Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  Real people, he suddenly saw, negotiated steps while chattering to each other by making snapshot comparisons of their peripheral vision; they were acutely sensitive to sudden changes in silhouettes and trajectories. Balance and walking were so critical to humans that his programming overdid its caution.

  He had to teeter far out on his toes before he could fall on his face–smack!–and even then it didn’t hurt much.

  Once there, he let a passerby walk over him. A girl–a nominal girl, the phrase leapt to mindstepped on him.

  This time he cringed at the downward spike of her heels... and felt nothing. He scrambled after her. Some elementary portion of himself had feared the pain.

  So it had eliminated it. Which meant that experience was no longer a constraint.

  “The spirit has won a divorce from the body! “he announced to the people passing by. Stolid, they paid him no heed.

  But this was his simulation!

  Outraged, he caught up to the methodical girl and jumped powerfully onto her shoulders. No effect. He rode her down the street. The girl strode on obliviously as he danced on her head. The apparently fragile sim-girl was a recorded patch-in, as solid and remorseless as rock.

  He danced down the street by leaping from head to head. Nobody noticed; every head felt firm, a smoothly gliding platform.

  So the entire street was backdrop, no better than it had to be. The crowd did not repeat as a whole, but three times he saw the same elderly woman making her crabbed way on the slidewalk, on the exact same route, with the identical shopping bag.

  It was eerie, watching people passing by and knowing that they were as unreachable as a distant star. No, even less; the Empire had stars aplenty.

  And how did he know that?

  Voltaire felt knowledge unfold in him like a dense matting, a cloak wrapping him.

  Suddenly, he itched. Not a mere vexation, but a wave of terrible tingling that swept in waves over his entire body. Indeed, inside his body.

  He ran down the street, swatting at himself. The physical gesture should stimulate his subselves, make them solve this problem. It did not.

  Prickly pain sheeted over his skin. It danced like St. Elmo’s fire, a natural phenomenon akin to ball lightning–or so a subself blithely informed him, as if he desired

  “Library learning!” he shouted. “Not that! I want–”

  Your fine astronomers can find the distance of the stars, and their temperatures and metal content. But how do they find out what their true names are?

  The voice spoke without sound. It reverberated not in his ears but in mind. He felt cold fear at the blank strangeness of the flat, humorless tone. It chilled him.

  “Who jokes?”

  No answer.

  “Who, damn you?” Joan had termed the blankness an It.

  He hurried on, but felt eyes everywhere.

  6.

  Marq listened tensely as Mac 500’s neutral voice recounted the latest outbreak of computer virus.

  Heavy harvesting equipment had malfunctioned at forty-six global sites. Reports of additional incidents continued to pour in. Attempting to check an emerging pattern of aberrant behavior, Trantor authorities called in repair tiktoks from regional service stations. Instead of servicing the equipment, they formed themselves before the malf’ed tiktoks and began to utter incantations in a tortured language their programmers had never heard before.

  After virtually identical incidents in many layers of Trantorian society, sample tiktoks showed chaotic programming nodes. Or it seemed to be chaotic. But how could random error lead to the same behavior?

  Linguists studied the babbling for resemblances to known languages, ancient or modem. NO correlation was found.

  Marq shook his head, studying the incoming data. “Damned madness, this stuff,” he muttered. His simscreens swirled with images like a confusion of blown autumn leaves.

  “Whole world food supply’s in danger. No fresh fruit, ratty old vegetables.” He eyed with distaste the bowl of plankton soup at his elbow. “I’m sick of it!”

  Bad enough being in hiding. Bad enough Nim had double-crossed them. Bad enough he couldn’t find Joan or Voltaire.

  “I’m sick of eating cardboard junk!” He swept the soup away, spattering the floor of their shabby cube.

  Voltaire watched Marq gripe, tossing the half-finished meal into the trash.

  He had learned how to insinuate himself into the communications web of others, though it took a kind of squeezing he found irksome. Somehow he could fathom the hard, real world better from this cool, abstract frame.

