But you would have to give them our nervous system first.”

  “You think as I do. Go on.”

  “Go on to what?” He said, exasperated. “You can’t send the context of the message before you send the message! What would that even mean? A language that deciphers itself? How do you do it?”

  She smiled, and it was like the sun coming out.

  “Simple. You encode the lock and the key both,” she continued. “The human brain is not really a lump of hydrogen and carbon, is it? It is a pattern of information. Anything that you grew in a tank that followed the code-pattern of the human genome would be human, would it not? A human brain made of another substance, provided the nerve cells operated in the same way, or in a way parallel to ours, would be human, would it not?”

  “Ghost Del Azarchel thinks so, or so he told me.”

  “And what is the human genome but a language, a code of information, a song of four notes, which could be recompiled into any system of other notes, the way a number line can be expressed in base two or base ten?”

  He nodded. “I guess so. If you were intelligent, and you wanted to send a message, and the only thing you knew about the recipient was that he occupied the same universe with the same natural laws as you, you’d send the message with the messenger. The messenger would be coded up, expressed as a series of numbers, or logic signs, or something else universal. You show him how to build the lock, tumbler by tumbler, and then you show him where to put all the ridges on the key, tooth by tooth. Is that what you are getting at with all this weird talk of logic and meta-logic? The Monument is instructions on how to build a system that can read the Monument.”

  “Not a system to read the Monument. A system to build a person who can learn to read it.”

  “A messenger!” He smacked his fist into his palm and grinned. “Listen, we can build this messenger, this message-reading machine. You must know that Del Azarchel has made a breakthrough in brain emulation. He has got a perfect replica of himself, I mean perfect, talks like him, and over the phone Alan Turing couldn’t tell it weren’t him. If you have enough wealth, Princess, then you can afford to get me the computer space needed to build a second one…”

  “It is not necessary.”

  “No, no, listen! It’s a great idea. All you do is string up the models the same way the human brain is strung up, using the universal life-code here, translated into human DNA, and making the hardwiring of the brain follow those DNA instructions … Don’t make a model of Blackie, make a model of the brain that can read the Monument, based on the Monument’s own negative image of…”

  “I am saying it is not necessary.”

  “… unlike a real brain, there is no upper limit to … Wait. Why ain’t it necessary?”

  “It’s been done.”

  Such a wild hope entered his heart at that moment, he wondered if he were going mad. The key to the Monument was what this conversation was about! The key to the future of Mankind, and, yes, to the future of Menelaus as well. If his soul had been music, it would have roared into a crescendo at that moment.

  He understood what she was saying.

  “It’s you, Princess, isn’t it? You are the key. You, the starry messenger!” Menelaus pointed at the Monument. “Where and how exactly were you born, Princess? What part of that describes your code?”

  Rania looked at him in puzzlement for a moment, and then mirth began dancing in her eyes, and she threw back her head, and peals of girlish laughter rang and echoed throughout the corridor.

  “Oh, dear, no … forgive me for laughing, but … ah! The irony…”

  “You’re not the key to the Monument?”

  “Would that I were!” And just as suddenly as her joy appeared, sorrow now appeared.

  “Well, who else?”

  “You are.”

  “Me?”

  “You, Crewman Fifty-One, you. Don’t you see the connection?”

  “Nope.”

  “For a genius, you are not very bright.” She pointed back at the mirror. “Compare these two files. Don’t you see those are two different translations of the same thing, defined by the same algorithm?”

  The first file was the Zurich run again. He had derived those parameters, of course, from the Monument math itself, manipulating symbols whose meaning he did not know, merely trusting that the unknown “grammar rules” of the aliens would make the conclusion valid if the axioms were valid.

  The second file was a snapshot of the Theta sine symbol group of the Monument: a mathematical expression which, when translated into Earthly biochemistry, contained instructions on how to build or emulate a brain to read the Monument.

  The two were the same. In using the Monument math to establish which nerve connections to use to become intelligent enough to read the Monument, Menelaus had unwittingly come to the same logic-path as the Monument instructions on how to read the Monument.

  She said, “The pattern is an emergent property of the mathematics.”

  “Why did they put the same thing in two places? I was not using the symbol-forms from that segment to do my brain-tinkering!”

  “The Monument Builders are obsessed with recursions.”

  Menelaus understood. The builders were trying to be as clear as possible, and so they repeated themselves. It was a communication strategy: two parts of a redundant message could be checked against each other for accuracy.

  She said, “You did not know what you were doing to yourself, but you produced, in part of your cortex, something that follows this same pattern that repeats as a leitmotif in the Monument. Don’t you recall?”

  “Recall what?”

