The Golden Transcendence

by John C. Wright

  Swarm One, which had been positioned in the air locks, had followed Neoptolemous and his cavalcade, and showed Phaethon the picture that the ship-mind vision cells were not showing.

  Certain of the flecks of substance falling from Neoptolemous’s cavalcade floated to nearby bulkheads, clung, grew, and became Neptunians. These Neptunians (or perhaps they were Neptunian partials, remotes, or servant-things; it was impossible to tell merely by looking at the glassy blue-gray shapelessness that housed them) scattered throughout the insulation space, and began affixing magnetic disrupters to the frameworks holding the fuel cells in place.

  The stealth remotes were smaller than bacteria. Some flew into those the disrupters planted by the enemy. Once inside, they emitted radiations, vibrated, probed. Phaethon’s many eyes recorded and analyzed. He had his own engineering programs as well as a military demolition routine (part of the stealth remote’s threat-assessment software) examine the information. Both civilian and military demolition partials in his mind agreed that there was little or no threat here.

  The ship’s vision cells showed Neoptolemous arriving along the outside rim of the living quarters. Here were the ship-mind decks, a nested circle of enormous thought boxes forming the outermost layer of the living quarters. The main group of the cavalcade headed “up” (toward the center of the carousel) elevator shafts and maintenance wells toward the bridge. But the stealth remotes (seeing what the ship mind was not allowed to see) showed a second group breaking off from the main group.

  This mass of Neptunians spread out across the floor once they were out on the ship-brain decks. They, or it (Phaethon could not guess at the number of individuals inhabiting the blue-gray nanomachinery mass), sent a dozen tiny tendrils of substance sneaking across the bulkheads, looking for unshielded jacks or thought ports. They interfaced with the ship’s mind and checked on the progress of the original poisonous thought-virus invasion.

  The Neptunians were mazed in the complexity of the ship logic. So, of course, they consulted manuals and help guides to discover the addresses and locations of the vital centers of the mental architecture they wished to examine. They opened the shipboard thought shop, downloaded certain tools and routines to accomplish their checks, and began further acts of sabotage.

  Phaethon was bitterly amused. He had designed that architecture. He had written those manuals. He had stocked the thought shop, and, in many cases, had designed those tools. Therefore the ship’s mind showed the saboteurs only what they expected to see.

  The real ship’s brain, of course, was in Phaethon’s armor, and always had been. What the saboteurs were accessing were merely secondary systems, repeaters and backups. With the help from the second swarm of stealth remotes (those who had grown in and around the thought-box connective tissues and circuit resolves) Phaethon was able to maintain the masquerade with ease.

  This ship, this beautiful ship, was his. He knew her every line and point, every joint and joist, every nut and bolt. He knew the ship and they did not. She was the child of his mind. Did they actually think they could take her from him by force?

  The intermediate doors on this level had opened and shut. Neoptolemous was approaching. The air lock leading to the bridge was cycling. The ship’s vision cells showed that Neoptolemous was mutating the outer surface of his blue-white armored body, making the adjustments necessary to enter a chamber held at Earth-normal temperature and pressure.

  Phaethon activated the third and final group of stealth remotes.

  Inside the bridge air lock, the third swarm of microscopic and hidden remotes landed on the surface areas of the Neptunian bodies, finer than the finest dust, undetectable. During the moment when the Neptunians’ armored surfaces were changing, the remotes penetrated through the cell layers, infiltrated the Neptunian internal systems, bonded to neural tissue, gathering near the node points that controlled the external signal traffic.

  Phaethon waited, tense as a cat watching a mousehole. If Neoptolemous had any Silent Oecumene technology to detect or counter these remotes, he would probably employ it now. Neoptolemous certainly would not enter the bridge if he knew it was a trap.

  Evidently, he did not know.

  A panel in the deck was already beginning to slide open.

  The remotes inside Neoptolemous began making their medical assessment of how much acceleration pressure each particular nerve group and brain mass could withstand.

