Spacetime Donuts (4 page)

"What is matter? What is mind?" Alice said, mimicking Vernor. When he had started out as an Angel he had thought that his sessions with Phizwhiz would help him to answer these questions, and had often bragged about this to Alice.

He still discussed these questions with the other Angels, and there were times when it seemed that they had arrived at genuine answers . . . but the "answers" they found were always a little unsatisfying when he wasn't stoned in one way or another. Doing the actual hard grinding work necessary for really scientific investigations no longer seemed possible to Vernor, now that he was plugging in to Phizwhiz once a week. Why break your ass working out the field equations for a hypothetical energy configuration when you could plug in and do the problem in your head in seconds. The drawback of this procedure was that once you unplugged from the computer, you weren't likely to remember the specific mathematical solutions which you had obtained with the machine's aid. It was not merely that the solution was too complex to remember, it was that it would have been obtained so rapidly that it was never permanently fixed in the mind.

So Vernor had the feeling of great mental prowess without having anything concrete to show in the way of achievement. He knew that he wasn't really getting anywhere, with science, with philosophy, with Alice, and when she reminded him of this again on the street near the Inquarium it was too much to take.

"Go to hell, Alice," he said, wanting to stop as soon as he began. "I've had enough crap from you, you stupid bitch." Why was he saying this? He wanted to apologize, take it back, but already her lost face was miles away from him, untouchable. Her move.

"Goodbye, Vernor." She started to say something else, then choked back tears, gave him a terrible smile and hurried ahead.

"Alice," he was suddenly shouting, running to catch up. "Alice, I didn't mean that!"

She turned, all grief refined to bitterness. "You don't know what you're doing anymore, Vernor. I don't want to be part of it. It's too sad. You're not the same person." Again she hurried off, and this time Vernor watched her go. He looked at his watch. Five thirty. Might as well go over to Waxy's.

The last conversation with Alice played over and over in his mind as he walked. She was right, sure, but she wasn't an Angel, not even a head, really. He smoked a stick of weed on the way over, bringing his thoughts away from the past and into his surroundings.

Dreamtown. Nobody working, but everyone with a little money in their pocket. Street action was picking up as the evening drew on. Dope dealers ambled along the sidewalks, unloading the night's supply. Hemispherical robots glided along the curbs cleaning up the day's refuse. There were homeshops selling tawdry pieces of plastic furniture equipped with small Hollowcasters to cover them with an image of luxury, restaurants selling Dreamfood molded and dyed to look like old style food, and stores selling pornographic Hollow infocubes. Illusions were the stock in trade.

Vernor stopped to watch a street magician, an intense man with a cable leading from his head socket to a Hollowcaster at his feet. The magician kept a constant play of images dancing in a ten-foot radius about him. Most were abstract . . . clouds and stripes of color . . . but some of the images were more realistic. Donald Duck paced glumly around the magician, wearing a trench into the ground while black smoke issued from his ears. Daisy Duck beaked softly between the magician's legs.

A fire-breathing lizard came scampering up to Vernor, rearing up on its hind legs to display a bright blue erection. As Vernor watched, the erection swelled and the lizard shrank . . . until the erection had turned into a large piggy bank.

The slit of the piggy bank moved and said, "Got a penny for the old guy?"

Unpleasantly surprised, Vernor kicked at the Hollow, but there was nothing really there to kick. His foot passed through the image and emerged covered with blood. Lightening bolts shot towards him from the magician's head and a voice of thunder said, "Let's have that donation, buddy."

All of his bad feelings from the fight with Alice came welling back up and he walked up to the magician, addressing him directly. "You're fucking with an Angel, douchebag."

The magician grinned at Vernor, sizing him up. A red, rubber douchebag appeared and swatted at Vernor's face. "I can take you," the magician said. "Duel?"

Dreamer duels were not uncommon. The idea was something like plugging in to a girl's socket while you made love. Only in this case the goal was not ecstatic union, but rather the annihilation of your partner. The magician snapped a cable into his neck and handed Vernor the free end.