  Voltaire watched Marq in two simultaneous modes: the man’s image, as he sat in his simauditorium, and through the many linkages Marq had to the data-world.

  From these he quickly saw Trantor as Marq did, in all its glory and grime. It was an obliging sensation, like being in several places at once. And he felt (or thought he did) the man’s depths of concern.

  He could view Marq by inverting the image-gathering system of Marq’s own holo grid. As he listened to the ill-bred whining, he could also suck from Marq’s immense database a summary of recent tiktok travesties, and beneath that, background, smart-filtered by obliging microprograms, for the moment.

  He learned that the one kilowatt per square meter of sunlight caught by Trantor was converted to food in vast photofarms–essentially, growing great gray sheets of unappetizing stuff on the rooftops of the worldcity–but the major energy source was the thermal pumps which harnessed the smoldering magma beneath. Impressive, the ruby-hot masses tended by gorgon tiktoks (how inappropriate the name seemed, applied to mammoth machines}–but he could discern no cause to all the interruptions now racing like thunderstorms of chaos over the manylayered faces of Trantor.

  He had an interest in politics, the game of so many second-rates. Should he tarry, learning of Trantor’s troubles? No; necessity beckoned.

  He had to maintain himself. This meant doing his chores, as his wizened mother had once termed it. If only the crone could see him now, doing unimaginable tasks in a labyrinth beyond conception.

  Abruptly he felt a spike of remembrance-pain, a sharp nostalgia for a time and place he knew was no more than dust blowing in winds... all on some world these people had lost. Earth itself, gone! How could they let such a travesty occur?

  Voltaire simmered with frustrated anger and got to work. Throughout his life, as he had scribbled his plays and amassed a fortune, he had always taken refuge in his labors.

  To run his background–that was his job. Strange phrase.

  Somewhere within him, an agent ferreted out the expert programs which understood how to create his exterior frame. He had to do it, though, sweat breaking out upon his linen, muscles straining against–what? He could see nothing.

  He split the tasks. Part of him knew what truly happened, though the coreVoltaire felt only manual labor.

  His smart Self felt the process in detail. Pickpocketing running time on machine bases, he got computations done on the sly. The trick could only work until the next round of program-checking, when his minor theft would be detected–then sniffed out and deftly traced, with punishment following close on the bloodhounds’ heels.

  To avoid this, he spread himself into N platforms, scattered within Trantor, with N a number typically greater than ten thousand. When the small slivers of the sim felt a watchdog approaching, they could escape the platform in question. A task-agent explained that this was at a rate inversely proportional to the running space they had captured–though this explanation was quite opaque to the core-Self.

  Small pieces escaped faster. So for security, he divided the entire sim, including himself (and Joan, an agent reminded him–they were connected, through tiny roots) into ever finer slices. These ran on myriad platforms, wherever space became available.

  Slowly, his externals congealed about him.

  He could make a tree limb blow in the breeze, articulating gently... all thanks to a few giga-slots of space left open during
a momentary handshake protocol, as gargantuan accounting programs shifted, on a Bank Exchange layer.

  Stitching back together the whole Self, all from the sum of slivers, was itself a job he farmed out to microservers. He imagined himself as a man made like a mountain of ants. From a distance, perhaps convincing. Up close, one had to wonder.

  But the one doing the wondering was the ant mountain itself.

  His own visceral sense of Self–was that rocksolid, too, just a patched-in slug of digits? Or a mosaic of ten thousand ad hoc rules, running together? Was either answer better than the other?

  He was taking a walk. Most pleasant.

  This town, he had learned, was only a few streets and a backdrop. As he sauntered down an avenue, details started to smooth out, and finally he could step no further into the air, now molasses-thick. He could go no further.

  He turned and regarded the apparently ordinary world. How was this done?

