Better Angels (52 page)

Toward completeness the dragon coiled outward in the universe born from the cosmic egg of the Big Bang, in black holes unravelling into spiralling strings, in light as wave, in coiled DNA unfurling, in dot and meander markings 300,000 years old on a carved bone, in spawn from sclerotium, in the song from the crystal, in Lakshmi and Vishnu resting on Sesha the thousand-headed serpent of eternity between the cycles of creation, in Fibonacci series, in spiral waves of Belousov-Zapotinsky reactions, in the door and the path leading forever on.

The fundamental reality was relationship, Jiro now knew. There was no separate existence. As the sage Nagarjuna had asserted, “things” derived their being and nature by mutual dependence; they were nothing in themselves. At the deepest levels every “thing” resided in a holographic plenum of information, which existed in the form of influences embedded in relationships. All information was everywhere, at all times, because information stood both within and without merely historical or temporal or even physical existence. The Dreamer was the ground state of all being. The Dream was all the changes in state of being, all the slants and shifts of that Light. The awareness of changes in the state of being was consciousness, was the pattern of information superposed.

The lucidity of the Dreamer in the Dream was absolute self-consciousness, consciousness conscious of itself, at one with the “thing” of which it was conscious, not kept apart in introspective distance from that “thing”—because for it “things” were always only aspects of relationship. The shadow of physicality, of materiality, of the thingness-of-ones, could be cast only from that oneness-of-things lucidity.

He had been right in what he had speculated to his brother Seiji so long ago. Observation by consciousness did indeed make the universe real, but ordinary human consciousness limited the universe to a single reality. An omnipresent and omnipotent consciousness, on the other hand, held in its mind all possible states of all possible being, simultaneously. Only such a divine dreaming mind could cast matter—a shadow made of light—without collapsing the wave function of all those possible superposed states.

He had seen some of those alternate possibilities. Alternate futures, worlds in which Earth was devastated by alien intelligences until the only surviving humans were left on a distant colony world where they themselves had extinguished the native sentient species. Worlds where human civilizations fell into various types of twilight—in cities, under the sea, among distant stars. The coldboxed Earth he had seen in vision in that other life—that was one variant of what had been an all too probable future: A universe that wound down, trapped in time, all transcendence denied.

That outcomewas always to be prevented. Jiro knew he was in the mind of the Dreamer and knew the Dreamer was in his mind. He had united fully in self-sacrifice with the Dreamer—at the beginning of time, at the end of time, outside of time. He also knew he had to go back to the world he had known, back into time, for it would still be some time there before the true bliss was realized. He could not begin to more fully realize that bliss in himself until that bliss had begun to be more fully realized in the world. Both were mutually enfolded, not separable in any ultimate sense. If he were to begin the healing—his own and others—he would have to cast a larger shadow into matter himself, no mind who mattered and no matter who minded.

He was alive in memory, but he would need to be more than that if he were to help set right so much of what had gone wrong. Being deaf, dumb, and blind here “in living memory” would not be enough. Jiro had become a conscious artifact. If he hoped to play the role of cyberpomp and realize the future perfect imperative he had brought back with him, however, he would have to reconstruct an artificial self of virtual brain and body .

He had come down from the highest of mountains with a backpack full of dreams. It was time to begin unpacking those dreams.

* * * * * * *

Not-Knot

The probability wave had reappeared. Mike’s Cultural minions had traced it to somewhere in the orbital habitat—although never to an exact location, unfortunately. Every time they seemed to get close they encountered a nonsensical blocking message, LAW WHERE PROHIBITED BY VOID. How the focal point of the wave had gotten to the orbital habitat from the Trashlands, the netizenry and Mike himself had no idea.

Nothing further had happened for three days. Since then, however, all Hell had broken loose. Unlike his Adversary, Mike still had to sleep. That was where the Other’s return made itself known to Mike all too clearly. In his dreams, a perverse image flashed through his head—a young, dark-haired man dead and afloat in some black sea, while a terrible abyssal fish, a mobile piece of night all jutjawed teeth and hunger and temptation, tore at his feathered breast again and again, yet never reached his heart.

The abyssal fish had Mike’s face.

