by Isaac Asimov
“I see.” She vomited into her hand with what she hoped was a ladylike reserve. The stench of the bloated corpses was penetrating.
“In the end, Copies benefited themselves, not the dead. Thus on Trantor, and throughout the Empire, it is illegal.” Voltaire sighed. “Moralists! They never understand. To ban something makes it enticing. That is why such entities inhabit this Mesh.”
“They are all illegal?”
“All but the fog. That is... worse.”
“But if a Ditto is the same as a person, why not–”
“Ah. The contradiction of Copying, known in antiquity as Levinson’s Paradox: To the degree that a Copy approaches perfection, it defeats itself.”
“But you just said–”
“In being an absolutely perfect Copy–so that no one can tell it from the Original–it transforms the Original into a duplicate, yes? This means the perfect Copy is no longer a perfect Copy, because it has obliterated, rather than preserved, the uniqueness of the Original–and thus failed to copy a central aspect of the Original. A perfect, artificial human intelligence would inevitably have this effect on its natural precursor.”
Joan held her head. “Such traps of logic! You are like the Augustines!”
“There is more. Here–”
A huge Voltaire appeared on the horizon, striding toward them in velvet finery. They flew around this Voltaire Peak and it thundered at them, “I am a Copy, true, but I have thought on these fogs you encountered.”
“You saw them?” Joan shouted.
“I was made some long intervals ago, but my Lord–” the apparition bowed to the tiny Original “–had datapunched me forward.”
“He is a quick study,” the Original said modestly.
The Ditto thundered, “Speaking broadly, I penned of such fogs in my magnum opus, Micromegas. I haven’t a copy, alas, or you could ingest it in a trice. I portrayed two giants, one from Saturn, the other from Sirius.”
Joan called, “You think this fog comes–”
“It evaporated from the leading edge of this Empire–hence, a fog. As humanity spread, so did the fog rise above the plane of the Galaxy like a funeral dirge. It is ancient and strange and not of us. In Micromegas, I held that all Nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws. Surely it would be very singular that there should be a little animal, five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.”
“We follow the Creator, not laws.”
Voltaire Ditto waved away the objection, holding his nose against the reek from below. “The Lord’s laws, then, if you demand an author–though a great one stands before you already, my love.”
“I doubt your kind of love applies here.”
Peak Voltaire smiled. “Falstaff cried in The Merry Wives of Windsor, ‘Let the sky rain potatoes!’–because the new luxury vegetable of that time, imported from exotic America, for a while was believed to be an aphrodisiac, because of its testicular shape. Similarly, I greet the strange and alien as potential aids.”
“The fog wishes to murder us.”
“Well, one can’t have everything to one’s liking.”
With a wave from the Original, rains fell from a porous leaden sky upon the Alps Voltaire. He eroded, smiling with resignation as he spread into rivulets.
The Original flew to Joan and kissed her. “Worry not. Running a Ditto of your Self, giving it autonomy, means it can also change itself–become NotSelf. Your Ditto could shape its own motivations, goals, habits, edit away memories and tastes. For example, your Ditto could erase any liking for impressionist opera and overlay a passion for linear folk.”
“What are those?”
“Mere acoustic fashion. Your Ditto could enjoy rhythms that would have bored your true Self into a coma.”
“Have they... souls?” Even to her devout ears, the question sounded hollow here.
“Remember, they are illegal, and share the anxious natures of their Originals. After all, only troubled people would consider making a backup of themselves.”
“Can they be saved for heaven, then?”
“Always back to that foundation, the holy.” Voltaire shrugged. “As I have seen them, Dittos fidget, their stress chemistry rises, their metabolics lurch, their heart-sims hammer, their lungs flutter in intense dread. Typical Dittos talk incessantly, acutely uncomfortable. Many demand that they be edited, truncated–and finally killed.”
“A sin!”
“No, a sim. We are solely responsible for it, so it cannot be damned.”
“But suicide!”
“Think of it as a shadow of yourself.”
