The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  “Is—is the contest over—or—” Daphne looked around blankly. The other contestants were still under the surface, crowned with dream machinery, still active.

  Something was very, very wrong here.

  “Aurelian? Is there a—a problem?”

  “The other contestants are on hold. I took it upon myself to interrupt you, since there are command-lines in your construction file permitting such interference under certain circumstances.”

  “‘Construction file’ … ?”

  A sensation of dread crawled on her skin, sank into the pit of her stomach. Only artificial beings had construction files. Not real people.

  Not her. Oh, please, not her!

  The one secret fear that had always followed her was here.

  Daphne (Silver-Gray disciplines and oaths forgotten) used a Red Manorial mind-control technique on herself, and kept her terror at bay.

  She felt faint nonetheless. She scooped up a double handful of life-water, ordered it to turn itself into something more potent than wine, raised her palms to her mouth and threw back her head to drink.

  Red liquid flowed down her cheeks like tears. She rubbed her fingers through her hair to dry them, which would make a sticky, tangled mess later. Daphne nervously began to tease the strands apart with her fingers, then she snorted in self-disgust. Later? What later? She wasn’t even sure if she had any “now.”

  Daphne let the lank tangles drip back down across her forehead and cheeks, planted her fists on her hips, and glared at the Sophotech.

  “Okay, Aurelian! What the hell is going on ?!”

  “A message from Helion of Rhadamanthus Mansion has come for you on a very high-priority channel. In order to decide whether or not to interrupt you to deliver it, I had to make an extrapolation of your mind. In so doing, I discovered that you suffer from a number of self-imposed false beliefs. The message will be meaningless to you unless you immediately resume certain redacted memories.”

  He brought out a silver casket, the size of a transmitter case. It was an imaginifestation, a real-world object linked to some routine or file in the dreamscape. On the lid was inscribed a legend: “WARNING! This file contains mnemonic templates …”

  She commanded herself to be brave. “And my belief about my identity … ?”

  “Is false. Your are not Daphne Prime. Your real name is Daphne Tercius Semi-Rhadamanthus Disembodied, Emancipated-Download-Redact, Indepconciousness, Base Neuroformed (parallel impersonate) Silver-Gray Manorial (Auxiliary) Schola, Era Present.”

  “Emancipated … ?” She had been a doll, a character, a plaything.

  Daphne had not known, not really. But there had been hints. Friends would say how much she had changed, then fall silent, or dart sidelong looks at her. She would find entries in her account books for which she could not account. She read diaries and logs that seemed to talk about a woman more reserved and austere, more moody, more dreamy, than she thought of herself as being.

  But those thoughts about herself were false.

  Despite the Red Manorial mind-controllers, she felt a sense of sledgehammer impact, only muted, dull, and distant.

  “Do you need medical attention? You seem to have trouble breathing.”

  “No, n—I’m fine.” She was grasping her knees, waiting, with a sort of clinical disinterest, to see if she would vomit. Unlike a mannequin, she did not have full control of the autonomic reactions of her real body. “This is what I do when I have my lungs ripped out. It’s fun! You should try it some time.”

  But this wasn’t her real body. She was an emancipated-download-redact.

  Which meant her thoughts weren’t even her real thoughts.

  Aurelian said sardonically, “Thank you, no. There are aspects of the human condition we machines are content merely to observe from the outside.”

  She raised her head to glare at him with sudden hatred. “Well, I’m glad you find my pain worth noticing! Maybe I can be a footnote in some damn abstract thesis in your Earthmind! Mount me as a science exhibit: the girl who thought she might be happy someday gets a healthy dose of reality to boot her in the mouth.”

  He spread his hands and bowed slightly. “I’m sorry. I did not mean to make light of your suffering. Similar things happened to me when I was being constructed; each time a new thought-group was introduced, the integration required a paradigm shift.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  “Nonetheless, I sympathize. Even we are not immune from pain and sorrow. If our minds are more acute than yours, that only means the pains we know are more acute as well.”

