The Gentle Seduction

by Marc Stiegler

  As the melodies suffused her mind they intermingled, sometimes playing upon one another in a concordance of point and counterpoint. Once, such a duet evoked from several masterpieces a harmony, which surged to drive the cadence of a grander euphony, that captured and empowered an even greater polyphony, filling her mind with a symphony of symphonies. And on a thousand planets, with a thousand bodies and a thousand voices, she leapt in the air and filled the sky with lilting laughter, a chorus of joy that spanned the arm of a galaxy.

  Returning to ground on those scattered planets of distant stars, she felt surprised by her outburst. She marveled at herself. In her childhood she never would have laughed in such a way. She had once been so quiet it had been easy to think she was shy. The millennia had changed her, and she was delighted; how sad it would have been, never to express one s deepest joy!

  Still, she was a woman of simple tastes. In earlier times some would have called her sturdy. Others might have called her childlike.

  Yet these were not fair descriptions; better to think of her in the terms of ancient mythology. She was an elemental, almost a force of nature, with a core of simplicity that mocked overeager acceptance yet offered adaptability, that rejected panic yet always guaranteed caution.

  Her elemental qualities were vital, humanity had come to realize. Though the needles traveling through space never found other intelligent beings, they had found scattered remains of what had once been intelligence. Other species had come up to Singularity and had died there.

  Some had died in a frenzy, as the builders of new technologies indulged in an orgy of inventions, releasing just one that destroyed them all. Others had died in despair, as fear-filled leaders beat down the innovators, strangling them, putting the future beyond their grasp. The fear-ridden species settled into a long slide of despair that ended with degenerate descendants no longer able to dream.

  Only those who knew caution without fear, only those marked by her elemental form of prudence, made it through. Only humanity had survived.

  And humanity had not survived unscathed. Terrible mistakes had been made, many lives had been lost. Even millennia later there still remained a form of death—or perhaps not death, but a form of impenetrable isolation. The dreams could become too strong, so strong that the individual lived in dreams always, never reaching out to touch reality. Many of her friends from the early millennia had lost themselves to these enchanted infinities leading nowhere.

  She did not fear such dream-bound death. Seeing the span and deep intensity of her own dreams, she could almost understand those who wrapped themselves within and disappeared. But the new things humanity found every day were just as wonderful. The volume of space touched by the needleships grew at a geometric pace, opening hundreds of star systems. Even on days when few strikingly new systems were found, there were new planets, constructed by artists, awaiting her exploration. And the new things she learned in the realm of the mind matched these treasures and more.

  Someday, she believed she, too, would dream an endless dream. She did not want to live forever. But the beginning of that dream was far away.

  The new meaning of death was complemented by a new meaning of life. This new meaning was extremely complex, even for her; life dealt with wholes much greater than the sums of their parts. But she understood it intuitively—it was easy to distinguish an engineering intelligence, good only for manufacture, from a member of the community, even though that member might once have been just an engineering intelligence as well. New members of humanity usually came to life this way: an intelligence designed as a machine or an artwork expressed a special genius, a genius that deserved the ability to appreciate itself through self-awareness. When this happened, the psychological engineers would add those elements of the mind needed for life.

  In this manner her great-great-grandchildren had been born. Her great-grandchildren had envisioned them, giving them a parent's loving care long before they had even been designed. Only the best characteristics of the minds of her family had been passed on to them. They were very different from her, but not quite alien. With time she learned to love them as they loved her.

  The day came to say goodbye to her oldest friend. With her wonderful old Earth-born body, she returned to Earth to hike Rainier one last time: Rainier, whose surface lay so cold and eternal, was boiling within. With dawn, she knew, the boiling fury would break through, in the greatest volcanic event in Earthly centuries. She stood at the summit the day before the end and surveyed the horizon. Her feeling of appreciation grew till she thought she would burst. This was home in a sense few others could now understand.

  She descended. A marmot met her on the way down; she swooped him into her arms and carried him to safety, though he fought her and cut her and it seemed her bleeding would never end. Still, the marmot could not prevent her from saving him.

  She had considered saving the Mountain itself; she could, she knew. She could lace the Mountain with billions of tiny tubes, capillaries so small no living thing would notice. She could extract the heat, cool the heart.

  But to deny the Mountain its moment of brilliance seemed not right: perpetual sameness was never right, though change might often be wrong.

  So the next day, she and the marmot watched the eruption from afar. It was as beautiful as she had expected. And though the aftermath was gray and dreary, she knew that in a very short time the marmot's children would return to the Mountain, and a new kind of beauty would grow there.

  Nor was the Mountain truly lost. Even as her Earth-born body returned to her asteroid circling Jupiter, she built an exact replica of the Mountain: an image, molecule for molecule, of the Mountain's surface the day before it erupted. When her body returned, she joined the Mountain, to walk there forever, in another part of her eternal dream.

