The Golden Age

by John C. Wright

  “No, my dear, I will not preach morality to you: I was designed as a host-server, a master of ceremonies. Designed for the rather frivolous purpose of making sure that everyone invited to this party—and everyone on Earth was invited—has a good time. And yet … come to think of it … my party will go badly if everyone ruins their lives, won’t it? Hmph. So maybe I should urge you to be honest … .

  “Tell me simply, what would you think of Phaethon, whom you claim to love, if you found he was fooling you with a fraud as large as the one you hope to play on him?”

  “Oh?! You seemed eager enough to have me open these terrible memories! Now you want me not to act on them?!”

  Aurelian spoke in a mild tone: “I did not think you would necessarily carry out the dishonest purpose to which you had once agreed. You have the opportunity now to change your mind.”

  “It won’t do Phaethon any harm! I’ll be doing him a favor!”

  “Oh? Define ‘harm.’”

  Daphne was fed up: “Listen, you machine! Why don’t you just stick to the purposes you were designed to do! Go run your festival!”

  “Of course. And I hope you will be true to your own nature as well. But part of my festival function is to inform people as to their results. Do you wish to know your present standing in the dream-universe contest? You are third. You would win the Bronze.”

  “No. You’re lying.” She looked around at the wide, unwalled space of the Oneirocon, at the floating dreamers deep in their trances, sunk below the pool. Famous amateurs all; all brought here by the same hope of fame, a hope only two or three might reach.

  She looked back up at Aurelian’s eyes. In a very small voice she said: “ … . Me?”

  “Yes. There is a certain innocent optimism to your drama which is conspicuously absent in the rather cynical art forms of your competition; this has made it very popular among the players, even if the art critics dismiss it. The universe of your nearest rival, for example, Typhoenus of the Clamour, has worlds of great love collapse into singularities; and warfare has erupted in several of his galaxies, by races attempting to avoid the Blue-Shift collapse of his universe. Under our new popularity-rating method, many players abandoned his unhappy ending and flooded to your world. Also, you have the highest marks for external relevance.”

  “Relevance? I’m running a magical fairy-tale world!”

  “Hm. Perhaps the judges see something magical in the real world. Something of which you remind them. Reenter the game, Daphne! Everyone wants to know what your protagonist will find beyond his last barrier.”

  Daphne closed her eyes in an expression of pain.

  She thought about Phaethon. She thought about her hopes.

  Without a further word she turned and walked away, leaving everything behind.

  13

  THE MASS MIND

  1.

  The next group of memories recorded in the diary told how Daphne had gone to the nearest public box, climbed inside, and projected an image of herself to the ecoperformance at Destiny Lake.

  Daphne thought she could find Phaethon rather easily, since she knew he was dressed as Harlequin. And while the Masquerade had disenabled her locator circuit, she could program her sensorium to tell her who was really there and who was telepresent.

  And so she wandered through the crowd for what seemed an endless time. She passed a man dressed as Imhotep, and Lord Admiral Nelson; she passed Arjuna and Faust and Babbit; she saw Neil Armstrong talking to Christopher Columbus; she passed a group dressed as the Eleemosynary Composition who called on her to join them. (A jest—she was dressed as Ao Enwir, who had been a bitter political rival of the Old Eleemosynarians during the Sixth Era.) She even passed someone dressed as a Neptunian, a mass of blue translucent parathermal substances, aswim with high-speed neurocircuitry, crouching in a low dell, with only a few eyestalks thrust up over the edge. The lines of potential radiating from these eyes showed that the Neptunian was staring at a man in a black Demontdelune costume talking to someone dressed as a Porphyrogen Astronomer. But there was no sign of her husband.

  If he were her husband at all.

  Daphne sat on a rock, staring at the grass between her feet, sinking lower and lower in misery, and wondering if it were worth the risk to employ a Red Manorial mind-control routine to snap her out of her depression. But it didn’t seem worth it.

  Behind her, in the distance, trees were burning under the lake, collapsing, dying. Daphne knew just how they felt.

