Polystom (38 page)

‘It became harder and harder to ensure consistency; and hardest of all when these simulated people approached a level of technological sophistication consonant with our own. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In my original parameters for the System, you remember I mentioned I created a planet called War?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it was an early piece of writing, and its atmosphere was very thin. It was a cold world, barren. But nonetheless, at that early stage, I had toyed with the idea of several inhabited worlds – it’s what I was used to, after all, in the real world. So I sketched in some basic Computational Patterns for this world. I made it mostly desert, but gave it two ice caps of water. Then I toyed with the idea of a great system of canals, by which the population brought this water from the poles to the cold deserts of the central latitudes. There was a very crude sort of culture, kings and princesses and so on: but I wrote no “agent” characters for this world, nobody with any free will. As with all such background populations, they simply bubbled along, innovating nothing. To be honest, I got so caught up with the events on
The World
that I more or less forgot about this other planet. Its deserts were red, and it was just visible from the World as a red dot in the sky. Anyway, long after I had left the project, one of the agent characters began examining this world, War, with the benefit of a telescope. He was a scientist, you see. He studied it, saw the canals, mapped them out, published his research. There was a great deal of interest in what he saw. It brought the distant planet into the remit of the simulation. And the writers who were
working on it were faced with the necessity of inventing this entire new civilisation – of filling in all the detail in its history, and of writing agent characters for it. Who knew but that one day our simulated people might not go there? But the writers were too busy to do all this. They couldn’t really be bothered. So – do you know what they did?’

‘What did they do?’

‘They changed the core code! It boggled me when I heard it, I don’t mind telling you. They rewrote the whole of the planet War so that there was no indigenous population, no cities, no ruins, no canals, nothing at all. Amazing! They wrote in some hasty physics algorithms, and left the world cold and dead and barren. They even changed my water poles to poles of frozen carbon dioxide. Imagine! They couldn’t change what the agent character had written and published back on the World, though, not without erasing the entire programme. But they were in too much hurry, too harassed, to really care. If truth be told, there are thousands of suchlike inconsistencies. So, in one decade a respected scientist observes through a telescope and reports canals; and in a later decade new scientists look with more powerful telescopes and see no canals at all. Naturally they rubbish the earlier scientist. One thing that keeps the whole system running is that its simulated inhabitants possess a sort of
will to consistency;
they ignore things that don’t fit with their accepted world-view. Anyway, that’s a little off the point. Where was I?’

‘I’m not sure. Real people in the programme, I think.’

‘Ah,’ said Cleonicles. ‘Real people.’

‘What has happened more recently,’ said Cleonicles, ‘is that the simulation has become
more
complex and
more
sophisticated than the real world. Can you imagine it? In a sense, it’s more real, now, than we are.’

‘How could that be?’

‘Well, well. One example is technology. Technological
levels in the real world, our world – your world, I should say – have remained more or less constant for centuries now. There are good reasons for that, in fact. A tool is developed, be it a fork or a flying machine, and it does a certain job. There’s no point in inventing a tool to do a job nobody needs, and once a machine does the job then it does the job. We’re a conservative people, nephew. But it has not been like that in the Computational Device.’

‘No?’

‘Oh no, indeed not. Change built on change. The rate of change accelerated. The simulated population discovered and invented, they developed, many of the aspects of civilisation with which we are familiar in the real world. And then they superseded us.’

‘Superseded.’

