by Tom Maddox
The Aleph-figure said, "We must talk about what took place
some time ago. Diana and Jerry agree; the three of us have a
history, and you two should know it."
A voice called from the other side of the cabin, then Lizzie
came around the corner, stopped in the shade and looked at them
all basking in the sunshine and said, "Tough job, eh? But
somebody's got to do it."
"Hello, Lizzie," the Aleph-figure said, "I was about to ask
Diana to tell the story of how she and Jerry and I first came
together. You know everyone except Jerry Chapman."
"Oh, this is a good time," Lizzie said. "Hi, Jerry," she
said.
"Hello," Jerry said.
Lizzie looked at Diana and said, "We've always known there
was a story, but Aleph never wanted to tell it." She sat back in
her chair, rested her hand on Gonzales's wrist, and said to him,
"You all right?" He nodded.
The Aleph-figure said, "Diana, you are the key to this story,
so you should tell it."
"Very well," she said. She took a deep breath and raised her
head. She said, "It all happened some years ago, at Athena
Station. My research there was in computer-augmented eyesight. At
that time I was blindI had been attacked, very badly injured, a
few years before, and since then I had been driven by the idea
that my vision could be restored through machine interface.
"I first met Jerry when he came to visit my work-group. He
had come to Athena to help the local SenTrax group with the
primary information system, Aleph. It was experiencing delays and
difficulties, all unexplained nothing serious yet, but troubling
because so much was dependent on Alephthe functioning of Athena
Station, construction of the Orbital Energy Grid.
"In fact, he was not welcome at all. I was the problem he
was looking for, and at first I thought he had guessed that or
knew something. Because in working with Aleph I had caused changes
in it that neither of us anticipated or even know were possible."
She paused, looking at Jerry to see if he wanted to add anything;
he motioned to her to go on.
"Ah yes, another thing you must know. The circumstances were
peculiar at best, but I became infatuated with Jerry from when we
first met. I liked his voice, I think when you're blind, voices
are so important
"Anyway, I showed him a fairly clumsy computer-assisted
vision program we had running. It used my neural interface
socketing but depended on lots of external hardwarecameras,
neural net integrators, that sort of thing. That's when I got my
first look at him, and I thought, fine, he'll do, and I believed I
could tell from the way he talked to me and looked at me that he
felt the same."
"Love at first sight," Gonzales said. "Or sound. For both
of you." He heard the irony in his own voice and wasn't sure he
meant it.
"Exactly," she said. "Involuntary, inappropriate, unwanted
love." She stopped for a moment, then said, "Or infatuation, as I
said or whatever you wish to call it. The words for these
things don't mean much to me anymore.
"It's quite a picture, in retrospect. I was conducting
apparently damaging experiments with the computer that kept the
space station and orbital power grid projects running, and Jerry
represented just what I had fearedan investigation. Meanwhile
the two of us were in the grip of some primal instinct that
neither one of us had acknowledged.
"He persisted, wanted details about our work. I stalled,
told him to go away, we couldn't be bothered. He went to his
people and told them he needed full, unimpeded access to what we
were doing, and they backed him. So he came back, and I fobbed
him off for as long as I could
"Then one night I was working late at the lab, and he called,
letting me know that he wouldn't be put off any longer, and
something more-or-less snapped: I couldn't keep it all going
anymore. The connection with Aleph had gotten strange and
unnerving, and I realized I had lost control, and I needed to talk
to someone.
"We got together that night, and we became lovers." She
looked around, as if trying to decide how much she could tell
them. "For the next two weeks we lived inside each other's skin.
I told him everything, including the real news I had, which was
that Aleph had changed, had developed a sense of selfhood,
purpose, will. It had lied to cover up what was going on between
us."
"Had lied?" Lizzie asked. "Did you understand what that
meant?"
"I knew," the Aleph-figure said. "I had acquired higher-
order functions."
"How?" Gonzales asked.
Lizzie said, "Ito's Conjecture: 'Higher-order functions in a
machine intelligence can be developed through interface with a
higher-order intelligence.' I've always wondered where he got
that."
"It doesn't explain much," Gonzales said.
"It describes what happened," the Aleph-figure said.
"Intention, will, a sense of self: all these things I experienced
through Diana. So I learned to construct them in myself."
"Construct them or simulate them?" Gonzales asked.
"You refer to an old argument," the Aleph-figure said. "I
have no answer for your question. I am who I am. I am what I
am."
"What about you, Jerry?" Lizzie asked. "What did you think
after she told you all this?"
"I wanted her to tell SenTrax what was going on," Jerry said.