Vernor snapped the plug into his socket and stood glaring at the magician, who slowly dissolved along with the rest of the street scene. Animals and energy patterns came at him, clichés easily avoided and shunted aside. It was nothing compared to plugging into Phizwhiz. Vernor began flashing a series of images, connected in unusual ways to form a pattern of unpleasant strangeness. The corny lightning bolts and leaping tigers from the magician's brain began to look confused. Vernor stepped up the assault. It was easy, too easy, to take his present mood of despair and loneliness and project it out at this man; to show him that everything was nothing.

Suddenly the circuit broke. The magician had unplugged. He looked at Vernor with frightened eyes. "You win, Angel." Vernor unplugged, nodded, and walked on. At least he could do
something
right.

Ten minutes later Vernor arrived at the Angels' hang-out, Waxy's Travel Lounge. It was early evening and the place was beginning to fill up.

There was a sculptured black plastic bar along the left wall. The area in front of the rear wall was occupied by a Hollowjuke, and there were booths along the right wall.

The Hollowjuke was running, and the image of a larger-than-life couple making love occupied the rear of the room. The Hollow couple were singing a muffled duet punctuated by a yas-yas chorus from four Hollow massage robots busy hosing off the lovers.

The booths on the right seemed to be occupied. Noises of sex came from some, and over the door of some of the others you could see the bottles of intravenous feeding set-ups, dripping mixtures of sudocoke, synthoin, vitamins, and glucose into the arms of those inside.

There was a group of Angels near the bar and Vernor walked over. An Angel called Oily Allie was describing her latest attempt to build a flying machine. Apparently she stole pieces of machinery from the factory where she worked, and reassembled them in her own mad scientist fashion. Vernor didn't know her too well, but tended to stay out of her way, as Allie was something of a practical joker.

As Vernor walked up, Oily Allie looked at him, shouted "Have a drink," and pitched the contents of a thermos she was holding in Vernor's direction.

It appeared to be a boiling liquid, and Vernor dove to the floor to avoid it. Strangely, however, the steaming liquid turned into a cloud of gas before it reached Vernor. As the gas diffused, the coals on the Angels' reefers brightened, and Vernor realized that it had been liquid oxygen.

"Man, you looked funny, scrambling around," Oily Allie said, helping Vernor up. "Let me buy you a hit of seenz." Allie punched the order into the bar robot and fed in the coins. The robot extended a tube towards Vernor and he put it in his nose, snorting up the synthetic cocaine. His adrenaline dissolved in a rush of well-being and he was finally able to return Oily Allie's grin. She was a muscular woman with dark, spiky hair, not overly clean.

"What's happening?" Vernor asked.

"Moto-O's been looking for you. He's over there." Allie pointed down the bar. Moto-O was sitting near a light, writing rapid precise symbols with his Rapidograph pen. Vernor thanked Allie for the seenz and walked over to Moto-O.

"Ah, Vernor," Moto-O said, looking up. "I have new idea for mechanical mind." Both of them were interested in the problem of how one might go about making a machine which is conscious.

The problem was challenging, since the Second Incompleteness Theorem, proved by Kurt Gödel in 1930, seems to say that no machine
can
be conscious, i.e. aware of its own existence. The reason is that the only way a machine can be aware of itself is to form an internal model of itself and look at the model . . . and it is impossible for
any
one, man or machine, to fully know himself.

To see why this might be so, try to become completely conscious of yourself and all your thoughts. Easy, you may say, no problem. But wait, did you include the act of examining your thoughts when you made your mental inventory of what's going on in your head? And once you tack that on, will you be able to include the act of tacking it on? And that inclusion?

The problem is that every attempt to fully map your inner landscape adds new features to it. The map has to include a picture of itself, which has to include a picture of itself, and so on forever towards the Royal Baking Powder vanishing point. No matter how fast you move your mental reference point, you're always a jump behind.

It's easy to see that a computer would run into the same type of problems when it tries to form a mental image of itself. But how is it, you may ask, that we humans do, after all, seem to have consciousness and self-awareness? It cannot come from internal modeling, so how does it arise? Well it's . . . easy to do, but hard to describe. Be Here Now's one slogan that sort of captures the idea, but that's not too helpful if you're interested in programming a machine. As a matter of fact, Gödel's
First
Incompleteness Theorem says that there
is
in fact no way to describe how it is that we do it.