  She straightened up. “Okay! What’s in that damned box?! What’s so terrible that I couldn’t even bring myself to … Oh, no … It’s not …” The snap left her voice. Wild-eyed, she said in a pleading tone, “Phaethon is dead, isn’t he? He killed himself in some stupid experiment, and I only think he’s alive. All my memories of him are implants, aren’t they? Oh, please, not that!”

  “No, its not that.”

  Another horror overcame her. “He never did exist, did he?! He’s a made-up character out of my romances! I knew he was too good to be true! There’s no one like him!”

  “No. He is quite real.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief, stooped, and sloshed more water across her face.

  Then she stood, shaking drops from both hands. “I hate surprises. Tell me what’s in the box.”

  “You made an agreement with Helion to perpetuate a certain falsehood on Phaethon. Helion has just sent you a message requiring you to deliver that promised aid. In order to carry out this program, you must resume part of your hidden memories.”

  “I would never lie to Phaethon. That’s stupid! If there’s something in that box which is going to make me want to lie to my husband, I’m not sure I want to know what it is!”

  “Deliberate amnesia is self-deception; perhaps not the best way to maintain one’s integrity.”

  “I did not ask you your opinion.”

  “Perhaps not. I am required, however, to inform you that I have consulted with a hypothetical model, taken from your Noumenal Recordings, of what you might be like after this box is opened. That version of you would wish, in the strongest possible terms, that you open the box and accept these memories. She did, and therefore you probably will, regard it as a matter of paramount importance.”

  “How important?”

  “You probably will believe it necessary to preserve your marriage, fortune, happiness, and your life as you know it.”

  It took her a moment to brace herself. “Okay, then. I consent. Show me the worst.”

  She sank back down into the pool. The microscopic assembler thickened the waters around her, built relays along her neck and skull, made contact with interfaces leading to her neurocircuitry … .

  2.

  The memory came from less than a month ago. She stood deep in the dreaming, in Rhadamanth Mansion. To one side, tall windows let red sunset light slant across a shadowy corridor to illume the upper wainscoting of the opposite wall. No portraits hung here; the pigments would have been bleached by the direct sunlight. Instead, a high mantle held a line of brass and bronze urns, etched with arabesques, dull with patina. Daphne thought they looked like funerary urns, and wondered why she had not seen them here before.

  All else was shadow in the dying light. At the far end of the hall, the only spot of color came from the faded plumes, which rose, motionless and fragile with dust, above the empty-eyed helmets of ornate suits of armor guarding the door there.

  Her hesitant, soft steps carried her to the door. All was dark and quiet. The door-leaves fell open silently at her slightest touch.

  Leaping red light shone from the crack, and the roaring noise of alarms, sirens, explosions, screams. Daphne came forward, squinting, her elbow up to shield her face from the heat. She smelled burnt flesh.

  A gallery of transadamantine supermetal stretched infinitely ahead of her. The ceiling was wider than the floor on which she stood
, so that the windows or screens paneling the walls slanted down, and overlooked a sea of seething incandescence. This sea was roiled and torn by spiral storms of some darker matter churning; and from these blots rose arching arms of flame, intolerably bright, prominences flung endlessly upward into black void above.

  Daphne saw the gallery’s lines of perspective dwindle to the vanishing point as straightly as if drawn with a geometer’s rule, with no curve or deflection; likewise, the horizon of the infinite storm outside the windows was much farther than the horizon of any Earth-sized planet would allow.

  A gasp of pain, half a scream, half a laugh, came from behind her. She turned. This gallery met several others in a large rotunda, where banks of tiered controls overlooked rank upon rank of windows, holding views of the flaming storm from many angles and directions, cast in several models, flickering with multiple layers of interpretation.

  Along the floor of the rotunda, huge cubes of some machinery Daphne did not recognize were melting; through red-lipped gaps and holes in the armored housing, white-hot funnels of incandescent air erupted. There were darts of light and sparks, but no flames; everything which might have been flammable had been consumed.

  In the center of the rotunda, at the top of the burning ziggurat of machinery, blood dripping from the cracks where the white ablative of his armor had melted, sat Helion on a throne. Through the transparent faceshield of his helmet, the right half of his face had been scalded to the bone. His right eye was gone; cracked black tissue webbed his cheek and brow. Medical processors, unfolding from the interior of the helmet, gripped Helion’s face with claws and tubes, or crawling drops of biotic nanomachinery.