  Haikku, her loyal companion, was long dead; but she traced the descendants of his descendants. She arranged a mating. A new pup was born with Haikku's genes, in the image of Haikku. And so Haikku2 came to join her on the slopes of Mt. Rainier, on the orbit of Jupiter.

  One day two needleships met in space. This was not uncommon; needles from different launchers often crossed paths and were easy to spot, with the hundreds of kilometers of molecular sensor webs they spun.

  But this meeting was special, for one of the needles had no link to a human. It belonged to aliens.

  Aliens! Wild hopes and wilder fears rocked the human community. She watched the hysteria calmly, confident it would pass and wisdom would rule.

  The needles passed one another, too fast to meet. They swerved in long, graceful arcs to a distant rendezvous.

  A sense of calm, and prudence, returned to humanity. They selected a contact team to break off and meet the aliens.

  The needles closed. In their last moments they danced in a tight orbit about one another, a dance of creation: for though the needles died, a bubble formed where they met—a communications bubble.

  The two communities, human and alien, reached out. They touched—but the touch was jarring. Bafflement ruled. The deadlock of confusion ensued.

  She watched with interest. She felt sorrow that it was not going well, but her confidence remained.

  Then from the contact team she received a Call. They needed her; they needed her elemental resilience and adaptability.

  But in needing her elemental nature, they needed more than she had ever given before. They did not need the thoughts or calculations of her mind: they needed the basic traits of her personality, the very core of her being. To reinforce the team, she would have to expand her communication channels, open them so wide that what she thought, they would also think; there would be no filter protecting her internal thoughts. Far worse, what others thought, she would think; there would be no filter protecting her internal memories. It seemed to her it would be easy for her memories to get scrambled; she would rather die. And so for the first time in millennia, she was afraid. The team asked others of the community that held her special strength to come wit
h them instead; they, too, were afraid.

  Meanwhile humanity was failing. The anticipation, the yearning, the hope for contact with new beings developed a tinge of desperation.

  They showed her how easy it was to open the channels of her mind—but more, they showed her again and again how easy it was to close them. They did not believe they would need her for long, thousands of milliseconds at most. They guaranteed she would be fine afterward. Reluctantly, she agreed.

  She opened her mind; the shock of raw contact stunned her. A moment's near-panic like that of her first exploration of Jupiter returned.

  And then she was moving, there within the team, and she grew accustomed. The sensation reminded her of jumping into a mountain lake—the cold plunge that blotted out all thought, the sluggish warmth of her muscles responding, the passing of the coldness from her awareness as she concentrated on the act of swimming. She swam among the members of her team.

  Here she found many tasks to perform, the calming and soothing of a myriad of panicked souls as they plunged into the ice-cold lake of alien minds. She became the muscle that supplied the warmth, that allowed the awareness of the team to move beyond the cold, to swim.

  As the team responded, the sensation of cold changed to one of warmth, a merry warmth, and she was a bubble floating on a wide, warm ocean, clinging and bouncing with the other bubbles, some friends, some human, some alien. Then they were bubbles of champagne, effervescent, expanding and floating away.

  She floated to a greater distance; they no longer needed her; she was free to go. She closed the channels to her mind with slow grace, as would a woman walking from the sea through the sucking motions of the surf. She found herself alone again.

  In those first moments of solitude, being alone seemed unnatural, as unnatural as the communion had seemed earlier; she felt the coldness that comes after a swim, when breeze strikes bare skin. She shuddered.

  Was she still herself?

  Of course you are. You are all you have ever been, and more.

  The answer was her own, but it had once belonged to another person. For a moment she stumbled; perfect memory did not guarantee instantaneous memory, and she was seeking thoughts from her infancy. Then she remembered.

  Jack!

  She remembered, he had known that she'd remember.

  What had happened to Jack?!

  Could she have missed him all these years? She initiated a search of the community, but knew its futility even as it began; he could not, would not have remained hidden.

  Yet her need to know him again grew stronger as she opened more of her long unbidden memories.

  She searched swiftly back through the annals of history. Her search slowed suddenly to a crawl as she reached the early moments of Singularity: before the dawn of civilization, records had been crudely kept, with links insufficient to allow swift scanning. An analogy to cobwebs made her smile for a moment.

  Only a handful of machines maintained this ancient knowledge, older machines in older places. Her search plunged to the surface of Earth. There, in a place once called California, all the remnants of prehistoric information had been collected. But it had not been collated. It would take much time to find Jack in this maze. But she had the time.

  A salary report from a corporation of long ago . . . an article on accelerated technology's impact on the individual . . . a program design with its inventor's initials . . . and suddenly she found him, in a richly interconnected tiny tapestry within the sparsely connected morass. She read all of it, rapidly, as if she were inhaling fresh air after too long a stay in a stale room.

  Jack had saved her life, she realized. The capsule she had taken so long ago to heal her backache, that first step on the road to the life she now knew, was his—he had designed the machine that designed the machine that designed that pill. It turned out that he had learned much from her on that day when they walked quietly amidst the lush green wilderness. And it had taken her all these millennia to learn what he had known even then.

