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A Hunger for the Infinite (v1.1)Gregory Benford, 1999
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DEATH CAME IN ON SIXTEEN LEGS.
If it is possible to look composed while something angular and ominous is hauling you up out of your hiding place, a thing barbed and hard and with a gun-leg jammed snug against your throat -- then Ahmihi was composed.
He had been the Exec of the Noachian 'Sembly for decades and knew this corner of Chandelier Rook the way his tongue knew his mouth. Or more aptly, for the Chandelier was great and vast, the way winds know a world. But he did not know this thing of sleek, somber metal that towered over him.
He felt himself lifted, wrenched. A burnt-yellow pain burst in his sensorium, the merged body/electronic feeling-sphere that enveloped him. Behind this colored agony came a ringing message, not spoken so much as implanted into his floating sense of the world around him:
I wish to "talk"-to convey linear meaning.
"Yeasay, and you be --?" He tried to make it nonchalant and failed, voice guttering out in a dry gasp.
I am an anthology intelligence. I collapse my holographic speech to your serial inputs.
"Damn nice of you."
The gun-leg spun him around lazily like a dangling ornament, and he saw three of his people lying dead on the decking below. He had to look away from them, to once-glorious beauties that were now a battered panorama. This section of the Citadel favored turrets, galleries, gilded columns, iron wrought into lattices of byzantine stillness. It was over a millennium old, grown by biotech foundries, unplanned beauty by mistake. The battle -- now quite over, he saw -- had not been kind. Elliptical scabs of orange rust told of his people, fried into sheets and splashed over walls. White waste of disemboweled bodies clogged corners like false snow. An image-amp wall played endlessly, trying to entertain the dead. Rough-welded steel showed ancient repairs beneath the fresh scars of bolt weaponry that had sliced men and women into bloody chunks.
I broke off this attack and intervened to spare you.
"How many of my people ... are left?"
I count 453 -- no, 452; one died two xens ago.
"If you'll let them go -- "
That shall be your reward, should you comply with my desire for a conversation. You may even go with them.
He let a glimmer of hope kindle in him.
This final mech invasion of Chandelier Rook had plundered the remaining defenses. His Noachian Assembly had carried out the fighting retreat while other families fled. Mote disassemblers had breached the Chandelier's kinetic-energy weapons, microtermites gnawing everywhere. Other 'Semblies had escaped while the Noachians hung on. Now the last act was playing out.
Rook was a plum for the mechs. It orbited near the accretion disk of the black hole, the Chandelier's induction nets harvesting energy from infalling masses and stretched space-time.
In the long struggle between humans and mechs, pure physical resources became the pivot for many battles. It had been risky, even in the early, glory days after mankind reached the Galactic Center, to build a radiant, massive Chandelier so close to the virulent energies and sleeting particle hail near the black hole itself: mech territory. But mankind had swaggered then, ripe and unruly from the long voyage from Earth system.
Now, six millennia since those glory days, Ahmihi felt himself hoisted up before a bank of scanners. His sensorium told of probings in the microwave and infrared spectra. Cool, thin fingers slid into his own cerebral layers. He braced himself for death.
I wish you to view my work. Here ...
Something seized Ahmihi's sensorium like a man palming a mouse, squeezed-and he was elsewhere, a flat broad obsidian plain. Upon which stood ... things.
They had all been human, once. Now the strange wrenched works were festooned with contorted limbs, plant growths, shafts of metal and living flesh. Some sang as winds rubbed them. A laughing mouth of green teeth cackled, a cube sprayed tart vapors, a blood-red liquid did a trembling dance.
At first he thought the woman was a statue. But then breath whistled from her wrenched mouth. Beneath her translucent white skin pulsed furious blue-black energies. He could see through her paper-thin skin, sensing the thick fibers that bound muscle and bone, gristle and yellow tendons, like thongs binding a jerky, angular being ... which began to walk. Her head swiveled, ratcheting, her huge pink eyes finding him. The inky patch between her legs buzzed and stirred with a liquid life, a strong stench of her swarmed up into his nostrils, she smiled invitingly --
"No!" He jerked away and felt the entire place telescope away. He was suddenly back, dangling from the gun-leg. "What is this place?"
The Hall of Humans. An exhibition of art. Modesty compels me to add that these are early works, and I hope to achieve much more. You are a difficult medium.
"Using ... us?"
