Collected short fiction.., p.108
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 108
He uncovered his face. The thing was still with him.
It said, “Do you remember, when your faith came to you? The sense of a shield around you melting away, like armour you’d worn to keep God at bay?”
“Yes.” Jack acknowledged the truth defiantly; he wasn’t frightened that this abomination could see into his past, into his heart.
“That took strength: to admit that you needed God. But it takes the same kind of strength, again, to understand that some needs can never be met. I can’t promise you Heaven. We have no disease, we have no war, we have no poverty. But we have to find our own love, our own goodness. There is no final word of comfort. We only have each other.”
Jack didn’t reply; this blasphemous fantasy wasn’t even worth challenging. He said, “I know you’re lying. Do you really imagine that I’d leave the boys alone here?”
“They’d go back to America, back to their father. How many years do you think you’d have with them, if you stay? They’ve already lost their mother. It would be easier for them now, a single clean break.”
Jack shouted angrily, “Get out of my house!”
The thing came closer, and sat on the bed. It put a hand on his shoulder. Jack sobbed, “Help me!” But he didn’t know whose aid he was invoking any more.
“Do you remember the scene in The Seat of Oak? When the Harpy traps everyone in her cave underground, and tries to convince them that there is no Nescia? Only this drab underworld is real, she tells them. Everything else they think they’ve seen was just make-believe.” Jack’s own young face smiled nostalgically. “And we had dear old Shrugweight reply: he didn’t think much of this so-called ‘real world’ of hers. And even if she was right, since four little children could make up a better world, he’d rather go on pretending that their imaginary one was real.
“But we had it all upside down! The real world is richer, and stranger, and more beautiful than anything ever imagined. Milton, Dante, John the Divine are the ones who trapped you in a drab, grey underworld. That’s where you are now. But if you give me your hand, I can pull you out.”
Jack’s chest was bursting. He couldn’t lose his faith. He’d kept it through worse than this. He’d kept it through every torture and indignity God had inflicted on his wife’s frail body. No one could take it from him now. He crooned to himself, “In my time of trouble, He will find me.”
The cool hand tightened its grip on his shoulder. “You can be with her, now. Just say the word, and you will become a part of me. I will take you inside me, and you will see through my eyes, and we will travel back to the world where she still lives.”
Jack wept openly. “Leave me in peace! Just leave me to mourn her!”
The thing nodded sadly. “If that’s what you want.”
“I do! Go!”
“When I’m sure.”
Suddenly, Jack thought back to the long rant Stoney had delivered in the studio. Every choice went every way, Stoney had claimed. No decision could ever be final.
“Now I know you’re lying!” he shouted triumphantly. “If you believed everything Stoney told you, how could my choice ever mean a thing? I would always say yes to you, and I would always say no! It would all be the same!”
The apparition replied solemnly, “While I’m here with you, touching you, you can’t be divided. Your choice will count.”
Jack wiped his eyes, and gazed into its face. It seemed to believe every word it was speaking. What if this truly was his metaphysical twin, speaking as honestly as he could, and not merely the Devil in a mask? Perhaps there was a grain of truth in Stoney’s awful vision; perhaps this was another version of himself, a living person who honestly believed that the two of them shared a history.
Then it was a visitor sent by God, to humble him. To teach him compassion towards Stoney. To show Jack that he too, with a little less faith, and a little more pride, might have been damned forever.
Jack stretched out a hand and touched the face of this poor lost soul. There, but for the grace of God, go I.
He said, “I’ve made my choice. Now leave me.”
* * * * *
Author’s note: where the lives of the fictional characters of this story parallel those of real historical figures, I’ve drawn on biographies by Andrew Hodges and A.N. Wilson. The self-dual formulation of general relativity was discovered by Abhay Ashtekar in 1986, and has since led to ground-breaking developments in quantum gravity, but the implications drawn from it here are fanciful.
Orphanogenesis
From the author's website at — http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html — this excert first published in Interzone #123, September 1997.
This is an excerpt from the novel Diaspora by Greg Egan, first published in the United Kingdom by Orion/Millennium and in the United States of America by HarperCollins. Copyright © Greg Egan, 1997. All rights reserved.
* * * * *
Konishi polis, Earth
23 387 025 000 000 CST
15 May 2975, 11:03:17.154 UT
The conceptory was non-sentient software, as ancient as Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twenty — formed partly in their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance. Sporadically, though, every teratau or so, the conceptory created a citizen with no parents at all.
In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the polis founders had invented the Shaper programming language to recreate the essential processes of neuroembryology in software. But any such translation was necessarily imperfect, glossing over the biochemical details in favour of broad, functional equivalence, and the full diversity of the flesher genome could not be brought through intact. Starting from a diminished trait pool, with the old DNA-based maps rendered obsolete, it was crucial for the conceptory to chart the consequences of new variations to the mind seed. To eschew all change would be to risk stagnation; to embrace it recklessly would be to endanger the sanity of every child.
