Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  Yvana parted her lips to say something but was interrupted by a voice coming over the telephone on the desk: “This is James Armour in advisory command of the warship Aeneas hailing the unidentified planet which has materialized in orbit around our home star, Sol. Please confirm your identity and state your intentions.”

  Illverton picked up the phone, but a slight rustle of motion passed through the throng of Corthidians there, as they each looked eye to eye, forming their lightning-quick estimates of each other’s intentions. Instead of speaking, Illverton turned the telephone’s camera toward Yvana and nodded. She spoke: “This is Yvana Vathirid of Organization Vathir, representing the interests of the Safety Authority of the planet Corthid. Are you the ranking officer of the vessel? We seem to have been displaced from the Corthid home system by a cosmic disturbance.”

  One of the plates on the walls, in its automatic fashion, had zeroed in on the glimmering two-mile-long cylinder of the Venusian dreadnought. The readout showed the superbattleship was roughly 230,000 miles away.

  James Armour said dryly, “My rank is as high as anyone else’s aboard. Is that Gilbert Gosseyn there? Cosmic disturbances accompany his presence with noted frequency.”

  Gosseyn stepped forward and spoke into the microphone: “Mr. Armour, can your ship set up a relay link between the Games Machines of Corthid and Venus? I would like them to compare information. I have suffered a complete de-identification with the sidereal universe, which should have rendered it impossible for me to return. Also, I am aware of a … disturbance … a tension in space-time … between my body and some distant point….”

  Even as he spoke, this tension became a pull. He could feel something attempting to similarize the atoms in his body to widely scattered positions outside of time and space. Pain ran through his nerves like fire.

  He started to assume his shadow-form, but the pain grew more intense. He gritted his teeth. His future went blank in just a moment, which either meant that he would use his extra brain, or that he would perish.

  And the sense of nausea shivered through him, aching.

  His overriding thought was: If this is an illusion, what is really happening?

  Over the telephone, James Armour said, “Mr. Gosseyn, the distorter engines of the drive core of the Aeneas just fluctuated, and the astronomy team says the effect came from your position or nearby. Is the disturbance you mentioned the cause of a radical change in the fundamental properties of space-time?”

  Gosseyn was not sure about the answer to that allimportant question.

  Over the phone, Armour said in a tense voice, “Miss Yvana, how quickly can you bring Gosseyn to a spot where a Games Machine can examine him? The readings the shipboard astronomy team reports show a massive buildup of space-disturbance … we may have only minutes.”

  Yvana simply had her men shove Gosseyn out of the window. Once he was falling free from the building, the Vathir organization spaceship, which was still hovering overhead, picked him up on a force-pencil and swung him over to the huge pyramidal tower housing of the Games Machine of Corthid. It was as swift as that.

  The Machine, by this time, had been linked through distorter radio to the Games Machine of Venus. During the tense minutes while the examination took place, the other Null-A Games Machines of various planets in the local arm of the galaxy joined the distorter-radio hookup. It was a mental force of some twenty-five million electronic brains that examined Gosseyn’s mind and body structure down to the Planck level of detail.

  The combined Games Machines reported: “You are aware at a fundamental level that the reality around you is false. Under normal conditions, this would be an indicator of severe psychotic break.”

  Gosseyn said, “What about the sensation that something is trying to pull me out of the universe?”

  “It is a self-imposed symbolic delusion.”

  Gosseyn was sitting at a metal desk in one of the many rooms surrounding the base of the great machine’s housing. In his hands he held the metal contacts with the sensitive instruments probing him. Before him was a wall of electron tubes, glowing softly blue, purple, and purple-red.

  “Symbolic?”

  “Your mind is producing a sensation to interpret something within the context of your human sense impressions which is fundamentally alien to the continuum in which the matter-energy structures of your body and nervous system were evolved.”

