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of weak acid. Passing through deep rivers of acid hydrolyzed this to glucose.
Now people, not rugged tiktoks, had to mix niter suspensions and ground
phosphate rock in a carefully calculated slurry. With prepared organics
stirred in. a vast range of yeasts and their derivatives emerged.
'The Emperor has to do somethin'!" Yugo said.
"Or I, " Hari said. But what?
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"People're sayin' we have to scrap all the tiktoks, not just the Five Hundred
series, and do everything ourselves. "
"Without them, we would be reduced to hauling bulk foods across the Galaxy by
hypership and worms an absurdity.
Trantor will fall. "
"Hey, we can do better than tiktoks. "
"My dear Yugo, that is what I call Echo-Nomics. You're repeating conventional
wisdom. One must consider the larger picture. Trantorians aren't the same
people who built this world. They're softer. "
"We're as tough and smart as the men and women who built the Empire!"
"They didn't stay indoors. "
"Old Dahlite sayin'. " Yugo grinned. "If you don't like the grand picture,
just apply dog logic to life. Get petted, eat often, be lovable and loved,
sleep a lot, dream of a leash-free world. "
Despite himself, Hari laughed. But he knew he had to act, and soon.
2.
"We are trapped between tin deities and carbon angels, " Voltaire rasped.
"These... creatures?" Joan asked in a thin, awed voice.
"This alien fog quite godlike in a way. More dispassionate than real,
carbon-based humans. You and I are like neither... now. "
They floated above what Voltaire termed SysCity  the system representation of
Trantor, its cyber-self. For Joan's human referents he had transformed the
grids and layers into myriad crystalline walkways, linking saber-sharp towers.
Dense connections webbed the air. Motes connected to other motes in intricate
cross-bonds and filmed the ground.
This yielded a cityscape like a brain. A visual pun, he thought.
"I hate this place, " she said.
"You'd prefer a Purgatory simulation?"
"It is so... chilling. "
The alien minds above them were a murky mist of connections. "They seem to be
studying us, " Voltaire sad, "with decidedly unsympathetic eyes. "
1 stand read); should they attack. " She swung a huge sword
"And L should their weapons of choice be syllogisms. "
He could now reach any library in Trantor, read its contents in less time than
he had once taken to write a verse. He worked his mind or was it minds,
now? around the clotted, cold mist.
Once some theorist had thought that the global net would give birth to a
hypermind, algorithms summing to a digital
Gaia. Now something far greater, this shifting gray fog, wrapped around the
planet. Widely separated machines computed different slices of subjective
moment-jumps.
To these minds, the present was a greased computational slide orchestrated by
hundreds of separate processors.
There was a profound difference, he felt not saw, but felt, deep in his
analog persuasion between the digital and the smooth, the continuous.
The fog was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen,
implicit in the fundamental computation.
And within it all... the strangeness.
He could not comprehend these diffuse spirits. They were the remnants of all
the computational-based societies, throughout the Galaxy, who had somehow but
why? condensed here on Trantor.
They were truly alien minds. Convoluted, byzan-tine. (Voltaire knew the origin
of that word, from a place of spires and bulbous mosques, but all that was
dust, while the useful word remained. ) They did not have human purposes. And
they used the tiktoks.
The thrust of the mechanicals' agenda, Voltaire saw, was rights the expansion
of liberty to the digital wilderness.
Even Dittos might fall under such a rule. Were not copies of digital people
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still people? So the argument went.
Immense freedom to change your own clock speed, morph into anything, rebuild
your own mind from top to bottom came along with the admitted liability of not
being physically real. Unable to literally walk the streets, all digital
presences were like ghosts. Only with digital prosthetics could they reach
feebly into the concrete universe.
So "rights" for them were tied up with deep-seated fears, ideas which had
provoked dread many millennia ago. He now recalled sharply that he and Joan
had debated such issues over 8, 000 years ago. To what end? He could not
retrieve that. Someone no, something, he suspected had erased the memory.
Ancient indeed (he gleaned from myriad libraries) were people's terrors: of
digital immortals who amassed wealth; who grew like fungus; who reached into
every avenue of natural, real lives. Parasites, nothing less.
Voltaire saw all this in a flash as he absorbed data and history from a
billion sources, integrated the streams, and passed them on to his beloved
Joan.
That was why humans had rejected digital life for so long... but was that all!
No: a larger presence lurked beyond his vision. Another actor on this shadowy
stage. Beyond his resolution, alas.
He swerved his world-spanning vision from that shadowy essence. Time was
essential now and he had much to comprehend.
The alien fogs were nodes, packets dwelling in logical data-spaces of immense [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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