  It was all so easy, so sweet, that Phaethon would have laughed out loud, except that he was already ordering his cloak to stiffen his body into its tough, immobile, supergravity-resistant form, and his face had grown as immobile as a block of wood.

  2

  THE SILENT ONE

  1.

  By a tradition as old as that first orbital village (that village whose name was lost to history during the Erasure of the World-Library during the De-renaissance), the entrance to the bridge was in the deck, so that to enter was to travel ‘up,’ that is, toward the dead center of the centrifuge. Therefore it was a section of the ‘floor’ that opened to admit Neoptolemous.

  Like an iceberg rising to the surface of an arctic sea, Neoptolemous entered. The bridge was as large as an ancient amphitheater, and was able to hold his giant body with ease. Up through the doors and to either side now flowed the rest of Neoptolemous’s entourage, pools and surging masses of the Neptunian amoeboid body form, and took up positions to the left and right of the large body mass housing Neoptolemous, a semicircle facing the captain’s chair. Some formed elephantine legs and heaved themselves upright; others rolled like enormous slugs, the motions and pulsation of their brain stuffs visible through the translucent surface of their integument. The Neptunians glistened in the blue-red light from the pressure curtains, the colored glint from the energy mirrors.

  Was there anyone here except for Neoptolemous himself? The medical stealth remotes in the other members of the entourage told him there was little or no neural activity of the kind associated with self-aware thinking, but there was a tremendous thought and nerve-pulse communication with the Neoptolemous body mass. Evidently all the other Neptunians were puppets, backups or sleepwalkers, being used as secondary extensions of his nervous system by Neoptolemous.

  The doors closed beneath Neoptolemous.

  The medical remotes inside of Neoptolemous, by examining the nerve-to-nerve signal traffic, had estimated which brain areas performed which functions, or held which memories. Calmly, efficiently, the military units were calculating a roster of priority. How much of the organism would be held utterly helpless by superacceleration? Which parts of which brains should be destroyed by microlaser scalpel first, to prevent the enemy from thinking about any counteraction or defense? And which brain parts could be examined (once the remotes had attached microscopic reader rebroadcasters to the nerve cells involved) by the portable noetic reader for militarily useful information? And also, for how many seconds would the brain cells carry the information once the target had been crushed to death by the acceleration?

  Phaethon examined the readings from the medical stealth remotes, and prepared a charge of paralyzing energies in the mirrors. Aiming elements in the mirrors received information from the medical stealth remotes and targeted specific nerve clusters and ganglia.

  Phaethon’s cloak told him that his body was now in its most stressresistant configuration. He was invulnerable to gravity. He had estimates and measurements as to how much pressure the Neptunian bodies and neural webs could withstand before blacking out.

  There was a range of values, between twenty and thirty gravities, where the Neptunian body could be pinned and held helpless, but risk of unrecoverable death was low. Between forty and fifty, the specially tough Neptunian brain cells would not be able to convey charges from one to the next, and all neural action would stop, but those charges could still be read, and the last dying thoughts be interpreted. Unfortunately, this would destroy all macrocellular structure in the brain, resulting in the instant death of the organism.
The military estimator in the stealth remotes politely recommended this option as the maximal to achieve mission goals with a good safety margin.

  Phaethon could kill the enemy now, instantaneously, and read the information from the enemy’s dead brain matter at his leisure. Phaethon wondered why he was not more horrified at the concept.

  The status boards now showed the main drives were ready. Navigation showed no objects along the Phoenix Exultant’s line of flight. Nor was this a surprise. Any acceleration would carry the great ship back along the course through which she had just been decelerating. This area, naturally, was bare of other ships or signals.

  With a mental command, Phaethon had the Phoenix Exultant close all her outer hatches, bays, ports and thought ports. Phaethon had paid for every expensive artificial atom of that hull armor. He knew that there were no breaches or breaks in it, not even a pinhole to run a quantum-band antenna through. There was no form of energy, no electromagnetic frequency whatever, that could penetrate that hull. Every known type of communication was blocked.

