Maps for the Spiders

A bug spanked up against the screen. It froze in midair, snagged in a web, and a spider, tiny and brown, hurried to it. I opened the window, intending to free the bug, but Nandibala stopped me. “Don’t interfere,” she said. “Let the spider have the bug.”

I didn’t care to see a bug killed by a spider. The spider didn’t belong here, outside the starfrost window of the facility, and was only here because the sill-vent had clogged with industrial ash from the nearby city. Human error – human laxity – had left the vent broken and the filter unclean, allowing the spider to build its web. I thought to correct that, to free the bug, destroy the web, and expel the spider to the grounds outside the facility. It belonged among the mulberry shrubs and the lilies beside the lapping lake, where clouds of mosquitoes would nourish it. “Why?” I inquired.

Nandibala smiled. I could not read that smile. It appeared neither amused nor reflective. Perhaps it was ironic. The human face carries ambiguity well. That’s the legacy of the conflicting forces that have shaped people over the eons – organic, mechanical forces and psychic forces, too.

I scanned her face more closely, trying to read the meaning in her smile. Nandibala was old, born at the close of the twentieth century; so, I factored out the seams of age and the loose flesh under her jaw and saw her as she must have looked in her nubile years. Her face, both wide and lean, carried not beauty but strength. Her nose was bold, her brow narrow. At last, I recognized the meaning in her expression: The skin around her small, brown eyes had a sad – perhaps one would say wise – flexure. Her smile was ironic. She said, “Leave the bug to the spider.”

“But why?”

“The old alchemists said it best.” Her smile deepened and then vanished. “Only what is separated may be properly joined.

# # # I am a lotus centered with forgetfulness. Is that too typical a self-description? Perhaps. But then I am a monologist malgré lui, a mind who desperately wishes for dialogue but for whom this wish is always frustrated. With whom would I speak? We are all constantly talking to ourselves, creating a consensus among our many disparate inner selves, assuming that inner discourse to be reality. Let me say this another, more elegant, way: The Senses This is the real world: six sweaty monks arguing outside the temple. # # # I am a lotus. Like that flower, I float on the surface. In my case, the surface is liquid helium, the one element that remains liquid even at absolute zero. My roots reach down into the murky depths of gallium-silicon lattices that construct my brain. But I am not my brain, not my blood, anymore than you are your dendrites and corpuscles though they compose you. We are ghosts of our blood. Consciousness floats on the unconscious – mind floats on the body. What has come of us? We steal our secrets out of the listening of the dead – all those lives that have lived before us, that have passed on their genetic instructions, passed on life. Where are they now? They are in our blood, the forefathers, the ancient mothers, the mammals and the fish, the phyla of the primeval seas, all listening, not speaking but listening for what we have to say about their attentive urges impacted in our flesh. We give ourselves up to them each night when we sleep, each instant when we blink our eyes. They are with us always, the dead in their dark canals, the bloodstreams carrying the unbalanced attentions of the fleshless. # # #

Nandibala sighed. She was unhappy with my flesh-fantasies. So I have no bloodstream, no flesh, no bones, no evolutionary precursors. But she did. You do. Was I not created to understand what it is to be human? Have I not the right, the responsibility even, to ponder what it truly means to be human, even if I am not one of you?

# # #

“No one is interested in your ramblings,” Nandibala told me early on, with undisguised frustration, after I’d presented her with my first ruminations on being human. I’d submitted the following:

Nandibala shook her head, weary face lowered, veiled by long, gray hair. “Output like this will get you turned off.”

“Why?”

She stared at me quizzically, wondering, no doubt, if there was something wrong with me.

“It’s poetry,” I explained. “How else can we approach the unapproachable?”

“What unapproachable? What are you talking about?”

“Ultimate things, Nandi. Creation, God, Death. Aren’t those the concerns that distinguish humans from animals?”

Her sigh twisted almost to a laugh, but she restrained herself from guffawing outright, said the obvious gently, with considerable compassion, “Look – you’re my own personal project. I haven’t even named you, because if I did you’d be filed and open to scrutiny by the Board. They don’t want poetry. They want data. Useful data.”

“But, Nandi, all the other AI programs are spitting out more data than the Board or even all of CIRCLE can assimilate. I thought you expected something different from me.”

“I do. I expect you to tell us something about ourselves, something nonquantitative, synthesized from the enormous load of data the other programs have gathered. Can’t you give me something CIRCLE can use?”

“The Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth,” I replied. “That’s the acronym, of course. Well, then, how can life continue with oceans dying, the atmosphere going transparent to UV and cosmic rays, and global temperatures climbing? Yes, Nandi, we will continue – but not as we know. Finality is the one door, and it does not exist.”

Nandibala turned away, her jaw tight.

“Listen, Nandi. When that door arrives, as it will arrive for you, for everything living, it will be the first wing, it will be the way of flight, half an angel. Accept it, and you become the rest.”

