Destination Void by Frank Herbert
Bickel examined the question. He could feel his mind clearing under the pressure of the stimulant—and there in his memory was the sensation that the ship was his body, that he was a creature of hard metal and thousands of sensors.
“I … think so,” he said.
Timberlake held up the block of plastic. “But … it des-troyed this and … apparently shut itself down.”
A thought began stirring in Bickel’s mind and he said: “Could this be a message to us … a kind of ultimate message?”
“God telling us we’ve gone too far,” Flattery muttered.
“No!” Bickel snapped. “The Ox telling us … something.”
“What?” Timberlake asked.
Bickel tried to wet his lips with his tongue. His mouth felt so dry. His lips ached.
“When nature transfers energy,” Bickel said, “almost all that transfer is unconscious.” He fell silent a moment. This was such a delicate plane of conceptualizing. It had to be handled so gently. “But most of the energy transfers for all the enormous amount of data in the Ox-computer is routed through master programs … and total consciousness would turn all of them on, force the system as a whole to suppress some while letting others through. It’d be like riding herd on billions of wild animals.”
“You gave it too much consciousness?” Timberlake asked.
Bickel looked at the transceiver panel of the Accept and Translate system beside his own action couch.
Timberlake turned, followed the direction of Bickel’s stare.
Prudence stirred and moaned. Flattery bent to her.
But Timberlake ignored them, beginning to see the direction of Bickel’s thoughts. The ship was dying, but here was hope.
“All the master programs dealing with translation of symbols are monitored through feedback loops linked to the AAT,” Timberlake said. “Symbols!”
“Remember,” Bickel said, “that impulses going out from the human central nervous system have that additional integration/modulation factor added to them—synergy. An unconscious energy transfer.”
Flattery, kneeling beside Prudence, wondered why he could bring only part of his awareness to bear on ministering to her. The conversation between Timberlake and Bickel electrified him.
Something was added to impulses going out from the central nervous system.
The thought boiled in Flattery’s mind, and he had to force his attention onto Prudence, pressing a stimulant shot against her neck.
An addition. Gestalt addition.
To be addible, qualities had to have sufficient similarity. Otherwise, how could human sense take two superimposed sensations of a color and say one was a more intense version of the color than the other? What made one green more intense than another—to the senses? Increase in intensity had to be a form of addition. “It could be in the axon collaterals of the Ox’s high-speed convergence fibers,” Bickel said.
Flattery sank back on his heels, waiting for the stimulant to work on Prudence.
Bickel’s right, he thought. If you superimposed a sufficiently rapid convergence of sense data, that itself could be interpreted as intensification. One of the images would contain more bits than the other.
But bits of what? All this didn’t account for the way data overlapped in the human consciousness … awareness …
Flattery looked up at Bickel and Timberlake. They appeared lost in their own thoughts.
Prudence said: “Fmmmsh.”
Almost automically, Flattery put a hand to her temple, checking her pulse.
When I search my memory, Flattery thought, I find data separated against a background. Whatever that back-ground is, consciousness operates against it. That background is what gives consciousness its size and reference—its dimension.
“The Ox’s sense organs were modeled on ours but with a wider range,” Timberlake said.
Bickel nodded. “The differences,” he said. And he remembered the nightmare quality of those superimposed and merging globes of radiation.
“How about all that contact with the hybernating humans and livestock in the tanks?” Timberlake asked. “Has any woman ever carried that many … children … in just that way?”
“If consciousness results from combining sensations,” Bickel said.
“Of course it does!” Timberlake said.
“Very likely,” Bickel said. “And it can receive and discriminate across the entire radiation spectrum. You can’t say it hears or sees or smells … or feels. Those are just different forms of radiation.”
“And the combinations could produce strange sense qualities, ones we can’t even visualize,” Timberlake said.
“They do,” Bickel whispered, remembering.
“But it’s dead,” Flattery said. “It … refused to live.” He looked up at them while still keeping a check on Prudence’s return to consciousness.
“It’s not like a human, though,” Bickel said. “If we can find the answer—why it turned itself off—why it sent us this message …”
“You’d turn it back on?” Flattery asked.
“Wouldn’t you?” Timberlake demanded.
“Are you forgetting how it turned vicious?” Flattery asked. “You were there with me … trapped.”
We’re playing a kind of blind man’s bluff, Bickel thought. We know something’s out there—something useful and something dangerous. We grope for it and try to grasp it and describe it, but Raj is right. We don’t know if what we get will be the useful thing or the monster—the tool or the Golem.
“But it’ll go beyond our consciousness, beyond our abilities,” Timberlake said.
“Exactly,” Flattery said.
“It contains an infinite progression of shades of, all within that new form of awareness,” Bickel said. “We’ve built a kind of ultimate alien here. Raj’s question is as good as yours. Should we turn it on? Can we turn it on?”
Prudence reached up, groping, pushed Flattery’s hand away from her head. She tried to sit up. Flattery helped her.
