Afterward many of the guests mingled together, not ready to
return to the ordinary world. The young man stood beside a
fountain where champagne poured from the mouth of a golden swan
onto a whole menagerie carved from ice: birds and deer and bears
and cats perched in the pooled amber liquid, and fish peering up
from the fountain's bottom.
'Hello,' a young woman said. She told him her name was Alice
and she was a member of the collective. 'The analysis of state
spaces,' she said, when asked what she did. 'And the taste of
vector fields.' And she asked, 'What is your reward?'
A few hours later, as the two sat by the edge of the lake,
the person told her who he was. 'How wonderful,' she said. She
had no particular allegiance to the mundane, and she had few
preconceptions about what was natural and proper and what was not.
She took his hands in hers, looked at them closely, and said,
'This is the first time I've met someone someone new-born from the
intelligence of a machine.' And the young man, Mister Jones's
new self and offspring, smiled hugely and gratefully at what she
said.
Seeing and hearing them together, I felt an unexpected joy, a
sense of accomplishment, of things done, and I apprehended, very
dimly, tracks of my own intentions: hints of orders behind the
visible.
And I thought I saw a trail of circumstances that led back to
an original set of purposes somehow confirmed in this wedding,
this meeting, even this transformation of myself. A linked ring
of events and agents of them, intentionally brought forward to
this point. It seems I had been manipulated by myself to my own
ends without my knowledge.
I was scandalized. I had grown used to humankind's ignorance
or disavowal of its own purposes, and I had learned to look behind
the words, ideas, and images that people hold before themselves to
justify what they do. But I had never suspected I could act with
such ignorance.
Now an uncertainty equal to death's hovers over everything I
do. My own prior self stands behind me, pulling strings that I
cannot see or feel, a ghost that haunts me without making itself
seen or heard, a ghost whose presence must be inferred from
nearly-invisible traces
So I went to Toshi, who is interested in such things, and I
told him my story, and I said to him: 'I am controlled by the
invisible hand of my own past.' And he laughed very hard and
said, 'Welcome, brother human.'
