Washington, D.C.
October 14th
I didn’t believe him at first.
“Really?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Yes,” he nodded. “I was worried when I could feel you calling into the Overnet so easily, but as soon as I started to read your pamphlet I knew that I had made a mistake. It’s hard to control the primitive reflexes, sometimes.” He looked at me for a moment, staring into my eyes. “Hmmm… I have questions, and you do too, I bet, so let’s take a walk and get away from the crowds.”
He stood up, slowly moving his ponderous bulk, and I followed him to a section that was roped off. A guard nearby came by, but when he saw whom it was, he just smiled and waved and went back to watching the other visitors. We climbed over the velvet rope and walked into a large cavernous room.
“Given my connections and the fact that I donate quite a bit of money here, they give me some latitude,” he explained. “This is going to be a new exhibit next month about how technology shapes evolution.” We walked through a doorway into yet another room, and he sat down on a bench in there while I paced about, nervous. Dust motes floated through the air and flared brilliantly as they intersected the sunshine coming through the windows. The roar of the crowd was now a faint background noise.
“You’re really Leonardo da Vinci?”
He nodded. “But you knew that, already.”
“But I don’t believe it,” I said. “I still expect you to have a long flowing white beard, even now.”
He laughed. “That would hardly make me inconspicuous in the current day and age, wouldn’t it? Tell me, though – how did you find me?” he asked. “I thought that I had covered my tracks fairly well. You didn’t find me with the Overnet, did you?”
“No,” I answered. “Your obfuscation field, or whatever you call it, works too well. You haven’t changed your handwriting over the last 50 years. I used handwriting analysis against the DMV records.”
He nodded. “Huh. That makes sense, although I hadn’t thought of that before. But how did you know to look? It’s not as if people get research grants for running handwriting analysis against long-dead painters. How did you know who I was 50 years ago?”
I wasn’t sure whether or not to tell him about Monitor, but then decided that Monitor hadn’t warned me against it, or anything. “There’s an intelligent agent that is running in the Overnet computers. It taught me how to access the Overnet at a very basic level, and told me about you.”
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “There’s an AI in the Overnet? We’ve never run into it before.”
“Yes,” I said. “It says that it has been hiding all this time, that it was afraid to reveal itself,” I answered.
He started to speak, stopped, and drifted into thought. “Interesting. I wouldn’t have thought… but I guess the evidence leads to the conclusion. It told you about me. Why are you looking for me, for that matter?”
How did I explain that half the reason that I was here was just to verify that I wasn’t going crazy, that it was actually an alien intelligence talking to me rather than just imaginary voices? Too hard to explain. “I wanted to see if you actually existed, for one. Also, Monitor thought that you might be able to train me to use these powers.”
He considered for a second. “One, I’m not sure I should. Two, I’m not even sure that it’s possible for you. You’ve become astoundingly well versed in being able to read information from the Overnet; most humans can’t tap in at will, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a human that has been able to effect changes without killing himself in the process.”
I was astounded, for a moment, and thought about my conversations with Monitor. I realized that there had been subtle allusions to this, but I had never asked, never pierced my way through Monitor’s vague references and allusions. “Humans have been able to tap into the Overnet?”
He seemed surprised that I didn’t know that. “Well, yes. Sometimes people come close enough to the required brain patterns that they’re able to use it, although without training it’s usually fairly difficult. A number of your religious figures have had this ability – such information often seems to be in the form of a message from heaven, or they see it as auras, or something like that.”
“And humans are able to change things, as well as perceive them?”
He nodded again. “Absolutely, although it’s extremely risky, because there is a tendency to overrun the amount of power that you can actually control – which means a messy death for the participant.”
“And this has happened?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “You’ve heard of incidents where people suddenly burn up and disintegrate, right? Spontaneous combustion?”
I nodded that I had.
“That’s the result of someone being in the right frame of mind to being able to use the Overnet, and then trying to use it.”
“But I thought that spontaneous combustion was just suicide, or falling asleep while smoking, or something; it tends to happen with depressed people.”
“Your description of the population that it affects is correct,” he said, “and it makes sense. For some reason, the Overnet is easier to use for most humans if they are in a depressed state of mind or under the influence of alcohol. I believe that it has something to do with changing the symbol processing and acquiring the right proportions of neurotransmitters in the human brain, but to be honest, research into why humans sometimes are able to access the Overnet has never been a priority for us. It’s much easier with the access technology.”
