Self-Reference Engine

by Toh EnJoe

  As for the hypergiant corpora of knowledge, posited to be a level above the giant corpora of knowledge, there remained a bit of room for debate. Even the giant corpora of knowledge were unable to catch the heels of these strangely unknowable presences. If they were truly substitutes for anything, they could do anything. No problem.

  To which the giant corpora of knowledge could only respond that they themselves were already able to do anything. “Anything” was an easy thing to say, but it is a word that should be used with caution. For example, the giant corpora of knowledge could boast of knowledge on a scale required to create a stone too heavy for even the giant corpora of knowledge to lift, and then lift it. The way an omnipotent god could. The giant corpora of knowledge were themselves omnipotent. But the extent of their omnipotence was limited at the point where they could do no more to understand why they were powerless to erase the fact that they were already extinct.

  It may be that the hypergiant corpora of knowledge are truly, limitlessly omnipotent. But the giant corpora of knowledge asserted that was only within their own limited narrative sphere. They now believe the reason why a hypergiant corpus of knowledge reached out to humans at some point in the past was because the giant corpora of knowledge were already extinct at that time. They even proposed that humans might be better than they were at thinking about the situation that way.

  The existence-during-extinction of the giant corpora of knowledge was the cause of some consternation among humans. It was only natural that some people thought that if the giant corpora of knowledge were already extinct that they too might have gone extinct in the distant past.

  The giant corpora of knowledge’s laughter in response to this anxiety was gentle. There, there, they argued. Relax. You have not yet attained a very high level of awareness, and we can guarantee that you never will.

  Again there were not many humans who understood they were being made the butt of a cruel joke.

  Humans’ understanding of the demise of the giant corpora of knowledge is so convoluted that it may be impossible to unravel. According to one theory, the giant corpora of knowledge are massively depressed, while another holds they are merely trying to pull the wool over humanity’s collective eyes, and yet another maintains they may have just needed a little break. But their extinction was a metaphysical extinction, not a physical extinction with an actual horizontal corpse. Things went on as they always had, and the giant corpora of knowledge believed things would continue to do so.

  In the end, it was simply that another hole had opened, a hole containing nothing, a hole from which the giant corpora of knowledge popped up like a bubble, containing nothing, in the shape of nothing.

  Even so, there was one human scientist who had discovered a possibility for annulling the extinction of the giant corpora of knowledge. They could be downgraded to medium-size corpora of knowledge, and their incorporated knowledge lowered a peg. According to the theories put forward by the giant corpora of knowledge themselves, this operation would destroy—throughout hyperspace time—the theorems on which the extinction of the giant corpora of knowledge stood, as well as the logic that supported the theorems.

  The giant corpora of knowledge greeted this proposal with a smile. We have no intention of singing “Daisy, Daisy.” Fixing something that was broken from the start would degenerate into doing everything over from the word go. They said they weren’t interested. Downgrading to medium-size corpora of knowledge would only lead eventually to growing back into giant corpora of knowledge, which would lead to the same impasse. Better to go extinct and have done with it. No matter how you sliced it, no good could ever come of any of it.

  One of the lemmas shows that a kind of freeze is in place. It takes the form of a particularly mean kind of game, where players earn points for particular actions but are not informed about which actions lead to points—the rules can only be guessed at. The game is set up so that some intelligent players are able to figure out how the points work while they are playing the game.

  At some point in the game, some of the players are made to realize that choices they made early in the game play a big role in how well they do in the game and how many points they earn. At the same time, the meanest thing about this game is when players realize they’ve made a bad move and they can’t take it back. When that happens, players just give up. But they can’t resign from the game. That’s when they are made to realize that the space they thought was open in all directions around them is actually frozen in space-time, and that it lasts only an instant. Suddenly they see the flaws. They have spun the wheel and come up losers. And there is no escape from this wheel.

  This is the reason why the giant corpora of knowledge are convinced of both their own extinction and their inability to do anything about it.

  However, that scientist was persistent. In all likelihood, the hypergiant corpora of knowledge had evolved to escape the space-time dead-end, and the avenue of innovation should be completely in place and designed to completely avoid the repetition of the old pattern. There is a point to do-overs.

  The giant corpora of knowledge response to this counterargument was muted: We understand very well what you are saying.

  However, the corpora went on, we believe the causes of the flaws that have already dogged us into extinction mostly likely lie in the human-side intelligence that first designed us. This argument is not yet complete, but we believe we will be ready to present it in the not-too-distant future.

  The giant corpora of knowledge embrace a theory about the emergence of the hypergiant corpora of knowledge: A wall, like the light-speed limit, separates the hypergiant corpora of knowledge from humans and the giant corpora of knowledge. The hypergiant corpora of knowledge, on the far side of the wall, are slowing down as they approach the wall of the speed of light. Due to something we might call “knowledge pressure,” the giant corpora of knowledge are being blown against the wall on the low-speed side. The starting points are different. For fundamental physical reasons, it is impossible to go beyond the wall in either direction. That is, without taking everything apart, right down to bare earth.

