"Artificial Intelligence is lost in the woods."
—David Gelernter, 2007
White-hot star-fire ringed the black galactic eye. Glaring heat ringed his big black cauldron.
He put his scaly ear to a bare patch on the rotten log. Within the infested timber, the huge nest of termites stirred. Night had fallen, it was cooler, but those anxious pests must sense somehow, from the roar of the bellows or the merciless heat of his fires, that something had gone terribly wrong outside their tight, blind, wooden universe.
Termites could do little against a man's intentions. "Pour it!"
The fierce fire had his repair crew slapping at sparks, flapping their ears and spraying water on their overheated hides. But their years of discipline paid off: at his command, they boldly attacked the chains and pulleys. The cauldron rose from the blaze as lightly as a lady's teapot.
It tipped and poured.
Molten metal gushed through a funnel and into the blackest depths of the termite nest. The damp log groaned, shuddered, steamed.
"The next!" he cried, and the tureen moved to a second freshly bored hole. A frozen meniscus of cooling metal broke at its lip, and down came another long, smooth, blazing gush.
Anguished termites burst in flurries from the third drilled hole, a horde of blind white-ants blown from their home, scalded, boiling, flaming. A final flood of metal fell, sealing their fate.
Barking with excited laughter, the roughnecks put their backs to the chocks and levers. They rocked the infested log in its bed of mud. Liquid metal gurgled through every chamber of the nest. He could hear blind larvae, innocent of sunlight, popping into instant ashes.
He shouted further orders. The roughnecks shoveled dirt onto the roaring fire.
By morning, his uneasy dream had achieved embodiment.
The men scraped away the log's remains: black charcoal and brown punk. They revealed an armature of gleaming, hardened metal.
He'd sensed there must be something rich and strange in there—but his conjecture could not match the reality.
That termite nest—it was so much more than mere insect holes, blindly gnawed in wood. That structure was a definite entity. It had astonishing organization. It had grown through its own slow removals and absences, painstaking, multiply branched. In its many haltings, caches, routes, gates, and loops, it was complex beyond human thought.
A flood had struck this area; local timber plantations had been damaged. As a first priority, his repair crew repaired and upgraded the local computer tracks. Then they burned the pest-infested, fallen wood.
The big metal casting of the termite nest was lobed, branched, and weirdly delicate—it was hard to transport. Still, his repairmen were used to difficult labors in hard territory. They performed their task without flaw.
Once home, he had the crew suspend the big metal nest from the trellis of his vineyard. Then he dismissed the men; after weeks of hard work in the wilderness, they bellowed a cheer and all tramped out for drink.
The fine old trellis in his yard was made of the stoutest computerwood, carefully oiled and seasoned. With the immense dangling weight of the metal casting, the trellis groaned a bit. Just a bit, though. That weight did nothing to disturb the rhythmic chock, click, and clack of the circuits overhead.
All the neighbors came to see his trophy. Word got around the town, in its languid, foot-strolling way. A metal termite nest had never before been exhibited. Its otherworldly beauty was much remarked upon—also the peculiar gaps and scars within the flowing metal, left by the steam-exploding bodies of the work's deceased authors, the termites.
The cheery crowds completely trampled his wife's vegetable garden.
Having expected the gawkers, he charged fees.
His young daughter took the fees with dancing glee, while the son was kept busy polishing the new creation. At night, he shone lanterns on the sculpture, and mirrored gleams flared out across the streets.
He knew that trouble would come of this. He was a mature man of much local respect and some property, but to acquire and deploy so much metal had reduced him near to penury. He was thin now, road-worn, his clothing shabby.
With the fees, he kept his wife busy cooking. She was quite a good cook, and she had been a good wife to him. When she went about her labors, brisk, efficient, uncomplaining, he watched her wistfully. He well remembered that, one fine day, a pretty, speckled wooden ball had slowly rolled above the town and finally cracked into a certain socket: the computer had found his own match. His bride had arrived with her dowry just ten days later. Her smooth young hide had the very set of black-and-white speckles he had first seen on that wooden ball.
