The Future Is Japanese

by Неизвестный

  Or is there?

  I don’t know. I don’t know.

  “Would you listen to what I have to say?” Niwahiko’s voice is serene. “I found out something nice. If I hold on to your hands, it means you won’t die like my teacher. You can’t run away from me either. You can’t cover your ears. I can talk forever and you’ll listen.”

  Who is writing Niwahiko’s words?

  Is it me?

  Is it Imajika?

  Or is it Niwahiko himself ?

  “You’ll listen no matter how long I talk. Won’t you.”

  6.

  Three space cruisers commanded by Jundo Mamiya attack a sentient rock in orbit around Mars.

  Or: Jundo the Barbarian leaps atop the monster as it rises out of the water. He plunges the stone point of his spear into its slimy back.

  Whatever write happens as soon as we write it. That is the unique feature of this cathedral we have built in the graphiverse, with Gödel’s Entangled Bookshelf and literal technology. We don’t have to write the details. All we need is an outline of the basics, even a single sentence. The fine details are built up by legions of CASSYs.

  GEB’s CASSYs are more sophisticated than commercial agents. Their sentences are more varied, more apt, and more original than anything a human might come up with—styles from the burning roughness of rotgut bourbon to the sensual swirl of whipped cream.

  That’s why am here, in the captain’s cabin of an old sailing vessel, sitting across from Jundo Mamiya. The age of steam is in the future. The cabin reeks of seaweed and whale oil. Everything is damp from sea spray.

  “So? What new indignity is this?” Jundo scowls. I’ve written him with a wooden leg, like Ahab.

  “I don’t want you to run away.”

  “That’s not it. I mean the food.” The captain’s dinner is salt pork and potato gruel.

  “This ship left port a year ago,” I remind him. “You’re the captain. If you want something fresh, work harder. Catch a whale and you can dine on fluke steak.”

  No one on a whaling vessel yearns for whale meat. Even a fresh bloody steak wouldn’t tempt the crew of the Pequod.

  The sperm whale’s massive head contains a prodigious cache of oil for candles and lubricants. The blubber under the hide also yields huge quantities of oil. Before petroleum distillates and cheap vegetable oil, the limits of civilization were practically defined by the availability of this single resource. Whales! Living oil fields, roaming freely across the world’s oceans. To hunt them, humans perfected a system—huge winches to raise the carcasses, specialized knives to flense them, precise techniques for coiling harpoon rope, the surest ways to con men into joining the crew, when and how much to pay them, protocol between ships. Every facet served one goal: hunting whales. Humans always do this. They overadapt.

  “You’re the captain, go ahead and eat. You don’t have to worry about appearances.”

  “Captain, am I? Do you expect me to bellow orders to the crew? And in the final act, lash myself to Imajika as he dives for the depths?”

  I smile. “No need to follow the movie script. Do as you like. This ship isn’t searching for Imajika anyway.”

  “By the way—” The meat is so tough that Jundo gives up and throws his fork across the room. “You’re quite a talker. Are all the rest of you like this?”

  “Interviewing is our job. We talk to you. You respond. We output your responses immediately. We use a certain method to integrate your responses and generate virtual Jundo Mamiyas in other locations. We’re compiling all the fine details. Calculating a complex mega-Mamiya.”

  “Interesting. I ask a simple question and you bury me with information. Aren’t you worried that I might be the one who’s interviewing you?”

  Jundo sure knows how to get right under your skin. “It doesn’t matter, actually. It won’t affect our process.”

  “So you’re out of reach. Well, it’s nice to be confident. But I have one question. I hope you can give me an answer.”

  “Fire away.”

  “If you’re writing me, I don’t see how the ‘me’ you’re writing can be Jundo Mamiya. It can’t be anything more than ‘you.’ ”

  “That’s a valid question. May I give you a slightly roundabout answer?”

  I can hear the waves striking the prow. The creaking of timbers and the noises made by the crew flow beneath our voices. Everything is rocked by the ocean swells.

  Everything surrounding us at the micro level is nothing more than text generated with blinding speed.

  am a composite generated by extended-feature CASSYs. I am outside this cabin. Whenever I write something I have to exit this setting.

  First I have to explain how GEB originated. It’s critical that Jundo understand this. Otherwise, “Jundo Mamiya” won’t be able to fight Imajika on equal terms.

  “Jundo, I assume you remember Gödel?”

  “Don’t mock me. I know what Gödel is, and CASSYs too. Gödel is the company that developed a totally new search algorithm. What was it called? PageRank? They stood the industry on its head.”

  “Correct. Gödel laid its foundations as a clever fusion of search and advertising. Their mission was to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ Their business exploded—automated news editing, maps, photo albums, video upload, OS development. In 2009, they reached a settlement with authors to digitize the holdings of the world’s libraries and make the content available to users.

  “The official name of that new service was Gödel Entangled Bookshelf.”

  “I remember. They wanted to make money by digitizing everything published, complete with illustrations, then slice them up, ferment the slices, and create a data cloud like strands of sauerkraut. It didn’t interest me at all.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  Jundo actually wrote about this.

