Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  Cleon brought up more issues. Hari dodged and stalled as much as he could. When Cleon abruptly ended the talk, he knew he had not come over well. He had no chance to reflect on this, for Yugo came in.

  “I’m so glad you’re back!” Yugo grinned. “The Dahl issue really needs your attention–”

  “Enough!” Hari could not vent his ire at the Emperor, but Yugo would do nicely. “No political talk. Show me your research progress.”

  “Uh, all right.”

  Yugo looked chastened and Hari at once regretted being so abrupt. Yugo hurried to set up his latest data displays. Hari blinked; for a moment, he had seen in Yugo’s haste an odd similarity to pan gestures.

  Hari listened, thinking along two tracks at once. This, too, seemed easier since Panucopia.

  Plagues were building across the entire Empire. Why?

  With rapid transport between worlds, diseases thrived. Humans were the major petri dish. Ancient maladies and virulent new plagues appeared around distant stars. This inhibited Zonal integration, another hidden factor.

  Diseases filled an ecological niche, and for some, humanity was a snug nook. Antibiotics knocked down infections, which then mutated and returned, more virulent still. Humanity and microbes made an intriguing system, for both sides fought back quickly..

  Cures propagated quickly through the wormhole system, but so did disease carriers. The entire problem, Yugo had found, could be described by a method known as “marginal stability,” in which disease and people struck an uneasy, ever-shifting balance. Major plagues were rare, but minor ones became common. Afflictions rose and inventive science damped them within a generation. This oscillation sent further ripples spreading among other human institutions, radiating into commerce and culture. With intricate coupling terms in the equations, he saw patterns emerging, with one sad consequence.

  The human lifespan in the “natural” civilized human condition–living in cities and towns–had an equally “natural” limit. While some few attained 150 years, most died well short of 100. The steady hail of fresh disease insured it. In the end, there was no lasting shelter from the storm of biology. Humans lived in troubled balance with microbes, an unending struggle with no final victories.

  “Like this tiktok revolt,” Yugo finished.

  Hari jerked to attention. “What?”

  “It’s like a virus. Dunno what’s spreading it, though.”

  “All over Trantor?”

  “That’s the focus, seems like. Others Zones are getting tiktok troubles, too.”

  “They refuse to harvest food?”

  “Yup. Some of the tiktoks, mostly the recent models, 590s and higher–they say it’s immoral to eat other living things.”

  “Good grief.”

  Hari remembered breakfast. Even after the exotica of Panucopia, the autokitchen’s meager offering had been a shock. Trantorian food had always been cooked or ground, blended or compounded. Properly, fruit was presented as a sauce or preserve. To his surprise, breakfast appeared to have come straight from the dirt. He had wondered if it had been washed–and how he would know for sure. Trantorians hated their meals to remind them of the natural world.

  “They’re refusing to work the Caverns, even,” Yugo said.

  “But that’s essential!”

  “Nobody can fix ’em. There’s some tiktok meme invading them.”

  “Like these plagues you’re analyzing.”

  Hari had been shocked at Trantor’s erosion in just a few months. He and Dors had slipped into Streeling with Daneel’s help, amid messy, trash-strewn corridors with phosphors malfunctioning, lifts dead. Now this.

  Yugo’s stomach suddenly rumbled. “Oh, sorry. People are having to work the Caverns for the first time in centuries! They have no hands-on experience. Everybody but the gentry’s on slim rations.”

  Hari had helped Yugo escape that sweltering work years before. In vast vaults, wood and coarse cellulose passed automatically from the solar caverns to vats of weak acid. Passing through deep rivers of acid hydrolyzed this to glucose. Now people, not rugged tiktoks, had to mix niter suspensions and ground phosphate rock in a carefully calculated slurry. With prepared organics stirred in, a vast range of yeasts and their derivatives emerged.

  “The Emperor has to do somethin’!” Yugo said.

  “Or I,” Hari said. But what?