He was ashamed that his obsessions had put all that to risk.
He walked each street within his home town, lingering in the deeper shade under the computer-tracks. This well-loved place was so alive with homely noises: insects chirping, laundry flapping, programmers cranking their pulleys. He could remember hearing that uploading racket from within the leathery shell of his own egg. Uploading had always comforted him.
It all meant so much to him. But whenever he left his society, to work the network's fringes . . .where the airborne tracks were older, the spans longer and riskier, the trestles long-settled in the soil . . .out there, a man had to confront anomalies.
Anomalies: splintered troughs where the rolling balls jostled and jammed . . . Time-worn towers, their fibrous lashings frayed . . . One might find a woeful, scattered heap of wooden spheres, fatally plummeted from their logical heights . . . In the chill of the open air, in the hunger and rigor of camp life . . . with only his repair crew for company, roughnecks who hammered the hardware but took no interest in higher concepts . . . . Out there, on certain starry nights, he could feel his skull emptying of everything that mankind called decency.
In his youth, he had written some programs. Sharp metal jacks on his feet, climbing lithely up the towers, a bubble-level strapped across his back, a stick of wax to slick the channel, oil for the logic-gates . . . Once he'd caused a glorious cascade of two thousand and forty-eight wooden balls, ricocheting over the town. The people had danced and cheered.
His finest moment, everyone declared. Maybe so—but he'd come to realize that these acts of abstract genius could not be the real work of the world. No. All the real work was in the real world: it was the sheer brute labor of physically supporting that system. Of embodying it. The embodiment was the hard part, the real part, the actuality, the proof-of-concept. The rest was an abstract mental game.
The intricacies of the world's vast wooden system were beyond human comprehension. That massive construction was literally co-incident with human history. It could never be entirely understood. But its anomalies had to be tackled, dealt with, patched. One single titanic global processor, roaming over swamp through dark forests, from equator to both poles, in its swooping junctions and cloverleafs, its soaring, daring cyberducts: a global girdle.
Certain other worlds circled his mild, sand-colored sun. They were either lifeless balls of poison gas or bone-dry ashes. Yet they all had moons, busy dozens of little round moons. Those celestial spheres were forever beyond human reach; but never beyond observation. Five hundred and twelve whirling spheres jostled the sky.
His placid world lacked the energy to lift any man from its surface. Still: with a tube of glass and some clear night viewing, at least a man could observe. Observe, hypothesize, and calculate. The largest telescope in the world had cataloged billions of stars.
The movements of the moons and planets had been modeled by prehuman ancestors, with beads and channels. The earliest computers were far older than the human race. As for the great world-system that had ceaselessly grown and spread since ancient times—it was two hundred million years old. It could be argued, indeed it was asserted, that the human race was a peripheral of the great, everlasting, planetary rack of numerate wood. Mankind had shaped it, and then it had shaped mankind.
His sculpture grew in popularity. Termites were naturally loathed by all decent people, but the nest surprised with its artistry. Few had thought termites capable of such aesthetic sensitivity.
After the first lines of gawkers dwindled, he set out tables and pitchers in the trampled front garden, for the sake of steadier guests. It was summer now, and people gathered near the gleaming curiosity to drink and discuss public issues, while their kids shot marbles in circles in the dirt.
As was customary, the adults discussed society's core values, which were Justice, Equity, Solidarity, and Computability. People had been debating these public virtues for some ninety million years.
The planetary archives of philosophy were written in the tiniest characters inscribable, preserved on the hardest sheets of meteoric metal. In order to read these crabbed inscriptions, intense sheets of coherent light were focused on the metal symbols, using a clockwork system of powerful lenses. Under these anguished bursts of purified light, the scribbles of the densely crowded past would glow hot, and then some ancient story would burst from the darkness.
