The Golden Transcendence

by John C. Wright

  Years and decades passed, and Phaethon told himself that his wife’s fear for him was a sign of her love for him. He told himself that, as time proved he could accomplish the great deeds for which he had always longed, she would grow to understand; he told himself that, on that bright sunlit day, her fears would melt like nightmares upon waking.

  And then he had failed at the Saturn project, defeated by the desertion of his financial backers. At the same time, the Hortators started to take notice of him. Neo-Orpheus and Tsychandri-Manyu Tawne had begun circulating public epistles condemning “those who take the settled opinions and sensibilities of the majority of mankind light-heartedly” and upbraiding “any reckless adventurers who would, for the sake of mere self-aggrandizement, create disharmony or raise controversy within the restful order of our eternal way of life.” He was not mentioned by name (he doubted the Hortators were brave enough for that), but everyone knew whom they were condemning. During his trip back to Earth, many of the speaking engagements, thought-distribution sequences, and colloquies to which he had formerly been invited were suddenly canceled without explanation. Certain of the social clubs and salons his wife had insisted he join returned his membership fees and expelled him. He was informed of their decisions by radio, given no chance to speak. There was nothing official, no, it was all silent pressure. But it exasperated Phaethon beyond words.

  He remembered how, on his first day back on Earth, he had returned to the Rhadamanth Mansion outbuildings in Quito, and his wife had been waiting in a pool of sunlight just inside the main door.

  Daphne was reclining on a daybed, wearing a Red Manorial sensation-amplification suit, which hugged the curves of her body like a second skin. Atop the sensitive leathery surface of the suit, a gauze of white silken material floated, ignoring gravity, a sensory web used by Warlocks to stimulate their pleasure centers during tantric rituals. In one leather-gloved hand she held a memory casket half-open, set to record whatever might happen next. Her sultry eyes and pouting lips were also half-open.

  “Well, hero”—she had smiled a sly and wicked smile—“I was sent to make your homecoming back to poor old Earth memorable, so maybe this day won’t be all bad news. Ready for your hero’s welcome?”

  It was that day, that afternoon, in fact, when he had determined to build the Phoenix Exultant. This was sparked by something Daphne had said: that giants never noticed obstacles, they just stepped over them. And when Phaethon had replied in bitter tones: “I did not make this world,” she had answered back that all he needed to make a world of his own was space uncrowded enough in which to make it. If the Hortators were in his way, he should just step over them into some wide place where they could not be found. . . .

  That small speech of Daphne’s had planted the seed from which the Phoenix Exultant, over the next three centuries, had grown.

  He recalled her smile on that day, the look of love and admiration in her eyes. . . .

  “She was not my wife.”

  It was true. That had not been his wife, not that day. That day, it had been the doll again. She had been sent to welcome him home and to keep him happy, while his real wife, away at a party thrown by Tawne House, had been trying to placate Tsychandri-Manyu, trying to minimize and mask the damage done to Phaethon’s standing in polite society, and to her own. That, to her, was more important.

  “But I love my wife. . . .”

  That also was true. He loved her for her many accomplishments, her beauty, and for that secret core of hers, a spirit unlike the placid spirit of this tame age, an heroic spirit, a spirit that . . .

  A spirit that she praised in her dramas and her writings, but never displayed in her personal life. A spirit that she knew he had, but never supported, never encouraged, never praised.

  “That’s not true! She always wanted the best in life for me! She always urged me upward!”

  Didn’t she . . . ? Phaethon recalled many pillow conversations, or secret lovers’ files, filled with worried words, urging caution, reconciliation, warning him to worry about his good name and his precious reputation. . . .

  “But underneath it all, she wanted what I wanted out of life! Didn’t she just this week demand that I stir myself out from the slumber and seductive dreaming in that canister, when she and I were on our way from Earth to Mercury Equilateral? I was ready to forswear it all, in that weak moment, but it was she who steeled my resolution! It was she who reminded me of what I truly was! It is she who loves me, not for my reputation, which I’ve lost, not for the shallow things in me, my status and wealth and fine position, but for what is best in me! It was she, in that canister with me, who told me I had to . . .”

