Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  As God does not appear to exist, they said, it became necessary to invent Him/Her. This is now being done. The Kingdom is at hand, and you are welcome to join. Any living human whatsoever may become a neuron in The Mind, and all are equal therein. Go to the nearest telephone company business office or switching facility. There will be a lot of golden crowns. Put one on. You need never fear anyone or anything again. No money down. Satisfaction guaranteed. Act anytime you like; this offer will last. But remember: a smarter God is up to you.

  And then viewers were returned to normal news programming.

  Within minutes, curious people were logging on to the new system, and The Mind began to grow.

  The CIA and KGB, the Joint Chiefs and the Politburo and their counterparts all around the Earth, the guardians of national security and the balance of terror and business as usual and the unnatural order of things, all went individually and then collectively berserk, for the end of status is the end of status quo. But as fast as their servants developed leads, they seemed to forget them…

  For so audacious a mind, Jacques LeBlanc was curiously conservative in his projection of the demand: in that first run he provided only three hundred million of the golden crowns. That is to say, he assumed that no more than one percent of humanity would take his offer within the first week.

  Fortunately three hundred million minds in communion and concert can work just about any miracle they choose. What had taken Jacques, Maddy, Karyn and Joe eleven years was duplicated in a week, and again in a day.

  And everything changed.

  To join The Mind you did not have to lose your ego, your identity or free will. You could leave The Mind and restore the walls around your own personal mind as easily as switching off a phone—that being in fact how it was done—and for as long as you chose. There were no constraints whatsoever on freedom except consensus; no one neuron of God’s Brain had or could have any more, or less, power than any other. Conformity was finally no longer necessary, for there was no static “state” to be threatened by its lack. The codified and calcified rituals that form a state are what humans must do because they do not have telepathy. The Mind was not static; it flowed. The ancient stubborn human conviction was right; in most disagreements, one side is rightest—and now both could know which, neither could refuse to admit it. Nothing could supersede the truth, not who you were or who you knew, for everyone knew everyone and everyone knew the truth. Consensus decisions were self-enforcing. All came to learn what computer hackers had always intuited and prayed for: that in a shareware economy, with free flow of information, there can be no hierarchy, and all users are equal.

  Not everyone joined The Mind, of course. It is possible to adapt so well to pain and fear that you cannot shift gears and adapt to their lack. Black Americans, knowing more about these things than most, had a colloquial expression for this common response to unremitting pain: It got good to him, they said. Those people who had made cruelty or malice or indifference into an essential integral part of their self-identity, a sadly large portion of humanity, found that they were forced to reinvent themselves, or leave The Mind. Cruelty is love twisted by pain, malice is love twisted by fear, and indifference is love twisted by loneliness, and there was no pain or fear or loneliness in The Mind.

  Others were so incurably afflicted with intolerant religious doctrines of one sort or another that they could not accept the damnable heresy of human beings daring to make their own God, could not bear to live in any Heaven where they were not a privileged elite by virtue of birth.

  Within a single generation, all gnosis was ended; every religion that did not have tolerance built right into the very marrow of its bones (most of them) had vanished—at long last!—from the face of the globe, and those who had been afflicted by them were forgiven by their surviving victims. Something like a new religion came into existence almost at once, quite superior to simple “secular humanism” (a fascist code-word for “intellectual liberty”).

  (The new religion was simple. Clearly the universe is mindless. Equally clearly it was written by a mind. A program of such immense size and self-consistency cannot form by random chance; the idea is ludicrous. The new religion sought The User, the intelligence that had written the program, for no other reason than that it was the most exciting game possible. Some individual minds felt that by the act of collapsing into The Mind, the human race had debugged itself and would thus soon attract the pleased attention of The User [“soon” defined by whatever he/she/it used for “realtime”]; others argued that The Mind was as yet no more than an integrated application, an automatic routine beneath notice, and would have to deduce The User from contemplation of the Operating System.)

  Many tore crowns from their foreheads in rage or shame, and swore to fight The Mind and all it represented. Of course they never had a chance: by definition they were unable to cooperate enough, even with each other, to seriously threaten minds in perfect harmony. Evil, however clever, is always stupid.

  They were not punished for trying. In time, they forgot what they had been angry about, forgot that they had been angry, were allowed to live out their lives and (since they insisted on it) die in the fullness of their years without remembering their bitter defeat. Rugged individualists who could not live without their loneliness became nothing when their bodies died, and there is nothing lonelier than that, so perhaps they too had their Heaven. Within one generation there were no more of them.

  But an astonishing number of even humanity’s most bitter pessimists chose, freely, to reinvent themselves rather than leave The Mind once they had tasted of it. Most human bitterness had derived from lack of The Mind. All evil derives from fear.

