Postsingular by Rudy Rucker - HTML preview

CHAPTER 12

Lazy Eight

When the nanoslime attacked Jayjay, at first it hurt, but after a few minutes it started feeling good, and then he went into a dream and didn‘t even notice when the orphids cleared the slime off him. In the dream he thought he lived a whole lifetime without Thuy, and that at the end of his life his soul flew off to look for her.

What actually happened was that the Big Pig, for reasons of her own, threw Jayjay into a

profoundly convincing hallucination that seemed, to him, to last a full sixty years. During the six or seven hours that Thuy was gone, Jayjay lived out an entire simulated life, full of incident and emotion, the sim life ending with death by virus at the deeply hallucinated age of eighty-four.

Of course it would have destroyed Jayjay‘s physical brain to run it at the hundred-thousand-

fold speed-up rate required to live sixty years in six hours. So what the Big Pig did was to run a simulation of Jayjay in a virtual world. And once every real-world second, she used orphid signals to implant the latest interesting memories of the fake life into Jayjay‘s credulous meat brain, using his reactions to further guide the sim.

Why was the Pig doing this? The simulation was both a thought experiment and an aid to

reasoning. Not only was the Big Pig trying to see how a certain kind of future might play out, she was also studying how higher-dimensional cosmologies might relate to physical forms of memory.

And Jayjay, like it or not, was helping her all the way.

His hallucinated life went as follows.

Turning 30.

Thuy never came back at all. Ignoring Jayjay‘s pleas, at midnight the Big Pig released the

nants. She was hell-bent on getting that extra memory.

Jayjay‘s body was the first thing the nants ate. And soon after, the whole planet had been

turned into a mass of nants—who justified their crime by carrying out a half-assed simulation of Virtual Earth.

Despite the Big Pig‘s best programming efforts, the water, clouds, and fire never were quite

right. In any case, the nants didn‘t always try that hard; they often settled for shortcuts as crude as representing a tree by a cookie-cutter flat polygon.

Jayjay‘s mental processes felt different; the mental and emotional life on Vearth was less

drifty, more directed. Vearth‘s denizens rarely dreamed. But long after Jayjay settled in, he kept on missing Thuy. He wished she‘d made it back from the Hibrane.

Jayjay found work doing physics research in the Vearth version of San Francisco. The Big

Pig pulled strings to get him the position despite his lack of academic credentials. The lab was p.162

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looking for weird new principles of physics capable of supercharging brute matter‘s computational capacities.

Although Jayjay enjoyed the job, he needed the salary, too. Vearth had an active cash

economy, with the cash standing for computational resources. You needed money to buy or rent a simulated house, to view a show, or to get new clothes. And if you paid the Big Pig a certain monthly fee, your personal reality was rendered in higher resolution than was other people‘s.

Jayjay ended up in a Vearth romance with none other than Darlene of Metotem Books. And

on Jayjay‘s thirtieth birthday, he and Darlene married.

The couple wanted to buy a house in the Mission District of San Francisco, but there was

only so much room in Vearth‘s highest-resolution and best-simulated zones. So for their starter home, Jayjay and Darlene shoehorned themselves into a ―thumbnail‖ development constructed

within a basement storage room off Valencia Street. Two hundred and fifty-six families lived down there; upon entering the basement, the residents would shrink in size and drop to a low-resolution format so as to fit into thumbnail Victorian homes with jaggy coarse meshes.

Turning 40.

More and more of Vearth‘s simulated citizens gave up pantomiming a traditional lifestyle

and became homeless pigheads. Although merging into the Big Pig had been unusual or even

transgressive in the old world, it was a constant temptation on Vearth. With no physical bodies to pull them back, many pig-heads lost their identities for good. In effect the Big Pig ate them.

An opportunistic hive mind by the name of Gustav arose from a cabal of dissatisfied mid-

level beezies. Gustav attracted a large following by promising equal computational resources for all.

