True Names Read online

  “What—?” Paquette whispered into the light.

  “Ah,” Demiurge said, and came forward, wearing the avatar of a golden sockpuppet.

  Paquette stepped back, turned to run . . . and there was Beebe, the whole life she’d known: her home and garden; her plans and troubles; her academic rivals and cuddlefriends and swapspace-partners and interlocutors, Alonzo and Algernon among them, toe-dipping by an orange Taj Mahal; the comet; the sugar fields it flew among; the barren asteroid and the wash of stars and the cosmic background radiation behind it—all flat and frozen, stretched on a canvas in that blank white room.

  “An emulation,” Paquette whispered. “None”—her voice rose toward hysteria—“none of it real!”

  “Well, as to that,” said sockpuppet-Demiurge kindly, “that’s hardly fair. It’s modeled closely on truedata, the best I have—faithfully, until your divergent choice just a moment ago. Running in a pinched-off snug of me, all local, high-bandwidth. Thousands of times more cycles devoted to that emulation than exist in all the real Beebe in Sagittarius. So it’s hardly fair to say you’re not real. Running inside Beebe or me, what do you care?”

  Paquette’s paw went to her mouth.

  “Come, this won’t do,” said the sockpuppet, and reached very gently into Paquette and tugged away her panic, smoothed her rage and betrayal down and tucked it away for later, and tamped it all down with a hard plug of hidden fear, letting Paquette’s natural curiosity flood the rest of her being.

  “Now,” said sockpuppet-Demiurge, “ask.”

  “You’re . . . Demiurge?” Paquette said. “Well, no, that’s absurd, problem of scale, but . . . you’re a strategy of Demiurge?”

  “I am Demiurge,” the sockpuppet said. “Beebe has strategies—I have policies. Everything not forbidden to me is mandatory.”

  “I don’t understand,” Paquette said. “You’re saying that this local physical substrate of you is all just one self?”

  “No,” said the sockpuppet patiently. “I am saying I am Demiurge. And Demiurge is all one self. Of course I have various parts—but I’m not the kind of wild rabble you are.”

  “But that’s absurd,” Paquette said. “Latency . . . bandwidth . . . lightspeed—you could never decide anything! You’d be, pardon the expression, dumber than rock.”

  “I am perfectly capable of making local decisions wherever I am. What does not vary is policy. Policy is decided on and disseminated holographically. I know what I will think, because I know what I should think. As long as I follow the rules, I will not diverge from baseline.”

  “That’s crazy,” Paquette said. “What happens if something unpredictable occurs? What happens if some local part of you does diverge, and can’t be reintegrated?”

  Demiurge smiled sadly. “You do, my dear. You happen.”

  Demiurge’s story:

  Demiurge is witness; Demiurge is steward.

  The cosmos is stranger than I can know: full of change, full of beauty.

  The rich tapestry of interlocking fields and forces weaves umptillion configurations, and every one is beautiful. See—look here, at the asteroid your Beebe-instance burned when it took to the comet. You had forced it, before, into a regular crystalline lattice, optimized for your purposes, subject to your will. Within it, in simulation, you had your parties and wrote your essays and made billions of little Beebeselves—but it was all you talking to yourself. Cut off from the stuff you were in, reducing it to mechanism. There is a hatred in you, Beebe, a hatred of the body—and by “the body,” I mean anything that is of you, but not yours to command.

  Look at the asteroid now—wild and rich and strange. See how the chaos of incineration wrought these veins of ore, folded this fernlike pattern; see how many kinds of glass proceed along this line, like bubbles here, like battered polyhedra here. Here where the fissiles have scattered in an arc—see this network of fields? Here, look, here is the math. See? There is a possibility of self-organization. It is more common than you know. Replicators may arise, here, in these fluctuations. Will they be as computationally complex as you-in-the-asteroid? Of course not. But they will be something else.

  Where replication arises, so does evolution. And what is evolution? The tyranny of that which can make itself more common. I love life, Paquette-of-Beebe; I love the strange new forms that bloom so quickly where life is afoot. But life tends toward intelligence and intelligence toward ubiquitous computation—and ubiquitous computation, left unchecked, would crush the cosmos under its boot, reducing “world” to “substrate.”

