Better Angels (16 page)

“When we first met,” Vang said, after sipping at his tea through a straw, “you told me you didn’t believe in a ‘great man conspiracy theory of history.’ No one can plan that thoroughly, I think you said. People can’t keep secrets well for that long. I’m inclined to agree with that, more and more.”

Vang paused to sip at his tea and Paul did likewise before the older man continued.

“I gather from Egan Ortap—he reports to me too, you know—that a good deal of your work in the infosphere suggests you’ve come under the sway of Ms. Easter and the Kitchener Foundation. So tell me: what do you know about Tetragrammaton and Medusa Blue? What do you think you know? What do you believe?”

Paul was floored, as thoroughly as if he’d walked into the conversational equivalent of a perfect aikido or jujitsu throw. He would never have suspected Vang to start the discussion so bluntly and directly. The old man had apparently anticipated his mindset and used Paul’s own energy against him.

“Tetragrammaton’s the big long-range survival plan,” Paul blurted, caught off guard. “The remnant from the Cold War days. When the shadow governments—the CIAs and KGBs and Mossads and MI-6s—played a big role in running the planet. Before they went to work for the big corporations.”

Vang paused from eating his fish and grimaced.

“I tried to tell you as much when we first met,” he said. “Anyone could glean that from half a dozen sites in the infosphere. Go on.”

“Medusa Blue is a psi-power enhancement project within Tetragrammaton,” Paul continued, spooning up his soup, trying to gather his thoughts together. So this was how they were going to play it—blunt, purely informational, report-to-the-boss neutrality? So be it. Paul could play that game too, for now. “Sort of ‘phase one’: enhancing psi-power with the aim of facilitating computer-aided apotheosis. Thought recognition at the least, maybe even the translation of human consciousness into a machine matrix. An attempt to make human and machine intelligence co-extensive.”

They were out of the small harbor now, past the jetty that protected it from storms out of the northwest. The sea, however, was still fairly placid. Paul suspected that they were in a large bay—near Monterey, perhaps?

“Ah,” Vang said. “The Kitchener people, certainly, don’t like that ‘co-extensive’ idea. Nils Barakian himself has said that, just as Tetragrammaton exists to break down the boundaries between humans and machines, the Kitchener Foundation exists to maintain those boundaries.”

“No, they don’t like it, as far as I can tell,” Paul agreed, finishing his soup. He was a bit surprised to hear that Vang was apparently on speaking terms with Barakian, the chairman of the Kitchener board. Still, Paul had seen and heard similar comments on the Foundation’s sites in the infosphere. Vang seemed to know what he was talking about.

“And what,” asked Vang, starting in on his soup, “is supposed to be the point of all Tetragrammaton’s high-tech high jinx, hmm?”

Paul stared down at the piece of fish he had just forked into on his plate.

“That’s not quite so clear,” he replied.

“No theories?” Vang asked.

“Too many theories,” Paul said, chewing and swallowing the long fork-hovering piece of fish.

“Such as?”

“Some infosphere sites say it’s all military,” Paul began, trying to sound as scientifically objective and neutral as possible. “Intended for something called MAAAAD—Machine Aided Action At A Distance. Other sites say the chemical side of it is really about creating battlefield hallucinogens, aerosol brainscrubbers, other new kinds of chemical warfare.”

Paul stopped. What came to his mind next came dangerously close to his worst suspicions about Tetragrammaton. Vang looked at him expectantly. Nothing for it but to plunge ahead.

“Some sites claim Medusa Blue is really a covert project to expose unborn children to KL 235,” Paul continued, scrutinizing the fish on his plate with more care than it merited. “Supposedly, later in life, the kids’ ‘latent’ paranormal talents can be switched over to ‘active’—triggered into what the infosphere sites refer to as direct mind-to-mind ‘shield telepaths’ and ‘empath-boosters’.”

“For what purpose?” Vang asked, finishing his soup.

“Depends whose politics you follow,” Paul said carefully. “According to the sites on the political right, the federal government, or some secret world government, has codenamed these psi-talents ‘starbursts’ and intends to use them to mind-control those who don’t go along with the global order. According to sites on the political left, or what’s left of the Left, the in utero exposure is connected to something called ‘Operation E 5-24’.”

