Gales howled across troubled waters. They flew above foaming
waves and banked on thermal upwellings.
“Your idea, to be birds for a bit.” He was a silvery eagle.
“I always envied them. So light, cheerful, at one with the air it self.”
He morphed his wings up to his shoulders, making his vest-coat fit much better. Even here, life was mostly details.
“Why must such strangeness manifest as weather?” Joan asked.
“Men argue; nature acts.”
“But they are not nature! They are strange minds—”
“So strange we might as well regard them as natural phenomena.”
“I find it difficult to believe that our Lord made such things.”
“I’ve felt that way about many Parisians.”
“They appear to us as storms, mountains, oceans. If they would explain themselves—”
“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
“Hark! He comes.”
She grew armor while keeping her giant wings. The effect was startling, like a giant chromed falcon.
Voltaire said, “My love, you never cease to surprise me. I believe that with you even eternity will not be tedious.”
Hari Seldon hung in midair. He was clearly not yet used to ad venturesome simulations, for his feet kept trying to stand some where. Eventually he gave up and watched them swoop and dive around him.
“I came as soon as I could.”
“I gather you are now a viscount or duke or such,” Joan said.
“Something like that,” Hari said. “This space you’re in, I’ve ar ranged for it to be a permanent, ah—”
“Preserve?” Voltaire asked, batting his wings before the Hari-fig-ure. A cloud drifted nearer, as if to listen in.
“We call it a ‘dedicated perimeter’ in computational space.”
“Such poetry!” Voltaire arched an eyebrow.
“That sounds much like a zoo,” Joan said.
“The deal is, you and the alien minds can stay here, running without interference.”
“I do not like to be hemmed in!” Joan shouted.
Hari shook his head. “You’ll be able to get input from anywhere. But no more interference with the tiktoks—right?”
“Ask the weather,” Joan said.
A cascade of burnt-orange sheet lightning ran down the sky.
“I’m just glad the meme-minds didn’t exterminate all the robots,” Hari said.
Voltaire said, “Perhaps this place is a bit like England, where they kill an occasional admiral to encourage the others.”
“I had to do it,” Hari said.
Joan slowed her wings and hovered near his face. “You are dis tressed.”
“Did you know the meme-minds would use the tiktoks to kill robots?”
“Not at all,” Joan said.
Voltaire added, “Though the economy of it provokes a certain admiration. Subtle minds, they are.”
“Treacherous,” Hari said. “I wonder what else they can do?”
“I believe they are satisfied,” Joan said. “I sense a calm in our weather.”
“I want to speak with them!” Hari shouted.
“Like kings, they like to be awaited,” Voltaire said.
“I sense them gathering,” Joan said helpfully. “Let us help our friend here with his vexations.”
“Me?” Hari said. “I don’t like killing people, if that’s what you mean.”
“In such times, there is no good path,” she said. “I, too, had to kill for the right.”
“Lamurk was a valuable public servant—”
“Nonsense!” Voltaire said. “He lived as he died—by the dagger, too slippery to show the sword. He would never rest with you in power. And even had you stepped aside—well, my mathist, remem ber that it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”
“I still feel conflicted.”
“You must, for you are a righteous man,” Joan said. “Pray and be absolved.”
“Or better, peer within,” Voltaire explained loftily. “Your conflicts reflect subminds in dispute. Such is the human condition.”
Joan flapped her wings at Voltaire, who veered away.
Hari scowled. “That sounds more like a machine.”
Voltaire laughed. “If order—you are an enthusiast of order, yes?—means predictability, and predictability means predetermin ation, and that means compulsion, and compulsion means nonfree-dom—why then, the only way we can be free is to be disordered!”
Hari frowned. Voltaire realized that, while for him ideas were playthings, and the contest of wits made the blood sing, for this man the abstract mattered.
Hari said, “I suppose you’re right. People do feel discomfort with rigid order. And with hierarchies, norms, foundations—” He blinked. “There’s an idea, I can’t quite see it…”
Voltaire said kindly, “Even you, surely you do not want to be the tool of your own genes, or of physics, or of economics?”
“How can we be free if we’re machines?” Hari asked, as if speaking to himself.
“Nobody wants either a random universe or a deterministic one,” Voltaire said.
“But there are deterministic laws—”
“And random ones.”
Joan put in, “Our Lord gave us judgment to choose.”
“Freedom to choose to do other than one would like—what a sordid boon!” Voltaire said.
Joan said, “You gentlemen are circling the divine without knowing it. Everything worthwhile to people—freedom, meaning, value—all that disappears within either of your choices.”
