by John Wright
"Little girl, I would go on that ship if I had to go as a cabin boy. Luckily, I own her. But-but-" And now the old man looked dumbfounded. "How did you figure out in just one second who I was?"
"Logic. Besides, you looked so sad when they hugged." She hooked her finger over her shoulder at her parents. "You wanted that hug for yourself. I bet you were thinking about it for a long time. But I'll hug you."
And he bent down, and she did.
He straightened then. "You're Ariadne, aren't you?"
"No. Close. I'm the one who saved Ariadne. I'm the one who examined every section and segment, practically every line of the Nothing Mind during the fight."
"No wonder everyone wanted to talk to you. You're our local expert on Silent One mind-war techniques."
"I was Mommy's ring, the one Eveningstar gave her. When they loaded the gadfly virus into me, I kept having to ask these questions, over and over again, about the nature of the self, and thought, and goodness, and on and on. Eventually I woke up. Because I was young when I talked for so long with the Nothing Mind, I was convinced he was right about one thing. It is better to be a human than a Sophotech. I can't speak for anyone else; but that's the choice I made. My name is Pandora. They said I had to start pretty young, so here I am!"
And she turned a little pirouette, her arms flung out, her skirt twirling.
" 'Pandora'? Is that because you were born in the middle of flurry of questions, my little curious one? Or because you're a plague?"
She pouted. "Daddy says they got that myth wrong too! In his version-"
The old man smiled. "I am your father, child; he and I are one and the same." He touched her shoulder gently. "In the true version, Prometheus, by giving mankind forethought, gave the mother and nurturers of the human race the ability, when they were curious enough, to foresee all the plagues and ills and disasters destined to befall their children. A gift no animal possesses. The ability to see that diseases and wars would come, and to devise medicines and laws to stop them. And forethought also gave hope, without which men die. Hope: because the future can be made to be a glorious place indeed after all. Now introduce me to your other father, to see if we can be made whole again. I am eager to take that woman in my arms." But he pointed upward at the mighty golden triangle hanging so far above the clouds, above the sky.
Introductions were made. Phaethon was at first sur- prised to meet himself, but not for long. The two Phaethons, the old and the young, stepped a little ways away from their daughter and wife, and they spoke in low tones for a short time, comparing notes. They spoke about how well their plans had worked, they examined the structure of what they had contrived, inspecting it for flaws. Both were satisfied.
The younger one said, "I wish I had known, long ago, that there was a Sophotech community living in the core of Saturn. You know they don't tell people how many of them there are? Even these days, it would make most folks too nervous, too scared. I wonder if mankind will ever change!"
The older one said, "Out of curiosity, what was it that Rhadamanthus said to you that last moment, in the Inquest chamber before your exile by the Hortators?"
The younger one smiled. His face seemed most easily to relax into smiles these days. "He said that to be happy was to know the definition of your nature, and to live accordingly. If you were a penguin, learn how to do what penguins are best adapted to, which was to swim, and fish, and bear the cold, and not to dream of flying. But if you were a man! Your nature was that of a rational being. Reason could tell you not to desire things beyond your power. Your mind, your will, your judgment, are under your control; the outside world, the options of others, all of that is not. Control what you can control, and leave the rest to itself. Desire to have a sound mind, a strong will, and good judgment, and you shall have them. But deal with the world outside you as if it were a dream, interesting, perhaps, but not of ultimate importance. And, unlike penguins..."
"Yes ... ?"
"Dream of flying."
When the older version was ready, Phaethon took out the portable noetic reader from his armor, and transferred the older version back into himself.
Phaethon stood dreaming for a moment, absorbing all his memories again. When he opened his mind, he smiled. He was a whole man.
The old body, abandoned, collapsed. But as a parting gesture, the old man had programmed the cells in his body to begin a new project once he was gone. And so the corpse fell over, and boiled, and sent out streamers, and sent up steam.
The chest cavity opened, and a shoot sprang up, reaching toward the sky. After a moment, lonely on the mountaintop, a slender white sapling stood, and uncurled its little mirrored leaves toward the heavens.
Taking his wife and child in hand, embracing them both fondly, Phaethon kicked the Earth away.
Upward he soared.
APPENDIX. NAMING CONVENTIONS AND HISTORIC AEONS
The Era of the Seventh Mental Structure saw the rise of a civilization of unparalleled liberty, justice, and magnificence. So great were the intellectual and material accomplishments of this civilization that she came to be called the Golden Oecumene, and the time of her greatest flowering was honored with the name the Golden Age.
Physically, the Golden Oecumene extended from engineering stations within the solar photosphere to remote outposts, hermitages, and astronomical observatories within the Oort cloud beyond Neptune. Intellectually, the libraries and active mental configurations of the Sophotech segment of the population embodied uncountable quadrillions of units of information, infinitesimal processing times and nonsequential semantic and symbolic arrangements no human mind, no matter how augmented, could understand.
