by Tony Daniel
LAP
A Large Array of Personalities. If a person makes multiple copies of him- or herself and integrates these personalities to act in parallel via the quantum interaction of the grist, you have a LAP. Usually these various personas are copies of an original “person” and are mostly converts—although it is usual for a LAP to have three or so clones, in addition to the original biological aspect. A LAP can be a conglomeration of many physical bodies, many convert portions, or a mixture of both. The convert portions of LAPs are usually a plethora of programs and subroutines, all under a mediator intelligence that is a complete replica of the human personality, along with whatever virtual controls and calculators are necessary for proper functioning.
These Large Arrays of Personalities are instantaneous networks, since they are linked by the merci, and the merci operates superluminally. By becoming a LAP a person can lead multiple lives in multiple locations, all at the same time. He or she might also choose to concentrate all those separate (but similar) attentions on one task or way of life. There are many different ways that LAPs have chosen to exist. The ships of the outer system, for instance, are large-scale LAPs that are essentially spaceship and crew, all in one. Being a LAP in the Met is more like being a subway system or a high-rise in a city than a single person in one. Not everyone can become a LAP. A significant number of people have a psychology that would cause them to go insane during the conversion process. This is normally predictable and is usually avoided. The process of becoming a LAP is quite expensive, as well.
Manifold
A fully integrated, multiply differentiated LAP with a highly diverse plethora of personalities. A manifold is a LAP of LAPs.
Time Tower
LAPs that were the product of some of the first attempts to create a manifold. Rather than being “nonlocal” in space, as most LAPs are, the consciousness of the time tower is spread over time, so that his or her present can span a decade of e-years or more. The idea was to create a being who could see into the future. Instead, the effort produced a species of utterly gnostic human personalities whose Delphic pronouncements were of little practical use. Many time towers became the prophets and even the “gods” of offshoot religions, however. Time towers have very odd effects on the grist in their immediate vicinity, and their presence can serve as a form of “firewall” or barricade within the virtuality, preventing—or in some cases allowing—eavesdropping and direct virtual travel through the grist. For that reason they were highly valued during the war.
Cloudship
Something like a mini-Met in the form of a spaceship. Usually one controlling personality inhabits a ship, but some are multiply inhabited. The cloudships traverse the outer system, where they serve as bankers and interplanetary transports (although there are also plenty of noncloudship craft available as well). Cloudships take the names of various important historical or fictional characters in human history. They consider themselves humanity’s elite and are often aloof towards everyone else. The cloudships are the major political and economic power in the outer system. Cloudships began to be recognized as such in the 2700s, C. E.
From
The Memoirs of Cloudship Lebedev
We moved farther and farther out, always adding to our number in a stepwise process. Frequently, pioneers to the outer system would, after a time of hardship, acquire their own ships, and if we thought them suitable, we would ask them to join our consortium. Hardly anyone ever turned us down. It was, relatively speaking, easy money, and a sure passport to LAP status. Eventually, Tacitus and I reached the Oorts—the subject of my doctoral dissertation some 350 e-years before. We thought we could go no farther.
We remained there, and others joined us. After several years, a kind of society began to develop among us. For the most part, we eschewed the merci and kept to ourselves, although we are as able to make use of the merci as the next fellow. Mainly, we found that the programming did not speak to our needs and was generally not to our taste. As I said, cloudships can be a snobby bunch. And then the males and females among us began to explore the possibility of procreating, as ships. This is what one does out in the Oorts with a great deal of time on one’s hands.
There were, by that time, some grist engineers and quantum physicists among us of what I do not hesitate to call genius status. They were called upon to perform the rather odd task of reinventing sex—and in our case, sex as it might be carried out between hurricanes and storm clouds. By the time a ship got to the Oorts, it had formed into a sort of miniature copy of the shape that galaxies and nascent solar systems take. Fortunately for our children, those engineers and physicists were up to the task, and even succeeded in adding a new sort of beauty to the process.
Now I won’t go into the exact specifics of cloudship courting and breeding practices here. Suffice it to say they are complex, but dancelike. Most of us are spirals, and one has to maneuver the tines of oneself within those of another without destroying that other in the process. Over time we discovered that it is better for males to have cyclonal rotations and for females to have anticyclonal, counterclockwise spins.This is entirely arbitrary, but a great improvement over the old days, when sex could be quite dangerous.
Population
There are approximately 90 billion people of various sorts living in the Met and on the planets of the inner solar system. There are approximately 10 billion people living in the outer system.
Appendix Three
THE SCIENCE OF CLOUDSHIPS
The Casimir Effect
The physical effect underlying the operations of cloudships and founded upon the principle of quantum fluctuation. This effect, discovered and experimentally proved in the twentieth century, is a result of the fundamental quantum nature of reality, and it works as follows: if two mirrors are placed a short distance apart and facing one another, they will move to a small degree toward one another. This distance is imperceptible to the naked eye, of course, but it does indeed occur.
