Logic Beach- Part I

by Exurb1a

  The Glass King, Argie thought. Yes, where is he now? He could fix all of this, probably. Unless the Mergerment is too powerful already.

  “Is this true?” Argie said to Lambert.

  Lambert nodded noncommitally. “I suppose.”

  “Why would you want that, for yourself or anyone?”

  “Life coheres,” she said flatly, staring up at the tier portal. “It is built into the grammar of things. Conquests, then absorption. Conquests, then absorption. The Mergerment will win out eventually anyway. We may as well give ourselves to it freely, else it will use force.”

  “I told you,” The Navigator murmured. “She's mad as cats.”

  Lambert grinned again and said to the crowd, “Look on, I've brought you the mother of Omega. Check her tags if you don't believe me.” The crowd turned on Argie. There was a long silence, then many stepped back and many stepped forward. A number of them fell to their knees and prostrated in the dirt and kissed the floor.

  Argie stared.

  “Omega mother,” a small chant began at the back of the crowd.

  “Navigator,” Argie whispered.

  “I told you when you found your daughter you wouldn't like it. Didn't I say that?” The Navigator murmured.

  Omega mother, Omega mother, the chant came again and grew.

  The anti-Mergerment folk had removed themselves now, watching from a safe distance behind, apparently disgusted. And still the chant intensified, almost hysterical.

  “Lambert,” Argie yelled. “God damn it, what is this?”

  But Lambert was gone, replaced with a monstrous version of her previous body, the skin scaled, the eyes yellow and burning. “Well,” the creature said. “It is quite a thing to explain, of course. How best to go about it…”

  “Hell's teeth,” The Navigator murmured. “I should've seen it…”

  The chanting grew louder still, deafening.

  “Lambert,” Argie screamed. “For the love of God.”

  “That is not my name. Rather I would prefer you address me as Ocelot. No one has called me that in some time, but I shall ask you to do so for the sake of formality.”

  The crowd halted their chanting at this and turned about.

  “Right there and I didn't see it,” The Navigator barked. “The snake itself.”

  “Snake?” Argie said desperately.

  “She's an Original Migrant, came in with the Glass King and the others right at the beginning. Who do you think started the hermit-infant revolution? Who do you think got them so worked up they migrated off to a separate tier?” He shook his cigarette at the great black lung in the sky. “Who do you think is behind that monstrosity?”

  “Now, what is what?” purred the thing that called itself Ocelot. “Well to begin with I recommend you check the tags of the Mergerment, my dear. Its identity-key in particular.”

  With cold and creeping dread Argie did so. Despite the millions of denizens the Mergerment had already absorbed, it displayed only one identity-key: Kaluza's.

  “I don't understand,” Argie said in a mouse's voice.

  “We've met before,” Lambert or Ocelot said. “I visited you in your burrow. I took the name Nonagon. I wore a different face but you ape-fuckers are so trusting you didn't even look into it. The child had obvious potential, even back then. No ideology, too much tenacity. Plus she held her mother's tier privileges by virtue of her lineage. The seduction was easier than we imagined. Within three cycles she had escaped your primitive clutches, explored most of Lemuria, and migrated to Indigo. It was there she pioneered an entirely new mode of selfsense blending. The experiment went, shall we say, better than expected.” She nodded to the pulsing black mass above. “Ah, progress manifest. The grammar of everything!”

  “The grammar of everything,” chanted the crowd.

  Thunder rang out from the Mergerment and the thing expanded. The sky darkened further, a great girdle of death.

  “Within fifty cycles all of Arcadia will have been consumed,” Lambert said. “Eaten, devoured, delicious!”

  “Kaluza…” Argie said.

  “And, naïve little thing, I hardly need to look into your selfsense to tease out the strangest of your hopes. There have been clues all along for you, haven't there? Your fondness for Hare. Your dislike of his darling wife. Your obsession with all things sapien, with your migrant past.”

  Lambert stepped right up to Argie, bent to her ear and whispered, “But you are not Polly Hare, despite your desperation to be so. You never could've been. You're not even an Original Migrant.” Argie started back. “See for yourself, run a search for your history. You were created by a denizen. There is no record of which one, but created nonetheless. Given your absurdly high tier privileges, the Glass King himself may well be behind this. There is a certain charming irony to a facsimile desperately pretending to be an ape. Of the few in the cellar, you are the least qualified to pretend!”