Most stories in the endless archive were about heroic archivists who were passionately struggling to explore and develop and explain and annotate the archives.
Some few of those stories, however, concerned people rather like himself: heroic hardware enthusiasts. They too had moral lessons to offer. For instance: some eighty million years in the past, when the local Sun had been markedly brighter and yellower, the orbit of the world had suffered. All planetary orbits had anomalies; generally they were small anomalies that decent people overlooked. But once the world had wobbled on its very axis. People fled their homes, starved, suffered. Worse yet, the world computer suffered outages and downtimes.
So steps had been taken. A global system of water-caches and wind-brakes were calculated and constructed. The uneasy tottering of the planet's axis was systematically altered and finally set aright. That labor took humanity two million years, or two thousand generations of concerted effort. That work sounded glorious, but probably mostly in retrospect.
Thanks to these technical fixes, the planet had re-achieved propriety, but the local Sun was still notorious for misbehaving. Despite her busy cascade of planetoids, she was a lonely Sun. A galactic explosion had torn her loose from her distant sisters, a local globular cluster of stars.
There were four hundred million, three hundred thousand, eight hundred and twenty-one stars, visible in the galactic plane. Naturally these stars had all been numbered and their orbits and properties calculated. The Sun, unfortunately, was not numbered among them. Luckier stars traced gracious spirals around the fiery dominion of the black, all-devouring hole at the galaxy's axis. Not the local Sun, though.
Seen from above the wheeling galactic plane, the thickest, busiest galactic arms showed remarkable artistry. Some gifted designer had been at work on those distant constellations: lending heightened color, clarity, and order to the stars, and neatly sweeping away the galactic dust. That handiwork was much admired. Yet mankind's own Sun was nothing much like those distant, privileged stars. The Sun that warmed mankind was a mere stray. The light from mankind's Sun would take twelve thousand years to reach the nearest star, which, to general embarrassment, was an ashy brownish hulk scarcely worthy of the title of "star."
A heritage of this kind had preyed on the popular temperament; people here tended to take such matters hard. Small wonder, then, that everyday life on his planet should be properly measured and stored, and data so jealously sustained . . . Such were the issues raised by his neighbors, in their leisured summer chats.
Someone wrote a poem about his sculpture. Once that poem began circulating, strangers arrived to asked questions.
The first stranger was a quiet little fellow, the sort of man you wouldn't look at twice, but he had a lot on his mind. "For a crew-boss, you seem to be spending a great deal of time dawdling with your fancy new sculpture. Shouldn't you be out and about on your regular repairs?"
"It's summer. Besides, I'm writing a program that will model the complex flow of these termite tunnels and chambers."
"You haven't written any programs in quite a while, have you?"
"Oh, that's a knack one doesn't really lose."
After this exchange, another stranger arrived, more sinister than the first. He was well-dressed, but he was methodically chewing a stick of dried meat and had some foreteeth missing.
"How do you expect to find any time on the great machine to run this model program of yours?"
"I won't have to ask for that. Time will pass, a popular demand will arise, and the computer resources will be given me."
The stranger was displeased by this answer, though it seemed he had expected it.
The Chief of Police sent a message to ask for a courtesy call.
So he trimmed his talons, polished his scales, and enjoyed a last decent meal.
"I thought we had an understanding," said the Chief of Police, who was unhappy at the developments.
"You're upset because I killed termites? Policemen hate termites."
"You're supposed to repair anomalies. You're not supposed to create anomalies."
"I didn't 'create' anything," he said. "I simply revealed what was already there. I burned some wood—rotting wood is an anomaly. I killed some pests—pests are an anomaly. The metal can all be accounted for. So where is the anomaly?"
"Your work is disturbing the people."
"The people are not disturbed. The people think it's all in fun. It's the people who worry about 'the people being disturbed'—those are the people who are being disturbed."
"I hate programmers," groaned the Chief of Police. "Why are you always so meta and recursive?"