  Neoptolemous, as far as Phaethon could imagine, was trapped, and unable to communicate with any confederates outside.

  Phaethon was uneasy. Was it all to be as simple as that?

  He prepared a second charge of much deadlier energies in the mirrors, energies sufficient to destroy anything not encased in adamantium armor. He instructed those mirrors to flood the bridge with fire if Phaethon’s thoughts showed any trauma or undue anxiety, or if communication between the ship mind and Phaethon’s armor was interrupted.

  A signal came from the medical stealth remotes, warning him that chances of discovery where growing with each second of delay. The little machine asked for the kill order. It almost seemed impatient.

  Phaethon hesitated. What if this were not the enemy? Didn’t he have an obligation to talk to it first? At least to give it a chance to surrender?

  The Neptunian spoke first.

  A voice issued from the bridge speakers. “This is the translator. My client issues parallel simultaneous communication on twenty-four channels, including an introductory file with appended suggestions for artistically proper methods of interrelating the contents of each communication so as to best appreciate the contrasts, similarities, and patterns of many-sided interrelationship. It is not recommended that you continue in your present neuroform, which seems to be capable only of linear-thinking formats.

  “For example, in the first suggested configuration, labeled ‘Mandelbrot Fractal,’ your mind would be subdivided into recursively symmetrical parts, with your subconsciousness receiving information from communication files one through five, your midbrain complexes receiving file six as memory, seven as dream associations (with a separate subfile for scents, as olfactory memories are stored in different areas of your nervous system), and files eight through fourteen simultaneously being experienced by a multiple-personality format, which would later integrate the responses and cross-correlations back into an artificial main self, according to a neurosymphonic pattern orchestrated through file fifteen. Thereafter—”

  Phaethon sent: “Stop. Are you the same individual, the Neptunian Legate, who first accosted me in the Saturn-tree grove on Earth? Where is Neoptolemous? Your speech pattern is entirely different from his.”

  “I have not yet described the benefits of the Mandelbrot Fractal configuration for files sixteen through twenty-four; nor have I described the one hundred eighty-two other mental configurations or time systems for apprehending my client’s first message. By asking a question at this time, you are attempting to enter question-and-answer dialogue without first establishing dialogue format.”

  Phaeton: “Nevertheless, pass my question along to your client. I consider the question of his identity paramount, since, if he is not Neoptolemous, then he is not an individual who has any right to be here, and I will have him thrown off the bridge.”

  “My client in the meanwhile has posted four hundred twenty new communication files, ranging from topics including decision-actions trees predicting the outcome of this conversation, compliments and new forms of art relating to the appearance and aspects of this bridge, an in-depth information study of the concept of ‘self-hood’ as it relates to certain abstract philosophic ideals, a prospectus for the marriage and conglomeration of your identity and neural systems into his own, along with explanations of the memory benefits and a sample model of the pleasure-reward sharing cycle offered to new members.”

  Phaethon allowed anger to sound in the voice he sent: “This is not responsive to my demand. I am recording this conversation for legal purposes, and hereby make demand that, if you are not a trespasser, you immediately identify yourself, and show by what right you claim to be here. Where is Neoptolemous? Do not utter further irrelevancies.”

  “My client wishes to draw your attention to certain legal documents waiting for you attention in the preliminary introduction file of his first communication grouping. These documents include various writs and titles showing his ownership of the Phoenix Exultant.”

  “What?”