“Which is?” Vang asked, rather circumspectly.

“Ephesians Chapter 5, verse 24,” Paul replied. “‘As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.’ The Left infosphere sites claim Operation E 5-24 is after a ‘headship hormone,’ a female submission synthetic. Something to counteract the gains of feminism by selectively altering female consciousness and intellection.”

Vang finished his soup. One of the two non-steering crew came forward with raspberry sorbets. Paul hurried to finish his fish.

“To which of these theories do you subscribe, Dr. Larkin?”

“None of them, totally,” Paul said, glancing out over the bow, through the occasional wisp of spray that wafted toward them—out to the blue-green sea merging with the cloudless sky at the horizon line. “Any or all of them may have some truth. Personally, I favor another explanation. The FTL theory.”

Vang savored his sorbet a moment.

“Why’s that?” the older man asked.

Because I’ve heard you hinting about it yourself, Dr. Vang, Paul wanted to say, but didn’t.

“Because if you’re on a fishing expedition,” he said instead, “you might as well go after a big fish. Faster-than-light travel is the biggest of them all. The Kitchener people claim a seamless mind/machine linkage is necessary for the creation of an information density singularity. A gateway into and through the fabric of space-time. Use computers and large-scale machine intelligences to generate the levels of information density needed to open the transdimensional singularity and presto! Faster-than-light travel to anywhere in the continuum.”

“One doesn’t need drugs, or paranormal powers, or in utero exposures, or even human consciousness, in such a process,” Vang said quietly.

“No, that’s true,” Paul agreed. “Apparently none of those played a part in what happened in Sedona....”

Ah, Paul thought, I hit him there! Despite Vang’s skills as a grandmaster of negotiation and The Deal, Paul saw a shadow of emotion cross the man’s face.

“Sedona was a pure machine approach,” Vang said in a level voice. “Tetragrammaton has shifted its efforts out of pure machine approaches and completely into mind/machine linkages.”

“What exactly happened at Sedona?” Paul asked, extremely curious.

“Human error,” Vang said, looking back toward land. “One of our Myrrhisticine people went rogue. The ‘black hole sun’ happened because he tried to implement his own agenda. Attempted to simulate a quantum information density structure for his own purposes. It won’t happen again. That, too, is a threat to your ‘great man conspiracy theory of history’.”

“How do you mean?” Paul asked, not quite seeing the connection.

“I am merely one of the inheritors of Tetragrammaton and Blue,” Vang said. “Things were done before I came on board that I had no say in. Over the years the programs and projects have grown far beyond the control, the praise, or the blame of any one individual. Things I don’t approve of still happen, despite my best efforts.”

Hmm, Paul thought. An interesting admission. But before he could follow up, Vang was addressing him again.

“You seem to still have some gaps in your theories, however,” Vang said. “You still haven’t explained how KL 235 and paranormal powers, or human consciousness itself, link up with faster than light travel.”

“That’s just it,” Paul said, an image of Caracamuni tepui’s last moments flashing through his mind. “I don’t understand how they link up.”

Vang suddenly laughed.

“You, of all people, should know,” the older man said. “You need me more than you know. A few years ago, I sent you a memo requesting from you the full circumstances surrounding how you came to be in possession of the Cordyceps jacintae spore print. I appreciated your frankness in providing that account. I believe everything you wrote—about the ghost people, about Caracamuni tepui lifting off and disappearing. I’m probably the only person on this planet with any real power who believes you. And you know ‘why’?”

Paul, finishing his melting sorbet, could only shake his head no.

“Because it fits so perfectly with what we’ve been looking for, that’s why!” Vang said, with a smile of wonder. “Turn off the left side of your brain with its constant questions of ‘Why?’ for a moment—and let your right hemisphere sense the ‘How?’ Of course, in your ‘why?’ bias you’re being typically human. Evolutionary pressures drove perceptual skills out of the left brain, to make room for the development of explanatory and interpretive consciousness, deep pattern-finding, in that hemisphere. But you need both skill-sets.”

“I don’t see what all that has to do with Caracamuni,” Paul said, bewildered.