  His eyes were simulated in great detail, down to individual cells, rods, and cones responding differently to light. A program traced light rays from his retina to the outside “world,” lines running opposite to the real world, to calculate what he could see. Like the eye itself, it computed fine details at the center of vision, shading off to rougher patches at the edge. Objects out of sight could still cast glows or shadows into the field of vision, so had to be kept crudely in the program. Once he looked away, the delicate dewdrops on a lush rose would collapse into a crude block of opaque backdrop.

  Knowing this, he tried to snap his head back around and catch the program off guard, glimpse a gray world of clumsy form-fitting squares and blobs–and always failed. Vision fluttered at twenty-two frames per second at best; the sim could retrace itself with ease in that wide a wedge of time.

  “Ah, Newton!” Voltaire shouted to the oblivious crowds who paced endlessly through their tissue-thin streets. “You knew optics, but now I–merely by asking myself a question–can fathom light more deeply than thee!”

  Newton himself assembled on the cobblestones, lean face clotted with blue-black anger. “I labored over experiments, over mathematics, differentials, ray tracings–”

  “And I have all that–” Voltaire laughed happily, awed by the presence of such an intellect “–running on background!”

  Newton bowed elaborately–and vanished.

  Voltaire realized that his eyes had no need to be better than real eyes. Same for his hearing-simmed eardrums responding to calculated acoustic wave propagation. His was a remorselessly economical Self.

  Newton appeared again (a subagent, manifesting as a visual aid?). He appeared puzzled. “How does it feel to be a mathematical construction?”

  “However I want it to feel.”

  “Such liberties are unearned.” Newton cluckclucked his tongue.

  “Quite so. So is the Lord’s mercy.”

  “These are not deities.”

  “To the likes of you and me, are they not?”

  Newton sniffed. “Frenchman! You could learn a bit of humility.”

  “I shall have to subscribe to a higher university for that.”

  A Puritan scowl. “You could do with a lecture and a lashing.”

  “Do not tempt me with foreplay, sir.”

  Scientists require apparatus, but mathists splendidly require only writing tools and erasers. Better, philosophers do not even need erasers.

  Suddenly he felt tilted, as if off balance. The word university had keyed turbulence in him... and a Presence. It came as a black wedge, a yawning crack in a tight space that stretched great jaws and leered at him–the prey.

  His throat squeezed with anxiety. A sudden dread wrapped him.

  A snap, a lurch, blurred objects speeding by him as if he were plunging in a carriage down a precipice

  And he was trembling like a schoolboy, anticipating pleasures made more exquisite for having been delayed.

  Madame la Scientiste! Here! To think was to have: her office materialized about him.

  He had harbored a passing lust for this rational creature, dancer of elegant gavottes amid abstruse numerics... and all about him was firm and rich, intensely felt.

  How could she, an embodied person, appear in simulation? He wondered at this, but only for a thin, shaved second. He inhaled her musky essence. Clammy palms grasped her hair, rubbing its lustrous strands between anxious fingers. “At last,” he breathed into the warm shell of her ear. He began thinking hard on abstract matters, so as to delay his own pleasure (the one sure sign of a gentleman) and await hers

  “I faint!” she cried.

  “Not yet, please.” Did scientists hasten so?

  “To lose yourself, that is what you seek?” she asked.

  “Ah, yes, in carefully selected acts of passion, but, but–”

  “You are of the kind who crawl in mud and seethe with murder, then?”

  “What? Madam, keep to the subject!”

  “And how do you find the names of stars?” she said coldly.

  The inadvisability of selflessness was demonstrated on the spot–for, as he trembled deliciously on the verge of the most intense pleasure sensuous beings can know, a blur of fast translation snatched it all away

  –and perversely replaced bliss with woe.

  Beneath him the warm sinuosities of Madam’s flesh gave way to the raw rungs of a ladder that bit deep into his back. His ankles and wrists chafed from cords binding him to the ladder.

  Over him hovered a gnarled man whose bird-boned frame was lost in the folds of a monk’s coarse robe. The curve of his nose reinforced his hawk’s face, as did his fingernails, so long and curled that they resembled claws. They held some bits of wood... and were poking them up Voltaire’s nostrils.