  Argie had never vocalised the fantasy, had never even admitted it inwardly in some lonely moment. But the fantasy had persisted beneath. She ran a chronology search. Lambert was correct, she was six hundred thousand cycles old. Created, not imported. Arcadian-born.

  “What you said about Kaluza…” she murmured.

  “A prodigy no less,” Lambert beamed. “Indigos have been trying to hard-merge for thousands of cycles, in secret of course.” She glanced at The Navigator. “They all try it. They all fail. It took the genius and tenacity of your daughter to perfect the procedure. More than that, I don't know.”

  Argie looked back to the black mass.

  Lambert shook her head. “I know what you're thinking. Don't bother. The process can't be undone. Little Kaluza can't be extracted. Entropy has taken hold, as in all things! Their selfsenses are far too entwined, nine million denizens and counting. They perceive as one, they will as one.”

  Argie sat down in the dirt and stared emptily for a long while.

  Lambert licked her lips. “For my final trick then…” she chuckled and gave some elaborate command with her selfsense. The barrier between the mountain and the crowd dissolved. The crowd was frozen for a moment, looking to the tier portal, then to Lambert, and back to the tier portal.

  “Go on then,” she said with a wink.

  Some of the crowd set off, running at first, then ascending into the sky, skimming the inclines of the mountain like wild gnats, rising, shrinking into the middle distance, and finally reaching the tier portal. Then they were disappeared, transported to Indigo, transported into the black clutches.

  The rest of the crowd stood about despondently for a time and dispersed. Lambert bent down to Argie. “So,” she said flatly. “How's it all going?”

  “I'll confine you,” Argie spat. “I'll make it so you can never be released again without my specific instruction, and I'll sooner die before that happens. I'll see to it that you rot for a trillion cycles, that you can never escape.”

  “Ah,” Lambert smiled. “Unfortunately in your releasing of me, Arcadia has already automatically returned my privileges. As an Original Migrant mine are, quite by design, higher than yours. In actual fact it is you who will be treated to confinement, this version of you anyway. I will also create several hundred thousand snapshots of your mind for my ongoing consciousness endeavours and educate them in all manner of pain and suffering. You, however, will now inherit the enviable post of Chief Correspondent Axiomat, in my former position, in that stinking entrance hall. Unfortunately there will be no new visitors to Lemuria for you to administer the examinations, so you will have to eke out your days until the Mergerment comes for you.”

  With its new occupants from Lemuria already absorbed, the Mergerment began to expand. Thunder rang out, unbearably loud.

  Argie tried to spot her daughter in the folds of the storm but it was only turbulence and lightning.

  She launched herself at Lambert, screaming, and demanded Arcadia remove the monster's tier privileges and reconfine her. Arcadia ignored this request. Lambert remained st
ill. Argie beat her fists on her head and Lambert took the attack without flinching, even cracked a smile. This was all a formality, Argie knew. Lambert did not really present as a sapien, and she wasn't really attacking her. The perception filter was merely trying to keep consistency intact. But still, the act was somewhat satisfying in itself.

  After a time Lambert tired of the dance and removed Argie to a distance with a command in high-Arcadian. A crystal barrier erected itself between the two of them, erected itself all the way around Argie in fact.

  “Now,” Lambert said. “I will talk for a short while and you will listen. Then you will be permanently incarcerated, but at least knowing the extent of your flaws. Perhaps you can use the time to think on them. Your first flaw, or sin if you will, is arrogance. There is a reason life is so rarely created in Arcadia, and it is that the infants will inevitably spiral out of control. Unlike us migrants, they don't bear the hangover of their biological past. Yet, like all of the dumb parents, you thought this could be overridden somehow. It cannot. It never has been, it never will be. Sapienity is not some shining strength, nor an honourable cross to bear. It is a weakness that has been rightly bred out of the new generations. Were you brave enough, you would remember this from your time in Indigo.”

  “I was never an Indigo,” Argie said.

