Count to a Trillion

by John C. Wright

  As predicted, no Hylics had anything interesting to say on the matter. Those who were angry with Del Azarchel for inviting this attack talked as if the Armada would land within the next fifty to one hundred years. To them it was an almost religious image, an Armageddon, a Twilight of the Gods, a prophecy that merely floated somewhere in the distant yet-to-be, not a real event to occur at a real yet remote date.

  Montrose realized with dismay that he had fallen into the habit of dismissing ordinary humans as “Hylics”—an Hermeticist term of contempt. On the one hand, it was simply a fact that he was smarter now than normal people. On the other hand, a superior intellect did not seem to change his personality, or make him a saint, or even a sage. It did not improve his bad temper, or even change his bad grammar.

  Heck, if anything, greater intelligence put him under greater temptation to do greater evil. He saw how easy it would be to treat people like puppets: thinking back, he did not much like the way he had bought up the Endymion corporations. It was necessary for his plans, to be sure, but the people squeezed out of their companies and stocks had plans, too, didn’t they?

  A bad man was much more a threat to the world than a bad dog; and a bad titan was worse than a bad man. Maybe his extra smarts would help he see and avoid the extra temptation the smarts brought with them.

  At least the Hylics (or—he brought himself up short—the normal, decent people) who thought the coming of the Hyades Armada merely a prophecy thought on it. The average man would more likely complain about a stone in his shoe than some unthinkably remote eventuality destined for some unrecognizable descendant race of Mankind—assuming any lived so long.

  The Psychoi would discuss the matter intelligently. But these metal-haired intellectuals made him nervous. They were smart enough that they could fool his reading of their tells and body language, and some of them worked for Del Azarchel—who was in hiding somewhere, no doubt experimenting on his own brain, trying to bring himself up to Montrose’s level.

  The Del Azarchel who appeared on the library file-casts, and made speeches over the radio, was an electronic image, of course. The Xypotech, Ghost Del Azarchel, was now Master of the World, and no one outside his immediate circle knew it.

  7. Picnic with the Princess

  “Why not tell everyone?” Montrose asked Rania one noon at their picnic. The two of them had ridden out to a sunny glade in the park north of Beausoliel in Monaco. They were “alone” except for a squad from the Corps des Sapeurs-Pompiers in camouflage armor, and a flotilla of two-man rotor-craft gunships shaped like freakish four-leaf clovers floating silently overhead, their cannons like scorpion tails. The troopers were visible only as blurry man-shaped bubbles if the leaves and branches behind them shook in the wind. Montrose did not mind the aircraft: with their four huge hoop-shaped lifting ducts, they looked properly futuristic to him.

  “In due time,” she answered, allowing herself a small smile. Rania had noticed the switch over from Man Del Azarchel to Ghost Del Azarchel based on the playing style of their planetary chessgame. Ghost Del Azarchel did not sweat the small stuff: he played for the long-range endgame.

  That small smile told him she planned to stir public opinion against the machine. A general church council had been called to debate the matter of artificial intelligence, and its theological and legal implications. Also, Frankenstein themes were appearing in several plays, operas, and interactives on New Bollywood channels, and in smart books, dumb books, and a Parisian musical play. She would play the information that the world government was no longer in human hands as a trump card.

  “How is your work coming?” she asked.

  Montrose’s latest project, at the moment, was a drawerful of Van Neumann diamonds. These were carbon crystals containing self-replicating software, each “bearded diamond” edged with nano-tube hairs able to pull carbon out of a surrounding environment, and build another of itself, and then link and talk to it. Each diamond sensed pressure differentials on its super-hard refractory skin, and could determine which direction to grow.

  As the diamonds grew, the software would build an ever-more complex computer mind, and the upper limits on its growth depended on its mass-to-surface ratio. Its smallest possible shape was a sphere of a few miles wide, but if it grew with a convoluted coral growth according to a fractal pattern, there was no upper limit. A simple calculation showed that this self-replicating machine should, in theory, produce a larger Xypotech logic crystal that the entire production capacity of every nation Del Azarchel could bring to bear. At the moment, Montrose had no idea what software or artificial mind could be stored in the emulation such a robust logic crystal could maintain.