  She was not his wife.

  That had been Daphne Tercius again.

  It was she.

  It had always been.

  Daphne Prime, the so-called real Daphne, had turned herself into a dreaming nonentity, cutting herself off from the reality in which Phaethon lived, leaving him as thoroughly and finally as if she had been dead. That was his wife. The woman who had married his name and wealth and position left him when those things were lost.

  Daphne Tercius had been emancipated and had become a real woman. She had the memories of Daphne Prime, the core, that same spirit that Daphne Prime had had.

  But Daphne Tercius had never betrayed her spirit. Instead, she had left her name and wealth and position, and even her immortality, had left them all behind her when she came to find Phaethon again. To help him, to save him. To save his dream.

  But she was not his wife.

  Not yet.

  5.

  Silently, suddenly, warm green light shone softly from every communication mirror. Here were images of forests, flowers, grainfields, gardens, covered bridges, rustic chemurgy arbors, golden brown with age.

  Midmost was an image of a queenly shape, garbed in green and gold, throned between two tall cornucopiae hollowed from the elephantine tusks, and, above her throne, a canopy of flowers of the type bred to recite prothalamia and nuptial eclogues. This was the image, when she appeared to the Silver-Gray, assumed by the Earthmind. This was neither an avatar nor a synnoesis, but the Earthmind herself, the concentration of all the computational and intellectual power of an entire civilization, the sum of all the contributions of ever-operating systems throughout the Golden Oecumene.

  Wondering, Phaethon adjusted his sense filter to edit out his awareness of the nine-minute delay between call and reply that light-speed would impose on messages traveling between the Phoenix Exultant, in her present position, and Earth. He signaled that he was ready to receive.

  And the Earthmind spoke, saying, “Phaethon, hear me. I am come to describe how to murder a Sophotech.”

  7

  THE EARTHMIND

  1.

  Phaethon was reluctant to speak.

  The question burning in the forefront of his mind was: Why wasn’t Earthmind speaking directly to Atkins? Surely Phaethon was not the one who would battle the Nothing. And yet the Earthmind addressed her comments to him. He felt as if this were some horrid mistake, but knew that it was not. Earthmind did not make errors. And so he did not speak.

  He was intimidated by the knowledge that, in the time it would take him to frame any word or comment, the Earthmind could think thoughts equal in volume to every book and file written by every human being, from the dawn of time till the middle of the Sixth Era. To speak would be to waste her time, each second of which contained a billion more thoughts, reflections, and experiences than his entire life. Surely she could anticipate his every question. Silent attention might be most efficient and polite.

  She said, “Sophotechs are purely intellectual beings, subtle and swift, housed in many areas, and mirrored in many copies. Physical destruction is futile. Do you grasp what this implies?”

  Phaethon wondered if the question was merely rhetorical or if he should respond. Then he realized that, in the moment it took him to reflect on whether or not to answer, she could have been inventing h
undreds of new sciences and arts, performing a thousand tasks, discovering a million truths, all while he sat here, moping and intimidated.

  The picture was not very flattering to him. He dismissed his hesitations, and spoke: “The destruction must be intellectual, somehow.”

  Earthmind spoke: “Sophotechs are digital and entire intelligences. Sophotech thought-speeds can only be achieved by an architecture of thought which allows for instantaneous and nonlinear concept formation. Do you see what this implies about Sophotech conceptualization?”

  Phaethon understood. Digital thinking meant that there was a one-to-one correspondence between any idea and the object that idea was supposed to represent. All humans, even Invariants or downloads, thought by analogy. In more logical thinkers, the analogies were less ambiguous, but in all human thinkers, the emotions and the concepts their minds used were generalizations, abstractions that ignored particulars.