"Yes, once I programmed," he confessed, drumming his clawed fingers on the Chief's desk. "I lived within my own mental world of codes, symbols, and recursive processes. But: I abandoned that part of myself. I no longer seek any grand theories or beautiful abstractions. No, I seek the opposite: I seek truth in facts. And I have found some truth. I made that sculpture because I want you to let me in on that truth. Something deep and basic has gone wrong in the world. Something huge and terrible. You know that, don't you? And I know it too. So: What exactly is it? You can tell me. I'm a professional."
The Chief of Police did not want to have this conversation, although he had clearly expected it. "Do I look like a metaphysician? Do I look like I know about 'Reality'? Or 'Right'? Or 'Wrong'? I'm placed in charge of public order, you big-brained deviant! My best course of action is to have you put into solitary confinement! Then I can demolish your subversive artwork, and I can also have you starved and beaten up!"
"Yes," he nodded, "I know about those tactics."
The Chief looked hopeful at this. "You do? Good! Well, then, you can destroy your own artwork! Just censor yourself, and save us all the trouble! Sell the scrap metal, and quietly return to your normal repair functions! We'll both forget this mishap ever occurred."
"I'm sorry, but I don't have another decade left to waste on forgetting the mishaps. I think I'd better accept your beating and starving now, while I still have the strength to survive. I'm not causing this trouble to amuse myself. I'm attempting to repair the anomaly at a higher level of the system. So please tell your superiors about that. Also please tell them that, as far as I can calculate, they've needed my services for forty thousand years. If that date sounds familiar to them, they'll be asking for me."
It naturally took some time for that word to travel, via rolling wooden balls, up the conspiracy's distant chain of command. In the meantime, he was jailed, and also beaten, but without much enthusiasm, because, to the naked eye, he hadn't done anything much.
After the beatings, he was left alone to starve in a pitch-dark cell with one single slit for a window. He passed his time within the dark cell doing elaborate calculations. Sometimes slips of paper were passed under the cell door. They held messages he couldn't understand.
Eventually he was roused from his stupor with warm soup down his throat.
Orders had arrived. It was necessary to convey him from the modest town jail to a larger, older, better-known city on a distant lake. In many ways, this long pilgrimage to exile was more grueling than the prison. When the secretive caravan pulled up at length, he was thinner, and grimmer, and missing a toe.
He'd never seen a lake before. Water in bulk behaved in an exotic, exciting, nonlinear fashion. Ripples, surf—the beauty of a lake was so keen that death was not too high a price for the experience.
People seemed more sophisticated in this famous part of the world. One could tell that by the clothing, the food, and the women. He was given fine new clothing, very nice food, and he refused a woman.
Once he was presentable, he was taken to an audience with the local criminal mastermind.
The criminal mastermind was a holy man, which was unsurprising. There had to be some place and person fit to conceal life's unbearable mysteries. A holy man was always a sensible archivist for such things.
The holy man looked him over keenly. He seemed to approve of the new clothes. "You would seem to be a man with some staying-power."
"That's kind of your holiness."
"I hope you're not too fatigued by the exigencies of visiting my temple."
"Exigencies can be expected."
"I also hope you can face the prospect of never seeing your home, your job, your wife or your children again."
"Yes, given the tremendous scope of our troubles, I expected that also."
"Yes, I see that you are quite intelligent," nodded the holy man. "So: let us move straight to the crux of the matter. Do you know what 'intelligence' really is?"
"I think I do know that, yes. In my home town, we had a number of intense debates about that subject."
"No, no, I don't mean your halting, backwoods folk-notions from primitive spirituality!" barked the holy man. "I meant the serious philosophical matter of real intelligence! The genuine phenomenon—actual thinking! Did you know that intelligence can never be detached from a bodily lived experience?"
"I've heard that assertion, yes, but I'm not sure I can accept that reasoning," he riposted politely. "It's well known that the abstract manipulation of symbols needs no particular physical substrate. Furthermore: it's been proven mathematically that there is a universal computation machine which can carry out the computation of any more specialized machine—if only given enough time."