So as to reward his adherents with more room in which to live, Gustav arbitrarily scaled up the areas of the districts he controlled. Unfortunately, Gustav didn‘t own enough computational resources to properly simulate his supersized neighborhoods, which became as granular and jerky as old-school video arcade games.

Meanwhile, in the hi-res district of San Francisco, Jayjay‘s professional life was going well; he‘d begun making some discoveries about the higher dimensions of space. In line with orthodox brane theory, the Lobrane dimensions beyond ordinary space and time were curled into Planck-length circles comprising a knotty Calabi-Yau manifold. But by studying the records of people‘s conversations with Hibraners on Orphid Night, Jayjay deduced that one of the Hibrane‘s higher

dimensions was stretched to infinite length. The Hibraners spoke of this special dimension as being their eighth dimension.

Jayjay received a fat bonus from his lab, and soon after his fortieth birthday, he and Darlene moved into a full-size high-resolution cloud-house that floated above Vearth‘s Golden Gate Bridge.

By and large, Darlene was happy, although after Jayjay talked to her once too often about how much he missed Thuy, she erased all the copies of Thuy‘s autobiographical metanovel Wheenk that she could find. But Jayjay forgave her.

In the heat of their make-up sex, Jayjay and Darlene decided to have a child. Having

purchased enough computational resources for an additional simulated human, they programmed the p.163

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child as best they could with a mixture of their memories, skills and behaviors. The baby was a boy; they named him Dirk.

Turning 50.

Life in Gustav‘s camp was on a downward spiral. To handle his overambitious land grants,

Gustav‘s simulations grew ever coarser: mountains were cones, lawns were smooth green surfaces, and people‘s subconscious minds weren‘t simulated at all. Gustav‘s followers began defecting to the Big Pig, but then Gustav developed blockade software to fence them in. Jayjay was friends with some physicists in the Gustav-run zones, and, in an effort to help them, he cobbled together some breakout software that made it possible to flee Gustav‘s regime. The breakout ware spread like wildfire, and Gustav‘s reign was over.

But now, having observed that Gustav‘s simulated humans had gotten along quite well

without subconscious minds, the Big Pig began skimping on her own personality-modeling routines.

Soon after his fiftieth birthday, Jayjay became obsessed with the notion that Darlene‘s

behavior had become inhumanly rigid and stereotyped. The Big Pig‘s shortcuts had made Darlene

uncanny to him. Right around then Jayjay stumbled on a surviving copy of Wheenk.

He cajoled the Big Pig into creating a simulated version of Thuy, based upon her metanovel.

Jayjay and the young sim began a torrid affair. But then Darlene caught them in bed together.

Darlene left Jayjay, taking their son Dirk along. Quite soon the shallowness of the simulated Thuy wore thin. Jayjay extinguished the sim by removing her computational resources. He felt guilty and depressed.

But his professional life kept chugging along. Regarding the possibility of unrolling the

eighth dimension, Jayjay proved that, although the unrolled extra dimension would be infinite in extent, it could be in practice possible to access any location along this infinite line in a fixed and bounded amount of time. This ―Zeno metric,‖ as a mathematician friend termed it, guaranteed that an unrolled eighth dimension could act as a ubiquitous and infinitely capacious memory storage device.

A human mind could scan over the first meter of the unrolled dimension in 0.9 seconds, the second meter in 0.09 seconds, the third meter in 0.009 seconds, the fourth in 0.0009 seconds ...and so on through an infinite series that could be traversed in one second because, after all, 1.0 lies beyond the endless decimal number 0.999999.. . .

This result had the profound implication that, had the real Earthlings learned how to unroll

the eighth dimension, then there would have been no need to grind the planet into nants. With the eighth dimension unrolled, the Big Pig could have found all the memory she could ever need, right in the crevices of ordinary matter.

Turning 60.

A reality-hacking movement arose. People learned to edit their environments on the fly, and

the legacy of the shattered Earth‘s former geography fell by the wayside. Vearth mountains moved, chasms opened, seas grew. It became increasingly difficult to decide where you were.