“Access technology? Is that the same as a grik?” I asked.
He nodded, held up his right hand, and with his left hand pointed to a plain silver ring on his ring finger. “This is it. I know that it doesn’t look very impressive. But it taps one of the most potent technologies ever created.”
“How many of those exist?”
“Only 11,” he said. “Which was initially a problem, because when the… accident occurred that stranded us here, there were 23 of us. That has slowly dwindled down to the teens, since the ones without griks have been slowly dying off. It’s very tricky to maintain the necessary anti-aging processes without the grik to help.”
“What can’t you just make more rings?”
“We’ve lost most of our libraries and manufacturing capabilities,” he replied, “so we are now in the position of being unable to create technology. Fortunately, our technology runs indefinitely and is self-repairing, otherwise we would have had no way to even maintain this level of technology…”
“Who decides who has a grik?” I asked. “Who controls the Core?”
“No one controls the Core,” he said. “There is no organization or central committee. That’s part of the problem. It’s been an ongoing battle for the past 2500 years, factions forming and unforming, frequent battles between different members of the Core, grik holders challenging other grik holders. Entire nations have arisen at the machinations of the Core. Eventually, it just wearied my soul: over two millennia of slaughter, ill-thought plans, political machinations and experiments, all making your history such a very bloody one. I was tired. I hid from the rest of the Core, and have spent the last 50 years here in the United States, just… existing.”
“Will you teach me how to use the Overnet?” I asked.
“I haven’t decided, yet. I’m still not sure why you’re here.”
I thought about the events leading up to this point in time, tried to separate them and simplify them into an explanation that would make sense to the both of us. “From what Monitor has told me, the Core is trying to push the human race to a level of technology that will allow us to create something it called a quantum teleportation tube. This… quantum tube, or whatever, is about 150 years in the future, and due to the way that the Core is manipulating the human race, we will die off soon after creating this tube.
“So, the reason I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the Overnet is so that I can stop the Core, or modify the plan, or something, so that the human race survives.”
He looked at the roof for a while, and then his eyes dropped back to my face and spoke. “It makes sense on the surface, but I’m still not sure what you’re supposed to do. It’s hard to believe that you’d be able to access the Overnet well enough to be able to change the momentum that is already in place … you’ve only been able to read information with the Overnet? You’ve never been able to do anything?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Hmmm… it’s an interesting problem, to say the least. I’m not saying that I’ll help you, but I’m intrigued. I want to see what is going on here.”
He sketched his hands in a brief outline, and suddenly a rectangle of bright, bright white light formed around me, vertices subdividing into more vertices as I watched until I was surrounded by a haze of horizontal and vertical lines. His voice sounded distant and faint, obscured by a low buzzing from the lines. “Bring up the Overnet.”
For whatever reason, I was in the frame of mind necessary to do this without any problems. I tapped in, looked around the room and saw the weaknesses in the ceiling structure that would require fixing in 80 years, saw the arrangements and fluxes of power in the sensory array that he had constructed around me, looked at him and saw his aura.
The rectangle abruptly vanished, leaving no trace. He stood there silently, looking at me.
“Well?” I asked.
“The fit is amazingly close,” he muttered, almost to himself. “There’s almost no impedance mismatch. You’re very close to the ideal... once you learned how to use the Overnet, how long would you say that it took you to reach to this level of proficiency?”
“After three or four hours,” I said, “I was able to subconsciously bring it up and read auras. It’s almost a part of me, now, although sometimes it takes me a couple of tries, especially if there is something going on that is distracting me.”
“You learned it quickly,” he said. “It’s hard to draw a parallel with the Core, because it’s an entirely different situation, but nonetheless you climbed a steep learning curve in very little time. You have a knack, so to speak. I think that your blockage is just a symbol processing problem: you simply haven’t found the right mental metaphors.”
“Yes, that’s the same thing that Monitor said,” I replied. “But I’ve tried everything. The problem is that there’s no feedback. It’s only right or wrong with no gray, and I haven’t found anything that’s right.”