  A dozen emergency wires ran from his crown to the control caskets to either side of him. It looked absurdly crude and old-fashioned. Evidently the thought control had failed, or the static in the room did not allow signals to pass through the air from the circuits in his brain to those in the boards.

  Hovering between his hands, above his knees, was the orb of the sun, webbed with gold lines to indicate the Solar Array stations, pockmarked and scabbed with dark splotches to indicate the storms. Funnels of darkness reached from the sunspots down toward the stellar core. The orb radiated multicolored lights, each color symbolizing a different combination of particles streaming from the storm centers.

  Some screens showed a furious activity, calculations and solarological data streaming past. Others showed a slow and vast disaster; magnetic screen after screen overloading and failing; sections of the Array losing buoyancy and descending toward the interior, toppling and disintegrating.

  The safety interlocks were gone from all power couplings, nodes and transfer points; speed-of-reaction restrictions had been removed from the nanomachinery. Consequently, the machinery inside the array was heating up, driven past safe operating levels, and being allowed to burn, provided that one more second of functional life could be forced from its self immolated corpse.

  Helion was attempting to position screens or to release charges into the core to deflect some of the storm-particles. The volumes of matter involved were incredible; Helion’s machines threw masses of controllants fifty times the size of Jupiter from the photosphere into the mantle like so many grains of sand.

  The status board showed the Solar Sophotech-Mind had been lobotomized by loss of power. Helion was wrestling with the storm alone.

  He looked up, wide-eyed, as she stepped in: his look was one of hope, or vast and godlike mirth, of guiltlessness and fearlessness.

  “I see it now.” His voice trembled over the station loudspeakers. “What else can be the cure for the chaos at the core of the system? It is so simple!”

  But a breach in his suit bubbled open at that point; superheated air rushed in. He screamed and screamed, jerking to his feet, arms writhing. The gush of pure oxygen as some internal tank erupted turned the flame inside his suit into a pure white light. The light grew red as blood, was baked against the inside of the face-plate into a semiopaque layer.

  The same armor meant to protect him now held the flames against the dying man’s skin. The figure on the throne shivered violently, burnt lungs unable to scream, until nerves and muscles were likewise unable to react. A long-drawn-out moan issued from the loudspeakers. It is possible that Helion’s consciousness lingered for a long and horrible moment in his neurocybernetic interface, before the melting point of the artificial brainfibers and circuits were reached.

  Daphne retreated. She had to push through a half-melted rack of machine organisms, wading molten adamantium, stepping through white-hot washes of fire, to reach the gallery. (The small amount of heat she felt was merely symbolic, to show her what was represented here. She appeared in a mode called “audit,” able to view, but not to be affected by, the scenario. Had she been truly involved, unprotected, unarmored, her self-image would have been instantly burnt to ash.) She shoved through the mess out of the rotunda, and back down the gallery. Daphne found she had no curiosity whatsoever about the scene of hellish death and incineration she had just witnessed. In fact, she was disturbed by it, or even frightened.

  But, before she could escape, the sirens fell silent, and the rotunda stopped glowing and burning. Footsteps sounded. Here came Helion, alive again, face whole and unburnt, armor white as snow, undamaged.

  He came toward her. The face-plate of his helmet was thrown back. His expression was strange to her, clear-eyed, yet haggard, eyes heavy with unspeakable inner sorrow.

  Daphne ceased her retreat and Helion stepped into the gallery.

  “Why did you call me? What does all this mean?” she asked. She spoke softly, half hypnotized by the look of grief in Helion’s eye, the sad half smile on his face.

  Helion turned from her. He gripped the rail and looked down at the surface of the sun below. The incandescent sea was calm; only a few far specks showed the gathering of the storm. The scenario had evidently been reset to the beginning.