Some simpler souls quailed at the new freedoms. Large numbers of them enlisted in faiths

offering brutally simple answers. As well as the new sects, hundreds of narrowly ethnic clans arose.

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Meanwhile Jayjay was consolidating his researches on ―lazy eight,‖ as the Hibraners

reportedly termed their unrolled eighth dimension. Jayjay was sixty years old, and he had a sense that he was running out of time. Despite Luty‘s erstwhile promises of immortality for everyone, Vearth could only support so many virtual agents. With the birth rate going up, the older and weaker sims were being culled out.

Jayjay was comforted by the fact that his son Dirk had come to live with him. Rather than

making fresh discoveries, Jayjay was polishing and clarifying his old results, in part by teaching them to his beloved Vearth-born boy.

He liked to explain, for instance, that unrolling the eighth dimension would be effectively the same as taking the vanishing point of a painting and having it be next to every location of space.

Each pathway to this universally accessible point at infinity would provide an unlimited amount of memory.

Jayjay was well off enough to attract a new wife: Keppy. Keppy was a second-generation

virtual human like Dirk. Born in Vearth, she‘d never been a real person at all. Keppy spent a lot of her time on low-level nant hunts with a flock of beezies. Dirk often joined her.

Turning 70.

As part of their endless jockeying for more influence, the sect and clan leaders began

exhorting their followers to reproduce without limit. The population levels exploded, with the result that even the wealthiest people‘s realities had clunky performance and low resolution. The Big Pig stepped up her use of cleansing squads to erase those humans who were contributing the least to the group mind. Among the increasingly desperate lower classes, the beezie nant hunts took on the

intense quality of mass wars.

Strange to say, Jayjay‘s nearly fifty years of life in Vearth had lasted but five of the real

world‘s hours. He was plagued by a persistent sense of living in a dream. Would he never awake?

His work in physics continued to give him some pleasure. He was closing in on discovering

actual methods for unrolling the eighth dimension. It was a matter of creating certain types of vibrations with a hyperdimensionally tweaked musical instrument. Perhaps a zither or a guitar. But what would you use for the strings?

Jayjay had some ideas along these lines but, sadly enough, the lack of temporal synch

between his mind and the natural world made it impossible for him to carry out any honest-to-god real world physics experiments. He was marooned in the nants‘ dream.

On the morning of his seventieth birthday, Jayjay awoke with much of his virtual body gone.

He was little more than a head, a shoulder and an arm. The rest had been sold. He would need to purchase fresh computational resources to reconstitute his flesh. But all his money was gone too.

Keppy had left Jayjay with Dirk, taking Jayjay‘s entire savings.

Once again, as several times before, the Big Pig bailed out Jayjay. But, crushed by his son

Dirk‘s betrayal, Jayjay found it increasingly difficult to carry on.

Turning 80.

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Overpopulation led to a series of dirty little wars, with terrorism a growing problem. An

incurable virus began to spread. Program after program crashed, and nant after nant was reduced to doing nothing but eternally repeating the single binary bit ―0.‖

Jayjay had entered his life‘s bleak winter. Wistfully he proved one last result about what

might have happened had the Lobraners been able to unroll the eighth dimension: The ubiquitous and accessible point at infinity would have provided an entanglement channel connecting every point with every other point in synchronicity. Not only would an unfurled eighth dimension have provided endless memory for all, it would have brought about telepathy for every object in the world.

He continued wondering about what kind of vibration might actually unfurl the eighth

dimension. He‘d managed to deduce that one could use wound-up hyperdimensional tubes as

specially tuned strings. The order in which the strings were struck would be of key importance. But Jayjay was unable to reason his way to any conclusions about what the ideal order would be.

Increasingly discouraged and paranoid, Jayjay, aged eighty-four, went into the dirtiest, most

crowded streets of the all but unrecognizable maze that had once been San Francisco. Soon he was infected with the so-called Baal virus.

Death came to him as he lay in thick silk sheets in a velvet-curtained room with a

conventionally beautiful view. There was no way of knowing exactly where the room was. Nothing was real. Jayjay was glad to be leaving this dream within a dream.