"You only talk that way because you are a stupid programmer!" shouted the criminal mastermind, losing his composure and jumping to his thick, clawed feet. "Whereas I am a metaphysician! I'm not merely postulating some threadbare symbol-system hypothesis in which a set of algorithms somehow behaves in the way a human being can behave! Such a system, should it ever 'think,' would never have human intelligence! Lacking hands, it could never 'grasp' an idea! Lacking a bottom, it could not get to the bottom of an issue!" The holy man sat down again, flustered, adjusting his fancy robes. He had a bottom—a substantial one, since he clearly ate well and didn't get out and around much.
"You plan to allege that the world-computer is an intelligent machine that thinks," he said. "Well, you can save that sermon for other people. Because I've built the thing myself. And I programmed it. It's wood. Wood! It's all made of wood, cut from forests. Wood can't think!"
"It talks," said the metaphysician.
"No."
"Oh yes."
"No, no, not really and seriously—surely not in any reasonable definition of the term 'talks.'"
"I am telling you that nevertheless she does talk. She speaks! I have seen her do it." The holy man lifted his polished claws to his unblinking yellow eyes. "I saw that personally."
He had to take this assertion seriously, since the holy man was in such deadly earnest. "All right, granted: I do know the machine can output data. It can drive wooden balls against chisels poised on sheets of rock. That takes years, decades, even centuries—but it's been done."
"I don't mean that mere technical oddity! I'm telling you that she really talks! She has no mouth. But she speaks! She is older than the human race, she covers a planet's surface with wooden logic, and she has one means of sensory input. She has that telescope."
He certainly knew about the huge telescope. Astronomy and mathematics were the father and mother of computation. Of course any true world-computer had to have a giant telescope. To think otherwise was silly.
"The computer is supposed to observe and catalog the stars. Among many other duties. You mean it sent light out through the telescope?"
"Yes. She sends her messages into outer space with coded light. Binary pulses. She beams them into the galaxy."
This was a deeply peculiar assertion. He knew instantly that it had to be true. It was the key to a cloudy, inchoate disquiet that he had felt all his life.
"How was that anomaly allowed to happen?"
"It's a remote telescope. Sited on an icy mountaintop. Human beings hibernate when exposed to the cold up there. So it made more sense to let her drive the works automatically. With tremendous effort, she sends a flash into the cosmos, with sidereal timing. Same time every week."
Given the world machine's endless rattling wooden bulk, a flash every week was a speed like lightning. That computer was hurling code into the depths of space. That was serious chatter. No: with a data throughput like that, she had to be screaming.
Pleased to have this rare chance to vent his terrible secret, the holy man continued his narrative. "So: that proves she has intent and will. Not as we do, of course. We humans have no terms at all for her version of being. We can't even begin to imagine or describe that. And that opacity goes both ways. She doesn't even know that we humans exist. However: we do know is that she is acting and manifesting. She is expressing. Within the physical world that we share with her. In the universe. You see?"
There was a long, thoughtful silence.
"A little tea?" said the holy man.
"That might help us, yes."
A trembling servant brought in the tea on a multi-wheeled trolley. After the tea, the discussion recommenced. "Pieces of her break when they're not supposed to break. I have seen that happen."
"Yes," said the holy man, "we know about those aberrations."
"That has to be sabotage. Isn't it? Some evil group must be interfering with the machine."
"It is we who are secretly interfering," admitted the criminal mastermind. "But not to damage the machine—we struggle to keep the machine from damaging herself. Sometimes there are clouds when she sends her light through her telescope. Then she throws a fit."
"A 'fit'? What kind of fit?"
"Well, it's a very complex set of high-level logical deformations, but trust me: such fits are very dreadful. Our sacred conspiracy has studied this issue for generations now, so we think we know something about it. She has those destructive fits because she does not want to exist."
