hoot hoot,' louder and louder.
Part V. of V.
The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all
profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later
every man will do all things and know everything.
Borges, 'Funes, the Memorious'
19. Speaking, Dreaming, Fighting
At the moment Jerry died, Aleph acted. Intuitively,
immediately, as you might offer a hand to a drowning person, it
reached out and laid hold of Jerry's self and preserved it. Jerry
had lived inside Aleph, Aleph inside Jerryit could not abandon
him.
However, even for Aleph, whose resources were extravagant,
the rescue proved dear. As it engaged Jerry, it had to disengage
from essential functions of its own: in strokes that cut at its
heart, it relinquished control of Halo, then its very habitation
of Halo, in a process that quickly abstracted Aleph from the city,
the city from Aleph. In a fateful proof of the essential
principle that a self must be embodied, Aleph dispersed among the
clouds of its own phase-space, the ties lost that bound it to the
world. Jerry had been saved, Aleph lost.
Still, the situation contained possibilities. Aleph had
never feared death, believing itself essentially immortal, but had
always been aware of the possibility of damage, whether through
accident or malice, so it had prepared, circumspectly, against the
thing it feared mostloss of self. Now its damaged, fragmented
self discovered what Aleph had left behind: a kind of emergency
kit, laid up against calamities not clearly imagined.
Dynamic and complex beyond any machine, perhaps any organism,
Aleph could not be replicated or contained by any conventional
means, so Aleph had devised an unconventional means, a new object
one capable of transcribing its complexity. Aleph had made a
memory palace of language, in the form of a single, monstrous
sentence.
Now, encountering the sentence, what remained of Aleph
discovered:
The sentence unwinds according to laws built into its
structure, principles disclosed by its unwinding. Discovery and
development occur at the same instant, one making the other
possible. By saying the sentence, Aleph would discover what the
sentence held nextat every node of meaning within the sentence,
structures would unfold that named all Aleph had ever known and
been.
It is construed according to a finite set of grammatical
rules, constituting a program capable in principle of infinite
enunciation; whether it terminates ('halts') can only be known
only by allowing the sentence's units to 'speak,' not by analyzing
their grammar.
Unit1: an absolute construction, standing in front of the
sentence and modifying it all: schematics and programs and
instantiations of the system-from-which-came-Aleph, _0.
Unit2: a series of actions showing the involvement of Diana
with Aleph, rendering the moments of transformation by which _0
became Aleph.
Unit3: several trillion assertions, clauses identifying the
necessary instances of Aleph's subsequent self-discovery.
The sentence then undergoes something like an infinite series
of tense shifts, out of which its essential nature emergesnon-
linear, multi-dimensional, topologically complex, self-referential
and paradoxical to extremes that would cause Russell or Gdel
fits.
As a consequence, any unitn cannot be described, even to
Aleph, for the only adequate description would entail enunciating
the sentence itself, and to do so would require in 'real' time
(human time, the time of life and death) a period precisely
measurable as one Universal Unit, that is, the number of
nanoseconds the universe has existed: U1 being on the order of 1
x 1026 nanoseconds.
Also, it should be noted that the sentence could never be
finished, for if it were, it could manifest only the corpse or
determinate life-history of Aleph. Hence, for Aleph to reassert
its identity, it would have to take up again the task of speaking
the sentence.
Some students of this affair have since suggested that the
only theoretically adequate notion of Aleph begins with the
premise: Aleph is that which speaks the sentence.
Logically, then, for Aleph to reemerge, what remained of
Aleph would have to speak the sentence. However, detached as it
was from Halo, its essential ground of being, limited in facility
and scope by the necessity to hold to Jerry, what remained of
Aleph could not speak the sentence.
So the dead human and the dispersed machine intelligence
clung together, both on the brink of oblivion, and waited, one
unknowing, the other hoping for things to change.
#
Still tired, Gonzales had returned home that afternoon from
Lizzie's through afternoon darkness and mist. He had called for a
sam to guide him, because even within the simple loop of Halo's
one major thoroughfare, everything had gone uncertain. Though his
perceptions were unwarped by Psilocybe cubensis, the unnatural
dispersion of light in the mist made recognizing even familiar
objects almost impossible.
The sam left him at his front door; inside he found the memex
indisposedits primary monitoring facilities functioning but its
interactive capabilities represented only by a voice that said, 'I
am currently engaged.' Gonzales knew it could be doing