That dream had not been the last. Sometimes his opponent was an eagle and Mike was a snake, and they battled up and down a tree as big as the universe, with stars and planets in its branches. Sometimes they were both eagles, sometimes both snakes sometimes winged snakes or winged twisted ladders. Sometimes it seemed the two of them created everything alive, every species, by transforming themselves from one creature to another over and over again in their battles.

Waking drove the dreams away, yet left Mike infuriated nonetheless. The Opponent had perhaps revealed something of himself, however. Working with his netizens, Mike had determined that the young dead man he had seen in his dreams was most likely Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi, the same young dead man somehow involved in the initial release of the probability wave. Jiro Yamaguchi, however, was actually quite dead, his body burned, and Mike could not believe he had actually “come back” from the dead. At most he could be no more than some kind of ersatz simulacrum running on a machine. No, an uploaded zombie-memory could not be responsible for what was happening in his dreams.

I’m not like that, Mike thought. I’m not a sim, I’m not an imposter playing myself. I’m still alive, dammit. I know what’s real.

The dreams, however, kept coming with nearly every sleep. The hell had continued not only night after night but day after day as well. Mike had to be careful, for he knew his opponent was a powerful one. He set the netizenry in their Deep Background to tracing every move the Other made, anywhere in the infosphere, which they dutifully did.

From his netizens he learned that, although the infosphere seemed nearly as transparent to the Other as it did to Mike himself, his adversary did not seem to spend nearly so much time extended in his body electric as Mike did. Almost as if, perversely, the Yamaguchi construct (if that’s who or what the Other was) often purposely shut itself out, alienated itself from the great buzzing beast of the human infosphere.

He learned that his opponent, whoever that might be, spent what at first seemed an absurd amount of time beaming information on odd frequencies into coastal mudflats and estuaries all over the planet—which, like so much of of his opponent’s activity, seemed nonsensical, until Mike realized that the Other was establishing some sort of contact with the colonies of spirochetized human tissue that now swarmed in those regions. Mike thought it best to mimic his opponent’s actions there, just in case.

Other aspects of his opponent’s behavior still seemed to make little sense, however. Why, for instance, had the Other seen to it that the travel reservations of three passengers—Marissa Correa, Jhana Meniskos, and Roger Cortland—assured that they would be seated near each other on a ship bound for the orbital habitat from Earth? The background checks Mike had run on the three indicated no particularly strong connections between them.

Mike looked at their assembled personal profiles hanging in virtual space before him. The three were all young—all within a couple years of the same age, in fact. Cortland was a thin, pale man with dark hair and a trim beard. Correa was a redheaded woman with gray eyes. Meniskos had long black hair and dark eyes. She was a population ecologist with Tao-Ponto AG. Correa was a biochemist with a specialty in senescence. Cortland was the child of billionaire parents, so Mike supposed he could do anything he wished with his life. Currently, that seemed to involve research on naked mole rats and a lot of infosphere time spent searching for female fighting porn.

When Mike tried to covertly contact Cortland, however, all he and his netizens apparently succeeded in doing with their access wave was knocking Cortland’s personal data display off channel. He hoped they’d gotten some message through, but Cortland’s equipment seemed to be shielded against them somehow. The same was true with the women as well. They were all important to the Other, but Mike couldn’t figure out why. The same went for other orbital inhabitants it also spent time tracking—Seiji Yamaguchi, Atsuko Cortland, Paul Larkin, Lakshmi Ngubo. The first name might be read as more proof of some connection between Jiro Yamaguchi and the probability wave, the second name was that of Roger’s mother, but Paul Larkin’s connection to all the others (if any) he could not fathom.

Such opaqueness in the infosphere—which had once been so transparent to Mike—annoyed and frustrated him. He had done all he could to foster a breakdown in relations between the orbital habitat and Earth, for if the habitat had to be destroyed in order to destroy the other, bitter relations between Earth and the habitat might well come in handy. Given that it too apparently had an extended electronic body, Mike doubted that the Other could be obliterated by the destruction of any particular point in space. Still, the destruction of the orbital habitat might destroy the Opponent’s human connections in the gross physical world. That at least was something.