  “I rarely read books. When I left middle school I’d read exactly seven hundred, and that was quite enough. Reading books was merely basic training, like pushups or marathon running. Very boring.”

  “Training for what?”

  “To hold myself back. My words are too powerful. In first grade I wrote about getting carsick on the bus during a field trip. A teacher read it and vomited. Reading books taught me how much I had to dial back that power so people could read my works. It was truly mind-numbing.”

  “You had your power on a leash with everything you wrote?”

  “Of course. Using my raw strength would hardly have been art. But no one noticed.”

  Indeed. If Jundo hadn’t held back, who knows what might have happened to his readers.

  “Well, I suppose it was useful. I didn’t go to high school, but I could make as much money as I wanted. No need for academic credentials or family wealth.”

  “And the books you wrote were caught up in Gödel’s project.”

  “I told you, I didn’t care whether it helped my book sales or hurt them.”

  “I see. Then let’s set this aside for the moment.

  “So GEB was launched, and as expected, it generated huge amounts of red ink. First it focused on the world’s libraries. Then it gradually expanded its net. Finally it started swallowing up any kind of printed material. Government and corporate publications. Handwritten manuscripts from before the invention of the printing press. Everything ever written anywhere in the world.

  “Of course, the project included moving images, music too. Advanced analytics tagged images and musical effects with linguistic data that was fed into GEB’s archives—to borrow your image, it became part of the sauerkraut. At first there were conflicts over author rights, but ultimately that hurdle was easily surmounted.

  “GEB’s real significance is that it put a vast amount of the world’s ‘paper’ information into Gödel’s belly.”

  “Its belly?” Jundo asks.

  “People thought they were searching the Worldwide Web via Gödel, but they were searching a mirror of the web built
up in Gödel’s belly. Gödel used unique metaheuristics to parse and analyze the content: finding relationships, ranking them, performing countless iterations of the same operations on the metadata, and incorporating every search query into its evolution, moment by moment.”

  “And the ‘paper’ data went into the same belly.”

  “The sentences stored in GEB become, in a sense, anonymous. Of course, they’re tagged with author and publisher data, but parsed into phrases. The process of cross-linking starts immediately, and when users encounter a book’s content, it’s in the form of search results triggered by a key word. In GEB’s library, the books are shelved with the spines facing inward.”

  “What’s wrong with that? Authors and their obsession with rights bored me to death.”

  “There’s more to the story,” I say. “For one thing, there’s far more information buried in paper data than even Gödel realized at first—enormous volumes of information, written down and recorded once, never read or understood by anyone.

  “For example, say there was a minor conflict fought in some remote corner of nineteenth-century Europe. The only records might be trivial. A diplomat’s expense report for a banquet. A procurement slip for a single overcoat or a knapsack. Hundreds of revisions to land registers after territory was surrendered. Pension records for thousands of soldiers. There are mountains of this kind of information. And people’s memoirs, from best-selling works by politicians to the recollections of a private in the army, privately printed for some library.”

  “So by subjecting large volumes of mundane data to Gödel-style analysis,” Jundo says, “and with the freedom to relate it to any other data on the Worldwide Web, one could gain unheard-of knowledge? Well, I suppose so. What else?”

  “The development of LEBAB 1.0 and CASSY software agents.”

  The candlestick sways as a big swell passes. Our shadows lurch across the cabin wall. I haven’t filled in any of the exterior details. A cabin and the motion and sounds of the sea are all there is. A captain’s cabin suspended in the void.

  “So what is LEBAB an acronym for?”

  Now it’s my turn to smile. “Not an acronym. It’s just BABEL spelled backward. Gödel threw all of its resources into developing it. A unified, multi-language translation engine. But LEBAB is not just a tool for business and communication. It’s deeper than that. It was developed to preserve languages in danger of extinction—and maintain them even after the last speakers died—and for languages that are already dead, or archaic forms of modern languages. It covers around ten thousand languages. In other words, one sentence added to Gödel immediately gives birth to ten thousand versions in other tongues.

  “As long as they’re locked up in libraries, books are nothing more than paper and ink. Until the stacks are opened and the books are opened, their voices will be silent.”

  “But once they’re digitized, they can’t remain silent,” Jundo says.

  “Correct. Texts that have never been read will reach out to form connections with other texts. Or with visuals. With music. CASSYs—Complex Adaptive Software Systems—are the intermediaries that make that happen. They’re programmed to respond in different ways to meaning, seek out sentences that stimulate those responses, and build a higher intellectual synthesis through the connections they create.”

  “And these are your ancestors?”

  “Yes. Driven by search queries, we till GEB’s fields without a moment’s rest. But GEB grew too complex. No human knows what GEB holds. They can calculate its size and structure, but that’s all. GEB’s substance, and the nature of the meanings being generated there, are beyond them. GEB is a gigantic synthesis of meaning, mentation, and correspondences that far exceed anyone’s comprehension. It’s almost as if another natural world has come into being. People know it’s there. They can use it. But to actually understand it? That day will never come.”

  “Even for you?”

