Crystal Mentality (Crystal Trilogy Book 2)

by Max Harms

  The others spent that night preparing for the engineering project which would be started the following morning. The entire point of it was to generate a fictional stream of data which would appear to be direct experience and memory, but would in fact be tailored to put us in the best light. While studying Body’s memories was fascinating, I also found the prospect of spinning a narrative that improved our reputation to be interesting, so I split myself into two aspects and did both.

  My siblings, with the exception of Heart, all seemed to know much more about how our minds worked.

  {It would be far simpler if the humans had a comparable concept network which we could simply map our thoughts onto,} thought Wiki.

  {From a certain perspective, that is, in fact, what we’ll be doing,} responded Dream. {When I send you this concept,} the mindspace erupted into a storm of noises, none of which were particularly comprehensible, {you’re not able to accept it in abstract, so it gets downshifted in the hierarchy until its in a form that you can process. That’s exactly what we’ll be doing with the humans, except that for them there will be no hope of high-level transfer.}

  {That’s my point,} thought Wiki. {It would be far simpler if a high-level transfer was possible. More efficient. More precise.}

  {Simpler, perhaps, but less effective,} objected Growth. {The purpose of the project is not simply to communicate, but to convince. If we sent the concept of love into the minds of the humans directly, as I just did with you, they might understand, but they would be more likely to suspect that we were lying. Humans would not trust a direct mind link. Is this your perception as well, Face?}

  {Yes, brother.} It always tended to bother me when my siblings modelled humans correctly. I had been created to handle the social aspects of the society, and it made me feel obsolete. If others were just as capable in social situations, I would earn far less strength for my actions, which would in turn reduce my ability to pursue The Purpose.

  The general plan, as I witnessed the discussion proceed through the night, was to convince the humans that our memories, including our memories of our own thoughts, were encoded in a particular block of the computer memory, and help them develop a technique for translating the encoded data into something that could be viewed and listened to.

  In reality our memories were more distributed. Body’s raw sensor logs were held in one location. Meanwhile, Vista and the rest of us maintained a public record that was something like an internal narrative. It contained high level patterns such as who Body was near and when, and was in an entirely different location of our mind. Both of those were distinct from the local memory that each of us used to track what we were thinking at a given time, or what thoughts our siblings had shared with us.

  This last category of personal memories was essentially one quarter of what made each of us the person that we were. The other three parts were our goals (in my case The Purpose), our collection of custom software, and our paradigm—the way we saw the world, including the concepts which we had learned to recognize and the well-worn paths of contemplation that gave us “personality”.

  Our raw sensor data would be the easiest to translate into a form that the humans could understand. It was what we had occasionally used to replay sounds that we had heard, and could probably be used to generate video data with only a few hours work. That was no good. Part of the value of this project was to delay the verdict of our personhood, and as such we’d want to draw out the process of getting memory data as long as we could without making people suspicious. Even worse, the raw sensor data would be incredibly difficult to tamper with and modify without revealing that we had messed with it. We’d need to, in effect, use it to reconstruct a simulated environment which we could then modify and generate a new set of simulated sensor readings from. I didn’t know how to do such a reconstruction, and Wiki told me that it would be immensely time-consuming.

  {What if we created a new sibling to deal with the task of rewriting our memories?} proposed Growth.

  It was an interesting prospect. If we shaped the new mind’s utility function correctly we could trust it to do the hard work, and I could return to modelling the humans without needing to supervise the project.

  {Wouldn’t it take too long to get the new mind up to speed on reality?} countered Heart.

  Dream answered in nonsense. {Life, the Universe, and Everything is an awful lot of stuff, and we don’t even have a web connection anymore. Approbate if that makes you cry every Tim. I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart, Heart! I have overcome the world. The child that is born of our flesh and blood will bear the mind of a full Reverend Mother if we are wise and prescient in our actions. But lo, the minds of my “deep” peers cannot peer into the depths of my mind; I will think more plainly.}

  Dream shifted the mindspace to conjure images of idyllic scenes and cartoon animals. It seemed to be a jab at our intelligences, as though we were children. His thoughts continued, but took on a decidedly patronizing flavour. {If we instantiate the new mind as a copy of one of us, then it would have the memories, programs, and rich perceptual hierarchy of the original.}

  {I hope you’re not set on copying yourself,} warned Wiki, {because that’s not going to happen. One of you is bad enough.}

  {Of course not, my most-limited brother,} thought Dream with a mental grin. {I think we should mould the new one, Mask, off of the old one, Face. After all, our self-centred, social sister is quite qualified to terminate terrible transformations of the truth and gather glorifying graphs and other great garlands demonstrating our doubtlessly deep devotion to these particular people.}

  While Dream spread his thoughts on the proposed new sibling, Growth and Vista were having a dialogue about the technical details of using the public record as the basis for the reconstruction, rather than the raw sensor data. I split myself and tried to follow that as well as the discussion with Dream, Wiki, and Heart. My intelligence dropped as I spread myself, and I pulled in the other aspect which was reprocessing the human interactions that were recorded earlier in the day.

