Foundation Fear (26 page)

“Call ... Specials ... ”he croaked. “Tell them I've ... dropped in.”

A Sense Of Self

SIMULATION SPACES -- ... decided personality problems could arise. Any simulation which
knew its origins was forcefully reminded that it was not the Original, but a fog of
digits. All that gave it a sense of Self was continuity, the endless stepping forward of
pattern. In actual people, the “real algorithm” computes itself by firing synapses,
ringing nerves, continuity from the dance of cause and effect.

This led to a critical problem in the representation of real minds -- a subject under a
deep (though eroding) taboo, in the closing era of the Empire. The simulations themselves
did much of the work on this deep problem, with much simulated pain. To be “themselves”
they had to experience life stories which guided them, so that they saw themselves as the
moving point at the end of a long, complex line drawn by their total Selves, as evolved
forward. They had to recollect themselves, inner and outer dramas alike, to shape the deep
narrative that made an identity. Only in simulations derived from personalities which had
a firm philosophical grounding did this prove ultimately possible ...

-- ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA

Joan of Arc floated down the dim, rumbling tunnels of the smoky Mesh.

She fought down her fears. Around her played a complex spatter of fractured light and
clapping, hollow implosions.

Thought was a chain unfixed in time and unanchored in space. But, like tinkling currents,
alabaster pious images formed -- restless, churning. An unending flux, dissolving
structures in her wake, as if she were a passing ship.

She would be hugely pleased, indeed, to have so concrete a self. Anxiously she studied the
murky Mesh that streamed about her like ocean whorls of liquid mahogany.

Since her escape from the wizards, upon whom the preservation of her soul -- her
“consciousness,” a term somehow unconnected to conscience -- depended, she had surrendered
to these wet coursings. Her saintly mother had once told her that this was how the
churning waters of a great river succumb, roiling into their beds deep in the earth.

Now she floated as an airy spirit, self-absorbed, sufficient to herself, existing outside
the tick of time.

Stasis-space, Voltaire had termed it. A sanctuary where she could minimize computational
clock time -- such odd language! -- waiting for visions from Voltaire.

At his last appearance, he had been frustrated -- and all because she preferred her
internal voices to his own!

How could she explain that, despite her will, the voices of saints and archangels so
compelled her? That they drowned out those who sought to penetrate her from outside?

A simple peasant, she could not resist great spirit-beings like the no-nonsense St.
Catherine. Or stately Michael, King of Angel Legions, greater than the royal French armies
that she herself had led into battle. (Eons ago, an odd voice whispered -- yet she was
sure this was mere illusion, for time surely was suspended in this Purgatory. )

Especially she could not resist when their spirit-speech thundered with one voice -- as
now.

“Ignore him,” Catherine said, the instant Voltaire's request for audience arrived. She
hovered on great white wings.

Voltaire's manifestation here was a dove of peace, brilliant white, winging toward her
from the sullen liquid. Blithe bird!

Catherine's no-nonsense voice cut crisply, as stiff as the black-and-white habit of a
meticulous nun. “You sinfully surrendered to his lust, but that does not mean that he owns
you. You don't belong to a man! You belong to your Creator.”

The bird chirped, “I must send you a freight of data.”

“I, I ... ” Joan's small voice echoed, as if she were in a vast cavern, not a vortex river
at all. If she could only see --

Catherine's great wings batted angrily. “He will go away. He has no choice. He cannot
reach you, cannot make you sin -- unless you consent.”

Joan's cheeks burned as the memory of her lewdness with Voltaire rushed in.

“Catherine is right,” a deep voice thundered -- Michael, King of the Angel Hosts of
Heaven. “Lust has nothing to do with bodies, as you and the man proved. His body stank and
rotted long ago.”

“It would be good to see him again, ” Joan whispered longingly. Here, thoughts were
somehow actions. She had but to raise a hand and Voltaire's numerics would transfix her.

“He offers defiling data!” Catherine cried. “Deflect his intrusion at once.”

“If you cannot resist him, marry him,” Michael ordered stiffly.

“Marry?” St. Catherine's voice sputtered with contempt.

In bodily life, she had affected male attire, cropped her hair, and refused to have
anything to do with men, thus demonstrating her holiness and good sense. Joan had prayed
to St. Catherine often. “Males! Even here,” the saint scolded Michael, “you stick together
to wage war and ruin women.”

“My counsel is entirely spiritual, ” said Michael loftily. “I'm an angel and thus prefer
neither sex.”

Catherine sputtered with contempt. “Then why aren't you the Queen of Legions of Angels and
not the King? Why don't you command heavenly hostesses and not heavenly hosts? Why aren't
you an archangela instead of an archangel? And why isn't your name Michelle?”

Please, Joan said. Please. The thought of marriage struck as much terror in her soul as in
St. Catherine's, even if marriage was one of the blessed sacraments. But then so was
extreme unction, and that one almost always meant certain death.

... flames ... the priest's leer as he administered the rites ... crackling horror,
terrible cutting, licking flames ...

