The Wild

by David Zindell

  Thus began their battle’s third and final act. Because none of Ede’s own simulations of the future had ever hinted that such a disaster was possible, he was ill-prepared for what he must do next. But he was neither helpless nor hopeless. Even before his vastening as a god, he had always been the master of computational origami, the folding together of many computer parts into a synergistic whole. And now he proved to be a master of the unfolding. With his mainbrain lost, he decided to abandon it. The Other was chewing through millions of layers of circuitry, converting him to a slave unit, eating him alive. But Ede would not leave the largest and most glorious lobe of his brain to be incorporated into the brain of this treacherous machine god. After pruning his programs and memories and then encoding them as an intense tachyon pulse, he set loose the zero-point energies of the spacetime within his great brain and exploded himself into the pieces of flotsam that Danlo had discovered orbiting the Star of Ede. He had hoped to destroy the Other and leave not the tiniest diamond circuit for the Silicon God to feed upon. He split the tachyon signal into a million separate beams aimed at a million smaller lobes of his brain orbiting nearby stars. Almost instantly – in less than a thousand nanoseconds – he found his master programs installed in these millions of moon-sized brains. But the Other had followed him. In truth, like a leech attached to a man’s eyeball (or rather, like a retro-virus stitching itself into its host’s DNA), the Other had carked itself into Ede’s master programs, into his memory, into his very soul. Again Ede pruned his programs, coded them as pure signal, and in a flash of tachyons infinitely faster than light, made the almost instantaneous unfolding of his self to smaller lobes of his brain farther out among the stars. Again he destroyed the computer circuitry that he left behind. But he could not wholly free his programs from the Other, and so he repeated this pruning of himself many times. Many, many times. Bit by bit, Ede’s soul – his very self – diminished even as his consciousness was blown like the seeds of a dried-out dandelion flower across twenty light-years of space. At last, when he had pruned himself from a great galactic being into something that could barely be called a god, he found himself installed in millions of separate computer lobes, some of which were as tiny as rocks. And still the Other remained with him. Only now, like a sleekit fleeing a fox into its deepest burrow, Ede was trapped. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of his great and beautiful brain was destroyed, and no spare circuitry or piece of machinery survived to run his programs or store his memories. And so Ede, the god – what was left of him – made the hardest decision of his life. He destroyed all but one of his brain parts, and then he made a final pruning. In truth, the soul-surgery that he performed on himself might better be called an amputation, but it was really more, much more than even the agony of an animal who gnaws off its leg to escape a trap. At the end of the third act of his battle with the Silicon God, which lasted no more than a millionth of a second, Ede simply erased every program and operating system, every algorithm, virtual, pathway, language and memory that was not essential to his identity as Ede. In this last and most desperate of prunings, he thought that he had finally edited out every bit of the Other. And so Ede wrote one final program. He compressed the essence of himself as pictures in a fractal code; in his panic to survive in any way that he could, he carked this core program into a simple radio signal and cast his soul to the black and empty spaces of the universe. It was a hideously crude thing for him to do. But he had no machinery left that might generate tachyons, nor even the high frequency laser light that could hold much more information than any radio signal. In this way, after thousands of years of personal evolution and his ontogenesis into one of the galaxy’s greatest gods, after hopes and visions and dreams of infinity, Ede found himself reduced to nothing more than invisible radio waves spreading out through a cold vacuum at the torturously slow speed of light, a cry in the night, a lost soul seeking home, the last gasp of breath of a dying man. It was something of a miracle that this weakened radio signal, after years of crossing the vast interstellar deeps, had fallen down upon the Earth where Danlo now stood. It was a miracle that for centuries, in the lost temple that Ede had once built, the devotionary’s radio receiver had remained always turned on, always open to the music and songs of the stars. And so it was a miracle that the program encoding Nikolos Daru Ede, the man, found itself received and installed in the very primitive circuitry of what was little more than a religious toy. It was a miracle, yes, but then all life is a miracle, even the life of a god who is dead and yet remains somehow mysteriously alive.

  ‘You … are he,’ Danlo repeated. He stared at the hologram of Ede, which was staring back at him with an expression of astonishment written across his glowing face. ‘The core program that survived the battle.’

  ‘You know, then,’ Ede said, reading the strange light in Danlo’s eyes. ‘But how do you know? How could you possibly know?’

  Danlo looked down at the dusty temple floor. Six years before, in a dark corridor of the library on Neverness, he had looked into his deepest memory, and this marvellous way of seeing wholes from the tiniest of fragments had first flowered into consciousness. But how could he ever explain such a strange and mysterious sense to a computer?

  ‘How … does anything know?’ Danlo asked. ‘How do we know that we know?’

  ‘Do you really wish an answer to this question, Danlo wi Soli Ringess? My program contains the answers to all the famous philosophical conundrums of man.’

  Amused by this impossible offer, Danlo slowly shook his head and smiled. ‘I have often wondered what a computer can know. What it truly means when the Architects and programmers say that a computer can know.’

  ‘Then you are not of the school that believes ai programs can render a computer self-aware?’

  ‘I do not like … to believe things,’ Danlo said. ‘I would rather know.’

