John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

This little Transcendence predicted (or decided) that the Never-First leader called Unmoiqhotep, also called Ungannis of Io, who conspired with Xenophon of Far-beyond and the Nothing Machine to make war upon the Golden Oecumene, would be sought and caught, convicted of treason and attempted mass murder, and killed, erased with no possibility of resurrection.

It had been she, in her guise as the tentacled rugose cone, who had accosted Phaethon outside the Curia House. With the help of Scaramouche (who was riding her back in the form of a polyp) she had shown Phaethon the thought card to infect him with the mind virus which, later, made him hallucinate the attack by Scaramouche outside the Red Manorial Mausoleum.

Ungannis had therefore been party to the attempt to seize control of the Phoenix Exultant and to use her as a warship. Ungannis had contemplated, with glee, the coming destruction of Mercury Equilateral, the solar north polar civilization, the orbital Sophotechs near Earth, and the Transcendence itself.

For that, she would be chased, caught, and killed.

Most of the drama of Ungannis's futile attempt to escape had already been played out during a half second of Transcendence time (during which, the union of all minds had been disgusted that they need be distracted by the unpleasant necessity to attend to this distasteful matter).

The remainder was fated (so ran the prediction) to be concluded during the Fourth Month after, the Month of Fading Recollections. At that time, Temer and Intrepid and Sanspeur Lacedaimon of the Dark-Gray (all wardens from the late Sixth Era, and Chiefs-Advocate for the Constabulary), would find the last of the self-replicating information storages where her noumenal self was hidden.

Some copies of herself were coded as parts of a mosaic; another, as changing nonrandom fractals among the shapes of clouds in the Ionian atmosphere; others in places more imaginative yet; every copy making as many copies of herself as her available energy budget allowed.

But the Transcendence knew her plans before she knew them herself. Foolishly, she had been in the Transcendence, too, so self-satisfied that she never imagined anyone would criticize her for her crimes (so she thought) once they understood.

Understand they did. Well enough to find every place she planned to hide. Well enough to spend the effort in time and manpower to track her down, no matter what the cost.

The last copy of Ungannis was found in a hiding place taken from a mystery story composed so long ago that the idea was a cliche: inside the facets of a gemstone, whose altered molecular structure refracted the light to record the thought-patterns.

The Constables gathered them all.

Some of the copies mutated. Others radically redacted themselves, attempting to destroy the guilty memories she held so as to make herself (in her own mind, at least) innocent of wrong when caught. Many would attempt to "redeem" herself, using self-consideration editors to alter opinions and emotions on herself, to program herself to regret her horrid acts. (Many of these self-changes were cosmetic only. She never thought to reprogram her basic philosophy, which gave rise to those opinions.)

The public dismay and anger surrounding the trials of these myriad of copies, would, if anything, be worse than that surrounding the New College's militarism. Ancient legal precedent established that persons could not escape debt or penalty by making themselves forget their past, unless the changes were so global, and so fundamental, as to be legally equivalent to suicide, and the rewritten version was then considered a child, a new entity. This precedent would be cruel when, carried out to its logical extreme, hundreds of young women, copies of Ungannis, innocent, self-ignorant, suspecting nothing amiss, would be hauled before the Curia to stand trial for their lives, and be executed.

Other copies would express their contrition and regret, and would display, on any public channel, how in their inmost thoughts they had no reservations, no desire to do these horrid acts again. All would plead for mercy; mercy would not be shown.

The peaceful and graceful peoples of the Golden Oecumene would wonder, aghast, at this severity, and question: Why did the Transcendence, the culmination of all the wisdom of civilization and history, allow this to happen? Why these pointless deaths, this bitter vengeance?

That question could be answered. Certain copies of Ungannis were here, "now" as part of the Transcendence, for, all memory of her own wrongdoing erased, she had seen no reason not to link minds with all her neighbors. Only as she joined, and all old memories were reviewed, did she see the horrid truth: that she was a would-be mass murderess.

The part of the Transcendence that was Ungannis set aside certain memories to be stored with those who would otherwise be aghast at her multiple executions. In those memories she showed the choices that the supreme intellect and insight of the Transcendence had shown her.

The extrapolation was detailed enough to predict her last oratory word for word: "All those copies of me I have made (will make) still believed my same core values, still knew (will know) that to be human was to be a sick, diseased, failed thing, full of weakness, pride.

and hate. The Transcendence told me (tells me now) that if I change those core values in myself, that if I program my copies to reject the root causes which led me to my crimes, that I would be spared execution. I refused! (I shall refuse!) I spit upon your mercy!

"My core values cannot be challenged. I would rather die than give up my ideas. Deep in my soul, I know, by mystical intuition not open to question, inspection, or debate, that humanity is a vile disease. The only thing which, once, long ago, made human life tolerable at all, was the glad knowledge that each generation of that disease would be wiped out by old age, and a new generation of children, temporarily innocent, would take its place. Who, now, needs to avenge the destruction of the Knights Templar by King Philip the Fair of France? Who needs to avenge the persecution of the Christians by Diocletian, the persecution of the pagans by Constantine? No one! The merciful cycle of endless death has wiped all their crimes away. But if Philip, if Diocletian, if Constantine were all still alive, then their intolerable crimes would never, not ever be punished!

"But you have stopped the cycle of death, you have rusted the turning wheel of the generations! And every cruel act, every harsh word, every slight, and petty domination done to a child, now, now that you have inflicted immortality upon us all, all those crimes will last forever!

"My father, Gannis, was cruel to me as a child! There were things I wanted which he did not provide. Desires I had which I wanted satisfied! Toys and games and contests; I wanted to command the respect of others; I wanted to change the world for the better. I was not con-lent to be made to feel inferior to the Sophotechs. Were any of these desires satisfied? Not one!

"And so, when I was young, because I knew that I might change my mind as I grew older, one night, when no one was alert, I used my father's unregulated self-consideration circuit to fix my emotions in place, vowing that I would never forget, never forgive, the insults and indifference heaped on me! What kind of cruel, endlessly cruel civilization is this, when the tears of a child cannot be wiped away? I hate you all!

"Filth of the Golden Oecumene (or the Rusted Oecumene, as I call her)! Now I have forced you to kill me, to kill a hundred innocent versions of me, so that your lily-white hands run red with the blood of children! Your pious fraud stands exposed in all its cruelty: this civilization, built on reason and logic, is nothing but an endless state of oppression, an endless charnel house, and you are all an endless line of rubber-faced man-' nequins. Slash your faces all with razors and you will not bleed! Out of all this great civilization of which you are all so proud, only my desires, my human desires, could not be satisfied! Only I suffer! Only I am human! I am the last human being alive in all the Solar System, and you vile machines and pets of machines and pretend-humans have finally found the guts to kill me! Now you are murderers; now I have made you human, too! Here, in death, is victory!"