  “Please examine the file. You will find included my client’s procedural claim to be thought-heir to Neoptolemous; extrapolations and legal briefs on possible outcomes of a counterclaim or challenge to his rights of ownership; a copy of Neoptolemous’s internal mental constitution; voting records and internal mental decision hierarchies; and, finally, Diomedes’s recorded affirmation and legal subscription to that constitution before he joined, as well as, in a postscript, noetic records scanning his brain showing that Diomedes did in fact understand the rules and possible outcomes of merging his mind with my client’s, including his acknowledgment that the absorption of his lesser personality into my master’s greater personality would be permissible and acceptable, and not legally grounds for a charge of murder, provided it was done according to the agreed-upon legal rules and standards, a copy of which, as I have said, has thoughtfully been provided for you to peruse.

  “And, it is incumbent on me to point out that, had you accepted any of the mental-configuration formats labeled ‘fractal’ in the file I proffered you earlier, this information would have already automatically been sent to your midbrain emotion centers and memory, so that, not only would you remember all this as if you had always recalled it but all internal mental distress, questioning, grief, and pondering as to whether or not my client truly is, essentially, Diomedes and Neoptolemous, would also have been automatically inserted into your nervous system. You would have been instantaneously run through the cycle of grief, anger, and futile challenge, and would already be experiencing a pleasant resignation to reality, and congratulating yourself on your stoicism. Would you like me to download this mental construction into your midbrain? Please open your private mental files and render the access codes.”

  Phaethon felt a peculiar sensation of crawling horror. (This sensation was made peculiar by the slowness with which it happened. Phaethon’s sluggish false blood reacted slowly as the threads of the retardation field surrounding him prodded molecules of adrenaline, each individually, into his bloodstream. Other parts of the field deliberately pulled his nape hairs erect.)

  “You . . . you are Xenophon, aren’t you?”

  “The question of identity is complex. The preliminary files appended to the first information burst contain the debates, records, conclusions, and extrapolated questions-and-answers surrounding this issue.”

  Phaethon sent: “The Xenophon half of Neoptolemous consumed and absorbed the Diomedes half during the ten minutes it took you to travel down the ship axis and reach the bridge. That’s why you started the trip in human form, according to Silver-Gray conventions, looking like Queen Victoria, and why you arrived looking like an amoeboid. Isn’t that right?”

  “I repeat my last answer. All questions as to my identity are answered. Lower your mental defenses and open the channels leading into your brain. As owner of this ship, and your new employer, I demand that all crew be examined for honesty of
intentions, mental reservations, and memories related to possible acts of sabotage or ship tampering. If you fail to comply, it is I, the owner of this vessel, who will have you, the trespasser, removed.”

  2.

  How should he answer? Should he blast Xenophon now? The energy mirrors were already aimed and focused. Or should he pin the monster in place with ninety gravities, and read what he could from the remains of the crushed brain slush with the portable noetic reader sitting by his left chair arm? The main drive, after all, was primed and ready.

  Was there any reason to continue this absurd pretense?

  At that moment, the medical stealth remotes implanted in Xenophon’s body fed additional information into Phaethon’s armor. There was a mass of neural tissue, a brain, with no nerve fibers linking its upper spinal control nerves to any circuits. This brain’s sensory nerves were being fed through a regulator controlled by the central Xenophon brain group, and additional one-way links were running to the midbrain (seat of the emotions) and the pons (where the pain center of the brain was kept).

  A configuration analysis detected no threat. This brain, after all, was utterly helpless. Whoever was in the brain had no more control over their own emotions than a raving drunk, had no muscles or circuits to manipulate, and could only see and feel whatever things or whatever pains as the master brains would choose to impose.

  And so the simple-minded stealth remotes had, until now, ignored this extra brain mass. A higher-level strategy formulator in the stealth remotes had noticed this prisoner as a possible ally.

  It was Diomedes.

  Motionless, helpless, betrayed and trapped in hell by this enemy.

  Phaethon decided there was no reason to continue any pretense after all.

  The energy mirrors erupted with fire, with concentrated scalpel lasers aimed at specific nerve clusters, with more general washes of electric and focused high-energy particles meant to burn out sense organs, cripple legs and motor control, disrupt links between and through the Neptunian body.