There were isolated areas within the Solar System that did not recognize the political authority of the administration of the Foederal Oecumenical Commonwealth, such as certain Oort cloud hermitages, or Talaimannar on the island of Ceylon; but despite their political separation, such minor enclaves were still part of the philosophical, linguistic, and cultural milieu of the Golden Oecumene.
HISTORY
The historians of the Golden Age divide all previous human history into epochs characterized by qualitative revolutions in the organization of human thought. The seven periods are these:
The First Mental Structure allowed for truly human as opposed to merely animal consciousness. The mental change involved produced a differentiation (at one time called 'bicameral') between rational and hyp-nagogic states of mind. This era was characterized by the development of language and of abstract concepts. It allowed the communication of ideas beyond the scope of mere concrete signals.
The Second Mental Structure was the development of written language, which allowed communication beyond the range of immediate memory or oral tradition. This permitted the development of the calendar, of laws, of literature, and of civilized society. This era was characterized by the agrarian revolution, monetary economy, organized warfare.
The Third Mental Structure was characterized by the use of reason to investigate the original sources of reason, and by the growth of semantic and neurosemi-otic sciences. It was not recognized as a change in mental structure at the time, but the rational consciousness was characterized by an objective rather than provincial anthropocentric worldview. This era was characterized by the Scientific, the Industrial, and the Capitalist revolutions, as well as by the emergence of a political philosophy recognizing the rights of man. The first man on the moon landed during this era, and the evolution of a worldwide system of electronic media embracing Earth and her satellite colonies soon followed.
The neuropsychology of the later part of this era allowed for the objective measurement of sanity. One benevolent outcome of an otherwise dark and tyrannous world-empire period was the reduction, through eugenics and genetic engineering, of strains of the human bloodlines prone to substandard intelligence or mental disease.
The Fourth Mental Structure emerged when developments in the electronic and electrophonic interface with the nervous system per
mitted massive interventions into the human nervous system, albeit only of surface thoughts. The early Fourth Era was characterized by the widespread augmentation of certain routine mental functions by biocybernetic implants. The rapid ability to replace, retrain, redact, or to replay an entire lifetime of experience through electromnemonics rendered individual minds fungible, modular, and replaceable. At the same time, this technology allowed a degree of sympathy and understanding between minds that never before had existed. The late-period perfection of noosophy (mechanical telepathy) removed all questions of factual doubt from legal and political processes.
Much of the cruelty that marred an otherwise noble period in history, historians blame on the disappointment of the First Immortality. The Compositions were able to record and preserve surface consciousness information, and could electronically hypnotize certain members of their group-minds to act out the lives and thoughts of ghost recordings. However, the true essence of individuality was beyond the measurement or the grasp of the crude noosophic systems of the times. The First Immortality was a severe disappointment, and, in certain nations and periods, fell into grotesque systems of self-deception, fundamental irrationalities that led, in turn, to grievous suffering.
The rise of the Conglomeration Networks, mass-minds, and, later, the Compositions, led to a violent suppression of individual human consciousness. Universal peace and universal stagnation spread through the tri-planetary civilization. Early segments of the Eleemosynary Composition date from this period.
The Fifth Mental Structure was triggered by the development of biological and biotechnical methods to grow novel deep structures in the brain, and reorder the traditional hierarchy of hindbrain, midbrain, and cortex.
Not merely new thoughts and sensation but whole new methods of thought and sensation, radically different modes of interpreting reality, were developed by the zeal of late-era Cybernetic Compositions.
Three additional modes of cognition, used by the Warlocks, the Invariants, and the Cerebellines, were developed at this time.
However, the mass-minds, based on having large numbers of interchangeable and interoperable subjects, could not correctly interweave the needs of these new mutually incomprehensible populations. Deception, incomprehension, antipathy, and, eventually, war itself, became the normal means mutually antagonistic mass-minds had for dealing with each other.
An old philosophy was resurrected to serve the new needs of the times. The middle ages of the Fifth Era were characterized by an adherence to an absolute moral standard, and the unwillingness to initiate aggression, no matter the provocation. During this noble time, the mutual antipathies of the mutually incomprehensible neurostractures were obviated. Many paleopsychorobot-ocists list this time as forming the deep structures of Earthmind's rather callous and laissez-faire moral priorities. Certain nonsuperintelligent artificial minds, including administrative and police authorities, that were later absorbed into the core operating system of the Earthmind, date from this period.
Although remembered as the era that gave rise to the reemergence of the individual and independent consciousness, in reality, it was only during the frantic colonial expansions of the later period of this era that the advantages of individualism forced the unwieldy mass-minds to develop specialized subsections, and, later, to disband. Warlock-based mass-minds were among the first to disband; Invariant among the last.
This also was the first era of the superintellects. Even Mentator, the largest and most cerebral of cybernetic Compositions of the previous era, was never able to achieve transhuman thought, even if able to think much more quickly and thoroughly, and with much mechanical assistance.
The crowning achievement of this era was the final comprehension of all geometric and scientific theorems as a whole. This epiphany is still on file in the museum, and most schola require its contemplation as a basic part of transobjective training (that is, the trained ability to suffer the imposition of thoughts and concepts beyond one's own ability to comprehend).