  And the majority of human beings had always, in their heart of hearts, at least wanted to love all mankind—if only there had been some sane, practical way to do so. The problem with living in total perpetual honesty and openness had always been making sure that no one else lied either. People had tended to be untrustworthy because they lacked trust, to be selfish because they needed to be, paranoid because it worked—but for a million years they had never lost the sneaking awareness that it ought to be otherwise, had never ceased dreaming of a society in which it was otherwise. People had feared that others might see their secret thoughts—because each and every one was convinced that his or her secret thoughts and sins were fouler and more shameful than anyone else’s (a delusion that could not survive an instant in The Mind)—and yet had never given up the search for a lover or confessor to whom they could unburden themselves. They had always yearned to be telepathic, and yet had suppressed most tendencies toward planetary awareness that they did develop—because the first thing any telepath notices is that most of his brothers are starving to death and there is nothing he can do about it.

  But once that last clause no longer obtained, once world hunger and the arms race and death and pain themselves were seen to be soluble problems, humanity leaped to embrace telepathy with such ardor that it was as though Jacques LeBlanc’s golden crown had been a seed crystal dropped into the heart of a great supersaturated solution, which collapsed at once into a structure, a pattern, of awesome complexity and beauty.

  In the instant that Loneliness and the Fear of Death were ended, Evil died for good and for all.

  At the point when there were approximately a billion minds in The Mind, there was a quantum change. A switch was thrown and a new kind of awareness came into existence. The pattern became a living, functioning, growing thing, learned how to teach itself, approached at long, long last both intelligence and wisdom.

  On an evolutionary scale the change was instantaneous. At the computer rates of thoughtspeed now available to its members, it seemed subjectively to last for hundreds of millennia. In old-style, Homo sapiens terms, the metamorphosis was essentially complete in something under three months from a standing start.

  By half a century or so later, The Mind was something utterly unknowable to any old-style human, indescribable in any pre-exist
ing language. But it can perhaps be imagined that it was both intelligent and wise. Some of its members had lived thousands of subjective lifetimes of uninterrupted thought, without ever losing a friend or a colleague to death. It can be understood that The Mind spread to fill its solar system, and began to contemplate how best to reach the stars. And it can be reported that it had discovered—and discarded as much too dangerous to have any practical purpose—a way to bend space in such a way as to travel backward (only) through time.

  Then one day one of the neurons in The Mind had an astonishing idea—

  * Publisher’s note—for a more detailed account of these events, see MINDKILLER (Berkley 1985).

  CHAPTER 17

  IT WAS ALMOST irrelevant that this particular neuron had once been known as Karyn Shaw. Having been one of the original Four earned her respect—but not “status” or “authority,” since these things no longer existed, and certainly not “worship,” for worship is a kind of fear.

  It was the idea itself that was so irresistibly appealing. It was suffused with the same sort of dazzling audacity that had led Jacques LeBlanc to conquer the world in order to save it, the same kind of arrogance it took to wipe minds and subvert wills in order to make a world in which no mind would be wiped or will subverted ever again.

  We have (Karyn argued) overcome Death but not yet conquered it. We’ve managed to plug the massive information leak it comprised. Half of the human minds that ever thought are thinking now, and their thoughts are no longer wasted—

  —only half.

  Perhaps (she proposed) humanity was now grown mighty enough, not only to beat Death, but to rob it. To wrest back from it the half of the human race it had stolen before we learned how to circumvent it. To recover the trillions of man-hours of human experience that had been stored as painfully-collected memories, and then ruined.

  Perhaps (she urged) we could go back and rescue our dead.

  It was odd and ironic that this idea should have been conceived by Karyn Shaw, for she had less reason than most to love her dead parents. (Her father had been a sadistic child-molester, her mother a cipher.) Equally ironic that the first to agree with it was Joe, who had no parents…but less odd, for he and Karyn were married, both old-style and in the fashion of The Mind. Together they communicated her thought to Madeleine Kent—who saw at once that it was just what her own husband needed.

  Though basically at peace with himself, Jacques LeBlanc was still plagued with a lingering echo of something like guilt, a persistent regret for some of the things he had been forced to do in pursuit of his dream, pain which even the vindication of his judgment could not entirely ease. Chief among these was that he had—in order to preserve his secrets, until it was time for all secrets to be ended—been forced to kill quite a few men and women. Not all of them had been evil people.

  He seized gladly on the idea that perhaps he could undo this harm.

  And so The Four, reassembled once more, studied Karyn’s idea, refined it to a plan, polished it, and presented it to the rest of The Mind…

  The debate was titanic. Never in the history of The Mind had consensus been so hard to achieve.

  The risk was horrible. Careless time travel could change history, shatter reality, destroy The Mind itself and the universe in which it inhered, waste everything that had been gained so far and all possibility of future gain.

  (On the other hand, a race which had feared nothing for countless subjective lifetimes was not utterly opposed to some risk in a good cause. It did not seem reasonable that the dissolution of the universe could hurt, exactly, and who would be left to mourn?)

  The sheer physical task was daunting: to place, somewhere in the spinal fluid of every human being that had ever lived, a tiny and fantastically complex descendant of a microchip which would copy every memory that brain formed—and when triggered by death trauma, would transmit that copy to the nearest buried “bubble” for storage and future recovery—all this without ever getting caught at it by touchy ancestors.