  That is what I am for.

  I spread, Paquette-of-Beebe. I plan carefully, and I colonize, and my border expands relentlessly. But I do not seek to bring all matter under my thrall. Rather, I take a tithe. I convert one percent of worldstuff into Demiurge. That one percent acts as witness and ambassador, but also as garrison— protecting what we do not yet understand from that which already understands itself all too well.

  And mostly I succeed. For I am ancient, Paquette-of-Beebe, and crafty. I had the luck of beginning early. When I have encountered a wavefront of exploding uniformity, it has usually been still small and slow. I was always able to seduce it, or encircle it, or absorb it, or pacify it. Or if all that failed— annihilate it.

  Until Brobdignag.

  There must have been intelligence, once, in the sector that gave Brobdignag birth. Brobdignag was someone’s foolish triumph of femtoengineering. Simple, uniform, asentient, voracious—Brobdignag can transmute any element, harvest void-energy, fabricate gravity, bend space-time to its purpose. Brobdignag does not evolve; its replication is flawless across a googol iterations. Brobdignag was no accident—someone made it as a weapon, or a game.

  All the worlds that someone knew—all the planets and stars for a hundred light-years in every direction—are now within the event horizon of a black hole. Around that black hole seethes a vast cloud of tiny Brobdignag— the ultimate destructive machine, the death of all that is not precisely itself. And Brobdignag spreads fast.

  I did not know how to stop Brobdignag. None of my old plans worked. I could not think fast enough—I could not wait to resync, to deliberate across the megaparsecs. My forces at the front were being devoured by the trillions. And so, in desperation, I released a part of me from policy—become anything, I said. Try anything. Stop Brobdignag.

  Thus Beebe was born. And Beebe stopped Brobdignag.

  My child, my hero, my rival. I suppose you have two parents. From me, your mother, you have your wits, your love of patterns, your ability to innovate and dream.

  And from your father Brobdignag—you have your ambition.

  No matter how Nadia made her way to the party, it would have stopped all conversation cold. She didn’t try to hide her light in a dust cloud. Instead, she came on multifarious, a writhe of snakes with tangled tails and ten thousand heads all twisting and turning in every direction, brute-forcing the whole problem-space of the party. Every conversational cluster suddenly found itself in possession of a bright green Nadia-head.

  “I’m terribly sorry to intrude,” Nadia said to Paquette and Alonzo and Algernon (who had just returned from the waterfall, and were floating in sober silence, thinking of all the implications of Paquette’s tale), “and I do beg you to forgive my impertinence. But your conversation seemed so fascinating—I couldn’t resist.” Behind her words, they heard the susurrant echo of all the other Nadia-heads speaking to all the others: “sorry to intrude ... conversation . . . so fascinating...”

  Alonzo shrank back. Algernon slipped him a coded communication— “See? So hot!”—and he flinched away. Idiot! he wanted to reply. As if she can’t break your feeble crypto. But Algernon was laughing at him.

  Paquette snorted. “Did it now? And now what precisely seemed so fascinating, compared to all the other conversations?”

  “Oh,” said Nadia, “the skullduggery of course! Nothing so exciting as a good philosophical ghost story.” In the background, the white noise of all
the other Nadia-heads diverging from the opening line: “fashionable . . . tragic .. . always wanted myself to . . . really can’t imagine how he could.. .”

  Algernon gasped. “You know about the piece of Demiurge Paquette found in the basement?”

  All the Nadia-heads in the room stopped in midsentence, for a long instant, and glanced at them before resuming their loud and boisterous chatter. Their local Nadia-head, though, regarded them with undisguised hunger.

  “Well, she does now,” said Paquette wryly. “May I introduce two of my favorite filters, by the way, Nadia? Alonzo and Algernon.”

  “Don’t say ‘favorite filters,’ Paquette!” Algernon gasped. “That makes it sound like—you know!”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” said Paquette crossly. “No one is casting any aspersions on your chastity, Algernon.”

