“I shall send my spiritual fraction, as well.”
“I believe they are giving me an itch already.” He did indeed feel a restless, edgy scratching at the edge of perception, like insects crawling in his brain. He shook himself. Why did a perfidious mathists’ logic rob him of his sensuality, and torture him with rasping irritations?
But her defiance had only begun. “You have taken my virginity, sir, yet you speak only slightingly of marriage. And of love.”
“ Bien sur,love between married couples may be possible-though I myself have never seen an instance of it-yet it is unnatural. Like being born with two fused toes. It happens, but only by mistake. One can, naturellement, live happily with any woman, provided one doesn’t love her.”
She gave him an imperious glance. “I have become immune to your rogue ways.”
He shook his head sadly. “A dog is better off in this respect than I am in my present state.”
He trailed his sim-finger lightly across her throat. Her head lolled back, her eyes closed, her lips parted. But he, alas, felt nothing. “Find a way,” he whispered. “Find a way.”
5.
He had been neglecting his work. His lack of interactive senses was thus his own fault.
That, and the itching. He must learn to…somehow…scratch himself-inside himself.
In this damnable digital abode.
“One can scarcely blame a deity for His absence from such a place as this,” Voltaire said into the infinite recessional coordinate system which surrounded him. He flew through black spaces gridded out in exact rectangular reaches, lattice corridors extending away to infinity.
“How different!” he shouted into the deep indifference. “I swim into sims of others, inhabit realms far from-”
He had been about to say from my origins- butthat meant:
A France
B Reason
GSark
He was of all three. On Sark, the self-proud programmers who had…resurrected…him, had spoken of their New Renaissance. He was to be an ornament to their fresh flowering. Somewhere on that planet, editions of Volt 1.0 ran.
His brothers? Younger Dittos, yes. He would have to inspect the implications of such beings, in a future rational discourse. For now
The trick was close scrutiny, he realized. If he slowed events-a trick he had learned early-then he could devote data-crunchers to the task of understanding…himself.
First, this inky vault through which he flew. Windless, without warmth or the rub of the real.
He delved down into the working mathematics of himself. It was a byzantine welter of detail, but in outline surprisingly familiar: the Cartesian world. Events were modeled with axes in rectangular space, x, y, z, so that motion was then merely sets of numbers on each axis. All dynamics shrank to arithmetic. Descartes would have been amused by the dizzying heights to which his minor method had spun.
He rejected the outside and delved into his own slowed reaches.
Now he could feel his preconscious reading the incoming sights, sounds, and flitting thoughts of the moment. To his inner gaze, they all carried bright red tags-sometimes simple caricatures, often complex packets.
From somewhere an idea-packet arrived, educating him: these were Fourier transforms. Somehow this helped to understand. And the mere wafting sense of a fellow Frenchman’s name made him feel better.
An Associator-big, blue, bulbous-hovered over this data-field, plucking at the tags. It reached with yellow streamers over a far, purple-rimmed horizon, to the Field of Memory. From there it brought any item stored-packages of mottled gray, containing sights, sounds, smells, ideas-which matched the incoming tags.
Job done, the Associator handed all the matchings to a towering monolith: the Discriminator. A perpetual wind sucked the red tags up, into the yawning surfaces of the coal-black Discriminator mountain. Merciless filters there matched the tags with the stored memories.
If they fitted-geometric shapes sliding together, mock sex, notches fitting snugly into protruding struts-they stayed. But fits were few. Most tags failed to find a host memory which made sense. No fit. These the Discriminator ate. The tags and connections vanished, swept away to clear fresh space for the next flood of sensation.
He loomed over this interior landscape and felt its hailstorm power. His whole creative life, the marvel of continents, had come from here. Tiny thoughts, snatches of conversations, melodies-all would pop into his mind, a tornado of chaos-images, crowding, jostling for his attention. The memory-packets which shared some sturdy link to a tag endured.
But who decided what was rugged enough? He watched rods slide into slots and saw the intricate details of how those memories and tags were shaped. So the answer lay at least one step further back, in the geometry of memory.
Which meant that he had determined matters, by the laying down of memories. Memory-clumps, married to tag-streams, made a portion of his Self, plucked forth from the torrent, the river of possibilities.
And he had done it long ago, when the memories were stored-all without realizing how they could fit with tags to come. So where was any predictable Voltaire to lurk? In sheer intricacy, deep detail, shifting associations in the flow.
No rock-hard Self at all.
And his imagination? The author of all his plays and essays? It must lie in the weather of the tag-memory torrents. The twist, warp and sudden marriages. Jigsaw associations, rising up from the preconscious. Order from chaos.
“Who is Voltaire?” he called to the streaming gridded emptiness.
No reply.
His itch was still with him. And the yawning nothing all around. He decided to fix the larger issue. What had Pascal said?
The silence of these spaces terrifies me.
He probed and gouged and sought. And in the doing, knew that as his hands dug into the ebony stuff all about him, they were but metaphors. Symbols for programs he could never have created himself.
He had inherited these abilities-much as he had, as a boy, inherited hands. Down below his conscious Self, his minions had labored upon the base Volt 1.0, plus Marq’s augmentations.
He pulled apart the blackness and stepped through. To a city street.
He was puffing, weak, strained. Resources running low.
He walked shakily into a restaurant-anonymous, plain, food merely standing on counters-and stuffed himself.
He concentrated on each step. By making each portion of his experience well up, he found that he could descend through the layers of his own response.
Making his body feel right demanded sets of overlapping rules. As he chewed, teeth had to sink into food, saliva squirt to greet the munched mass, enzymes start to work to extract the right nutrient ratios-else it would not seem real.
His programs, he saw, bypassed the involved stomach and colon processes. Such intricacies were needless. Instead, the “software” (odd phrase) simplified all the messy innards into a result he could feel-a satisfying concentration of tasty blood sugars, giving him a carbohydrate lift, a pleasant electrolyte balance, hormones and stabilizers all calculated, with a patchwork of templates for the appropriate emotional levels.
All other detail was discarded, once the subroutines got the right effect, simulating the tingling of nerve endings. Not too bad for what was really a block of ferrite and polymer, each site in its crystal complexity an individual, furiously working microprocessor.
Still, he felt as though he had been hollowed out by an intense, sucking vacuum.
Voltaire rushed out of the restaurant. The street! He needed to see this place, to check his suspicions.