First, this inky vault through which he flew. Windless, without warmth or the rub of the real.
He delved down into the working mathematics of himself. It was a byzantine welter of detail, but in outline surprisingly familiar: the Cartesian world. Events were modeled with axes in rectangular space, x, y, z, so that motion was then merely sets of numbers on each axis. All dynamics shrank to arithmetic. Descartes would have been amused by the dizzying heights to which his minor method had spun.
He rejected the outside and delved into his own slowed reaches.
Now he couldfeel his preconscious reading the incoming sights, sounds, and flitting thoughts of the moment. To his inner gaze, they all carried bright red tags—sometimes simple caricatures, often complex packets.
From somewhere an idea-packet arrived, educating him: these were Fourier transforms. Somehow this helped to understand. And the mere wafting sense of a fellow Frenchman’s name made him feel better.
An Associator—big, blue, bulbous—hovered over this data-field, plucking at the tags. It reached with yellow streamers over a far, purple-rimmed horizon, to the Field of Memory. From there it brought any item stored—packages of mottled gray, containing sights, sounds, smells, ideas—which matched the incoming tags.
Job done, the Associator handed all the matchings to a towering monolith: the Discriminator. A perpetual wind sucked the red tags up, into the yawning surfaces of the coal-black Discriminator mountain. Merciless filters there matched the tags with the stored memories.
If they fitted—geometric shapes sliding together, mock sex, notches fitting snugly into protruding struts—they stayed. But fits were few. Most tags failed to find a host memory which made sense. No fit. These the Discriminator ate. The tags and connections vanished, swept away to clear fresh space for the next flood of sensation.
He loomed over this interior landscape and felt its hailstorm power. His whole creative life, the marvel of continents, had come from here. Tiny thoughts, snatches of conversations, melodies—all would pop into his mind, a tornado of chaos-images, crowding, jostling for his attention. The memory-packets which shared some sturdy link to a tag endured.
But who decided what was rugged enough? He watched rods slide into slots and saw the intricate details of how those memories and tags were shaped. So the answer lay at least one step further back, in the geometry of memory.
Which meant that he had determined matters, by the laying down of memories. Memory-clumps, married to tag-streams, made a portion of his Self, plucked forth from the torrent, the river of possibilities.
And he had done it long ago, when the memories were stored—all without realizing how they could fit with tags to come. So where was any predictable Voltaire to lurk? In sheer intricacy, deep detail, shifting associations in the flow.
No rock-hard Self at all.
And his imagination? The author of all his plays and essays? It must lie in the weather of the tag-memory torrents. The twist, warp and sudden marriages. Jigsaw associations, rising up from the preconscious. Order from chaos.
“Who is Voltaire?” he called to the streaming gridded emptiness.
No reply.
His itch was still with him. And the yawning nothing all around. He decided to fix the larger issue. What had Pascal said?
The silence of these spaces terrifies me.
He probed and gouged and sought. And in the doing, knew that as his hands dug into the ebony stuff all about him, they were but metaphors. Symbols for programs he could never have created himself.
He had inherited these abilities—much as he had, as a boy, in herited hands. Down below his conscious Self, his minions had labored upon the base Volt 1.0, plus Marq’s augmentations.
He pulled apart the blackness and stepped through. To a city street.
He was puffing, weak, strained. Resources running low.
He walked shakily into a restaurant—anonymous, plain, food merely standing on counters—and stuffed himself.
He concentrated on each step. By making each portion of his experience well up, he found that he could descend through the layers of his own response.
Making his body feel right demanded sets of overlapping rules. As he chewed, teeth had to sink into food, saliva squirt to greet the munched mass, enzymes start to work to extract the right nutrient ratios—else it would not seem real.
His programs, he saw, bypassed the involved stomach and colon processes. Such intricacies were needless. Instead, the “software” (odd phrase) simplified all the messy innards into a result he could feel—a satisfying con centration of tasty blood sugars, giving him a carbohydrate lift, a pleasant electrolyte balance, hormones and stabilizers all calculated, with a patchwork of templates for the appropriate emotional levels.
All other detail was discarded, once the subroutines got the right effect, simulating the tingling of nerve endings. Not too bad for what was really a block of ferrite and polymer, each site in its crystal complexity an individual, furiously working microprocessor.
Still, he felt as though he had been hollowed out by an intense, sucking vacuum.
Voltaire rushed out of the restaurant. The street! He needed to see this place, to check his suspicions.
Down the placid avenues he lurched. Run, stride!
Even though reckless, he never accidentally fell. Inspection of his inner layers showed that this was because his peripheral vision ex tended beyond 180 degrees, taking everything in. So he was literally seeing behind his head—though he did not consciously register this.
Real people, he suddenly saw, negotiated steps while chattering to each other by making snapshot comparisons of their peripheral vision; they were acutely sensitive to sudden changes in silhouettes and trajectories. Balance and walking were so critical to humans that his programming overdid its caution.
He had to teeter far out on his toes before he could fall on his face—smack!—and even then it didn’t hurt much.
Once there, he let a passerby walk over him. A girl—a nominal girl, the phrase leapt to mind—stepped on him.
This time he cringed at the downward spike of her heels…and felt nothing. He scrambled after her. Some elementary portion of himself had feared the pain.
So it had eliminated it. Which meant that experience was no longer a constraint.
“The spirit has won a divorce from the body!” he announced to the people passing by. Stolid, they paid him no heed.