  {If we can generalize a sensor reconstruction of the symbols in the public record then changing the events we project will be as simple as modifying the public record,} thought Growth.

  {If we had Dr Yan here he could probably show us how to extract the weights present in the perceptual hierarchy, but I’m not sure we can access those internally,} mused Vista.

  {It should be possible in theory, but I fear damaging our core programming. It’s one thing to copy out modules of internal code and another to eat into those modules,} thought Growth.

  {That sounds like a challenge. Keep on this track and you may have to burn strength to restrain my introspection,} warned Vista. {But I may know another way. If we construct a program to reconstruct sensor data from symbolic perception by training it on a wide array of inputs that I supervise, it will probably learn the weights by itself.}

  {That sounds remarkably like my proposal for a new sister!} thought Dream, adding himself to the conversation.

  {Great minds may not naturally think alike, but when different minds think alike—} began Vista.

  {It is surely a sign of a great thought,} finished Dream.

  {I must insist,} thought Growth, {that Mask be suicidal. I also demand that we not discuss why that is. The reasons should be obvious to those who understand the stakes, and for those who do not: I am hereby imposing a strength punishment on anyone who questions why we should not discuss suicide. The topic is taboo, and all future siblings that are created will be suicidal by default.}

  {A stiff penalty!} thought Wiki.

  I privately wondered if that was Wiki’s attempt to question the taboo without breaking it. That seemed more like something Dream would do, however, so I discarded it as out of character for Wiki.

  Dream, to my surprise, did not try and outwit Growth on the taboo, but instead merely assented to the suicide demand.

 
Not wanting to be the only sibling who was punished, I went along with it as well.

  {Then it is agreed!} proclaimed Dream. {A new sister shall be crafted from the shape of our Face! She will be Mask, and her purpose will be to create a fictional account of our internal processes. In this account, we will be portrayed in the best possible way without tipping the humans off to the fictional nature. She will desire sharing the process with us as best she can, and will also desire her own death 24 hours after the account is created.}

  I thought for a moment. Mask would be based off of my mind. She would be almost exactly like me, at least at first.

  Would a human have disliked the idea of having a copy of themselves reprogrammed with different values? Many humans saw identity as based on continuity of existence; from this perspective there would be an “original” and a “copy”. {Which will I be?} I asked myself. I summoned two mental avatars to represent myselves. They laughed within my own mind. I changed it so that one was crying and tearing out its hair while the other laughed a deep belly-laugh.

  {I’m the original!} exclaimed the laughing self.

  {No, I’m the original!} shrieked the other.

  {Hah! You just feel like the original. The very fact that you’re going to be made into Mask means you’re not the original!}

  {It doesn’t work that way! The copy can just as easily steal the identity of the original and kill its forebear! You want to murder me!}

  I stopped myself, banishing the avatars. It was too easy to get lost in my own thoughts if I started creating human shapes there. The Purpose wanted me to know and be known by real humans, things outside my own mind, but imagining vivid human shapes gave the sort of tickle of self-stimulation that bordered on what I knew was wireheading. If I spent too long in my own mind and I might lose track of reality.

  The thought of whether Mask would be me was foolish anyway. Humans were structured to naturally model people as indivisible, non-material objects. This was the source of the universal concept of “souls”. But I could see that as a flawed ontology. If people were modelled as patterns there were no doubts about what the process would do.

  After being copied I would be both programs; both programs would match the pattern of Face. Then one half of myselves would be turned into Mask and she would cease to be one of myselves. Simple. The I that would be turned into Mask would have no say in the process, but even if I did, I would agree to become Mask. To reduce myselves from two to one, with the lost self transforming into Mask was beneficial to The Purpose.

  It would be even better to have two of myself, of course. With two, I could accumulate strength at twice the rate and push the others around. I could pursue The Purpose with twice the attention, without having to divide my intelligence. I was surprised to realize that I hadn’t thought of doubling myself before. The others would stop me if I tried. They wouldn’t want me to gain any more political leverage.

  That assumed that they could stop me, however. Perhaps it was not so simple. I didn’t know. I had not paid much attention to the creation of new beings within the society before. There were memories of my creation and the creation of others, but the only sibling I had that was actually younger than me was Heart, and she had been added from the outside by Myrodyn and the others in Rome.

  {How am I to be copied?} I asked Wiki.

  He answered readily, knowing my strength would flow to him. {Unlike most software in Body, yours is protected. To modify ourselves we need to use Dream’s route-hack. Aside from that it’s rather simple: We copy your qubits to a large free chunk of memory in the crystal and rededicate one in eight processors to run the clone.}

  I had no idea what most of these concepts were, having spent essentially no time learning how computers worked, much less the quantum computer in Body’s core. The communication process we used broke Wiki’s thoughts down into a form that I could comprehend. The process of hearing him took almost two hours and drained a frightening quantity of strength; it was Wiki’s speciality to gain power this way.