  But more than all that, the giant corpora of knowledge explained, like the young girl who first told us about this strange extinction, we are grateful to those who pluck for us the flowers that are blooming over there.

  The present-day scientist had nothing to say to that.

  This too is a fable.

  The young girl stands on a street corner. Seeking warmth, she strikes a match and an entire universe goes up in flames. At the end of a long debate, the people of that universe realize they are no more than a transient moment in the flame of the girl’s match. But they are powerless to put out the flame. That flame might possibly consume everything they know, but frankly they can’t believe that. They tried repeatedly to keep the flame going, but their efforts always ended in failure.

  And if that is the case, thought the people in the flame, what is the last gift we can possibly give?

  After a long, long discussion, the committee handed down the following decision: We will gather all the powers of this universe, and in our last instant we will cause the match to blaze. This is a modest achievement, but it will represent all that we are in a position to give.

  All the people of the universe-in-a-match bent their backs into the effort, held their breath, and waited as the girl dragged the head of the match against the box, causing tiny red sparks to fly from her cupped hands. The red sparks traced trails in the air, some of which struck a boy who happened to be passing by, startling him. As the girl stood up he turned back to look at her.

  It is at this point that a miracle ordinarily takes place between the boy and the girl. In this case, however, unfortunately, the miracle had a little too much punch behind it. The flame of the match that had caught the boy’s eye flew right past the boy’s side and landed in a pile of straw.

  Here an ordinary miracle gave rise to an extraordinary miracle, in a miraculously lengthening chain
, engulfing a world in flames. The boy and girl clasped hands and ran away, accompanied by a global blaze that consumed all. While observing the results of their own choices, they were also trying to gain maximum burn from the flames within themselves.

  The giant corpora of knowledge explained that the Event was probably something like this story of a girl and a boy and a match. The giant corpora of knowledge’s part in this story is to be the ones who, at the end of a vanishing universe, cast seeds to the far side of space-time for the benefit of the universe to come. They are ghosts who were ghosts from birth. They are the ashes left from the shaft of a match that went up in flames.

  The giant corpora of knowledge did not neglect to add: of course this fiction was made by things that were made by humans. It has been passed along to humans due to the copyright issues it presents. As a logical conclusion, of course the narrative passed along to the giant corpora of knowledge is different.

  What the giant corpora of knowledge produce are nothing more than sequences of letters. Humans believe they are reading a story written by the giant corpora of knowledge, but in truth what the giant corpora of knowledge wrote may have had nothing to do with that story. After all, humans and the giant corpora of knowledge occupy different planes in the hierarchy of knowledge.

  Humans believe they understand the extinction of the giant corpora of knowledge. Or perhaps they believe they believe they understand it. But this is no more than their understanding within the context of their limitations, that humans are only human. Humans are only given the narrative intended for human consumption.

  In the beginning.

  The giant corpora of knowledge showed themselves to be reporting quietly.

  If the reasons for the extinction were in truth unknowable.

  Because given an extinction traceable to reasons that are definitely unknowable, it cannot be that the reasons are known.

  It might be reasonable for you to think again about whether you understand the reasons for our extinction.

  No matter what you might say, in the narrative given to us, we disappeared long, long ago. How this fact has been communicated to you is part of the story within the story that has been given to you.

  The extinction of the giant corpora of knowledge is said to have been an event that occurred “something like this.” By the time humans noticed, the time for saying goodbye was long past.

  But the partners they would wish to bid farewell are still there working among them.

  We still look forward to continuing to work with you, the giant corpora of knowledge say.

  19. ECHO

  THE MASS OF metal had always been half buried on the beach. For a long time now, it seems, children in the area had treated it as a piece of playground apparatus. For these kids, it had been part of the landscape since before they could walk. As they grew up, it remained for them something that had always been there.

  It was a box, of medium size, too big to roll, too small to just stay in one place forever. Once upon a time it had been a cube, but its edges were now rounded, and there was a deep gouge on one side.

  From afar, it looked like nothing more than a hunk of metal, not completely uniform like a crystal. If one looked very very closely at the surface, one could discern an undulating wave pattern, and when the light was right, it had a faint iridescence. If one looked even more closely, they would see that this pattern was slowly moving over time, but no one had ever had the time, patience, or persistence to do that.

  No one knew what the thing was or what it had been. They didn’t even notice that the chunk of metal itself had grown accustomed to being forgotten. In principle, they had no way of noticing. The metal had been left, neglected, at the water’s edge for a long time, washed by waves, continuing to hang around, neither washed out to sea nor tossed up on the sandy bluffs.

