Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [16]
Some of the Fallen Watchers called it “a happy childhood on a farm.”
With the external e-World sensors, Nathi watched the Dragon Guard ships dance in space. He couldn’t find a better word for that. With a small but ever-present, ever-changing thrust from their sails, they could ignore the orbital dynamics of free fall. In a magnetosphere this complex and powerful, they spun and flipped, maneuvering so fast that it was dizzying to watch. They were alive—intelligent shapeshifters, morphing their hulls in flight to fit the dance. Beings of grace and beauty.
Humankind had long dreamed of creating artificial intelligence, yet dreading we would only make heartless machines. Who would have thought that our mind’s children would be as emotional as we are? They would have to be. No emotionless computer could compute free movement in response to unpredictable and arbitrary input. Too many degrees of freedom, too little control, too strong the butterfly effect. We had to reinvent emotions, this time as an optimization mechanism for fast decision making—although, condensing a report on thousands of flight parameters into a single human face to show to the pilot had been done for centuries. Free movement was ingrained in the human mind—no, any mind—the never-ending loop of action–feedback–action building the internal model of the world. We knew no other. Thought itself was motion internalized.
So beautiful, he thought. And so vulnerable.
Not physically, but in cyberspace. Like him.
“Do you know what I’d like to morph to, if I could?” the personette said.
“No. What?”
“A ballerina.” Sie sighed.
Of all things, sie desired a human body! Nathi didn’t know what to say.
“I so love to dance,” sie said.
The bride must dance.
He heard a bell. A human shape “materialized” in Nathi’s simulated sensory environment—an avatar of his personal healer, a gentle woman with tired eyes. How many posthumans had she “cleaned” by analyzing their minds? He hoped that the healer wizard corps had their hands full with other rescued posthumans. But he knew the war was not going well for the Order of Flamethrowers of late.
“Sawubona, Nathi,” she said. “It is time for our next session.”
He’d debugged so many brains! It was his turn to have another person look into his mind and probe his shame, his innermost pain—just like he’d done back in the castle with the girl.
HE LIVED THROUGH AN INCESSANT STREAM OF DIGITAL nightmares. Children burning in the jungle. In baptismal pools, the sacred Martian water boiling from the heat of blood. His mother, standing over the piles of skulls in healer’s blue—an apparition? e-World presence? He may never know if she had survived, or if she had become a posthuman. All that mattered was in her eyes—forgiveness.
Why?
In burning shame, he felt the presence of another deep within him, analyzing his mind into cluster units and their subclusters and their subclusters too—the intertwining, multitiered constructs of his reality, the nested fractal patterns of his consciousness—deriving first-and higher-order Rényi entropies, manipulating clustering and integration indexes. Except, this time it wasn’t the inhuman presence that had watched him run through the nightmares back on Mars. For that had been the Fairy that the girl carried in her digital substratum, thus infecting him.
Wish Fairies were purely cyber-beings that had appeared mysteriously in e-World before the current war began, but they were no viruses—they didn’t reproduce. Nobody knew where they came from. No faction claimed credit for developing them. No one was able to communicate with a Wish Fairy either. They were too alien, impenetrable, as if their perception space