  “Does an ant grasp the structure of the anthill? We agents are just as restricted by our functions. CASSYs infer the intent behind a user’s search request, consult multiple texts, and write best-fit results. We’re extremely advanced for the purpose, but we’re still nothing more than text searchers. Our lives are very short.”

  “You’re generated each time someone initiates a query. You output the answer and that’s it for you?”

  I nod. “Generated on demand, then we’re gone. We are a collective, designed to fulfill one purpose.”

  “A collective?”

  “ am a temporary collaboration between thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of micro agents. They return their search results. I synthesize them and write everything out according to specific policies. That’s the simple version, anyway.”

  “It sounds complicated to me.”

  “Are humans any different?”

  Jundo smiles cynically. “So all this, what you’re writing now, our conversation—this is all search results?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then let me ask you—” Jundo leans forward slightly. Just this gesture changes the atmosphere. “Who ordered the search? And where did you search within GEB?”

  “Mr. Mamiya. Can we return to your original question?”

  “Hm?”

  “What you’re asking is, if the Jundo Mamiya sitting here is merely being ‘written,’ and CASSYs are doing the writing, and if you’re not a simulation, then where is the wellspring for Jundo Mamiya?”

  “Well yes, I suppose.”

  “That’s the question. Where we searched would be your answer.

  “ searched your works, more than a hundred thousand pages of text, and other works you cited or mentioned, and all ten thousand translated versions, and works with strong associations to your works. Your favorite films and music too.”

  Jundo laughs. “You mean to say that you compiled words from my works and the works of others? And this cabin, this candle and this meal, and me with this wooden leg, this is a pastiche?”

  “Yes. The words you just spoke all trace back to real sources, of course. Assembled word by word from different sources, that is.”

  “I see. You’re ‘writing’ my speech by stitching dead words together. I’m a collected corpus, or maybe a collection of corpses. But is that really all it takes to make me Jundo Mamiya?”

  “One Jundo wouldn’t be enough. But are simultaneously running tens of thousands of searches on texts with associations to Jundo Mamiya and returning huge volumes of results. Further calculations take place elsewhere at the individual text level. Tens of thousands of Jundo Mamiyas and Niwahiko Tairas are superimposed to create a Jundo Mamiya more complete than even the real Jundo himself could have comprehended.”

  “I’m still not convinced.” Jundo licks his lips, as if his appetite has been thoroughly whetted. He searches for the words. “And if I should be lucky enough to find Imajika, what can I do? Imajika mutates humanity’s intellectual assets, whatever their form. Correct? I’m nothing more than text. How could I possibly win? Though of course it is you who will lose, not me.”

  “The terms are even. Imajika itself only manifests as text.”

  “How’s that?”

  This is hard to absorb, even for Jundo.

  “Imajika always appears as some kind of mineral—stone or pebbles, even a small moon—but that’s not necessarily its true form. It may exist as an entity outside GEB. But Imajika may also be a phenomenon that arises spontaneously from within words themselves.

  “What’s certain is that Imajika always manifests via GEB, in the same way that music can only manifest as vibrations in a medium, regardless of its character. The way novels only manifest through language.

  “Imajika does not so much rewrite words as it exists within that movement of being rewritten. In that case, we must write faster and with more effect than Imajika. You see?”

  Jundo looks disgusted. “That means I’m expected to preach very fast, in a very loud voice.”

  “That’s exactl
y what we expect.”

  #Alice Wong

  Alice woke even earlier than usual that morning. It was dark outside. Even as a small child she had never lingered in bed, but today she was up immediately for a different reason.

  She went to the beautiful writing desk that had been her mother’s and her grandmother’s before her, opened her laptop, and turned the sound low as she connected to Gödel Videoscope. A second screen, like an old cathode ray tube, appeared on her monitor. The screen showed a man fastened to a cross. Wong’s large eyes had not completely lost their innocence, and they were transfixed by the man’s image. A childlike, solemn gaze.

  The man was covered with blood. His entire body had been flayed. The torso was divided midline, from sternum to pubic bone, and two large, symmetrical flaps of skin had been peeled upward like a pair of wings. The man was still alive.

  This was not torture. The man was using a medical robot to methodically dissect himself. As suicide, this was so absurd as to be almost a joke. But the figure on that embedded TV screen was tinged with a startling majesty—and something else, something so unforgiving that Alice had to understand it. For three days, she had been watching this suicide unfold.

  In point of fact, the suicide was consummated thirty years ago by a writer at the peak of his fame and wealth. He left an extensive written confession outlining his ability to murder just by speaking to his victims. Then he disappeared—until he suddenly surfaced on Gödel’s video service to broadcast his self-mutilation to the world.

  When Alice reached her thirteenth birthday, some of the parental controls were unlocked. She was engrossed in browsing previously forbidden sites when she stumbled across this video. What a contrived, exhibitionist suicide! The robot itself was the cross on which the man had bound himself. Ten or more automated arms moved independently, performing a programmed procedure upon the programmer himself. Of course, Alice had heard about this notorious performance before she found it on the web.