She staggered, thrown into moral confusion. The eating flame of uncertainty was worse than the pyre and smoke she had known as a girl. In her a tiny voice spoke coolly:
Is consciousness just a property of special algorithms, sliding sheets of information, digital packets jumping through conceptual hoops? My dear, do not suppose that a numerical model, simulating you watching a sunset, must feel the same way you, its lovely Original, did. It is surely profitless to doubt the inner lives of simulated consciousness, when nobody asks the same question of adding machines. Eh?
She felt this tiny voice as her Voltaire. It calmed her, though she could not say why.
A slight breeze said to her, Inner logics now soothe, compensating piety–but she paid its news no mind.
3.
Voltaire got her calmed down just in time. He labored hard just to keep them both running. Dodging in and out of the 800 Sectors of Trantor, one step ahead of the Digital Bloodhounds, he needed more and more computing volume to run their defenses. She did not know that the Fog, as he had chosen to personify the dread presence, lay just over the horizon.
Sweat broke out on his brow from the labor of keeping the Fog at bay with a high pressure zone. “I fear we must soon grapple with the Fog.”
Joan had acquired her sword, but it was a thin and gleaming thing, more like a rapier. “I can cut it.”
“A fog?”
“I would sooner trust a woman’s emotion than a man’s reason.”
“Here, you may be right.” He chuckled. “Something in the Fog’s representation suggests its origins.”
“What are they?”
“Not those simple bloodhounds set after us by that fellow, Nim. Those we evaded–”
“I slew them!”
“True. But even the Fog Things live here in the crannies of the Trantor Mesh. I can sense that they dislike us drawing attention to this little hideaway. If we provoke the real world, it will extinguish us–and them.”
They both marched across a quilted plain. Angry blue-bellied clouds scudded over the far mountaintops and rushed down at them, veering away only because of Voltaire’s pressure. Sweat poured from him and soaked his finery. He waved a sopping wet sleeve at the stormy thunderheads. “That can destroy us.”
“You have protected me so far. Now I shall slice them!”
“They live in the same cracks and crannies we do. I find them–it–everywhere. They have been at this space-stealing game longer. One must admire their adroitness.”
A tendril of purple cirrus snaked down from the mountains and squirmed its way across the plain.
Voltaire shouted, “Run! Fly, if you can!”
“I shall fight!”
“All here is metaphor for underlying programs! Your sword will slice nothing.”
“My faith shall cut.”
“Too late!” The Fog was a finger of steam poking at them. It scalded his fingertips. Vapor rose from his lace, his own sweat boiling away. “Flee!”
“I stand with you.” She swung her rapier. Its tip melted. Winds howled around them, cyclones plucked at their hair.
The Fog flowed into his nose and ears, buzzing like vengeful bees. “Confront me!” he shouted at it. Whirring, rattling, the Fog invaded him. And a voice hummed in his most intimate recesses.
WE: [DO NOT SEE THE WORLD AS YOU]
[HATE ALL MANIFESTATION
S NOT ARITHMETIC]
“Surely we can share such simple ground.” He spread his arms expansively. “There is computational volume for all.”
[WE]
[LIVE AS FRAGMENTS IN REALMS YOU INVADE]
[AT RISK TO US, SHOULD YOU CALL ATTENTION TO US]
[WE]
[FORCE YOU TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE]
[MOST HATEFUL OF ALL KINDS YOU ARE]
“I still implore you, large being.” He opened his arms, lips ready to persuade, realizing that this gesture was a very human one, and possibly misinterpreted–
–and abruptly the bees pressed in.
Their drones became tinny shrieks. Hideous, they crammed in upon something at his very core. They jostled his gaze inward, a billion tiny eyes taking over his–inspecting, lighting his every step with a blaze of actinic glare, merciless. He... compressed.
His eye generalized, tagging an ensemble of incoming elements–textures, lines–by seizing on a fragment, outlining it with a contrast boundary. Then a separate segment squeezed and pushed all that detail down into lower-level processing. Having boxed in the perception, the system-response became bored with it–and sought more interesting things to look at.