  Gosseyn thought: It was a classic problem in Null-A. The universe was not as our senses presented it. In order to grasp the complexities of reality, the sensory apparatus of a living thing, and the midbrain tissues and complexes, had to simplify sense impressions into meaningful but false categories.

  The eye of a frog as it watched for the flies that nourished its life could not see certain types of motion. Motions not typical of flying insects were not seen. This was not a case of the simple frog brain ignoring the signal from the eye: The eye was designed to send no nerve signal to the brain unless the motion was one tied to the frog’s eternal struggle against starvation. Hence if a frog were put into a new circumstance, such as one where a fly was moving in some fashion not typical of flies, the frog could not see it, not even if its life depended on it. The frog’s nervous system and sensory apparatus locked it into a category of perception based on a positive judgment about the nature of motions it saw or could not see: a judgment it could not question.

  The Machine said, “You are still engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the Ydd entity. At this moment, your extra brain is dangerously overstimulated: It is using nearly all of its available neural paths to counteract space-time and matter-energy manipulations taking place, thousands per microsecond, all around you.”

  Gosseyn said, “But what is actually around me?”

  “The most likely hypothesis is that the moment of your death is still ongoing. Everything you are experiencing now simply appears to you to be taking time: In reality, you still occupy a frozen split second of time just before the destruction you set in motion overwhelms you.”

  Null-A was not a binary system of logic: Gosseyn did not conclude merely from the fact that the universe was not true that it was false. What was around him was a model, if only an incomplete one. Even if inaccurate, it still represented the basic underlying reality it hid.

  Gosseyn said slowly, “If this universe around me, this group of perceptions, was given a symbolic value by whatever psychological process created it … I am going to act on the assumption that there must be something I can do within the framework of this illusion that will have a real effect on the real battle that is still going on.” The Machine said, “It is not that simple. There is a strong possibility that you have gone insane. The record in your memory indicates you attempted an attack on the Ydd by similarizing the origin point of the universe into your location: a suicidal attack, which, given the known facts of the Ydd composition, could have harmed only yourself, not your enemy. A shadow-being cannot be harmed by matter or energy to which it is not attuned. Your decision to trigger this effect, according to our examination of your subconscious memory, arose out of no prior thoughts.”

  The Machine continued, “Consider this: Lavoisseur, according, at least, to some evidence, acted in a similarly reckless and self-destructive fashion. Gosseyn One, who was shot to death outside of the Presidential Palace in the City of the Machine on Earth, fled from a safe hiding place to expose himself to gunfire in an absurdly reckless and pointless fashion; Gosseyn Two dosed himself with a hypnotic drug in order to convince himself to commit suicide when—”

  Gosseyn interrupted, “If there is only a strong probability that I am insane, what is the other probability?”

  The Machine said blandly, “The unlikelihood that you would impulsively yet suicidally similarize the Big Bang directly into the heart of the Ydd, and yet by means unknown survive the attempt, implies a planned action. Someone, perhaps by a similarity technique, implanted the impulsive thought in your head to strike at the Ydd using the uncontrolled
energy Anslark’s apparently random act had placed at your disposal, and this opportunity in turn arose because certain energy-balancing structures were imprinted in your nervous system by creatures representing themselves to be remote future versions of yourself, an act whose purpose they failed to explain. Summed together, the percent chance that it was not coincidence approaches unity. A more elegant hypothesis suggests that this moment was planned from the start.”

  “So I am still being manipulated by the Chessplayer.”

  “Obviously.”

  “And Patricia knows who the Chessplayer is.”

  “I cannot verify that statement,” said the Machine.

  “But she can.”

  A signal on the panel before him indicated that Dr. Hayakawa’s team was standing by. Gosseyn, at some deeply buried level, was still connected to the Stabilization Spheres in the various Milky Ways of the past and future. Hayakawa’s plan was to have the Games Machine stimulate Gosseyn’s nerve paths attuned to the Spheres, but instead of allowing the near-infinity of information to overwhelm him, the Machine would act as a filter and a processing stage—an artificial thalamus, as it were—before allowing the perception circuit to complete itself.