‘Certainly they did! They developed propeller-driven flying machines, just like ours, ten or eleven years ago. Our years, I mean. But then they refined and enhanced their invention; they made bigger flying machines, faster ones. They fought wars with them. They invented new engines for them, engines that sucked in air, ignited it and ejected it explosively behind. Our military, the real military I mean, have been trying to duplicate the technology, but it’s hard. When
we
built similar machines in the real world they would mostly blow up and kill the test pilots. The same thing happened in the simulation – only they didn’t seem to mind. They are profligate of life. They invented bigger, faster cars.’ He shook his head. ‘When I first laid down the System, I did not believe that they would ever travel from world to world. To travel through vacuum? The difficulties would surely be insurmountable. But they achieved it – can you believe that? These Computational Device imitation-people built air-filled containers, fired them with explosives, and travelled the enormous distances I had written into their cosmos. They went from the World to their moon – nothing like my beloved moon, nephew, although with
some of the same features. But an airless, grey wasteland. Nonetheless they went there, for no other reason than they had the technological capability to do it! It was instructive, and awful, to watch. And there are two other things I must tell you, before my lengthy lecture draws to a close. Do I bore you?’

‘Not at all, Uncle,’ said Polystom.

‘Two more things. Two more developments in the World of the simulation. I had withdrawn from the project long before, of course; I was living on the moon of Enting. But I was in constant communication with the military. I was convinced, you see, that the insurrectionists on the Mudworld, here, had somehow tapped into the simulation. They adapted and improved themselves, fought as no insurrectionists had fought before. For thirty years, forty, however long it has been. But more than this, I began to suspect their presence in the simulation. Somehow, I don’t know how. Before we introduced real people into the simulation there had been insurrections against simulated social order, of course, as there are in the real world. And like the real world they had been small-scale affairs. And even after real people were introduced, social stability was retained. But suddenly, in the simulation, the world was full of revolutions. Imagine! Whole nations rebelled against their leaders, their ruling families. Higher orders were butchered in great numbers. In
all
portions of the globe, uprising followed uprising. The whole World went mad for revolutions. Some of these rebellions were crushed, but many were successful, and on a huge scale.’

‘You suspect the intervention of the insurrectionists from the Mudworld in the simulation?’

‘Indeed I do. I think they somehow infiltrated the Computational Device itself. The military, in particular, were worried: they had come to see the simulation as predictive, you understand, of real events. Although there’s little actual evidence of that. But I think the real insurrectionists have
introduced some strange code into the programme, turning people into revolutionaries. I don’t see how you explain it otherwise, the sudden mania for revolution.’

He stopped. The rain was falling more softly now.

‘And the second thing?’ Polystom prompted him. ‘You said there was a second thing, the thing that rounded off your lecture?’

‘Ah,’ said Cleonicles. ‘The most important thing of all. The most important thing.’

‘We did not anticipate it. We did not realise that it could happen. In retrospect this was naïve of us. But the inhabitants of the simulation developed Computational Devices of their own. This changed everything.’

‘A Computational Device inside the Computational Device?’

‘Well, yes. Wheels within wheels, eh? They were tinkering with the principles of computation fifteen years ago, or more. Our years, I mean. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that they perfected it. And, again, they took it further. They found more efficient, and much smaller, methods of binary analysis than valves and crystals. Suddenly, in a month or so of our time, the world of the simulation was overrun with Devices. Almost everybody possessed them. Devices much larger in capacity than even ours were created.’

‘I don’t see,’ said Polystom, slowly, ‘how the machine could contain a bigger machine.’

Cleonicles merely smiled. ‘A good point, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Oh, the philosophical abyss that has opened up since that happened! It’s less a matter of size, I think, than efficiency. Or something like that. Certainly, the interaction between actual computer and simulated computer has, somehow, changed the fundamentals of the programme. It’s not exactly clear how. The military continued to put in the algorithms of real people, but they were no longer accepted. Instead of fitting into a preset childhood package,
which allowed the characters to be born into the simulation, to develop within the system absorbing its influence as they grew . . . instead of that, the programme refused to accept the new input. Refused! The new “agent” algorithms wandered, fully formed, ghostly, in the other world. Or in this world. And not really present in either.’

‘Is that what happened to you?’