For example, I attempted in this artwork to express a coupling I perceive in the human world-sum, a parallel: often fear induces lust shortly after, an obvious evolutionary trigger function. Fear summons up your mortality, so lust answers with its fleeting sense of durability, immortality.
Ahmihi knew this Mantis was of some higher order, beyond anything his 'Sembly had seen. To it, their lives were fragmented events curved into ... what? So the Mantis thought of itself as an artist, studying human trajectories with ballistic precision.
He thought rapidly. The Mantis had some cold and bloodless passion for diseased art. Accept that and move on. How could he use this?
You share with others (who came from primordial forces) a grave limitation: you cannot redesign yourselves at will. True, you carry some dignity, since you express the underlying First Laws.
Still, you express in hardware what properly belongs in software.
An unfortunate inheritance. Still, it provides ground for aesthetic truths.
"If your kind would just leave us alone -- "
Surely you know that competition for resources, here at the most energetic realm of the galaxy, must be ... significant. My kind too suffers from its own drive to persist, to expand.
"If you'd showed up when we had full Chandelier strength, you'd be lying in pieces by now."
I would not be so foolish. In any case, you cannot destroy an anthology intelligence. My true seat of intelligence is dispersed.
My aesthetic sense, primary in this immediate manifestation, still lodges strongly in the Hall of Humans that I have constructed light-years away. You visited it just now.
"Where?" He had to keep this angular thing of ceramic and carbon steel occupied. His people could still slip away --
Quite near the True Center and its Disk Engine. You shall visit it again in due time if you are fortunate and I select you for preservation.
"As suredead?"
I find you primates an entrancing medium.
"Why don't you just keep us alive and talk to us?" He was sorry he had asked the question, for instantly, from the floor below, the Mantis made a corpse rise. It was Leona, a mother of three who had fought with the men, and now had a trembling, bony body blackened by Borer weaponry.
You are a fragile medium-pay witness. I do know how to express through you, though it is a noise-thickened method.
Inevitably you die of it. But if you prefer --
She teetered on broken legs and peered up at him. Her mouth shaped words that whistled out on separate exhalations, like a bellows worked by an unseen hand.
"I find this ... overly hard-wired ... medium is ... constrained sufficiently ... to yield ... fresh insights."
"My God, kill her." He thrashed against the pincers that held him aloft.
"I am ... dead as ... a human ... But I remain ... a medium."
He looked away from Leona. "Don't you have any sense of what she's going through?"
My level does not perceive pain as you know it. At best, we feel irreducible contradiction of internal states.
"Wow, that must be tough."
Working her like a ventriloquist's dummy, the Mantis made Leona cavort below, singing and dancing at a hideous heel-drumming pace, her shattered bones poking through legs caked with dried brown blood. Fluids leaked from the punctured chest.
"Damn it, just talk through my sensorium. Let her go!"
My communicative mode is part of the craft I create. Patterns of fear, of hatred; your flood of electrical impulses and brain chemicals that signifies hopelessness or rebellion: all part of the virtuosity of the passing mortal moment.
"Sorry I can't seem to appreciate it. Leona ... she's suredead?"
"Yes ... This one ... has been ... fully recorded ... " Leona wheezed, "I have ... harvested her ... joyously."
"This way ... she's hideous."
As this revived form, I can see your point. But with suitable reworking, hidden elements may emerge. Perhaps after my culling among the harvested, I shall add her to my collected ones.
She has thematic possibilities.
Ahmihi shook his head to clear it. His muscles trembled from being held suspended and from something more, a strange sick fear. "She doesn't deserve this."
Yet I feel something missing in my compositions, those you saw in the Hall of Humans. What do you think of them?
He fought down the impulse to laugh, then wondered if he was close to hysteria. "Those were artworks? You want art criticism from me? Now?"
Leona gasped, "I sense ... I have ... missed essentials ... The beauty ... is seeping ... from my ... works."
"Beauty's not the sort of thing that gets used up."
"Even through ... the tiny ... grimed window ... of your sensorium ... you sense ... a world-set ... I do not. Apparently ... there is ... something gained ... by such ... blunt ... limitations."
Which way was this going? He had a faint glimmering. "What's the problem?"
"I sense ... far more ... yet do not ... share your ... filters."
"You know too much?" He wondered if he could get a shot at Leona, stop this. No human tech could salvage a mind that was sure-dead, "harvested" by the mechs -- though why mechs wanted human minds, no one knew. Until now. Ahmihi had heard legends of the Mantis and its interest in humans, but not of any Hall of Humans.