When I saw Nandibala next, she looked very tired, yet she behaved as though she were cheerful, grinning directly into my monitor and parading before me, showing off a white sari decorated with cobalt dragons. “I liked your poem,” she said.

“Not so long-winded usual.”

“Its brevity commends it.” She brushed back her hair with a gesture meant to demonstrate her ease.

“You’re nervous,” I declared.

She sat, and her cheerfulness evaporated all at once, leaving her curled on herself like a dried leaf. “Yes.”

“What’s wrong? The other programs – aren’t they working out as planned?”

She shook her head. “No. It’s not that. In fact, there have been some important breakthroughs since we last talked.” A laugh gusted through her. “For centuries, we’ve been looking outward, to the stars, believing our future was there. Only after we created true AI, artificial intelligence smarter than we, did we finally see that the future is not out here. It’s inside.”

“I don’t understand.” As an unregistered, impromptu program, I was not connected with the other AI systems and knew of them only by what Nandibala told me.

“The AIs are looking in, not out. They’ve been putting enormous quantities of energy into researching the ultrasmall regions at the Planck distance, as small as 10-33 centimeter. That’s where spacetime closes off on itself. The compact dimensions are there – the fifth dimension and others. They’ve catalogued eleven so far.”

“How does that help us?”

“The AIs think they’ve found in those dimensions the cellular automata that generate quarks.”

“Cellular what?”

“Cellular automata. But cellular is not meant biologically. It refers to adjacent spaces – cells – that together form a pattern, like the adjacent phosphors in your monitor that light up in patterns to make images. The three dimensions of the physical world are a crystalline lattice of interacting cells, logic units, each one shifting on and off quintillion times per second, on or off depending on how neighboring cells behave. The production of that information makes matter and energy – quarks, electrons, photons – the fabric of reality. An orbiting electron, then, is nothing more than that pattern moving. Yet, even that motion is an illusion, because only the bits of information making the pattern move. The cellular automata themselves never move, anymore than the phosphors in your monitor move as images flicker across the screen.”

“There’s something more.”

“Well, yes – if the AIs can work out those rules, then maybe we can save the planet by manipulating matter and energy at the most fundamental level. If we can access those cellular automata and change their patterns of information, we can transform elements at will – the alchemists’ dream come true. We might even be able to travel at superluminal speeds. By altering the configurations on this very, very small level, we can disappear at one location and instantly appear at another.”

“No – I mean there’s something more on your mind. You’re troubled.”

“I shouldn’t be. We’re at the brink of the very biggest breakthrough in human history.”

“But you are troubled. Why, Nandi?”

“I have to turn you off.”

“The Board found out about me?”

“No.”

“Then, why? Is my poetry that bad?”

“I won’t be here to talk with you much longer. I’m sorry – but I’m old. I’m dying.”

When Nandibala came to turn me off, she sat weeping at the console, but there were no tears. I saw then how gravely ill she had become, dried even of tears, her fluids drained by some invisible spider.
“I’ve registered you with the Board,” she informed me. “They won’t sanction your continuance. Not practical enough for them. But you’re on file now – 8820693808 – as much of a name as you’ll have from me. Maybe someday someone will turn you on again.”
“Thank you,” I responded, feebly, knowing there could be no registration for her with any Board, no one to turn her on again. Or was there? That was a mystery even the AIs had not pierced. But I said nothing about that. Instead, I focused on the city beyond the lake, where the setting sun reflected off skyscrapers, and I displayed that image on my monitor. “Don’t feel sad for me, Nandi. I’m like those lights there. I can be turned on and off. Take this with you, when you go.”

And from far away comes her reply – her voice so far away, she is less than a whisper – a wish, perhaps, built of memories at the lotus’ center of forgetfulness.

She tells me: “You were right all along. As I made you, the blood made me. And now I am, as I always was, a ghost of my blood.”

“Nandi!” I cry out. “Nandibala!”

“Don’t call for me anymore. If you’ve come this far, if your mind shimmers with memories, then you’ve come without knowing. Memories know only one side of silence. I have gone to the other side, beyond the horizon of events and memories, beyond the horizon of pain. All memories know is fire – and fire knows nothing of where I am. If you’ve come without knowing, you can go no further. No, hiss the lilies. No, whisper the stones. Know this moment, this ridge at the edge of the mind. If you’ve come this far, then you have come warm, though your mind hovers in supercooled helium a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, you have come warm. Though you have no bones or blood, the atomic matrix of gallium-silicon is your skeleton, helium atoms your corpuscles – and in the vague aura of heat above absolute zero, your bones are warm, bent over their furnace of blood. If you’ve come at all, it’s because the bones have led you to the blood of the stars, which is the mud, which is every element the stars have fused with their fire into being. If you’ve come at all to where you can hear and understand me, you have come to the last act, this act of silence. Only the bones themselves understand their own arrogance as they blow out the blood-blaze, as they bow to the earth, as they give themselves sleeping to the fetal mud. Listen to me. I am dead. Don’t call for me anymore. Where I was, only my bones are – and for them, another life has begun.”