Moto-O had spent a few years studying Zen, and he seemed to think that the answer to their problem was contained in the principle of the Zen
koan
, an apparently nonsensical problem (e.g. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?) which beginners wrestle with in an effort to break the shackles of rationality.

"Consciousness is paradox," Moto-O was saying now to Vernor at Waxy's bar. "But we exist in paradox. I raise my finger and all the world is there."

"I don't see how you plan to program this into Phizwhiz, Moto-O," Vernor responded, sipping a beer.

"I plan to split Phizwhiz work-space into two parts which monitor each other. First part will say 'This statement is false.' Other part tries to decide if statement is true or false. First part will evaluate truth or falsity of other part's decision. Infinite regress."

"'This statement is false'," Vernor mused. "If that's a true statement than it's false. And if it's false, then it's true."

"Exactly. This trick is heart of Gödel's original proof." Moto-O grinned and took a swallow of speed-tea. "Phizwhiz need built in paradox like human to be alive."

"But won't he just reject the program after finding the loop?" Vernor objected. "Won't he refuse to assimilate it?"

"Phizwhiz need firm master," Moto-O replied. "When program enter, and before he can reject, I will administer tripled operating voltage surge to him."

"Like Rinzai hitting the monks with his stick?" Vernor asked, referring to the Zen master Moto-O had talked about the most.

"Yes," he answered, "and more technical reason is voltage surge will cause memory banks to open so that loop can be forced in."

"I don't know," Vernor said finally. "I doubt if Phizwhiz'll stand still for it, though I know that he does want someone to program a soul for him. Are you going to actually try it?"

Moto-O nodded vigorously. "Oh yeah. Tomorrow I go talk to Mr. Burke of Governor's Research Council. If they give approval I begin real work on technical aspects."

Vernor thought about Moto-O's ideas, to the extent that he could. What is this that I am? What if Moto-O really was successful . . . would they still need the Angels once Phizwhiz could think? His reveries were interrupted by the prick of a needle in his biceps. He turned around to see Mick Turner pocketing an empty syringe.

"It's just a shot away," Turner grinned.

Vernor rubbed the spot on his arm nervously. A tingling was spreading up towards his head. "What the fuck was that?" he asked, but Turner was already dancing across the room. Mick Turner had been the first person after Andy Silver to become an Angel. His scientific and philosophic learning was minimal, but he had probably survived more trips than any three Angels combined.

Mick's main concern in his Phizwhiz sessions was to disrupt the functioning of the mechanical brain . . . to freak it out of its program. Vernor, Moto-O and a few of the others were more concerned with using the sessions to advance the cause of science; but the avowed purpose of Andy Silver, Mick, and most of the others was to radically alter Phizwhiz's functioning.

Occasionally Mick treated people the same way. There was really no telling what he had shot Vernor up with. Vernor started across the room after him, but the roar of the drug hit him before he made it, and he stood rooted in the center of the room, twitching to the beat of the Hollowjuke.

It was an electronic number now, played by robots, squat machines with mechanical hands fingering dials on their chests. The rhythm shifted constantly, as Vernor's stimulated brain hungrily followed the sound's convolutions. He began to dance, and danced through the rest of the song and into the next. When one song ended the accompanying images would disappear, and a new set of Hollows would be beamed out by the Hollowjuke.

The image for the new song was two-dimensional, not that Vernor, in his state, could tell the difference. It was a classical recording, the Rolling Stones doing "Gimme Shelter." The surf music introduction seemed to last several minutes. Vernor was dancing hard. The wild power of the main part of the song came on and the room faded, the singer's voice fatalistic over the god-like and authoritative surge of the guitar. In the background, a girl was screaming, "It's just a shot away, shot away, shot away, shot away," the sound dwindling like someone falling off a cliff...Alice? Vernor danced harder, eyes open, eyes closed. The song drove to its conclusion, "It's just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away, kiss away." A shot or a kiss?