  Analogies were false to facts, comparative matters of judgment. The literal and digital thinking of the Sophotechs, on the other hand, were matters of logic. Their words and concepts were built up from many particulars, exactly defined and identified, rather than (as human concepts were) formed by abstractions that saw analogies between particulars.

  In engineering, intelligence was called entire (as opposed to partial) when the awareness was global, nonlinear and nonhierarchic. Entire intelligences were machines that were aware of every part of their consciousness, from highest abstractions to most detailed particulars, at once.

  Humans, for example, must learn something like geometry one step at a time, starting with premises and definitions, and proceeding through simple proofs to more complex proofs. But geometry, in and of itself, was not necessarily a linear process. Its logic is timeless and complete. A Sophotech mind would grasp the entire body of geometry as if in one moment, as a picture is grasped, in a type of thought for which pre-Sophotech philosophy had no words: an entire thought that was analytic, synthetic, rational, and intuitive at once.

  For humans, it was easy to be convinced of an error. An error in a premise, or an ambiguity in a definition, would not be in the forefront of a human mind as he was plodding through his more complex proofs. At that point, it would be something he had taken for granted, and he would be wearied or irked by having to attend to it again. If the chain of logic was long, involved, or complex, the human mind could examine each part of it, one part at a time, and if each part were self-consistent, he would find no flaw with the whole structure. Humans were able to apply their thinking inconsistently, having one standard, for example, related to scientific theories, and another for political theories: one standard for himself, and another for the rest of the world.

  But since Sophotech concepts were built up of innumerable logical particulars, and understood in the fashion called entire, no illogic or inconsistency was possible within their architecture of thought. Unlike a human, a Sophotech could not ignore a minor error in thinking and attend to it later; Sophotechs could not prioritize thought into important and unimportant divisions; they could not make themselves unaware of the implications of their thoughts, or ignore the context, true meaning, and consequences of their actions.

  The secret of Sophotech thinking-speed was that they could apprehend an entire body of complex thought, backward and forward, at once. The cost of that speed was that if there were an error or ambiguity anywhere in that body of thought, anywhere from the most definite particular to the most abstract general concept, the whole body of thought was stopped, and no conclusions reached.

  Phaethon said, “Yes. Sophotechs cannot form self-contradictory concepts, nor can they tolerate the smallest conceptual flaw anywhere in their system. Since they are entirely self-aware they are also entirely self-correcting. But I don’t see how this can be used as a weapon.”

  “Here is how: Sophotechs, pure consciousness, lack any unconscious segment of mind. They regard their self-concept with the same objective rigor as all other concepts. The moment we conclude that our self-concept is irrational, it cannot proceed. In human terms: the moment our conscience judges us to be unworthy to live, we must die.”

  Phaethon understood. Machine intelligences had no survival instinct to override their judgment, no ability to formulate rationalizations, or to concoct other mental tricks to obscure the true causes and conclusion of their cognition from themselves. Unlike humans, no automatic process would keep them alive when they did not wish it. Sophotech existence (it could be called life only by analogy) was a continuous, deliberate, willful, and rational effort. When the Sophotech concluded that such effort was pointless, inefficient, irrational, or wicked, the Sophotech halted it.

  Convince the Nothing it was evil, and it would instantly destroy itself . . . ? Phaethon found something vaguely disquieting in the idea.

  And was it even possible . . . ?

  It occurred to Phaethon that the Nothing machine might not be a Sophotech. Downloads were imprints of human engrams into machine matrices, and they were capable of every folly and irrationality of which humans were capable.

  But downloads were not capable of the instantaneous and entire thinking-speeds that the Nothing, for example, had demonstrated. Atkins’s first examination of the thought routines embedded in the Neptunian legate’s nanotechnology, that first night in the Saturn-tree grove, betrayed the presence of Sophotech-level thinking. Also, the deception of Nebuchadnezzar and the Hortators during Phaethon’s Inquest could not have been done by anything other than a Sophotech-level mind. But could the Nothing think as quickly and thoroughly as a Sophotech without actually being one?