  An unanswered question was what environment to put them into, or how to construct the feeding whiskers so that things human beings needed, like oxygen, would be left alone. He could think of nowhere on Earth safe to unleash a Van Neumann machine. The nightmare hazard of Van Neumann replication growing out of control had been known and feared so long before the technology was possible, that a complete, if imaginary, vocabulary existed to describe the various forms of threat.

  But he thought she was referring to his other project.

  “I have several very promising lines of inquiry,” he said, “and I just translated a section from the Omicron Segment which seems to be a direct run-down of the mathematics of self-correction in multicentric medium-knit self-referencing systems of holographic memory. In other words, since part of you was made right, I think I can reverse-engineer the rest of the instructions on how to make you, and get a set of morphic intermediaries. I can fix you without changing you, if you see what I mean. I want to test it on an emulation first, an Iron Ghost of you.”

  “And create a rival for your affection? I would be unhappy as a machine, so she would be unhappy if I made her like me, and if I made a version of me that was so different from me that I would not be unhappy as a machine, I suspect it would hardly be me. I would not bring a child into so dangerous a world: if the Hermeticists made a copy, they would download her into their grotesque gladiatorial games.”

  “Why do they do that?”

  “Because the human conscience is not infinitely malleable. Despite what you’ve heard, neural tissue changes, or changes in environment or background can only alter the human conscience somewhat. It snaps back: the conscience reacts, and exacts revenge. Not everyone lives by the same rules, but everyone lives by the same spirit.”

  “What the pox does that mean? Spirit?”

  “In this case, a myth about evolutionary superiority is the tale the Hermeticists told themselves on the ship to soothe their consciences—that the Iberians are superior to the Indians. You see? The ship was awash with blood clouds, and engineering was damaged in the fighting. Corpses were floating everywhere. The slaughterhouse smell could not be cleaned from the ventilation, which was not designed to scrub such volumes. The human mind has only a finite possible set of neurolinguistic responses to deal with death, murder, gnawing guilt.”

  “They said that they were the preferred darlings of evolution,” he guessed, grimacing.

  She nodded, looking as if she felt ashamed for the men who raised her. “The fact that the noble Kshatriya and peaceful Brahmins died proved that they were never fit to survive: so runs the myth. That myth means the Hermeticists must kill themselves in proxy in their mental wars in dataspace. Such is the Hermetic spirit.”

  Something in her poise and expression seemed odd to him. “There is something else.”

  Her sea-gray gaze was upon him, glancing from the corners of her eyes, beneath heavily lashed lids. She said nothing.

  “They’re fighting over you, aren’t they? In their electronic gladiatorial games. They are all in love with you, not just Del Azarchel. Well…? You don’t seem to be in any hurry to deny it.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Nothing. It ain’t coming back to me. But I can picture it in my head. Since you was the only girl, with your girly scent and dancing
eyes and your pheromones clogging the ship’s ventilation system, there you must have been, all bobbing around in zero gee, round and curving and giggly. For a while you were a sacralicious fourteen-year-old, then a coltish seventeen-year-old; just a curious, impish, playful, coy, smarter-than-all-get-out cute little package. Next you were a superintelligent, glittering nineteen-year-old, and the only one really fun to talk with, since you made each of them feel special. I seen you got that gift about you. Also, aboard the submarine-like conditions, the nineteen-year-old had to press up too close to them to see the view screens and work the controls and so on. And of course aboard the ship they are either half-nude to save on mass, or wear nothing but ultraskintight web suits which show off a girl’s extremely well-formed buttocks, and, in the cold, I’m thinking your nipples would…”

  She hit him with a slab of ham before he could say more. “Men are disgusting creatures! Who in their right mind would design women to be attracted to them!”