“My love, you must remember that Hari is a mathist.” Voltaire zoomed about both of them on spread wings, obviously enjoying ruffling his feathers in the turbulence. “Order/disorder seem implic ated in other dualisms: nature/human, natural/artificial, animals with natures/humans outside nature. They are natural to us.”
“How come?” Hari squinted, puzzled.
“How do we frame the other side of an argument? We say, ‘on the other hand,’ yes?”
Hari nodded. “We think our two hands mirror the world.”
“Very good.” Voltaire flew loops around Joan’s chromed falcon.
“The Creator has two hands as well,” Joan persisted. “ ‘He sitteth on the right hand of the Father almighty—’ ”
Voltaire cawed like a crow. “But you’re both neglecting your own selves—which you can inspect, in this digital vault. Look deeply and you see endless detail. It ramifies into a Self that cannot be decomposed into the mere operation of neat laws. The You emerges as a deep interplay of many Selves.”
Into the shared mind-space of the three Voltaire sent:
Complex, nonlinear feedback systems are unpredictable, even if they are deterministic. The information-processing capacity needed to predict a single mind is larger than the complexity of the whole universe itself! Computing the next event takes longer than the event itself. Precisely this feature, written into the texture of the universe, makes it—and us—free.
Hari replied with:
Paradox. How does the event itself know how to happen?
Only a massive computer could describe the next tiny whorl in a stream. What makes real systems even able to change?
Voltaire shrugged—a difficult gesture for a bird.
“At last you have encountered an agency you cannot dismiss,” Joan said proudly.
Voltaire’s head jerked with surprise. “Your…Creator?”
“Your equations describe well enough. But what gives these equations—” she hesitated at the word—“fire?”
“You imply a Mind which does the universal computation?”
“No, you do.”
Hari said, “Fair enough—as a hypothesis. But why should such a Mind care a whit for us, mere motes?”
“He cared enough to make you come out of the matrix of matter, did He not?”
“Ah, origins,” Voltaire said, catching an updraft. He looked re lieved to be on surer intellectual ground. Plainly her point had rattled him. “Insoluble, of course. I prefer to deal with our moralities.”
Joan said primly, “Morality is not dependent upon us.”
Voltaire shot back, “Nonsense! We evolved with morals shaped by the universe—by a Creator, if you wish.”
Hari asked, “You mean by evolution? The pans—”
Joan cried, “Indeed! Holiness shapes the world, the world shapes us.”
Hari looked doubtful, Joan pleased. Voltaire said wryly, “My mathist, would you rather believe that moral constraints emerge as ‘a spontaneous order from rational utility-maximizing behavior’? Truly?”
Hari blinked. “Well, no…”
“I quoted one of your own papers. What you’ve forgotten, sir, is that our endless models of the world shape how we look at hu man experience.”
“Of course, but—”
“And the models are all that we know.”
Hari suddenly smiled. “I like that. Don’t get married to a model.” He allowed himself to morph slightly, growing taller, more muscu lar. “I don’t know why, but I feel better.”
“Your soul has come to terms with your actions,” Joan said.
Voltaire said, “I would prefer ‘selves’ to ‘soul,’ but let us not quibble.”
Suddenly Hari felt categories shift in his mind. He had arranged for the revival of these sims, guided by pure intuition. Now came the payoff: they had inadvertently discovered the step he wanted. “The mind…is a self-organizing structure, and so is the Empire. I can work back and forth between those models! Import your knowledge of subselves, use it to analyze how the Empire learns!”
Voltaire blinked. “What a marvelous idea.”
Hari said, “Wait’ll I show you! The Empire is self-learning, with subunits—”
“I wonder if the alien fog knows this?” Joan asked.
Hari frowned. “I do not want to involve them. My equations cannot deal with elements of unknown—”
“They are already involved,” Joan said. “They are here, all around us.”
Hari sighed. “I hope we can keep them here in the—”
“Zoo,” Joan said dryly.
Thunderheads roiled over the horizons, closing fast.
“You killed robots!” Hari shouted into the gale. “That was not in our bargain.”
[WE DID NOT SAY WE WOULD REFRAIN]
“You took more than we agreed! Lives of—”
[TERMS OMITTED CANNOT BE PRESUMED UPON]
“The robots are a separate kind. Of high intelligence—”
[YOUR MERE TIKTOKS COULD KILL THEM THOUGH]
[YOU, SELDON, DID NOT OWN THESE MACHINES]
[AND THUS HAVE NO DISPUTE WITH US]
Hari ground his teeth and fumed.
[MORE IMPORTANT MATTERS BECKON]
“Your rewards?” Hari asked bitterly. “You’ve come for them?”
[WE SHALL NOT STAY HERE]