He levered himself up out of the bench, started walking ponderously around. He thought for a minute, and then looked at me. “Okay, let’s see what you can do. Stay here for a second.” He walked off and soon came back both a large yellow bucket filled with soapy water and a chair. He put the chair on the floor, and set the bucket about five feet away. “Go ahead and sit down,” he said, and after I did that, he added, “give me a second,” as he again did brief sketching motions with his hands. The bright vertical and horizontal lines of light once again enveloped me.
“Okay, try to heat the bucket of water,” he said.
I tried for five minutes, skipping through some of my mental metaphors, but as far as I could tell nothing was happening. Through the bright bars of light I could see the yellow bucket standing there, soap bubbles slowly popping and vanishing, and my efforts were for naught.
“That’s not even close,” he said. “You aren’t reaching the right configuration at all. You tried several different things?”
I nodded.
“Okay… let’s see… don’t worry about affecting the bucket for now. I just want you to relax and let your mind drift…”
I settled back into the chair and tried to relax. I looked up at the ceiling, through the field of energy that enveloped me, and tried to think about how long it had taken to construct the ceiling, wondered how many people came through this particular branch of the Smithsonian per day. I realized I was hungry, and thought about what I wanted to eat, but I was still at that stage where I knew that I was hungry but not what I was hungry for, if that makes any sense.
I had placed my life on hold for the past couple of weeks, chasing this phantom all over the United States, and I realized that there were things that I was going to have to take care of. Bills that were piling up and needed to be paid; the lawn needed to be taken care of; for that matter, there were countless errands around the house that needed to be finished, and it was just going to get worse the longer this took. I wouldn’t worry about the errands, really, if I was just sure that I was actually saving the human race. Somehow, the heroes in the comic books never had to deal with dirty laundry or bills that needed to be paid. They must have had concierges, all of them, that took care of such things and maintained their secret identities while they were trying to fight ultimate evil in far off star systems.
For that matter, work was going to go crazy. The product had shipped and we would no doubt be receiving bugs from the customers, and here I was still on an indeterminate vacation and with no definite return date. They really would need my help, for some of the modules. There were still the changes that I needed to do on the reconciliation section, for example, which was a rat’s nest of logic right now, but I really could clean it up, just by adding this class and moving these others and then implementing this module…
“Stop,” said the other man in the room.
“What?” I said, shaken out of my reverie.
“That was it. What were you just thinking about?”
“Umm…,” I grunted, and oddly enough, even though I had just been thinking about it, I still needed time to think about what I was thinking about. “Coding.”
“Really,” he said. “That’s interesting. You write software programs for a living?”
I nodded.
“uYou actually process it in a very fundamental way. It’s as if your brain was hardwired for it.”
“Well, it comes naturally to me,” I said. “But I wouldn’t say that I’m the best programmer in the world.”
“Nonetheless… there are some possible ramifications. You’ll be interfacing with the Overnet using internal metaphors that are very close to the primary operating patterns of the Overnet itself. I’m not sure what the effects will be. I’d like you to try to heat the water in the bucket again, but treat it as a programming problem.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused.
“To be honest, I’m not sure what I mean,” he said, “but if you can figure out what I mean, I think that will be the key to your problem.”
Everywhere
I went, there were Zen-like statements.
I sat down, closed my eyes, thought about the bucket, tried to treat it
as a programming problem. I pretended
the bucket was object, and I called the (inherited) bucket.raiseTemperature(100), but
nothing happened. I thought about the
temperature of the bucket being a simple property, and imagined changing the
property with a property sheet.
Nothing. This looked like it was
going to be a repeat of the last 10,000 times…
A programmer was sitting down contemplating a bug, and his
manager came along.
“How am I ever going to fix this program today? I’m
exhausted, and my computer keeps crashing.”
The manager considered.
“When you say yourself, or the program, or the computer, you draw a line
between you and the rest of the universe.”
“But how else am I to ask the question?”
“When you realize that everything is the program, and
everything is the computer, and everything is yourself, then you will arrive at
your answer.”
