Lightpaths (31 page)

BUILDING THE RUINS™

“We’ll play a beginner’s version,” Lakshmi said, robotic arms placing a circlet of electronic headgear on her temples. “It has the whole opening sequence. You may view it either projected or in one of these full-sensorium circlets. There are several scattered about.”

“The trideo’s interactive reality can be joystick controlled, voice-directed, or,” Lev said, slipping on a pair of thin gloves, “if you put on these livegloves, you can let your fingers do the walking—and the talking.” He began to hand around several pairs to those who opted for them. “Of course, if we had the sort of direct mind/machine link we were talking about before, we wouldn’t need all this gear. These will have to do for now.”

Jhana chose for herself one of the wraparound circlets—depth screens for her eyes, audio implants for her skull—and pulled on a pair of livegloves, thin flat-wire traceries prickling over her hands as she did so, electrodes probing minute differences in electric potentials at her skin surface. She was now in the world of the game.

“I’ve called for a share-game,” Lakshmi said over Jhana’s implants. “All of us will essentially be functioning as a team.”

For Jhana, this “team” manifested itself as a silvery translucent orb—like a soap bubble blown from mercury metal—afloat upon a couch of sunset-fired cloud. In the bubble, etherealized human faces stood out, cut in bas-relief from the virtual sky and tinted that sky’s same silvery-blue hue. All eyes of her “teammates” turned forward toward one vision.

“Welcome to the MACHINE,” a disembodied voice said over the implants. “The MetAnalytic Computer Heuristic Incorporating Non-analytic Elements. The global brain. A synergistic and evolving system composed of two parts: LOGOS, the Logical Ontological Governance Operating System, and CHAOS, the Cognitive Heuristic Antalgorithmic Operating System. They were created to work together, but now they work apart. The global brain has gone insane and now seeks suicide to end its pain. Your job is to help save it from itself.”

In the virtual space around and before her, there now began to appear what Jhana believed must certainly be the LOGOS the voice-over spoke of. She had seen quality graphics before, but this LOGOS was incredible: an immense cybernetic data construct, a shape of thought almost beautiful beyond thought, a shining global village-on-the-hill rising from the flatland gridspace of the Plains of Euclid, a cybertopia stretching onward and onward, mathematical kingdom of orderly orchestrated bustling where all the trains of thought ran on time. It was a thing of preternatural beauty, as if the greatest symphony of most glorious music ever played had been flash-frozen in the form of a City of Light, celestial harmony transubstantiated in an instant into the radiant architecture of a Neon New Jerusalem, an Electric Heaven too coolly perfect for mere mortals to sing in.

Hyperreal, surreal, ethereally unreal. She remembered that someone had once said virtual reality would never look truly real until they figured out how to get dirt and noise and grit into it. That pre-dirt godly cleanliness was the LOGOS all over. But if there was something disturbingly “too ordered” about the cool perfection of this City of LOGOS, it was not nearly as disturbing as the CHAOS.

As the teammates moved deeper into the game’s virtual space, it was soon enough apparent that the inhumanly perfect order of the LOGOS did not go on forever. In innumerable regions the dark matter of CHAOS appeared, fluid as ocean waves and dry as desert dunes, thing of all shapes and no shape of all things, Illusion and Error breaking through and turning to disarray the clear lines of the Plains, battering discordantly against the harmony of the Shining City, drowning and choking out and covering in obscurity the structures of light, as if some great Earthly city were falling to ruin beneath the waves of a final flood, or sinking abandoned into the desert of time.

The silver orb, the mercury-metal soap bubble she and her fellow players were contained in, burst dissolvingly. With the vast computing power of the LOGOS behind them, fully integrated with that power, they moved like a tall soft wall of driving sunlit wind against the uncreating dimness.

Encountering the dark tide, though, there was almost a physical sensation of impact. Jhana felt as if she had plummeted like a hurtling meteor into a vast ocean of grey tapioca static, cold and dark and viscous. She did not have time to think, for the darkling sea seemed inhabited by the sharks and eels of long-repressed memories, ancient sins—her own and others not her own.