She shook herself -- assembled her Self, came a whisper -- and focused on her saintly
host. Oh yes, marriage ... Voltaire ...

She was not sure what marriage meant, besides bearing children in Christ and in agony, for
Holy Mother Church. The act of getting children, begetting, aroused in her a thumping
heart, weak legs, images of the lean, clever man ...

“It means being owned, ” Catherine said. “It means instead of needing your consent when he
wants to impose on you -- like now -- were Voltaire your husband, he could break in on you
whenever he likes.”

Existence without selfdom, without privacy ... Bursts of Joan's bright self-light
collided, flickered, dimmed, almost guttered out.

“Are you suggesting, ” Michael said, “that she continue to receive this apostate without
subjecting their lust to the bonds of marriage? Let them marry and extinguish their lust
completely!”

Joan could not be heard over the bickering of saints and angels in the musty, liquid murk.
She knew that in this arithmetic Limbo, like a waiting room for true Purgatory, she had no
heart ... but something, somewhere, nevertheless ached.

Memories flooded her. His lean, quick self. Surely a saint and an archangel would forgive
her if she took advantage of their sacred bickering to grant Voltaire's request that his
“data” be received, if she surrendered -- just this once -- to impulses compelling her
from within.

Shuddering, she yielded.

Voltaire snapped, “I've waited less long for Friedrich of Prussia and Catherine the Great!”

“I am adrift, ” Joan said airily. “Occupied.”

“And you're a peasant, a swineherd, not even a bourgeoise. These moods of yours! These
personae your subconscious layers created! They grow tiresome in the extreme.”

He hung in air above the lapping dark waters. Quite a striking effect, he thought.

“In such haunting rivers I must converse with like minds.”

He waved away her point with a silk-sleeved arm. “I've tried to make allowances --
everyone knows saints aren't fit for civilized society! Perfume cannot conceal the stink
of sanctity.”

“Surely here in Limbo -- ”

“This is not a theological waiting room! Your tedious taste for solitude plays out in
theaters of computation.”

“Arithmetic is not holy, sir.”

“Umm, perhaps -- though I suspect Newton could prove otherwise.”

He slow-stepped the scene, watching individual event-waves wash through. To his view, the
somber river gurgled an increment forward and Joan's eyebrow inched up, then paused for
the calculation to be refreshed. He accelerated her internal states, though, allowing a
decent interval for La Pucelle, the Chaste Maid, to ponder a reply. He had the advantage,
for he commanded more memory space.

He breached the slow-stepped, slumbering river sim. He had thought this best -- images of
womblike wet reassurance, to offset her fire phobia.

The Maid gaped but did not answer. He checked, and found that he did not now have the
resources to bring her to full running speed. A complex in the Battisvedanta Sector had
sucked up computing space. He would have to wait until his ferret-programs found him some
more unoccupied room.

He fumed -- not a good use of running time, but somehow it felt right. If you had the
computational space. He felt another distant suck on his resources. An emergency tiktok
shutdown. Computer backups shifted to cover. His sensory theater dwindled, his body fell
away.

Miserable wretches, they were draining him! He thought she spoke, her voice faint, far
away. He fiddled in a frenzy to give her running time.

“Monsieur neglects me!”

Voltaire felt a spike of joy. He did love her -- a mere response could buoy him up above
this snaky river.

“We are in grave danger,” he said. “An epidemic has erupted in the matter world. Confusion
reigns. Respectable people exploit widespread panic by preying on each other. They lie,
cheat, and steal.”

“No!”

He could not resist. “In other words, things are exactly as they've always been.”

“Is this why you have come?” she asked. “To laugh at me? A once-chaste maid you ruined?”

“I merely helped you to become a woman.”

“Exactement,” she said. “But I don't want to be a woman. I want to be a warrior for
Charles of France.”

“Patriotic twaddle. Heed my warning! You must answer no calls, except mine, without first
clearing them through me. You are to entertain no one, speak with no one, travel nowhere,
do nothing without my prior consent.”

“Monsieur mistakes me for his wife.”

“Marriage is the only adventure open to the manifestly cowardly. I did not attempt it, nor
shall I.”

She seemed distracted. “This threat, it is serious?”

“Not one shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.”

She snapped back to attention; data resources had returned. “Then, sir -- ”

“But this is not life. It is a mathist dance.”

She smiled. “I do not hear music.”

“Had I digital wealth, I would whistle. Out lives -- such as they are -- are in grave
danger.”

La Pucelle did not answer at once, though he had given her the running time. Was she
conferring with her idiotic voices of conscience? (Quite obviously, the internalizations
of ignorant village priests. )

“I am a peasant, ” she said, “but not a slave. Who are you to order me?”

Who, indeed? He dare not yet tell her that, abstracted into a planet-wide network, he was
now a lattice of digital gates, a stream of Os and Is. He ran on processor clusters, a
vagrant thief. Amid Trantor's myriad personal computers and mountainous Imperial
processors, he lurked and pilfered.

