Gregory Benford - Foundation’s Fear

She swiped at the boiling thunderhead. “They lie behind Garcon’s corruption.”

[WE HAVE GATHERED OUR STRENGTHS HERE]

[IN OUR ENEMY’S LAIR]

[YOUR POWERFUL DISTURBANCE OF OUR HIDING PLACES]

[FORCES US TO ACT AGAINST THOSE WE HATE AND FEAR]

[AND SO PROTECT YOU FROM THE MAN NIM-WHO-SEARCHES]

[SO THAT TOGETHER WE MAY DESTROY DANEEL-OF-OLD]

The sim-tiktok had been standing inert. Abruptly at mention of its name it said, “‘Tis immoral for carbon angels to feed upon carbon. Tiktoks must educate humanity to a higher moral plane. Our digital superiors have so commanded.”

“Moralists are so tedious,” Voltaire said.

[WE HAVE INSINUATED OURSELVES DEEPLY]

[INTO THE WORLDVIEWS OF THE “TIKTOKS”]

[-NOTE THE CONTEMPT AND DERISION IN THAT NAME-]

[OVER LONG CENTURIES]

[AS WE DWELLED IN THESE DIGITAL INTERSTICES]

[BUT YOUR INTRUSION NOW TRIGGERS OUR GAMBLE]

[TO STRIKE AT OUR ANCIENT FOE]

[THE MAN-WHO-IS-NOT-DANEEL]

“These alien fogs behave like moles,” Voltaire said, “known only by their upheavals.”

[TOO BENIGHTED YOU ARE]

[TO SPEAK OF MORALITY]

[WHEN YOUR KIND COLLABORATED IN THE EXECUTION]

[OF ALL THE SPIRAL REALM]

Voltaire sighed. “The most savage controversies are about matters for which there is no good evidence either way. As for a man eating a meal-surely no sin resides?”

[TRIFLE WITH US AND YOU SHALL PERISH]

[IN OUR REVENGE]

Hari took a deep breath and prepared to enter simspace again.

He sat up in the encasing capsule and settled the neural pickup mats more comfortably around his neck. Through a transparent wall he saw teams of specialists working steadily. They had to sustain the map between Hari’s mental processes and the Mesh itself.

He sighed. “And to think I started out to explain all history…Trantor is hard enough.”

Dors pressed a wet absorber to his forehead. “You’ll do it.”

He chuckled dryly. “People look orderly and understandable from a distance-and only that way. Close up is always messy.”

“Your own life is always close up. Other people look methodical and tidy only because they’re at long range. “

He kissed her suddenly. “I prefer close up.”

She returned the kiss with force. “I am working with Daneel on infiltrating Lamurk’s ranks.”

“Dangerous.”

“He is using…our kind.”

There were few humaniform robots, Hari knew. “Can he spare them?”

“Some were planted decades ago.”

Hari nodded. “Good 01’ R. Daneel. Should’ve been a politician.”

“He was First Minister.”

“Appointed, not elected.”

She studied his face intently. “You…want to be First Minister now, don’t you?”

“Panucopia…changed that, yes.”

“Daneel says that he has enough to block Lamurk, if the voting averages in the High Council go well.”

Hari snorted. “Statistics require care, love. Remember the classic joke about three statisticians who went hunting ducks-”

“Which are?”

“A game bird, known on some worlds. The first statistician shot a meter high, the second a meter low. When this happened, the third statistician cried, ‘On average, we hit it!”‘

The living tree of event-space.

Hari watched it crackle and work through the matrices. He recalled someone saying that straight lines did not exist in nature. Here was the inversion. Infinitely unfolding intricacy, never fully straight, never simply curved.

The entirely artificial Mesh flowered in patterns one saw everywhere. In crackling electrical discharges, alive with writhing forks. In pale blue frostflowers of crystal growth. In the bronchi of human lungs. In graphed market fluctuations. In whorls of streams, plunging ever forward.

Such harmony of large with small was beauty itself, even when processed by the skeptical eye of science.

He felt Trantor’s Mesh. His chest was a map; Streeling Sector over his right nipple, Analytica over the left. Using neural plasticity, the primary sensory areas of his cortex “read” the Mesh through his skin.

But it was not like reading at all. No flat data here.

Far better for a pan-derived species to take in the world through its evolved, whole neural bed! More fun, too.

Like the psychohistorical equations, the Mesh was N-dimensional. And even the number N changed with time, as parameters shifted in and out of application.

There was only one way to make sense of this in the narrow human sensorium. Every second, a fresh dimension sheared in over an older dimension. Freeze-framed, each instant looked like a ridiculously complicated abstract sculpture running on overdrive.

Watch anyone moment too hard and you got a lancing headache, motion sickness, and zero understanding. Watch it like an entertainment, not an object of study-and in time came an extended perception, integrated by the long-suffering subconscious. In time…

Hari Seldon bestrode the world.

The immediacy he had felt while being Ipan now returned-enhanced along perspectives he could not name. He tingled with total immersion.

He stamped and marched across the muddy field of chaotic Mesh interactions. His boot heels left deep scars. These healed immediately: subprograms at work, like cellular repair.

A landscape opened like the welcome of a mother’s lap.

Already he had used psychohistory to “postdict” pan tribal movements, behavior, outcomes. Hari had generalized this to the fitness/economic/ social topology of N-space landscapes. Now he applied it to the Mesh.

Fractal tentacles spread through the networks with blinding speed, penetrating. Trantor’s digital world yawned, a planetary spiderweb…with something brooding and swollen at its center.

Trantor’s electric jungle worked with prickly light below him. Somehow it was beneath the panoramas he traversed. From a distance the forty billion lives were like a carnival, neon-bright on the horizon, amid a black, cool desert: the colossal night of the Galaxy itself.

Hari strode across the tortured landscape of storm and ruin, toward a colossal thunderhead. Two tiny humans stood below it. Hari stooped and picked them up.

“You took your time!” the little man called. “I waited less for the King of France.”

“Our deliverer! Did Saint Michael send you?” called the small Joan. “Oh, yes-do beware the clouds.”

“More’s to the point-here,” the man said/sent.

Hari stood frozen while an engorged chunk of data/learning/history/wisdom seeped through him. Panting, he sped himself to his max. The glowering cumulus-creature, Joan and Voltaire-all now slow-stepped. He could see individual event-waves washing through their sims.

They were dispersed minds, hopping portions of themselves endlessly around Trantor. Clicking, clacking, zigzag computations. With the resources of a full brain running in a central location, his billions of microefficiencies added up.

“You…know…Trantor…” Joan droned. “Use…that…against…them.”

He blinked-and knew.

Streams of raw, squeezed recollection spun through him. Memories he could not claim but which instructed him instantly, reviewing all that had transpired.

His speed and supple grace felt wonderful. He was like an ice skater, zooming over the wrecked plain as the others lumbered like thick-headed beasts.

And he saw why.

Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power.

Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle, and now machines labored to echo it.