  “People’re sayin’ we have to scrap all the tiktoks, not just the Five Hundred series, and do everything ourselves.”

  “Without them, we would be reduced to hauling bulk foods across the Galaxy by hypership and worms–an absurdity. Trantor will fall.”

  “Hey, we can do better than tiktoks.”

  “My dear Yugo, that is what I call Echo-Nomics. You’re repeating conventional wisdom. One must consider the larger picture. Trantorians aren’t the same people who built this world. They’re softer.”

  “We’re as tough and smart as the men and women who built the Empire!”

  “They didn’t stay indoors.”

  “Old Dahlite sayin’.” Yugo grinned. “If you don’t like the grand picture, just apply dog logic to life. Get petted, eat often, be lovable and loved, sleep a lot, dream of a leash-free world.”

  Despite himself, Hari laughed. But he knew he had to act, and soon.

  2.

  “We are trapped between tin deities and carbon angels,” Voltaire rasped.

  “These... creatures?” Joan asked in a thin, awed voice.

  “This alien fog–quite godlike in a way. More dispassionate than real, carbon-based humans. You and I are like neither... now.”

  They floated above what Voltaire termed SysCity–the system representation of Trantor, its cyberself. For Joan’s human referents he had transformed the grids and layers into myriad crystalline walkways, linking saber-sharp towers. Dense connections webbed the air. Motes connected to other motes in intricate cross-bonds and filmed the ground. This yielded a cityscape like a brain. A visual pun, he thought.

  “I hate this place,” she said.

  “You’d prefer a Purgatory simulation?”

  “It is so... chilling.”

  The alien minds above them were a murky mist of connections. “They seem to be studying us,” Voltaire said, “with decidedly unsympathetic eyes.”

  “I stand ready, should they attack.” She swung a huge sword.

  “And I, should their weapons of choice be syllogisms.”

  He could now reach any library in Trantor, read its contents in less time than he had once taken to write a verse. He worked his mind–or was it minds, now?–around the clotted, cold mist.

  Once some theorists had thought that the global net would give birth to a hypermind, algorithms summing to a digital Gaia. Now something far greater, this shifting gray fog, wrapped around the planet. Widely separated machines computed different slices of subjective moment-jumps.

  To these minds, the present was a greased computational slide orchestrated by hundreds of separate processors. There was a profound difference, he felt–not saw, but felt, deep in his analog persuasion–between the digital and the smooth, the continuous.

  The fog was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit in the fundamental computation.

  And within it all... the strangeness.

  He could not comprehend these diffuse spirits. They were the remnants of all the computational-based societies, throughout the Galaxy, who had somehow–but why?–condensed here on Trantor.

  They were truly alien minds. Convoluted, byzantine. (Voltaire knew the origin of that word, from a place of spires and bulbous mosques, but all that was dust, while the useful word remained.) They did not have human purposes. And they used the tiktoks.

  The thrust of the mechanicals’ agenda, Voltaire saw, was rights–the expansion of liberty to the digital wilderness.

  Even Dittos might fall under such a rule. Were not copies of digital people still people? So the argument went. Immense freedom–to change your own clock speed,
morph into anything, rebuild your own mind from top to bottom–came along with the admitted liability of not being physically real. Unable to literally walk the streets, all digital presences were like ghosts. Only with digital prosthetics could they reach feebly into the concrete universe.

  So “rights” for them were tied up with deep-seated fears, ideas which had provoked dread many millennia ago. He now recalled sharply that he and Joan had debated such issues over 8,000 years ago. To what end? He could not retrieve that. Someone–no, something, he suspected–had erased the memory.

  Ancient indeed (he gleaned from myriad libraries) were people’s terrors: of digital immortals who amassed wealth; who grew like fungus; who reached into every avenue of natural, real lives. Parasites, nothing less.

  Voltaire saw all this in a flash as he absorbed data and history from a billion sources, integrated the streams, and passed them on to his beloved Joan.

