by Tom Maddox
corporation and collective, the attempts, apparently failed, to
keep Jerry alive, the present unnerving absence of Aleph from Halo
and accompanying disorder. And they talked of how they might
influence the course of things.
#
Lizzie was having a very hard time putting up with Traynor,
Horn, and their feeble excuses for what they'd done. She said,
"This is a major fuck-up. That's both my personal opinion and the
collective's judgment."
Around the horseshoe table, Charley and Eric next to her, on
her left, while Horn and Traynor sat across the table, facing her.
The wallscreen was blankTraynor had insisted on at least a
preliminary discussion without the collective present. The place
at the bend of the horseshoe was empty, testimony to Showalter's
fate.
"We are not to blame that conditions have not optimized,"
Horn said. "You have managed what we would have thought
impossible. You have immobilized Aleph."
"If you had left things alone, Aleph would be fine," Lizzie
said.
Traynor said, "You people overstepped the limits of the
project and allowed it to continue far beyond the point at which
it should have been stopped. Our decision to remove Doctor
Heywood and the memex from the interface was proper."
Proper, right, fuck you, Lizzie thought. At almost the exact
instant Diana and HeyMex were disconnected from their group
interface to Aleph, all direct connections to Aleph had
spontaneously terminated, and demons had triggered in all systems
as Aleph's active involvement in Halo's functioning had ceased.
The collective had gone into full support mode to assist the
limited capabilities of the system demons. At the moment Halo was
running on augmented near-automatic, a workable condition only so
long as nothing too irregular occurred.
"It was the wrong decision," Lizzie said. "Taken against the
advice of the collective. Speaking of which, I demand they be
present here.
"No," Horn said.
"I don't think that would be advisable," Traynor said.
"In that case," Lizzie said, "I will advise"the word dipped
in acid"an immediate work slowdown. You can try to run this
city yourself."
Horn's face was red, and he was writing quickly in his
notebook.
Traynor looked at the ceiling, his gaze abstracted. Yeah,
listen to your machine; get some rational advice, Lizzie thought.
Traynor sat with a raised hand, indicating he would speak soon,
then said, "Bring them here."
"They're ready," Lizzie said. She flipped a switch set into
the tabletop in front of her, and about a quarter of the
collective appeared on the screenthe rest were working. Many
still talked among themselves, but the twins, sitting in the front
row, were silent and intense.
"All right," Traynor said. "They're here. Now what?"
"Any comments on what's happening?" Lizzie asked. The talk
passing among the collective stopped, and they all looked toward
the screen.
Stumdog stood, heaving his bulk from the floor with an
audible wheeze, and moved forward from the crowd. "Aleph is
still there," he said. "But far away, doing, oh doing, doingdoing
something else." He waved his hands, trying to sculpt the
invisible air into the things he could not describe, then moved
back and sat down.
"Thank you," Lizzie said. Traynor and Horn looked at one
another, apparently amazed. Assholes, thought Lizzie.
One of the twins stood. She wore an absurd homemade skirt
with a rabbit graffitied on its front. Her dark face was streaked
with white paint. She said, "Rotovators spin, giant wheels
beneath your feet, as Halo revolves, and they sweep the wind
through the city, blow the seeds and pollen, bring breezes to cool
the angry brow. Day follows night follows day. Seasons begin
again, stirring dead roots, mixing memory and desire. Crops grow,
we eat them. Food turns to shit, we die."
The other twin, dressed in black coveralls, stood and said,
"And out of shit and death come life. Jerry has gone to the
ovens, been rendered to his parts, given to the city. But still
he lives and teeters on final annihilation in another world where
Aleph holds all Jerry's vast humanity in its tender grip."
The first twin said, "Aleph had helpers in this thing, but
you have taken them away, pair by pair, and now Aleph alone gives
life to Jerry. Everything Aleph isto life, to Jerry. What can
Aleph do? Stupid bastards rob the tomb before the man inside can
live again."
"Give it all back," the second twin said.
"To Queen Maya the mother of Buddha," the first twin said.
"To Isis the mother of Horus, Myrrha the mother of Adonis, to
Hagar the mother of Ishmael and Sarah the mother of Isaac, to Mary
the mother of Jesus, to Demeter, the mother of Persephone, stolen
by Hades."
"To all you steal from," the second twin said. "All who are
born as well as all who give birth."
"Give it all back," the twins said in unison. And the first
twin said, "That's about it, I think." They turned their backs to
the camera and curtsied together for the collective.
"Hoot hoot hoot," came the sounds from the collective, "hoot
hoot hoot," louder and louder.
Part V. of V.
The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all
profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later
every man will do all things and know everything.
