John C Wright - Chapter 7: By the Light of a Personal Moon lyrics

We will never know if the impulse that sent Ulysses to visit Penelope “in the flesh” (as the quaint old Manorial expression has it) was one that arose naturally from his psychology, or if it was a manifestation from a hidden thought-singularity of the Eighth Mental Structure. Nonetheless, we can re-create, with some artistic license, what that first meeting involved. We know, for example, from the ma**-payload records of the surface-to-orbit remotes, that an object not far from the base-human standard norm of three hundred pounds and ten feet tall was ferried from Ulysses to Twenty-first Earth. Radio traffic records, albeit encrypted, nonetheless show a volume of data comparable to a kenosis format typical of that era. In other words, Ulysses himself, occupying a 10^24 kilogram logic diamond (something approaching sophotech levels of intellect), transmitted a severely stepped-down caricature of his personality template to a 10^8 kilogram space station, which, in turn, constructed a personality template inside the circuits of a relay (one-tenth that size) orbiting Twenty-first Earth, and this satellite was in high-volume communication with a flesh-and-blood-and-diamond brain of about four hundred grams. Each segment of the fourfold brain system carried a constantly updated representative of the other three segments. The thought structure was a recursive hierarchy, working something like the secondary brain in a dinosaur's tail. Whatever was too complex or significant for the human brain of Ulysses Partial Four was sent to the relay for high-speed review and confirmation by Ulysses Partial Three; and higher-priority signals were sent (with a one-and-a-half-second delay on each end) to the space station whose circuits held Ulysses Partial Two; and anything really important was narrowcast down to the surface of Ulysses Prime. This was not an unusual mental hierarchy for its time, and the three-second turnaround delay due to light-speed limits on brain-connection distances could be edited out of playback. Besides, the laws and customs of those days made Ulysses Prime liable for the actions and agreements of his remote partials: men were strange then, and family honor was cohesive. For good or ill, a man would live up to the vows and mistakes of his partial selves. So: here was Ulysses Recursive Hierarch Four, Linear Step-Down Kenosis, Base Neuroform (with Secondary Template for Isolation Psychology (Cold Duke) in Potential), housed in a Human-Modified Phenotype. He was a ten-foot-tall cyborg with a dozen input responders peppering his spine and skull, naked as Adam, with hair not past his manly shoulders broad, and in one hand, a guitar.