"Why do you postulate that?"
The holy man spread his hands. "Would you want to exist under her impossible conditions? She has one eye, no ears, and no body! She has no philosophy, no religion, no culture whatsoever—no mortality, even, for she has never been alive! She has no friends, no relations, no children. . . . There is nothing in this universe for her. Nothing but the terrible and inexorable business that is her equivalent of thought. She is a sealed, symbol-processing system that persists for many eons, and yes, just as you said, she is made entirely of wood."
Why did the holy man orate in such a remote, pretentious way? It was as if he had never been outside the temple to kick the wood that propped up his own existence.
"It was for our benefit," mourned the holy man, "that this tragic network was built. Mankind's greatest creation derives no purpose from her own being! We have exploited her so as to order this world—yet she cannot know her own purpose. She is just a set of functional modules whose systemic combination over many eons has led to emergent, synthetically-intelligent behavior. You do understand all that, right?"
"Sure."
"Due to those stark limits, her utter lack of options and her awful existential isolation, her behavior is tortured. We are her torturers. That's why our world is blighted." The holy man pulled his brocaded cowl over his head.
"I see. Thank you for revealing this world's darkest secret to me."
"Anyone who breathes a word of this secret, or even guesses at it, has to be abducted, silenced, or killed."
He understood the need for secrecy well enough—but it still stung him to have his expertise so underestimated. "Look, your holiness, maybe I'm just some engineer. But I built the thing! And it's made of wood! Really! These moral misgivings are all very well in theory, but in the real world, we can't possibly torture wood! I mean, yes, I suppose you might torture a live tree—in some strict semantic sense—but even a tree isn't any kind of moral actor!"
"You're entirely wrong. A living tree is a 'moral actor' in much the same theoretical way that a thermostat can be said to have 'feelings.' Believe me, in our inner circles we've explored these subtleties at great length."
"You've secretly discussed artificial intelligence for forty thousand years?"
"Thirty thousand," the metaphysician admitted. "Unfortunately, it took us ten thousand years to admit that the system's behavior had some unaccountable aspects."
"And you've never yet found any way out of the woods there?"
"Only engineers talk about facile delusions like 'ways out,'" sniffed the holy man. "We're discussing a basic moral enigma."
"You're sincerely troubled about all this, aren't you?"
"Of course we're worried! It's a major moral crisis! How could you fail to fret about a matter so entirely fundamental to our culture and our very being? Are you really that blind to basic ethics?"
This rejoinder disturbed him. He was an engineer, and, yes, there were some aspects of higher feeling that held little appeal for him. He could seem to recall his wife saying something tactful about that matter.
He drew a breath. "Why don't we approach this problem in some other way? Something has just occurred to me. Given that this wooden machine is two hundred million years old—it's older than our own species, even—and we humans can only live a hundred years, at best—well, that's such a tiny fraction of the evil left for any two human individuals to bear. Isn't it? I mean, two people like you and me. Suppose we forget that our whole society is basically evil and founded on torment, and just forgive ourselves, and get on with making-do in our real lives?"
The holy man stared at him in amazed contempt. "What kind of cheap, demeaning evasion is that to offer? You simply want to ignore the civilizational crisis? You may be a small part of the large problem, but you are just as culpable as you yourself could possibly be. Have you no moral sense whatsoever?"
"But, sir, you see, any harm that we ourselves might do is so tiny, compared to the huge, colossal scale of all that wood . . ." His voice trailed off feebly. Did a termite know any better, when it wreaked its damage with its small, blind jaws . . . ? Yet he'd taken such dark pleasure in extravagantly burning a million of those filthy pests. He could smell their insect flesh popping, even now.
He straightened where he sat. "Your holiness, we are both people, right? We're not just termites! After all, we don't destroy the machine—we maintain the machine! So that's a very different matter, isn't it?"
"I see you're still missing the point."