Reviewing the names his netizens had ferreted out, he saw that Ngubo’s connection to the developing pattern was a bit clearer. For whatever reason, the Other had thoroughly infiltrated the orbital habitat’s net-coordinating system—the Variform Autonomous Joint Reasoning Activity, or VAJRA. Lakshmi Ngubo had designed that system. Through the VAJRA the Other was coordinating an increased rate of “malfunction and defection” among nanotech assemblers and mechanorganic systems in space, using them to generate small but growing X-shaped “flowers” of unknown function.

Mike’s netizens glitch-commandeered sensing equipment to scan thr X-shaped things, but the Other’s space-borne nanomachines appeared to be engaged mainly in growing a type of solar exchange film. The film, however, was configured as both power source and memory matrix. It was also oddly studded at points with micropropulsion apertures and what the netizens described as “combinatorial arrays of microscopic lasers embedded in photorefractive material.” The X-shaped satellites seemed to be mobile, photorefractive holographic projectors of a peculiar type, but if so, where were they going and what information were they intended to project?

The Other seemed to be glitching VAJRA code too, almost as unconsciously as the netizens themselves sometimes glitched code. In much of the material they had tracked to the Opponent, Mike’s minions found a recurring quasi-viral code sequence: a 3D spiral staircase with keywords—TETRAGRAMMATON MEDUSA BLUE WORLDGATE APOTHEOSIS UTEROTONIC ENTHEOGEN TRIMESTER RATS SEDONA SKY HOLE SCHIZOS BALANCE COMBINATION ANGELS—where that structure should have had stairs.

Mike had the netizens tracking down the various provenances of those words and the possible connections among them as quickly and thoroughly as they could, but he already knew something about most of those terms. That was what bothered him. Who couldn’t, with a little digging, discover the connection between Medusa Blue, and entheogens delivered as uterotonics? Or between Tetragrammaton and Sedona? Mike thought the inhabitants of the orbital habitat were behaving in far too complacent a manner about all of this diddling with their machine systems. They should be much more concerned than they seemed to be about these glitches and X-shaped mirror flowers or whatever they were. He had helped see to it that the governments and corporations on Earth certainly were—they were already drafting plans for a military invasion of the orbital habitat!

The more Mike thought about it, the more astounded he became that the orbital inhabitants weren’t more paranoid about such goings-on, or at least more aware of them. Even though they undoubtedly did not live as fully in virtual space as Mike himself did, it almost seemed as if the VAJRA might be suppressing reports of such glitches. The media up there too did not seem to be covering the glitches or the X-sats either—almost as if their awareness and curiosity about such things was being purposely “damped down.”

From what he’d seen so far in the infosphere, Mike thought that maybe the Other was still in some ways not yet fully aware. Fine, but that was no excuse for the habitat’s residents to be so unaware. Mike wondered darkly if the Other was glitching their dreams the way he was glitching their machines’ codes.... No. The Yamaguchi construct might glitch machines, but not dreams. Beyond his own peculiar experiences, Mike had no proof that anything was affecting anyone else’s dreamlife.

Surely he could hardly expect the orbital inhabitants to know as much about the Realtime Artificial-life Technopredators, the RATs, as he did, however. Even he didn’t know who rediscovered whom first—the RATs or the Deep Background—but they were in communication again. If Mike’s guess was right, the last time those two tribes of machine intelligences collaborated the results had been devastating.

Into his virtual space Mike called up another of the old video recordings of the Sedona Disaster—which, he noted in passing, had been recently accessed several times by two orbital inhabitants, Aleister McBruce and Lev Korchnoi. Who knew exactly what that meant, though?

In its own way the Sedona Disaster was as freakish an occurence as the War Mite Plague, although of course not on nearly the same scale. The amateur video he watched showed an unsteady image of a red mesa, the big rock outcrop topped by the Neo-Gothic buildings of the Myrrhisticine Abbey complex. Above the abbey on its mesa-top, a flash of light burst out, then quickly became a point or tiny sphere of light, then a hole of darkness rimmed by light, like the “diamond ring” stage of an eclipse. The light-rimmed hole grew rapidly, revealing myriad rainbow fires dancing over its entire surface. Points of light glowed inside it too. In a moment more, the apparition blotted out the Abbey, then most of the mesa, then disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving behind only a bowl of broken stone.