"I have ... invaded nervous ... systems ... driven them to ... insanity, suicide." Leona twitched, stumbled, sprawled. Her eyes goggled at the vault above, drifted to peer into Ahmihi's. "Not the ... whole canvas ... something ... missing."
He tried to reach a beam tube and failed. The Chandelier's phosphor lights were dimming, shadowing Leona.
With obvious pain she struggled to her feet. "I tried ... Ephemerals ... so difficult ... to grasp."
Ahmihi thought desperately. "Look, you have to be us."
For the first time in this eerie discussion the Mantis paused. It let Leona crumple on the floor below, a rag doll tossed aside.
That is a useful suggestion. To truncate my selves into one narrow compass, unable to escape. Yes.
Ahmihi felt a sudden pressure, like a wall of flinty resolve, course through his sensorium. He had no hope that he would live more than a few moments longer, but still, the hard dry coldness of it filled him with despair.
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>I had come around the corner and there it was, more like a piece of furniture than a mech, and it poked something at me.
>The last thing I saw was a 'bot we used for ore hauling, tumbling over and over like something had blown it, and I thought, I'm okay because I'm behind this stressed glass.
>I still got the memory of something hard and blue in my line of sight, a color I'd never seen before.
>She fell down and I stooped to help her up and saw she had no head and the thing that was holding her head on the floor jumped up at me, too.
>It had a kind of ceramic tread that came around on me when I thought it was dead, booby-trapped some way, I guess, and it caught me in the side like a conveyor belt.
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The Noachian 'Sembly fled the mech plunder of their Chandelier. Their Exec, Ahmihi, had emerged from his capture by the Mantis with a sensorium that howled with discord. Each neurological node of his body vibrated in a different pattern. His voice rang like a stone in a bucket. It was as if the symphony of his body had a deranged conductor.
But within hours he recovered. He would never speak of the experience with the Mantis. He led his 'Sembly into craft damaged but serviceable. The mechs did not attack as over three hundred escaped the drifting hulk their once-glorious spin-city had become.
This was one of the last routs of the Chandelier Age. After these defeats, humanity fled deep space for the nostalgic refuge of planets. This was in the end foolish, for the Galactic Center is unkind to the making and tending of worlds. There, within a single cubic light-year, a million suns glow. Glancing near-collisions between stars can strip the planets from a star within a few million years. Only worlds carefully stabilized can persist. Even then, they suffer weathering unknown in the calm outer precincts of the great spiral galaxy.
The Noachian 'Sembly used a gravitational whip around the black hole to escape pursuit. This cost lives and baked their ships until they could barely limp on to a marginally habitable world, named Isis by some other 'Sembly, which a millennium before had departed for greener planets, farther out from True Center. Isis was dry and windswept, but apparently of little interest to mechs. This was enough; the Noachians spiraled in and began to live again. But much had happened on the way.
Mech weaponry can be insidious, particularly their biological tricks. A 'Sembly platitude was all too true. You may get better after getting hit, but you do not get well.
A year into their voyage, Ahmihi lay dying. As he gasped hideously, lungs slowly eaten by the nano-seekers the mechs had carried, his wife came near to say goodbye. The 'Sembly folk were afraid to record Ahmihi's personality into an Aspect, since he was plainly mech-damaged, perhaps mentally. In his fever he spoke of some bargain he had struck with the near-mythical Mantis, and no one could fathom the terms. He had been tampered with in some profound way, perhaps so that the story he told could give away nothing vital.
But they did have his archived recording from the year before; not everything would be lost. In a desperate era, skills and knowledge had to be preserved into the chips which rode at the nape of the neck of each 'Sembly member. These carried the legacy of many ancient personalities, rendered into Aspects or the lesser Faces or Profiles. Ahmihi would survive in fractional form, his expertise available to his descendants.
No one noticed when a small insectlike entity crawled from the dying Ahmihi's mouth. It whirred softly toward his wife, Jalia, and stung her. She slapped it away, thinking it no different from the other vermin released from the hydro sections.
The flier implanted in Jalia a packet of nanodevices that quickly recoded one of her ova. Then it dissolved to avoid detection. The Noachian 'Sembly burned Ahmihi's body to prevent any possible desecration by mechs, especially if nanos were alive in the ship.
Their prayers were answered; apparently the small band of fleeing humans were not worth mech time or effort to pursue.