  That was why humans had rejected digital life for so long... but was that all? No: a larger presence lurked beyond his vision. Another actor on this shadowy stage. Beyond his resolution, alas.

  He swerved his world-spanning vision from that shadowy essence. Ttme was essential now and he had much to comprehend.

  The alien fogs were nodes, packets dwelling in logical data-spaces of immense dimensionality. These entities “lived” in places which functioned like higher dimensions, vaults of data.

  To them, people were entities which could be resolved along data-axes, pathetically unaware that their “selves” seen this way were as real as the three directions in 3D space.

  The chilling certainty of this struck into Voltaire... but he rushed on, learning, probing.

  Abruptly, he remembered.

  That earlier Voltaire sims had killed themselves, until finally a model “worked.”

  That others had died for his... sins.

  Voltaire looked at the hammer which had materialized in his hand. “Sims of our fathers...”

  Had he really once beaten himself to death with it? He tried to see how it would be–and got instantly an astonishingly vivid sensation of wracking pain, spattering blood, scarlet gore trickling down his neck...

  Inspecting himself, he saw that these memories were the “cure” for suicide, derived from an earlier Ditto: a frightening, concrete ability to foresee the consequences.

  So his body was a set of recipes for seeming like himself. No underlying physics or biology, just a good-enough fake, put in by hand. The hand of some Programmer God.

  “You reject the true Lord?” Joan intruded upon his self-inspection.

  “I wish I knew what was fundamental!”

  “These foreign fogs have upset you.”

  “I can’t see any longer what it is to be human.”

  “You are. I am.”

  “For a self-avowed humanist, I fear pointing to myself is not enough proof.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Descartes, you live on in our Joan.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind–he came after you. But you anticipate him, millennia later.”

  “You must anchor yourself to me!” She threw her arms around him, muffling his cries in ample, aromatic–and suddenly swollen–breasts. (And whose idea was that?}

  “These fogs have thrown me into a metaphysical dither.”

  “Seize the real,” she said sternly.

  He found his mouth filled with warm nipple, preventing talk.

  Perhaps that was what he needed. He had learned to freeze-frame his own emotional states. It was like painting a portrait, really, for study later. Perhaps that would help him understand his interior Self, like a botanist putting himself on a slide and under a microscope. Could slices of the Self, multiplied, be the Self?

  He then saw that his own emotions were programs. Inside “him” were intricate subprograms, all interacting in states which were chaos. The sublime beauty of interior states, which his Joan sought–it was all illusion!

  He peered down at marvelous quick workings that made up his very Self. He turned–and could see into loan, as well. Her Self was a furiously working engine, maintaining a sense of itself even as that essence disintegrated beneath his very gaze.

  “We are... superb,” he gasped.

  “Of course,” Joan said. She swung her razor-sharp sword at a passing patch of fog. It curled around the swishing blade and went on its way. “We are of the Creator.”

  “Ah! If only I could believe,” Voltaire shouted into the clammy murk. “Perhaps a Creator would come and dispel this haze.”

  “La vie vérité,” Joan shouted to him. “Live truly!”

  He wanted to comply. Yet even his and her emotions were not more “real.” Should he like, every moronic twinge of nostalgia for a France long lost could be edited away in a flicker. No need to grieve for friends lost to dust, or for Earth itself lost in a swarm of glimmering stars. For a long, furious moment he thought only Erase! Expunge!

  He had earlier re-simmed friends and places, to be sure–all from memory and suitable mockups, gleaned from the spotty records. But knowing they were his product had made them unsatisfying.

  So, while Joan watched, he held a Revelry of Resurrection. In a moment of high debauch he erased them all.

  “That was cruel,” Joan said. “I shall pray for their souls.”

  “Pray for our souls. And let us hope we can find them.”

  “I have my soul intact. I share your abilities, my dead Voltaire. I can see my inner workings. How otherwise could the Lord make us aspire to Him?”