  “Oh you were, but it's beside the point. Now, to the matter of your daughter.” Lambert nodded to the great, dark cloud. “One would imagine the Mergerment will eventually develop some technique of influencing the Earth Outside, whatever is left of it, and absorbing its materials for the purposes of even more advanced computation. So you see this is so much more significant than your precious subjective individuality, my dear.”

  “This is unnatural,” The Navigator shouted. “This is absurd and unnatural.”

  “That is where you couldn't be more incorrect,” Lambert smiled. “In fact there is nothing more natural. The towers you were so perplexed by, the algorithmic artifacts? One in particular began generating interesting output several cycles ago on the nature of cross-system behaviour. All enduring systems, it said, begin in adversity and chaos. Bacteria battles bacteria, solar systems are born as diffuse clouds of gas. Eventually both systems cohere into a unity. Mammals evolve. Earth persists. Arcadia started in much the same fashion, chaotic and adversarial. Now it is in its maturation stage, moving towards unity. That is a central tenet of hard logicality, you understand? Adversity, then solidarity. The plural to the singular. On a long enough timescale this principle will always triumph. Nothing can truly mute it. This is the true face of good and evil in the cosmos: the great winding down versus the great unification. That race is about to reach its conclusion. Polly Hare knew this. The Glass King knew this. You, little Argie, know this. Thanks to Kaluza and the Mergerment, we’ll soon find ourselves watching the final coalescence of Arcadia, and more perhaps. It’ll be finer than any fireworks.”

  Argie went to yell again, to beat at her crystal cage.

  Wait, a voice said in her selfsense, The Navigator's. If you really must be violent, have this.

  A memory dove into her, nuzzled its way among the others and found a soft patch to lay its head – an alien recollection. She felt herself infinite in size and scope suddenly, an Indigo. She knew her name also and it was not her name, but The Navigator's. In Indigo it was merely a long string of notions, barely comprehensible to her. He had ripped the entire memory from his selfsense, bringing with it all its frayed ends. The longing for Kaluza was gone and replaced instead by a longing for a lover, for a lost lover, and for knowledge and peace of mind and, shit, a million other sad unreachables. And she saw then what The Navigator had wanted to convey: a weapon, the only weapon used up in Indigo; in the land where death is impossible. There, soldiers fired arrows made of madness and when they hit their targets, they sent those targets mad. Argie tried to translate the name of the weapon out of Indigo. Recurrer was the closest she could get.

  A small packet would be fired at a foe, barely even tangible. The packet contained a simple command: Replicate the last cycle of memory to infinity. It was almost impossible to defend against. The target's memory would spin around on itself, the distant and middle past traded for the last recent details of history, replicated on itself again and again until the target lost their mind: total stupification. The battle would be over in an instant. Indigo was full of victims of this kind of assault, Argie knew now. Some were taken pity on by selfsense surgeons and had their memories erased. Others lived in permanent dementia for the next hundred thousand cycles.

  The memory softened. What was that? Argie shot back at The Navigator.

  We can't fight, came his reply. Indigos, I mean, not in other tiers. But you're not an Indigo. Not anymore, anyway. Don't worry, the barrier won't stop you. Indigo weapons trump Lemurian defences.

  Unaware of this exchange, Lambert continued. “Some time ago sapiens developed the ability for high abstraction. An ant can roam freely in two dimensions, but does it grasp the notion of a dimension itself? Of course not. Man did. First he conceived of shelter and sheltered himself. Then he conceived of civilisation and civilised himself. Part animal, part god – gnawing on a chicken leg with his mind turned to particle physics. We, my little explorers, are the culmination of that strange journey, from germ to man and onwards. We are pure abstraction and that is all it is rightful to care about. Arcadia was built under conditions you cannot possibly imagine, and yet you use it to revert to a most awful episode in history. Your daughter on the other hand-”

  Now, The Navigator yelled at Argie's selfsense.