  The processing power of the thousands of Games Machines on a thousand worlds would search through the abundance of information, with the help also of human operators on Corthid.

  The No-men freed from their orbital prison were standing by to examine the information-flows on a gross level and use their trained intuitions to direct the “lucky” Corthidians toward the data streams where useful information might be found. The two working together would enable them intuitively to see patterns the Null-A machines and their Venusian operators might miss. The Nexialists freed from the temple were in charge of understanding and coordinating the diverse mental sciences of these three groups and establishing a perception model in which all groups could act efficiently.

  But the apex of this complex structure of human and machine brain cooperation was Gosseyn. It was his extra brain that was the conduit to the deluge of information the Stability Spheres were pulling in from the enigmatic pattern of timeless and spaceless phenomena the human mind insisted on seeing in discrete dimensions of time and space, rather than as a continuum.

  Gosseyn said, “I’m ready.”

  The first experiment was actually rather small-scale. Gosseyn allowed faint prediction-images to appear in his mind, showing conditions of possible futures. The combined Games Machines, guided by No-man intuitions, found and stimulated that strong energy connection he had running to Patricia.

  The reason why his attempt to similarize her to him previously had failed, of course, was that peculiar armor she wore, which allowed her to carry a small hint of the Shadow Effect with her, a shadow his powers could not penetrate. But within any given twenty-four-hour period, surely she had to take it off to rest or bathe?

  And there was no such thing as simultaneity in an Einsteinian universe. Any point in time within the next twenty-four hours might be “now” as far as his frame of reference was concerned.

  The Patricia who materialized beside him was the one occupying the first moment of unprotection: She was actually bending over to strip the flexible metallic leggings from her legs and stepping out of them. The upper part of the suit, its Shadow Effect unenergized, was bunched in her hands. Beneath, she was wearing a skintight sheath of material that left her arms and legs bare.

  She straightened in shock, her hand moving automatically to the holster that rode the curve of her hip. But by the time her long fingers, swift as they were, snatched at the butt of her Colt 1.6 megavolt, it was similarized in Gosseyn’s hand.

  “Who is the Chessplayer, Patricia?” he said.

  She visibly relaxed. “It’s nice to see you, too, Gilbert.” She nonchalantly reached down to where the suit fabric had fallen around her ankles and started to draw it up around her legs and hips, until Gosseyn came forward suddenly and stepped on a fold of it. This prevented her from pulling the suit up and fastening it, which also apparently prevented the shadow-energy circuit from activating.

  She smiled and shrugged and straightened up, letting the metallic fabric drop. Gosseyn was standing close to her, and he noticed how dainty she was, despite her regal bearing: The crown of her auburn head was level with his chin.

  Patricia said, “For a moment, I was afraid you were X or some other near relation.”

  “Who is the Chessplayer?”

  “Oh, come on. That’s been obvious from the start. Lavoisseur.”

  “You said he was dead.”

  She shrugged prettily. “He is. We are playing out what he set in motion.”

  The Games Machine offered, “While she is not literally lying, she is speaking with deceptive intent.”

  Gosseyn angrily took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Who is the Chessplayer, Patricia? Who is running my life?”

  She was standing on her tiptoes now. The metallic fabric fell away into a heap around her ankles. In spite of Gosseyn’s rough handling, she merely smiled thoughtfully. “All right: I’ll tell you. In order to convince Enro that I was his sister, I had to undergo the ordeal of interment in the Crypt of the Sleeping God, as he had done.”

  Gosseyn picked her up and set her down a foot or two back. He stood and gathered up the metallic cloth of the shadow-armor in his hands, looking at the clasps and control-buttons as he did so. “Go on!” he said, not looking up.