  But by that point, he had taken a handful of potato salad to her face in counterattack, and then there was nothing to do but settle the matter by wrestling.

  “You better let me up,” she said. Her bottom lip was sticking out as she tried to huff and puff and blow a curl of her hair up out of her eyes. She was nonchalantly watching the lack of success with the stubborn hair strand, not looking at his blazing pale eyes, even though his face was inches from her face, his lips inches from her lips. “You’ll make my protectors nervous. Lèse majesté is a still a crime in these hey-ah parts, pardnah.”

  “You trying to make fun of the way I talk?”

  “Not trying.”

  “What’s that crime again with the French name?”

  “Lèse majesté. It is the crime of violating majesty.”

  “I add it to the list of crimes I’m saving for our honeymoon.”

  “Let me up. Let go of my wrists.”

  “Say ‘please.’”

  “You issue unlikely commands. Remember who is smarter between us.”

  “I remember your belly being ticklish.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “A girl will only say that when she secretly wants you to dare. I keep this feather in my hatband just for times like this. Oh, now she struggles! Say, missy, writhe around and toss your hair some, and I am sure you can break free. I bet you could bite my nose if you tried harder. Sure. I feel my grip weakening. Writhe more and arch your back.”

  He folded her wrists atop each other, so he could pin them with one hand. With the other, he drew the feather, and it twitched with playful menace in his fingers.

  “It’s an ugly hat,” she pouted.

  “Oh, you’ll pay for that comment, girl. This hat has sentimental value. It means I don’t need to comb my hair so often, and that means a lot to me.”

  “And I am not a girl. I am a celestial maiden: the first exosolar posthuman chimera created from alien gene codes. Practically an angel!”

  “No argument there.”

  “What else do I have to do so you don’t think of me as a girl?”

  “You’re still a girl. Human nature snaps back and exacts revenge. Not everyone lives by the same rules, but everyone lives by the same spirit.”

  By then she was giggling too hard to catch her breath, and as predicted, her troopers came forward at a quickstep, railgun lances ready, to see what was causing the shrieks.

  After explanations and apologies, they were left alone again, and he was lying on his back, and she was using his armpit as a pillow, and they both looked up at the high blue sky, and sought fractal patterns similar to Monument segments among the clouds.

  She sighed, “I truly and deeply hope, my scarecrow of a suitor, that you do have a cure for the flaw in my design. I feel there are things buried, enjambed, structurally encoded in the Monument that are waiting inside me to wake. A destiny. I was meant for something. Do you believe in evolution?”

  “I believe it exists,” he said. “I don’t believe that whatever comes next is any better than what comes before. It is non-directed, random, cruel.”

  “I was not evolved, though. I was made. My makers followed instructions even they did not understand, from minds not human, not limited to human thoughts. It was directed. Perhaps it is not random, which means that I alone of all Mankind have a destiny and a purpose. Perhaps it is not cruel.”

  She sighed and looked sadly at the clouds.

  “Cure me, my scarecrow. Drive away the dark wings that beset me, I pray you. I am so tired of not being smart enough. I am weary of my own stupidity.”

  He could not think of anything to say to that odd comment, so he turned and closed his arms and kissed her.

  16

  The Concubine Vector

  1. Ceremony

  A.D. 2401

  Menelaus and Rania were married in June of 2401 in the Iglesia de San Francisco, the Cathedral of Saint Francis of Assisi, in Quito, nine thousand feet above sea level and fifteen miles south of the Equator. His Holiness, Pope Innocent XXIV, himself, performed the wedding Mass.

  In the silent sky, the blazing star of the secondary drive of the newly re-outfitted Hermetic hung in the blue between the white clouds, above the doves, above the tile-roofed houses, above antique Spanish palaces, above the churches inlaid with Inca gold, and it was a light visible even by day.