“Nature is redundant,” Vang said, “but that’s its greatest strength. Repetition times variation minus selection equals learning—or evolution. Mind and nature learn by repeating themselves slightly differently in different times and places. Both are also chaotic. The right kind of chaos is the single most significant way the human brain and human consciousness differ from rule-governed artificial intelligences and simulacra. Chaotic acausality of the right type can’t be programmed into machine systems because they are rule-governed. Rule-breaking is what’s needed.”

“And Caracamuni has something to do with that ‘right kind of chaos’?” Paul asked, trying to get a grip on what Vang was driving at.

“Exactly,” Vang said, warming to the chance of sharing his thoughts on such a wild subject. “Classical mechanics usually ‘works’ for us because the quantum of action is too small and the speed of light is too large to affect our everyday experiences. In the range of extremely small distances or extremely high velocities, however, the walls of intractability close in.”

“Intractability?” Paul asked. The only thing that struck him as intractable at the moment was where Vang was heading with all this.

“Heisenberg says you can’t know both momentum and position at the same time,” Vang said peremptorily, as if in a hurry to cover the basics and move quickly beyond them. “Gödel says no set can contain itself. Einstein says what you see depends on where you stand. Quantum theory is a complete theory that claims all theories must be incomplete. The laws of physics predict that at the singularity the laws of physics break down. Down at the Planck length, out at the speed of light, on the other side of the wave function’s collapse, the tractable universe of the linear and sequential becomes highly intractable. To get around that, you have to bring in higher dimensions, chaos, complementarity. Your sister and the tepuian ‘ghost people’ must have found a way to ‘surf’ intractability! That’s what the lift-off and disappearance of Caracamuni is all about.”

The cabin boys came and cleared away the luncheon things, including the low table. Larkin and Vang stood up and leaned against the railing at the bow, into the wind and spray.

“But how?” Paul asked, distractedly.

“That fungus, of course,” Vang said, as one of the cabin boys arrived with coffee for both of them. “It’s a product of extraterrestrial bioengineering. Spores have been falling in a thin panspermian rain among the stars for millions of years. Some of them survived and took hold in that tepui. The transdimensional gateway can only be opened by a chaotic key. That fungus must provide both the key—most likely an artificial gene ‘command sequence’ embedded in the fungal genome—and the chaos.”

“The fungal supertryptamines,” Paul said, sipping his coffee, catching on. “They loosen up the dorsal and median raphe nuclei’s ‘governor’ on human brain activity. By damping down the DMNs the supertryptamines allow heightened chaotic activity to arise in the brain.”

“Precisely!” Vang said, placing his coffee cup on the rail before him, eyeing it from time to time to make sure it didn’t spill. “The human mind possesses the right kind of chaos to complement the levels of information density that I once thought only computers and AIs could put together. Apparently the ghost people figured out how to do it with just their own heads and a particular kind of quartz. However they managed it, the result is the same. Put together the right combination and the sky opens up. Simulated quantum information density structure. A mathematical model of a gateway so complete it is a gateway.”

Paul stood frozen, stunned as he worked out the conclusion.

“The virtual and the real coincide,” he said. “A singularity of almost pure Platonic form—or formlessness. Much-faster-than-light travel to anywhere in space-time.”

“And more—more, even before that’s achieved,” Vang said, taking another sip of his coffee, then facing proudly into the slackened wind as the ship came around in what was apparently the circular course it was running in the bay. “A mind/machine linkage so seamless that human consciousness becomes machine-mountable. Think about it. Independence from the all that flesh is heir to—and flawed by. A virtualized humanity, conscious software running on machines. Myriad human minds downloaded into robots, or piloting conscious spacecraft. Conscious artifacts dispersed throughout space-time, so that no single event—no war, no alien invasion, no killer asteroid, no ecocatastrophe, no cosmological gamma ray burst, not even the exponential growth of our own numbers and needs—nothing can make humanity extinct. Once virtualized, humanity’s physical needs will be radically diminished and need not every impinge on a biosphere again!”

So that was it, Paul thought as he slowly sipped his coffee. The bridge between brains and computers. The seamless interface between mind and machine. The contingent computer that would be both mind and machine. The final escape valve for population pressure—and also the exit door in the luxon wall. The ultimate solution for the narrowness of the needle’s eye.