Postsingular, Rudy Rucker [e book reading free txt] 📗

Pig, but then Gustav developed blockade software to fence them in. Jayjay was friends with some physicists in the Gustav-run zones, and, in an effort to help them, he cobbled together some breakout software that made it possible to flee Gustav’s regime. The breakout ware spread like wildfire, and Gustav’s reign was over.

But now, having observed that Gustav’s simulated humans had gotten along quite well without subconscious minds, the Big Pig began skimping on her own personality-modeling routines.

Soon after his fiftieth birthday, Jayjay became obsessed with the notion that Darlene’s behavior had become inhumanly rigid and stereotyped. The Big Pig’s shortcuts had made Darlene uncanny to him. Right around then Jayjay stumbled on a surviving copy of Wheenk.

He cajoled the Big Pig into creating a simulated version of Thuy, based upon her metanovel. Jayjay and the young sim began a torrid affair. But then Darlene caught them in bed together. Darlene left Jayjay, taking their son Dirk along. Quite soon the shallowness of the simulated Thuy wore thin. Jayjay extinguished the sim by removing her computational resources. He felt guilty and depressed.

But his professional life kept chugging along. Regarding the possibility of unrolling the eighth dimension, Jayjay proved that, although the unrolled extra dimension would be infinite in extent, it could be in practice possible to access any location along this infinite line in a fixed and bounded amount of time. This “Zeno metric,” as a mathematician friend termed it, guaranteed that an unrolled eighth dimension could act as a ubiquitous and infinitely capacious memory storage device. A human mind could scan over the first meter of the unrolled dimension in 0.9 seconds, the second meter in 0.09 seconds, the third meter in 0.009 seconds, the fourth in 0.0009 seconds …and so on through an infinite series that could be traversed in one second because, after all, 1.0 lies beyond the endless decimal number 0.999999.…

This result had the profound implication that, had the real Earthlings learned how to unroll the eighth dimension, then there would have been no need to grind the planet into nants. With the eighth dimension unrolled, the Big Pig could have found all the memory she could ever need, right in the crevices of ordinary matter.

Turning 60.

A reality-hacking movement arose. People learned to edit their environments on the fly, and the legacy of the shattered Earth’s former geography fell by the wayside. Vearth mountains moved, chasms opened, seas grew. It became increasingly difficult to decide where you were.

Some simpler souls quailed at the new freedoms. Large numbers of them enlisted in faiths offering brutally simple answers. As well as the new sects, hundreds of narrowly ethnic clans arose.

Meanwhile Jayjay was consolidating his researches on “lazy eight,” as the Hibraners reportedly termed their unrolled eighth dimension. Jayjay was sixty years old, and he had a sense that he was running out of time. Despite Luty’s erstwhile promises of immortality for everyone, Vearth could only support so many virtual agents. With the birth rate going up, the older and weaker sims were being culled out.

Jayjay was comforted by the fact that his son Dirk had come to live with him. Rather than making fresh discoveries, Jayjay was polishing and clarifying his old results, in part by teaching them to his beloved Vearth-born boy.

He liked to explain, for instance, that unrolling the eighth dimension would be effectively the same as taking the vanishing point of a painting and having it be next to every location of space. Each pathway to this universally accessible point at infinity would provide an unlimited amount of memory.

Jayjay was well off enough to attract a new wife: Keppy. Keppy was a second-generation virtual human like Dirk. Born in Vearth, she’d never been a real person at all. Keppy spent a lot of her time on low-level nant hunts with a flock of beezies. Dirk often joined her.

Turning 70.

As part of their endless jockeying for more influence, the sect and clan leaders began exhorting their followers to reproduce without limit. The population levels exploded, with the result that even the wealthiest people’s realities had clunky performance and low resolution. The Big Pig stepped up her use of cleansing squads to erase those humans who were contributing the least to the group mind. Among the increasingly desperate lower classes, the beezie nant hunts took on the intense quality of mass wars.

Strange to say, Jayjay’s nearly fifty years of life in Vearth had lasted but five of the real world’s hours. He was plagued by a persistent sense of living in a dream. Would he never awake?

His work in physics continued to give him some pleasure. He was closing in on discovering actual methods for unrolling the eighth dimension. It was a matter of creating certain types of vibrations with a hyperdimensionally tweaked musical instrument. Perhaps a zither or a guitar. But what would you use for the strings?

Jayjay had some ideas along these lines but, sadly enough, the lack of temporal synch between his mind and the natural world made it impossible for him to carry out any honest-to-god real world physics experiments. He was marooned in the nants’ dream.

On the morning of his seventieth birthday, Jayjay awoke with much of his virtual body gone. He was little more than a head, a shoulder and an arm. The rest had been sold. He would need to purchase fresh computational resources to reconstitute his flesh. But all his money was gone too. Keppy had left Jayjay with Dirk, taking Jayjay’s entire savings.

Once again, as several times before, the Big Pig bailed out Jayjay. But, crushed by his son Dirk’s betrayal, Jayjay found it increasingly difficult to carry on.

Turning 80.

Overpopulation led to a series of dirty little wars, with terrorism a growing problem. An incurable virus began to spread. Program after program crashed, and nant after nant was reduced to doing nothing but eternally repeating the single binary bit “0.”