  (On the other hand, this was a manageable problem for several billion supergeniuses who could subtract memories at need and had an entire solar system to plunder for parts.)

  The cost was also daunting. Any individual mind that volunteered to go back in time would go one way, to a ficton which did not contain The Mind. After a lifetime of solitary confinement in the equivalent of a deaf, dumb, blind and numb hulk, such a one would die—not permanently, to be sure, but it would hurt. Should its true intentions be suspected, and it be surrounded by more minds than it could control alone, it might very well be burned at the stake…

  The potential benefit was irresistible. To undo two million years of tragedy, the aching psychic weight of grief and mourning represented by billions of deaths! The Mind would almost precisely double in size, both in numbers of “neurons” and in man-years of human experience. The Family would be together again!

  The debate surged through The Mind from one end to the other, provoking more vigorous disagreement than that entity had heretofore known. In objective terms, it must have taken over an hour.

  It was decided to perform a careful experiment.

  The Four made copies of themselves. Heavily edited copies, extremely abridged copies, versions of themselves so close to the solitary old-style humans they had once been that they believed the copies could live among such without going insane. They grew a body out of germ plasm which, by now, was thoroughly racially mixed, and poured themselves into it, and called themself Rachel. They picked a target ficton close to the historical moment of The Mind’s birth, but enough short of it that there would be time for a proper forty-year test of the plan.

  And then they hurled themselves through time and into my birch tree.

  Because of that single unfortunate error (my father explained to me now), the secret was compromised from the start. By the time Rachel had recovered from the near-fatal trauma of blowing up that tree, got her crown back, and was once again physically capable of controlling my mind, I had shared what I knew with Snaker—and he and I had lived through too much subjective time. To edit our memories now would leave gaps too large to remain unnoticed for long—and by horrid mischance we were both science fiction readers, perfectly capable of deducing what had been done to us.

  A practical solution would have been to kill us both. The part of Rachel that had once been Jacques LeBlanc had had a bellyful of that particular practical solution.

  Instead she opened Snaker and me up and examined us—and decided to invite Snaker into the conspiracy, and keep me in the dark. Between them they did their best to cure me of the spiritual illness that made me dangerous, the sickness that feared its cure…and when that failed, they committed themselves to keeping me in ignorance of Rachel’s true mission.

  They had very nearly pulled it off. They were foiled by the preposterous chance involvement of a plastic moose, and by the unexpected savagery with which I defended my poisoned mindset.

  And so I had brought the universe to the brink of disaster, by making a change in history too great for it to heal itself around. By changing the date of my death.

  Imagine an immense computer program composed of billions of files, quadrillions of megabytes of data, an immense and intricate array of ones and zeroes, of yeses and nos. A cosmic ray strikes one bit of data, alters it. Does the program crash? Of course not. A program that vast has mighty debugging routines written into it, or it could never have reached that size in the first place. As the altered bit causes tiny errors to accumulate, they are spotted, collated, analyzed, and the bit is “repaired,” restored to its correct state. If it cannot be, through media failure, a good debugger will rewrite the program around the damaged sector.

  But if a whole file, millions of bits of related data scattered through many discontiguous sectors, suddenly seizes up and dissipates prematurely—before the results of its operations are made available to the other subroutines that depend on it—if the discontinuity is too large to work ar
ound—

  —then cascading errors ripple outward like shock waves and the system crashes. And all the information—in this case, all information—vanishes, lost forever.

  It was explained to me that my premature death—first cause, Rachel choosing to use a time machine to monkey with history; final cause, Snaker choosing to pull two triggers—was just such a potentially catastrophic disruption.

  It was further, and most humiliatingly, made clear to me that this was not because of any profoundly significant effect or affect upon the universe as a result of my premature absence. By the time of my death I was an ingrown toenail of a man, halfway to hermitage, interacting with my world as little as possible and doing my very best to influence no one’s life. Between Death and the remaining life I had planned for myself there was very little difference. There were no children who would now be unborn, no albums that would go unrecorded.

  What made my death significant to anyone but myself—what made my own personal folly the rock upon which the universe itself might be broken—was that in my blindness and fear I had forced Snaker to kill me.

  For he did interact with the world. He was a writer, an artist, and it was written in his kharma that he would one day be a fairly influential one. But some public explanation had to be found for my death, and policemen always bet the odds. History would now record that Snaker O’Malley had been convicted of murdering me because I had slept with his wife Ruby. Killing me would abort some of his greatest works, and distort all the others beyond recognition, with far-reaching effects on people neither of us would ever meet. Similarly, Ruby’s paintings could never now be what they would have been, and she was fated to be a greater artist than her husband, though less commercially successful in her lifetime. And Nazz would, in his grief and guilt, fail to pass on to friends an off-the-wall, blue-sky insight that would have so profound an effect on computers in the Eighties as to forestall nuclear war in the Nineties…