‘Indeed. Well, no, my situation was rather different. My dossier was turned into code in a much more detailed way. The scientists who put me there were hoping, I think, that I would address the problem, whatever the problem was. Take the example of your wife: Beeswing. I took her dossier at the funeral, and wrote it up into code myself, trying to find ways of getting around the blockage, whatever the blockage was. I failed. Beeswing is also caught in this odd liminal state.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Polystom. ‘Is she dead? Isn’t she a ghost?’

‘Yes,’ said Cleonicles, with a blank face. ‘I think so. I think she is. Understand the transformation that has taken place, in me for instance. Nothing of the man you knew of Cleonicles, that is to say, nothing
essential
, is present in me. I was constructed after his death, out of a dossier of his memoirs and various other accounts. I remember everything that Cleonicles put in that dossier.’

‘A strange sort of ghost,’ said Polystom. ‘More a poem than a ghost.’

Clouds parted, and a frying sunshine fell onto everything. It was mid-afternoon, or thereabouts; steam oozed out of Polystom’s sodden clothing. The ghostly Cleonicles, although his form had intercepted the falling rain, seemed to have absorbed none of the water. He sat, clean as a wax figure.

‘What do you want me to do, Uncle?’ Polystom asked. ‘I don’t understand why you’ve come to me.’

‘I want you to go to the mountain,’ said Cleonicles. He
was standing now, although Polystom could not remember him having actually gone through the process of getting to his feet. He was standing on the far side of the pool, his arm outstretched, pointing. ‘To the mountain!’ he called.

‘Why there?’

‘Go to the Device. It needs to be rewritten. The whole programme has gone very wrong. I can tell you how to do it.’

‘Me? Why me?’

His uncle was, oddly, at his side again, sitting in the sunlit mud beside the little brown pool. ‘I’ve tried talking to the scientists and the technicians inside there – of course, I can appear in there. Naturally. But they won’t acknowledge me. I don’t know, to be truthful, if they can’t see me, or
won’t
see me. But I can’t get through to them, whichever way it is. I suspect they
can
see me, you know. There’s a sort of harassed look that comes over some of their faces when I harangue them. But they don’t respond. And I have gotten angry, actually. It’s very difficult for me, practically difficult, but I’ve physically interacted on occasion, pushed them and so on. They just sit on the floor with their hair ruffled and astonished looks on their faces. Perhaps they think they’ve had a fit of some sort. A gust of wind. I don’t know.’

‘The men, the ordinary soldiers, know about you all.’

‘Of course they do! They have those virtues of common sense that the top brass necessarily lack.’

‘So,’ said Polystom, weighing the idea. ‘You want me to go into the Device?’

‘There are control rooms, and a large bank, like a sort of four-shelved piano, at which the primary programmes are written and put-in. Once you’re there, you’ll see what I mean. Then I can guide you. We need to rewrite the whole simulation!’

‘I couldn’t
reach
anybody else,’ Cleonicles was saying. They were walking now. Perhaps Polystom was a little feverish
because he couldn’t remember starting the walk; he had no memory of clambering out of the crater, yet here he was, picking his way awkwardly between the strewn lines of barbed wire. ‘I couldn’t get through to anybody else; then I met the agent, the ghost, of your wife. Beeswing. Because
you
had written her dossier, and because
I
had revised it when I was still alive – and because neither of us knew very much about her origins and childhood, she was a different sort of ghost to the rest. Her personality is mostly constructed around you; so she knew about you. And I knew that you had gathered a troop of soldiers and were on the world.’

‘Why did she have to come and get me though? Why couldn’t you come yourself?’

‘I’m tied to the Device, to the mountain. I’m not sure why. I think it has something to do with this peculiar interaction of Computational Device and the Computational-Device-within-the-Device. It’s set up resonances in the programming logic, the substratum of the logic of the written experience within the machine, that are very hard to predict, to understand. I think my close association with the Device has become, in a way, literalised in the logic of my algorithm, with the result that I cannot move too far from the
actual
machine in the
actual
world.’

‘I don’t understand.’