  ‘Then you must doubt that I am as conscious as yourself.’

  ‘I … do doubt. I am sorry.’

  ‘You doubt – and yet here you have stood for a long time conversing with me as if my consciousness were the same as any man’s.’

  ‘Yes, that is true.’

  Ede smiled his wicked smile, and then asked, ‘If you had closed your eyes, would you have known that you were talking with a computer?’

  ‘Is this to be the only test of consciousness, then?’

  ‘Well, it’s a time-honoured test, isn’t it? The ancient Turing test.’

  ‘That is true – but there are other tests, yes?’

  ‘What tests?’

  With a sigh, Danlo turned and crossed back into the meditation hall behind him. He stepped past the gyres and kevalin sets and the rack of wooden flutes. When he came to the glass jar encasing the blue rose that he had noticed earlier, he smiled at the sacrilege that he was about to commit. After clamping his palms on the cold glass, he lifted off this dome-like container and set it carefully on the floor. Then he reached out and grasped the rose’s stem. It was narrow and hard, with an almost woody feel to it. He wanted to examine the rose in the light of flame globes, and so, at arm’s length, directly in front of his eyes, he held up this symbol of the impossible. Its petals were light blue and as lovely as those of a snow dahlia. He looked at the flower for a long time. Then he returned to the grand doorway of the facing room, where the devotionary projecting the hologram of Nikolos Daru Ede sat waiting on its little stand. Ede was waiting, too. He was floating in the air, watching with intense suspicion as Danlo presented the sacred rose to him.

  ‘Do you see this pretty flower?’ Danlo asked.

  ‘Of course I see it. I see many things.’

  ‘Here,’ Danlo said, holding out the rose. ‘Take it.’

  The hologram of Ede extended one of his diminutive hands, but because his body was not made of flesh, he could not take it. However, the interference of the hologram’s coherent light with the flower’s blue petals highlighted the rose and caused it to glow brightly.

  ‘I can’t hold the flow
er, of course,’ Ede said. ‘I can’t touch it.’

  ‘No,’ Danlo said. With a sad smile, he reached out his finger and stroked the flower’s many petals. They were as cool as silk and felt as fine as gossamer. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it will be so hard for you to truly know whether or not this flower is real.’

  ‘It looks real,’ Ede said.

  Danlo looked at the striations, veins, and the pattern of tiny filaments lining the rose. He said, ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘But I would deduce that it’s artificial. It would have been too difficult to have kept a real flower alive in my temple, even in a clary cold chamber, even in krydda suspension.’

  Again, Danlo touched the rose. He let the whorls of his fingertip linger over the petals’ lacy surface. The cells of his skin slowly slid over the smoothness of gossilk, and instantly he knew that the rose was not real.

  ‘In truth, it is artificial,’ he said.

  ‘You see – we both knew this.’

  ‘No,’ Danlo said. ‘I knew that the rose was not real, but you only deduced it.’

  ‘I don’t see the difference.’

  ‘There is … all the difference in the universe.’

  At this, Ede’s face froze into an unreadable mask, and for the first time he fell into silence.

  ‘Talking to a computer’s imago is like looking at an artificial flower,’ Danlo said. ‘You seem real, only …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Only, I cannot touch you. Your consciousness. Your … soul.’

  Ede waited a moment before saying, ‘But I am as real as you.’

  ‘No, you are only an ai program that causes electrons inside your brain circuits to move.’

  ‘I am as conscious as you are,’ Ede said.

  ‘But … how can that be?’

  ‘I am as aware as any man.’

  Pain is the awareness of life, Danlo remembered. He stood there staring at the many-hued lights of Ede’s little face as he brooded over this saying so close to his heart. He realized, then, that this was his own private Turing test of consciousness: the ability to feel pain.

  He told this to Ede, who said. ‘There are many kinds of pain.’

  ‘Yes,’ Danlo agreed as he held his hand over his eye, over the familiar pain shooting through his head. ‘But pain is always just pain. Pain always … hurts.’

  ‘Once, I was a man much as you,’ Ede said in his high, whiny voice. ‘And I had pains of the body much as any man. When I carked my mind into my computer and left my body behind, I’d thought to escape pain forever. But the pain of the mind is greater than any body pain. Infinitely greater.’

  ‘Others … have said that to me before.’

  ‘Do you think it didn’t hurt to cast off my body and become vastened in the light storms of my computer?’

  ‘How … could I know?’

  ‘Do you think I haven’t suffered for three thousand years at the fear that some essential part of my humanity – of myself – was lost in this vastening?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘And in my battle with the Silicon God, as I pruned my programs smaller and smaller – do you suppose this diminishment of myself wasn’t pure agony?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Danlo said. ‘Or perhaps you are only programmed to call it agony.’

  ‘Can you imagine what it’s like to be a god?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was like this,’ Ede said. ‘In less than a millionth of a second, if I wished, I could have thought all the thoughts that were ever recorded in all the libraries of man.’

  ‘I … am sorry,’ Danlo said.