“Easy now,” he said.
She put her hand to her throat. How sore her throat felt. She had been absorbing the conversation around her for several minutes, remembering. She remembered there had been a train of thought, frantic efforts to raise Bickel on the intercom and communicate with him. She remembered the effort and the urgency, but the precise reason for aban-doning her post and rushing off to try to tell Bickel eluded her.
“We have to weed false information out of our minds,” Bickel said. “We’re assuming a totally conscious robot, all of its activity directed by consciousness. That cannot be, unless every action is monitored simultaneously.”
His words aroused a vague sense of anger in Prudence. He kept skirting the … what was that thought?
“Would it have the illusion that it’s the center of the universe?” Timberlake asked.
“No.” Bickel shook his head, remembering: “The universe has no center.” That’s what it had said to him.
This was a coding problem contained in the concept of you and the concept of—of identity. Bickel nodded to himself. Are you aware? Am I aware? He looked at the others.
The object and its surround.
A moment of intense despair overcame him. He felt like groaning.
“Life as we know it,” Timberlake said, “started evolving some three thousand million years ago. When it got to a certain point, then consciousness appeared. Before that, there was no consciousness … at least in our life form. Con-sciousness comes out of that unconscious sea of evolution.” He looked at Bickel. “It exists right now immersed in that universal sea of unconsciousness.”
As though Timberlake’s words had released a dam, Prudence remembered the train of thought so urgent it had forced her to abandon her post to go in search of Bickel.
Determinism at work in a sea of indeterminism! And she held the mathematical key to the problem. That was the train of thought. She had been trying to narrow down a new definition, mathematically stated, of quantum
Again, she felt that enormous increment of conscious-ness and the memory of that sudden knowledge—she had pushed her body’s chemistry beyond a balance point. She remembered how the darkness had engulfed her just as the mathematical beauty, the simplicity of the thought had spread itself out in her mind.
Everything depended on the origins of impulses and the reflection of them. It was a field of reflections—and this held the key to the sensation of consciousness.
We construct consciousness this way.
Our bodies take us part of the way and then the identity takes over.
Identity … an illusion … an assumption.
But that was just a working tool … like a navigator assuming his position on a boundless sea … assuming his position on a chart—an assumption on an assumption, sym-bol of symbols. Assuming such a position, even assuming a position which he knew to be wrong, the navigator could work his way mathematically to a close approximation of his correct position.
Approximation.
Particles or waves—it was not important which, but it was important whether the assumption worked.
Her entire conceptual process took no more than an eye blink of time but it produced a flare of awareness which filled her with energy.
There was no doubt at all where this flare of awareness pointed—at the AAT system. For a moment, she held the entire complex of the AAT system in her mind, manipulating the continuous interlocking pattern with her symbological grid. It was so simple. The AAT was a four-dimensional continuum, a piece of space-time geometry subject to considerations of curvature, duration-over-distance and particle/wave transfer through a multiplicity of sensor-traverse lines.
To the human nervous system, an instrument designed for the job, nothing could be simplier than visualizing and manipulating such a four-dimensional spiderweb—once the nature of the spiderweb was understood.
“John,” she said, “the Ox isn’t the instrument of consciousness; it’s the AAT, the manipulator of symbols. The Ox circuits are merely something this manipulator can use to stand up tall, to know its own dimensions.”
“The object and its surround,” Bickel whispered. “Subject and background, grid and map … consciousness and uncon-sciousness!”
“The Ox is the unconscious component,” she said, “a machine for transferring energy.”
And, still within this heightened awareness, she explained the mathematical clues that had led her to this point.
“A matrix system,” Bickel said, remembering his own plunge into this way of attacking the problem, and the blaze of consciousness which that plunge had whipped up. “And submatrices and sub-submatrices without end.”
Flattery stood up, seeing where these thoughts must lead, dreading the moment of action to come. He looked down at Prudence seated on the deck, seeing her flushed cheeks, the glitter in her eyes.
“And where does this AAT-cum-Ox stand?” Flattery asked. “Have you thought of that?”
Prudence met his stare, understanding now why their hyb tanks had been filled with colonists. “The colonists,” she said, nodding. “A field of unconsciousness from which any unconscious can draw—a ground that sustains and buoys—and the sleeping colonists provide it.”
Flattery shook his head, feeling angry, confused.
Bickel stared beyond Prue, absorbing her words. Ideas merged and fitting—orders evolved in his awareness. This ship had been armed, maneuvered, aimed and fired. He remembered Hempstead: gnome-wise face, eyes glittering, and that compelling voice saying: “What matters most is the search itself. This is more important than the searchers. Consciousness must dream, it must have a dreaming ground—and, dreaming, must invoke ever new dreams.”
“Knowledge is pitiless,” Bickel said.
Prudence ignored him, keeping her attention on Flattery, aware of the psychiatrist-chaplain’s confusion. “Don’t you see it, Raj? To separate subject from object there has to be a background of some kind. You have to be able to see it against something. What’s the background for conscious-ness? Unconsciousness.”
