Halo

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