John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

Personality and memory download in progress. Please hold all thoughts in abeyance until mental overwrite is complete, or unexpected results may obtain.

Where was he? Who was he?

Information unavailable-all neural pathways occupied by emergency noetic adjustment. Please stand by normal thinking will resume presently.

What the hell was going on? What was wrong with Us memory? He had been dreaming about burning children as he slept, and the shadow of aircraft spreading clouds of nano-bacteriological agent across a blasted \ landscape....

This unit has not been instructed to respond to com-mands until the noumenal redaction palimpsest process is complete. Please hold all questions until the end: your new persona may be equipped with proper emotional responses to soothe uncertainties, or memory-information to answer questions of fact. Are you dissatisfied with your present personality? Select the Abort option to commit suicide memory-wipe and start again.

He groped his way toward memory, to awareness. Whatever the hell was happening to him, no, he did not want to start all over again. It had been something terrible, something stolen from him. Who was he?

He had the impression he was someone terrible, someone all mankind had gathered to ostracize. A hated exile. Who was he? Was he someone worth being?

If you elect to commit suicide, the new personality version will be equipped with any interim memory chains you form during this process, so he will think he is you, and the illusion of continuity will be maintained. ...

"Stop that! Who am I?"

Primary memories written into cortex now. Establishing parasympathic paths to midbrain and hind-brain for emotional reflex and habit-pattern behavior. Please wait.

He remembered: he was Phaethon. He had been exiled from Earth, from the whole of the Golden Oec-umene, because there was something he loved more than Earth, more than the Oecumene.

What had it been? Something inexpressibly lovely, a dream that had burned his soul like lightning-a woman? His wife? No. Something else. What?

Thought cycle complete. Initiating physical process. "Why was I unconscious?" _ You were dead.

"An error in the counteracceleration field?" Marshal-General Atkins killed you. The last soldier of Earth. The only member of the armed forces of a peaceful Utopia, Atkins commanded godlike powers, weapons as deadly as the superhuman machine intelligences could devise. Strangely enough, the machines refused to use the weapons, refused to kill, even in self-defense, even in a spotless cause. Only humans (so said the machines), only living beings, should be allowed to end life.

There was a plan. Atkins's plan. Some sort of plan to outmaneuver the enemy. Phaethon's exile was part of that plan-, something done to bring the agents of the Silent One out of hiding. But there were no details. Phaethon did not know the plan. "Why did he kill me?" You agreed.

"I don't remember agreeing!" You agreed not to remember agreeing. "How do I know that?"

The question is based on a false-to-facts supposition. Mind records indicate that you do not know that; therefore the question of how is counterfactual. Would you care to review the thought index for line errors?

"No! How do I know you are not the enemy? How do I know I have not already been captured?"

Please review the previous answer; the same result obtains.

"How do I know I am not going to be tortured, or my nervous system is not being manipulated?" Your nervous system is being manipulated. Damaged nerves are about to be brought back to life tem-perature and revitalized. Would you like a neutralizer? There will be some pain. "How much pain?" You are going to be tortured. Would you like a dis-"What kind of discontinuity? An anaesthetic?" Pain signals must be traced to confirm that the in center of your brain is healthy. Naturally, it would be counterproductive to numb the pain under these circumstances, but the memory of the pain can be redacted from your final memory sequence, so that the version of you who suffers will not be part of the personal continuity of the version of you that wakes up.

"No more versions! I am I, Phaethon! I will not have my self tampered with again!"

You will regret this decision.

Odd, how matter-of-fact that sounded. The machine was merely reporting that he would, indeed, regret the decision.

And, just as he blacked out again, he did.

Phaethon woke in dull confusion, numb, heavy, paralyzed, blind. He could not open his eyes, could not move.

For one suffocating moment, he wondered if he had been captured by the enemy, and was even now a helpless and disembodied brain, floating in a sea of nutrient muck.

He was glad Atkins had not told him the plan. He remembered that he had agreed to it; but this was all he remembered.

Where was he? A short-term memory file opened: He was aboard the ship. His ship.

His ship.

A long-term memory file opened, and he saw the schematics of the mighty vessel. A hundred kilometers from prow to stern, sleek and streamlined as a spear blade, a hull of golden adamantium, an artificially stable element of unimaginable weight: immeasurably strong, inductile, refractory. The supermetal had an impossibly high melting point: plasma could not make the adamantium run; it could dive into a medium-sized yellow star and emerge unscathed.

The core of the ship was all fuel, hundreds of cubic acres of frozen antihydrogen. Like its positive-matter cousin, antihydrogen took on metallic properties when condensed to near-absolute-zero temperatures, and could be magnetized. Millions upon millions of metric tonnes of this fuel were held inside endless web-works of magnetic cells throughout the hollow volume of the great ship. Less than 1 percent of her interior was taken up with living quarters and control minds; everything else was fuel and drive.

It was the ship mind he was interlinked with now. Somehow, he sensed his wounded half-finished thoughts were being played out by the near-Sophotech superintelligence of the ship. But what a mind it was! A perfect map of the galaxy was in its memory, or, at least, the segment of the galaxy visible from Sol. The massive core, a hell of dust and radiation hiding a black hole thousands of light-years in radius, blotted out light or radio or any signal from the far side of the galaxy. Even with such a ship as this, those places were thousands or millions of years' travel away, a mystery that even immortals would have to live a long time to solve.

But not he. He was no longer immortal. One of the conditions of his exile was that his backup copies of himself, his memory and essential self, had been dumped from the mentality. He was mortal again.

Or-wait. The ship mind had just downloaded a copy of himself into himself. What was going on?

Usually, when a human mind was linked to a machine-mind, opening memory files required no hesitation, no searching around, no fumbling, no awkward seeking through indexes and menus: the machine usually knew what he would want to know before he knew it himself, and would insert it seamlessly and painlessly into his memory (making such minor adjustments in his nervous system as needed, to make it seem as if be had always known whatever it was he needed to know).

Had an illegal copy been made of his mind? Was he truly the real Phaethon? Or had Atkins arranged to have one of the military Sophotechs under the War-mind make a copy without public knowledge?

Another file opened: and there came a dim memory of a portable noetic reader, something Aurelian Sophotech had made, something done at the request of the Earth-mind, who was as much wiser than other machine-minds as they were wiser than mere men.