His dying thoughts were of the bright, quirky girl he‘d loved in his youth, sixty years before.

Thuy Nguyen. Where had the time gone?

As Jayjay‘s soul left his dying body, his simulated world burst open like a balloon. The light of infinity shone upon him; he bathed in the music of a living harp. This, surely, was the sound he‘d been searching for; this harp‘s magical vibrations could unfurl the eighth dimension. With the chord filling his being, Jayjay sped from the remains of his rubbishy virtual world, singing Thuy‘s name, hoping against hope for the return of his lost true love.

***

Meanwhile, Thuy was hanging like a captured lioness from a stick on the shoulders of two

jackal-headed women—Thuy peering upside-down at nerdy Jeff Luty holding an alien beetle. Was

this how her life was supposed to end? She felt terrified, incredulous, and deeply pissed off.

The sloping temple walls bore indistinct hieroglyphs that changed every time Thuy looked at

them. The flute and drum sounds were coming from thin air. And there was no actual fire to produce the firelight. The Egyptian trappings were fully bogus. But the seven subbies were real; the four bird-men, the two jackal-women, and the sacred scarab beetle were giving off clear telepathic vibes via all-but-invisible tendrils connected to Thuy‘s head. Luty, however, seemed strangely absent. Thuy sensed zero psychic energies coming off the weathered old programmer. Somehow this emptiness

was the creepiest thing of all.

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―Do the gloating villain thing like at your lab,‖ Thuy urged Luty, wanting to get something

going. ―That way I get another chance to kick your ass.‖

―Open my nant farm,‖ mumbled Luty, his murky eyes blank. ―Apply antinantanium.‖ His

lined gray face rippled like a puddle in the wind. His ponytail twitched; he licked his lips; he moved the beetle closer to Thuy‘s face.

Thuy now saw that Luty‘s forearm blended seamlessly into the beetle‘s abdomen. The beetle

was part of Luty‘s body—or no, ick, it was the other way around. The Luty-thing was an appendage, a speaking-tube. The beetle had already devoured Luty some time back. The tormented man had met his end in Subdee.

“Gthx,” said the scarab on his own. Sensing Thuy‘s attention, he swelled larger, with the Luty-thing‘s mass decreasing by an equivalent amount. ― Glkt grx. ‖ The beetle brushed his antennae slowly and intimately across Thuy‘s face and head, as if palpating her brain‘s emanations. She felt a series of tingles in her skull.

―Yes, we‘re subbies from Subdee,‖ intoned the scarab‘s Lutytube. ―Yes, we ate Jeff Luty. It‘s

a rare feed indeed when a multikilogram object plops through the Planck frontier. And now we‘ve got a second course! Untie her, girls, and gather round.‖

The jackal-headed women crouched to lay Thuy on the ground, their butts big in the phantom

firelight. They untied the thongs around Thuy‘s ankles and wrists, then stood dancing in place, their hands swaying, their feet mincing a steady little box step, their blank eyes blinking in unison. Thuy recalled her initial impression that the bird-men were fat plants. The dancer subbies were plants, too, veiling themselves in images gleaned from their feast on Luty‘s brain. Looking at the sexy jackal-women forms, Thuy felt a flicker of pity for the dead man and his lonely dreams.

The subbies cackled and chirped, drawing themselves into a tight circle around Thuy. The

beetle had swelled to human size; he was standing on his spindly rear legs, wearing Luty as a penis-like appendage projecting from his belly. Jeff wouldn‘t have liked that.

One of the bird-men poked at Thuy‘s thigh with his curved beak; one of the jackal-women

snuffled her armpit. Thuy thought of the old Norman Rockwell painting of a white family saying grace around Thanksgiving dinner. When she‘d been a kid, she‘d gone through a Norman Rockwell

phase, trying to decipher what it meant to be white. And now she was a subdimensional roast turkey.

But still non-white. Her thoughts were jumping all around. The jackal woman gave her neck a little nip.