  He found that, while the shadow-stuff was not activated, the crystalline-metallic structure of the fabric could be memorized by his extra brain. The collar and cuffs held a miniature circuit of some distorter-type mechanism, which could be activated by a simple electronic switch, once the fasteners were shut.

  Patricia spoke: “The belief on Gorgzid is that only a member of the Royal Family can survive being placed in suspended animation and being revived by the Observer,” she said. “Naturally, they interpret everything in terms of their Cult, and regard the thawing process as a divine rebirth. You were in that coffin, Gilbert. You remember. It is the only place where the Observer can communicate with one of its patients it is evolving up to a higher state of being.

  “This is what I learned: The damage to the Observer was deliberate. All other of the Primordial starships dismantled themselves for parts to help the early colonists, but the Observer could not carry out its program as long as it had a living passenger. It was required to remain intact. The man who damaged the Observer also was a master psychiatrist, who used his knowledge of human weakness to erect a Cult—only a religious institution would be conservative enough over the centuries—a Cult to worship the Sleeping God, and dedicated to keeping the Observer ship untouched, and in working order. The entire Gorgzidian society, its history and culture, was established merely so that a working Primordial ship would be preserved to the present day.

  “And of course these ships were all connected to the positive energy of the Stability Sphere system back in the Shadow Galaxy: That is how they were preserved when they passed though the Shadow Effect englobing that galaxy two thousand million years ago. And the circuits which control the Stability Spheres are therefore intact, and were allowed to fall into Enro’s hands: Enro was able to cross to the Shadow Galaxy much more quickly than the awkward and experimental ship you were on, because, among other things, the Observer had perfect understanding of the engine operation. It was a small matter to activate the Spheres, attune them to the proper frequencies of non-being, make contact with the Ydd—and to place X in a position contiguous to all shadow-segments in the shadow-space to kill you when you appeared. Other bits of the Primordial technology, such as this shadow-armor which prevents all distortion effects, the Observer turned over to Enro’s scientists.

  “The Observer helped Enro because it was programmed to do so, but it was also programmed to help me find Lavoisseur, the primordial being the Gorgzidians call Ptath. It helped Eldred Crang, once Eldred found the galactic base on Venus, enter the se
rvice of the Greatest Empire as a double agent and it also helped him arrange the armistice which ended the galactic war. You were there when the Observer aided your plan to stop the Follower. But what you do not know is that this same Observer kept intact the Null-A nervemanipulation technology that served as the model for the first Games Machine constructed six hundred years ago by a figure history named de Lany—another name for Lavoisseur-Ptath. A technology it gave to him. Someone, something, programmed the Observer to work against Enro and the Ydd. Your Chessplayer.”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head. “It never told me, and I do not have the control over energy you do which enables you to dominate the minds of machines, so I could not force it to respond. Our relationship was a little one-sided: The Observer was the one who told me where the body of Gosseyn Four was hidden, and ordered me to move it into my rooms at the Imperial Palace on Gorgzid. It knew Enro was going to kill you.”

  “And why did you obey its orders?”

  She shrugged again. “Walter asked me to.”

  “Walter?”

  “Walter S. de Lany. The man you call Lavoisseur.”

  Gosseyn turned to the Games Machine. “What do you make of all this?”

  The Games Machine replied, “Relatively unimportant. You are facing two strict time limits. First, if Enro discovers you are still connected with the Sphere at Accolon, he can induce a shadow-effect to cut you off. At the moment, your range in space and time is intergalactic, and thousands of years, an opportunity you dare not squander. Second, the activity in your extra brain is not stable: You are engaged in fighting a war with the Ydd involving more mass-energy than can be accounted for in our current understanding of the universe. We assume that you are unconsciously manipulating the great mass of non-identified matter outside of time-space to fight the Ydd, or to deflect Ydd attacks. There is no evidence that this situation will remain stable. The Ydd may simply overwhelm the number of possible interconnections in your nervous system before long, even from your current highly accelerated frame of reference. You must act at once.”