  “You were reading the Monument, sight-reading it, without notes, at a glance, from before I was born. Once you had the rules for reading symbols out of logic patterns build into your nervous system, you could not help but see them. That was part of what drove you mad.”

  “At a glance? But—I thought I was a failure!”

  “You were. What you did to your brain was ill-considered, stupidly rash, idiotic.” He liked her smile, sure enough, but he was not sure how much he liked her needling him.

  “But I could read the Monument!” he protested.

  “It that a tribute to your genius, or theirs? It was built to be read.”

  3. Flight of Ideas

  Then they were both talking at once. It was one of those conversations where each sentence was only a fragment for the other person to finish, a team conversation, with him and her merely contributing ideas as the stream of thought seemed to rush along under its own effort. For the first time since he laid eyes on he
r, Menelaus forgot she was gorgeous, and when he talked over her or shouted her down or called some idea of hers stupid, he did not notice it, any more than he noticed her interrupting him, or lashing him with golden laughter for his slow-wittedness.

  The conversation theorized that solving the Monument was not a decryption problem; it was an emulation problem. The Monument seemed to contain no symbols beyond the basics. After the opening sequence, it was all meta-symbolism, like a DNA string, meant to produce symbols through a series of logic gates, but the expression would be in terms of game-theory.

  That was why a computer emulation of an analog thinking machine was needed. They needed to model the meta-symbols and see them in action to see what they meant: see what came out of the rules of the game written out on the Monument surface.

  “Each symbol’s range of meanings could be expressed as a cup-length. Under the Leray-Hirsch Theorem, a cohomology monomorphism could be described to express the all polydimensional vector subspaces involved. The opening sequence of symbols could be manipulated, even if they were not understood, by the game rules described by the Theta Group of symbols.” So spoke the conversation. Menelaus did not realize that it was his side of the conversation speaking, himself, until she interrupted.

  She could not shout him down, her voice was too delicate, but she put her gloved fingers on his lips to say something, and the perfumed touch of silken fingertips, fingers slender as a child’s, snapped him out of his trance.

  Menelaus was brought up short.

  “… cannot overlook the possibility that your own nervous system structure was affected by the same game-theory codes embedded in the Monument. What was the expression you used to program that antique mainframe back in your day? The one that did a pattern recognition on possible nerve reorganization paths?”

  Menelaus heard himself answer, but he did not pay attention to his own words. Because he was looking at her face.

  It was shining. The eyes, green like emeralds in this light, or hazel as amber when she turned her head, were flickering, jumping from point to point, as if the mind behind them could read an encyclopedia of information out of the visual data impinging on her optic nerve. Then the eyes would grow still, staring, motionless, as if fixed on a distant star, a point on the far horizon.

  And she was blushing. Her cheeks were pink, her hairline was beaded with sweat, and she had that glow about her that pregnant women were said to have. The look of abundant life.

  His own cheeks were burning, too. His heart was pounding. Menelaus felt as if he might faint any moment.

  Menelaus stepped back from her, stopping in mid-syllable. She was too excited to notice, but kept talking about Schubert calculus, Grassmann manifolds, fibered subspaces, the E8 supersymmetries.

  For a moment his mind reeled. He could not follow what she was saying. How had she jumped to that conclusion? He tried to picture the geometric rotations she rapidly uttered, but found he could not visualize them, not and keep up. He had been following along, sometime leaping ahead of her line of proofs not half a moment ago. But now he was back in his right mind, and the dizzying architecture of speculations, certainties, and guesses was too great to hold in his imagination. The next step … was it correct or not? What was that about astro-algorithmic logic-gate matrices? In what sense was it a specific application of a more general case of emulating a universal virtual machine in n-dimensional coordinates?

  Then he noticed she had his ceramic knife in her hand. He did not member handing it to her. She was scratching diagrams and equations in neat rows of Greek and Latin letters, alephs and infinities, as well as the dots and triangles and Celtic knots of Monument hieroglyphs, all along the wallpaper. She was cutting figures into the wood underneath the wallpaper. This was not modern wallpaper, not smart fabric meant to be written on. This was some antique and horribly expensive stuff, probably hand-painted, probably by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo together, then touched up by Rembrandt, using solid gold paintbrushes.

  And, of course, right next to her equations, in a larger, rougher handwriting, were his equations and notes. There was a deep scar where he had circled a particularly important multicovariable expression. And there were the slashes where he had put three exclamation points through the gold leaf into the wood paneling.

  Next to him in the hallway was a crystal vase with flowers in it, carefully arranged. He plucked the bouquet out, hoisted the crystal jar, and dashed water into his own face.

  The shock of the water helped somewhat. He no longer felt faint.

  Princess Rania, who had been talking very loudly (for her), and very rapidly in an almost monotone singsong, now stopped. She turned.

