John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

And there was a note of fear in her voice when she said that.

Phaethon muttered, "There must be something wrong here, some basic assumption I've made. What did I overlook... ?"

Daphne looked up, and shouted at the tall plumed mask of the Silent Lord, "This is some sort of lie! No mind could be set up this way! This is just a meaningless picture on the screen! You're editing the readout!"

A slither of ironic music, a chime of distant bells, answered her. "Convince yourselves. Perform tests. My thoughts are displayed for you to examine. Read them."

Daphne turned to Phaethon, her eyes flashing. "That damn thing can make an image of a Second Oecumene Lord standing in front of us with a symphony orchestra coming out of his armpit! What makes you think he can't draw a swirl of lines on a mirror?"

Phaethon spoke in a low and dispirited tone. "I can see it. My armor monitors confirm the ship-mind activity. They match. I can detect the pulses moving from box to box, I can see the circuits opening and closing. If the Nothing Machine can falsify the readings inside my armor, why bother tricking me into opening the ar-mor up?"

Daphne said angrily, "It is still impossible! The mind cannot make a stable model of reality unless it has a stable modeling system! A mind must understand the laws of logic in order to understand reality around it, because reality is logical, right? Right? And those rules have to be written at the highest level of the core architecture because they are needed to understand any other rules." She threw up her hands angrily. "This thing is tricking us somehow. The core architecture is hidden, or the damn conscience redactor is hiding it, or the Nothing has not loaded all of himself into the ship-mind, or something!"

Phaethon said in a voice of soft confusion, "I don't see any evidence that the gadfly virus had any effect-"

Daphne said, "He just rejected the load. But you're right. There are blind spots here. Thousands of them. I can load it in some places he cannot see."

The silver mask above her played several Kiting notes, and delicately said, "How will you accomplish this, as I am here, watching you?"

Daphne scowled. "You're going to see it, but you're not going to believe it. You cannot see your own blind spots."

"Nor can you, it seems, see yours. It is you who are astonished by what you see, not I. Based on this, which one of us, Phaethon or I, do you think has been fundamentally deceived?"

Daphne's dream wand was shaped, at the moment, like a dueling pistol, and she drew it from her hip. She pointed at the little mirror upon which Phaethon had called up the four lines of the gadfly virus code, and touched her ramrod to record it. Then she pointed the barrel, aiming with both hands, at the large mirror where the image of the Nothing Machine mind structure swirled like some hungry whirlpool, glistening like a thousand twisted spiderwebs. She was looking for a dark line, one with a low priority, but the strands of the web kept shifting, turning, changing. The darkness kept appearing and disappearing in separate spots, and there seemed no rhythm or reason to it.

When she pulled the trigger, the virus reloaded into the ship-mind, at the line and address indicated on the mirror with her dream wand.

The line affected grew bright and moved immediately toward the empty center of the whirlpool of thoughts, establishing itself as a central and high-priority thought, a question that could not be ignored. There was a very rapid exchange of information packages with other lines of thought, a flurry of rapid questions-and-answers. Then, satisfied, the other lines moved away from this central line, drawing away their time and attention. The central line, ignored, fell into a low priority, darkened, and was forgotten. The core of the Nothing was still blank.

Evidently the Nothing Machine had answers perfectly satisfactory to itself, to whatever questions the gadfly had asked it about its morality and basic assumptions. And Daphne had seen no interruptions, no organized darkness, such as would have signified the appearance of the conscience redactor.

Could there be no redactor, after all? Could this machine actually be deliberately illogical, rationally irrational?

Daphne did not believe it. She raised the pistol and fired again and again at the mirror, trying to hit the sliding chaos of darkness surrounding the spinning image.

It was not working.

Phaethon, with his hand on the mirror, staring as if into the depth of some bottomless maelstrom, whispered aloud, "What did I assume? Where is the error?"

His own face now appeared in the glass, fingers raised and touching his. The maelstrom of the Nothing thought-architecture was still behind the reflection, so his face seemed to wear a halo of spiderwebs and spinning darkness. Phaethon squinted, wondering what was wrong with the reflection. Then, he realized it wasn't a reflection. His face was bare, his hair was flying free, and he was dressed not in bis armor but in a somber black jacket and high white cravat.

The reflection said, "We assumed the universe was rational. What if it is not?"

Phaethon said to his reflection in the mirror: "I don't believe in you. I could not have been convinced-not honestly convinced-by any argument started from that assumption. It is nonsense."

The reflection gave a short nod, and said, "Let me rephrase. What we call rational reality is a subset of a larger system. That system includes the conditions which take place inside the event horizon of a black hole, where all our laws of mathematics, our categories of time and space, identity and causality break down. Our Sophotechs, with their mathematics and their logic, could not understand or operate inside a black hole. The Second Oecumene machines could, and can, and do. The reason why the thought-architecture you're looking at seems to make no sense, is for the same reason that we could not decipher Ao Varmatyr's thinking, even when we had a noetic reading of him. It is based on irrational mathematics."

Phaethon shook his head. "If you think the laws of logic are not absolute, then you are not a version of me. Try to build a bridge without believing two plus two support girders equals four support girders, and you'll see what I mean."

The reflection said, 'Try to build a bridge inside a black hole, where space is so warped that one girder acts like two or three, and uncertainty values are greater than unity, and maybe you can build it. But no, please do not accuse me of betraying my principles. All I have done, now, is apply them consistently. Our idea of logic may be limited to the conditions that obtain in normal timespace, the conditions under which we all evolved, and for which our Sophotechs were built. However, the Nothing Machine was constructed under conditions where our categories of causation and identity do not apply. It was built to serve a moral system which our Sophotechs, by axiom, reject. What I learned, and the thing that convinced me, was that I found out I was making the same axiomatic assumption as the Sophotechs, but, I realized, I was not consistently applying it. Also, certain basic facts about the Nothing Machine, and about the history of the Second Oecumene, are just dead wrong. There is much more going on here, I'm afraid, than what first appears. Find out the facts before you judge."

Phaethon said angrily to his reflection, "I cannot be-lieve you let me be convinced by this monster! He tried to steal my ship! He's trying to steal it now! What in the world could convince you?"

The reflection said, "He was trying to steal it from you only to give it to you."

"More nonsense!"

"No. listen. It was meant to make you the hero of the Second Oecumene, just like Ao Varmatyr said. And if that had been you there on the bridge then, you would have been convinced by Ao Varmatyr. He wanted to reason with you. Instead, Atkins slaughtered him."