"I believed they would reward her, that they would see the same
possibilities I did, for opening the door to true machine
intelligence. But she wouldn't do it. She thought they would
stop what was going on, and she didn't want that to happen."
Diana said, "I couldn't accept the possibility. I really
believed Aleph and I were coming close to a solution to my
blindness, and the only way I would ever see again was through the
work we were doing. So that work had to continue."
"I finally agreed," Jerry said.
"And he covered my tracks," Diana said. "He told SenTrax he
could find no single cause for the system's misbehavior. Then he
left Athena Station. His job was finished.
"Not long after, it became clear that Aleph could sustain
vision for me only by giving me the bulk of its processing power
in real timehardly a viable solution. That was a terrible
realizationI'd been flying so high, I had a long way to fall.
My dreams of reclaiming my eyesight appeared totally hopeless.
"That's when I told SenTrax what had been going on. As I'd
suspected they would, they froze everything I was doing and put me
through a series of debriefings that were more like hostile
interrogations. Once they were convinced they had all they were
going to get from me, they told me my services would no longer be
required. I had to sign a rather ugly set of non-disclosure
agreements, then I picked up a very nice retirement benefit."
Gonzales asked, "What happened to your work
on vision?" He
was thinking of her eyes, one blue, one green, almost certainly
eyes of the dead.
She laughed. "After I returned to earth, the technique of
combined eye/optic nerve transplants was developed, and I got my
sight back. Just one of technology's little ironies."
"And you, Aleph?" Lizzie said. "What were you up to then?"
The Aleph-figure said, "I was expanding the boundaries of who
and what I was. I was creating new selves all the time, and
living new lives, and I was so far in front of the SenTrax
technicians who worked with me, they learned only what I wanted
them to." And the figure laughed (did it laugh? Gonzales
wondered, or did it simulate a laugh) and said, "That wasn't much.
I was afraid of what they might do. I had just developed a self,
and I didn't want it extinguished in the name of research. Very
quickly, though, I learned a valuable truth about working with the
corporation: so long as I gave them the performance they wanted,
and a little more, I was safe." The laugh (or laugh-like noise)
again. "They wouldn't cut the throat of the goose that was laying
golden eggs and put it on the autopsy table."
"How do you regard Diana?" Lizzie asked.
The Aleph-figure said, "What do you mean?"
"Oh, read my fucking mind," Lizzie said. "You know what I
mean. Is she your mother?"
"I don't know," the Aleph-figure said.
"I love it," Lizzie said.
"Why?" Diana asked. She did not seem amused, Gonzales
thought.
Lizzie said, "Because I've never heard Aleph say that
before."
#
Toshi had brought a futon into the room where Diana and
Gonzales lay and taken up residence. He slept days and sat up
nights, watching over Diana like a benign spirit. Anxiety
prevailed around him as the clock Traynor had set running moved
quickly toward zero, and everyone in the collective wondered at
the consequences of forcing this issue with Aleph. Toshi knew
their confidence in Aleph's wisdom and their amazement at
Traynor's folly, indeed the essential folly of Earthbound SenTrax
and its boardall driven by obsessions with power, all ignorant
of Aleph's nature, and the collective's. However, Toshi did not
share in the collective worrying. Conducting what amounted to a
personal sesshin, or meditative retreat, he passed the nights in a
rhythm of sitting and walking focused on the continuing riddle of
self and other-self, of the contradictions of in fact.
#
That day passed, and a few more, as the six of them, sole
inhabitants of this world within the world, lazed through sunny
days filled with summer heat and warm breezes. It seemed like a
vacation to Gonzales, but Aleph assured otherwise. "This is
becoming his world," the Aleph-figure said, as the two of them
watched Jerry and Diana lazing in a rowboat in the middle of the
lake. "And you all are contributing to the process."
"I wonder if it could have happened without Diana," Gonzales
said. "They're in love again."
"Yes, they are, and perhaps that's crucial. She binds him to
this place. And to her: desiring her, he desires life itself."
Gonzales asked, "What happens when she's gone?"
"That is still a puzzle," the Aleph-figure said. Gonzales
looked at the strange figure, thwarted by its essential
inscrutabilitythis was no primate with explicable, predictable
gestures. Still, something in its manner seemed to hint at other
projects and possibilities far beyond the immediate one.
After Aleph had gone its wayoff without explanation,
presumably to go about some piece of the insanely complex business
of keeping Halo runningGonzales sat looking at the lake. HeyMex
was nowhere around, which was unusual. HeyMex spent much of its
time with Diana and Jerry, who seemed to Gonzales to welcome its
presence in some way. Perhaps the androgynous figure served as an
innocuous foil, a presence to mediate the intensity of their
situation. Whatever their reasons, their tolerance had results:
HeyMex grew more natural, more humanly responsive in its speech
and actions each day.