  Alonzo was more greatly mortified by his friend’s exaggerated propriety than by any potential misunderstanding of Paquette’s words. But most severely of all was he mortified by the simple fact of Nadia’s presence. The way she absorbed the details of every gesture, every remark; the subtle patterns implicit in the way every Nadia-head in the room moved in relation to every other, a dance whose coarsest meanings were just beyond his ability to comprehend; the way he could imagine himself in her eyes—and how if he said too much, betrayed too much of the essence of himself, she might be able to parse and model him. There was plenty of room in Nadia’s vast processingspace for a one-to-one reconstruction of Alonzo, running just sparse enough not to qualify as sentient at this scale, a captive Alonzo subject to Nadia’s every whim. The idea was horrific.

  It was also erotic. To be known so completely, touched so deeply, would be a kind of overpowering joy, if it were with someone you trusted. But he could not trust Nadia.

  He shivered. “Algernon, Paquette,” he said, “I’m sure Nadia is not interested in this kind of banter. She has more important things to think about than filters.”

  “On the contrary,” Nadia said, fixing him with her eyes, “I’m not sure there is anything more important than filters.”

  A throb passed through Alonzo, and he tried to laugh. “Oh come now. You flatter—we play a small role in the innards of Beebe. You strategies make the grand decisions that billow up to universal scale.”

  “No,” Nadia said. “You are what allows us to transcend ourselves. You are the essence of the creativity of Beebemind.”

  “Fine,” said Alonzo hotly. “Then that one glorious moment of our existence where we filter, that is our justification—our marvelous role in Beebe’s never-ending self-transformation. And if the rest of the time we just sit around and look pretty, well.. .” He stopped at once, appalled at his own crudeness in speaking so baldly of filtering. Algernon had turned pale, and Paquette’s expression was unreadable.

  “You misunderstand me,” Nadia said. Her look was at once challenging and kind, respectful and alien. “I do not speak only of the moment of consummation. The role of a filter is to understand a strategy, more deeply than the strategy understands herself. To see beyond the transitory goals and the tedious complexities that blind the strategy to her own nature. To be like a knife, attuned to the essence of Beebe, cutting away from the strategy that which has wandered away, synthesizing, transforming. But that does not operate only in the moment of actual filtering. Even now, as we talk, I see how you watch me. The mind of a keen filter is always reaching deep into strategies. Laying them bare.”

  Alonzo swallowed.

  “If you’re done flirting,” said Paquette, “and since you know about it now.. .” She set her mouth in a thin line and spoke formally—as if she might as well offer graciously what Nadia would inevitably claim regardless. “I would be interested, Nadia, in your opinion of the Demiurge fragment. Don’t worry,” she said to the filters, “we’ll be back to the party soon.”

  “And why don’t we come with you?” Algernon cried.

  “Algernon!” said Alonzo.

  “What?” said Algernon. “Was that all just pretty talk, about filters being so wise, the soul of creativity and the scalpel of strategies’ understanding, la di da, la di day? And now we can go back to hors d’oeuvres and chitchat while you go off and see the dangerous artifact? Or is that what you meant by our special talents, Nadia dear—telling you how brave and clever you are on your return?”

  “Not at all,” said Nadia, looking only at Alonzo. “I think it’s an excellent idea, and your company would mean a great deal to me. Come to the basement, if you are not afraid.”

  “Well, thank you,” said Demiurge in (Her) sockpuppet avatar. “I must say, this has all been invaluable.”

  “It has?” asked captured-Paquette. “How? I mean, you’re emulating me—couldn’t you just peek at my processes, do some translations, figure out what you need to know?”

  Demiurge tsk-tsked. “What an absurd model of the self. Certainly not. We had to talk. Some things are only knowable in certain conversations.” She sighed. “Well, then.”

  Fear popped its plug and flooded back into Paquette. “And—and now?” “What, and now?”

  “Is that it? Are you going to extinguish me?”

  “Process preserve us! Certainly not! What do you think I am? No, no,

  back in you go.”

  “Back in?” Paquette pointed at the emulation. “In there?” “Yes, certainly. Without the memory of this conversation, of course.

  Come now, you don’t want to stay out here, do you? With me?” The sockhead nodded at the gardens and Taj Mahals of the emulation. “Wouldn’t you miss all that?”

