Daphne saw his faceplate turn toward her, and perhaps she misunderstood the look, for she said, "Don't be afraid. I think I was wrong before. You can go ahead and let him drive you crazy, or kill you, or whatever he's going to do. We might be able to repair whatever damage he does to you, once we fix him. It doesn't matter what he does now, or you. The trap is already sprung. Right? That was the plan. Right? He is going to enter the ship mind and take the virus, because he thinks we're just bungling fools, and he thinks it cannot hurt him. Right?"
The mask of the Silent Lord said softly, "You have convinced him."
Phaethon looked up at the towering figure, its floating headdress, its gleaming eyes. "Right," he said. "But if you are so convinced that I will be convinced, put these repairs in the form of an argument, and without manipulating any memories or subconscious sections of my mind, load that argument into the partial copy I've made of myself in the ship's mind. Of course, you'll have to download yourself into the shipmind-space to do this, but you should not have any reason to be afraid of-"
The apparition raised a slender finger. "I have already done so. My copy has been in your ship's brain since I came aboard, several minutes of your time ago, several years of mine. My copy encountered your version in the thoughtspace. He and my copy, having long ago concluded an agreement not unlike this one, exchanged information. The virus was put in my copy; my evidence was addressed to your copy. I will download my copy out from the ship-mind and into myself, adopting whatever changes your virus has made in my consciousness, provided that you open the thought ports of your armor, and allow your copy, now loyal to my purposes, to enter your thoughts. you and I can both examine the ship-mind information for evidence of tampering or trickery, and arrange the circuit in a double blind, so that the exchanges are simultaneous."
Phaethon said, "You-you've been in the ship mind all this time?"
"I have deceived your monitors. Here is the architecture diagram and status of ship-mind. This is an image of my mind."
Two of the mirrors near the thrones rose up and turned to face Phaethon and Daphne. Both showed the same image. The images displayed, like a spiderweb, the complex geometry of thought-architecture that presently was housed in the mind of the Phoenix Exultant.
Phaethon stared in fascination. It was not shaped like any Sophotech architecture Phaethon had ever seen. There was no center to it, no fixed logic, no foundational values. Everything was in motion, like a whirlpool.
He thought, What kind of mind is this? What am I seeing?
The schematic of the Nothing thought system looked like the vortex of a whirlpool. At the center, where, in Sophotechs, the base concepts and the formal rules of logic and basic system operations went, was a void. How did the machine operate without any base concepts?
There was continual information flow in the spiral arms that radiated out from the central void, and centripetal motion that kept the thought-chains generally all pointed in the same direction. But each arm of that spiral, each separate thought-action initiated by the spinning web, each separate strand, had its own private embedded hierarchy, its own private goals. The energy was distributed throughout the thought-webwork by a success feedback: each parallel line of thought judged its neighbors according to its own value system, and swapped data-groups and priority-time according to their own private needs. Hence, each separate line of thought was led, as if by an invisible hand, to accomplish the overall goals of the whole system. And yet those goals were not written anywhere within the system itself. They were implied, but not stated, in the system's architecture, written in the medium, not in the message.
It was a maelstrom of thought, without a core, without a heart. And, yes, as expected, there was darkness, Phaethon could see many blind spots, many sections of which the Nothing Machine was not consciously aware. In fact, wherever two lines of thought in the web did not agree, or diverged, a little sliver of darkness appeared, since such places lost priority. But wherever thoughts agreed, wherever they helped each other, or cooperated, additional webs were born, energy was exchanged, priority time was accelerated, light grew. The Nothing Machine was crucially aware of any area where many lines of thought ran together.
Phaethon could not believe what he was seeing. It was like consciousness without thought, lifeless life, a furiously active superintelligence with no core. He leaned forward toward the mirror, fascinated, and touched his armored fingers to the surface, as if wishing for a sense of touch to confirm the impossible image.
Daphne's voice broke into his thoughts: "Hey, engineer boy! Tell me how this thing is working without any fixed values. There are no line numbers on anything, no addresses. How does anything navigate in the ^ stem, without goals? How does it model reality without a core logic? Even amoebas have a core logic. How does it... How does it exist in a rational universe?"
And there was a note of fear in her voice when she said that.
Phaethon muttered, "There must be something wrong here, some basic assumption I've made. What did I overlook... ?"
THE REVOLT AGAINST REASON
Daphne looked up, and shouted at the tall plumed mask of the Silent Lord, "This is some sort of lie! No mind could be set up this way! This is just a meaningless picture on the screen! You're editing the readout!"
A slither of ironic music, a chime of distant bells, answered her. "Convince yourselves. Perform tests. My thoughts are displayed for you to examine. Read them."
Daphne turned to Phaethon, her eyes flashing. "That damn thing can make an image of a Second Oecumene Lord standing in front of us with a symphony orchestra coming out of his armpit! What makes you think he can't draw a swirl of lines on a mirror?"
Phaethon spoke in a low and dispirited tone. "I can see it. My armor monitors confirm the ship-mind activity. They match. I can detect the pulses moving from box to box, I can see the circuits opening and closing. If the Nothing Machine can falsify the readings inside my armor, why bother tricking me into opening the ar-mor up?"
Daphne said angrily, "It is still impossible! The mind cannot make a stable model of reality unless it has a stable modeling system! A mind must understand the laws of logic in order to understand reality around it, because reality is logical, right? Right? And those rules have to be written at the highest level of the core architecture because they are needed to understand any other rules." She threw up her hands angrily. "This thing is tricking us somehow. The core architecture is hidden, or the damn conscience redactor is hiding it, or the Nothing has not loaded all of himself into the ship-mind, or something!"
Phaethon said in a voice of soft confusion, "I don't see any evidence that the gadfly virus had any effect-"
Daphne said, "He just rejected the load. But you're right. There are blind spots here. Thousands of them. I can load it in some places he cannot see."
The silver mask above her played several Kiting notes, and delicately said, "How will you accomplish this, as I am here, watching you?"
Daphne scowled. "You're going to see it, but you're not going to believe it. You cannot see your own blind spots."
"Nor can you, it seems, see yours. It is you who are astonished by what you see, not I. Based on this, which one of us, Phaethon or I, do you think has been fundamentally deceived?"
Daphne's dream wand was shaped, at the moment, like a dueling pistol, and she drew it from her hip. She pointed at the little mirror upon which Phaethon had called up the four lines of the gadfly virus code, and touched her ramrod to record it. Then she pointed the barrel, aiming with both hands, at the large mirror where the image of the Nothing Machine mind structure swirled like some hungry whirlpool, glistening like a thousand twisted spiderwebs. She was looking for a dark line, one with a low priority, but the strands of the web kept shifting, turning, changing. The darkness kept appearing and disappearing in separate spots, and there seemed no rhythm or reason to it.