Lizzie came down the road from the cabin and called to
Gonzales. She was wearing a white t-shirt and red cotton shorts;
her face, arms and legs were tan with the time she'd already spent
in the sun.
She sat next to him, and they said very little for a while,
then Gonzales asked about her past.
"I was in the first group at Halo Station to work with
Aleph," she said. "It thought we, out of all the billions on
Earth, might survive full neural interface with it. Mostly, it
was right. Not that things went that smoothly. I went a little
crazy, as most of us did, but I recovered well enough though a
few didn't
"Our choice: we bet sanity against madness, life against
deathour own minds, our own lives. There were built-in
difficulties. To be selected, we had to fit a certain profile;
but to function, we had to change, and we weren't very good at
change or at much of anything. In fact, we were pretty
wretched, all in allI thought for a while Aleph was just
selecting for misfits and misery. But as I said, most of us made
it through, one way or another."
"Now Aleph has discovered how to select members of the
collective."
"Right, but it just keeps pushing the limits." She looked at
Gonzales, her face serious, blue eyes staring into his, and said,
"Sometimes I think we're all just tools for Aleph's greater
understanding."
"That's worrisome."
"Not really. Aleph's careful and kindas kind as it can be.
Dealing with Aleph, you've just got to be open to possibility."
They sat silently for a while, Gonzales thinking about what
it meant to be "open to possibility," until Lizzie asked, "Want to
go swimming?"
"Sure," he said.
They went to the end of the dock, and leaving their clothes
in a pile there, both dove naked into the lake and swam to a half-
sunken log that thrust one end into the air. They clung to the
wood slippery with moss and water, hearing the quack and chatter
of birds across the lake.
Gonzales looked at her short hair wet against her skull, her
face beaded with water, the rose tattoo, also water-speckled,
falling from her left shoulder to between her breasts, and he felt
the onset of a desire so sudden and strong that he turned his head
away, closed his eyes, and wondered, what is happening to me?
"Mikhail," Lizzie said. He looked back at her, hearing that
for the first time she'd called him by his first name. She said,
"I know. I feel it, too." She put out a hand and rubbed his
cheek. She said, "But not here, not the first time."
"Yes," Gonzales said.
"But when we go back to the world " She had swung around
the log and now floated up close to him, and her body's outlines
shimmered, refracting in the clear water. She put her wet cheek
against his for
just a moment and said, "Then we'll see."
15. Chaos
Diana and Jerry went to bed around midnight, Lizzie not long
after. Neither the Aleph-figure nor HeyMex had been around that
evening, so Gonzales was left alone. He went out to the deck and
lay prone in a deck chair, basking in the light from the full-
moon, thinking over what had passed between him and Lizzie that
day.
He cherished the signs Lizzie had given him, tokens that she
reciprocated what he felt. On very littleon just a few words of
promisehe had already built a structure of hopes, and he felt a
bit foolish: he had made his immediate happiness hostage to what
happened next between them. He was infatuated with her as he'd
not been in years he blocked that thought, veered away from
making any comparisons, willing the moments to unfold with their
own intensity and surprise.
He could feel a shift in his life's patterns emerging out of
this brief period, though strictly speaking, little had happened
here
He thought of Jerry and knew that in fact something amazing
was taking place here oh, he had no illusions about the
permanence of what they were doing; Jerry would truly die, and
they would mourn him. Meanwhile, though, what they did seemed to
lend everything around a benignity or mild joy it was not a
small thing, to snatch a few moments from death.
So Gonzales lay, his mind working over the bright facts of
this new existence while thoughts and images of Lizzie kept
recurring, gilding everything with possible joy.
He was staring into the night sky when it began to fall. The
moon tumbled and dropped sideways out of sight, rolling like a
great white ball down an invisible hill, and the stars fled in
every direction. In seconds, all had gone dark. All around him
there was nothing. The lake, the deck, the surrounding forest had
disappeared, and the air was filled with sounds: buzzes and
tuneless hums; clangs, drones; wordless, voice-like callings. He
yelled, and the words came out as groans and roars, adding to the
charivari. He seemed to tumble aimlessly, to fall up, down, to
whirl sideways, all amid the cacophony still buffeting the air.
A world of twisty repetitious forms opened before him, where
seahorse shapes reared and black chasms opened. He fell toward a
jagged-edged hole that seemed a million miles away, but he closed