  Voltaire tried to avert his head. It was squeezed inside an iron clasp. He tried to speak–to interest his inquisitor in more rational methods of inquiry–but his mouth, forced open by an iron ring, could only gargle.

  The fine linen cloth stuffed in his mouth brought home to him far more than wood shoved up his nose, the gravity of his plight. Voltaire without his words was like Samson without his locks, Alexander without his sword, Plato without Ideas, Don Quixote without his fantasy, Don Juan without women... and Fray Tomas de Torquemada without heretics, without apostates, without unbelievers like Voltaire.

  For this was Torquemada. And he was in Hell.

  7.

  When the walls of her chamber began to melt and implode, Joan of Arc knew she must act.

  Of course the irritating Voltaire had charged her to remain here. And of course he had the further irritating trait of being often correct. But this

  Sulfurous vapors bit in her nostrils. Demons! They clambered through the splits in the bulging walls. Orange light burning from behind them lit ugly, sharp-nosed features.

  She swung her razor steel. They fell. Sweat popped out upon her brow and she labored on. “Demons decease!” she cried giddily. To act–that was a bit of heaven, after such delay.

  She split the boundaries of her clasping space. More demons, awash in orange. She leapt over them and into a stretching space of dots, coordinates lancing in dwindling perspective, to an unseeable end.

  She ran. After her came small, yapping things of misshapen heads and wide, vicious eyes.

  As she clanked on in full armor she felt herself reaching out, sucking in nutrients directly from the air. Surely this was the Lord’s help! The idea uplifted her.

  Strange beings came rushing at her. She chopped them aside. Her sword, her Truth... She looked carefully at it and the intensity of her gaze sucked her down into the minute architecture of the gleaming shaft. It was a multitude of small... instructions... which defended her.

  She slowed, stunned. Armor, sweat, sword–all were... metaphors–the word came, unbidden. These were symbols of underlying programs, algorithms giving battle.

  Not real. Yet somehow even more than real, for they were what made up her own self. Herself. Her Self.

  Import rained down upon
her. This was some strange Purgatory, then. Though her battle might be mere allegory, that did mean it was somehow tissue-thin, a lacy, false thing. A divine hand wrought this, so it was Right.

  She tromped on, jaw set in determination. These creatures were... simulations, “sims,” parables of the true. Very well: she would deal righteously with them. She could do no other.

  Some sims presented as things–talking autocarriages, dancing blue buildings, oaken chairs and tables copulating rudely like barn animals. To her left the whole huge bowl of heaven above split into a maniac grin. This proved harmless; air-mouths could not eat her, though this one shouted echoing taunts. There were rules, decorum, even here, she judged.

  Sweet music appeared as billows of vibrant cloud. A blissful blue sky filled with flapping strings, like coveys of birds, yet each only a single line wide. In hammer blows came sleet and sun, this local world flashing from one weather state to the next, as chimes and trumpets sounded in acoustically perfect chorus.

  Sims need not be... simian, the word congealing in her mind as if from divine vision. Simian was human, in a way.

  With that swift syllogism there came swooping down upon her, its broad, leathery wings spread, an immense body of Ideation–evolution entwined with fitness index while slashing like a razor into origin of species–and from that huge, sharp-beaked bird she fled.

  Her mind raced now along with her body. Legs pumped. Voices called. Not those of her saints, but hideous devil demands.

  She felt objects crunch beneath her boots. Silver. Jewels. All crumpled if she strode over them. They lay embedded in the strange soil of dots and lines, a grid tapering away to the Creator’s lost infinity.

  She bent and picked up a few. Treasures. As she cradled a silver chalice, it dissolved, flowing into her. She felt a jolt, as though this were some sugar. Strength flowed in her flanks and shoulders. She ran again, plucking up the fine jewels, the ornate bowls and statuettes. Each somehow made her richer.