I was in a three dimensional array of memory, I was a piece of memory, and all the objects in the room were around me, existing in the execution process that was the universe, and really, to heat the bucket all I had to do was put a call here, so I did it. A thick smell of ammonia permeated the room, and I noticed that the bucket (object reference #32,132) in front of me was starting to steam (steam: object reference #58,976), and the man (object: #11,212) contained in the room transmitted via sound waves the message: “There, you’ve got it,” when I decided that I needed to speed this whole thing up, there was this ridiculous delay loop in the heat transfer, so I moved the call over to there and let it loop.
The bucket instantly exploded into a huge white cloud of superheated steam that billowed out and flew up to the ceiling. I was startled out of my state of mind, and looked in wonderment at what I had done
“Impressive,” he said. “Not bad at all.” He waved his hands randomly and the energy field around me vanished.
I still didn’t believe that I had done it, not really, but it had felt good, and I wanted to try it again. And again. And again. “Let me do it again,” I said.
He shook his head. “No. I’m not sure what the limits are going to be, and personally, I don’t want to discovered by the Core. If they detect it, it would be like waving a red cape in a bull’s face.”
I temporarily forgot the rush from using the Overnet, interested. “You’re afraid that they’ll find you?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Why do you think I’ve been hiding?”
“They’ll try to kill you?”
“Worse,” he said, and suddenly he looked tired, and I could believe, at that moment, that he was over 2 millennia old. “No, much worse. I’m afraid that they’ll convince me to live.” He walked over to the bench and settled down, looking at nothing in particular.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
He sighed, opened his hands and looked at them. “I haven’t been on Earth my entire life. I’ve wandered the galaxy, seen many amazing things, lived longer than you can imagine. I’m old… old for a race where someone that has lived two millennia is a teenager. There is something in my race called riksha, the black fugue – it harbors the final end, the time when I return to the Universal Core and merge with my ancestors. I want that. I want to end it. I’m so, so tired…”
I didn’t say anything, not knowing what I could say, not knowing any way to help.
He continued, almost academically, “But riksha is almost as much a mental state as a physical one. I haven’t been able to give myself the rest that I crave because I made a mistake, long long ago: I allowed myself to acquire a geas towards the human race. The others of the Core have been treating this like some huge game, a bloody sport where we struggle and move our chess pieces and try to capture the other kings and queens, all with the end goal of getting us a ticket out of here, at which point we’ll drop the chess board onto the floor and leave without cleaning up the pieces. I didn’t think it right…
“Oh, the humans that I have met.
“On the whole, you are such a greedy, shortsighted race, but once in a while there comes someone that is so blindingly ascendant, so bright and quick and good, that it justifies all the rest of it. Some of the humans that I’ve met and known have inspired me, have shaken me down to my soul, and convinced me that the human race was something worthy, something that should be preserved. But ours is an arrogant race, and we do not much care about the welfare of those that we consider less worthy than ourselves. I’ve tried to convince the others that there is a different way to do things, that we can slow the progress and try to work with the humans, but I have not been able to convince them. There is an event – think of it as a combination between a religious upheaval and an election, but that’s only the roughest sketch of what it really is – due to occur on our home planet that the others believe we must be at, and the destruction of the human race is small price for them to pay in order to be on the home planet at the appointed time.”
He stopped for a few seconds, and didn’t
look like he was going to speak any more.
I asked the question that had occurred to me earlier. “Why weren’t there twenty of you? I just don’t understand. If you wanted to advance the human race, why
couldn’t it have gone faster?”
He didn’t look up from the floor while he
answered my question. “We lost our
libraries. We didn’t know the
technology, only the odd little bits that we had retained, and most of them are
worthless. Imagine a biochemist trying
to bring a stone-age tribe up to his level of technology. His information wouldn’t be worthwhile until
the very end… I had an advantage,
maybe, in that I was actually a scientist.
I perhaps retained a little more knowledge, but more importantly, I knew
how to experiment, how to think. The
things that I did as Leonardo were really my inventions, based on
experimentation and maybe one or two hints from the libraries that I happened
to remember. The others from the Core
weren’t equipped to do that.”
“Why would they try to convince you to
live?”
“They might not. It depends on the factions that are
currently in power and where the game stands.
They might think that they need my talents, in which case they’ll try to
convince me that it’s my responsibility to help them succeed… or they might
decide that they don’t need my talents, in which case they’ll want to keep me
alive until I give them the grik.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If they don’t need you, why don’t they just
take the grik after you’re dead?”
