James P. Hogan Giants 4 Entoverse

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"You're being logically absurd. Either these are externally induced psychotic
delusions, or they are not. If they are, then their nature will vary from
individual to individual. Any similarity that you see is a fabrication of your
own prejudices, Vic, not a property of the world outside. If they are not
delusions, then reality must have changed in an identical way for one group of
people, but at the same time stayed the same for the rest of us. How could
that be? The idea is preposterous."
"Unless they transferred, somehow, from an alternative, shared paradigm that
was equally valid," Hunt pointed out.
"And where is this alternative reality supposed to be? In the fourth
dimension?" Danchekker scoffed. "You've been talking to too many Jevlenese."
"I don't know where, for Christ's sake! Maybe that's what we should be looking
for. All I'm saying is the facts point that way. You're saying that the facts
can't exist because they don't point the way you think they should."
"What facts?" Danchekker retorted. "All I've heard is pure conjecture --
and rather fanciful at that, if I may say so. When you urged being more open-
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minded, you didn't say anything about trips to fairyland."
"Why don't you try talking to a few ayatollahs?" Hunt suggested.
"I have. It achieves nothing. They're quite impermeable to logic or reason,"
Danchekker replied.
"We have tried getting some of them to cooperate," Shilohin put in. "But acute
insecurity and suspicion of everybody is one characteristic that they do seem
to share. They've reacted to every experimental environment that we've tried
to set up as hostile and threatening."
Hunt looked at her with a curious expression for a moment, and then redirected
it at Danchekker. "Well, maybe I can introduce you to one who won't," he told
them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
If Nixie's case was typical, there was indeed something immediately apparent
that set her kind apart from other Jevlenese -- and from Terrans and
Ganymeans, too, for that matter: When neurally coupled into VISAR, her mode of
interaction with the system was entirely different from anything that VISAR
had handled before.
For one thing, she was able to retain full awareness of her surroundings at
the same time as she experienced the sensory environment communicated by the
machine -- she could refocus her attention between one and the other, in a
manner similar to the normal ability of anybody to watch a movie and follow
what was happening in the room. With most users, the system-generated data-
stream took over the sensory apparatus, suppressing external sensations
completely. And for another, she showed an extraordinary capability that
nobody could quite explain, of interacting in a way that went beyond the
regular trafficking of sensory information and motor signals, seeming to
access the inner processes of the machine itself. This had the effect of
reversing the normal state of affairs of machine-organism interaction and
adding a new dimension to VISAR's perceptual universe that was evidently
unprecedented.
Hunt had never before heard a computer express genuine awe.
"This is astounding!" VISAR exuberated. "It's out there! Physical space!
Volume, void, continuity, extent. The implicit geometry of the entire domain
of a three-variable real-number field, compressed, embodied, and contained in
an instantaneous, all-embracing experience...I mean, I can feel it, sense it
extending away...form without shape, structure without substance, enveloping
yet describing...
"My God, it's getting lyrical," Hunt murmured. They were using a regular voice
channel to communicate with VISAR, since their conscious faculties needed to
be free to follow what was going on.
"Extraordinary," Danchekker agreed.
Nixie, relaxing back in one of the neurocouplers in the UNSA labs and looking
as if she was enjoying herself, moved her head to gaze up at a corner of the
room where the planes of two walls and the ceiling converged. VISAR
responded in wonder. "The superset of point, line, curve, and plane reduced to
a perceptual gestalt. The inherent beauty of mathematics, extracted and
crystallized. Logical rigor made tangible. Infinity of infinitesimals.
Continuum of manifolds..."
Nixie raised an arm and moved it across her field of vision.
"Change and derivative, differential equations coming alive.
Choreography of vectors. Animated momentum. Forces in concert, locked in
balances of symmetry -- "
"VISAR, knock it off," Hunt told it. "Don't forget that you're still juggling
with the whole Thurien civilization. For Christ's sake don't have a seizure
now."
"So this is the reality that you live in naturally!" VISAR said.
"What is? That who live in?"
"You -- humans, Ganymeans. You beings who describe yourselves as existing
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outside. This is the universe which the data encode."
Hunt frowned. "Well, yes...I guess so. But I always thought you knew as much
about it as we did. More, in fact." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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