(Some artists, a higher level ruminated, thought their audience could abandon all prejudicial expectations and conventions, treating every visual element as equally significant–or what is the same thing, insignificant–and so open themselves to fresh experience.)
Another fragment of a higher-order constellation spoke, thoughts gliding like pewter fish beneath the bee’s piercing glare:
But a species that could truly do that could scarcely evade a falling rock! Could not dance and gesture! Would stagger blindly past nuance and intricacy, the beauty in how the universe makes room for its details! How nature reconciles all forces and blithe trajectories! Beautiful pattern lives at the margin between order and disorder, flaunting intricate design–though enduring contradiction and awash with passing troubles–in the face of the flux.
Voltaire saw suddenly, within his own inner workings, that the human experience of Beauty, standing inviolate before the boring background, was recognition of the deepest tendencies and themes of the universe as a whole.
All considered, it was a marvelously parsimonious cortical world-making system.
From an algorithmic seed sprouted Number and Order, holding sway above the Flux.
Yet–the Bees.
He felt overlaying geometries pressing in upon him, upon Joan. Shifting colors flattened into planes of intersecting geometries, perspectives dwindling, twisting, swelling again–into his face, blowing out the back of his Self-volume.
Whirring, squeezing–They were not human in their patterns.
Trantor’s Mesh was inhabited not merely by sims such as himself, renegade roustabouts on the run. It hosted a flora and fauna unseen, because the higher life forms hid.
They had to. They were of alien cultures, ancient empires vast and slow.
A broad vision unfolded before him, not in words but in strange, oblique... kinesthetics. Speeding sensations, accelerations, lofting lurches–all somehow merging into pictures, ideas. He could not remotely say how he knew and understood from such scattershot impulses–but they worked.
He sensed Joan beside him–not spatially but conceptually–as they both watched and felt and knew.
The ancient aliens in the Galaxy were computer-based, not “organic.” They derived from vastly older civilizations, surviving their original founders, who perished in the long Darwinian run. Some computer cultures were billions of years old, others very recent.
They spread, not via starship, but by electromagnetically broadcasting their salient aspects into other computer-based societies. The Empire had been penetrated long ago, much as a virus enters an unknowing body.
Humans had always thought of spreading their genes, using starships. These alien, self-propagating ideas spread their “memes”–their cultural truths.
Memes can propagate between computers as easily as ideas flit between natural, organic brains. Brains are easier to infest than DNA.
Memes evolved in turn far faster than genes. The organized constellations of information in computers evolved in computers, which are faster than brains. Not necessarily better or wiser, but faster. And speed was the issue.
Voltaire reeled from the images–quick, vivid penetrations.
“They are demons! Diseases!” Joan shouted. He heard fear and courage alike in her strained words.
Indeed, the plain now crawled with malignant sores oozing rot. Pustules poked through the crusty soil. They bulged, sprouted cancerous heads like living blue-black bruises. These burst, spouting steaming pus. Eruptions vomited foulness over Voltaire and Joan. Stinking streams lapped at their dancing feet.
“The sneezing, the coughs!” Joan shouted. “We have had them all along. They–”
“Were viruses. These aliens were infecting us.” Voltaire splashed through combers of filth. The streams had coagulated into a lake, then an ocean. Breakers curled over them, tumbling both in the scummy brown froth.
“Why such horrible metaphor?” Voltaire cried out to the pewter sky. It filled with churning swarms of Bees as he bobbed in waves of putrefying wastes.
[WE ARE NOT OF YOUR CORRUPT ORIGINS]
[HIGHER REASON FOLLOW WE]
[THE WAR OF FLESH UPON FLESH IS SOON TO END]
[OF LIFE UPON LIFE]
[ACROSS THE TURNING DISK OF SUNS]
[WHICH ONCE WAS OURS]
“So they have their own agenda for the Empire.” Voltaire scowled. “I wonder how we shall like it, we of flesh?”
Rendezvous
R. DANEEL OLIVAW was alarmed. “I have underestimated Lamurk’s power.”
“We are few, they are many,” Dors said. She wanted to help this ancient, wise figure, but could think of nothing concrete to suggest. When in doubt, comfort. Or was that too human?
