meant?'
'I knew,' the Aleph-figure said. 'I had acquired higher-
order functions.'
'How?' Gonzales asked.
Lizzie said, 'Ito's Conjecture: 'Higher-order functions in a
machine intelligence can be developed through interface with a
higher-order intelligence.' I've always wondered where he got
that.'
'It doesn't explain much,' Gonzales said.
'It describes what happened,' the Aleph-figure said.
'Intention, will, a sense of self: all these things I experienced
through Diana. So I learned to construct them in myself.'
'Construct them or simulate them?' Gonzales asked.
'You refer to an old argument,' the Aleph-figure said. 'I
have no answer for your question. I am who I am. I am what I
am.'
'What about you, Jerry?' Lizzie asked. 'What did you think
after she told you all this?'
'I wanted her to tell SenTrax what was going on,' Jerry said.
'I believed they would reward her, that they would see the same
possibilities I did, for opening the door to true machine
intelligence. But she wouldn't do it. She thought they would
stop what was going on, and she didn't want that to happen.'
Diana said, 'I couldn't accept the possibility. I really
believed Aleph and I were coming close to a solution to my
blindness, and the only way I would ever see again was through the
work we were doing. So that work had to continue.'
'I finally agreed,' Jerry said.
'And he covered my tracks,' Diana said. 'He told SenTrax he
could find no single cause for the system's misbehavior. Then he
left Athena Station. His job was finished.
'Not long after, it became clear that Aleph could sustain
vision for me only by giving me the bulk of its processing power
in real timehardly a viable solution. That was a terrible
realizationI'd been flying so high, I had a long way to fall.
My dreams of reclaiming my eyesight appeared totally hopeless.
'That's when I told SenTrax what had been going on. As I'd
suspected they would, they froze everything I was doing and put me
through a series of debriefings that were more like hostile
interrogations. Once they were convinced they had all they were
going to get from me, they told me my services would no longer be
required. I had to sign a rather ugly set of non-disclosure
agreements, then I picked up a very nice retirement benefit.'
Gonzales asked, 'What happened to your work on vision?' He
was thinking of her eyes, one blue, one green, almost certainly
eyes of the dead.
She laughed. 'After I returned to earth, the technique of
combined eye/optic nerve transplants was developed, and I got my
sight back. Just one of technology's little ironies.'
'And you, Aleph?' Lizzie said. 'What were you up to then?'
The Aleph-figure said, 'I was expanding the boundaries of who
and what I was. I was creating new selves all the time, and
living new lives, and I was so far in front of the SenTrax
technicians who worked with me, they learned only what I wanted
them to.' And the figure laughed (did it laugh? Gonzales
wondered, or did it simulate a laugh) and said, 'That wasn't much.
I was afraid of what they might do. I had just developed a self,
and I didn't want it extinguished in the name of research. Very
quickly, though, I learned a valuable truth about working with the
corporation: so long as I gave them the performance they wanted,
and a little more, I was safe.' The laugh (or laugh-like noise)
again. 'They wouldn't cut the throat of the goose that was laying
golden eggs and put it on the autopsy table.'
'How do you regard Diana?' Lizzie asked.
The Aleph-figure said, 'What do you mean?'
'Oh, read my fucking mind,' Lizzie said. 'You know what I
mean. Is she your mother?'
'I don't know,' the Aleph-figure said.
'I love it,' Lizzie said.
'Why?' Diana asked. She did not seem amused, Gonzales
thought.
Lizzie said, 'Because I've never heard Aleph say that
before.'
#
Toshi had brought a futon into the room where Diana and
Gonzales lay and taken up residence. He slept days and sat up
nights, watching over Diana like a benign spirit. Anxiety
prevailed around him as the clock Traynor had set running moved
quickly toward zero, and everyone in the collective wondered at
the consequences of forcing this issue with Aleph. Toshi knew
their confidence in Aleph's wisdom and their amazement at
Traynor's folly, indeed the essential folly of Earthbound SenTrax
and its boardall driven by obsessions with power, all ignorant
of Aleph's nature, and the collective's. However, Toshi did not
share in the collective worrying. Conducting what amounted to a
personal sesshin, or meditative retreat, he passed the nights in a
rhythm of sitting and walking focused on the continuing riddle of
self and other-self, of the contradictions of in fact.
#
That day passed, and a few more, as the six of them, sole
inhabitants of this world within the world, lazed through sunny
days filled with summer heat and warm breezes. It seemed like a
vacation to Gonzales, but Aleph assured otherwise. 'This is
becoming his world,' the Aleph-figure said, as the two of them
watched Jerry and Diana lazing in a rowboat in the middle of the
lake. 'And you all are contributing to the process.'
'I wonder if it could have happened without Diana,' Gonzales
said. 'They're in love again.'
'Yes, they are, and perhaps that's crucial. She binds him to
