John C Wright - Chapter 16: The Eighth Mental Structure lyrics

It was not that Ulysses was prying. He had sent certain partial-selves and thought- chains into her sophosphere for perfectly legitimate reasons. It was just that Cerebellines are less strict about the boundaries of personality and persona. They let the thoughts of their pets commingle with them, and fluctuate in and out of various states of mental organization, so that for something with a base-neuroform psychology, it is hard to tell where the legal boundaries, or the limits of courtesy, arise. Let us pretend that Ulysses walked into Penelope's bedchamber, to which he had perfect right and permission to go, and found a diary lying open. A more perfect gentleman might not have read it, but he was old-fashioned and had quaint notions that man and wife could be a legal unity, even without forming a two-member composition. He did not think that she should keep secrets from him. By the nature of the problem of transition into the Eighth Mental Structure, the boundary conditions could not be known. The Eighth Mental Structure, when it came to pa** (if it had not already) would involve singularity metrics applied to thought: it would be an application of the noetic immortality technology of the Golden Oecumene of Earth to the black-hole engineering technology of the Silent Oecumene of Cygnus X-1. Because it is the nature of a singularity that an event horizon parts the outer from the inner frame of reference, any neuron (biological or mechanical) used as part of a brain structure could theoretically have any number of additional amounts of thought- information within it, no matter what the position in the thought-pattern of the neuron might be. A simple one in a string of ones and zeroes could, using the quantum fractals of Silent Oecumene math-sorcery, contain any number of imaginary numbers within it, in the same way a pinpoint black hole could contain a world. There was no way, even theoretically, to tell from the outside of a closed frame of reference, what was inside—and this applied both in physics and, apparently, in neural semantics. It meant, perhaps, that all thoughts were false, and the real personality, persona, and thought-matrix of any particular person was hidden behind the mathematical equivalent of an event horizon. In her diary, Ulysses found the musings of Penelope slowly turning into obsessions, manic self-examination. With her strange and decentralized form of self-awareness, she often caught herself doing and thinking things for which she had no clear motive, where later examination of her thought-logs showed strange ellipsis. Penelope feared that she was inhabited, possessed, infected. She no longer trusted herself. The one thought that kept tormenting her: she had been outside the obscuring cloud of the Great Carina Nebula long after the main Diaspora had departed, straining to overhear any radio traffic concerning the d**h of Earth. There had been no one around to see. Perhaps a radio beam of the Silent Oecumene, carrying a thought-virus, had been swept into her systems, or a ship had approached, fought, defeated, and compromised her, and erased all evidence of the battle. Imagine that he was poring over these strange speculations when she walked in on him. He straightened up, trying to control his expression; but she sees and knows what he has done, and the lavender eyes of the olive-skinned beauty do not flash with anger but with a cold disdain that cuts him worse than anger. It was not literally like this. She could have deduced from the change in his information flows between the various levels of his thought hierarchy that he was trying to keep something from her—the easiest way was never to download into his man-body any memory he did not want her planet-wide bioma** to guess. But her thought-logs would show when and where he had come near the diary material. Her reaction was to continue to carry out her legal duties toward his biosphere, but to erect barriers and firewalls between thought-information they previously had shared. The millions of lines of communication, the arguments, the pleadings, the reconciliation, the songs of thought and symphonies of dream, all boil down to one thing. He said, “Are we not man and wife?” She said, “So one might hope, however small that hope is.” “What are you hiding from me? Why?” She did not answer, but over the next few years, the black non-earthly life forms grew over more mountain peaks, and dark spores rode the winds, and a river of oily iodine-hued living material for the first time trickled through forests (as denuded and unsightly as a balding widow's hair) into the sea. It was one of his remotes, a partial-mind copy of himself occupying a body no larger than a battle cruiser, who answered him. “She fears you mean to murder her.” Ulysses rejected that idea as madness; and yet, the fear and sickness covering the forests and oceans of the earth were clear to see: trees were dying, rivers becoming yellow and clogged with silt, reindeer failing to mate, leopards failing to hunt. He sent her a message: “You fear you have a deeper self, sleeping inside your consciousness, ready to awake and brush you aside? Even were you a Lord of the Silent Oecumene, I could not attack—I am vowed to peace, as are all Renunciants.” She replied, “Not I. You.” Penelope's thoughts on the matter were plain. Ulysses did not know himself, but, like the Hawking radiation that seeps from physical singularities, information singularities were imperfect. “Some traces of your true personality escape,” she said. “There were clues. Why are your remotes so well-armed? Why do you reward them with medals and honor their valor? Your inability to piece the clues together, even with a brain the size of a large moon, indicates a redaction system is keeping the self-awareness from you.” At this point, we can imagine Ulysses, in the cool depth of his logic diamond brain, activates that simulation complex which precisely impersonates the human sensations of fear. He has no parasympathetic nervous system, but the flow of information-quanta in his noumenal subroutines can be affected in the same way a biochemical brain is influenced by midbrain-hindbrain reactions. People who, for good reasons or foolish ones, edit out the parasympathetic fear-cycle in their thought systems no longer think like base neuroform human beings. And so Ulysses is afraid. “We selected this place for our colony,” Penelope was saying, “because the surrounding nebula would tend to absorb or splash any radio lasers pa**ing through it, and smother certain bands of energy signal. Anything not lost in the glare of the near-nova sun would be smogged out by the nebular dust. We placed ourselves allegedly far from the theater of war. And yet, not by chance, we sit atop a power supply even the Silent Oecumene might envy: a hyper-supernova. All that would be required would be an agreement among the sophotechs dwelling below the solar corona. Corrupted sophotechs, those found working for the enemy, could be destroyed without any explanation, considering how dangerous the work is.” “My beloved wife, put these fantasies from you. No war will come here. We are not about to perish in a supernova! We are Renunciants. To my heart, I am vowed to peace!” “There are no Renunciants. I suspect that there never were. We are in the Eighth Mental Structure. The days of the Golden Age are gone. The days of honesty in thought are gone. You do not know your heart.” “Who am I?” “Atkins. Who else? This whole star system is a weapon. And I am the enemy.”