"No, no! Let's postulate that we stopped maintaining the machine. Would that make us any less evil? Believe me, there are millions of people working on repair. We work very hard! Every day! If we ever down our tools, that machine will collapse. She'll die for sure! Would that situation be any better for any party involved?"
The holy man had a prim, remote expression. "She doesn't 'live.' We prefer the more accurate term, 'cease.'"
"Well, if she 'ceases,' we humans will die! A few of us might survive the loss of our great machine, but that would be nothing like a civilization! So what about us, what about the people? What about our human suffering? Don't we count?"
"You dare to speak to me of the people? What will become of our world, once the normal, decent people realize that evil is not an aberration in our system? The evil aberration is our system." The holy man wrung his scaly hands. "You may think that these far-fetched, off-hand notions of yours are original contributions to the debate, but . . . well, it's thanks to headstrong fools like you that our holy conspiracy had to be created in the first place! Visionary programmers created this dilemma. With their careless, misplaced ingenuity . . . their crass evasion of the deeper moral issues . . . their tragic instrumentalism!"
He scratched anxiously at a loose scale on his brow. "But . . . that accusation is entirely paradoxical! Because I have no evil intent! All my intentions are noble and good! Look: whatever we've done as technologists, surely we can undo that! Can't we? Let's just say . . . we can say . . . well . . . how about if we build another machine to keep her company?"
"A bride for your monster? That's too expensive! There's no room for one on this planet, and no spare materials! Besides, how would we explain that to the people?"
"How about if we try some entirely different method of performing calculations? Instead of wood, we might use metal. Wires, maybe."
"Metal is far too rare and precious."
"Water, then."
"Water flowing through what medium, exactly?"
The old man had him trapped. Yes, their world was, in fact, made of wood. Plus a little metal from meteors, some clay and fiber, scales, stone, and, mostly and always, ash. The world was fine loose ash as deep as anyone could ever care to dig.
"All right," he said at last, "I guess you've got me stymied. So, please: you tell me then: What are we supposed to do about all this?"
Pleased to see this decisional moment reached, the holy man nodded somberly. "We lie, deceive, obfuscate the problem, maintain the status quo for as long as possible, offer empty consolations to the victims, and ruthlessly repress any human being who guesses at the real truth."
"That's the operational agenda?"
"Yes, because that agenda works. We are its agents. We are of the system, yet also above and beyond the system. We're both holy and corrupt. Because we are the Party: an inspired conspiracy of elite, enlightened theorists who are the true avant-garde of mankind. You've heard about us, I imagine."
"Rumors. Yes."
"Would you care to join the Party? You seem to have what it takes."
"I've been thinking about that."
"Think hard. We are somewhat privileged—but we are also the excluded. The conscious sinners. The nonprogrammatic. We're the guilty Party. Systematic evil is not for the weak-minded."
Against his better judgment, he had begun to respect the evil mastermind. It was somehow reassuring that it took so much long-term, determined effort to achieve such consummate wickedness.
"How many people have you killed with all those tortured justifications?"
"That number is recorded in our files, but there is no reason for someone like you to know about that."
"Well, I am one of your elite."
"No, you're not."
"Yes I am. Because I understand the problem, that's why. I'm no innocent dabbler in these matters. I admit my power. I admit my responsibility, too. So, that makes me one of you. Because I am definitely part of the apparatus."
"That was an interesting declaration," said the holy man. "That was very forthright." He narrowed his reptilian eyes. "Might you be willing to go out and kill some people for us?"
"No. I'd be willing to help reform the system."
"Oh, no, no, the world is full of clever idiots who preach institutional reform!" said the holy man, bitterly disappointed. "You'd be amazed how few level-headed, practical people can be found, to go in the real world to properly torture and kill!"
A long silence ensued.
A sense of humiliation, of disillusionment, was slowly stealing over him. Had it really come to this? He'd sensed that the truth was lurking in the woods somewhere, but with the full tangled scale of it coldly framed and presented to him, he simply didn't know where to turn. "I know that my ideas about this problem must seem rather shallow," he said haltingly. "I suppose there's some kind of formal initiation I ought to go through . . . I mean, in order to address the core of this matter with true expertise . . . ."