QUANTUM FLUCTUATION
The physical property that accounts for the Casimir effect. The most familiar concept usually used for demonstrating Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty is that of momentum and position. If you know one, the other becomes unknowable to an extent equal (precisely) to the amount that you know its partner. Another, lesser-known, product of uncertainty is the energy and time pairing. Taking this into account mathematically results in the prediction that space—empty space—is actually teeming with a sea of virtual particles, all produced in pair-antipair combinations that are continually being generated and annihilating one another. Empty space can be polarized, and you can “make” a particle out of nothing.
A good way to picture the process is this: Think of space as a string on a musical instrument. Now pluck that string. Normal space is a very long string and its “vibration” corresponds to the lowest energy state there can be. Now if you “fret” the string—say, with our two mirrors—you necessarily exclude certain vibrations. The only vibrations that will occur between the mirrors are those whose wavelengths fit exactly into the distance separating the mirrors. This is precisely how a fretted guitar string produces different notes, and how, in a sense, it “contains” all notes.
THE CASIMIR EFFECT IN THE ACTUAL UNIVERSE
Now you will remember that all elementary particles are not actually particles, but are wave-particle entities that have properties associated with both phenomena. With our mirrors we might “play” an electron upon the nothingness, or, more easily, a photon. But when we “play” one virtual particle, the others are all necessarily excluded. In effect, there are “more” possible particles on the outside of our mirrors than there are between them. There is less pressure, therefore, pressing them out than pressing them in. The mirrors move together. Remember that this has nothing to do with gases or liquids being between or outside the mirror surfaces. We are speaking of empty space.
Cloudship Propulsion and Weaponry
Cloudships have the ability to produc
e antimatter at any point on their surface, and to concentrate it for firepower or propulsion. The process is begun by using what is called the Casimir effect upon tiny mirrors whose size is in the nanometer level. The mirrors are, of course, created and manipulated by the grist.
THE CASIMIR EFFECT IN CLOUDSHIPS
While you must “put in” energy in the form of setting up the nanomirrors, so that the law of the conservation of energy is obeyed, the energy that comes out is precise and focused. If you “fret” the vacuum correctly (making use of the property of quantum fluctuation), the energy produced can be extracted in the form of a stream of antiparticles, which can then be lased into a beam or used to produce an annihilation reaction with matter. This operation is at the heart of a cloudship.
All of this is done on a nanometer level by the grist. The mirrors we use are conducting plates of material that is a single molecule thick. The lasers are of a similar dimension. A cloudship can enact this process anywhere on the ship where there is grist. To a cloudship, it feels very much like moving a finger or blinking an eye. If you are watching from space, it appears as if a bolt of raw energy has erupted from the ship’s surface (provided, of course, that that energy interacts with something along its path and so become visible). A fully energized cloudship is an awesome sight to behold.
Unless the cloudship is aiming at you.
Appendix Four
COMMON TERMS AND COMMON KNOWLEDGE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Basis
This is the most common language spoken in the Met and in the outer system. It is a combination of English and free-convert information transfer protocols—that is, it is English strained through a thousand-year-long “information age.” While most people believe they are speaking Basis, there are, in fact, millions of dialects, as well as dialects of all the other human languages, many having only one or two individuals as native speakers. This phenomenon is due to the proliferation of “Broca grist” throughout human space. People have adaptive translation programs embedded in their brains. Because of this, you can utter just about any sound you desire and, if it mentally correlates with an idea, image, or other language construct in your own mind, your pellicle can transform it into standard Basis. The pellicle of the person who is listening to you will receive and decode your words. This is normally done without either party noticing the process or giving it any thought—and the practice has been going on for centuries. Someone listening in on the Met who does not possess Broca grist will hear a vast Tower of Babel and will wonder how anybody understands what anyone else is saying. Most people in the cultural elite understand the problem and attempt to speak a standard Basis not mediated by Broca grist.
E-year
Along with e-month, e-week, e-day, these are time periods based on Earth’s rotation and orbit. It is the standard measurement of calendar time in the solar system. Local time is also frequently referenced when dealing with local matters.
Greenleaf
AKA “leaves.” The monetary unit of the solar system. The term has its origin in the Greentree religion, which has a strong economic component, and as a reference to the old U.S. dollars of Earth.
Rip
Slang in Met Basis for “highly desirable, pleasing, and stylish.”
Appendix Five
SOLAR SYSTEM HISTORY
Amanda Breadwinner
First Chief Engineer of the Met. Born in Dublin, in the old EU, in 2429, the daughter of American immigrant writers. Construction on the Aldiss, the first space cable, was complete, 2475 C. E. Initial construction began on the Mars-Earth Diaphany.
Breadwinner continued on in her job until her retirement in 2511 C. E., coincidentally the year of Raphael Merced’s birth. She took the position as the director of the newly established Breadwinner Labs within the first Met bolsa to be constructed on the Diaphany, Apiana. It was twenty years later at Breadwinner Labs that a young engineer named Feur Otto Bring, who suffered from incurable Tourette’s syndrome, would obtain his first internship in nanotech construction techniques. Bring would soon be fired by Breadwinner after questioning her parentage during a laboratory dispute. Bring would then end up at Bradbury University on Mars, where he eventually met Raphael Merced, and the grist as we know it today was invented.