Something waited at the heart of the CHAOS, a sleeping dragon on a treasure hoard, a Minotaur in the center of a maze, a night prowler compounded of every creature that had ever lived and died, a hybrid beastly-intelligent thing of horns, claws, teeth and tentacles, slit cat’s eyes and adder fangs dripping the milky poisonous rheum of death, a universe of death horrifying in its enormous impersonality—

Jeez, what am I getting so frightened about? Jhana thought. Must be projecting my own problems onto this chaotic grey swirling stuff. This thing’s got phenomenal graphics, excellent tactiles and full sensorium feed, yeah—but it is only a game, after all.

That in itself was disturbing, though. All this effort, put into something that was “just a game”?

As if through corridors and chambers of a flooded maze, onward she moved with the others, more fascinated than afraid, while behind her the sharks and eels followed, swimming to their own slow silent dark rhythms. Her movement and that of the others felt “upstream”, seemed to push back the chaotic flux, to recreate what that dark flux had blotted out.

Eventually, Jhana found herself just beneath the surface of a glassy stream, looking up through a drowned Ophelia’s eyes into a lawless sky of flawless blue. Impelled and compelled to break through the surface tension of the water, she sent ripples rebounding in every direction, new beauty settling into place as the scene calmed. Like a rapidly evolving computer animation or fractal graphic, cragged peaks mounted up to snag the sky, encircling in their broken bowl an Alpine meadow and small city so idyllic it seemed a caricature of itself.

The others had risen from the stream with her and, moving forward, they drove the cloudy tide back before them, the beautiful new world establishing itself around and behind them, scene after scene as they pressed on.

The regions they were helping the LOGOS recover now seemed better somehow—more beautiful because less sterile, less rigidly perfect than those regions of the LOGOS that had never been touched by the CHAOS. Whether from taint of contact with the CHAOS, or from touch of human consciousness, or from whatever cause, the element of randomness and unpredictability had been introduced into all the recreated regions so that they were now more truly beautiful than all those undisturbed realms of perfect order. No, they had not put “dirt” into virtual reality: it was more like “soil”, or even “soul”.

The restoration was not an easy task. The flux they pressed forward against was no sooner driven back in one region than it flooded in at another. At times the CHAOS seemed to howl in gibbering triumph, but overall the forces of the LOGOS were turning back the invading tide. Jhana was certain that, through their teamwork, the dim flood of CHAOS’s insurgency was being driven back completely, to the borders of the CHAOS itself. They were winning!

Perhaps everything should have stopped there. It didn’t. Somewhere something happened: a test was failed, a border was accidentally crossed. Perhaps the LOGOS forces pressed their advantage too far, moved too readily against the opponent, crossed some Yalu River of the Mind. Whatever the cause, the CHAOS felt its own existence threatened and struck back with Sphinx-like ferocity, exploiting weak links in the LOGOS front and bursting through with all its might—until cataclysm threatened to overwhelm all.

Jhana felt a sudden and immediate sense of vertigo, as if she were falling from deep space into planetary atmosphere at an immense velocity and very much the wrong angle of re-entry. All at once she was burning, breaking up, blossoming in petalshards of fire and blowing away, like a disintegrating falling star, like a rose of Hiroshima.

The Möbius Cadúceus skysign flashed before them.

“Game over,” the voice of the MACHINE said quietly.

Back in Lakshmi’s workshop, Jhana looked about her at a room full of dreamers waking from strange dreams, Atsuko and Seiji and Marissa looking just about as disoriented as Jhana felt.

“Every game is different—and the same,” Lakshmi said. She and Lev seemed more familiar with the game’s parameters and, consequently, much less disoriented—especially Lakshmi. “Innumerable scenarios, but underlying them all is the same pattern.”

“Yeah,” said Lev. “The damn thing’s teaching us how to lose—and we’re learning.”

“Vajra has been marketing receivers and hookups both here and on Earth through network and multi-level sales structures,” Lakshmi continued, ignoring Lev’s comment. “Billions of hours of game-time have been logged already. Building the Ruins has very quickly become the world’s master game—in less than a month’s time.”

“But is it just a game?” Jhana asked. “All those billions of human hours, all those scenarios logging back in to Vajra, all that information—what is it being used for? Maybe the game is more serious than we think.”

Marissa nodded. Apparently she’d been thinking the same thing.