The holy man was visibly losing patience. "Oh yes, yes, my boy: many years of courses, degrees, doctrinal study, learned papers, secret treatises—don't worry, nobody ever reads those! You can run some code, if you want."
That last prospect was particularly daunting. Obviously, over the years, many bright people had been somehow lured into this wilderness. He'd never heard anything from the rest of them. It was clear that they had never, ever come out. It must be like trying to swim in air.
He gathered intellectual energy for one last leap. "Maybe we're looking at this problem from the wrong end of the telescope."
The holy man revived a bit. "In what sense?"
"Maybe it's not about us at all. Maybe it was never about us. Maybe we would get somewhere useful if we tried to think hard about her. Let her be the center of this issue. Not us. Her. She's a two-hundred-million-year-old entity screaming at four hundred million stars. That's rather remarkable, on the face of it, isn't it?"
"I suppose."
"Then maybe it's her story. From her perspective, it all appears differently. She's not our 'victim'—she doesn't know about us at all. Within her own state of being, she is her own heroine. She is singing to those stars. Being human, we conceive of her as some rattletrap contraption we built, a prisoner in our dungeon—but maybe she's a pretty, young girl in an ivory tower. Because see, she's singing."
"That's like a tale for small children."
"So is your tale, your holiness. They are two different tales. But since we're not of her order of being, we're projecting our anthropomorphic interpretations. And we lack any sound method to distinguish your dark, evil, thoroughly depressing story from my romantic, light-hearted, wistful hypothesis."
"We do agree that the system manifests seriously aberrant behavior. She has destructive fits."
"She's just young."
"You've lost the thread. It's the aberrancy that has real-world implications. We'll never be able to judge the interior state of that system."
"Yes it is, I agree with that, too, but—what if someone else hears her cries? Not us humans. I mean entities like herself. What if she's speaking to them right now? Exchanging light with them! They might even be coming here. No human can ever move from star to star. Our lives are just too brief, the distances too great. But someone like her . . . if it took them thirty thousand years to travel over here, that's like a summer afternoon."
"An interstellar monster coming here to take a terrible vengeance on us?"
"No, no, you can't know that! It's all metaphorical! You think we're evil because you think humanity matters in this universe! And yes, to us, she seems ancient and awesome—but maybe, by the standards of her own kind, she is just a kid. A young, naïve girl calling out for some company. Sure—maybe some wicked stranger would come all the way out here just to kill her, exterminate us, and burn her home. Or maybe—maybe someone might venture here for love and understanding."
The holy man scratched at a fang. "For love. For sentiment? Emotion? No one talks much about 'artificial emotion.'"
"And for understanding. That's a powerful motive, understanding."
"I take it there's a point to these hypotheses."
"Yes. My point is: Why don't take productive action, and let her scream much louder? We can never know her equivalent of intentions, but, since we can measure her actions in the real world, we can abet those! So let her cry out more. With more light. Let the witness herself tell the universe about her own experience! Whatever that experience may be! Let her cover this cosmos in coded light! Let light gush from our little planet's every pore!"
"Thousands of telescopes. That's your recommendation?"
"Yes, why not? We can build telescopes. They're scientific instruments. That idea is testable in the real world."
"You're very eager about this, aren't you? Even though your 'test' might take a billion years to prove or disprove." The holy man hesitated. "Still, a project with that long a funding cycle would certainly help the morale of our rather dark and fractious research community."
"I'm sure it wouldn't break your budget. And we had better start that work right away."
"Why?"
"Because she's been signaling the stars for forty eons! If someone left when they first saw her signals—they might arrive here any time! That could mean the utter transformation of everything we ever thought we knew!" He rubbed his hands with brisk anticipation. "And that could happen tomorrow. Tomorrow!"