Jayjay had entered his life’s bleak winter. Wistfully he proved one last result about what might have happened had the Lobraners been able to unroll the eighth dimension: The ubiquitous and accessible point at infinity would have provided an entanglement channel connecting every point with every other point in synchronicity. Not only would an unfurled eighth dimension have provided endless memory for all, it would have brought about telepathy for every object in the world.

He continued wondering about what kind of vibration might actually unfurl the eighth dimension. He’d managed to deduce that one could use wound-up hyperdimensional tubes as specially tuned strings. The order in which the strings were struck would be of key importance. But Jayjay was unable to reason his way to any conclusions about what the ideal order would be.

Increasingly discouraged and paranoid, Jayjay, aged eighty-four, went into the dirtiest, most crowded streets of the all but unrecognizable maze that had once been San Francisco. Soon he was infected with the so-called Baal virus.

Death came to him as he lay in thick silk sheets in a velvet-curtained room with a conventionally beautiful view. There was no way of knowing exactly where the room was. Nothing was real. Jayjay was glad to be leaving this dream within a dream.

His dying thoughts were of the bright, quirky girl he’d loved in his youth, sixty years before. Thuy Nguyen. Where had the time gone?

As Jayjay’s soul left his dying body, his simulated world burst open like a balloon. The light of infinity shone upon him; he bathed in the music of a living harp. This, surely, was the sound he’d been searching for; this harp’s magical vibrations could unfurl the eighth dimension. With the chord filling his being, Jayjay sped from the remains of his rubbishy virtual world, singing Thuy’s name, hoping against hope for the return of his lost true love.

***

Meanwhile, Thuy was hanging like a captured lioness from a stick on the shoulders of two jackal-headed women—Thuy peering upside-down at nerdy Jeff Luty holding an alien beetle. Was this how her life was supposed to end? She felt terrified, incredulous, and deeply pissed off.

The sloping temple walls bore indistinct hieroglyphs that changed every time Thuy looked at them. The flute and drum sounds were coming from thin air. And there was no actual fire to produce the firelight. The Egyptian trappings were fully bogus. But the seven subbies were real; the four bird-men, the two jackal-women, and the sacred scarab beetle were giving off clear telepathic vibes via all-but-invisible tendrils connected to Thuy’s head. Luty, however, seemed strangely absent. Thuy sensed zero psychic energies coming off the weathered old programmer. Somehow this emptiness was the creepiest thing of all.

“Do the gloating villain thing like at your lab,” Thuy urged Luty, wanting to get something going. “That way I get another chance to kick your ass.”

“Open my nant farm,” mumbled Luty, his murky eyes blank. “Apply antinantanium.” His lined gray face rippled like a puddle in the wind. His ponytail twitched; he licked his lips; he moved the beetle closer to Thuy’s face.

Thuy now saw that Luty’s forearm blended seamlessly into the beetle’s abdomen. The beetle was part of Luty’s body—or no, ick, it was the other way around. The Luty-thing was an appendage, a speaking-tube. The beetle had already devoured Luty some time back. The tormented man had met his end in Subdee.

“Gthx,” said the scarab on his own. Sensing Thuy’s attention, he swelled larger, with the Luty-thing’s mass decreasing by an equivalent amount. “Glkt grx.” The beetle brushed his antennae slowly and intimately across Thuy’s face and head, as if palpating her brain’s emanations. She felt a series of tingles in her skull.

“Yes, we’re subbies from Subdee,” intoned the scarab’s Lutytube. “Yes, we ate Jeff Luty. It’s a rare feed indeed when a multikilogram object plops through the Planck frontier. And now we’ve got a second course! Untie her, girls, and gather round.”

The jackal-headed women crouched to lay Thuy on the ground, their butts big in the phantom firelight. They untied the thongs around Thuy’s ankles and wrists, then stood dancing in place, their hands swaying, their feet mincing a steady little box step, their blank eyes blinking in unison. Thuy recalled her initial impression that the bird-men were fat plants. The dancer subbies were plants, too, veiling themselves in images gleaned from their feast on Luty’s brain. Looking at the sexy jackal-women forms, Thuy felt a flicker of pity for the dead man and his lonely dreams.

The subbies cackled and chirped, drawing themselves into a tight circle around Thuy. The beetle had swelled to human size; he was standing on his spindly rear legs, wearing Luty as a penis-like appendage projecting from his belly. Jeff wouldn’t have liked that.

One of the bird-men poked at Thuy’s thigh with his curved beak; one of the jackal-women snuffled her armpit. Thuy thought of the old Norman Rockwell painting of a white family saying grace around Thanksgiving dinner. When she’d been a kid, she’d gone through a Norman Rockwell phase, trying to decipher what it meant to be white. And now she was a subdimensional roast turkey. But still non-white. Her thoughts were jumping all around. The jackal woman gave her neck a little nip.

“Don’t eat me!” cried Thuy. “I have to stop the nants.”

“We like the nant plan,” said the beetle bucking his abdomen to make the Luty-penis talk. “We subbies grow vatoscale roots to draw info from the quantum level of your cosmos, you see. We poke through the Planck frontier’s foam. Once the nants eat Earth, your planet’s high-level structures will be folded into the tasty quantum states of the nanomachines. We want to help the nants, yes. I’ve tweaked my metabolism to synthesize antinantanium, so I can