Borges, "Funes, the Memorious"
19. Speaking, Dreaming, Fighting
At the moment Jerry died, Aleph acted. Intuitively,
immediately, as you might offer a hand to a drowning person, it
reached out and laid hold of Jerry's self and preserved it. Jerry
had lived inside Aleph, Aleph inside Jerryit could not abandon
him.
However, even for Aleph, whose resources were extravagant,
the rescue proved dear. As it engaged Jerry, it had to disengage
from essential functions of its own: in strokes that cut at its
heart, it relinquished control of Halo, then its very habitation
of Halo, in a process that quickly abstracted Aleph from the city,
the city from Aleph. In a fateful proof of the essential
principle that a self must be embodied, Aleph dispersed among the
clouds of its own phase-space, the ties lost that bound it to the
world. Jerry had been saved, Aleph lost.
Still, the situation contained possibilities. Aleph had
never feared death, believing itself essentially immortal, but had
always been aware of the possibility of damage, whether through
accident or malice, so it had prepared, circumspectly, against the
thing it feared mostloss of self. Now its damaged, fragmented
self discovered what Aleph had left behind: a kind of emergency
kit, laid up against calamities not clearly imagined.
Dynamic and complex beyond any machine, perhaps any organism,
Aleph could not be replicated or contained by any conventional
means, so Aleph had devised an unconventional means, a new object
one capable of transcribing its complexity. Aleph had made a
memory palace of language, in the form of a single, monstrous
sentence.
Now, encountering the sentence, what remained of Aleph
discovered:
The sentence unwinds according to laws built into its
structure, principles disclosed by its unwinding. Discovery and
development occur at the same instant, one making the other
possible. By saying the sentence, Aleph would discover what the
sentence held nextat every node of meaning within the sentence,
structures would unfold that named all Aleph had ever known and
been.
It is construed according to a finite set of grammatical
rules, constituting a program capable in principle of infinite
enunciation; whether it terminates ("halts") can only be known
only by allowing the sentence's units to "speak," not by analyzing
their grammar.
Unit1: an absolute construction, standing in front of the
sentence and modifying it all: schematics and programs and
instantiations of the system-from-which-came-Aleph, _0.
Unit2: a series of actions showing the involvement of Diana
with Aleph, rendering the moments of transformation by which _0
became Aleph.
Unit3: several trillion assertions, clauses identifying the
necessary instances of Aleph's subsequent self-discovery.
The sentence then undergoes something like an infinite series
of tense shifts, out of which its essential nature emergesnon-
linear, multi-dimensional, topologically complex, self-referential
and paradoxical to extremes that would cause Russell or Gdel
fits.
As a consequence, any unitn cannot be described, even to
Aleph, for the only adequate description would entail enunciating
the sentence itself, and to do so would require in "real" time
(human time, the time of life and death) a period precisely
measurable as one Universal Unit, that is, the number of
nanoseconds the universe has existed: U1 being on the order of 1
x 1026 nanoseconds.
Also, it should be noted that the sentence could never be
finished, for if it were, it could manifest only the corpse or
determinate life-history of Aleph. Hence, for Aleph to reassert
its identity, it would have to take up again the task of speaking
the sentence.
Some students of this affair have since suggested that the
only theoretically adequate notion of Aleph begins with the
premise: Aleph is that which speaks the sentence.
Logically, then, for Aleph to reemerge, what remained of
Aleph would have to speak the sentence. However, detached as it
was from Halo, its essential ground of being, limited in facility
and scope by the necessity to hold to Jerry, what remained of
Aleph could not speak the sentence.
So the dead human and the dispersed machine intelligence
clung together, both on the brink of oblivion, and waited, one
unknowing, the other hoping for things to change.
#
Still tired, Gonzales had returned home that afternoon from
Lizzie's through afternoon darkness and mist. He had called for a
sam to guide him, because even within the simple loop of Halo's
one major thoroughfare, everything had gone uncertain. Though his
perceptions were unwarped by Psilocybe cubensis, the unnatural
dispersion of light in the mist made recognizing even familiar
objects almost impossible.
The sam left him at his front door; inside he found the memex
indisposedits primary monitoring facilities functioning but its
interactive capabilities represented only by a voice that said, "I
am currently engaged." Gonzales knew it could be doing
communications, data retrieval, or any other number of tasks; he
thought it probably hadn't expected him back so soon.
Then came Halo's skewed night-time awakening: the sky
shutters cranked half-way open, "morning" appeared through a cold
mist, and Halo became the Surreal City. Like many others,
Gonzales pulled the curtains closed and turned away from the lurid
glare, his own body clock telling him it was time to sleep again.