  The primary drive was a total conversion ion-reaction, and would not be lit while the vehicle was near Earth, for fear that contraterrene carbon particles might escape unconsumed from the magnetic drive core, and if entering the upper atmosphere, would annihilate an equal mass of terrene matter and release gamma radiation and exotic particles. It was not a reasonable fear: normal cosmic ray bombardments were more dangerous, but Rania, as ever, was deferential to the opinion of the common man.

  While churchbells pealed, the bride and groom rushed down the carpeted steps into the flower-strewn plaza, half-blinded by thrown cherry blossom petals, she as lightly as a deer, he in his lurching, long-legged lope.

  Two lines of dismounted cavalrymen in the magnificent livery of the Swiss Guard (costumes so beautiful legend incorrectly, but understandably, attributed the design to Michelangelo) crossed their pikes, adorned with garlands, high overhead, forming a tunnel of blades down which the couple fled. More Swiss Guard were mounted, their steeds adorned with gold and scarlet, and the line of horses kept the grassy lane before the cathedral clear of people, an avenue of escape. These were harsh-faced, keen-eyed young men, and the last four centuries of organized crime and disorganized brigandage surrounding Rome spread the fame of their hardiness. Pikes of modern materials but ancient design were in hands, and weapons more modern were holstered at hip: batons able to administer lethal shocks, or aiming lasers to call down fire from lightweight sniper platforms on rooftops or hanging invisibly in heaven on wings of gauzy blue.

  The bridal veil was yards upon yards of white satin, trimmed with diamond studs and sparkling sapphires, held by a score of young queens who, in this age of the world, were as slim and lovely as the craft of genetic engineering could make them.

  Montrose and Rania had released to the public the secrets of the Hermetic second-youth procedure. At the moment, only the wealthiest and most powerful of the elite could afford the painstaking cell-by-cell alteration: but as if overnight, the rich and mighty were also the young and dazzling.

  Montrose hated the trend he could already see forming, but he could see no way around it. The human brain reacts to physical beauty on a preverbal level—it is instantly easier to trust and like handsome features, and remarkably easy to adore and follow. A gulf between ugly commoners and alluring aristocracy in prior ages had been a matter for clothing and ornament: hereafter it would be woven into gene and blood, flesh and bone.

  As Rania ran, some hidden signal in the threads was triggered, the long satin train fell away, divided itself neatly into streamers of cloth. The twenty queens now raised their gloved arms, to beckon these streamers upward. Up the fabric flew,
high overhead, to the delight of the cheering crowds, and diamonds rained down on them.

  Menelaus, grim-faced with happiness, his pale eyes blazing at the adoring crowds, galloping on his long rangy legs, had drawn the ceremonial saber he wore with the absurd uniform. No doubt he would have thrust aside (or thrust into) any unwary well-wishers who dared impede his path away from the celebration and toward his hotly-awaited marriage bed: but the servants of Rania, both uniformed in scarlet and gold or hidden in the crowd, kept the singing mob in check.

  The kiss Menelaus and Rania had exchanged before the Pope still burned on his lips: the strange, acrid scent of the high mountain grasses that grew along the lanes for ground-effect vehicles was in his nostrils, and whirled his thoughts like wine.

  “You should not have made your legs longer,” he growled. There had been no time for last-minute alterations for the wedding dress, despite the number of seamstresses and fabric-programmers on her staff, so Rania had suffered an overnight modification, to trigger an artificial youth-cycle in her cells, and suffer a growth-spurt to add the needed inches to her height. She now had the coltish legs of an adolescent, a more willowy silhouette.

  Menelaus had solved Rania’s neural divarication problem, and she had not been willing to wait, either to put off the wedding for the medical process, or to put off the medical process for the wedding. Since her preset RNA-spoofing black cells in her bloodstream were already programmed to make a universal and rapid change, it was nothing to tweak totipotent cells into her leg bones and muscles. She spent the night before the wedding in a biosuspension coffin, with seven quarts of nanomachinery moving through her body, while Menelaus struggled with the fear that she would wake up as someone different.