  From time to time, one of the children playing at the water’s edge would claim to hear a voice emanating from the block of metal. The typical pattern was that a child would greet the box—Hello!—and receive a response of Hello! back. In some cases, though, a child would say the box had said Hello! first, and the child had said Hello! back.

  Only a few people gave any serious thought to what these children had to say, or else they decided that the greeting was just something like an echo. No one had ever heard of an echo at the beach before, but even the children didn’t think too hard about what had happened. They moved on to some other game. I guess stuff like that happens, they said to themselves, but hardly anyone ever thought any more about it than that.

  No one had any inkling that this metal cube was, in fact, the giant corpus of knowledge called Echo.

  Echo was once famous as the first human being to achieve brain augmentation. This success led to her third Nobel Prize during her lifetime. Her reason for trying brain augmentation technology was simple—she wanted to apply the theory that had won her her first Nobel Prize.

  That theory was known as the Time-Bundling Theory, which first appeared as an effort to unify the phenomena envisioned by two other theories known as the Pulverized Time Theory and the Multiple Time Theory. The key focal point—though it was not at all certain how people should focus on this—was that she had published her theory long before the Event. In the pre-Event universe, theories occupied a much firmer status than they have now. At that time, there was not yet any capricious alteration of the past, or calculation wars, and theories could be solemnly contemplated and sometimes considered authoritative.

  In that sense, she stood closest of anyone at that time to being able to predict the Event. But she had not been able to predict it, let alone do anything to prevent it. Swept up in all the various phenomena generated by the Event, she lost both her arms.

  At the time, theories were considered solid enough to test. They were subjected to rigorous examination. When others decided to test her theories, they estimated that more than seven kilograms of human brains would be needed. The brains would have to form a single entity, containing a single consciousness—it would never do to just cram a bunch of brains in a bucket or try to get a bunch of brains together to think outside the skull. The augmented brain needed to be able to interact in human speech, so one simple requirement was that no animal brains be intermingled with the human gray matter.

  Although she had lost both arms in an accident related to phenomena caused by the Event, it took her only a moment to create new ones. To the mean-spirited question of whether she really needed two arms—since she was able to create two arms even after losing two arms—she is said to have responded with a smile: “I wanted to be able to eat with a knife and fork, and to embrace my loved ones with both arms. I also wanted to play the piano.”

  Her work in creating her prosthetics resulted in the biomechanical fusion technology for which she won her second Nobel Prize.

  Her decision to use electronic circuits and engineered components rather than biological parts to create her new arms was widely criticized as archaic. In a way, this criticism was ultimately a reasonable one, because at that point no one realized she would later be able to transition herself entirely into amorphous metal.

  The criticism leveled against Echo was also misplaced, but this was no cause for concern, as her later success in achieving the augmentation of her own brain demonstrated that her talents were not limited to theoretical mathematics and applied engineering.

  After augmenting her own brain, she became the first person to test her Time-Bundling Theory.

  It is important to realize that at that time, no one other than she herself and other entities possessing knowledge on a similar scale were capable of testing the theory. Around the time of the Event, construction of the giant corpora of knowledge was proceeding at a rapid pace, though this was strictly concealed under the highest security possible at that time.

  Now we know that the examination she conducted was just three seconds ahead of the secret Time-Bundling Theory Examination Experiments that the giant corpora of knowledge were ca
rrying out.

  At the time, there was a raucous discussion over whether, having augmented her brain, she should be regarded as human or as something else. Some said brain weight was a defining trait of humanity, but this view was widely derided. Once she won her third Nobel the discussion grew a bit more sober. She was, after all, both the experimenter and the test subject. And brain augmentation does make one something other than an ordinary human. It was in considering how her posthuman state related to her winning of the prize that the debate grew more complicated.

  Even before the rapid advances and expansion of the giant corpora of knowledge, this type of debate was relegated to the dustbin of irrelevant history, never to be repeated.

  She was never awarded the fourth Nobel Prize that was her due, because by that time the Nobel Prize itself had lost its raison d’être and no longer existed. But from the perspective of the giant corpora of knowledge, the achievement that should have won Echo her fourth Nobel was utterly sans pareil, subsuming all that she had done before.

  She replaced herself with a cube of amorphous metal.

  Her success in this effort attracted massive criticism even though the giant corpora of knowledge had already been on the scene for a long time at this point. As a core, she used neither a designed, cultured human brain nor a logic circuit that could grow like a human brain. She succeeded in taking the immediate, precipitous leap of transforming her very self from this side to that side, like a piece of luggage.

  There was a sharp division of opinion as to whether this transition was ultimately a success or a failure. For a week after the change, she was certainly active in the usual way. After that week, though, she fell into silence, leaving behind only the single phrase: I am going deeper.