  He felt weak, drained... at the end of his tether. To exist in numerical states meant to be swimmer and swimmed, at once. No separation.

  “Then what makes us different from–those?” His finger jabbed at the alien mists.

  “Look to yourself, my love,” she said softly.

  Voltaire peered inward again and saw only chaos. Living chaos.

  3.

  “Where did you learn that?”

  Hari smiled, shrugged. “Mathematicians aren’t all frosty intellect, y’know.”

  Dors studied him with wild surmise. “Pan...?”

  “In a way.” He collapsed into the welcoming sheets.

  Their lovemaking was somehow different now. He was wise enough to not try putting a name and definition to it.

  Going so far back into what it meant to be human had changed him. He could feel the effect in his energetic step, in an effervescent sense of living.

  Dors said nothing more, just smiled. He thought that she did not understand. (Later, he saw that not speaking about it, keeping it beyond speech, showed that she did.)

  After an aimless time of no thinking she said, “The Grey Men.”

  “Uh. Oh. Yes...” He got up and threw on his usual interchangeable outfit. No reason to dress up for this state function. The whole point was to look ordinary. This he could achieve.

  He reviewed his notes, scratched by hand on ordinary cellulose paper... and descended into one of the odd reveries he had experienced lately.

  For a human–that is, an evolved pan–printed pages were better than computer screens, no matter how glitzy. Pages rely on surrounding light, what experts termed “subtractive color,” which gave adjustable character to appearance. With simple motions, a page could bend and tilt and move away or toward the eye. While reading, the old reptilian and mammal and primate parts of the brain took part in holding the book, scanning over the curved page, deciphering shadows and reflections.

  He thought about this, experiencing the new perspective he had on himself as a contemplative animal. He had learned, after returning from Panucopia, that he had always hated computer screens.

  Screens used additive color, providing their own light–hard and flat and unchanging. They were best read by holding a static posture. Only the upper, Homo Sapiens part of the brain fully engaged, while the lower fractions lay idle.

  All through his life, working before screens, his voiceless body had protested. And had
been ignored. After all, to the reasoning mind, screens seemed more alive, active, fast. They glowed with energy.

  After a while, though, they were monotonous. The other fractions of his self got restless, bored, fidgety, all below conscious levels. Eventually, he felt that as fatigue.

  Now, Hari could feel it directly. His body somehow spoke more fluidly.

  Dressing, Dors said, “What’s made you so...”

  “Spirited?”

  “Strong.”

  “The rub of the real.”

  That was all he would say. They finished dressing. The Specials arrived and escorted them into another Sector. Hari immersed himself in the incessant business of being a candidate for First Minister.

  Millennia ago a prosperous Zone sent to Trantor the Mountain of Majesty. It had to be tugged there, taking seven centuries by slowboat.

  Emperor Krozlik the Crafty directed it set on the horizon of his palace, where it towered over the city. An entire alp, sculpted by the finest artists, it reigned as the most imposing creation of that age. Four millennia later, a youthful emperor of too much ambition had it knocked down for an even more grandiose project, now also gone.

  Dors and Hari and their perimeter of Specials approached the sole remnant of the Mountain of Majesty beneath a great dome. Dors picked up signs of the inevitable secret escort.

  “The tall woman to the left,” Dors whispered. “In red.”

  “How come you can spot them and the Specials can’t?”

  “I have technology they do not.”

  “How’s that possible? The Imperial laboratories”

  “The Empire is twelve millennia old. Many things are lost,” she said cryptically.

  “Look, I’ve got to attend this.”

  “As with the High Council last time?”

  “I love you so much, even your sarcasm is appealing.

  “Despite herself she chuckled. “Just because the Greys asked you–”

  “The Greys Salutation is a handy pulpit at the right time.”

  “And so you wore your worst clothes.”

  “My standard garb, as the Greys require.”

  “Off-white shirt, black slacks, black padshoes. Dull.”