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"We seem... I hesitate to say... "
"Like divinities. "
"Blasphemy, but true. Though the Creator has wisdom and we do not. "
Voltaire's face stretched in despair. "Worse, we may not have even our own
wills. "
"Well, / do. "
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"If all we are is strings of digits zeros and ones, actually, no more, if you
will but look microscope-close then how can we be free? Are we not determined
by those marching numerals?"
-I feel free. "
"Ah, but then, we would make it so in any case, yes?" He sprang to his feet.
"One of my best couplets:
One science only will one genius fit
So vast is art, so narrow human wit. "
"So we cannot know we are free? The Creator makes us so!"
"I would wish for that Creator, now. "
Joan kicked over the table, spattering him with coffee. He edited out its
burns as he fell. She swung her sword at the kitchen walls and sliced them
into great sheets curving away into a gray Euclidean space, reality curling
like orange peel.
"How tiresome, " he said. "The best argument against Christianity is certainly
Christians. "
"I will not have "
You like to think of yourself as a philosopher?
The words somehow filled space. Acoustic walls swelled and blew past them,
like great pages riffling in a giant book.
Voltaire took a deep breath and bellowed, "You address me?"
You also like to think of yourself as a shrewd judge of the quick opportunity.
Or of verbal nuance.
Joan drew her sword, but the passing slabs of sound brushed it away.
You like to think of yourself even in this distant time and place as famous.
Huge sheets of humming pressure fell upon them, as if a gargantuan deity were
calling down from the faceless ashen sky.
"You challenge me?" Voltaire shouted back.
You like, in short, to think of yourself.
Joan laughed heartily. Voltaire reddened.
"I defy you, insulterer!"
As if in reply, their Euclidean plane bulged
And he was the landscape. He had a hot volcanic spine murmuring warmly
beneath, while his skin was moisture and grit. Winds beat his skin. Tinkling ;
-earns caressed him. Mountains rose from him like : raised carbuncles.
Joan cried out somewhere. He cast up a ridge line, strata buckling, shards
flying. She was a lofty cylindrical spire, snow-crowned and cracking with lava
pus.
Above them roiled pewter clouds. He knew them somehow as alien minds, a fog of
connections.
Hypermind? came the idea. Algorithms summing?
The shifting gray fog wrapped around all Trantor. Voltaire felt how he looked
to that fog: spattered life, electrical jolts in widely separated machines
which computed subjective moment-jumps. The present was a computational slide
orchestrated by hundreds of separate processors. Rather than living in the
present, they persisted more accurately in the post-past of the calculated
step forward.
There was a profound difference, he felt not saw, rut felt, deep in his analog
persuasion between the digital and the smooth, the continuous. To the fog he
was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit
in the fundamental computation.
Then he saw what the fog was.
He tried to run, but he was a mountain.
'They are others, " he called to Joan uselessly.
"How can they be more different than we?" she replied forlornly. "We, at
least, were conjured up from human stock.
These are alien. "
2.
They had escaped, somehow.
One moment the alien fog had enveloped the mountain ranges. The next, Voltaire
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had extricated himself and Joan. But he kept saying, as they fled across a
barren sea of stinking liquid corpses, that they had to... to give birth.
"We make ourselves into children?" she called to him, avoiding the sight of
twisted, bloated bodies below. Somehow the alien fog manifested its loathsome
self by reminding them of human mortality. Thus it dogged them.
"Bad metaphor. We must manufacture and hide some copies of ourselves. "
He raised a hand and shot her a bolt of knowing:
Termed variously Dittos, Duplicates, or Copies, all such hold a tenuous
existence. Society has decisively rejected what antiquity called the Copy
Fallacy: the belief that a digital Self was identical to the Original, and
that an Original should feel that a Ditto itself somehow carried them forward
into immortality.
"We must do so to be sure we survive, when the fog catches us? I will slay
them, instead!"
Voltaire laughed. "Your sword they can control it, if they like. They captured
your defense programming, and mine though, as they implied, I rely mostly upon
wit. "
"Dittos... ? I fail to understand. "
"Refuting the Copy Fallacy is straightforward, an exercise in the calculus of
logic. A simple exercise makes the point.
Imagine yourself promised that you will be resurrected digitally, immediately
after your death. Assign a price tag you will pay for that, insurance of a
sort. Then imagine that, well, perhaps it would not be started right away, but
sometime in future... we promise. As that date recedes, people's enthusiasm
for paying for Self Copies dims demonstrating that it was the hope of
continuity they unconsciously relished. "
"I see. " She vomited into her hand with what she hoped was a ladylike
reserve. The stench of the bloated corpses was penetrating.
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