Beat Myers
Poet. Best friend to Raphael Merced. Founder of the “Flare Generation” of poets, and editor of the poetry journal Flare , although the November 2646 issue of Flare was almost wholly devoted to Merced’s seminal paper “The Teleological Constant and Its Relation to Instantaneous Information Transfer at a Distance,” accompanied by poems written by Myers. Myers’s best poem is considered to be “Old Left-handed Time.”
Bradbury University
The great center of learning in the Met. It is located on Mars and was founded by Tacitus and Lebedev. This is where Raphael Merced did all his important work. Before the war, it had fallen far from its former glory. Its greatest period was the 2500s C. E., when new discoveries and technologies, new systems of thought, and great works of literature came pouring out of Bradbury. These were the years of Merced and Bring, of Ravenswaay’s Atmosphericsaga , and a hundred lesser, but no less worthy, works of skill and genius.
Chen Wocek
Raphael Merced’s mentor at Bradbury University.
Clara Merced
Sister to Raphael Merced. Interplanetary geophysicist who was the first to explain why the solar system planets lie in the same basic orbital plane.
Conjubilation of 2963
When Mars and Earth reach the closest point in their respective orbits, the Mars-Earth Diaphany is bent into a vast U shape trailing high above the planetary elliptic. At the closest point between the two sides of the U, a temporary bridge is built, and a festival is held. This is known as the Conjubilation, and it occurs about every two e-years. The most important Conjubilation in history occurred in 2963 C. E. Many important cultural and scientific movements had their origins in the event, but more important, a series of demonstrations broke out against the old Federal Republic. These in turn had their beginnings in the music and art festival called the Merge. From the Merge arose the system of direct “directorate-based” democracy that governed the Met until the war. The most important political figure to arise out of the Merge was a LAP going by the singular name of Amés.
Containment Principles
Legal strictures of the late 2300s and early 2400s C. E. that led to the Information Consortiums of the 2400s C. E., and to the genesis of the ECHO Alliance. They still have repercussions today, being the precedent for the reproduction and expiration constraints put on free converts in Met. Project Alsace-Lorraine’s tests were discovered five years after the fact by a Russian journalist, who published a full account in the Russian tabloids of the time. This caused a furor, but was not believed until the story was independently confirmed by EU military whistle-blowers (the original experiment had been a joint German-French venture called Project Alsace-Lorraine).
ECHO Alliance
Former government on Earth during 2400s C. E.—a consortium of transnational information brokers. Growth and commerce, though sluggish, were generally steady. For the arts and sciences, however, it was an era of stagnation and malaise. In the arts, the 2400s C. E. are known as the Ironic Age.
The Exiles’ Journey
The Exiles’ Journey is a compendium of essays, thoughts, and sayings by the artists and scientists who ran afoul of the Mercurian Endowment government in the 2590s C. E., and whose malfunctioning prison ship accidentally fell into the sun. Contains Beat Myers’s classic poem “Old Left-handed Time” and Raphael Merced’s aphoristic “Merced Synthetics.” Both men were on the doomed ship, as was Merced’s sister, Clara.
Feur Otto Bring
Nanotech engineer, coinventor of the grist. Victim of incurable Tourette’s syndrome. Fired by Met chief engineer Amanda Breadwinner after an outburst. Longtime collaborator with Raphael Merced. His daughter, Katya, was a famous spaceship pilot.
Fifty Worlds to Sunday
A written exchange between Raphael Merced and poet Beat Myers which attempted to codify an aesthetic theory.
FUSE
The Icelandic acronym for a terrorist group on Mars dedicated to the radical enforcement of free-convert rights. Destroyed by Roger Sherman’s command on Mars when he was a captain in the Federal Army, even though he believed in many of their tenets. Sherman’s company was known as the Fever Blisters by FUSE members.
Glory Channel
A special merci channel set up by the Department of Immunity to network the collective consciousness of those infused with the Glory or Confidence grist through subliminal communication during entertainment programming.
Hubble-Penrose Platform
Ancient space station circa 2300–2400s in Earth orbit.
Mars Terraforming Experiments
Disastrous attempt during the early 2700s C . E. to make the Martian surface inhabitable by unadapted human beings. Grist ecological feedback problems doomed the project.
Mouseflowers
An early attempt to make bean plants “warm-blooded” to an extent using mouse genes implanted by nanotechnological means. See Psyche Toomsuba’s comprehensive Artificial Speciation and the Genesis of Mammaliform Brachiation in the Legume Family , or Peter Ober’s Mouseflowers, which is intended for a more general audience.
Pithway Streamers
Bead compartments used for mass transit throughout the Met. They are coated with centimeter-long tendrils, slightly sticky, for passenger security. The walls are lustrous and pearly. There is normally a faint white-red, diffuse lighting that originates from these fiber tips. Grist commands can make the fibers into couches, chairs, etc. Windows can sometimes be deopaqued. Beads are highly crowded in the Vas, so packed with people that little movement is possible.