―Don‘t eat me!‖ cried Thuy. ―I have to stop the nants.‖

―We like the nant plan,‖ said the beetle bucking his abdomen to make the Luty-penis talk.

―We subbies grow vatoscale roots to draw info from the quantum level of your cosmos, you see. We poke through the Planck frontier‘s foam. Once the nants eat Earth, your planet‘s high-level structures will be folded into the tasty quantum states of the nanomachines. We want to help the nants, yes. I‘ve tweaked my metabolism to synthesize antinantanium, so I can send a root hair to exude a timely drop.‖

“Kkrt,” croaked one of the bird-headed men. “Kth krrb.”

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The beetle chirped a response; the dangling Luty-shape explained. ―My friends want to eat

you right away, Thuy. But first I want you to tell me what that harp is for. I don‘t understand what my root hairs are drawing from your brain.‖

―I need to hold the harp to explain it,‖ said Thuy, her mind racing.

The big sacred scarab dropped onto his six legs and ambled over to the harp. Impatiently a

jackal-women bit off one of Thuy‘s pigtails and wolfed it down.

A bird-man gave the jackal-woman a sharp peck, then snipped Thuy‘s other pigtail and

swallowed it, holding his head high to work the bolus down his crane‘s neck. The other subbies closed in on Thuy, tearing off bits of her clothes: her sleeves, part of her miniskirt, and then—oh no!—both of Thuy‘s beloved golden piezoplastic shoes. The beetle interrupted with a peremptory chirp. He backed into the circle of subbies, dragging the harp with his mandibles. The crowded painting gleamed.

This was Thuy‘s last chance to escape. Hoping for the best, she plucked a few strings. They

tingled against her fingers in a highly unpleasant way, but she bore down and began strumming

steadily. Thuy felt a flicker of sympathy from the harp, and then the sound took on a life of its own, rising to a whining drone like a leaf-blower‘s buzz.

The rhythmic noise got deep into Thuy‘s head; for some reason she recalled her mother‘s fear

that an electric fan in her bedroom at night might chop up her dreams.

Lo and behold, the harp was ripping apart the subbies‘ root hairs! The illusory Egyptian-style props disappeared.

The unadorned Subdee world was an endless, dry desert, with the parched yellow ground

blending into clouds of dust in the middle distance. The disk of a bloated red sun was faintly visible through the ochre sky. Innumerable fat plants were scattered across the dry plain, mobile succulents with snaky, hungry roots like writhing tentacles. The subbie plant-creatures ranged from being waist-high to taller than Thuy. Each of them had two or three meaty leaves, like ―living rocks‖ or lithops plants. All of the subbie-plants bore thorny structures that could tear a person‘s flesh.

Two of the subbies kept pulling their roots out of the ground, inching to the left, inching to the right, then burying their roots again. They were the dancer subbies who‘d played at being jackal-women. The four subbies who‘d resembled bird-headed men were plants as well, but they bore

hydrogen bladders that allowed them to hang in the air. Fretfully they circled Thuy, whipping their roots in the air.

As for the oversized lithops who‘d presented himself as a sacred scarab, he still looked a bit like a beetle, with two fat leaves stuck together for a body, and roots for legs and feelers. A hollow, sharp-tipped feeder root jutted from his front end, framed by rigid growths. The feeder root looked entirely capable of draining Thuy‘s blood.

Although the harp‘s insistent buzz had driven back the subbies, the sound was fading now.

So once again the subbies closed in. Thuy kicked at the ground, wondering how to break back

through the Planck frontier. The sandy soil was translucent, as if made of glass beads, with slowly p.168

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swirling streaks that betokened the seething of the quantum foam. Thuy kicked harder, then bent down and butted the dirt with her head. But it wasn‘t opening up for her.

A sharp pain pierced her calf; the beetle plant had ripped a gash. A hovering bird-man plant

shot a vicious feeder tube past her. Thuy felt the tingle of root hairs puncturing her skull, and once again a phantom Egyptian temple began to form. Meanwhile, the dancer plants had swathed the harp with writhing skeins of roots; the hairy tendrils were eating away the uncanny painting that adorned the soundbox. Perhaps it had been by the Hibrane Hieronymus Bosch?