The Konishi mind seed was divided into a billion fields: short segments, six bits long, each containing a simple instruction code. Sequences of a few dozen instructions comprised shapers: the basic subprograms employed during psychogenesis. The effects of untried mutations on fifteen million interacting shapers could rarely be predicted in advance; in most cases, the only reliable method would have been to perform every computation that the altered seed itself would have performed … which was no different from going ahead and growing the seed, creating the mind, predicting nothing.
The conceptory’s accumulated knowledge of its craft took the form of a collection of annotated maps of the Konishi mind seed. The highest-level maps were elaborate, multi-dimensional structures, dwarfing the seed itself by orders of magnitude. But there was one simple map which the citizens of Konishi had used to gauge the conceptory’s progress over the centuries; it showed the billion fields as lines of latitude, and the sixty-four possible instruction codes as meridians. Any individual seed could be thought of as a path which zig-zagged down the map from top to bottom, singling out an instruction code for every field along the way.
Where it was known that only one code could lead to successful psychogenesis, every route on the map converged on a lone island or a narrow isthmus, ochre against ocean blue. These infrastructure fields built the basic mental architecture every citizen had in common, shaping both the mind’s overarching design and the fine details of vital subsystems.
Elsewhere, the map recorded a spread of possibilities: a broad landmass, or a scattered archipelago. Trait fields offered a selection of codes, each with a known effect on the mind’s detailed structure, with variations ranging from polar extremes of innate temperament or aesthetics down to minute differences in neural architecture less significant than the creases on a flesher’s palm. They appeared in shades of green as wildly contrasting or as flatly indistinguishable as the traits themselves.
The remaining fields — where no changes to the seed had yet been tested, and no predictions could be made — were classified as indeterminate. Here, the one tried code, the known landmark, was shown as grey against white: a mountain peak protruding through a band of clouds which concealed everything to the east or west of it. No more detail could be resolved from afar; whatever lay beneath the clouds could only be discovered firsthand.
Whenever the conceptory created an orphan, it set all the benignly mutable trait fields to valid codes chosen at random, since there were no parents to mimic or please. Then it selected a thousand indeterminate fields, and treated them in much the same fashion: throwing a thousand quantum dice to choose a random path through terra incognita. Every orphan was an explorer, sent to map uncharted territory.
And every orphan was the uncharted territory itself.
· · · · ·
The conceptory placed the new orphan seed in the middle of the womb’s memory, a single strand of information suspended in a vacuum of zeros. The seed meant nothing to itself; alone, it might as well have been the last stream of Morse, fleeing through the void past a distant star. But the womb was a virtual machine designed to execute the seed’s instructions, and a dozen more layers of software led down to the polis itself, a lattice of flickering molecular switches. A sequence of bits, a string of passive data, could do nothing, change nothing — but in the womb, the seed’s meaning fell into perfect alignment with all the immutable rules of all the levels beneath it. Like a punched card fed into a Jacquard loom, it ceased to be an abstract message and became a part of the machine.
When the womb read the seed, the seed’s first shaper caused the space around it to be filled with a simple pattern of data: a single, frozen numerical wave train, sculpted across the emptiness like a billion perfect ranks of sand dunes. This distinguished each point from its immediate neighbours further up or down the same slope — but each crest was still identical to every other crest, each trough the same as every other trough. The womb’s memory was arranged as a space with three dimensions, and the numbers stored at each point implied a fourth. So these dunes were four-dimensional.
A second wave was added — running askew to the first, modulated with a slow steady rise — carving each ridge into a series of ascending mounds. Then a third, and a fourth, each successive wave enriching the pattern, complicating and fracturing its symmetries: defining directions, building up gradients, establishing a hierarchy of scales.
The fortieth wave ploughed through an abstract topography bearing no trace of the crystalline regularity of its origins, with ridges and furrows as convoluted as the whorls of a fingerprint. Not every point had been rendered unique — but enough structure had been created to act as the framework for everything to come. So the seed gave instructions for a hundred copies of itself to be scattered across the freshly calibrated landscape.
In the second iteration, the womb read all of the replicated seeds — and at first, the instructions they issued were the same, everywhere. Then, one instruction called for the point where each seed was being read to jump forward along the bit string to the next field adjacent to a certain pattern in the surrounding data: a sequence of ridges with a certain shape, distinctive but not unique. Since each seed was embedded in different terrain, each local version of this landmark was situated differently, and the womb began reading instructions from a different part of every seed. The seeds themselves were all still identical, but each one could now unleash a different set of shapers on the space around it, preparing the foundations for a different specialised region of the psychoblast, the embryonic mind.
