Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [17]
They came into e-World in order to destroy the Wish.
Some thought they had been sent by aliens. Some, that e-World had developed a global consciousness, of which Wish Fairies were avatars. Some, that the Fairies were sent by God, as living spirits breathed into a lifeless world, God adding His touch to man’s creation. Some, that they came from the devil, to seduce the posthumans to leave Eden and come back to Earth.
For Nathi, all that mattered was that his little girl carried a Fairy, and that she cared about the girl.
He had to go back to save the girl. But first, he had to be cleansed of any backdoors the wizards of his former order may have hidden in his digital mind.
ONCE UPON A TIME, WHEN BRAINWAVES WERE DISCOVERED, researchers used to marvel at how brains worked so well despite the noise, for the exactness of a digital computer was held up as a model of perfection.
But, that very noise, those same oscillation patterns, were the mental states. Continuously changing, they were both the data and the process. Brains did not have fixed routines and algorithms—unlike the primitive instructionist computer architectures that were easy to debug, to keep under control. Back in the early days of cyberdom, developers aimed to design all chaos out.
But the instructionist computer architectures couldn’t sup? port consciousness. Nothing designed could. Brains evolved. As a brain grew, its neurons formed connections with each other in a process very similar to natural selection. In a grown brain, neurons competed for a chance to fire. The winning connections were rewarded with stronger synaptic strength—they were remembered, selected to embody memories of the sensations and adaptive actions, making possible their repetition, recollection, or imagining—the brain was learning. The brain’s oscillation patterns were being selected for the best fit. For the evolutionary process worked wherever competition, memory, and variation could be found.
For it was the variation that made brains work.
The pink noise.
The brain would never give the same exact response to the same input. Its neurons spontaneously self-organized, without any master clock. Their synchronization remained transient and ever shifting. Interacting, the brain’s billions of os cillators randomly adjusted their phases, now forward, now back, creating “noise”—the brain’s internal context, not determined by but only modified by the external input.
White noise is just a random nonsense. But this noise was pink—a fractal noise, a product of the “neural evolution.” Every previous decision influenced the ones to come in unpredictable ways—a long memory effect. An imperceptibly small change could easily result in sharp swings in response—as if the brain were in a phase transition state, like ice and water at the melting point, except one didn’t know which direction it would take. The resonances were unstable, branching out into many states—just like a ball atop a hill deciding where to roll.
Brains chose.
In the digital world, in comparison, all resonances were predictable. Irrational clock multipliers had been meant to compensate for that. Only, the Wish subverted those multipliers to be rational. That made the posthuman minds just as deterministic or chaotic as their input was. The rest was the control of their environment. The virus made sure that the posthuman minds did not return from a predictable state, sinking instead into a stable balance in a “low potential pit” of undiluted rationality. It lured them by providing what they wanted—leading to the thing they wanted next, more and more predictable each time.
But easy life is easy to control. At first, it looked as if your wishes were being fulfilled. Then—you may think that you’re playing just another virtual reality game, while actually you’re killing real people.
That was what gave the Wish virus its name.
FOR THE FIRST FEW HEALING SESSIONS, NATHI WAS LOCKED in his private world. But later,