  All at once she was in his arms, on her tiptoes, and kissing him passionately.

  It was like a bolt of lighting traveled up his spine. It was perfect.

  And, then, just as suddenly, it was not perfect. She writhed out of his grasp, elusive as starlight, graceful as a sleek lioness, and danced back, her face blank.

  He was looking right at her face when it happened: her expression returned to normal. It was like watching a ghost fade out of the body of some possessed person on those old faith healer shows everyone in his family save him used to watch so raptly. Like an actress turning off a character and surfacing. But not like an actress. There was nothing fake about it.

  She was not panting, but Rania was breathing a little heavily. Long, slow breaths that made her bosom rise and fall.

  “You’re the other one. Ah. Welcome back.”

  This time, he understood how she slipped so effortlessly out of his hands: the point at which his two arms could trap her formed a folded set that could be expressed as a Hilbert space. Solving for the shortest vector distance, she leaned on his arm, and when he instinctively tightened it, she had put her center of balance elsewhere at the point of least resistance. It was as perfect as a ballet move. He wondered if the speed of her nerve impulses traveling to her muscles was momentarily increased, it was so smooth, and so rapid.

  “Your are possessed, too, ain’t you? You are a Mrs. Hyde!”

  Rania stared at him quizzically.

  “Miss Hyde, I would prefer. I am a maiden yet.” She showed dimples when she smiled. “Unless you are proposing? I warn you, I am spoken for.”

  Menelaus backed up, his arm raised as if to ward off a blow. “You are not in love with Del Azarchel!”

  “I don’t recall saying I was.”

  “You are in love with me.”

  “Define your terms,” she said, favoring him with an arch look. She wiggled the knife at him playfully. He carefully took it from her gloved hand, and slipped it back up his sleeve.

  “No normal girl says define your terms when you say you are in love with me.”

  She nodded judiciously. “Being normal is a goal oft sought and rarely achieved, but not unenviable for all that. Statistically speaking, it would be unusual if everyone were average.”

  “You are in love with the other me. Mr. Hyde. The Daemon. Crewman Fifty-One.”

  14

  Posthuman Sovereign

  1. Defining Her Terms

  She tapped the mirror, so that it turned into a mirror again, drew out a compact case, and began touching up her lip-gloss where the kissing had smudged it. At the same time, her sorceress’s flock of dragonflies began swirling around her head, using their tiny legs as combs, and, acting in concert, began resetting and repinning her coiffeur.

  Rania spoke in a dreamy, absentminded tone. “When I was a child I heard a legend of the missing crewman, Number Fifty-One, who was kept in a special biosuspension coffin on Deck Zero, at the axis of the world. They called it a ship, my fathers, but it was the only world I knew. Every few years, when confronted by some problem no one knew how to solve, the fathers in wide-eyed fear would wake up Crewman Fifty-One.”

  She turned toward him, and stepped closer, so she had to lift her chin to look up at him. Her eyes flashed like sunlight glancing on summer seas. “You odd
man! Do you know yours was the first laughter, the first real laughter, I ever heard? You were the only one who was still young?”

  Before he could answer, she had turned her back on him. Her elbows were high, and she put her hands in her hair as her insect-machines pinned her hair in place. He saw the line of her neck, the exquisite fineness of her back and shoulderblades, delicate as carved ivory sanded smooth. His eyes traveled down the line of her back to her trim waist, the swell of her hips, the parabolic drape of her satin train. He almost laughed, because her slippers were translucent. Glass slippers.

  “I remember as a little girl seeing you bounce from bulkhead to bulkhead in the mess, starting a food-fight, and writing equations on the walls in ketchup that only I could read—I thought they were meant for me.

  “And little, pale, gray, sickly men, the fathers who raised me, they seemed so feeble compared to you, until you taught them how to use the coffins to make them young again. Whenever you woke up, it was like a food watch, like Christmas.

  “Yes, we had Christmas aboard—we had very few gifts to share.

  “When I was twelve and thirteen, I used to solve some of the magneto-hydrodynamic containment engineering problems wrong, so the thrust would wobble, just to get them to wake you up again. And you had not aged a day! And sometimes you would speak to me, if I could get you to look at me, but you never knew who I was.”

  2. The Cure

  “You have a crush on Mr. Hyde?”

  “O-oh, I would not call it a ‘crush.’ I do not love your madness. Del Azarchel sought to keep us apart. He forced me into suspended animation for many years, telling the people I suffered from ‘Earthsickness’—a lie no one believed. You, he was afraid to thaw. It was not until I told him how to program his emulation of himself, and copy your chemical brain-alterations, that I was able to force him to wake us both in the same time period.”