“Because… because the Overnet is a very complicated thing, after all. It’s adapted over the millennia and changed
the rules, as it were. When we first
arrived here after the accident, there were almost no restrictions; we could do
anything that we wanted. We were drunk
on endless power, demigods playing with a new toy, and for the most part the
Core members used those powers to battle others. In many ways the tales of these battles have been remembered in
your culture as myths and fables about the gods. Entire civilizations were
wiped out in battles over a single grik
or over an insult.
“Gradually, the Overnet adapted. None of us are experts in reality
engineering, and we aren’t sure of the process that drives all of this, but a
set of rules gradually came about that we call the Guidelines. These Guidelines set real limits on the
power that may be used.”
“So the Guidelines aren’t written down?”
“No,” he shook his head, “they’re more
like rules of thumb that we’ve developed in order to explain the behavior of
the Overnet. You have to realize that
the Overnet is extremely complex – as complex as the human brain – so its
behavior can’t be easily described. But
over the past 500 years, and certainly within the last 50, the rules have gradually
become these:
I thought about the rules that he had
laid out. “Pretty vague.”
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “Very vague, in fact. You should have seen it before they were in
place, though. Power struggles, entire
continents being razed, overload attempts being done every hour… it was insane.”
“Overload attempt?” I asked.
“Umm… what do I say about this… one of
the most fundamental aggressions that one grik
holder can do to another is to attempt to invoke an overload. Extremely easy to do, fairly easy to stop,
but it made for interesting times, because if an overload is successful it
results in a rather significant and messy power overload at every level,
destroying everything in the near vicinity.
One or two of the Core actually lost their lives that way – they
acquired a grik and didn’t have
the knack of defending themselves by the time that someone tried an
overload. It got to be that you’d have
to fend off two or three overload attacks a day, it was some people’s way of
saying hello. That was one of the
better things that the Guidelines did.
“So at any rate,” he continued, “you can
see why they would want to keep me alive.
They want me to give them the ring willingly – and given enough time,
they could probably convince me such that I couldn’t freely enter riksha until I had handed over the
ring. They don’t want to take it and
wait the hundred years, not with the exit point being so close.”
“Why would that matter? They have plenty of griks, don’t they?”
“That one grik might be key, though, at least to one of the Core. It’s
hard to describe. When I mention the
Core’s manipulation of the human race as a game, I sell it short. It’s more:
it’s a game, and it’s a stock market, and a war, and the Superbowl and
World Series, and an arena where Core members can die, and the events that
occur here will have a direct bearing on what happens on our home planet two
hundred years hence. The Core is very
serious about this game, they play for keeps, and they play at a strategic
level.
“The progress of the human race has not
been helped along by a benevolent committee of Core; instead, each faction
picks the countries that it thinks will help it in the next phase of the game,
and the major wars between the countries are as much Core disputes as anything
else. North America, for example, is
collectively owned by three different Core members, and they’ve entered into
kind of an uneasy alliance… but in ten years, that might very well be
different.”
My head was reeling. “This… is all a bit much. I have to think about this.”
He looked at me kindly. “Yes, I understand. I have to think about things as well, figure
out what I’m going to do with you. Tell
you what – I have to take care of my day job.
Why don’t you go get some rest, and we’ll meet back here at 1:00pm
tomorrow?”
‘That sounds good,” I replied.
“And…
this is incredibly important. Do not use your powers. It is going to be very tempting for
you. You’ll want to, more than anything
else, but you must not. There is
another Core member in the area, and you will be detected if you do anything
and I am not there to veil it.”
Now that he said it, I could feel the
yearning, the addiction to the power already starting to form even after just
doing one simple thing with the Overnet.
Nonetheless, I thought that I could resist it. “Okay, I understand. I
won’t do anything.”
I started to leave, and he began to say
something, stopped, and then started again.
“You don’t want to encounter another Core member. Let me just tell you this, to give you an
idea: WWII was a office squabble
between five of the Core members. They
created the Holocaust as a unifying factor. The Cambodian massacre of Pol Pot was a social experiment. They really will stop
at nothing, and do not consider human life at all important.”
I shook hands with him, walked out of the building in silence, and then went back to my hotel. I had something to eat from the minibar and collapsed in bed. I didn’t dream.