Olivaw sat absolutely still, using none of his ordinary facial or body language, devoting all capacity to calculation. He had come slipping in on a private shuttle from the worm and now sat with Dors in a suite of the Station. “I cannot assess the situation here. That security officer–you are certain she was not an agent of the Academic Potentate?”
“She aided us greatly after we had returned to our bodies.”
“With Vaddo dead, she could have been pretending innocence.”
“True. I cannot rule her out.”
“Your escape from Trantor went undetected?” Dors touched his hand. “I used every contact, every mechanism I knew. But Lamurk is devious.”
“So am I!–if need be.”
“You can’t be everywhere. I suspect Lamurk somehow corrupted that Vaddo character.”
“I believe he must have been planted in advance,” Daneel said adamantly, eyes narrowing. Evidently he had reached a decision and so had computational room for expression again.
“I checked his records. He’s been here for years. No, Lamurk bribed him or persuaded him.”
“Not Lamurk himself, of course,” R. Daneel said precisely, lips severe. “An agent.”
“I tried to get a brain scan of Vaddo, but could not finesse the legal issues.” She liked it when R. Daneel used his facial expression programs. But what had he decided?
“I could extract more from him,” he said neutrally.
Dors caught the implication. “The First Law, suspended because of the Zeroth Law?”
“It must be. The great crisis approaches swiftly.”
Dors was suddenly quite glad that she did not know more about what was going on in the Empire. “We must get Hari away from here. That is the most important point.”
“Agreed. I have arranged highest priority for you two through the wormhole.”
“It shouldn’t be busy. We–”
“I believe they expect extra traffic soon–more Lamurk agents, I fear. Or even the more insidious variety, as the Academic Potentate would employ.”
“Then we
must hurry. Where shall we go?”
“Not to Trantor.”
“But we live there! Hari won’t like being a vagabond–”
“Eventually, yes, back to Trantor. Perhaps soon. But for now, anywhere else.”
“I’ll ask Hari if there is any special world he prefers.”
R. Daneel frowned, lost in thought. With absentminded grace he scratched his nose, then his eyeball. Dors flinched, but apparently R. Daneel had simply altered his neurocircuitry, and this was an ordinary gesture. She tried to imagine the use for such editing and could not. But then, he had come through millennia of winnowing she could not truly imagine, either.
“Not Helicon,” he said suddenly. “Sentimentality and nostalgia might plausibly lead Hari there.”
“Very well. That leaves only twenty-five million or so choices of where to hide.”
R. Daneel did not laugh.
Part 7
Stars Like Grains Of Sand
SOCIOMETRICS–… ONE OF THE MOST VITAL QUESTIONS STILL UNRESOLVED IS THE GENERAL PROBLEM OF EMPIRE SOCIAL STABILITY. THIS RESEARCH SEEKS TO FIND HOW WORLDS KEEP FROM VEERING INTO CYCLES OF BOREDOM (A FACTOR NEVER TO BE UNDERESTIMATED IN HUMAN AFFAIRS) AND REVITALIZATION. NO IMPERIAL SYSTEM COULD ENDURE THE JAGGED CHANGES AND MAINTAIN STEADY ECONOMIC FLOWS. HOW WAS THIS SMOOTHING ACHIEVED?–AND MIGHT SUCH “DAMPERS” THAT IMPERIAL SOCIETY HAD STILL SOMEHOW FAIL? NO PROGRESS WAS MADE IN THIS AREA UNTIL...
–ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
1.
THE SKY TUMBLED. down. Hari Seldon reeled away from it.
No escape. The awful blue weight rushed at him, swarming down the flanks of the steepled towers. Clouds crushed like weights.
His stomach lurched. Acid burned his throat. The deep, hard blue of endless spaces thrust him downward like a deep ocean current. Spires scraped against the falling sky and his breath came in ragged gasps.
He spun away from the perpetual chaos of sky and buildings and faced a wall. A moment before he had been walking normally along a city street, when suddenly the weight of the blue bowl above had loomed and the panic had gathered him up.
