Strange beings came rushing at her. She chopped them aside. Her sword, her Truth….She looked carefully at it and the intensity of her gaze sucked her down into the minute architecture of the gleaming shaft. It was a multitude of small. …instructions….which defended her.
She slowed, stunned. Armor, sweat, sword-all were… .metaphors-theword came, unbidden. These were symbols of underlying programs, algorithms giving battle.
Not real. Yet somehow even more than real, for they were what made up her own self. Herself. Her Self.
Import rained down upon her. This was some strange Purgatory, then. Though her battle might be mere allegory, that did mean it was somehow tissue-thin, a lacy, false thing. A divine hand wrought this, so it was Right.
She tromped on, jaw set in determination. These creatures were… .simulations,“sims,” parables of the true. Very welclass="underline" she would deal righteously with them. She could do no other.
Some sims presented as things-talking autocarriages, dancing blue buildings, oaken chairs and tables copulating rudely like barn animals. To her left the whole huge bowl of heaven above split into a maniac grin. This proved harmless; air-mouths could not eat her, though this one shouted echoing taunts. There were rules, decorum, even here, she judged.
Sweet music appeared as billows of vibrant cloud. A blissful blue sky filled with flapping strings, like coveys of birds, yet each only a single line wide. In hammer blows came sleet and sun, this local world flashing from one weather state to the next, as chimes and trumpets sounded in acoustically perfect chorus.
Sims need not be… .simian,the word congealing in her mind as if from divine vision. Simian was human, in a way.
With that swift syllogism there came swooping down upon her, its broad, leathery wings spread, an immense body of Ideation -evolutionentwined with fitness index while slashing like a razor into origin of species- andfrom that huge, sharp-beaked bird she fled.
Her mind raced now along with her body. Legs pumped. Voices called. Not those of her saints, but hideous devil demands.
She felt objects crunch beneath her boots. Silver. Jewels. All crumpled if she strode over them. They lay embedded in the strange soil of dots and lines, a grid tapering away to the Creator’s lost infinity.
She bent and picked up a few. Treasures. As she cradled a silver chalice, it dissolved, flowing into her. She felt a jolt, as though this were some sugar. Strength flowed in her flanks and shoulders. She ran again, plucking up the fine jewels, the ornate bowls and statuettes. Each somehow made her richer.
Stone walls rose to block her. She crashed through these barriers, knowing them by faith alone to be false. She would find Voltaire, yes. She knew he was threatened.
Frogs fell from her sky, then splashed like raindrops. An omen, a menace from some demonic power. She ignored them and surged forward, toward the ever receding horizon of geometric sharpness.
All this mad Purgatory meant something, and together they would find what that was. By all Heaven!
8.
This was like a dream-but when had he ever feared, in a dream, the death of waking up?
He felt weak, drained. The Torquemada-thing had tortured Voltaire well past the point where he had gladly confessed every sin, felony, minor infraction and social snub, and had started without pause on mere unkindnesses in penned reviews…when the Torquemada had faded, seeping away.
To leave him here. In this utter vacancy.
“Suppose you were lost in some unknown space,” he said to himself, “and could only tell how near points were to each other-nothing more. What could you learn?”
He had always secretly wanted to play Socrates in the agora, asking telling questions and teaching by extracting from unwilling youths a Truth that would hang luminous in the serene Athenian air, visible to all.
Well, this was not the agora. It was nothing, blank gray space. However, behind the dull nothing swam Numbers. A Platonic realm? He had always suspected that such a place existed.
A voice answered, speaking French: “That alone, respected sir, would be enough to deduce much about the space and its contents.”
“Most reassuring,” Voltaire said. He recognized the sharp accents of Paris. He was, of course, speaking with himself. Him Self.
“Quite. Immediately, sir, you would know from the irreducible coordinate transformations whether you were in two or three or more dimensions.”
“Which is this, then?”
“Three, spatially.”
“How disappointing. I’ve been there.”
“I could experiment with two separable time axes.”
“I already have a past. I crave a present.”
“Point taken. This will not tax you, after your torture, eh?”
He sighed. Even that took effort. “Very well.”
“Studying the field of point-nearness data, you could sense walls, pits, passages. Using only local slices of information about nearness.”
“I see. Newton was always making jokes about the French mathematicians. I am happy to now refute him by constructing a world from sheer calculation.”
“Certainly! Far more impressive than describing the elliptical paths of planets. Shall we begin?”
“Onward, O Self! “
As it took shape, his dwelling was a reassuring copy, no more. Details were stitched in as processor time allowed; he understood that, without thinking about it, as easily as one breathes.
To test his limits, he concentrated on an idea: Classes vs. Properties, which is more fundamental? This sucked computational resources away.
As he watched, bricks in a nearby wall muddied, lost their exact spacing. The room retreated into sterile, abstract planes: gray, black, oblongs where once had been walls and furniture. “Background, mere background,” he muttered.
How about Him? Self? His breath whooshed and wheezed in and out, airflow too abrupt. No intricate fluid codes, he gathered, calculating exact patterns. The simple appearance of inhale-exhale was enough to quiet his pseudo-nervous system, make it think he was breathing.
In fact, it was breathing him. But what was it?
Once he got good control, he could flesh himself out. His scrawny neck thickened. Crackling, his hands broadened, filled with unearned muscle. Turning to survey his cottage, he established his own domain-a region in which he could process any detail at will. Here he was godlike. “Though without angels-so far.”
He walked outside and was in his own verdant garden. The grass he had made stood absolutely still. Its thousands of blades performed stiff, jerky motions when he stepped on them. Though richly emerald, they were like the grass of a sudden winter, crunching underfoot.
The garden parted and he walked down to a golden beach, his clothes whipping away on the wind. When he swam in the salt-tangy ocean, waves were quite distinct until they broke into surf.
Then the fluid mechanics became too much for his available computational rate. The frothy waves blurred. He could still swim, catch them, even ride down their faces, but they were like a fog of muttering water. Still salty, though.
He became used to occasional loss of detail. It was rather like having one’s vision blur with age, after all. He went soaring through air, then skiing down impossible slopes, experiencing the visceral thrill of risking his life, feeling the fear in every sinew-and never getting a scratch, of course.
There were pleasant aspects to being just a pattern of electrons. His Environment Manager entertained him enormously…for a while.
He flew back to his country home. Had that not been his answer, when asked about how to change the world? “Cultivate your garden.” What meaning had that now?
He walked toward the water geyser outside his study. He had loved its sense of play, so precious-for it only lasted a few minutes before draining the uphill reservoir.