The technique was an ancient one: a budding flower’s nondescript stem cells followed a self-laid pattern of chemical cues to differentiate into sepals or petals, stamens or carpels; an insect pupa doused itself with a protein gradient which triggered, at different doses, the different cascades of gene activity needed to sculpt abdomen, thorax or head. Konishi’s digital version skimmed off the essence of the process: divide up space by marking it distinctively, then let the local markings inflect the unwinding of all further instructions, switching specialised subprograms on and off — subprograms which in turn would repeat the whole cycle on ever finer scales, gradually transforming the first rough-hewn structures into miracles of filigreed precision.
By the eighth iteration, the womb’s memory contained a hundred trillion copies of the mind seed; no more would be required. Most continued to carve new detail into the landscape around them — but some gave up on shapers altogether, and started running shriekers: brief loops of instructions which fed streams of pulses into the primitive networks which had grown up between the seeds. The tracks of these networks were just the highest ridges the shapers had built, and the pulses were tiny arrowheads, one and two steps higher. The shapers had worked in four dimensions, so the networks themselves were three-dimensional. The womb breathed life into these conventions, making the pulses race along the tracks like a quadrillion cars shuttling between the trillion junctions of a ten-thousand-tiered monorail.
Some shriekers sent out metronomic bit-streams; others produced pseudo-random stutters. The pulses flowed through the mazes of construction where the networks were still being formed — where almost every track was still connected to every other, because no decision to prune had yet been made. Woken by the traffic, new shapers started up and began to disassemble the excess junctions, preserving only those where a sufficient number of pulses were arriving simultaneously — choosing, out of all the countless alternatives, pathways which could operate in synchrony. There were dead ends in the networks-in-progress, too — but if they were travelled often enough, other shapers noticed, and constructed extensions. It didn’t matter that these first streams of data were meaningless; any kind of signal was enough to help whittle the lowest-level machinery of thought into existence.
In many polises, new citizens weren’t grown at all; they were assembled directly from generic subsystems. But the Konishi method provided a certain quasi-biological robustness, a certain seamlessness. Systems grown together, interacting even as they were being formed, resolved most kinds of potential mismatch themselves, with no need for an external mind-builder to fine-tune all the finished components to ensure that they didn’t clash.
Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardised subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data — one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan’s two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed.
Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred metres beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fibre and satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this superabundance.
In the orphan psychoblast, the half-formed navigator wired to the controls of the input channels began issuing a stream of requests for information. The first few thousand requests yielded nothing but a monotonous stream of error codes; they were incorrectly formed, or referred to non-existent sources of data. But every psychoblast was innately biased towards finding the polis library (if not, it would have taken millennia) and the navigator kept trying until it hit on a valid address, and data flooded through the channels: a gestalt image of a lion, accompanied by the linear word for the animal.
The navigator instantly abandoned trial and error and went into a spasm of repetition, summoning the same frozen image of the lion again and again. This continued until even the crudest of its embryonic change-discriminators finally stopped firing, and it drifted back towards experimentation.
Gradually, a half-sensible compromise evolved between the orphan’s two kinds of proto-curiosity: the drive to seek out novelty, and the drive to seek out recurring patterns. It browsed the library, learning how to bring in streams of connected information — sequential images of recorded motion, and then more abstract chains of cross-references — understanding nothing, but wired to reinforce its own behaviour when it struck the right balance between coherence and change.
Images and sounds, symbols and equations, flooded through the orphan’s classifying networks, leaving behind, not the fine details — not the spacesuited figure standing on grey-and-white rock against a pitch black sky; not the calm, naked figure disintegrating beneath a grey swarm of nanomachines — but an imprint of the simplest regularities, the most common associations. The networks discovered the circle/sphere: in images of the sun and planets, in iris and pupil, in fallen fruit, in a thousand different artworks, artifacts, and mathematical diagrams. They discovered the linear word for “person”, and bound it tentatively both to the regularities which defined the gestalt icon for “citizen”, and to the features they found in common among the many images of fleshers and gleisner robots.
By the five-hundredth iteration, the categories extracted from the library’s data had given rise to a horde of tiny sub-systems in the input-classifying networks: ten thousand word-traps and image-traps, all poised and waiting to be sprung; ten thousand pattern-recognising monomaniacs staring into the information stream, constantly alert for their own special targets.
These traps began to form connections with each other, using them at first just to share their judgments, to sway each other’s decisions. If the trap for the image of a lion was triggered, then the traps for its linear name, for the kind of sounds other lions had been heard to make, for common features seen in their behaviour (licking cubs, pursuing antelope) all became hypersensitive. Sometimes the incoming data triggered a whole cluster of linked traps all at once, strengthening their mutual connections, but sometimes there was time for over-eager associate traps to start firing prematurely. The lion shape has been recognised — and though the word “lion” has not yet been detected, the “lion” word-trap is tentatively firing … and so are the traps for cub-licking and antelope-chasing.
