John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

This fleet of worlds and ships and moons and motes was all converging on the area where the Phoenix Exultant was rising to the surface, surrounded by wings of flame.

Phaethon was awed. The antimatter bodies, he knew, belonged to his father, for his use in controlling the sun. But the rest..

"Is that all Atkins? Where have they been keeping it all? Where could he get minds enough to pilot all those dreadnoughts and battle wagons? Did he make a trillion copies of himself?"

Daphne said, "I think everything is helping him."

"You mean?..."

"I mean the whole Transcendence. It looks like it's going to start this time with a battle scene during a storm in the corona of the sun." Daphne smiled and leaned back, pushing her helmet back on her head, so that the twinkling of her eyes above her impish grin was visible. "My oh my! How Aurelian must be loving this!"

Daphne looked at Phaethon warily. "We may have only a moment of privacy while the Nothing Machine is too occupied to notice us," she said. "Now. Quick. Are you actually convinced the Nothing is right?"

Phaethon said, "For a moment, I was. I have all the memories of my partial in me now, and he was certainly convinced."

"It was an exact copy. If it was convinced, why aren't you convinced?" she asked.

"Why aren't you? You were practically weeping at some of the lovely sentiments your copy expressed."

She blushed, face warm. "Hey! Where do you get off listening to private conversations with myself? Besides, I saw something odd in the simulation runs Nothing did on our partials."

"And what would that be, my dear? The speed at which our convictions caved?"

"Not just that. During the simulated runs, the Nothing Machine's arguments could convince you; they could convince me; but-get this-they could not convince the two of us. Not when we were together."

"Not if we overheard the arguments given to the other, you mean. That's why I wasn't convinced, not really. The argument I was told justified everything by the grim necessities of war, the cold inescapable reality of inevitable conflict between life and nonlife. And I believe certain things are fixed, necessary, and inescapable. If you are building a bridge, you only have structures of certain weights and tolerances and that is that. You work within the structure of what you are given, and if the task is impossible, it's impossible. and that is that. If perfect morality is impossible for living beings, then that is that.

"But I also heard him tell you that the Lords of the Silent Oecumene were so brave and so quixotic that they would not accept the necessity of entropy itself; that they would rebel against the inescapable and inevitable heat-death of the universe. Sounds very romantic, doesn't it?

"So either one of us, I suppose, might have been convinced separately. But taken together, the Nothing philosophy seems to be that, in the area of moral actions (a field where rational beings can adjust their conduct to accord with each other) there can be no choice. The war between men and machines must take place, even if neither side desires it. The rules are fixed, and true virtue consists of bowing to the inevitability of doing evil. But in the area of inanimate natural science, any law can be broken, all standards are flexible, and true virtue consists of ignoring or escaping reality.

"So, therefore, no, I was not convinced. Even though I wanted to be convinced. Even though my memories now told me a version of me had been convinced. Logic said no."

Daphne smiled. "I kept thinking, if he wanted this ship so badly, why didn't he ask to buy it? If the Lords of the Silent Oecumene want to escape the rule of the machines so badly, what's stopping them? They can dive down their bottomless black holes if they want. We won't chase them. I mean, for a bunch of so-called anarchists, they certainly seem to spend all their time forcing other people to do things they don't want to. Why not talk your victims into it, and give the evidence, if you are so right?"

"Because one cannot use reason to persuade people to give up reasoning, or to tell them how good it is to ignore standards of good and bad. One can only use force." He pointed at the mirror that showed the gathering fleet. "Speaking of force, there is a war about to break out, unless you can stop it."

Daphne said, "Me?"

Phaethon said, "The virus has not yet discovered the conscience redactor. Before, it might have been hidden in the fields surrounding the singularity, or hidden somewhere else, not communicating with the Nothing. But now, the Nothing Machine has to be pulling on all his system resources. I can see millions of communication lines radiating from the singularity to various thought-ports around the room. Even my armor is filled up. Consider what this means."

Daphne said, "The conscience redactor must be hiding how much space it is taking up; and the Nothing has to be kept unaware of how much capacity the system has, so the discrepancy won't be noticed. But at the same time, since he's fighting for his life, the Nothing has increased his intelligence to his full available capacity. The conscience redactor will have to increase its intelligence also, just to keep up, since otherwise it would not stay smart enough to read and edit all the thoughts involved."

"Phaethon pointed at the swirling image of Nothing thought architecture in the mirror. "So where is it?"

Daphne shrugged.

Phaethon tapped on one of the moving lines with a finger, opened a second window, displayed the result as text. "I was watching you shoot more and more viruses into the thought-structure. Look at the lines which momentarily moved to the center of the hierarchy. Here is part of the argument our gadfly virus had with the Nothing. Here, at this line, the Nothing rejects the philosophy of the Silver-Gray entirely, because he says he is a machine, capable of doing only what he is programmed to do, and therefore incapable of being moral, even if he wanted to be. So he rejects the premises from which the argument started, which is that no free-willed being could freely deny that it had free will. But here, on this line, when the gadfly points out the error in simple logic that entails, the Nothing replies that he can freely choose to reject logic, since logic is merely a human construction, and the mind can choose not to abide by it. You see here? By this second line, the Nothing's memory has been affected. He's not just being stubborn or perverse. In the microsecond it took for the gadfly to move from the first line to the second, the Nothing actually forgot what he had just said, and his memory was replaced with the memory of a conversation in which the gadfly did not raise those other points."

"Our virus isn't fast enough." Daphne squinted at the image. "The conscience redactor is moving. It is in the darkness, moving. Every time the virus finds an error in one chain of reasoning, the darkness merely switches to another chain, changes its premises, and distorts another section of the web to compensate. An endless game of ad hoc explanations. An endless labyrinth of changed memories."

"Right. But how does Theseus find the Minotaur, when the Minotaur can run faster than he can, and has a trowel and brick and mortar enough to build new walls and change passages in the labyrinth during the chase?"

"I don't know. Get faster? Lay a trap? Build a bigger labyrinth? Hire Ariadne? Do you really solve your engineering problems by thinking about them as if they were analogies from ancient myth?"

Phaethon seemed surprised. "Of course. Metaphor. Isn't that the way you write your stories?"

"No. I use coldly rational literal thinking."

"So what's the answer?"

The conscience redactor is hidden somewhere in the system.... Wait! What about the ghost-particle array? Could it be there? Or..." Her eyes scanned the bridge. "There!"