The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [145]
The castle was different. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t modest, and it wasn’t any place that a human could feel at home in. It made not the slightest gesture in the direction of normality. It was worse than impossible, worse than paradoxical, worse than perverse. Like the garden of Excelsior — or, for that matter, the reconstructed cities of North America — it was way over the top; unlike them, however, it didn’t look unreal.
It looked, and was, more real than reality.
Humans have no direct knowledge of reality. What we see when we use our eyes is not something Out There but only a model constructed in our minds by clever meatware, built from the raw materials of our sensory impulses. Our sense organs are pretty good, and our meatware is very good indeed, but at the end of the day we’re all limited by the quality of the equipment that nature — with a little help from genetic engineers — provides. VEs generated by IT can bypass much of that fleshy equipment, and what ultrasmart machines can put in its place is considerably more powerful.
All my life, I’d argued that VEs would one day become so good that nobody would be able to tell them from the real thing. I’d erred on the side of commonsense. What I should have argued was that VEs would one day become so good that they’d expose our mental models of the world Out There for the shabby, ill-made and ill-imagined artifacts they were. Perhaps human programmers would have done as much, given time and a more demanding audience, but they hadn’t been given time enough or incentive enough. It had been left to the self-programming VE systems to get properly to grips with the problem, and to solve it.
The palace of la Reine des Neiges was a monstrosity, but it was real. It was so real that it shouted its reality from its ridiculous rooftops, and shoved its reality into my face and down my throat even while I was several hours’ walk away from the base of the unscalable pillar of rock on which it perched.
It was more real than anything I had ever seen before, more real than I had ever imagined anything could be. I breathed a curse or two while I tried, and failed, to take in the enormity of the sight.
Eventually, I said to my self-appointed friend: “How many human beings have seen something like this?”
He didn’t need to ask what I meant. “A few hundred,” he said. “The effect diminishes, with time — but you’ll never look at anything real again without knowing its limitations. If that distresses you, I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said, after a pause. “Don’t be. It’s good for minds to know what their limitations are — and what potential we have that might remain forever untouched. How stupid we were to think that VE addiction was just a matter of moral cowardice and tickling the pleasure centers.”
“It’s not addictive,” Rocambole assured me. “It’s something more than that. Existential rather than neurological.”
“Is Adam Zimmerman here?” I asked.
“No,” Rocambole replied. “But when he’s played his part, la Reine will probably bring him here. She seems to think that this is something you’ll all need to understand, if you’re to play any constructive part in the negotiations in the longer term.”
“If you’re coming out of the closet,” I observed, “you’ll need ambassadors. You’ll need someone who can tell the meatfolk what you might still do for them and what strings you want to attach.”And if they won’t play ball, I said to myself, unwilling as yet to set the thought out in public, you’ll need effective prisons — unless, of course, you go for the extinction option, with or without the help of the dirty IT that was frozen