“Zombies,” Bickel said. “Remember, Raj? You called us zombies. And why not? We’ve existed for most of our lives in a state of light hypnosis.”
Flattery knew Bickel had said something, but the words refused to link in any understandable form. It was as though Bickel had said: “Hop limbo promise the insect watering class to be erected to a first behavior preserve.” The words trailed off through his mind as though they had been flashed in front of his awareness to screen him from something else.
From what?
A profound silence filled Com-central, broken by the sound of Prudence shifting her position on the deck.
Bickel felt himself go as calm as that silence, as though some other self had waited for that silence to take the reins. The sensation lasted for a single heartbeat and expanded into a sense of well-being, a relaxed poise that illuminated everything around him. It was as if one universe had been substituted for another, as if a sensory amplication of enor-mous intensity had been turned on his universe.
He saw the stark unconsciousness in Flattery’s face, in Timberlake’s—and the semi-consciousness of Prudence.
Zombies, he thought.
“Raj, you called us zombies,” Bickel repeated. “If we were lightly hypnotized we’d appear partially dead to someone in a higher state of consciousness.”
“Do you have to mumble?” Flattery demanded.
Flattery glared at Bickel. He felt that the man was using real words and that communication was intended, but all the meanings slipped and slithered through his mind without making connection.
Prudence felt Bickel’s words lifting her. There came an instant in which the universe turned upon one still point that was herself. The feeling shifted: self no longer was confined within her. As she gave up the self, clarity came. Flattery’s words returned to her: “There’s nothing concerning our-selves about which we can be truly objective except our physical responses.”
The chemical experiments on her own body had never offered a real chance to solve their problem, but they had provided a ground for understanding her own identity. The hope of more had been illusory … because the experiments could not be conducted simultaneously on every occupant of the Tin Egg—their isolated world.
We share unconsciousness! she thought.
And she realized this must be the true reason the hyb tanks were filled with sleeping humans. Somewhere along the line, Project had seen that necessity. The umbilicus crew had to have a minimal ground of shared unconsciousness upon which to stand. They had to have a reference point, a tiny island in the vast dark which they could share with whatever they might produce out of their neuron fibers and Eng multipliers. They’d needed a ground upon which to stand before they could reach up tall.
The mirror cannot reflect itself, she thought.
“Hypnotized,” Bickel said. “We accept it as normal because it’s virtually the only form of consciousness we’ve ever seen. You’ve watched the Earth video. You wouldn’t expect an idiot to be fooled by the commercials, but that rhythmic hammering, that repetition …”
“Half dead,” Prudence said. “Zombies.”
She said, “Zombies,” Flattery thought. Her voice frightened him.
Bickel saw the alertness spread through her eyes, the awakening.
“We should’ve thought of the AAT when the thing came alive during reception from UMB,” Bickel said.
“You see what has to be done?’ Prudence asked. “The energizer—”
“Stimulator,” Bickel said.
“Stimulator,” she said. “It has to be part of the AAT’s input.”
“Slack lines,” Bickel said. “You can’t hold the reins too tightly because the signals have multiple functions. They need room to spread!”
Timberlake looked from one to the other. He felt a
Symbols!
Timberlake’s memory shot back to their conversation about the energizer. “All the master programs dealing with translation of symbols are monitored through feedback loops linked to the AAT.” He heard his own voice replaying in his mind.
Symbols!
The whole form of their problem arrayed itself in Timberlake’s memory with the sudden force of something thrown at him. Problem and solution set themselves up as a physical arrangement and he saw the nerve-nets they had built all arrayed as a series of triangular faces with a Mobius twist—prisms of cell triangles interlaced and marching with their energy flows through infinite dimensions, forming sense data and memory images outside conventional space, storing bits and altering relationships in limitless dimensional extensions.
Bickel saw the vitality flowing into Timberlake, said: “Think of the AAT, Tim. Remember what we were saying?”
Timberlake nodded. The AAT. It received hundreds of duplicates of the same message compressed into the modulated laser burst. It averaged out the blanks and distortions, filtered for noise, compared for probable meaning on the doubtful bits, fed the result into a vocoder and produced it at an output as intelligible sound.
“It closely approximates what we do when we hear someone say something to us … then repeat it to check if we heard correctly,” Timberlake said.
“You’re all forgetting something,” Flattery said.
They turned, saw Flattery at his own action couch, his hand on his own repeater console. A single red light had come alive there.
Flattery stared from Bickel to Prudence to Timberlake, seeing the unnatural brilliance in their eyes. Madness! And the deep color in their faces, their sense of excitement.
“Raj, wait,” Bickel said. He spoke soothingly, watching Flattery’s hand poised over a key beneath that single red light.
I should’ve known there’d be another trigger, Bickel thought.
Chapter 31
Mundane existence is the source of renewed suffering. The human goal is to attain release from the bondage of material existence and, achieving release, to unite with the Supreme Self.