  A three-legged walking cart of some kind approached her. The machine was not much taller than she was. Beneath the hood sat a rounded bulk, larger than a bear, with skin that glistened like wet leather. It had two luminous, disklike eyes, and splay-fingered hands, with yard-long fingers that writhed like tentacles. A little V-shaped mouth quivered and slattened. Atop its head was a silk top hat.

  A loud mechanical ululation issued from the machine, rising and falling. Daphne clapped her hands to her ears and looked up in annoyance. “Do you mind?!” she asked.

  “Sorry, mistress,” came a familiar voice. “I just thought this was an appropriate costume, considering what the ecoperformance here is really trying to say.”

  “Rhadamanthus, is that you?”

  The ugly, big-headed monster tipped his silk top hat. “Mistress, I did not mean to intrude, but you left orders with me to tell you the results of the dream competition as soon as the final judging was recorded.”

  Her misery increased. Had it been only an hour ago that she had been dream-weaving? It seemed like another life. Maybe the real Daphne would have cared. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

  “As you prefer, mistress.”

  “And whom do you imagine you’re supposed to be?”

  “An intelligence immeasurably superior to man’s, but as mortal as his own. I’m scrutinizing you as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the tiny creatures which swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” Rhadamanthus leaned from his three-legged cart, thrust his noseless face forward toward her, frowning and squinting with exaggerated motions of his goggle eyes.

  She raised her hand and pushed on his face, forcing him backward. “Oh, please! I’m in no mood for your jokes!”

  “Just don’t sneeze on me.”

  “Why do you have a sense of humor anyway? You’re a machine.”

  “Oh? I always thought humor was related to the ability to see things from more than one perspective at once, a matter of the intellect. Is it a bodily function? You should tell me which gland or organ secretes good humor; I know of some members of our mansion who could use an injection.”

  “Speaking of which, do you know where Phaethon is?”

  “Hm. There’s a section of me with him, but their location is masked by the Masquerade protocol. I wonder if it breaks protocol merely to have me figure out who other-me might be, based on my knowledge of how I tend to dress?”

  A tall funnel rose from the hood of the tripod cart, and a beam, like the beam of a warship’s searchlight, swept back and both across the people gathered on the grass near the lakeshore. Then it focused and pointed. “Aha!”

  Daphne jumped to her feet. “Do you see him?”

  “No, mistress. But I see a fat man dressed as Polonius. Do you see him, next to the public pool? Unless I miss my guess, that’s the segment of me who is with Phaethon.”

  “It doesn’t look like one of your icons …”

  “Ah, but look at where his robes touch the grass.”

  “Webbed feet?”

  “Any man with penguin feet must be me! I’d recognize myself anywhere! Shall I blast him with my heat ray?”

  “No.”

  “You’re right! The black smoke should take out more of the crowd.”

  “The man who was with him—Phaethon—he’s gone into the staging pool to enter to another scene—”

  “He’s going into the Rhadamanthus Manor House in the Deep Dreaming. I think he’s going to the memory chamber.”

  “Then I’
m too late!” Daphne’s voice hit a shrill note.

  “It’s never too late to do the right thing.”

  “You’ve got to help me find him.”

  “This way.” And the tripod cart started scuttling across the grass. Daphne followed. There was activity in her sensorium: new elements were introduced into the scene, trees, bushes, flowers. She rounded a tall stand of (nonexistent) trees, and suddenly stood facing the towers of Rhadamanthus Mansion. The windows gleamed cherry red in the sunset.

  A glance behind her showed that the lake scene, the party crowd, had vanished. Rhadamanthus leaned from his walking tripod, and said, “What are you going to tell him?”

  Daphne’s sense of misery faded. She straightened her back and squared her shoulders. She did not know how or when she had decided, but the decision was there, burning like a bright light in her soul. “I’ll tell him the truth, of course. He’s my husband. Or he thinks he is. So I’ll tell him everything I know.”

  “He will leave you.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. That’s up to him. But whether or not I act like the kind of woman a man ought to leave—that’s up to me.”