  From her, Jack had learned the importance of making technology's steps small, making its pieces bite-size. He had learned this as he watched, in her disbelieving eyes, her reaction to the world he had planned.

  For those who loved technology and breathed of it deeply, small bite-size steps were not important. It would have been easy to callously cast off those who did not understand or who were afraid. But Jack had thought of her, and had not wanted her to die.

  Reading these glimpses of his past, she grew to know Jack better than she had ever known him in life. With her growing wisdom, she soon understood even the clarity of organization that encompassed this lone swatch of antiquity: the clarity, too, was of his making. He had believed in her. He had believed that one day she would search for him here. And he had known that, when she arrived, her expanded powers of perception would enable her to understand the message embodied in the clarity, and in all his work.

  I loved you, you know, Jack told her across the millennia.

  She wanted to answer. But there was no one to hear.

  It hurt her to think of him lost forever, and she had not felt hurt for a very long time. Feverish, she worked to rebuild him. The Earth-bound computers gave her all the help they had to give, every memory of every moment of Jack they had ever recorded. She traced her own memories, perfect now, of every word he spoke, every phrase he uttered, every look he gave her in their long walks. She built a simulation of him, the best and most perfect simulation she could build with all her resources, resources far beyond those of a million biological human minds. It was illegal to build a simulation such as this, one of the few laws recognized by the community, but this did not deter her.

  The simulation looked like Jack; it talked like Jack; it even laughed like Jack. But it was not Jack. She then understood why it was illegal to build such a simulation; she also understood why it was not a law that needed to be enforced: such simulations always failed.

  Jack was gone.

  What could she do?

  What did she have to do? Suddenly she realized how silly the simulation had been: how could she have hoped to get closer to him, than to live his vision of the future?

  Only one small action, one appropriate action, remained that she could perform. She could remember forever.

  And so, just as a part of her lived forever on the Mountain, just as a part of her lived forever singing, so now she maintained a part of her that would spend all its moments remembering her earlier moments with him. She became in part a living memorial to the one who brought her here.

  And though no one could hear, the essence of her memory would have been easy to express: Jack, I love you.

  She turned her attention to the living members of humanity. There were many other places in the community, she realized, where the techniques she employed in contact with the aliens could help; there were many places where they needed her elemental force invested with the fullness of such expanded communion. She was eager to go. But still a question remained.

  Would she still be herself?

  The answer Jack had wrought so long ago welled up from within, her rightful inheritance of his understanding. Part of the answer, she knew, lay within another question:

  Are you still yourself even now? Were you still yourself even when you were twenty-five?

  She looked back with the vision that perfect memory brings. She remembered who she had been when she was twenty-five; she remembered who she had been when she was just ten. Amusingly, she also remembered how, at twenty-five, she had erroneously remembered her thoughts of age ten. The changes she had gone through during those fifteen years of dusty antiquity were vast, perhaps as vast as all the changes she had accepted in the millennia thereafter. Certainly, considering the scales involved, she had as much right today to think of herself as the same person as she had then. Expanded communion would not destroy her; she was her own bubble no matter how frothy the ocean might become.

  At least, this first time she had remained her
own bubble. Would it always be so?

  She dipped into communion, and withdrew to ask the question. She found the answer, and it was good. She dipped again, for a longer time; and still the answer was good, perhaps better.

  She dipped much longer still and asked one more time. This time she understood. The answer was so simple, so glorious, so joyful, that she did not ask the question again for a billion years.

  And by then, it just didn't seem to matter.

  Hypermedia and the Singularity

  Hypermedia is one of the technologies that will take us into the future of "The Gentle Seduction "

  I wrote this article about hypermedia just before writing "Seduction." I had come to realize about a year earlier that hypermedia was going to be a very important technology, and I had set out to make myself an expert in it. I went so far as to write a hypermedia version of one of my novels.

  Despite this, I did not realize at the time just how central a role hypermedia would play in my own future. Xanadu, which gets a one-paragraph mention here, received financial backing from Autodesk (one of the quietest but biggest software companies in the world) the month after 1 completed "The Gentle Seduction." A month after that, 1 met the Xanadu team for the first time. This team was composed of some of the smartest, most talented people I had ever met. But though they were very bright, none of them had ever managed a software engineering project of this size to success.

  I, however, had.

  So from Xanadu I received a call. They made me an offer 1 could not refuse. So I moved to California, to build great software, to hurry my vision to fruition.

  You see, I do not merely wish to write about Singularity. I wish to experience it.

  I cut a number of passages from the final drafts of "The Gentle Seduction" because, in the end, there was no place to put them. One of those was the following, an observation she makes shortly before entering expanded communion:

  "The population had stabilized at just a bit over a trillion individuals. A trillion seemed about the right size for a community: large enough to allow some diversity, but small enough so that you could get to know each member of the community quite well."