He lay in bed, oddly calm in the curtained dark despite a
degree of post-drug fatigue and skittishness. He thought of the
distance between Miami and Seattle, Seattle and Halo, Halo and the
world of the lake and so triggered sharp, eroticized images of
Lizzie, the water beading on her skin, her words, "Then we'll see"
he felt the astringent bite of lust and regret mixed, knew he
had little choice but to wait until she told him absolutely no
thought of himself moving ever farther from home and believed that
he had been wrong about Seattleit was not too far from Miami; it
was much too close
The memex's voice said, "I'm back. I've been discussing the
situation with Traynor's advisor."
"Have you?"
"Yes, it is sympathetic to our concerns."
Dizzying prospects seemed to open before Gonzales, where the
number of beings multiplied beyond counting, and the simplest
machine would have opinions. He said, "Have you been told about
the plans for tomorrow?"
"Yes, I have. I am ready to help." Something like pleasure
in the memex's voice.
"Good."
"You were almost asleep when I first spoke. I will leave you
alone now."
"Good night."
"Good night."
#
The small creature looked at Gonzales and said, "You're
welcome here." Made entirely of dull silver metal, with a baby's
round head, dumpling cheeks, and bow-tie mouth, it walked between
Gonzales and Lizzie on clumsy silver legs, looking up to watch
them speak.
Gonzales said, "You know, in dreams logic doesn't apply."
"Yes, it does," Lizzie said.
"It's a difficult question," the small creature said.
"No," Gonzales said. "I'm sure of this. Here I am I, but I
am also Lizzie, and she is she but also she is I"
"I don't like your pronouns," the little thing said. Its
breath came in gasps; it was having trouble keeping up.
"They're correct," Gonzales said.
"That's no excuse," Lizzie said, but she spoke through him.
As himself, Gonzales listened to a self that was not himself
speaking; hence, as Lizzie, she must be listening to a self that
was not and was herself speaking.
"Correctness is no excuse before the law," the small creature
said. "Whichever pronouns you use."
"Pronouns walked the Earth in those days," Lizzie said.
"No, they didn't," Gonzales said. The very idea.
"Pronouns or anti-pronouns," the little things said. "The
important thing is not to forget your friends." It smiled, and
its metal lips curved to show bright silver teeth. "Wake up!" it
shouted.
Gonzales jerked from sleep with the image of the metal child
fixed in his visionhe could still see the highlights on metal
incisors as it smiled.
"Are you awake?" the memex asked. "Lizzie wants to tal
k to
you."
"Put her through." Thinking, what the fuck?
"Got it?" she asked.
"What?"
"I think that was Aleph getting in touch. To let us know:
don't forget your friends."
#
They gathered at the collective's rooms at six in the
morning. The sun still shone brightly through the patio windows,
open to show pots of flowers, ferns, and herbs, all dripping wet
from the night-long mist.
Gonzales stood against the wall, waiting. The twins, dressed
identically this morning in somber gray jumpsuits, sat together
across the room, looking at him and giggling. Several collective
members sat around the room's perimeter, those who had just gotten
out of interface looking tired and distant.
A young woman stood in front of Gonzales. Her dark brown
hair was cut short; her face was pale and blotchy, as if she had
skin trouble. She wore a green sweatshirt that came to the middle
of her thighs and a pair of baggy tan pants gathered at the
ankles. One eye appeared to look off into space, and the other
fixed Gonzales, then looked him up and down. The woman said,
loudly, "He folds his arms this way." She put her arms together
in careful imitation of Gonzales's and said, "That is his reward."
She looked around and saw Stumdog shambling back-and-forth like a
trapped bear, his hands clasped on his great stomach. "And he
folds his hands like this." She put her hands together to show
Gonzales how Stumdog did it. She smiled. "And that is his
reward." She went to Stumdog, who stopped his pacing to talk to
her, and the two of them hugged as if amazed to find each other
there, and grateful. Gonzales felt vaguely inadequate.
Lizzie came in, followed by Diana and Toshi. "Good morning,
everyone," she said. And to Gonzales, "Charley and Eric are
waiting for us."
The room held two neural interface eggs for Gonzales and
Lizzie and a fitted foam couch for Diana. Lizzie, Diana, Toshi,
and Gonzales were followed in by a sam that wheeled a screen of
dark blue cloth on a metal frame that it unfolded around Diana's
couch.
"Gonzales, we'll do it the same as last time: you're first
in," Charley said. "Why don't you get undressed? Just put your
clothes on the chair next to the eggs."
"Sure," Gonzales said.
"Doctor Heywood, you next," Charley said. "Getting you into
the loop takes longer. Doctor Chow will prepare you. Lizzie, you