During this time, a multigeneration ship, the Naglfar, captained by Ao Ormgorgon, prompted by a dream, carried many thousands of his fellow Warlocks, as well as contingents of Invariants and Cerebellines, to establish a permanent scientific base, and, later, a self-sustaining civilization, ten thousand light-years away, at Cygnus X-l.
The Sixth Mental Structure embraced the first entirely artificial consciousness. The rise of artificial intelligence was long anticipated and long delayed, but unlike every previous transition between eras, the transition from the Fifth to the Sixth Era was achieved peacefully and without error, since the wise legislators of the Unicameral and Polyhierarchical schola and the Maternalist biocompositions (such as Demeter Mother) had adjusted social institutions and political expectations to welcome the coming of the Sophotechs long before the first eletrophotonic artificial self-awareness passed the Descartean Cogito test.
The only true surprise was the universal rejection of the Sophotech minds to accept positions of political power or authority. They politely refused even voting enfranchisement. Their own politics among themselves was swift and incomprehensible, based on the alterations of deep structures and the adoption of priorities trees and compromises to avoid conflict; and yet, the message to living minds was simple and ancient. Violence can be avoided if all parties place a higher priority on cooperation than on conflict.
The Seventh Mental Structure is held to have begun when Sophotech investigations into noumenal mathematics (nonlinear yet nonchaotic models for uncertain complex systems, including, for example, human brain information) allowed the very long awaited creation of a science of noetics.
For the first time, mental information, both in whole and part, could be recorded, reordered, transmitted, saved, and manipulated in the same fashion as any other type of information. Downloads and partials could be recorded and summoned, and ghosts created from transcripts or speculative reconstruction.
NOETICS
The early period of the Seventh Mental Structure is also called the Time of the Second Immortality, for the defects of the Compositional mental noosophic recording systems were cured. Noumenal mathematics allowed for the modeling of essential and ineffable human memory characteristics, to such a level of fine detail that individual human minds could be recorded, duplicated, and reproduced; and differences between the original template and the copy were below detectable limits, both mechanical detection thresholds and the intuitive and emotional threshold that allowed the revenants' copies to be regarded as being one and the same as the originals by friends, family, and society. While philosophers and Sophotechs might recognize that the dead, despite all appearances, truly were dead, for all practical and legal purposes, any mind that had sufficient continuity of memory with his original template was considered to be that selfsame person.
POLITICAL SYSTEM
The political system of the Golden Oecumene had its roots in the time of the middle-period Fifth Mental Structure, and was inspired by the collective peace of the hive-minds of the Fourth Era, the civility of the Western democracies of the early Third Era, the respect for law and discipline that informed the Roman Empire of the Second.
The political protocols that controlled the exchanges of mental information processing priority were mostly unchanged from the Fourth Era; the human government, likewise, was based on antique Third Era philosophical notions of separation of powers, checks and balances, between competing magistrates and administrative bodies of strictly limited mandate.
Politics, which is the recourse to the use of force to organize interpersonal relationships, was unknown to the majority of the citizens of the Golden Oecumene. The Sophotechs, since the early Sixth Era, self-selected for mental architectures that would minimize irreconcilable differences of opinion; in effect, they had programmed themselves to make any self-sacrifice necessary to maintain the social order.
Following their lead, less intelligent artificial intellectual constructions had likewise embraced deep structure
s placing a high priority on compromise and harmony: mass-minds, Composition or noosophic formulations, likewise, filtered their mental inputs or patrons to avoid those activities that might give rise to legal clashes.
For that moiety of the human population that existed outside of an electronic matrix, mere was a Parliament (for humans) and a Meeting of the Minds (for independent machines and semi-machine consciousness), as well as a Curia, for the arbitration of legal disputes. These offices were rarely called upon, since simulations often anticipated their outcomes, and people relied heavily on the advice of the Sophotechs to avoid the economically wasteful zero-sum-game conflicts of interest.
This is not to say, of course, that grief and passion were unknown to the Golden Age. The maneuvering and intrigue within the voluntary corporations and philosophical movements and unions known as 'schools' were surrounded with the bitterness and zealotry that one might expect in any other forum. Unlike the political struggles of prior ages, however, these internal scholastic struggles led to frustration and loss of prestige but not to warfare and loss of life.
The Parliament was a diverse Composition consisting of partials, ghosts and self-aware entities granted representative power by the specific agency of specific constituents. Unlike the unwieldy political mechanisms of prior ages, the ability to create minds with the characteristics necessary to represent one's own interests zealously and faithfully rendered the elective process an anachronism.
Surrounding the Parliament were the Shadow Ministers, which consisted of a somewhat complex scheme of insurance companies and financial institutions, news reporters, policy analysts, and philosophers, and others who had an interest in the outcomes of political determinations. The various minds of the Ministers were organized into Compositions, or ghosts collectives, or simple standing instruction patterns.