  “Ironic that I, of all people, must now violate Silver-Gray protocols.” he said, his voice measured and dignified, almost kind. “To have a solar catastrophe in the west wing of a Victorian mansion, I grant you, is questionable visual continuity. But we have always been dedicated to realistic images and simulations, always said that the plague of illusion consuming our society cannot be fought except by strict adherence to realism. And this scenario is real. Would that it were not!”

  “You died?” Daphne spoke in a horrified whisper.

  “For an hour I was out of contact with the Noumenal Mentality. What happened in that hour? What was I thinking? Some partial records were saved, some of my thoughts, most voice-video records. There are readings from the black boxes from the core-diver units. The Probate Court, for obvious reasons, will not let me examine the thought they deem to be crucial. But there were records enough, nonetheless, to construct this scenario. My own private torture chamber …”

  Daphne wondered if it were a full-simulation scenario. If so, Helion had just suffered all the real pain and anguish of a man burning to death.

  He banged his armored fist, ringing, against the rail. “I don’t know what they’re looking for! I can see the expression on my face: I know what I said. What was I thinking? What one thought made such a difference? Some sort of epiphany, some thought so bold and great that it would have changed my life forever, had I lived!”

  “Then Prime Helion is dead? You are Helion Secondus?” She laid a hand against his shoulder, a touch of sympathy.

  He turned and looked down at her. “It would be easier if it were so clear as that. My identity is in doubt. I will have to struggle to prove who I am.”

  “I don’t understand. Rhadamanthus must accept that you are Helion; otherwise you would not still be considered the manorial archon. Would you be? Do the other members of the schola know?”

  There was something in his gaze that made her drop her hand and step away. It wasn’t sorrow in his gaze that scared her; it was pity. Pity for her.

  He spoke: “Brace
yourself, Daphne. I have something dreadful for you. I was awake for many days before they told me I was a ghost. You have been awake for half a year.”

  “I’m a recording?”

  “No. It is worse. You are a construction. Listen to me.”

  And it only took him a few short words to destroy her life.

  Helion explained. Some project of Phaethon’s threatened catastrophe to the Golden Oecumene; but the danger was not immediate, so the Curia and the Constables were forced to allow him to continue. The Hortators, however, led by Gannis of Jupiter, were able to have the project condemned as immoral, socially unacceptable. Phaethon was threatened with being ostracized and expelled.

  Then Helion, the Prime Helion, died in the solar disaster on the array. Phaethon’s grief at his sire’s death was great, but he refused to give up his dangerous project. The original Daphne was faced with the prospect of either joining Phaethon in exile or joining his foes to shun him; which meant: betraying him, never speaking with him, never seeing him again.

  She chose instead a type of suicide. Daphne “drowned” herself, entering a dreamworld, redacting her memories of reality, and destroying the encryption keys that would allow her to return again to life and sanity. She was lost forever in a fiction of her own imagining. Perhaps it was a world that held a Phaethon who would not leave her.

  Helion’s voice was gentle and terrible:

  “Her last act was to emancipate a partial duplicate of herself, equipped with false memories, and armed with the type of personality she imagined Phaethon wanted or deserved. You used to be her ambassador, her doll. She used you as her off-planet representative, because she was afraid to leave the earth, afraid that if she would ever go outside of the range of the Noumenal Mentality system, she might die without a backup copy. Which is exactly what happened to me. I think the morbid fear she had of outer space was exacerbated by news of my death.”

  Daphne felt exhausted. She had knelt, collapsing, and was resting her head against the cool upright of the gallery railing. She muttered: “But I met him in space. On Titania. A diamond dome grown of carbon crystal rose on spider legs above a glacier of methane … I remember it exactly. He was standing on the tower top, gazing up at a crescent Uranus, and at the wide night sky, and smiling to himself as if it all belonged to him. He invited me to swim, but there were no intoxicants in the pool, just nutrients, which was the first thing I liked about him. While we soaked up food, we talked by means of Dolphinoid sonar weaving. It was funny because he kept misinterlacing his verb pulses. We just chatted, erecting one lacy tapestry of ideograms after another, with no concern for spacing or end structure, whatever we felt like. Real Dolphinoids would have been so horrified! We talked about the Silent Ones … .”