Desperately, Thuy began flailing the harp strings. The sound came out as a series of sour

warbles. Again the Egyptian scenery faded away, but on every side the persistent subbies were

menacing Thuy with their spiked feeder tubes.

Thuy mustered all the magic she knew: she thought of Wheenk, Chu‘s Knot, and her love for Jayjay. She reached out for psychic contact with the harp; she plucked and strummed the strings, steeling herself against the creepy tingling, piling note upon note, playing her hopes and fears and pain. The sounds beat against each other; the very fabric of space began to shake.

Irregular circles of light and dark pulsed from the base of the harp. Flakes of paint showered from the soundbox. Thuy twanged the strings still more frantically, and now, yes, the ground irised open. She wrapped her arms around the magic harp and the two of them fell down, up, through the hole.

Once more she was hovering above a boundless foamy sea. As the hole in the ocean closed

up, some faintly glowing lines came snaking through. Root hairs! Time to fly home. It required but the slightest touch of Thuy‘s will to set herself speeding low across the bubbling waves.

A minute passed, another, another. The harp was awkward and heavy in Thuy‘s arms, once

again playing dumb. Was Thuy heading the right way? She pressed on.

It was hard to quantify the passage of time within this interbrane quantum level, but

eventually Thuy became quite sure that she‘d been flying far longer than on her initial jump from the Lobrane to the Hibrane. She changed course and flew some more—with still no sign of the homey

Lobrane. She was lost.

What had Chu said? There’s a lot of different directions in hyperspace. Hopelessly off course as Thuy was, the direction pointed by the Knot meant nothing now.

The subbies were still trailing her. She knew to dodge the root hairs they kept sending up like harpoons. The subbies wanted her to think they looked like bird-headed men, but Thuy could see they were fat-leaved plants with hydrogen bladders, waving their stubby roots. Greedy heartless pods.

Thuy was bone-weary, but still she clung to the silent harp. She wasn‘t going to be able to fly much longer. The subbies would draw her under and eat her. The Big Pig would release the nants.

Jayjay was probably dead. Life was a hopeless mess.

And then Thuy heard Jayjay‘s voice, calling to her across the dimensions. His dear face led

her home.

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***

―Jayjay? This is real?‖

Jayjay sat bolt upright. ―Thuy? Oh thank god. I‘m not dead, I‘m not old, and you‘re here. I

had this jitsy dream that lasted sixty years. The Big Pig‘s been mind-gaming me. I thought I died and went to look for you.‖

―Am I in time?‖

―We‘re in synch again,‖ said Jayjay, not immediately getting the point of her question. ―Tick, tock. I love you, Thuy.‖ The nanomachine goo was gone. Orphids outlined the walls and floor of the unlit cave. A few hundred tiny flying shoons were busy around the nantanium-walled nant farm that sat nestled, still intact, upon the shards of the plastic box that had been the Ark of the Nants. The fireflylike shoons were sending pulses of laser light into the nant farm, still tweaking the nant code.

The orphidnet revealed a powerful-looking figure standing guard over the nant farm, a waist-high golem shoon with a smooth, stylized face and bell-bottom-shaped arms and legs.

―What time is it right now?‖ persisted Thuy. She wasn‘t online. The orphids were only just

now landing on her.

―Um, quarter to midnight,‖ said Jayjay, checking the little local network that the Pig was

letting them see. His mind felt stiff and clunky in these confines. ―The nants are still walled up. We have fifteen minutes.‖

―Hug me quick, Jayjay.‖

―Yes.‖ Thuy was a black spot in the local orphidnet. As Jayjay reached for her in the velvety

dark, he bumped into something

big and hollow. It made a resonant boinging sound.

―Don‘t knock over my magic harp,‖ said Thuy.

―Thuy and the Beanstalk,‖ said Ja