“Certainly there’s more to it than some trivial trideo game,” Marissa seconded. “It’s an ancient pattern that’s being played through again and again here, especially the idea that the perfection of the LOGOS can be amplified from its ‘having known imperfection’. That goes all the way back to Genesis, to the idea of the ‘fortunate fall’—that Adam and Eve’s primal sin was ultimately good because it made necessary the incarnation of Christ. With the loss of perfection, change and history came into the world.”

“What our experience in the game demonstrates, though,” Lakshmi put in, “is that by their changes things aren’t completely changed from their first perfection. Through
apparent
change everything in the game dilates its being until at last it becomes truly itself again, works its own re-perfection, moves from perfection to new perfection, cognition to re-cognition.”

“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, as Eliot says,” Marissa suggested.

“So even CHAOS is just a more subtle form of order, eh?” Lev Korchnoi asked Marissa skeptically.

“Yes,” she said with a nod. “Discord is merely harmony not understood, and partial evil must be subsumed within universal good.”

“That’s putting a nice rhyming spin on it, and maybe that’s how it will work out in the end,” Korchnoi said with a shrug, “but right now what’s going on in the game seems to be a reflection of what’s really going on in the world. Or a parody of it. A parodic reflection—a fun-house mirror. Think of our era’s fascination with acronyms, and the way the game parodies that—”

“Maybe the game is simply
implying
the world that produced it,” Atsuko speculated. “Self-similarity across scales—less like a fun-house mirror than like a section of a fractal or a small piece of a hologram.”

“Okay,” Lev said, “but what kind of world is it a ‘self-similar’ chunk of? Lately Vajra—and whatever ‘distributed consciousness’ is ghosting it—has been taking in unprecedented amounts of seemingly random information. Maybe the global brain has gone insane, is seeking suicide to end its pain. Maybe the goal is to save it, but maybe not. I wish I could be as sure of the outcome as Marissa is, but I’m not. All I know is that the MACHINE always wins, no matter which side we’re on. We always get blown out of the system at last.”

Lakshmi called up food and drink, and thin supple robotic arms began to move.

“When I’m playing that game it feels like I’m in the midst of some sort of psychomachia,” she said, pausing, as if unsure of what she was aboutto say, “though whose soul or what soul is being contested I can’t say.”

“I felt it too,” Atsuko said. “Almost as if it were the struggle for the soul of the proverbial ‘new machine’. Or maybe a struggle for the World Soul, the Mind At Large.”

Seiji had been unusually quiet since they came out of the game, intent upon examining the iconic assemblage, but Jhana noticed that he had glanced over when Lakshmi and Atsuko spoke of struggles for souls. Still, as the evening wore on and all of them drifted amidst conversation and zero gravity and robotic arms and icons and fellowship, Seiji volunteered nothing of his game-playing experience. Lev and Lakshmi went into no further detail about what relation his brother’s personal effects might have to what was going on, though at one point Lakshmi suggested that the icon ensemble seemed shamanic to her somehow—almost like a fetish or an image of an animal spirit-guide. Seiji very much agreed with that interpretation.

Gradually their meeting evolved into an informal dinner party, Lev regaling them with stripped-down guitar-only versions of the many new numbers Möbius Cadúceus would be performing at the
Temple Guardians
event.

“I’m surprised you were able to get away from rehearsal,” Marissa said to Lev at one point during the evening, “with that performance so near.”

“Oh, the band has a tradition,” Lev said, tuning his guitar during a pause. “We always take a break from each other a night or two before the show—to avoid getting too slick or over-rehearsed. Got to keep at least a little spontaneity in it, after all.” He struck a chord tentatively. “Speaking of the spontaneous, sorry we’re not much closer to understanding the skysign’s power to evoke images or whatever in you, Jhana and Seiji, or in Roger, but I assure you that our group will retire the logo immediately after the performance of
Guardians
.”

“If it wants to be retired,” Lakshmi said. By way of comment, Lev merely began to play his guitar and sing again.

So the party continued for a long while, until all at last said their farewells and everyone save Lakshmi departed by transfer ship for the habitat’s central sphere. Jhana noticed that Seiji still seeming pressed upon by his private thoughts, and perhaps she was beginning to understand why.