  A sensation of cheerful lightness caught her up, as if, the moment she rejected any idea of deception, a weight left her. She knew then how wrong Helion was. Any sort of lie, even a little one, could not keep Phaethon.

  She told herself: Once Phaethon knows, he’ll understand, he’ll stay with me, he’ll stop trying to get back these lost memories, whatever they are. This place is so beautiful! Who in their right mind would do anything to get themselves thrown out?!

  With a brave and cheerful step, Daphne walked forward into the gloomy mansion.

  Up the spiral stairs she ran and into the memory chamber, where Phaethon already had the casket of forbidden memories in his hand.

  There was a glimmer of darkness as the diary memories ended.

  2.

  (For a moment, she stared in confusion, not remembering that the large, muscular hands gripping the pastel diary were her own. His own … ? Phaethon’s hands.)

  Daphne’s memories faded. Phaethon woke. It took him a moment to remember where he was: In a private box, a thought casket, in an Eleemosynary hospice in a lower segment of the orbiting equatorial ring-city, in Deep Dreaming, semipublic thoughtspace.

  Phaethon spread his fingers in the gesture of opening; the panels surrounding his balcony winked out. Around him, in tiers, reaching upward, canyonlike, were images and open windows depicting the local mentality.

  Underfoot were moving lights indicating traffic, a geometry of doors opening and shutting as temporary scenes, telephone dramas, or teleconference rooms, winked into and out of existence. Overhead, scenes from permanent dreamscapes flashed from higher windows; the cold light of synoetics trembled on the rows still farther above; and at the utmost peak, rising rank upon rank, were the higher Sophotects, the Ennead, and the Earthmind. The Earthmind channels were full (they were always full—everyone wanted to talk to her) and this was represented as a swarm of glowing lines and rainbows that hid the peak of the balconies as if in a cloud of radiance.

  Because he was not connected to Rhadamanthus, the local area service did not realize that Phaethon was a Silver-Gray Manorial, and therefore the scene around him did not employ a strict Silver-Gray Protocol. For example, next to him was a table surface, but no table. Instead, a two-dimensional flat surface hung unsupported in the air. Phaethon “sat,” but sitting, here, merely relieved him of sensations of weight and pressure on his feet, and made the lower half of his self-image body disappear.

  The table surface had icons floating in it from the Middle Dreaming, so that a glance told him the whole contents of the possible services the local area had on file. A menu displayed the variety of illusions of food and drink that the table could provide. Not being in Silver-Gray territory, his self-image would not be redrawn as pudgy or obese, no matter how much he “ate.”

  Other menus promised other services. There were book icons to insert full files into his brain, either directly or as a linear experience. There were pornographic hallucinations; there was a library of full simulations, including pseudomnesia dramas as fully real seeming as any human brain could detect. There were synnoetisms and interfaces to augment his mind and memory, marrying his thoughts to the super-thoughts of distant Sophotechs. There were channels to quench the pain of individuality, open invitations to join with shared minds, both hierarchic and radial-cell formats, or full embrace into the Compositional mass-minds, which would abolish his standing as a separate individual.

  The icons of the Compositions floated in the table surface alluringly. Here was the Porphyrogen Composition, a name well worthy of respect, or the ancient Eleemosynary Composition, no longer Earth’s king, but still a Peer, and a voice even the Hortators heeded. There was the token for the austere Reformation Composition, which held true to some of the discipline and strict rules of charity for which mass-minds had once, so long ago, been famous. The youthful and zealous Ubiquitous and Harmonious Compositions had been formed more recently, as part nostalgia and part back-to-fundamental movements, an attempt to restore the simplicity and peace of the middle-period Fourth Era, when all of Earth had been swept clear of war and hate and also of personal individuality.

  Phaethon leaned away from the table. Why was he staring at the invitation icons of the mass-minds? All he had to do was open a channel, open his brain files, and join … .

  Phaethon realized that he was contemplating suicide.

  A sweep of his hand made the icons vanish from view.