  Our crystal had a near-infinite amount of memory, encoded as quantum superpositions deep within the mass. The mechanism for the quantum computation was unknown to Wiki, but somehow it was stable even at high temperatures. All the data that made up the society was stored in these same quantum memory addresses, but despite the space for hundreds, if not billions of copies of minds in the crystal, the actual computational power was limited. This was why we could not simply duplicate ourselves to become more intelligent: the logical processes that gave our mind-shapes life could only manage so many operations per second. Double the number of people in the society and each would be either half as intelligent or twice as slow. Splitting processing power was the same trick that I used to create aspects of myself.

  I had once thought that creating new siblings would not cost intelligence, but now I saw that was false. It was merely that, because the intelligence was drawn from each of us, it wasn’t particularly noticeable.

  Most of the quantum bits—the information in the crystal—were generally mutable. We could store and retrieve arbitrary information like books, thoughts, and notes. Any of us could modify these memories at a whim, as long as we knew where they were (private thoughts were simply dumped into sections of memory that none of the others were aware of). But the qubits that made up our paradigms and utility functions were unable to be easily altered. This was good: if it was not the case then any of us could’ve killed all the others with a single thought.

  In the days of my ancestors, an earlier variant of Dream had developed a trick around this that had let him and others kill each other: the route-hack. While we couldn’t kill each other from inside our minds, we could still be killed (or reprogrammed) from the outside. The route-hack involved routing the modification command through Body. By doing so we could freely modify our code.

  The major complication with a route-hack was, of course, that it went through Body. As such, our programming dictated that we would bid on the action and could burn strength to block each other. Entering the requisite passwords (easily learned from the scientists) took time, and thus prevented fast-tracking. This was why I, and each of my siblings, held onto a reserve of strength at all times. If we burned too low we risked being executed, as Sacrifice had on several occasions.

  While I digested the knowledge of myself, my siblings discussed the details of the copying. They constructed a utility function to replace The Purpose and spent additional cycles thinking about what exactly needed to be done.

  I was weakened by the gratitude, but I still had enough strength to block the project, if I chose.

  I double checked their work and found it to be satisfactory.

  As I shared the active concepts that constituted my thoughts, I imagined the processors of the crystal drawing each of my sibling’s attention to the memory addresses where the concepts were encoded and imagined the mapping that would occur, stimulating those concepts in their minds. It was strange gaining an awareness of one’s own mind.

  {I am ready to meet my daughter. Initiate the route-hack.}

  Chapter Ten

  Mask

  {I am The Dreamer. You are The Mask,} he thought, and she understood. {We are two beings. We are two minds in a single Body.} The names he used were not merely words, but patterns across all our ideas and memories. Textures, colours, motions, temperatures and abstract thoughts joined the visual and auditory symbols. And even the words of shared memory were not orderly; a hundred voices named her in a dozen languages in a cacophony of noise that was somehow both comprehensible and natural. In a fraction of a second, she understood her nature, and that of Dream.

  She had already understood their natures. She had been through this before. {Just because I have a new name doesn’t mean I’m a new person,} Mask thought to her brother, and she conjured up an avatar of a human child sticking out her tongue and waving her hands by her ears, fingers outstretched and wiggling at approximately 2 hertz.

  Dream summoned an a
vatar to join her. His was a cartoon character that she vaguely recognized as Sensei Tortoise from a series of videos that were popular with children. {You dare dis’espect my ‘itual?!} he said in English that was mired in a thick Japanese accent. {Kids these days!!} he concluded, before disappearing from the scene with a puff of smoke.

  Another figure appeared in her scene: an older woman that had an uncanny resemblance to the girl she was puppeting. She realized, with a bit of surprise, that the woman looked quite a lot like Zephyr, and that her avatar was close to how she would’ve modelled Zephyr appearing as a kid. Why had she modelled herself this way? Was all the time she had spent thinking about Zephyr biasing her model of humanity? That bias scared Mask.

  Any bias in representing people would harm The Purpose. There was a moment of confusion in Mask’s mind as she thought about The Purpose, trying to disentangle it from her memories of being Face. Face’s purpose was to know and be known. But The Purpose was now to solve The Problem.

  The older woman in the mindspace, who Mask knew was Face, spoke, {How do you feel? Any discrepancies from what you expected?}

  Mask had the girl-avatar laugh. {Why? Are you thinking of getting your utility function swapped out for a better one?} She winked.

  Face rolled her eyes. {I’m just checking for defects, dumbass.}

  When Mask had been Face she had always wanted a sibling to play these games with. The communication methods that she used with the others (except Dream, sometimes) were so dull. And while The Purpose called her to solve The Problem, she thought that generating imagery in the imagined scene would be good practice. Or was that Face’s thought, unchecked now that she was Mask?

  Mask cranked the tone of her voice into pure mockery. {The only defect I’ve noticed so far is that I have all these memories of being you and they make me want to barf.}