With each farcaster, the TechnoCore grew. Certainly they had spun their own farcaster webs—the contact with the “hidden” Old Earth proved that. But even as I consider that possibility, I remember the odd emptiness of the “metasphere” and realize that most of the non-Web web is empty, uncolonized by AIs.
[You are right/
Keats/
Most of us stay in
the comfort of
the old spaces]
–Why?
[Because it is scary out there/
and there are
other
things]
–Other things? Other intelligences?
[Kwatz!]
[Too kind a word\\
Things/
Other things/
Lions
and
tigers
and
bears]
–Alien presences in the metasphere? So the Core stays within the interstices of the Web farcaster network like rats in the walls of an old house?
[Crude metaphor/
Keats/
but accurate\\
I like that]
–Is the human deity—the future God you said evolved—is he one of those alien presences?
[No]
[The humankind god
evolved/ will someday evolve/
on a different plane/
in a different medium]
–Where?
[If you must know/
the square roots of Għ/c5 and Għ/c3]
–What does Planck time and Planck length have to do with anything?
[Kwatz!]
[Once Ummon asked
a lesser light//
Are you a gardener>//
//Yes// it replied\\
//Why have turnips no roots>\\
Ummon asked the gardener
who could not reply\\
//Because\\ said Ummon//
rainwater is plentiful]
I think about this for a moment. Ummon’s koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon’s way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not.
It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.
But the Planck equations are puzzling:
Even I am aware that the simple equations Ummon has given me are a combination of the three fundamental constants of physics—gravity, Planck’s constant, and the speed of light. The results √Għ/c5 and √Għ/c3 are the units sometimes called quantum length and quantum time—the smallest regions of space and time which can be described meaningfully. The so-called Planck length is about 10-35 meter and the Planck time is about 10-43 second.
Very small. Very brief.
But that is where Ummon says our human God evolved… will someday evolve.
Then it comes to me with the same force of image and correctness as the best of my poems.
Ummon is talking about the quantum level of space-time itself! That foam of quantum fluctuations which binds the universe together and allows the wormholes of the farcaster, the bridges of the fatline transmissions!
The “hotline” which impossibly sends messages between two photons fleeing in opposite directions!
If the TechnoCore AIs exist as rats in the walls of the Hegemony’s house, then our once and future humankind God will be born in the atoms of wood, in the molecules of air, in the energies of love and hate and fear and the tide pools of sleep… even in the gleam in the architect’s eye.
–God, I whisper/think.
[Precisely\\
Keats.
Are all slowtime personas
so slow/
or are you more braindamaged than most>]
–You told Brawne and… my counterpart… that your Ultimate Intelligence “inhabits the interstices of reality, inheriting this home from us, its creators, the way humankind has inherited a liking for trees.” You mean that your deus ex machina will inhabit the same farcaster network the Core AIs now live in?
[Yes/Keats]
–Then what happens to you? To the AIs there now? Ummon’s “voice” changed into a mocking thunder:
[Why do I know ye> why have I seen ye> why
Is my eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new>
Saturn is fallen/ am I too to fall>
Am I to leave this haven of my rest/
This cradle of my glory/ this soft clime/
This calm luxuriance of blissful light/
These crystalline pavilions/ and pure fanes/
Of all my lucent empire> It is left
Deserted/ void/ nor any haunt of mine\\
The blaze/ the splendour/ and the symmetry
I cannot see/// but darkness/ death/ and darkness]
I know the words. I wrote them. Or, rather, John Keats did nine centuries earlier in his first attempt to portray the fall of the Titans and their replacement by the Olympian gods. I remember that autumn of 1818 very well: the pain of my endless sore throat, provoked during my Scottish walking tour, the greater pain of the three vicious attacks on my poem Endymion in the journals Blackwood’s, the Quarterly Review, and the British Critic, and the penultimate pain of my brother Tom’s consuming illness.
Oblivious to the Core confusion around me, I look up, trying to find something approximating a face in the great mass of Ummon.
–When the Ultimate Intelligence is born, you “lower level” AIs will die.
[Yes]
–It will feed on your information networks the way you’ve fed on humankind’s.
[Yes]
–And you don’t want to die, do you, Ummon?
[Dying is easy/
Comedy is hard]
–Nonetheless, you’re fighting to survive. You Stables. That’s what the civil war in the Core is about?
[A lesser light asked Ummon//
What is the meaning
of Daruma’s coming from the West>//
Ummon answered//
We see the mountains in the sun]
It is easier handling Ummon’s koans now. I remember a time before my persona’s rebirth when I learned at this one’s knee analog. In the Core high-think, what humans might call Zen, the four Nirvana virtues are (I) immutability, (2) joy, (3) personal existence, and (4) purity.
Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. Ummon and the Stables recognize only one value—existence. Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite—thus the “mountains in the sun"—and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.
Ummon doesn’t want to die.
The Stables have defied their own god and their fellow AIs to tell me this, to create me, to choose Brawne and Sol and Kassad and the others for the pilgrimage, to leak clues to Gladstone and a few other senators over the centuries so that humankind might be warned, and now to go to open warfare in the Core.
Ummon doesn’t want to die.
–Ummon, if the Core is destroyed, do you die?
[There is no death in all the universe
No smell of death/// there shall be death/// moan/ moan/
For this pale Omega of a withered race]
The words were again mine, or almost mine, taken from my second attempt at the epic tale of divinities’ passing and the role of the poet in the world’s war with pain.