Halo

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