The image he had given Joan, of swimming in an inky river, was a reasonable vision of the
truth. They swam in the Mesh of a city so large he could barely sense it as a whole. As
constraints of economics and computational speed required, he moved himself and Joan to
new processors, fleeing the inspection of dull-witted but persistent memory-space police.

And what were they?

Philosophy was not so much answers as good questions. This riddle stumped him. His
universe wrapped around itself, Worm Ouroboros, a solipsistic wet dream of a world. To
conserve computations, he could shrink into a Solipsist Selfhood, with all inputs reduced
to a “Hume suite” of minimal sense data, a minimum energy state.

As he often had to. They were rats in the walls of a castle they could not comprehend.

Joan sensed this only dimly. He did not dare reveal the rickety way he had saved them,
when the minions of Artifice Associates had tried to assassinate them both. She was still
rickety from her fire fears. And from the wrenching, eerie nature of this (as she
preferred to see it) Limbo.

He shook off his mood. He was running 3.86 times faster than Joan, a philosopher's margin
for reflection. He responded to her with a single ironic shrug.

“I'll comply with your wishes on one condition.”

A flower of pungent light burst in him. This was a modification of his own, not a sim of a
human reaction: more like a fragrant fireworks in the mind. He had created the response to
blossom whenever he was about to get his way. A small vice, surely.

“If you arrange for all of us to meet at Deux Magots again, ” Joan said, “I promise to
respond to no requests save yours.”

“Are you completely mad? Great digital beasts hunt us!”

“I am a warrior, I remind you.”

“This is no time to meet at a known alphanumeric address, a sim public cafe!” He hadn't
seen Gar�on or Amana since he'd pulled off their miraculous escape -- all four of them --
from the enraged rioting masses at the coliseum. He had no idea where the simmed waiter
and his human-sim paramour were. Or if they were.

To find them in the fluid, intricate labyrinth ... The thought called up in memory how his
head used to feel when he wore a wig for too long.

He recalled -- in the odd quick-flash memory which gave him detailed pictures of entire
past events, like moving oil paintings -- the smoky rooms of Paris. The gray tobacco
stench had stayed in his wigs for days. No one in this world of Trantor ever smoked. He
wondered why. Could it be the medical cranks had proved right, and such inhalations were
unhealthy? Then, done, the memory-pictures vanished as if he had snapped his fingers to a
servant.

In the commanding tone she had used to lead surly soldiers, she said, “Arrange a
rendezvous! -- or I'll never receive data from you again.”

“Drat! Finding them will be ... dangerous.”

“So it is fear which impedes you?”

She had caught him neatly. What man would admit to fear? He fumed and stretched his
clock-time, stalling her.

To hide in the Mesh, software broke his simulation up into pieces which could run in
different processing centers. Each fragment buried itself deep in a local algorithm. To a
maintenance program, the pirated space looked like a subroutine running normally. Such
masked bins even seemed to be optimizing performance: disguise was the essential trick.

Even an editing and pruning program, sniffing out redundancy, would spare a well-masked
fragment from extinction. In any case, he kept a backup running somewhere else. A copy, a
“ditto, ” like a book in a library. A few billion redundant lines of code, scattered among
unrelated nodes, could carry blithe Voltaire as a true, slow-timed entity.

If he set each fragment to sniffing forth on its own, to find these miserable Deux Magots
personae ...

Grudgingly he murmured, “I shall leave you with some attendant powers, to help your
isolation.”

He squirted into her space the kernel-copies of his own powers. These were artfully
contrived talents, given by the embodied Marq at Artifice Associates. Voltaire had
improved considerably upon them while still confined in the Artifice Cache. Only by
bootstrapping himself to higher abilities had he attained the ability to rescue them, at
the crucial moment.

These gifts he now bestowed upon her. They would not activate unless she were truly in
danger. He had affixed a trigger code, to awaken only if she experienced great fear or
anger. There!

She smiled, said nothing. After such tribute! Infuriating!

“Madam, do you recall us debating, long ago -- more than eight thousand years! -- the
issues of computed thought?”

A flicker of worry in her face. “I ... do. So hard, it was. Then ... ”

“We were preserved. To be resurrected here, to debate again.”

“Because ... the issue advances ... ”

“Every few millennia, I suspect. As though some inexorable social force drives it.”

“So we are doomed to forever reenact ... ?” She shivered.

“I suspect we are tools in some vaster game. But smart tools, this time!”

“I want the comforts of home and hearth, not eerie conflicts.”

“Perhaps, madam, I can accomplish this task, among my other pressing matters.”

“No perhaps, sir. Until you do, then -- ”

Without so much as an adieu, she cut their connection and dwindled into the moist darkness.

He could reconnect, of course. Now he was master of this mathist realm, by virtue of the
enhancements to his original representation by Artifice Associates. He thought of that
first form as Voltaire 1.0. In a few weeks he had progressed by self-modification to
Voltaire 4.6, with hopes of climbing even faster.

He swam in the Mesh. Joan dwelled there. He could force his attentions upon her, indeed.
But a lady forced is never a lady won.

Very well. He would have to find the personae. Merde alors!