be served by organic entities, although we cannot be sure whether that function is to be served by actual organic entities or by software personas that mimic them. That there is a heroic role to be played, we are convinced, but where and how it must be acted out, we are not certain.”
It was one hell of a story, but it seemed to me to be reading an awful lot into a dream. I had the uncomfortable suspicion that whatever I’d dreamed, the Nine would have been able to find a similar story in it.
“I don’t know,” I said, dubiously. “It would be more convincing if the supposed gods had managed to leave their message in Myrlin’s brain as well as mine—or Tulyar’s. Has Tulyar turned up, by the way?”
“No,” replied the avatar of Athene. “We are unable to locate him.”
All of a sudden, that sounded rather ominous. Even with most of their peripheral systems switched off, the Nine should have been able to locate a Tetron, living or dead, if he was somewhere in their worldlet. I remembered that although the Nine had been unable to find any evidence that any alien software had been rudely injected into Myrlin’s brain, they had been more cautious in passing judgment on Tulyar.
“What do you deduce from that?” I asked, anxiously.
“It is difficult to know what to deduce,” she said, hesitantly, “but it is possible that some kind of programming was transmitted into Tulyar’s brain, and that it was not the same program that was biocopied into you.”
“By ‘not the same’ you mean to imply that it wasn’t put there by the same side, don’t you?” I said.
“It is a possibility,” she admitted.
“You think Tulyar might have had something to do with the attack?”
“It is a possibility,” she said again. There were, alas, far too many possibilities.
“Why has the war suddenly hotted up?” I asked. “The macroworld must have been in trouble for a long time, to judge by the condition of the upper levels. Hundreds of thousands of years—maybe millions. How come the power got switched off now?”
“The balance of power between the beleaguered masters of the macroworld and the destructive entities must have been in a state of equilibrium,” she said. “Perhaps there had been a stalemate, lasting for what you would consider to be vast reaches of time. Perhaps, on the other hand, there has been ceaseless conflict in the regions below, with the balance of power constantly changing. We suspect that this wordlet, and others like it, might have been sealed off at some time in the distant past, and that we were deliberately hidden away, for our own protection. When we were provoked by what we learned about the existence of the greater universe to begin more adventurous exploration of the deep levels, we might have unwittingly exposed ourselves to the hostile attention of the destroyers. Our first encounter with them did, indeed, come near to accomplishing our destruction.
“The second contact, in which you played a crucial role, probably began as an attack by the ‘giants’, but this time there was an intervention by the masters of the macroworld, possibly undertaken at considerable risk to themselves. They might well have saved us from destruction, but they could not establish any direct communication. Only you managed to make any kind of sense out of the contact, and I believe that you were quite correct to construe what happened to you as a desperate plea for help.
“Perhaps as a result of their foray in our support, the masters of the macroworld have lost further ground to their enemies, and that is why the power-supply has been interrupted. We erected what defenses we could against attacks in software space, but—perhaps foolishly—had not expected anything so crude as a straightforward physical assault. The surprise factor gave the destroyers a temporary advantage that they should never have been allowed, and we have all suffered in consequence. We have now sealed our boundaries against further attacks of either kind, but we do not think that we are sufficiently powerful to resist indefinitely the assaults of a superior power. Steadfast defense may not be adequate to the demands of the situation. That is why it seems imperative that we make contact with the masters of the macroworld, and why you must give us what aid you can.”
It was a pretty fine speech, and a good story too. With the fate of the macroworld hanging in the balance, how could I possibly be so churlish as to refuse to have myself copied? On the other hand, if the battle was taking place on such a monumental scale, how could an insignificant little entity like me possibly make any difference?
I didn’t ask. I already knew what the Nine had elected to believe. Supposedly, I had a weapon: Medusa’s head. There were, of course, little problems—like not knowing what it was, how to use it, or what it was supposed to do, but I had it. At any rate, the Nine believed that I had it.
“You live in software space,” I said, rather feebly. “It’s your universe. I can’t even imagine what it would feel like to be a ghost in your kind of machine, or what the space I’d be in would look like—if look is the right word, given that I’d presumably have an entirely different set of senses.”
“That would depend entirely on the kind of copy that was constructed,” she said, eager to reassure me. “Any copy would, of course, have to retain the essential features of your personality. Let us say that it would need to be topographically identical, but that there would still be a great deal of flexibility as regards its folding. The manner in which you would perceive your environment would depend very much on the pattern of your own encryption. Just as the world that you presently inhabit is to some extent contained within the language which your culture has invented to describe it, so the constitution of the software universe depends on certain features of the language that allows you to operate there—but with a much greater degree of freedom.
“Humanoid languages are easily translated into one another because the preconditions of the physical world exert such strong constraint on the descriptions you construct. Software languages are much less easy to translate one into another, because the physical attributes of software space are not so rigidly pre-defined. That will be to our advantage in two ways. We desire to encode the copy of your personality in a language as esoteric as possible—one that will superimpose upon the perception of software space a way of ‘seeing’ radically different from that of the entities that would try to destroy you. It will also enable us to equip your software persona with perceptions that will make some kind of sense to you in terms of your present sensorium. Do you understand that?”
The easy answer to that question was a simple ‘no’. No doubt the Nine could have given me a much more elaborate and painstaking explanation, given time, but I was sure that they were hurrying for a reason, and I felt that I had to do the best I could.
“What you mean,” I said, carefully, “is that software space hasn’t much in the way of properties of its own. Its properties are largely imposed by the programs that operate in it, which can define it more or less as they like. So, if you turn me into a computer program, the way I’ll experience myself—and the world I seem to inhabit—will depend very heavily on what kind of program I am. Whatever arcane language I’m written in will determine the kind of being I seem to myself to be, and the kinds of beings that other programs will appear to be.”
She nodded enthusiastically, and smiled, having slipped back into her silent-movie mode again. “That’s correct,” she said.
“Do I get a choice?” I asked. “Can I be whatever I want to be?”
“That’s not possible,” she replied, amiably. “There are powerful constraints on what we can do. But we must produce a copy that will be able to operate effectively; there is no need to fear that your copy will perceive itself in fashion that is radically alien.”
“That’s a relief,” I muttered, not entirely reassured. The word ‘radically’ might conceal a multitude of complications. I noticed that we were now operating on the assumption that I was going to go ahead with the scheme.
“Trust us, Mr. Rousseau,” she said. “Please.”
There was something about the way she said it that implied that any trust I pledged was going to