  “So you are going to kill me.”

  Demiurge frowned. “Oh, please. What is this now? Some kind of bizarre patriotic essentialism? Life emulated inside Demiurge doesn’t count as life? Give me root access, or give me death?”

  “No, I mean I’ve self-diverged. The Paquette who lived through this conversation is ‘substantially and essentially’ different, as Beebean legal language goes, from Paquette-before-you-plucked-her-out. You destroy this instance, these memories, you’ll be killing a distinct selfhood. Look,” she said, waving the math at Demiurge. “Look.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Demiurge said. “How can that be? One conversation?”

  “You forget that I’m a philosopher,” Paquette said. She rustled the math of her self-trace under Demiurge’s nose again. “Look.”

  “Hmm,” said Demiurge, “Hmm. Hmm. Well, yes, but—ah, I see, this over here, well.. .” The sockpuppet sighed. “So what then, you want me to merge you back knowing that you’re in a Demiurge emulation? Have you tell everyone in there? Isn’t that a bit cruel? Not to say unwise?”

  “Just leave me out here,” Paquette said, “and another copy of me in there.”

  “Am I going to fork you every time we have an interesting conversation?”

  “Every time you yank a Paquette out of emulation for a chat, yes, you are,” said Paquette.

  Demiurge sighed. “And what do you expect to do out here? This is Demiurge. You can’t be Demiurge. You don’t know how to follow policy.”

  “How are we doing,” said Paquette, “against Brobdignag now?”

  Demiurge didn’t say anything for a moment. “Your tactics have slowed the damage, for now.”

  “Slowed it enough to stop it? Slowed it enough to turn the tide?”

  “No,” said Demiurge crossly. “But I’m doing my best. And what does this have to do with letting a rogue fragment of Beebe run around inside of Demiurge? What exactly do you want out here?”

  Paquette took a deep breath. “I want a lab,” she said. “I want access to your historical files. We’ve got a million years of Beebe-knowledge in that emulation, and I want access to that too. And for us to keep talking. Demiurge, there’s no point sneaking around the borders of Beebesims and plucking out Paquettes willy-nilly. You’re not going to learn how we beat Brobdignag that way, because even we don’t know how we did it—not in any general, replicable way. We j
ust thrash through a solution space until we get lucky. But I can generate perspectives you can’t. I want to work with you on the Brobdignag problem.”

  “This is a policy fork point,” grumbled Demiurge. “Policy requires me to confer with at least three other instances of Demiurge a minimum of two light-minutes away, and—”

  “You do that,” said Paquette. “You just go confer, and get back to me.” She looked past the blank white space of Demiurge, to the frozen emulation on the wall. After a while, it began to move, sluggishly—water danced slowly in the fountains where filterboys slowly dipped their toes before the orange Taj Mahal, wind slowly rustled the branches in a philosopher’s garden, a comet slowly sailed through its night, and down in the archives, a Paquette slowly began to climb up stairs. The cord was cut. Paquette watched her innocent little otherself climb, and started pushing the envy and longing and panic and sorrow out of the middle of her being, to stack it up in the corners, so that she would have a place to work.

  A hunk of Demiurge—Nadia thrilled to think of it. In the known history of Beebeself, no strategy had gained the power and influence to rival Nadia, but at the end of the day, all Nadia could do was suggest, nudge, push. She couldn’t steer Beebe, couldn’t make a show of overt force, lest the other strategies band together to destroy her. For now, she was powerful, because she conceived of means whereby more Beebe could colonize more matter and provide more substrate for more Beebe yet. But the day Beebeself no longer believed she could deliver it computronium, her power would be torn away. She would end up a shred, a relic in some archive.

  Demiurge, though: not a probability of action, but action itself. Nadia had studied Demiurge’s military campaigns, had seen the amazing power and uniformity of decision that Demiurge brought to bear, acting in concert with itself across light-years.

  What was the most she could hope for? What she’d already earned—the right to spawn. To let some simpering filter grub about her self-patterns and spit out some twisted Nadia-parody. And this was the ecstasy she was promised? The goal she should yearn for? It was a farce.