  To enter a mass-mind might be painless, and might satisfy all his wants and needs, and surround him with eternal, endless brotherhood and peace and love; but it was suicide nonetheless, an abolition of self-hood too horrible to imagine.

  The other icons in the tabletop all promised pleasure and delusion and false-memories. The wines and spirits and crude hallucinogens once used to addict his ancestors were nothing—nothing at all—compared to what modern neurotechnology could accomplish. It was simple to cascade the pleasure centers of the brain with direct stimulations; but it was subtle to marry that pleasure to a philosophy that would also justify that sensation, carefully editing away thoughts and memories that might disturb nirvana. For example, here was an icon leading to the Zen Hedonist thought virus, which promised to resculpt his brain to accept a self-consistent philosophy of total passivity, total pleasure, total renunciation. Any effort or attempt to break out of the Zen Hedonist thought system would be defeated by loss of ego, which formed the core of the doctrines.

  Another sophisticated thought virus offered for sale was the Self-Referencing Fulfillment routine, published by the Subjectivist School. This routine promised that the user, aided by artificial programs, would enjoy all the sensations and experiences of genius-level artistic creation. The user’s standards of valuation and ability to critique himself would be blotted away in a wash of endorphins, false memories, and self-sustaining sophistries. Everything the user made or did would seem—seem to himself—to be a work of supreme magnificence.

  More subtle was the Invariant School’s Stoic software. This thought routine promised to alter the user’s sensitivity to pain and grief, simply making them able to endure any torment without a twinge of emotion. Anything, even the death of a loved one, even the discovery that your whole life was a lie, could be regarded with perfect and Olympian detachment, as if one were a machine, or a remote and heartless god.

  More subtle still was the Time Heals All Wounds software published by the Dark-Gray Mansion of New Centurion. This created a predictive model of the user’s brain, to deduce how the user would think and act once his present grief had run its course; and then imposed the new thought forms on the user. It did not abolish the memory but merely softened its edges, as if the tragedy had happened long, long ago.

  Phaethon was actually reaching for that icon, and about to download that program into his head, before he caught himself. He stood up so
suddenly that the scene he was in did not have time smoothly to render his legs and feet; and he stumbled against the balcony rail, and caught it with both hands.

  The rail did not feel like metal or wood or polystructure or urim. It did not feel like any substance at all; it was merely a geometrical notion of a flat surface, a sensation of hardness and resistance in the nerves of the palms and fingers. When he dug in his fingernails there was no give; when he pounded with his fist, there was no pain.

  Phaethon heard a two-tone chime ring. He turned his head left and right, unable to locate a source. Disconnected from Rhadamanthus, Phaethon did not automatically have the knowledge of what these two chimes meant. The traditions and customs of the aesthetic of this room were unknown to him. He wanted to make the identification gesture, but there was nothing at which to point.

  The two notes of music sounded again. Phaethon said, “Activate.” And then he said, “Engage function. Open. Go. Go ahead. Come in. Perform. Yes.”

  One of them must have been the magic word. A three-headed self-image appeared on the other side of the table surface. It was dressed in an old-fashioned housecoat from the middle period of the Fourth Era. The fabric had vertical pipings for recyclers and buoyancy and other household functions. The three heads were monkey, hawk, and snake. This was the Chimera image of the Eleemosynary Composition.

  The bird of prey was actually a blue-headed merlin; the monkey head was an ourangoutang; the snake was a black asp. Phaethon was familiar with some Eleemosynary iconography: these particular combination of heads showed that the image was projected from the hospitality branch of the media and publicity subdirectory of the Eleemosynary spaceside operations. In other words, this was the managerial officer or maître d’hotel of the public box and local area service Phaethon was using. Other functions of the Eleemosynary mass-mind represented themselves with different combinations of bird, primate and reptile heads.

  Phaethon could not restrain a sense of condescension and distaste. The image had not come through a doorway; it had simply appeared. There had not even been a simulated sound of air being displaced by the sudden arrival. He suspected that this was all according to Second Revised Standard Aesthetic, or some other populist, plebeian school.