Jalia gave birth to a son, a treasure in an era when human numbers were falling. Gene scanners found nothing out of the ordinary. She called the boy Paris, in the tradition of the Noachian 'Sembly, to use city names from Earth -- Akron, Kiev, Fairhope -- though Earth itself was now a mere legend, doubted by many.
When he was five his intensive education began. He had been an ordinary boy until then, playing happily in the dry fields from which skimpy crops came. He was wiry, athletic, and seldom spoke.
When Paris began learning, he made a discovery. Others did not sense the world as he did.
Every second, many millions of bits of information flooded through his senses. But he could consciously discern only about forty bits per second of this cataract. He could read documents faster than he could write, or than people could speak, but the stream was still torpid.
Whether the information was going in or out, his body was designed for roughly the same torpid flow speed. All serial ways of taking in information were painfully sluggish. His awareness was like a spotlight gliding across a darkened stage, lighting an actor's face dramatically, leaving all else in the blackness. Consciousness stood on a mountain of discarded information.
Even thinking about this fact was slow. It took him much longer to explain to himself what he was thinking than it did to think it. His brain channeled ten billion bits per second, far more than he took in from his surroundings.
There were as many incoming signals from his sensorium as there were outgoing commands to his body. But nearly none of this could he tell anyone about. His sensibility, his speech -- all were hopelessly serial logjams. Everybody else was the same; humans were not alone in their serial solitude.
He had already learned how important story was to them -- and to him. Plots, heroes and villains, for and against, minor roles and major ones, action and wisdom, tension and release -- as fundamental as the human linear mouth-gut-anus tube, for story was the key to mental digestion.
And without knowing it, each of them told their own stories, in every moment. Their bodies gave them away with myriad expressions, grunts, shrugs, unconscious gestures. Big chunks of their personalities came through outside their conscious control, as the unconscious spoke for itself through the body, a speech unheard by the discerning driver, hidden from it.
For a young boy this was a shock. Others knew more about him than he knew about himself. By sensing the megabits that leaked through the body, they could read him.
This was enormously embarrassing. Such a silent language must have come early in human evolution, Paris guessed, when it was more vital to know what strangers meant than what they said, using some crude protolanguage.
And laughter -- the wine of speech, he learned -- was the consciousness's admission of its own paucity. He laughed often, after realizing that.
Soon, even while scampering in madcap joy over the hard-packed dirt of the playground, he felt a part of him stand apart. What he experienced -- all those billions of bits per second -- was a simulation of what he sensed. This he felt as a gut-level truth.
Worse, the simulation lagged half a second behind the world outside. He tested this by seeing how fast his body reacted to pain or pleasure. Sure enough, he jerked away from a needle before he consciously knew it was poking him in the calf.
His sensorium was ripe with tricks. His vision had a blind spot, which he deduced must emerge from the site where nerves entered the back of the eye. An abandoned, ruined Chandelier seemed larger when it hung in its forlorn orbit just above the Isis horizon than when it arched high in the sky. When he ran across the crinkled plains and stopped to admire filmy clouds overhead, his eyes told him for a while that the clouds were rushing by -- a kinesthetic memory of running, translated by his mind into an observed fact.
All because evolution shaped the eye-brain system to regard things high up as farther away, more unattainable, and so made people perceive them as smaller. And retained the sensation of running, unable to discard the mind's pattern-frame right away.
He sat in class and regarded his giggling classmates. How odd they seemed. Understanding himself had helped in dealing with them. He was popular, with a natural manner that some mistook for leadership. It was something decidedly different, something never seen in human society before. He felt this but could not name it. Indeed, there was no word.
Gradually Paris saw that their -- and his -- world was meaning-filled, before they became aware of it. Scents, rubs, flavors-all carried the freight of origins many millennia and countless light-years away.
So he came to make his next discovery: the unconscious ruled. He learned this when he noticed that he was happiest when he was not in control -- when consciousness did not command. Ecstasy, joy, even simple gladness -- these were the fruit of acting without thinking.
"I am more than my I," he said wonderingly. "I am my Me."
When his work went well -- and everyone worked, even children -- his Me was engaged. When things went well, they just went, zinging along. He ran 'facturing 'bots, tilled fields, prepared spicy meals -- all in the flow, immersed.
Even when he used his Faces or Profiles for craft labors, he could manifest their outlined selves without conscious management. These ancient sliced segments of ...
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