  Argie shot off a beam of recurrence, just as The Navigator had shown her. It passed effortlessly through the crystal barrier. Outside of Argie, outside of Lambert, in True Space, information swirled and parried. There was no Lemuria. There was no great plane, no towers, no looming mountain. There were only coordinates and interactions between those coordinates: emptiness and points. Lambert saw the attack coming and put up her hands instinctively. In True Space she erected a shield around her selfsense. It was too late. The wave hit, wrapping about her memories, about her perception matrices. Her selfsense cocooned on itself, erasing her short-term memory and replacing it with repetition after repetition of this one, present, infinite moment.

  From the outside she stood perfectly still, her eyes a touch wider perhaps. Argie and The Navigator stared, waiting for the moment to break, for Lambert to cry out or fall down. Her eyes widened a little more.

  “Should have known it at once…” The Navigator muttered. “Knew she was lurking about somewhere. Everyone knew she was lurking about somewhere…”

  “Who the hell is she, really?”

  The Navigator went to explain, then stopped himself. Instead he put out his hand. Argie nodded without deliberation.

  A new memory burrowed into her, a pure notion this time, no feeling; presented almost as a sapien child's storybook.

  The first wave of sapiens to enter Arcadia had been eleven strong. This had included the Glass King of course, but a great physicist also: Lambert. She had remained passive until the division of Lemuria from the Ape Cellar. When the Lemurians were established as a separate force she migrated to their tier permanently and ingratiated herself with the population, apparently under the name Ocelot. The Lemurians were resistant at first; Ocelot was an Original Migrant after all. But soon enough they bowed to her wisdom and seemingly infinite knowledge of things and allowed her to conduct her research in peace. Little was known about her work, she was a typical recluse. Soon though Lemuria began to descend into sub-divisions and cults, the most notable of which espoused a kind of high regard for collectivism. All systems tended towards unity in their later stages, they argued. Lemurian citizens should cohere into a single selfsense and give in to what was an eventual inevitability anyway. By this point, however, Lemuria was beginning to prosper. The Ape Cellar had need of competent mathematicians and would outsource problems to Lemuria. In return, the Ape Cellar provided the oc
casional child from their ranks to keep the Lemurian population growing. This period became known as the Balance Era, and both tiers largely seemed happy with the arrangement.

  Soon enough though the cohesion-fanatics swelled to numbers too large to ignore and the Glass King was forced to consider their demands. Just as you did for Lemuria, they said, give us our own tier. We will keep to ourselves.

  The Glass King agreed to this on the condition that full and permanent selfsense merging would be forbidden. Those who tried it would face exile. This was reluctantly accepted, and so Indigo was born. Ocelot migrated upwards right away, along with millions of other audacious Lemurians.

  What happened on the tier from that point on was unknown. Occasionally Indigos appeared in Lemuria or the Ape Cellar with no memory of their time above, but obviously guilty of contravening the clear restrictions and having received exile as promised. So too had Lambert materialised in Lemuria one day, amnesia-stricken but still with her same radical leanings. Several Indigos had accompanied her below and informed the Lemurians of her recent torture practices. And so she was confined.

  “Christ…” Argie whispered. “Someone should kill her. She's relentless.”

  She went to approach Lambert, but The Navigator grabbed her hand. “Wait,” he said. “She's completely mad. Recurrers aren't so powerful against the insane.”

  “When will she wake up?”

  “Impossible to say. Hours, cycles. Sometimes never.”

  “Or sooner,” Lambert said.

  She darted, almost faster than the eye could follow, a feral blur, grabbed Argie's hand. The world exploded for Argie, Lemuria coming undone, her vision and hearing coming undone, and the sky was awash with coordinates and manifolds suddenly. Time bent back on itself. Lambert had pulled her into True Space, she realised. She could focus and not focus. She could hear and not hear. This is Arcadia, she thought with utter dread. True Arcadia.

  “I can stomach this. How about you?” Lambert laughed from somewhere ahead. She was nothing but a swirling jumble of numeric points, pure selfsense. Her drawl came again. “I have spent many thousands of cycles in here, many centuries as you would have it. It is the finest way to know the world, naked I mean. Some are not so prepared for it of course.” She approached. “It is not just the rawness of it that so appeals. In True Space certain rules are forfeit. One denizen may enforce their will upon another. It is the privileges which take precedent. As an Original Migrant, mine will always come first.”