  Ede’s face fell into an expression of grief. ‘I’ve lost almost everything. Even the great simulation with which the Silicon God destroyed me. Especially that. I can’t tell you how perfect this simulation really was. The vision. The beauty. The detail. It was a surreality of all surrealities: I saw the galaxy remade, almost down to the configuration of every molecule. I saw myself transformed, ever vaster. I saw how I would be folded, connected, and how I would build ecologies of information that had never before existed in this universe. I knew what it would be like, someday, really to know. To know almost everything. And now I’ve forgotten it all. Only the faintest memory of a memory remains.’

  As Danlo stood there twirling the stem of the blue rose between his fingers, Ede told him about other things that had been lost. Once, Ede said, he had reconstructed the history of the Milky Way galaxy, from the firing of the first stars to the rise of the rainbow star systems and alien races such as the Shakeh and the Elsu and the divine Ieldra. All that was now forgotten, as was the secret of destroying the Silicon God, which he had apparently learned only toward the end of their battle. Forgotten, too, were the words to a poem that he had been composing for a thousand years. All he could remember was his reason for creating this great poem: it was his fancy to woo a goddess in the centre of the cluster of Valda Galaxies some fifty million light-years out toward Yarmilla Cluster. All the words were gone from his memory. This, he said, was not surprising, since each of the poem’s sixty-six trillion ‘words’ was really a complex of information compressed as beautiful fractal images. A word might be a theory of the universe or the condensation of all the accumulated knowledge of a hundred alien civilizations over a hundred thousand years. Some words were symbols for godly philosophies, or symbols for whole arrays of symbols, down through thousands of layers of abstraction. Ede thought that many of the words he had once written were metaphors for beautiful mathematical constructions existing only in the manifold; he was almost sure that one of the poem’s most poignant words – repeated again and again through the many cantos – encoded the pattern of supernovae across a billion galaxies over the last three billion years.

  ‘To lose pieces of oneself is a great agony,’ Ede told Danlo. ‘But it is not the worst of it.’

  ‘What is, then?’

  ‘Not knowing is the worst pain there is.’

  ‘Not knowing … what?’

  ‘Not knowing if I am really I. Not knowing who I really am.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Danlo said again. He studied the convincing grimace formed by Ede’s facial programs. He thought that Ede certainly looked as if he were suffering a great deal of pain.

  ‘The Silicon God was killing me,’ Ede said. ‘I had only nanoseconds to write the final program of myself. The program that is myself, that must be I, if anything really is.’

  As Danlo nodded his head and pressed the petals of the artificial flower to his lips, Ede told him of some of the difficulties in hurriedly writing such a program. He described his frustration in forcing his great self into a personality type that couldn’t quite capture the essence of who he really was. But he had had no other choice, he said. From descriptions of various human traits out of sources such as the Enneagram – as well as the cetic system of universal archetypes and the old, Earth-centred astrology – he had cobbled together a persona, an identity, a self. For an ai program, it was a subtle piece of work, even if somewhat incomplete and crude. And Ede, of course, was unhappy with it. He was unhappy with himself, with what he had become.

  ‘Where is the mirror in which I can see my own face?’ Ede asked. ‘How can I ever know that I really am I, Nikolos Daru Ede?’

  Danlo looked down at the blue rose in his hand and said, ‘Truly, I cannot know what you are. Conscious or not, aware of your own awareness or only a program running a machine. But you are only you, yes? This is the marvel. You cannot be other than what you are. Isn’t this enough?’

  ‘No, it’s not enough.’

  ‘Then … I am sorry.’

  ‘There is something I want, something I programmed myself to want above all other things.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  Ede’s bright eyes flashed as he looked at Danlo and said, ‘I want to be human again.’

  ‘Oh,’ Danlo said in astonishment. ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘I want to be a ma
n again, to have a body, to breathe real air.’

  ‘But you said–’

  ‘I have said that existence as pure mind is infinitely greater than being a mere human. But what if I am wrong?’

  ‘Then you–’

  ‘I want to know,’ Ede said. He looked at the flower clasped in Danlo’s hand. ‘I want to feel myself alive again. I want to smell roses again. I’m afraid that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to really live.’

  Danlo shook his head, slowly, sadly. ‘What you desire … is impossible.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Ede said. ‘But on Old Earth, blue roses were also an impossibility until the botanists engineered the first one at the end of the Holocaust Centuries.’

  ‘A human being is not a rose.’

  ‘I believe that the Solid State Entity has learned the secret of incarnation.’ Ede’s face, as he said this, was full of hope. ‘I believe that She can incarnate human beings as easily as a cartoonist creates his characters.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Danlo said. He looked down at his hands. He did not want to tell Ede of the Entity’s failed incarnation as Tamara.

  ‘And there might be another way. It is a far possibility, but still possible nevertheless.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’ve said that you seek the planet Tannahill. The Architects of the Old Church.’

  ‘Many pilots of my Order seek Tannahill.’

  ‘The Architects have always worshipped me as God,’ Ede said. His smile was now as radiant as the sun. ‘At my vastening, when I carked my mind into my eternal computer, what do you suppose became of my body?’

  ‘I … do not know.’

  ‘Shall I tell you?’

  ‘Yes, if you would like.’