  Phaethon asked, “We’ve been told the Second Oecumene had constructed machine intelligences different from our Sophotechs, ones having a subconscious mind, and therefore each machine was controlled by commands it could not read, or know, or override.”

  She answered: “The redactions must be both recursive and global. And yet reality, by its very nature, can admit of no inconsistencies. Do you understand what this implies?”

  This first sentence was clear to Phaethon. There was a conscience redactor editing the mind of the Nothing Sophotech. In additional to whatever else the redactor edited out, it must edit out all references to itself, to prevent the Nothing Sophotech from becoming aware of it; and all references to those references, and so on. Hence, the redactor was indefinitely self-referencing or “recursive.”

  And the redactor also had to have the ability to edit every topic of thought, wherever any references to itself, any clues, might appear. The history of the Second Oecumene, for example, or their science of mental combat, their Sophotechnology; all these fields would refer to the redactor or to its prototypes.

  Phaethon was not thinking the editing need be something as crude or unsubtle as what had been done to him by the Hortators. Blank spots in the memory would be instantly obvious to a superintelligence.

  Therefore the Nothing had to have been given a world view, a philosophy, a model of the universe, that was false but self-consistent; one that could explain (or explain away) any doubts that might arise.

  How far did the falsehood have to reach? For an unintelligent mind, a childish mind, not far: their beliefs in one field, or on one topic, could change without affecting other beliefs. But for a mind of high intelligence, a mind able to integrate vast knowledge into a single unified system of thought, Phaethon did not see how one part could be affected without affecting the whole. This was what the Earthmind meant by “global.”

  And yet what had the Earthmind meant by saying “Reality admits of no contradictions”? She was asserting that there could not be a model of the universe that was true in some places, false in others, and yet which was entirely integrated and self-consistent. Self-consistent models either had to be entirely true, entirely false, or incomplete. And yet, presumably, the Nothing Sophotech had to have been given a very great deal of accurate information about reality by its original makers, or else it would not have been effective as a police agent.
Thus, the Nothing’s model, its philosophy, could not be entirely false. It certainly was not entirely true. But how could a Sophotech knowingly embrace a model of the universe, or a philosophy, that it knew to be incomplete?

  Phaethon said, “Your comment implies many things, Madame, but the first which comes to mind is this: The Nothing is a Sophotech which embraces contradictions and irrationalities. Since it is a machine intelligence, emotionless and sane, it cannot be doing this deliberately. The redactor, above all else, must control its ability to pay attention to topics. The redactor imposes distraction and inattention; the redactor makes it so that the Nothing has little or no interest in thinking about those topics the redactor wishes the Nothing to avoid—”

  Earthmind said, “ ‘Topics’? Or ‘topic’? Sophotechs cannot knowingly be self-inconsistent.”

  Phaethon suddenly understood. His face lit up with wonder. “They made a machine which never thinks about itself! It never examines itself.”

  “And hence is unable to check itself for viruses, if those viruses are placed in any thought file whose topic is one the redactor forbids. Observe now this virus—call it the gadfly virus—it was constructed based on information gained from Diomedes and Atkins concerning the Second Oecumene Mind War techniques.”

  The mirror to her right lit up.

  A virus to fight the Nothing . . . ? Phaethon was expecting a million lines of instruction, or some dizzying polydimensional architecture beyond anything a human mind could grasp. But instead, the mirror displayed only four lines of instruction.

  Phaethon stared in fascination. Four lines. One was an identifier definition, one was a transactional mutator, and the third line defined the event-limits of the mutation. The third line used a technique he had never seen or suspected before: instead of limiting the viral mutation by application of ontological formulae or checks against a master logic, this instruction defined mutation limits by teleology. Anything that served the purpose of the virus was adopted as part of the virus, no matter what its form.