John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

There was a cold twinkle in Atkins's eye, a look of professional amusement. He obviously thought that he. at least, knew the names and more about the Nep-tunian thought weapons, their viruses and information duels. But he said nothing.

Diomedes concluded: 'There are other copies of Neoptolemous in the Duma, yes: but none of Ao Var-matyr. I have been in him since a fortnight past; nor did he hide any secrets from me, accounting me as one already dead. I think I would have seen a successful transfer of his template. There was none. He was far more alone and scared than his tale to you would have led you to believe."

Phaethon wanted to ask if that other version of Neoptolemous held the lien on the title to this ship, but he held his tongue. Other matters took priority.

Atkins was asking: "Did Ao Varmatyr ever communicate with his superiors?"

Diomedes said, "In the early hours, right after my capture, he made a nerve-to-nerve link with me. This was before he imposed complete control over the Neoptolemous host, and cut off my unfiltered outward sensation."

Diomedes made an easy gesture and continued: "What next occurred was not so strange. Xenophon, fine fellow that he is, was an Eremite. I am a Cold Duke. Compared to the scattered Eremite iceholds of the Kuiper belt, we Dukes, down in the S and K methane layers of Neptune himself, are much more densely populated. Sometimes, as little as a thousand kilometers would separate the outliers of our palace swarms and sink houses from each other, and the shells and turrets of a deep Neptunian Cold Duke are ringed with firewalls and false reflections to hinder the badworms which tend to pepper our speech when we share thoughts with each other. You understand?"

Atkins said "Meaning Xenophon engaged you in mind-to-mind and you whipped bis little behind."

"Inelegantly put, but essentially correct. I had access to his deep-memory files for a few seconds, enough to make a cipher copy into my own brainspace before Ao Varmatyr put me into sensory deprivation. It made interesting reading during my lonely hours. From it I could extrapolate the information about everything Ao Varmatyr knew."

Phaethon said, "My dear friend, you will not keep us in suspense, I trust?"

Diomedes smiled easily. "No more than is necessary to build up dramatic tension, my friend."

"I tingle with the appropriate tension, good Diomedes, I assure you."

Atkins, hearing this exchange, shook his head. He bought: No wonder these snooty Silver-Gray guys just get on everyone's nerves. And, then, aloud, "Gentle-men! Time's running! Let's get on with this."

Diomedes spoke with slow emphasis: "First, Xenophon was cooperating consciously. Second, Ao Varmatyr was unaware of any superior.

"There were two times, both times when Ao Var-matyr was hooked into the long-range communication nerve link, when his memory went blank, and his internal clock was reset to mask the missing time. Xenophon noticed it and Ao Varmatyr did not and could not. Xenophon was puzzled by this, but, lacking a suspicious imagination, did not realize what it implied: namely, that Ao Varmatyr's mind was set up the same way he described the minds of the Silent Oecumene thinking machines. An invisible conscience redactor, unknown even to him, forced him, from time to time, to perform certain acts of which he was not afterwards aware. Ao Varmatyr (unbeknownst to himself) communicated with his superior, this Nothing Sophotech, but they did not 'speak.' I suspect the superior merely fed operating instructions into Ao Varmatyr's conscience redactor, the loyalty virus inside of him."

Phaethon muttered, "How horrible!"

Diomedes, with a grim smile, fingered the haft of his spear, and said, "Indeed. But it was no worse than the Silent Oecumene had been doing for years and centuries to their own thinking machines. So why not do the same to their human subjects? The step is small Atkins said, "How did you resist being taken over by the Last Broadcast loyalty virus when Xenophon did not? You were entirely isolated, and Ao Varmatyr had complete control over your input."

"Part was lack of time and attention of his part, I think. But part of it was, in all modesty, strength of character on my part. It is true that I was convinced, perhaps for up to an hour at a time, that the Nothing philosophy was correct, and that there was no reason to resist, and that I had to cooperate for the sake of the Silent Oecumene. But never for longer than an hour.

"You see, I suspect the Last Virus was intended to work on the minds and mind-sets typical of the Silent Oecumene. The core value which the target mind must accept before it will accept the Nothing philosophy is that morality is relative, that the ends justify the means, that right and wrong is an individual and arbitrary choice. This strips the target mind of any defense: for who can rightfully defend his own prejudices against another's if he knows, deep down, that both are equally arbitrary, equally false?

"But it did not work on me, because I had, not so long ago, uploaded a copy of the Silver-Gray philosophy tutorial routine into my long-term memory. The tutorial kept pestering me with questions. One I liked was: If a philosopher teaches you that it is not wrong to lie, why do you not suspect he is lying to you when he says so? Another I liked was: Is it merely an arbitrary postulate to believe that all beliefs are mere arbitrary postulates?"

Phaethon asked: "What convinced Xenophon? Was he exposed to the same thought virus?"

"No. He believed the story Ao Varmatyr told without prompting. The same tale told to you; Xenophon believed in the implacable inhumanity of the Sophotechs to begin with. Many Neptunians do."

Atkins said, "So where is this Nothing Sophotech now? Have any clues as to where those instructions came from?"

"None. But since Ao Varmatyr was programmed to make his 're-ports' unwittingly, he did not choose time or circumstance under which to make them. (Nor the content, which probably consisted of an unedited information dump from his memory.) Hence they come at regular intervals." Diomedes nodded toward the hourglass in the middle of the table, and smiled again.

Phaethon said, "I haven't lived through as many spy dramas as my wife, but one would think enemies trying to hide would not fall into such predictable patterns."

Diomedes said, "Such weaknesses are an inevitable result of the Silent Oecumene way of doing things. If you treat people like machines, you must give them mechanistic orders. Hence we know when the next broadcast will take place."

They all watched the running sands in the glass for a quiet while, each with his own thoughts.

Diomedes spoke up. "There is still much I do not understand about what happened just now. Marshal? May I ask, if it is not one of these military secrets in which you put so much stock ... ?

Atkins raised one eyebrow. "You can ask."

"How did you survive inside Phaethon's armor? You decelerated toward the Neptunian embassy at ninety gravities. But only Phaethon has a specially designed body to withstand those pressures. That was precisely why Ao Varmatyr did not suspect you were not Phaethon. How did you survive?"

Atkins said curtly: "I didn't."

"I beg your pardon?"

Phaethon said: "His body was crushed into bloody paste inside my armor. Meanwhile his mind was stored in the noetic unit. It was not until we were at rest, and my suit lining had a chance to reconstruct the military-basic marine body it was carrying, that I transferred and reincarnated him. Everything he 'saw' before that was merely sent from my armor cameras into his recorded mind. He wasn't inside the armor, looking out, until later, when he drew his first painful breath."

Diomedes looked impressed. He asked: "Who was inside the Ulysses mannequin? The one that was incinerated by Ao Varmatyr?"